Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Like most of the neighbouring farms, High Park was originally owned by the Duke of Argyll, sublet to a tenant farmer named John Brown, who kept 60 sheep and eight dairy cows on his 183 acres. Old man Brown was ready to retire when Paul’s lawyers bought the farm, without revealing the identity of their client. The tenant farmer was tending his stock when McCartney came by for the first time. ‘Christ, it’s a Beatle!’ the old boy exclaimed. His farmhouse proved to be a basic single-storey stone cottage, built in the nineteenth century, with one bedroom, a roughcast floor, an old cooking range, open fires and corrugated tin roof. There was no heating or running hot water. Many friends wondered why Paul bought such a place when he could afford luxury. It was the peace and quiet that appealed, also the rustic contrast to his metropolitan life, while a penchant for roughing it on holiday is often found among the moneyed English. Jane thought the cottage delightful and Paul, who had adopted some of her upper-crust ways, agreed.

  The setting was beautiful. A meadow lay between the farmhouse and Ranachan Hill, which rose steeply in the near distance. Planted in the meadow between house and hill was a phallic finger of rock, 12 feet tall, one of the mysterious standing stones that are a feature of this part of Scotland, erected time out of mind by the Celts. Up on top of Ranachan Hill were the remains of an equally ancient fort, possibly built as a defence against the Vikings. These artefacts caught Paul’s imagination and fuelled an interest in Celtic mythology. As Ranachan Hill guards High Park on the south, the steading is closed in to the north by woodland, the fields between bright with flowering primroses in spring, turning purple with the heather in autumn. Crystal clear water ran through the burn. Rabbits, hares and foxes scampered hither and yon, a veritable Eden, dead quiet, with fabulous starry skies. When Paul climbed Ranachan Hill he could look across the sea to Ireland, which helped him connect with his ancestry.

  Paul introduced himself to the neighbours. ‘He wanted to meet his neighbours, and he came to see us [with] Jane Asher,’ recalls Katie Black, who welcomed the Beatle into her cosy kitchen at Tangy Farm. The Blacks were musical, Archie Black loving nothing better than a singsong around the piano, and Paul joined in, though Mrs Black’s elderly mother was unimpressed when the music went past her bedtime. One night when they were all having a session downstairs, the old lady stomped on the floor. ‘What is that noise? ’ she asked her daughter when she came upstairs to ask what she wanted.

  ‘Mother, it’s Paul McCartney.’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s Winston Churchill, I’m not having it!’

  Firm friendships were formed with established farming families like the Blacks, who proved loyal and discreet. When fans and members of the press started trickling up in search of Paul, the neighbours didn’t say where he lived, nor did they trouble Paul for autographs, or resent the fact he wasn’t a real farmer. Paul employed a local man to look after High Park, a fellow named Duncan Cairns, later Duncan’s son Robert, but they didn’t work the land for profit any more.

  Paul also found the townsfolk agreeable. He could wander about Campbeltown doing his shopping, and using the pub and wee cinema, without being bothered, while also feeling welcomed into a small, tight-knit community with an everyday friendliness less common in more populous parts of the U K. New friendships were formed in town. One day a drummer from the Campbeltown Pipe Band - ordinary working men who came together in the evenings and at weekends to play traditional Scottish music on bagpipe and drum - introduced himself to Paul, who invited the band to High Park to make a home movie with him and Jane. ‘He wanted us to go down in this park well below the farm, playing up and down, and Jane was supposed to be lost out in the hills, and she’d hear the band and come running down as we are marching up and down,’ recalls drummer Jim McGeachy. ‘We played there for an hour or so. He made a film of it.’ Later Paul’s association with the pipe band would lead to one of his most successful recordings.

  When the sun shone, there seemed no better place to be than High Park, and the weather was glorious when Paul and Jane visited in June 1967, so nice they stayed a few days longer than they’d intended. And when they had to go home, they were able to fly to London. Another attraction for Paul was that, while Kintyre was very remote, private planes could use nearby RAF Machrihanish, which meant he could get back to Beatles business within two hours.

  ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

  Paul had only just got home to Cavendish when a Sunday People reporter knocked on his door asking about a story in Life magazine that Paul had taken LSD. Paul asked the reporter inside, confirming that he had used LSD, four times, and had no regrets.

  [It] opened my eyes to the fact there is a God. A similar experience could probably do some of our clergy some good. It is obvious that God isn’t in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life [to me]. It was truly a religious experience.

  He added that he hoped world leaders would try LSD, commenting, ‘I believe the drug could heal the world.’ The interview made the front page of the Sunday People on 18 June 1967, Paul’s 25th birthday: BEATLE PAUL’S AMAZING CONFESSION ‘Yes - I took LSD’. When a television crew came to Cavendish to follow up, Paul told them much the same, helping create a major news story, though his drug confessions were only partial.

  Paul had succumbed to peer pressure to try LSD when his late friend Tara Browne offered him acid some months back, after a night at the Bag o’ Nails. Paul’s first trip wasn’t pleasant. He became overly conscious of how dirty his shirt was, and felt too exhausted the next day to do any work. Then came a time, during the making of Sgt. Pepper, when John took acid by mistake. George Martin led John up to the roof of the EMI building to get some fresh air, not realising John was tripping. Paul rescued his friend from this perilous situation, taking him home to Cavendish, where he dropped acid to keep John company. Again, Paul found the experience less than pleasurable. He had a vision of John as ‘a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity’, which would seem to betray an unconscious inferiority complex. Paul had taken acid once or twice since then, not nearly as often as John and George Harrison, but as he revealed in his authorised biography many years later, he had tried other, harder drugs. His art dealer Robert Fraser introduced Paul to cocaine, a legal, pharmaceutical supply of which the Beatle kept at home for a time, as we have seen. But Paul didn’t like the come-down from a coke high. A normally upbeat person, he didn’t see the point in making himself depressed, so he stopped using it, a demonstration of his strength of character. Paul also sniffed heroin with Fraser. ‘I said afterwards, “I’m not sure about this, man. It didn’t really do anything for me,” and [Fraser] said, “In that case, I won’t offer you again.” And I didn’t take it again.’

  Paul didn’t share his coke and smack experiences with the press in 1967; that came 30 years later. The little he said about his use of LSD at the time caused enough fuss, coming when the newspapers were full of stories about pop stars and their associates being busted for drugs. A photographer friend of the Beatles, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, was jailed for possession of marijuana the day Sgt. Pepper was released. Following the police raid at Keith Richards’s country house, Robert Fraser, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were ultimately sentenced to six, 12 and three months respectively. The Stones were released on bail in a matter of days, pending an appeal, but Fraser served four months in Wormwood Scrubs (an experience he likened to being back at Eton). Although the intelligentsia took the view that unjust sentences had been handed down-the editor of The Times writing a celebrated leader that helped the Stones win their appeal-there was a feeling that the police, encouraged by and in cahoots with the tabloid press, were working up to the biggest prize of all-busting a Beatle. Paul’s LSD confession was therefore awkward for John, George and Ritchie, who found themselves the subject of unwanted scrutiny about their own drug use, while the irony was that Paul had been the last among them to try acid. ‘It seemed strange to me,’ George Harrison commented sardonically years later for the Anthology, ‘because we’d been trying to ge
t him to take LSD for about 18 months-and then one day he’s on the television talking about it.’ George appeared to suggest by saying this that Paul craved the attention.

  Paul’s Liverpool family were concerned by the news of their Paul taking drugs. Aunt Ginny called a family conference to discuss what to do, with the result that Ginny came down south to have it out with Paul. ‘So she goes to London to stay with Paul,’ says family member Mike Robbins. ‘About five days later she comes back and we all meet - I’ll always remember - in her little cottage, in Mersey View, [my wife,] me, Milly.’ The family asked if Ginny had been able to see Paul, whereupon the 57-year-old took a spliff out of her handbag and asked dreamily: ‘Have you ever tried one of these?’ The ‘relies’ sparked up and had a smoke of Paul’s weed. ‘We laffed like bloody drains,’ says Mike. ‘That was Ginny, see.’

  As it turned out, Paul’s drug confessions didn’t do the Beatles’ reputation any serious harm. The boys were still loved by the British press and public, deemed fit to represent the nation in a prestigious television broadcast that summer. Television stations around the world were marshalled together on Sunday 25 June 1967 for a unique TV show, Our World, featuring contributions from 18 countries via the new technology of a satellite link-up, the Beatles appearing on behalf of the United Kingdom briefly at the start and again at the end of the show, when they would perform a specially written song, John’s ‘All You Need is Love,’ live from Abbey Road.

  As with the orchestral climax to ‘A Day in the Life,’ Studio One was transformed into a Beatles happening for the broadcast, the band joined by their friends and family. Sitting at the Beatles’ feet before the cameras were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, together with Pattie Harrison (née Boyd, having married George the previous year), Jane Asher, Mike McCartney and other McCartney relations. During the show, audience members paraded for the cameras with ‘All You Need is Love’ spelled in different languages on sandwich boards. One of Paul’s cousins held up a sign that read ‘Come Back Milly!’ intended to be read by Paul’s aunt who had recently gone to Australia.

  Presiding over everybody was George Martin, the picture of cool in a white linen suit, though he was having a trying week. George’s father had died on Tuesday; his second wife Judy (formerly his secretary) was expecting their first daughter; and the Martins were moving house. On top of this, George was finding the Beatles increasingly wilful: George Harrison had tested his patience to the utmost in the run-up to the Our World broadcast by expressing the desire to play violin, even though he didn’t know how. An ensemble of professional session musicians would fill that role, Martin hiring a selection of string and brass including David Mason, the trumpet-player on ‘Penny Lane’. The session men would perform the introduction to the song, and a collage of background tunes that included ‘La Marseillaise’, to lend an international flavour to proceedings. The whole thing was so complex, it was almost bound to go wrong, yet it worked perfectly on the night, John delivering an immaculate vocal, the band playing without a hitch to speak of, all looking happy and confident as they sent their message of love to the world.28 Released as a single a few days later, ‘All You Need is Love’ went to number one in Britain and the USA and embodies all the charm and optimism of the hippie era, as well as the intellectual vacuity of the beaded and bearded. It is the quintessential sound of the summer of love.

  A FOOLISH AFFAIR

  The Beatles were due a huge amount of money from EMI. The reason was technical. In 1966 the band’s recording contract with EMI had lapsed. While Brian Epstein renegotiated their deal, EMI temporarily stayed payment of royalties. Then in January 1967, with the new contract in place, the company paid over a very large sum in back royalties, with much more to come thanks to new, enhanced royalty rates. If the Beatles retained this avalanche of cash as income they would suffer punitive surtax. If they invested the money in business they could legally avoid taxation. So the Beatles decided to establish a company, Apple Corps, a madcap enterprise the very name of which was a joke (a pun on apple core), and embarked on the weird, often comic final phase of their career.

  Although Apple was a tax dodge, the Beatles were sincere about creating a company that had the financial clout of a major corporation, but that was run with kinder hippie ideals, creating and selling the groovy things they and their friends were interested in, at a fair price, to like-minded people - a kind of hippie socialism. From the main apple tree would hang many little apple companies, dealing in all sorts of things: records, of course, Apple would be prominent in the music business, its record label based on the Magritte picture of an apple that hung in Paul’s drawing room; movie-making was also an important part of what Apple Corps would be about; but there would be many, smaller and more off-beat enterprises: Apple clothes, Apple Electronics, a spoken-word recording unit named Zapple; even an Apple school for Beatles children and the children of their friends. Paul’s pal Ivy Vaughan was put in charge of this venture, which like so much that Apple tried to do, was well intentioned but hopelessly unrealistic.

  Apple started life in offices at 94 Baker Street, a couple of bus stops from St John’s Wood, which made it convenient for Paul. While Apple business was conducted upstairs, the ground floor became the Apple Shop, managed by former Quarry Man Pete Shotton, whose head Lennon had once crowned with a washboard, the intention being to sell hippie clothes and other items designed mostly by the Fool, an art group led by an attractive young Dutch couple, Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger.

  Having travelled around Europe together, Simon and Marijke established themselves as members of the London in-crowd in 1966, befriending Brian Epstein firstly, and through him meeting the Beatles. George Harrison invited the Fool to paint a mural over the fireplace of his new home in Esher, Surrey. Pattie Harrison and other Beatle womenfolk began wearing Fool clothing, giving them the look of gypsy fortune-tellers, while Simon and Marijke were invited to Beatles sessions and the Our World telecast, during which Marijke was seen shaking a tambourine.

  Despite having had their design for the Sgt. Pepper sleeve rejected by Paul, Simon and Marijke were now commissioned to decorate the Apple boutique, inside and out, and to produce posters and affordable hippie garments for sale. ‘It is wrong that only a few should be able to afford our things,’ Simon told the newly launched American music magazine Rolling Stone. ‘We want to be for everyone.’ The concept was confused from the outset. ‘I don’t know why it was labelled a boutique as it was intended to be more of a cultural centre with books and musical instruments, art lectures, etc.,’ says Marijke. ‘Unfortunately the whole thing was badly managed, which was nothing to do with the Fool. We were just the creative idea[s] people.’ To decorate the façade of the Apple building, Marijke painted a fabulous picture of a genie, four storeys tall, transforming an everyday London street corner into a psychedelic fantasy. It was the best thing about the shop.

  Marijke regularly visited Paul at nearby Cavendish Avenue, giving the Beatle private Tarot readings (he kept drawing the Fool). One thing led to another and they ended up in bed. ‘Paul’s was a sympathetic and warm personality and he had a great sense of humour,’ remembers Marijke. ‘I saw empathy in the way he dealt with his hired help and he loved animals. As a lifelong animal-lover and vegetarian I could really relate to that.’ Simon guessed something was going on between Paul and his girlfriend - ‘Paul and Marijke were very good friends - they had this electricity’ - and stormed into Cavendish one morning to confront Paul. He found the Beatle in his kitchen eating breakfast and reading his fan mail.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Simon yelled.

  Paul admitted the affair. He said he couldn’t help it, and gave Simon to understand that Jane had found out, too. ‘He had a problem, with Jane, of course … There was also hurt on Jane’s side.’ The men agreed that the affair would end, and they remained friends, just about. Not long afterwards, Simon and Marijke took LSD with Paul, a strange and disturbing trip for Simon, the drug serving to make the Dutchman i
ntensely aware of what had transpired between Paul and his girlfriend. ‘That was a tough trip.’

  AUGUST BANK HOLIDAY, 1967

  Simon and Marijke were not the only colourful characters to enter the Beatles court at this time. Another new face was Alex Mardas, a Greek-born TV repairman whom the clever but ever-credulous John Lennon came to believe was an electronics genius, and duly made head of Apple Electronics. Magic Alex was set up in a workshop behind Marylebone Station where he strove to develop such stupendous inventions as light-emitting paint and a spaceship that could be powered by the engine from George Harrison’s Ferrari. Unsurprisingly these inventions didn’t work. Alex also took the Beatles back to his homeland that summer, shopping for a Greek island the band could buy as a commune. After looking at several islands the boys lost interest and flew home, where they fell under the sway of another absurd character.