Magical Mystery Tour was effectively a McCartney creation: he had devised the concept, supervised the filming, and been the only Beatle dedicated enough to endure the editing process. The film's reception introduced an unfamiliar sense of vulnerability into the group's morale, and threatened the unchallenged leadership that McCartney had assumed over the previous 18 months. 'John used to say, "I'm the leader of this group!" and we used to say, "It's only because you fucking shout louder than anyone else!"' McCartney noted thirty years later. 'Nobody cared as much as he did about being the leader.' It was precisely that Lennon no longer seemed to care, about the Beatles or anything else, that had allowed McCartney to seize control. 'Paul was always courageous,' Derek Taylor recalled. 'In a way he was braver than John.' In 1967 he masterminded the group's assumption of new identities on the Sgt Pepper album and the development of Apple into a commercial empire.
'Paul wanted to work,' reflected Beatles/NEMS press officer Tony Barrow; 'John hated to work.
He had a MTV-level concentration span. He got bored very quickly, and pushed things aside, whether it was a song or a business deal. Paul was a much more methodical worker. He liked the discipline of coming into the office every day.' Lennon would be shaken by fits of passion, for Magic Alex or against men in suits, and would then subside into an inertia that bordered on depression. McCartney never quite lost control of his emotions. As Barrow noted, 'John was the noisiest of the four, and so he was accepted as being the leader. But it quickly became obvious that Paul was the most persuasive of the Beatles, and the one who wielded the real power with Brian Epstein. John would make a lot of noise, but not get his own way. Then Paul would go in and persuade Brian that what John had suggested was the right thing to do. Paul was very shrewd in the way he handled relations, both inside and outside the group.'
But now Brian was dead, and the buffer between Lennon and McCartney had been removed. In any case, the relationship between the two men was built upon shared recognition of Lennon's supremacy. 'I always idolised him,' McCartney admitted in 1987. 'We always did, the group. I don't know if the others will tell you that, but he was our idol. He was like our own little Elvis . . . always someone for us to look up to.' Elsewhere, McCartney revealed that he lived for those occasional moments when his idol would acknowledge his talent: 'He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest. So whenever he did praise any of us, it was great praise indeed, because he didn't dish it out much. If ever you got a speck of it, a crumb, you were quite grateful.'
McCartney's comments suggest that even at the height of his creative fulfilment he could still be deflated and undermined by Lennon. He seemed to require public affection more than his older partner, and even that reward could feel empty if it wasn't supported by Lennon's approval. Nobody else could ever have made him admit, 'I have always quite enjoyed being second . . . You're still up with number one. Number one still needs you as his companion.' Everywhere else in his life, McCartney demanded first position: from his lovers, from his employees, from the audience whose desertion might render his life meaningless. But subservience to Lennon gave him a sense of worthiness that he couldn't find elsewhere.
As the junior member of the Beatles – 'Paul was always eight months older than me, and he's still eight months older' – George Harrison sometimes displayed resentment towards his more successful colleagues. But he drew consolation from their willingness to share his explorations of Indian spirituality. When the Beatles travelled to the Maharishi's retreat in Rishikesh early in 1968, he took personal responsibility for their devotion. 'George actually once got quite annoyed and told me off because I was trying to think of the next album,' McCartney revealed. 'He said, "We're not fucking here to do the next album, we're here to meditate!" It was like, "Ohh, excuse me for breathing!" You know, George was quite strict like that.' And in those moments McCartney felt hurt and bewildered that the natural order of Beatles hierarchy – John, Paul, George and Ringo – had been disturbed.
Harrison's obvious admiration of Lennon did not mean that he felt inferior to his older colleague. 'After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship,' he explained. 'That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says,
"I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger." That's an illusion people are under. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on, and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death.' This conviction allowed Harrison to transcend any petty aggravations in his dealings with Lennon and concentrate on what he saw as their mutual understanding.
Harrison and Lennon were certainly the two Beatles most prepared to immerse themselves in the spiritual waters of Rishikesh. Starkey famously returned home first, weary of his self-imposed diet of baked beans and his wife's aversion to the subcontinent's array of insect life. McCartney followed, having set his own limit – a strict four weeks – on the expedition from the outset. As he admitted later, he 'wondered what was going to happen with the other guys. For a week or so there I didn't know if we'd ever see them again, or if there ever would be any Beatles.' Even Starkey, normally the least imaginative and most level-headed of the quartet, was now philosophising like a mystic about 'the greater plan' that governed life 'with a pattern and a reason for everything you do'. Like the Christian conundrum about the extent of free will in a God-directed universe, his statements demonstrated a blend of fatalism and blind faith: 'I think that when you're born, there is a very complex pattern that is planned out for your whole life . . . The major decisions are yours, but if you decided to do one thing, then everything that happens to you because of that decision has been planned out in advance. I never worry about what's going to happen in the future, and I never plan too far ahead, because I know that things are planned to happen, whatever I do.'
In the face of such acceptance, at home and abroad, McCartney could only trust his own instincts and continue to shape his own future – and, he hoped, that of the Beatles. While Lennon and Harrison were away he was free to impose his will on the fledgling Apple organisation. He told Derek Taylor that Apple should exhibit 'controlled weirdness'. This chimed with Taylor's own mental state: 'I was completely out of control. I was as free as a bird, and if this thing was going to be weird, then it was going to be weird. But it didn't take me many hours to realise that Apple was not a dream world.' At the end of Taylor's first day in the office McCartney turned to him and said, 'You've been pretty obnoxious. It must be living in America that's done it.' As Taylor realised, 'I was still an employee and the boys were still the bosses – especially Paul, the bossiest of the bossy. But still one's optimism survived.'
In India the two remaining Beatles were sucked into a drama about the Maharishi and his supposed preference for sexual rather than spiritual relations with his young female disciples. 'To tell you the truth, I think they may have used it as an excuse to get out of there,' McCartney reasoned. Lennon stormed home like a child who'd been promised Christmas and instead found himself at the dentist. Harrison refused to allow the squabbles in the Maharishi's camp to shake his faith in the power of meditation or the allure of the East.
Delaying his return to Britain by visiting Ravi Shankar allowed Harrison to distance himself from what was happening in London. 'I had very little to do with Apple,' he insisted. 'I was still in India when it started. I think it was basically John and Paul's madness – their egos running away with themselves or with each other.' At the heart of the madness, Derek Taylor became aware that
The Beatles weren't together: they didn't know what they wanted out of Apple. What Paul wanted was a publishing company, a record company, the Apple shops. I'm not sure that he wanted Apple Electronics and Magic Alex. John was the big sponsor there, but George liked Alex and Paul didn't dislike him. I don't know what Ringo's idea of Apple was. But back then I still saw the Beatles as one tight unit, one for all and all for one. I didn't realise the tensi
ons underneath, until George came back from Rishikesh and reacted with real horror to what was going on in the building, particularly in my press office.
The legendary excesses of Taylor's hospitality, with the finest dope and whisky on offer to guests, paled alongside the magnitude of Apple's ambitions. Every week a new company was incorporated under the Beatles' umbrella – Python Music Ltd, Apple Publicity Ltd, Apple Management Ltd, even a financial subsidiary based in Jersey. There should also be, Lennon and McCartney decided, an Apple School, and their Liverpudlian pal Ivan Vaughan – responsible for the pair's first meeting, in 1957 – was recruited to mastermind this unlikely venture.
The most innocent of Apple's schemes was to solicit music, poetry and art directly from the British public, thereby evading the bureaucracy that had delayed the Beatles' rise to stardom. Paul McCartney conceived a series of advertisements which suggested that anyone with unheralded talent should send their wares to Apple's office in Baker Street. 'If you're a singer, sing for us,' McCartney wrote. 'If you're a writer, write for us. Send us tapes and picture.' The company's ethos was simple: 'WITH THE EMPHASIS ON ENJOYMENT'. Apple's reward was a torrent of packages containing tapes and manuscripts, few of which were ever opened, let alone enjoyed. 'It was a good idea to help the world,' Taylor said twenty years later, 'but you should do it quietly, and not try to save the whole world at once, because then you end up breaking your promises. What on earth made us think that we could pull off this stunt of opening the doors to the world? After all these years of the Beatles shopping in Harrods after hours, suddenly we threw all that out of the window and said, "Here we are, come and get us!"'
While the deluge descended upon Baker Street, Lennon, McCartney and a retinue of retainers – Taylor, Mardas, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans and Ron Kass, who had been recruited to lend Apple Records a more professional edge than Evans could provide – flew to New York on 11 May 1968 to proclaim Apple to the New World. McCartney had already set the tone, declaring, 'Instead of trying to amass money for the sake of it, we're setting up a business concern at Apple – rather like a Western communism.' The Beatles' motives, he claimed, were purely altruistic: 'We've got all the money we need. I've got the house and the cars and all the things that money can buy.' No mention of the Beatles' tax burden was allowed to intrude on this idealistic scene.
In New York McCartney said that they wanted 'to see if we can't get artistic freedom within a business structure; to see if we can create things and sell them without charging three times our cost'. His comments betrayed a stunning naivety about the distribution network whereby art and artefacts reached the public, but also an almost Christ-like willingness to lay down his wealth and be as one with his audience. Lennon's message was more direct: he wanted to avoid the
inevitability of creative people having 'to go on their knees in an office, begging for a break . . . You don't even get there, because you can't get through the door because of the colour of your shoes.' His perception of himself as a persecuted outsider would become entrenched over the years to come.
Taylor remembered the New York trip as 'a mad, bad week . . . frenetic with promises, explanations and small silver packages containing something called speed, which made me talk very quickly and which was probably methedrine'. McCartney liaised with a local photographer named Linda Eastman whom he had met in London the previous summer. The American media buzzed with Apple-related news: of the possibility that the Rolling Stones might join the company when their current contract expired; of the film soundtrack that George Harrison had recorded; of the enticing projects optioned by Apple Films; of the 72-track recording studio that Alexis Mardas would build in their newly acquired London HQ in Savile Row, at the heart of the city's tailoring district; of the 47 territories around the globe in which Apple had been trademarked. As a corporate ad boasted that week, 'A is for Apple: Beatles Film, Television, Electronics, Retail, Records, Publicity.' As an aside, Lennon trailed his intention to 'package peace in a new box'. Ending war, reshaping capitalism, rescuing artists, reinventing education: there were no limits to the Beatles' hubris and hope.
'Basically, it was chaos,' Harrison recalled of this era. 'We just gave away huge quantities of money. It was a lesson to anybody not to have a partnership, because when you're in a partnership with other people you can't do anything about it (or it's very difficult to), and at that point we were naive. Basically, I think John and Paul got carried away with the idea and blew millions, and Ringo and I just had to go along with it.' Harrison's estrangement from his older colleagues had been captured on celluloid a few months earlier when the Beatles filmed promotional clips for their single 'Hello Goodbye'. While Lennon and McCartney cavorted like ecstatic lovers, Harrison glowered through the entire shoot. Had he heard his comrades' extravagant rhetoric in New York, his sense of distance could only have increased.
Yet already McCartney was showing signs of being overwhelmed by the demands of the empire he had created. As Derek Taylor lamented, 'The weirdness was not controlled at the start. You can't control weirdness, anyway; weirdness is weirdness.' And weirdness was now seeping into McCartney's private life. He was notorious among Beatles aides as, in one's description, 'a cocksman', but that was simply a facet of his fame. What threatened his long-standing relationship with actress Jane Asher was her insistence on pursuing her own career, even if this entailed lengthy engagements in the United States. Having come close to ending their affair, McCartney overcompensated by asking Asher to marry him. Yet this show of commitment did nothing to quell his restlessness.
Lennon's problems were more existential, as his lifestyle was more extreme. In India meditation had freed his imagination. 'I wrote 600 songs about how I feel,' he noted. 'I felt like dying, crying and committing suicide, but I felt creative.' Restored to family life, however, he retreated into his familiar gloom. 'I spent years trying to destroy my ego,' he recalled the following year. Jet-lagged after the flight from New York, he medicated himself with anaesthetic doses of LSD and marijuana. Still afloat on some level of consciousness, he experienced an epiphany. 'I'm Jesus Christ; I'm back again,' he told his friend Pete Shotton. 'I've got to tell the world who I am.' He called an emergency meeting of senior Apple staff, invited McCartney to witness the second coming and made his revelation. There was a stunned silence, before Lennon's friends politely welcomed their messiah to the planet. 'I've never been frightened by insanity or eccentricity,' Derek Taylor recalled, and Lennon was certainly teetering between those two states.
Restored to a degree of normality after a night's sleep, Lennon shuffled morosely around his spacious home while Shotton attempted to distract him. Cynthia Lennon was out of the country, and her husband hoped that some novel female company might brighten his mood. Shotton no doubt expected his friend to order in some models or aspiring starlets, but instead Lennon announced, 'I'll call Yoko.'
Since his sponsorship of Yoko Ono's art exhibition, Lennon had maintained discreet communication with the artist and film-maker. He had been intrigued and entranced by intelligent, articulate, assertive women in the past – journalist Maureen Cleave, folk singer Joan Baez, actress Eleanor Bron – but he had never sought out those qualities in a lover, let alone a wife. 'The Beatles were, and probably still are, typical northern male chauvinists,' Cynthia Lennon reflected. 'The Beatle wives were supposed to be on constant call, but not to get in the way of their husbands.' An art student herself, she had briefly attempted to emulate her husband's passion for heightened creativity: 'I remember once that I painted a psychedelic design on the front of a cabinet at home, and then I came down the next morning to find that John had covered it over with posters. After that, I gave up.'
Ono would never have conceded so easily. 'She has a tendency to think of men as assistants,' Lennon joked shortly before his death. Both of her husbands – Japanese pianist Toshi Ichiyanagi and American artist Tony Cox – had begun as equal partners and then discovered that they were expected to support her creativity rather than their
own. Despite separating in 1967, Cox and Ono continued to work together. On Boxing Day that year, as the British public prepared to sample Magical Mystery Tour, the couple were in the Belgian city of Knokke. A festival of experimental cinema was in progress, but the organisers refused to allow Ono's Film No. 4 to be shown because it contained nudity. As a protest against this timidity, the French anarchist Jean-Jacques Lebel staged a satirical beauty contest to elect 'Miss Exprmnt'. The participants – Ono and Cox among them – danced naked in public, and were promptly arrested. Scotland Yard's International Division was enlisted to investigate Ono's activities in Britain. The artists were tried in absentia and sentenced to three months' imprisonment – though only if they were foolish enough to revisit Belgium.
For more than a year Ono had been concentrating her artistic efforts on Britain. 'The English people were very kind to me when I first arrived in London,' she recalled. 'I found the English so poetic and sensitive; I felt like, Oh, it's my kind of people. So I felt I didn't want to go back to New York. And the press was extremely kind to me – until one of their boys got together with me.'
Besides contributing to occasional celebrations of the Fluxus movement, Ono gave public performances of what she dubbed Music of the Mind, where she would appear on stage hidden in a large black sack (Bag Piece), allow audience members to snip away her clothing with scissors (Cut Piece) or invite them to leap from a stepladder (Fly). She staged concerts in universities and arts centres, offered 'a Perception Weekend with Yoko Ono' in Birmingham, and participated in the mostly conceptual Antiuniversity of London, offering a course entitled The Connection, which attempted 'to connect people to their own reality by means of brain sessions and ritual'. Occasionally, she reprised one of her early experiments in sonic collage, which she had formulated earlier in New York and Japan. Her instrument was her voice, which she used fearlessly as a means of communicating pain, pleasure and the unhindered expression of pure emotion. In February 1968 she appeared as a guest artist at a London concert by the free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, squawking and squealing while Coleman's band improvised in her wake.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 5