by David Browne
Since he’d been such a natural, unaffected screen presence in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! a career in acting became another way to pass the time between Beatle projects. He’d already played a Mexican gardener in 1968’s Candy, a warped sex comedy based on a novel coauthored by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and he’d just wrapped up a larger, costarring role in The Magic Christian, also based on a Southern novel, in which he was cast as the adopted son of a rich cynic (played by Sellers) who bribes unsuspecting people to do outrageous things for cash. The film had already opened in the U.K. to mixed reviews, but a U.S. premiere was set for the middle of February.
Arriving in Los Angeles for the film’s opening, Starr made nice at a press conference. With his usual nonchalance, he deflected most of the Beatle questions, only saying the group would most likely be recording together soon. Hardly anyone seemed to care about the movie; most of the non-Beatle questions had to do with working with his busty costar Raquel Welch.
Starr couldn’t have been happier to leave the next day for Las Vegas to see Elvis Presley. The previous summer, Presley had returned to live performance with a string of triumphant and inordinately profitable shows at the International Hotel. Coming on the heels of his 1968 comeback TV special, the Vegas shows marked the concert debut of a different Elvis. His voice revealing new layers of emotional depth and velvety richness, he was still undeniably sexual, a prowling cougar onstage. But he was singing far more contemporary pop tunes, he was surrounded by a choir and orchestra, and he was wearing a newly designed one-piece jumpsuit that made his karate stage moves easier to pull off. Before long, Presley would be taking a nearly identical version of the show on the road.
After being sneaked in through the kitchen entrance at the International, Starr, Maureen, and Brown were escorted to their table. Halfway through the show, Presley introduced the visiting Beatle from the stage and Starr, good-natured as always, took a bow. Afterward, he and Brown were hustled backstage for a quick meeting with Presley. Despite the presence of more beefy security types than he’d ever seen, Brown was pleasantly surprised by how chatty, courteous, and charming Presley was. Six years before, the Beatles had visited Presley at his Bel Air home, a meeting notorious for Presley’s indifference to their presence. Now, as the new decade arrived, Presley and Starr were on equal ground: two well-compensated, beloved pop aristocrats, each searching for something new in their lives and work.
Two weeks after John Brower left Denmark, Lennon’s assistant Anthony Fawcett tracked him down at a hotel in Los Angeles, where Brower was being interviewed about his grandiose festival by a writer from the Los Angeles Free Press. Still scrambling to turn his idea into reality, Brower had changed the name of his festival company to Karma Productions. Now, here was Fawcett on the line, telling him Lennon had written and recorded a new song, “Instant Karma,” and offering to play it for him over the phone.
On January 26, just before the call, American gossip columnist Earl Wilson had written a syndicated column, “Beatles May Not Record Together,” in which he noted there was “increasing conviction among their intimates that they may never record again as a whole.” The following day, Lennon unintentionally backed up Wilson’s story. Having just returned from his Scandinavian trek, he’d woken up with a lyric in his head, written a rudimentary melody on a piano, and then, with the help of Apple employees Mal Evans and Bill Oakes, rounded up a quick cast of musicians (including Harrison and White, substituting for the nowdeparted Starr) to help him put it to tape. To oversee the session, Lennon suggested Phil Spector.
In rock and roll circles, the diminutive but intense Spector was a controversial and mythical figure. After a flush of early success, he’d retreated into seclusion. Starting with a cameo as a drug dealer in Easy Rider the year before, he’d emerged from semiretirement. He was strong-willed and strident, yet he and Lennon shared a caustic sense of humor right from the start: The two men joked about starting and finishing the song in a day. As Spector scurried around the studio hooking up tape machines and setting up microphones, the band began rehearsing the tune. “John played the song and we all started playing and it sounded good and was very swinging and came together fast,” recalled Voormann, a German artist and musician who’d met the Beatles in Hamburg and was playing bass at the session. Evans corralled a bunch of locals from a nearby pub to join in on the background vocals in the chorus. By 4 A.M. it was done—recorded, mixed, and ready to roll off a vinyl assembly line. Again, Lennon was elated: The Beatles would never have bashed out a song so fast. “There was a simplicity in the way he did it that I don’t think he would have been able to get across with the Beatles,” recalled Voormann. “He felt much freer than before.”
In the L.A. hotel room, Brower and the Free Press’ John Carpenter picked up separate phone lines and prepared to hear the results. “Instant Karma” roared out; even over a Transatlantic connection, Brower could hear its massive, reverberating piano chords and White’s loud, pushy shuffle beat, which put a massive exclamation mark at the end of each line in the chorus. But those lyrics . . . “Who on earth do you think you are—a superstar? Well, right you are!” taunted Lennon with a rasp that stung like scalding water.
When it was over, Carpenter looked at Brower and brought up the use of the word “karma” in the song. “Isn’t that the name of your company?” he asked. “I don’t know if that’s a song for your festival. It doesn’t sound very positive.”
Brower had to admit that, yes, it was the name of his production company, and no, he didn’t know what to make of its message. Similarly, plenty of Beatle fans scratched their heads when copies of “Instant Karma” arrived in stores ten days later: The sleeve credited the song to “John Ono Lennon.” Although Lennon had had his middle name officially changed from Winston to Ono when he wed Ono the previous March, “Instant Karma” marked the first time he used the name on a record. Even in the world of John Lennon, it was hard to imagine a more puzzling month than the one just ended.
Both everyone and no one knew where Paul McCartney was. Certainly, the other Beatles and Apple employees knew he’d spent a good deal of the winter holidays at his bare-boned farmhouse outside Campbeltown in the remote southwest of Scotland. He’d purchased it several years before, during his relationship with Peter Asher’s sister Jane. In the fall of 1969, when a new degree of tension enveloped the Beatles, McCartney had retreated to the house with Linda, her seven-year-old daughter Heather from her previous marriage, and her and McCartney’s new baby Mary. Aside from a Life magazine photographer and journalist who tracked him down that fall, looking to prove he was actually alive during the “Paul Is Dead” uproar, McCartney was guaranteed isolation.
None of the Beatles ever made the trip to the house, and in February, Lennon gave an interview—one of many at the time, sometimes to promote his peace causes, sometimes to simply keep his name in the papers—saying he and McCartney hadn’t spoken in two months and only communicated by postcard. Even Peter Brown, Apple’s dapper and unflappable administrative director and one of the few in close touch with McCartney, didn’t bother making the trek to the farm, knowing he’d have to hike from a main road to reach it. McCartney told everyone the house didn’t have a phone, even though it did; Brown, who’d more or less taken over the duties of handling the Beatles after Brian Epstein’s death in 1967, would often receive calls at Apple from Scotland.
With McCartney’s exact whereabouts up in the air and communication among the Beatles fractured, Klaus Voormann was particularly stunned to receive a call one winter afternoon from McCartney himself. Would Voormann be up for a visit to McCartney’s home in London?
In Hamburg a decade before, Voormann, then a young Berlin-born artist with male-model cheekbones, chanced upon the Beatles when they were blasting out sweaty rock and roll at the Kaiserkeller Club during their residence there. With his friends Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer, Voormann became an immediate Beatle follower and friend. When he moved to London a few years later
, he remained close with Lennon, Harrison, and Starr; it was Lennon who suggested Voormann illustrate the cover for Revolver, and Voormann at various times crashed at Harrison’s and Starr’s homes.
No sooner had Voormann said yes to McCartney’s invitation than the Beatle himself pulled up to Voormann’s apartment on Heath Street. McCartney was driving a Mini, one of Europe’s fashionably small cars, complete with dark-tinted windows. In the car on the way to McCartney’s home in St. John’s Wood, Voormann noticed the collar of his friend’s blue shirt: scruffy and worn down, not quite the sartorial garb everyone associated with McCartney. Like others, Voormann had heard McCartney’s fashion sense had taken a funkier, more downscale turn with his new wife.
In less than ten minutes, they arrived at 7 Cavendish Avenue, a cozy three-story home behind a black security gate that McCartney had purchased five years earlier. Voormann stepped inside and came upon keyboards, drums, and guitars: a veritable one-man band scattered about the living room. Voormann picked up a guitar and the two men jammed a bit together. Then, to Voormann’s added wonder, McCartney cued up a tape machine and played him a few songs he’d been creating on his own.
Upon his return to London in the new year, McCartney had bought a home recording unit and had it delivered to Cavendish Avenue. There, he began putting on tape some of the songs and fragments he’d been playing at the farm. He started with a trifle, strumming lazy chords and singing about the way Linda looked “with the lovely flowers in her hair.” It wasn’t much of a song, but it was a start. Over the next month and a half—at home and then in Morgan, a studio just north of London—more songs began taking shape, with McCartney playing all the instruments himself. Some, like a modest rocker called “That Would Be Something” built around a coiled-up guitar line, were cut in his living room. (In that song and others, he’d hum when he didn’t have enough words written down.) He tossed off “Valentine’s Day,” an instrumental, and resurrected “Junk,” a wispy, lullaby-style leftover from the White Album sessions. With its bumpy rock and roll feel, “Oo You” recalled “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road,” from the White Album. “Momma Miss America,” another instrumental, was fueled by a rumbling piano and drumbeat that were, by his standards, experimental and ambient. Like a few other songs, it devolved into random strums and giggles, as if McCartney wanted to make it explicitly clear that he wasn’t taking it all terribly seriously.
In late February, McCartney returned to EMI Studio, the Beatles’ home base, bringing the tapes with him. John Kurlander, a young EMI employee who’d worked as an assistant on the Abbey Road sessions, couldn’t help but notice the difference in McCartney’s mood. McCartney was now relaxed and productive, playing one instrument at a time as he constructed or finalized his new songs, only Linda and their children his companions. Inspired by the plight of a South American tribe he’d seen on TV, he recorded “Kreen-Akore,” essentially a drum solo, then played every instrument and sang every note on two truly fully realized songs, “Every Night” and “Maybe I’m Amazed,” both odes to Linda.
To Peter Brown, one of the few told of the work in progress, the unassuming project hardly felt out of the ordinary. After all, Brown thought, the Beatles were always working on one thing or another, albeit increasingly on their own. As McCartney well knew, Lennon had just finished “Instant Karma,” Harrison had already put out an album of instrumental film music, Wonderwall Music, and Starr was at work on his album of oldies. Brown also knew McCartney had a particularly strong work ethic and, far more than the others, a deep-seated need to entertain.
On February 25, one of McCartney’s last days at the studio, he began and finished an entire song, “Man We Was Lonely.” The music—a gentle sway led by an acoustic guitar, with mild bass and drum parts that hinted at polka oom-pah—was determinedly casual. Starting with the ungrammatical use of “was” instead of “were,” the song was consciously hammy, and the repetitive lyrics, with their references to his former city life and his new wife, were his most direct comment on his state of mind. “But now we’re fine all the while,” he and Linda sang at the end—three times in a row, as if to ensure the point was made. “After all the tension with the Beatles, spending several weeks up at the farm with Linda put him in a state of relaxation he hadn’t been in for a while,” Kurlander recalled. “There was no one else to answer to at all.”
In part, that was because few knew he was there. Following an earlier session, on February 22, Kurlander jotted down McCartney’s name in his logbook—then scratched it out and wrote “Ssssh.” Starting the following day, McCartney was referred to in Kurlander’s journal as “Billy Martin,” his nom de studio. For reasons Kurlander couldn’t discern, the sessions were suddenly clandestine.
The silver film canisters squirreled away in an office at Apple Corps told their whole story, or at least the early part of it. Footage of them, young and ebullient, at the Cavern Club. Clips from their early days on tour, playing to swaying stadiums of weeping female fans. Film of Brian Epstein, youthful, alive, talking of his plans for the group. The canisters sat in a small room with no windows located next to the second-floor office of Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ longtime and loyal friend. Despite all the changes in the band and at Apple, Aspinall remained a valuable, rocksteady presence. He’d gone from working as their first road manager—putting up posters of their club gigs, among other tasks—to helping run Apple from its launch. A movie projector sat in the middle of the room, with a projection screen nearby. All that was needed was someone to catalogue the contents of each canister, and for that job, Aspinall turned to Chris O’Dell.
O’Dell, a vivacious brunette born and raised in Oklahoma, was on her second tour of duty at Apple. She’d been living in Los Angeles in 1968 when she’d met Derek Taylor, Brian Epstein’s former assistant and a dapper hippie aristocrat in his own right. After a falling-out with Epstein, Taylor moved to southern California to become a rock publicist—for, among others, the Byrds, who then included David Crosby. When Taylor met O’Dell, he told her he was returning to London to work for the Beatles’ new business, Apple. A few months later, at Taylor’s invitation, O’Dell was at Apple herself, working random jobs like answering the switchboard, until Peter Asher asked her to be his personal assistant. In the fall of 1969, O’Dell left Apple and returned to Los Angeles to be with her new boyfriend, singer and pianist Leon Russell. But when their relationship soured, O’Dell was back in London, this time at the dawn of 1970.
A year and a half after its launch, Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row looked unchanged in many ways. The five-story building tucked away on the modest Piccadilly Square street, alongside a string of upper-crust tailoring shops, retained its reddish-brown brick exterior; the Apple Scruffs, the loyal female fans, still gathered outside, just beyond the black iron front gate. Peter Brown was still reporting to work, handling the band’s social engagements, helping organize wedding plans, and juggling innumerable Beatle details. His office at Apple was on the second floor, right across from the one the Beatles shared, and Brown, in the old days, would see McCartney there almost every day.
But that was before Epstein’s death, before the fractious making of the White Album, before the Twickenham Studio filming, before Lennon and Ono had held that meeting with Allen Klein. It was before their marriages and house purchases, and it was certainly before the meeting in Brown’s office the prior September, when McCartney had argued for future concerts and a TV special and Lennon had called him “daft,” told everyone he wanted a divorce from the band, and stormed out. “Well, that’s that, then,” said one Apple employee glumly afterward.
Apple was different now. Inside, the whirlwind of activity O’Dell had witnessed in 1968—the constantly brrrring phones, the sight of McCartney, Lennon, Harrison, or Starr whipping in and out, the secretaries brewing tea and making sandwiches—was largely gone, as was her old boss Peter Asher. Everything was so quiet now, the mood so much less freewheeling. O’Dell heard from the outset that McCartney, once the m
ost business-focused, never came into the office anymore.
Apple was hardly in a position to hire, especially now that Klein was pruning its budgets and attempting to rein in its out-of-control finances. But Aspinall needed an assistant, so O’Dell had a new job helping him dig through the film canisters. For several weeks, O’Dell diligently scribbled down the contents of each reel. Aspinall never talked about his assignment in detail, but after a while O’Dell assumed he was putting together a documentary on the history of the Beatles. It felt odd to compile what amounted to a chronicle of a band that still existed, but O’Dell didn’t question the project.
Nor did she see it through to completion. To O’Dell’s surprise, Harrison called her one late winter day and asked her to work for him at his new home. By 1970, rock and roll was roughly fifteen years old and ready for royalty of its own. The Beatles fit the bill, and as O’Dell saw for herself on a late-night drive to the house, so did Harrison’s new home. In early March, he and wife Pattie Boyd had left their bungalow in Esher, Surrey, and moved into Friar Park, a Gothic mansion in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, over an hour west of London. Once visitors drove past the entrance house and onto the main property, they saw a mansion a far cry from the drab, two-floor Upton Green, Speke, council house in which Harrison had lived with his family as a teenager. Surrounded by thirty acres, Friar Park had two dozen rooms, stainedglass windows, multiple gardens, oak-paneled rooms, a library, and pointed turrets outside. If Harrison wasn’t able to place many of his own songs on Beatle albums, he’d at least show them up with the grandest of all Beatle residences.