The Zapple Diaries

by Barry Miles

  However imaginative he was, when it came down to it, Derek Taylor had not the faintest idea how to promote George’s Electronic Sound album; he just couldn’t find an angle that would interest the Daily Mirror or the Express. He aimed instead at the underground press, also hoping that some of the Fleet Street hacks would regard themselves as ‘switched on’ (as the Mirror called it) and groove to the freaky new sounds. Then again, he might have just smoked too much hash before he wrote it. His press release, more prose-poem, read:

  Zapple

  Electronic Sound by George Harrison – Zapple 02

  Under the Mersey Wall: side one

  In February 1969 in a mounting wortex of decibels

  There came to pass a wrecked chord of

  Environmental sounds that went beyond the genre

  Of hashish cocktail music . . .

  The bass line has been milked through the Moog machine

  And lo and high we behold electronic music . . . music

  That becomes sounds that are food for the mind,

  Not to forget the soul, o sole mio.

  Dear George, would you be so kind

  And fulfil this request

  And play the lost chord

  The one I like best.

  Under the Mersey Wall/science fictionalized horrors

  Of man in his lyrical home grown simplicity.

  A wind blew in Esher.

  No Time or Space: side two

  In California through the machine gun of his mind George

  Thought aloud to himself and in his composure he has

  Exposed the thought patterns beating on his brow and

  Diametrically opposed he has exposed through the medium

  Of the Moog, a pottage of space music. And on and on we go . . .

  George Harrison versus Godzilla and King Kong

  In space and Bernie Crause [sic] was there to give a helping hand.

  Dear George, say hi to Bernie.

  The sleeve reproduced two naïve paintings by George made specifically for the album. The front featured a painting of Bernie Krause, with an inexplicable green face, wearing a bow tie and a pocket handkerchief, patching in the four modules from which the sound was synthesized through the sound board of the Moog. The resulting sounds could be seen pouring out of a large pipe on the bottom right-hand corner of the sleeve – the ‘Trippy Meat Grinder’. At the bottom centre is a small blue face – Harrison himself – who says he was making the tea – a white tea set on a folding table is to the left of the board. His cat, Jostick (sic), is the small green-and-white figure near where the music pours from the spout.

  The back sleeve depicts Derek Taylor’s press office at Apple with Derek himself in his huge high-backed wicker chair and described by George’s son Dhani as ‘holding on to all of Apple’s aggravation and problems’ that appear as an angry Japanese kite hovering over everyone.1 The two faces on the chair-back are Neil Aspinall, frowning, with all the cares of Apple on his shoulders, and Mal Evans, smiling, ever amiable. To the right of the sleeve stands Eric Clapton in full psychedelic mode, complete with permed Jimi Hendrix afro hair. To the left of Derek’s chair are the four framed photographs of the Beatles from the White Album. At the top left is a lotus-seated yogi with an ‘Om’ sign above him, only the picture is hung upside down, as is the crude landscape (or window) at the upper right-hand corner.

  George’s less than convinced approach to anything avant-garde was expressed in two epigrams:

  It could be called avant-garde, but a more apt description would be (in the words of my old friend Alvin) ‘Avant-garde clue’!

  George Harrison

  There are a lot of people around, making a lot of noise, here’s some more.

  Arthur Wax

  The album consists of two long pieces, one each side. Side one, ‘Under the Mersey Wall’ (which was inadvertently pressed as side two in the American release with the consequent wrong title), was recorded at George’s Los Angeles-style house in Esher, Surrey (London’s stockbroker belt), in February 1969. The title is a pun on the regular column, Over the Mersey Wall, in the Liverpool Echo written by his namesake – no relation – George Harrison, who covered all the early Beatles tours. George is quoted as saying, ‘All I did was get that very first Moog synthesizer with the big patch unit and keyboards you could never tune, and I put a microphone into a tape machine. Whatever came out when I fiddled with the knobs went on tape.’2

  Side two, ‘No Time or Space’, was recorded in November 1968 at Armin Steiner’s Sound Recorders on the corner of Argyle and Yucca in Los Angeles where George was producing the Is This What You Want? album with newly signed Apple artist Jackie Lomax. The latest in studio gadgets was the Moog synthesizer, which had been demonstrated at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 by composer-musicians Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, and had been talked about excitedly by musicians and studio technicians ever since. This cumbersome machine, which resembled an old- fashioned telephone exchange, could not only imitate existing instruments but also create new sounds. George decided that he wanted to use one on the Jackie Lomax album and hired Bernie Krause to play on the session, so on the evening of 11 November Krause brought a Moog III over to Sound Recorders. It was an immensely complicated machine to use, but George was intrigued by it and asked Krause to stay on after the session and demonstrate how he had achieved the sounds he used on the session.

  Krause had flown into Los Angeles early that morning from San Francisco, and it was now 3 a.m. and he was exhausted. Nonetheless, he put the machine through its paces, but he hadn’t noticed that George had asked the tape operator to keep the tape rolling. Krause wrote in his autobiography, Into a Wild Sanctuary, ‘Had I been aware that he was recording my demonstration, I would never have shown examples of what Paul [Beaver] and I were considering for our next album, which was to be Gandharva. As I showed him the settings and gave some performance examples, Harrison seemed impressed with the possibilities.’3

  George decided he must have one and asked Krause, who represented the Moog Corporation, when he could have one delivered to London. Bernie told him that like anyone else he could have it thirty days after he received a 50 per cent deposit and it had cleared the bank. George immediately attempted to pull rank, reminding Krause that he was a Beatle and that Apple generally did not make deposits. Bernie was unmoved and repeated the terms, ‘in a calm voice and looking him straight in the eye’, telling George there were no exceptions; when the cheque cleared his synthesizer would be on its way within a month.

  A couple of months later Krause received a phone call from Harrison asking where his Moog was. Krause wrote, ‘Feeling that I was speaking with a total idiot, I once again repeated the terms.’ Beaver and Krause were just representatives for the Moog Corporation; they didn’t have any control over the factory. They had already sold Moogs to George Martin and Mick Jagger, and it was clear from the urgency in his voice that George was feeling left out and couldn’t understand why being a Beatle didn’t entitle him to jump the queue. Eventually he understood and asked Krause to come over with the machine to clear it through customs and to show him how to use it. George said that he would pay all his expenses but nothing for his time. ‘You’re selling the bloody things. Now show me how to play it.’ Bernie agreed. After one more phone call from George, a first-class ticket to London arrived in the mail. Krause immediately cashed it in, as you could in those days, for two economy seats so that his wife, Denise, could accompany him. He called Apple to make sure he was expected, which he was, and he and his wife left on a 707 for London.

  They had been booked into the Dorchester, then, as now, one of the most expensive hotels in town. It turned out, however, that the day Bernie had called to confirm that everything was all right George had had his tonsils out and would not be able to see Bernie for a week. The Apple office had neglected to tell him. They said they would call him when George was ready to see him. As Krause had only allowed for one week in London to show George the ropes,
he was understandably irritated. He decided to go on to Paris making sure that he left the number of his Paris hotel with George’s assistant, several secretaries and the concierge of the Dorchester.

  Every few days he called Apple to see if there was any news and each time was told that ‘George will call when he’s ready’. Then, after about a week, there came a furious call from London, ‘Where the fuck have you been? George has been sitting around waiting for you for days!’ It turned out that Apple was unable to get the synthesizer out of customs because no one there could define what it was and they were trying to tax it as an electronic device. Bernie told the caller, in no uncertain terms, where she could put her attitude and hung up. She soon called back, apologetic, and Bernie agreed to return to London in a couple of days. It was arranged that someone from Apple would meet him at Heathrow and take him straight to the customs section of the airport where the Moog was being held. Krause arranged for the driver to bring an amplifier with him. At customs he quickly unpacked the instrument, plugged in the amplifier, set the controls to make it sound like a Hammond B-3 organ and played the officer a couple of tunes. This did the trick. As an electronic device the customs duty would have been 60 or 70 per cent, a huge amount as the instrument cost $15,000; however, as an electronic organ the duty was less than 10 per cent. Bernie saved Apple a lot of money. The duty was paid, and the Moog III was allowed to enter the country.

  Later that afternoon two cars arrived to take Bernie and Denise, separately, to George’s house in Esher. Patti Boyd welcomed them and offered them food while George proffered a joint. George stressed that the food was vegetarian, as he stretched out on a large leather couch. George was the first of the Beatles to embrace vegetarianism, beginning as far back as 1965. Patti was possibly less keen. On a visit to Esher I remember George boasting how wonderful Patti’s vegetarian food was and my wife, Sue, who was a cook, catching Patti’s eye and them both nodding imperceptibly. They knew that the meal was so tasty because it contained chopped-up shrimps.

  The Moog was set up against the wall across from the couch. In the corner was a multi-track and a two-track with tape cued up, ready to play. George said he wanted to play something to Bernie that he made on the synthesizer that he was planning to release on Zapple. He told him, ‘It’s my first electronic piece done with a little help from my cats.’ In his autobiography, Krause recalls how at first he didn’t recognize the material, then it slowly dawned upon him that the tape that George was playing was from the tape that he had made late at night after the Jackie Lomax sessions in Los Angeles a few months before. In fact George had only had a few hours alone with the Moog before Krause arrived, so it was clearly not made on George’s own machine. Krause didn’t know what to do, but eventually screwed up his courage and said, ‘George, this is my music. Why is it on this tape, and why are you representing it as yours?’ He reports that George assured him, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve edited it, and if it sells I’ll send you a couple of quid.’

  An argument quickly developed. Krause was understandably outraged to see his material appropriated and passed off as George’s without being in any way consulted, and George was also getting angry that anyone would challenge his actions. Krause reported the exchange: ‘“You’re coming on like you’re Jimi Hendrix. When Ravi Shankar comes to my house, he’s humble.” Then . . . he screamed his most famous line, “Trust me, I’m a Beatle!”’4

  Krause got up, and asked George to order him a car. There was no point in continuing the conversation. While they were waiting George asked him to set up a bagpipe sound, which Krause did without saying a word. Krause didn’t have the money to sue George for plagiarism and probably didn’t relish the thought of coming up against Apple’s powerful lawyers either, so he just asked for his name to be taken off the acknowledgement on the cover. As we didn’t expect the album to sell very well, it was decided that rather than reprint the sleeve we would just paint over Bernie’s name – which was in any case spelled incorrectly as ‘Crause’ – with silver paint, which is what was done.

  I had no role in any of this as I was in the USA the whole time that the record was in production. I was present only at one meeting, and that was the one in which the use of silver paint was decided. I didn’t know the full story until years later, although there was a bit of muttering around Apple at the time. I was not keen on the record, as it was not the result of much experimentation or research, and hardly counted at all as a piece of electronic music; it was just George learning to use the Moog III synthesizer. Had it been by anyone else we would not have released it, but obviously the Beatles could do anything they wanted. Nor did I find John’s and Yoko’s album pleasurable in any sense, but it did have a kind of grim intensity and intelligence about it that I respected: they really did believe that everything they did was of such earth-shattering importance that it should be recorded for posterity and released. I was pleased to release it because I believed very much that throughout the course of the sixties rock ’n’ roll had transformed itself from being a branch of the variety and entertainment business and had become an art form. The pop side still existed, but rock musicians were now telling the tale of the tribe, and the personal diary aspect of Life with the Lions fitted right into that.

  ‘ You’re coming on like you’re Jimi Hendrix. When Ravi Shankar comes to my house, he’s humble.’ Then . . . he screamed his most famous line, ‘ Trust me, I’m a Beatle!’

  John and Yoko with Allen Klein, who is pictured here representing Lennon in negotiations over control of shares in the Beatles’ Northern Songs company. They orchestrated Klein’s arrival at Apple, and Klein oversaw a wholesale change of management that destroyed the original Apple team.

  Chapter 15

  Apple Crumble

  I HAD RETURNED FROM my recording trip to the USA to find a very different atmosphere at Apple. People were wary of each other and scared. This was because Allen Klein had been appointed first as an adviser, then as business manager of Apple. He had already been in to make lists of who did what. No one liked him, particularly Paul McCartney who remembered the way Klein had snared John:

  We were in some office. Klein was practising putting in one of those little things. You know, really suave in his dreadful brown pullover he used to wear, dreadful brown slacks and big pools of sweat underneath the arms, fucking hell, and his big sidies which he thought made him hip. He was just an ’orrible little man but with an amazing gift of the gab. ‘Wadda ya want? Wadda ya want?’ His dialogue would go, ‘Wadda ya want?’ ‘Money.’ ‘Fantastic, you got it.’ He said to John, ‘Wadda ya want?’ and John said, ‘Yoko’, and he said, ‘You got it.’1

  Klein quickly took on the role of the Brian Epstein/missing father figure for John and could do no wrong. He consolidated his position by firing as many people as he possibly could and installing his own people. It took a little while for him to figure out how far he could go, so he began with the small fry. Margo Stevens was an Apple Scruff, one of the fans who waited outside the door for a glimpse of their heroes, until Tony Bramwell hired her as the tea lady and she joined the kitchen staff. Klein fired her, so there was no tea. The cook was fired, so everyone went to restaurants. Then the translator was fired; this was foolish. Apple’s records were released simultaneously in twenty-seven territories, meaning that sleeve printers and record manufacturers, record company executives and press representatives in all those countries had to be contacted on the telephone and the entire operation coordinated in a dozen languages. The translator usually did this, and without him there was chaos; it was much less common to find English spoken outside Britain and North America in those days.

  The first major firing came on 8 May, when six executives and their secretaries were sacked. Brian Lewis, in the contracts department, went, and the publishing office was closed with all its staff. One of the more obvious ones to go was ‘Magic’ Alex, supposedly John Lennon’s best friend, who returned from a trip to Paris to find himself locked out of his workshop in Bo
ston Place and his contract terminated. He had applied for more than a hundred patents, all of which had been refused on the grounds that they were already patented ideas; as everyone suspected, Alex had a subscription to Popular Science, and the Beatles didn’t. The invisible sonic screen never happened, the phone that called someone when you spoke to it, the flying saucer, the wallpaper loudspeakers, were all someone else’s ideas or else pure fantasies. The 72-track recording studio that he had been building in the basement of 3 Savile Row was already well known to be a disaster: he hadn’t realized that studios have to be soundproofed, and you could hear people walking on the floor above. Even worse was the building’s central heating unit which made a lot of noise and was also located in the basement. It would have had to be turned off every time anyone wanted to record. It was when George Harrison saw him preparing to install seventy-two small speakers on the wall that they finally realized that he knew less about recording studios than the tea lady. Long-suffering George Martin was prevailed upon to come to the rescue; he ripped out all of Alex’s junk and installed machines borrowed from EMI. Alex had not even known that the control room and the studio had to be connected so that microphone leads and cables could run between them, so for a short period cables ran down the corridor to connect the two. Alex’s famous mixing deck was sold for £5 to a scrap electronics merchant on the Edgware Road.

  It came as a complete shock when Alistair Taylor was fired. He had been with the Beatles from the Cavern days and was a close friend; it was Alistair whom they called up in the middle of the night to tell their problems to, or whom they paid visits to unexpectedly after midnight to get drunk with or cry on his shoulder, whom they turned to for comfort over losing their girlfriends. He was one of the Liverpool group of totally loyal staff who adored the boys and were there out of love, not for the money. Alistair never took kickbacks – although accused of it by Linda McCartney (née Eastman) – and was, like Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans and Peter Brown, more of a royal courtier than a record business employee. It turned out that their loyalty was misplaced. Rather than let Klein fire him, Peter Brown told him the news. Alistair choked back tears and spent the rest of the day trying to reach Paul and John on the phone, but they wouldn’t take his calls.