It would have been hard to imagine a one-shot live performance more unlike the one the Beatles had given for thirty-odd people among the Apple chimney pots in biting January cold. Half a million Stones fans massed around Hyde Park Corner to watch the band give the most riveting show of its career to date, fronted by Mick Jagger in what seemed to be an Edwardian little girl’s white party frock. The concert was also a rite of mourning for Brian Jones, their recently dumped instrumental genius, who had been found dead in his swimming pool three days earlier. Jagger read a funerary passage from Shelley’s “Adonais”—the signal for hundreds of symbolic white butterflies to be released—before settling down to simulate fellatio with a hand microphone.
On August 31 came the most remarkable of all Britain’s free rock festivals, convened on the sleepy, 1950s-ish Isle of Wight and headlined by Bob Dylan, whom the organizers had tempted out of Beatle-like seclusion by stressing the island’s associations with his favorite poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. After what proved a short, disappointing performance, Dylan was helicoptered away to what the press knew only as “a destination near London.” It was in fact Tittenhurst Park, the rambling stately home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, now occupied by John Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon. As Dylan and John greeted each other in the gusts from the rotor blades, it was hard to say which of them had changed more out of all recognition.
Thunderous with alfresco guitars, perfumed with joss and pot, sparkling with sunshine and acid, it was as if this last summer of the sixties truly could, and would, go on forever. Young people lying half-naked in the grassy heat, romping in water, foam, or mud to the free sounds, for hectare after hectare, had found anno Domini’s nearest equivalent to the Garden of Eden. Though their power was soon to dissipate, if it ever really existed at all, they could point to this one irrefutable achievement. Never again in their lifetime would youthful crowds of half a million and more congregate together without wanting to harm each other or smash up the environment.
But the season was already changing. And the great guiding beacon for harmless joy in the past six-year golden age was being appropriated for darker purposes. From Los Angeles came news of random multiple murder on a scale previously associated only with gangland violence. A young movie actress named Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of the Polish director Roman Polanski, and six friends had been hacked to death at Tate’s luxury home by a hippie named Charles Manson and his “family” of largely female disciples. With his vaguely artistic as well as criminal tendencies, Manson was exactly the type who, a few months earlier, might have come begging at Apple’s still-open door. He was also the first fan-turned-fiend; the prototype of Mark David Chapman and George Harrison’s future stalker, Michael Abrams. Under questioning, Manson claimed to have received “guidance” to commit his atrocities from two songs on the Beatles’ White Album, “Piggies” and “Helter-Skelter,” the latter title having been found scrawled on walls throughout Sharon Tate’s home in her and her fellow victims’ blood.
Not all Apple creatures had perished under Allen Klein. In the press office there were still plastic birds, dipping and dipping their beaks around a shallow watertray. The press office, likewise, continued to function, though at what inscrutable whim of Klein’s Derek Taylor could not claim to understand. Sometimes in mid-afternoon, when his department became too crowded and the Scotch and Coke fumes too uproariously thick, Taylor would raise himself in his scallop-backed throne, push the hair off his eyes, and shout, “Clear the room now! I mean it!” After one such dismissal, wandering in the sudden space behind Carol Paddon’s desk, he paused by the water tray and studied the nodding birds. “Those beaks are going moldy,” he remarked gloomily. “No one told us they’d do that when we bought them. They cost us one pound each.”
Derek Taylor was a frustrated writer. But, unlike most frustrated writers, he had talent. Often he would have dismissed his court simply for the purpose of fighting his way back the few inches across his desk to the typewriter that stood there. He wrote a great deal during Apple’s last year: essays and soliloquies and memoranda to himself, all on a theme as constant as the pressure on him from above, below, and sideways. Why do I work for the Beatles? And why, of all the complex emotions produced by working for the Beatles, is the commonest one simple fear?
“Whatever the motivation,” Taylor typed, “the effect is slavery. Whatever the Beatles ask is done. I mean, whatever the Beatles ask is tried. A poached egg on the Underground on the Bakerloo Line between Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross? Yes, Paul. A sock full of elephant shit on Otterspool Promenade? Give me 10 minutes, Ringo. Two Turkish dwarfs dancing the Charleston on a sideboard? Male or female, John? Pubic hair from Sonny Liston? It’s early closing, George (gulp), but give me until noon tomorrow. The only gig I would do after this is the Queen. Their staff are terrified of them, and not without reason. They have fired more people than any comparable employer unit in the world. They make Lord Beaverbrook look like Jesus.”
Then the music would begin again, and Taylor, and Mavis Smith, and Carol Paddon—who was afraid to go on vacation lest her job should vanish—each remembered why they were sitting here. The stagnant sea of journalists and TV men remembered, or almost did. Taylor said the same thing into the telephone a dozen times each day. “It’s called Abbey Road. Yes—the studios are in Abbey Road. It’s an album just like they used to make. They sound the way they sounded in the old days.”
Something had stopped the elements diverging and restored them to their old unsurpassable balance. Abbey Road was John Lennon at his best, and Paul McCartney at his best, and George Harrison suddenly reaching a best that no one had ever imagined. It was John’s anarchy, straight and honed. It was Paul’s sentimentality with the brake applied. It was George’s new, wholly surprising presence, drawing the best from both sources. It was a suite of glorious new songs, not warring internally as on the White Album but merging their irreconcilably different viewpoints into a cohesive and balanced whole, and performed with the tautness and unartificiality they had sought for so long. It was the moment, caught again and crystallized, even in the flux of an expiring decade. It was hot streets, soft porn, and hippiedom fading into a hard reality. It was London here and now, and Liverpool then, and the Beatles, dateless and timeless in a sudden, capricious illusion of perfect harmony.
It echoed throughout 3 Savile Row on September 11, then a date just like any other, as the Apple house girded itself to face whatever ructions this day might bring, its green carpets vacuumed smooth, its still-empty upper suites savory with the aroma of furniture polish. Here was the opening track, “Come Together,” with its hissing percussion and all-too-obvious echoes of the Lennons’ bedroom. Here was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” another cutie-pie Paul song, but this time with an undertow of viciousness: “Bang bang Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon her head / Bang-bang Maxwell’s silver hammer made sure that she was dead.” Here was the ritual Ringo track, a children’s song called “Octopus’s Garden,” as happy and optimistic as Ringo somehow remained, yet still with a wistful subtext of longing for the Beatles to be “under the sea… knowing they’re happy and they’re safe.” Here was “Because,” featuring the sweetest and closest group harmony since “Here, There and Everywhere,” from a lyric jotted down by John on the reverse of one of John Eastman’s most reproachful interoffice memos.
In the ground-floor office of Bag Productions, the first visitors were led in to meet John and Yoko. They were not journalists; they were two blind, middle-aged Texan women in pink and orange taffeta ballgowns. Each was led across to touch John, then Yoko led them to the group of four Plexiglas cabinets blocking the fireplace. It was the hi-fi system that John had ironically christened The Plastic Ono Band, and even credited with the playing of “Give Peace a Chance.” Each blind girl’s hand in Yoko’s touched the featureless robots hopefully, like a shrine.
Next came the day-long line of reporters, primed with questions about peace; about John’s interest in the Tate m
urder case, but mainly about the two films he and Yoko had shown that week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The first was Rape; the second, entitled Self-Portrait, was a forty-two-minute study of John’s penis both in partial and full erection. “Anything that gets a reaction is good,” he told the New Musical Express. “People are just frozen jellies. It just needs someone to do something to turn off the fridge.” Yoko sat beside him, eating brown rice from a bowl with a long wooden spoon. She interjected only to regret that no serious critical comment had been directed at their film of John’s penis. Or, as Yoko innocently said, “The critics wouldn’t touch it.”
George and Ringo were both at Savile Row that day. For Ringo, the errand was straightforward. He had come in to give Peter Brown details of the house he wanted to sell, having bought it from Peter Sellers a few months previously. Now he was tired of its extensive parkland, its private cinema and sauna baths and wide frontage, with fishing rights, on the River Wey.
“Do you want some apple jelly?” he asked Neil Aspinall.
“Apple jelly?” Aspinall echoed suspiciously, as if it were code for some new narcotic.
“Yeah, we’ve got hundreds of apples lying round our orchard,” Ringo said. “So Maureen’s made pots and pots of apple jelly.”
George arrived, accompanied by his assistant, Terry Doran, to do a photographic shoot for a German magazine named Bravo. He was suddenly in demand, thanks largely to the song that, by common consent, was one of Abbey Road’s very best. George had written it months before while sitting in his friend Eric Clapton’s garden. Forgetting his mantras and sitars, he had entitled it “Here Comes the Sun,” and in that simplicity at long last touched a chord of the mystical. Perhaps its ultimate accolade was that, on first hearing it, most people mistook it for a “John” song, lead-sung by John. In the same way, years of exposure to Paul’s melodic gifts had borne fruit in a ballad called “Something,” the first-ever George song chosen for a Beatles single as the A side.
Upstairs, the Bravo photographer was waiting patiently beside a set banked high with flowers in Hare Krishna yellow and orange. An elderly workman staggered in, carrying a box containing the disconnected components of an eight-armed Hindu deity. Between them the photographer and he began to assemble the figure, trying to figure out which arm went into which socket. Even George seemed impressed by the thoroughness of the preparations. “If I’d known it was going to be like this, I’d have washed me hair,” he said. As the shoot was about to start, he decided that his blue denim shirt and jeans were not a suitable outfit. A press office secretary was sent to the nearby Mr. Fish boutique to buy half a dozen silk shirts for him to choose from. As he looked through them he tried to answer an English journalist’s question, the same old one—how had Apple managed to go so wrong? “It was like a game of Chinese whispers, really,” George said. “We said one thing, it was passed along among lots of other people, and what came back to us wasn’t anything like we’d meant.”
The Beatles ceased to exist that afternoon, when Anthony Fawcett, John and Yoko’s personal assistant, picked up a ringing telephone from the debris of papers and plates. It was a Canadian entrepreneur asking if John and Yoko would attend a rock ’n’ roll revival concert in Toronto the following day. John took the telephone from Fawcett: He would go, he said, but only if he were allowed to perform. Within hours, the Plastic Ono Band had metamorphosed from Plexiglas robots into an ad hoc supergroup consisting of John, Yoko, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman, and Alan White. A charter airliner was booked to carry them, if John got up in time and did not take fright at the last minute at the thought of appearing with an unrehearsed band before an audience of thousands.
In the studio, George was still being photographed by Bravo magazine in his chosen Mr. Fish shirt, against the Hindu idol and the banked yellow flowers. Ringo wandered in to say hello and, as a keen photographer himself, to check out the professional camera equipment being used. “You want to use a zoom lens through that prism,” he advised the Bravo photographer.
“Do you fancy going to Australia to play?” George asked him in ironic reference to John’s impending twenty-four-hour Canadian visit.
“When do we get back?”
“Tomorrow.”
Two floors down, the press office was, as usual, plunged into darkness, speckly with psychedelic light shapes, crowded with expectant, seated figures, and reverberant with the aural sunshine of the Abbey Road album. In one corner, Mal Evans’s discovery, the Iveys—now renamed Badfinger—sat, like very young pantomime pirates, awaiting news of their first release on the Apple label. Mary Hopkin, a sweet, frail, bewildered girl, passed through with her even more bewildered Welsh parents. Neil Aspinall came in to say that the Plastic Ono Band had got away to Canada on the second charter airliner asked to stand by after they missed the first one.
Now on Abbey Road the Apple house heard the voice that had first imagined it, and argued to launch it, and that had now abandoned it, leaving only a song lyric behind as explanation. “You never give me your money,” sang Paul to the manager he would not recognize. “You only give me your funny paper.” He had contrived to make the album that was an act of reunion serve also as an outlet for his bitter frustration, even though, being Paul, he could only do so in hints, between the smiles of one who still hated to admit any unpleasantness.
By late afternoon, after its umpteenth play, it was as though Abbey Road told the Beatles’ whole life story in miniature, from the effortless good sex of “Come Together” to the finish of side two, where the narrative splintered into unfinished scraps and intros that led nowhere: the mystical “Sun King,” the Sergeant-Pepper-ish “Mean Mr. Mustard,” the Scouse wisecracking “Polythene Pam” (“she’s the kind of a ge-erl who reads the News of the We-erld…”), the memory of some relentless groupie in “She Came in through the Bathroom Window.” Here, if not in real life, Paul had the last word, with his tender cradle song “Golden Slumbers”; his little wink and nod (“Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl”) to the monarch who would one day knight him; his coded warning to those who had beaten him that they would “carry that weight a long time.” Here, prematurely, from Paul was an epitaph for the band that would never be bettered:
And in the end, the love you take
Is equal to the love
You make.
That September, in the heady aftermath of festivals and free concerts, Paul made one last effort to reunite the others on stage again. His idea now was that they should play at small clubs, unannounced, perhaps even in disguise. Ringo supported the idea and George, though noncommittal, did not refuse outright. But John told Paul bluntly he must be daft. “I might as well tell you,” John continued, “I’m leaving the group. I’ve had enough. I want a divorce, like my divorce from Cynthia.”
He had reached his decision while flying back with Yoko, Eric Clapton, and Klaus after their tumultuous welcome at the Toronto rock ’n’ roll festival. Standing up there with Yoko and the robots, singing any words that came into his head, he had realized that ceasing to be a Beatle need not strike him blind. “Cold Turkey,” his new song, named for heroin’s withdrawal horrors, was written to renounce an even worse addiction. He would never again be hooked by “Yesterday” or “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.” All that remained was to do what his idol Elvis Presley had never been able to, and “break out of the palace.”
What restrained him was an urgent plea from Allen Klein not to jeopardize the deals Klein still hoped to do on behalf of the Beatles as a unit. For Klein, at that very moment, was on the brink of an unequivocal coup concerning their record royalties. Having failed to browbeat EMI he had set about browbeating their American label, Capitol. Bob Gortikov, Capitol’s president, under pressure from Klein, was proving less inflexible than Sir Joseph Lockwood. But clearly, for John to announce his resignation would seriously weaken Klein’s bargaining position. John, therefore, agreed to keep silent—even to the other Beatles—until the Capitol deal was done.
It was a promise
he found impossible to keep when Paul, in another long boardroom wrangle, brought up the subject of live performing again. A furious row developed, with John railing bitterly at Paul for his “granny” music, especially “Ob-la-di” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” on the Abbey Road album, which John had particularly detested. He told Paul he was sick of fighting for time on their albums, and of always taking the B sides on singles. Then, rather tactlessly, he pointed at George as perennial victim of the Lennon-McCartney “carve-up.” Paul replied that only this year had George’s songs achieved comparable quality with theirs. George interrupted resentfully that songs he had recorded this year were often those he had written years earlier but not been allowed to release. He added that he had never really felt the Beatles were backing him. As John rounded angrily on George, Paul made a sudden, quiet plea to them to remember how they had always overcome disagreements in the past. “When we go into a studio, even on a bad day, I’m still playing bass, Ringo’s still drumming, and we’re still there, you know.”
Paul could not believe that John’s resignation was anything other than a fit of temperament—like George’s during the Let It Be sessions. When the white Rolls-Royce moved off down Savile Row that afternoon, it had been agreed not to dissolve—for the time being. Not long afterward, a slightly stunned president of Capitol Records agreed to Allen Klein’s demand for an unheard-of royalty of sixty-nine cents on each Beatles album sold in America. Derek Taylor spoke to Bob Gortikov shortly after Gortikov ended his last session with Klein. “We would have done the deal anyway,” Gortikov said, “but did he have to be so nasty about it?”
According to Klein, the deal with Capitol swung Paul in his favor at last. “Paul congratulated me on the agreement. He said, ‘Well, if you are screwing us, I can’t see that you are.’” Paul’s version, sworn subsequently in a high court affidavit, was that, on the contrary, he felt uneasy to think the Beatles had received a massive royalty increase at the very moment when their future together was so uncertain. Also, by that time, he had ceased to believe anything Klein said. The most public and PR-conscious Beatle retreated into complete seclusion, with Linda and their newborn daughter, Mary, on his farm in Argyllshire.
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