Shout!

by Philip Norman

  Linda, meanwhile, was bringing about changes in Paul that Margo and the other girls viewed with deep resentment. They knew, from their illicit journeys round the house, how fastidious he had formerly been. “He used to shave every day, he always wore fresh clothes, and he smelled delicious. Rosie, the housekeeper, told us he insisted on having clean sheets on his bed every night.

  “We heard from Rosie how different Linda was. We hardly recognized Paul once she’d got hold of him. He started to put on weight—and he got so scruffy. I’ll swear he didn’t wash his hair for three weeks at a time. He never shaved, never wore anything but this old navy overcoat. He could go on the bus down to Apple, and no one would recognize him. Some of us thought we saw him in Oxford Street one day. We followed this real tramp in a navy overcoat all the way down Oxford Street, thinking he was Paul.”

  In May, the Beatles had met at Abbey Road to begin their first album for release on their Apple label. John and Paul between them had a backlog of some thirty songs, mostly written during their stay in India. George had been earnestly composing; even Ringo had a tune of his own to offer. With so much material in hand it was decided to use a format common enough in classical recording but unprecedented in pop. The collection would appear as two LP discs packed into a single dual-envelope sleeve. Not even Sgt. Pepper started in such an atmosphere of energy and abundance.

  Things began to go wrong on the very first day, when John Lennon walked into Studio One, his arm protectively encircling a small, frizzy-haired figure, dressed all in white. He had not, it seemed, grown tired of Yoko Ono. He was, if anything, more obsessed by her. As before, Yoko showed no awareness of studio protocol. She settled herself among the Beatles, cutting herself and John off from the other three by the neck of his guitar. His hair center-parted like hers, his eyes aslant behind pebble glasses, he was even starting to look a little Japanese.

  They whispered together, constantly and secretively, all through the session. Most unbelievably, when John took off his headphones, laid aside his guitar, and went off to use the men’s lavatory, Yoko still trotted at his heels. “That wasn’t me pursuing John, the way everyone thought,” she says now. “That was John’s terrible insecurity. He made me go out to the men’s room with him. He was afraid that if I stayed in the studio with all those other guys, I might go off and have an affair with one of them.”

  The awkwardness deepened as John and Paul strummed over to each other the finished songs they proposed the Beatles should record. This interchange, so often the flashpoint for brilliance, now produced only noncommittal nods. To Paul, John’s new music seemed harsh, unmelodious, and deliberately provocative. John, for his part, found Paul’s new songs cloyingly sweet and bland. For the first time, Lennon and McCartney saw no bridge between them.

  The album that resulted was, therefore, not the work of a group. It was the work of soloists: of separate egos, arguing for prominence. Paul and John each recorded his own songs in his own way, without advice or criticism from the other. George—apart from his own individual sessions—withdrew into a resigned neutrality. Ringo, in his acoustic hutch, bent his drumsticks as far as possible with the ever-changing currents. Sometimes, Ringo did not even bother to turn up.

  From John came music equally full of resentment and defiance and lingering terror of opening his mouth too wide. “Sexy Sadie” was a satire on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (“What have you done? You made a fool of everyone?’) but heavily camouflaged for fear that the holy man might still be able to put some kind of transcendental hex on him. “Revolution” was a chant in sympathy for the student protests now breaking out all over the world, yet of two minds whether the composer himself was quite ready to take to the barricades. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” inspired by an American firearms magazine, swiped in the approximate direction of the Vietnam holocaust. “Glass Onion” satirized overearnest Beatles fans with cross-references to earlier lyrics, even a false clue: “The Walrus was Paul.” The straightforward rock pieces, like “Yer Blues,” were one-dimensional and charmless, the playing turgid, the singing harsh and somehow vindictive. Nowhere was his conversion more evident than in the track called “Revolution 9,” a formless length of electronic noise interspersed with vocal gibberish, which Paul—and everyone else—tried unavailingly to cut from the finished album.

  Paul’s tracks were neat, polished, tuneful and, in their way, as unbalanced and incomplete: “Martha My Dear,” a song for his sheepdog; “Rocky Raccoon,” an unfinished Western doodle; “Honey Pie,” a glutinous twenties pastiche. In each, somehow, the most noticeable element was John’s missing “middle eight.” Only in “Blackbird,” briefly and beautifully, did Paul’s gift succeed in editing itself. “Back in the USSR,” too, was totally successful, a Chuck Berry–style rocker with Beach Boy harmonies that briefly restored the old familiar grin to John’s face. In that, as in a few more songs to come, their matchless combination somehow survived in an individual effort. Paul could have written John’s song “Julia.” It was his memorial, ten years too late, to the mother whose laughter gave the timbre to his own. But Julia in the song bore a second name: “Ocean Child.”

  It was while Lennon fought McCartney on “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” and “Revolution 9” that George Harrison suddenly and surprisingly gathered strength as a composer and performer. His tally of four songs on the finished thirty-track list was the highest John and Paul had ever permitted. As their joint control dwindled, so George’s presence increased: His voice, gathering confidence, sounded somehow like John’s and Paul’s. His “Savoy Truffle” was, after “Back in the USSR,” the album’s best piece of rock ’n’ roll. “Piggies,” a nursery-rhyme-ish diatribe against meat eaters, was mordantly humorous. Best of all was “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” a heavy rock lament, with searing guitar phrases played by George’s friend Eric Clapton of Cream. Clapton could not believe at first that the Beatles needed anyone but themselves.

  All this happened amid a constant drip of argument and bad feeling that, strangely enough, took heaviest toll on the Beatle whose placid temper was so often a strength and rallying-point. Ringo, halfway through the sessions, emerged from behind his acoustic screens looking tired and morose. He was playing badly, he said, and generally “not getting through.” To John first, then to Paul, he announced he was resigning. The others, tactfully, did not try to stop him. A week at home with Maureen and Zak and his new baby son, Jason, restored him to his old equanimity. When he returned to Abbey Road, Paul and George had covered his drums with welcome-back messages and flowers.

  They had been working on the still untitled double album for five months. For all that time, by night as well as day, Margo Stevens and the other girls had waited and watched the Abbey Road front steps. “We stuck it out through all weathers,” Margo says. “We were as tough as old boots in the end. When they came in to record, we’d sleep out on the pavement. People who lived in Abbey Road saw us when they came home from work at night. In the morning when they left for work, we were still there. I got so tough, I could sleep in all weathers. When I woke up one morning, there was snow all over me.”

  Margo, on these all-night watches, shared a sleeping bag with Carol Bedford, a Texan girl to whom George Harrison had once actually said “Hello.” “Normally the Beatles would go in to record around midnight,” Carol says. “They’d finish around four a.m. So we could count on at least four hours’ sleep. But once they all came out suddenly at about two-thirty. Margo and I woke up—we tried to stand up but we couldn’t undo the zipper on our sleeping bag. Both of us were hopping round the pavement, shrieking and trying to undo the zipper while the Beatles stood there, laughing at us.”

  George Martin had done all he could as adviser and editor. To Martin, the thirty songs, or song fragments, on tape reeked of the argument and self-indulgence that had gone into their making. Vainly he pleaded with John and Paul to drop the double album idea; to lose the scribble, like “Goodnight” and “Revolution 9”; to cut out all the linking, meaningless
shouts and murmurs and pull the fourteen best titles together for a Beatles album like Revolver, packed end-to-end with quality. The answer was no. On that, at least, all four agreed.

  “One night, we were all outside—we could tell they’d nearly finished,” Margo says. “It got to about three in the morning. We could see John through a window, playing with a light cord hanging from the ceiling. ‘Come on, boys,’ we were all saying, ‘it has been five months.’ Then they all came out and down the steps. It was all over.”

  As a tribute to their five-month wait Margo and the others were then taken into the empty Studio One to hear a playback of “Back in the USSR” and to pick up and take home as cherished souvenirs the apple cores and crisp packets littering the floor.

  The doorman at Apple was a thickset, heavily genteel young Cockney named Jimmy Clark. He was, so people said, a discovery of Peter Brown’s. He wore a stiff collar, tight-fitting trousers, and an exquisitely cut dove-gray morning coat. On fine days he would bask on the Apple front step, his hands in his coattails, watching the girls who eternally watched the house. His job was to prevent unauthorized entry via the front door or the area steps to the basement studio. He would block the rush and repel it with his large, starch-cuffed, shooing hands. To the resultant boos and insults, Jimmy Clark would grin and bridle delightedly like a cat under the grooming brush.

  It was, even so—as hundreds discovered—quite easy to enter the Apple house. Provided that one arrived by taxi and that one carried no banner or other sign of Beatles fanaticism, one was generally assumed to have legitimate business with Apple Corps. The girls fell back, unenviously. Jimmy Clark sardonically stood aside. The white front door yielded to a gentle push.

  The front hall was much as in any half-million-pound Georgian house. To the right sat a receptionist, instructed, like all Apple staff, to believe in the bona fide of all visitors. Into a telephone, white as the White Album, she would murmur the information that so-and-so was here. She would then smile. “OK, you can go up. You know the way, don’t you?” Everyone knew the way, up the green-carpeted stairs, past the framed gold records, too numerous to count, and the soft-lit oil painting of two honey-colored lion cubs.

  One did not, if one were scrupulous, try any of the doors of offices on the second floor. One climbed on, past more gold records, to Derek Taylor’s third-floor press and publicity office. This room, in the mornings, was bright with sun and fragrant with the scent of furniture polish. In the late afternoon it grew dark and bewildering. The only light came under the window blinds and from two projectors that beamed a psychedelic light show of bright-colored, writhing spermatozoa shapes, traveling in perpetuity across the opposite wall. Though dark and filled with obstructions, the room was exceedingly busy. One crossed the projector beam, conscious of many shaggy heads turning, like anxious topiary hedges, in the gloom.

  None but the specially important or importunate caller immediately approached Derek Taylor’s desk. If one were merely a journalist, one sat initially on a small outlying sofa, behind Taylor’s second assistant, Carol Paddon, and next to a tray of water into which several plastic birds endlessly dipped their beaks. Presently, one might move across to the small white button–backed sofa that led directly into Taylor’s presence. Already, one would have been offered tea, Scotch, and Coke, a cigarette, or perhaps something stronger. As each of Taylor’s visitors got up and left, one wriggled toward him another few inches. Eventually one would be seated immediately to the right of his huge scallop-backed wicker chair. The slender man with his neat hair and mustache and quiet, indiscreet voice, would lean over on the wicker arm that was to become split and broken with hours of leaning and listening.

  Press officers by their very nature pursue journalists. It was Derek Taylor’s unique accomplishment to be a press officer whom journalists pursued. Journalists from every newspaper, magazine, wire service, and radio and TV network in the Western world pursued him, as a means of access to the Western world’s longest-running headline story. They pursued him also because Taylor, strangely enough, was not a monster. He was amiable, sympathetic, polite to a degree that would ultimately seem miraculous. As an ex-journalist himself, he believed that journalists should get their story. It was simply a matter of time, he always said, and of choosing a moment when one or another “Fab” would be amenable.

  Two side doors connected the press office with other Apple departments. On Taylor’s right was the door to a downstairs kitchen where two Cordon Bleu–trained debutantes supplied meals to the directors and executive staff, and refreshments to all. On the left was a walk-in closet, presided over by Taylor’s hippie assistant, Richard, and popularly known as the Black Room. It had been used initially as a dumping ground for the entire—and entirely unread—cache of novels, poems, synopses, plans, and blueprints submitted from all over the world as projects deserving support by the Apple Foundation for the Arts. Several thousand manuscripts lay there, forgotten as absolutely as the nearby row of high-fashion shoes that Derek Taylor had brought home from Hollywood. What the Black Room principally contained were boxes of LP records by Apple artists, cases of wines, spirits, and soft drinks, and cartons of Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

  Another amenity of the press office—as of almost every other office in the building—was drugs. The presence of the West End’s major police station only a couple of hundred yards away did not prevent 3 Savile Row’s staff from puffing joints as casually as they sipped tea. Upper and downer pills of every color, compounded by the costliest amateur pharmacists, were to be found in desk drawers, along with the envelopes, glue, and staplers. A certain secretary had been nominated to gather up the entire stock and flush it away in the ladies’ lavatory if ever Savile Row’s boys in blue should decide to pay a surprise visit (which, amazingly, they never did). Another female employee brought in regular consignments of hash brownies that she herself had baked at the home she still shared with her parents and grandmother. Finding some left to cool in the family kitchen, her grandmother innocently sampled one and remained unconscious for the next twenty-four hours.

  “Press,” under Derek Taylor’s tolerant regime, was a term of almost infinite elasticity. It described virtually anyone who came to Apple with the ghost of an excuse for sharing in the Beatles’ artistic Utopia. It encompassed the sculptress who wanted money to produce tactile figures in leather and oil; and the French Canadian girl, frequently pried from the basement windows, who wanted money to get her teeth capped. It corraled in the same potentially creative ambit a showman who wanted money to do Punch and Judy shows on Brighton beach and an Irish tramp who wanted money to burn toy dolls with napalm as an antiwar gesture in the King’s Road.

  It encompassed, most of all, the hippies, who simply wanted money and who flocked to Savile Row in every type of flowing garment and every degree of dreamy-eyed incoherence. Several times each week the call would come to Apple from Heathrow Airport’s immigration department announcing that yet another beautiful person had arrived from California with beads and bells, but without funds or definite accommodation, to look up his four brothers in karma and Sergeant Pepper. At 3 Savile Row an entire San Francisco family, complete with breast-fed baby, waited to accompany John and Yoko to found an alternative universe in the Fiji Islands. There was also a mysterious Stocky, who said nothing, but perched all day on a press office filing cabinet drawing pictures of genitalia. He was harmless enough, as Derek Taylor always said.

  The spirit of Apple in those days is best summed up, perhaps, in a moment when Taylor’s desk intercom chirped yet again. “Derek,” the receptionist’s voice said, “Adolf Hitler is in reception.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Taylor said. “Not that asshole again. OK, send him up.”

  It was a consequence of the hippie age’s mingling superstition and vanity that young, fashionable people, in the young, fashionable music industry of the late sixties, endowed themselves freely with what amounted to psychic powers. Judgment of a person was made according to what vibratio
ns—or vibes—he gave off by his presence and mood. So the people who came to 3 Savile Row were judged not by the legitimacy or sincerity of their purpose but by their good or bad vibes. A person visiting Apple in a beard and sandals, holding a lighted joss stick, portended good vibes. A lawyer, tax official, or policeman portended bad vibes. Colloquies of people, such as board meetings, created vibes proportionately stronger. It was mainly under the influence of these ever-changing, ever-unpredictable vibes that 3 Savile Row, during the next year and a half, alternately glowed with happiness and grew pale with fear.

  To start with, the vibes were nearly all good. “Hey Jude,” the Beatles’ most successful single ever, had sold almost three million copies for their own Apple label. “Those Were the Days,” by Mary Hopkin, the little Welsh girl Paul had taken up, was number one in Britain and number two in America. Apple’s other new signings—James Taylor, Jackie Lomax, the Iveys, and, a prestige acquisition, the Modern Jazz Quartet—were all receiving an energetic and expensive launch as the Beatles’ favored protégés.

  There had been some bad vibes, admittedly, over the Apple boutique, The Fool and their extravagance, and the undignified scrimmage for giveaway merchandise. Nor were the vibes entirely amiable downwind of the house, among Savile Row’s custom tailors and outfitters. Dukes and bishops in their fitting rooms looked on appalled at the daylong riot, the banners and chanting, the shrieks whenever a white Rolls-Royce appeared. But, in general, the West End treated Apple with indulgence. The scene around the front steps made even passersby with bowler hats and rolled umbrellas smile.

  Best of all were the all-powerful vibes given off by the Beatles’ own frequent presence in the Georgian town house, directing their luscious new empire with a zest that infected each member of their ever multiplying staff. Though largely invisible within Apple, their presence was unmistakable. There would be the commotion on the first-floor landing, the tightly shut door to Neil Aspinall’s office, or Peter Brown’s. There would be the wakefulness surging suddenly through the press office as Derek Taylor answered his intercom. There were the familiar kitchen orders—a one-egg omelette for Ringo; cheese and cucumber sandwiches for George; for John and Yoko, brown rice, steamed vegetables, chocolate cake, and caviar.