Fab

by Howard Sounes

  At the end, the Beatles threw a wrap party at which the Bonzos again performed, the band’s drummer ‘Legs’ Larry Smith doing a tap dance while wearing false breasts. (‘Come on, Larry, show us yer tits!’ heckled Lennon. ‘We’ve all seen them before.’) Paul then edited the picture in a Soho cutting room, which took most of October, at the end of which he popped over to France to film himself miming to ‘The Fool on the Hill’ as additional footage. Paul didn’t bother to take his passport or money, but being a Beatle he managed to get there and back. With a little more work in the cutting room the whole bag of nonsense was tied up by November, Paul capping the project by directing a promotional film for the band’s lightweight but enjoyable new single, ‘Hello Goodbye’, featuring the boys in their Sgt. Pepper suits on stage at the Saville Theatre. The single and the accompanying double EP of songs from Magical Mystery Tour proved a great success in Britain, while a full-length Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack was released as a regular LP in North America. Featuring all the film tunes, plus ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘All You Need is Love’, this is a surprisingly strong album.

  It was Paul’s mistaken decision to sell first rights to Magical Mystery Tour to the BBC, rather than open the picture theatrically at cinemas. The Corporation didn’t pay much money for the rights, but its controllers agreed to broadcast the film on Boxing Day, when it would be guaranteed a massive audience. Paul, who like most British people held the BBC in affection and respect, thought the audience size the main thing. The problem was that the BBC intended to show what was a colour film in black and white at a time when the Corporation was still phasing in colour transmission, and the BBC wanted cuts to the picture before showing it to a family audience at Christmas. Scenes of Ivor Cutler canoodling with Ringo’s aunt would have to go; bare breasts would be covered up.

  With this unsatisfactory deal done, Paul and Jane went to Scotland for a few days’ holiday at High Park, missing the opening of the Apple Shop on 5 December. During their stay in Kintyre, Paul and Jane called in on their farmer neighbours, the Blacks, whose teenage son Jamie was home from boarding school for the festive season. ‘My vivid memory is that he played “Lady Madonna” on that piano in the living room, before he released it, which was just [fantastic],’ recalls Jamie, whose school friends never believed his story, even though Paul gave him an autograph to endorse it. ‘Lady Madonna’ was a good and important new song, in the style of Fats Domino, that went to number one the following year. While the song has a rollicking tune, and the words are put over with brio, the lyric is also tender and personal, evoking the image of Mary McCartney as midwife, tending mothers and their babies in Liverpool as she had during Paul’s childhood. The phrase ‘Lady Madonna’ also has a clear Christian meaning, of course, conflating Paul’s memory of his mother with the Virgin Mary in what is a boogie-woogie hymn.

  The trip to Scotland gave Paul and Jane a chance to talk about their relationship. There had been problems before Jane went to the USA with the Bristol Old Vic, and when she came back she found Paul, if anything, even more difficult to live with. ‘Paul had changed so much. He was on LSD, which I hadn’t shared. I was jealous of all the spiritual experiences he’d had with John. There were 15 people dropping in all day long. The house had changed and was full of stuff I didn’t know about,’ she confided in Hunter Davies, in one of the very few interviews she ever gave on the subject of her relationship with Paul. Davies enjoyed unparalleled access to the Beatles and their associates while researching an authorised biography of the band. Gamely, Jane tried to fit in with Paul’s new world. She went along with him and the others to see the Maharishi, even though she (in common with the sensible George Martin) didn’t think much of the yogi. Jane put up with the drug-taking, and got along as best she could with Paul’s hippie friends. When wallpaper painter Dudley Edwards came back to Cavendish for a visit, Jane traded her Ford Popular with him for a statue of Shiva. ‘At that time they seemed to be very much a couple,’ comments Dudley, ‘everything seemed to be fine.’ Others weren’t so sure. During visits to Rembrandt, Jim and Angie McCartney overheard arguments. Jim hoped the youngsters would be all right. Everybody liked Jane, and thought her a positive influence on Paul.

  The Scottish break seemed to do Paul and Jane good. Afterwards, the couple invited Paul’s father and Angie and her daughter Ruth to Cavendish for a family Christmas. When they were all gathered around the tree on Christmas Day, unwrapping their presents, Jane opened a special gift from Paul to reveal a diamond engagement ring. He asked her to marry him, and she said yes. The engagement was announced to the press shortly thereafter. Whatever problems they had had, the couple seemed to have reached an understanding by which Paul would stop being jealous of Jane’s career. ‘I always wanted to beat Jane down,’ Paul admitted to Hunter Davies. A striking phrase, beat her down, but one that summed up the way men of his background typically treated women. John, Paul, George and Ritchie all expected their partners to stay home. Cyn, Mo and Pattie didn’t work after they married into the band. Even though his own mother had worked, Paul didn’t want Jane to have a career. ‘I wanted her to give up work completely,’ he told Davies during a joint interview with his fiancée for the book.

  ‘I refused,’ Jane interjected. ‘I’ve been brought up to be always doing something. And I enjoy acting. I didn’t want to give that up.’

  ‘I know now I was just being silly,’ admitted Paul. ‘It was just a game, trying to beat you down.’

  With Paul and Jane’s future apparently settled, the McCartneys sat down together at 8:35 p.m. on 26 December 1967 to watch Magical Mystery Tour on BBC1, as did millions of people across the U K. It was a huge disappointment. The film was plotless and, although apparently meant to be amusing, failed to raise a laugh. Even though there were several good songs, and the film was less than an hour long, it dragged, and the decision to broadcast what was a colour picture in black and white robbed the flick of the modicum of visual appeal it originally possessed. Viewers called the BBC with complaints, others wrote to the newspapers to express how let down they felt. ‘Everyone was looking for a plot. But purposely it wasn’t there … We did it as a series of disconnected, unconnected events. They were not meant to have any depth,’ commented Paul, defending the picture to Don Short of the Daily Mirror. At least the Beatles had tried to do something different. As he said: ‘We could always write and do nice things and become more and more famous. But we wanted to try something different … It doesn’t mean that we won’t go on trying.’ Indeed, the remaining months of the Beatles’ existence as a working band would be marked by an unswerving, and laudable, commitment to innovation.

  THE BEATLES IN THE HIMALAYAS

  The Beatles flew to India in mid-February 1968 for what George Harrison described, with his facility for a phrase, as ‘the world famous “Beatles in the Himalayas” sketch’. They travelled in two groups. John, Cynthia, George and Pattie flew first to Delhi on 15 February, with Pattie’s sister Jenny and Mal Evans. Paul, Jane, Ritchie and Maureen followed four days later. They then drove 200 miles to Rishikesh in a fleet of old, British-made cars that served locally as taxis. As ever, the Beatles were trailed by a pack of reporters and photographers, who were having a fine time following the crazy Beatles around the world. The press found George difficult; he pretended to sleep all the way to India, for example, so they couldn’t ask him questions. Ringo was good for a laugh. He’d brought a case of Heinz baked beans with him, claiming not to be able to stomach foreign food. John was also entertaining, but unpredictable; while Paul was the newspaperman’s pet, the sensible Beatle they could usually count on to say a few words and pose for a picture, as he did on the Lakshman Jhula bridge crossing the Ganges into Rishikesh.

  The Maharishi’s ashram was situated on a 15-acre plot of land beside the Ganges, at a point where the river gushes out of the Himalayas, with a large and comfortable bungalow accommodating the yogi and huts for his followers, fifty or so people at this time,
most of whom were Westerners. The Beatles brought a host of celebrity friends and flunkies with them, including Donovan, Magic Alex, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Mia Farrow with two of her siblings. The band members, who’d parted with the requisite week’s wages in exchange for their stay (a huge sum in their case), moved into their huts with the intention of remaining for two months, and acclimatised as best they could. Although they were high up in the mountains, the weather was oppressively hot. Each morning began with a communal vegetarian breakfast, interrupted by apes swinging down from the trees to pinch their food. The disciples then met with the Maharishi to talk and meditate. After lunch there was more time for meditation. There was indeed a rare amount of time for the Beatles to hang out together, think and make music, which was the happiest outcome of the trip. They wrote a lot of songs in India.

  George loved the atmosphere, sinking deeply into the Indian spiritual life, which became part of his quotidian existence. Ritchie and Maureen weren’t so happy. The Starkeys wouldn’t eat the local food; Mo disliked the flies, and they missed their kids, two-year-old Zak and Jason, born the previous summer, whom they had left at home. For her part, Cynthia Lennon hoped for a second honeymoon with John, but found her husband moody and distant, taking himself off to sleep in a separate hut and spending much of his time writing songs, numbers such as ‘Yer Blues’ and ‘Dear Prudence’, about Mia Farrow’s sister, who caused concern by shutting herself away and meditating at inordinate length.

  For his part, Paul wrote a ska pastiche, ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, and a pretty tune, ‘Junk’, which he was never able to fit good words to, finally settling on a seemingly random jumble of images. The result is virtually meaningless: Motor cars, handlebars, bicycles for two,

  Broken-hearted jubilee.

  Parachutes, army boots, sleeping bags for two,

  Sentimental jamboree.

  Inevitably, business interrupted this Indian idyll. George thought Apple should make a picture about transcendental meditation, and Denis O’Dell, head of Apple Films, was sent for to discuss the idea. When O’Dell arrived, he tried to talk the Beatles into committing instead to a film of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which had become a cult book with the hippie generation. For a brief time the band considered the suggestion. Lennon fancied himself in the role of the wizard Gandalf. Paul might have been the plucky hobbit hero, Frodo. Stanley Kubrick had been approached to direct. The bizarre idea of the Beatles starring in Stanley Kubrick’s production of The Lord of the Rings came to nought, like the TM film and so many putative movies. More to the point, when Paul tried to talk to George about the Beatles’ next album, Harrison almost bit his head off. ‘I remember talking about the next album and he would say: “We’re not here to talk music - we’re here to meditate.” Oh yeah, all right Georgie Boy. Calm down, man …’ Ritchie and Mo returned home, fed up with the strange food, the flies, the thieving monkeys and the heat. Paul and Jane followed shortly thereafter.

  After Ritchie, Mo, Paul and Jane had all left, John Lennon got it into his head that the Maharishi had made passes at some of the Western girls in the ashram, including Mia Farrow, and decided this was gross hypocrisy on the yogi’s part. Lennon confronted the Maharishi in ‘his very rich-looking bungalow’, then left the ashram in high dudgeon, denouncing the yogi as a randy conman. This was all very odd, and probably disingenuous on Lennon’s part. While he may well have been a charlatan, and the whole TM programme stuff and nonsense, didn’t the yogi have as much right as the next man to try and get laid? The truth was perhaps that, by throwing his tantrum, John was creating a cover for his own imminent and far more discreditable act of sexual betrayal, which we shall come to shortly. George Harrison remained loyal to the yogi, though, and Ritchie and Paul also maintained a long-term respect for the Maharishi and transcendental meditation, which Paul continues to practise.

  THIS MAN HAS TALENT …

  Back in London the Beatles decided that they wanted members of the public to come forward with their songs and other ideas, which Apple would help them produce. To promote this egalitarian initiative Paul created a print advertisement, featuring Alistair Taylor from the Apple office. Taylor was photographed as a busker under the line, ‘This man has talent …’ The copy read that the busker had sent his audition tape into Apple and thereby transformed himself into a star who now drove a Bentley. The ad was placed in the music press inviting people to send in their demos. The Apple office in Baker Street was inundated with mail as a result. No great new talent was discovered this way, but Apple did begin to sign acts, some of whom proved very successful.

  Jane’s brother Peter Asher introduced James Taylor to the Apple record label, which Peter now helped run. Paul played on Taylor’s début LP, which launched the American star on a long career. Less notably, Jackie Lomax, a former member of the Mersey Beat group the Undertakers, also joined Apple around this time. Perhaps the most surprising Apple artist was a devoutly religious classical composer named John Tavener, a doubly surprising signing because Tavener came to Apple via Ringo Starr, who’d been introduced to the composer by his builder brother Roger Tavener, who’d been working on Ringo’s new house at St George’s Hill. Uncommercial though his music was, John Tavener fitted into the strange world of Apple, which released his oratorio The Whale. ‘I felt comfortable because of the enthusiasm of the Beatles,’ says the composer, who discovered that Paul in particular was really quite interested in the elite world of ‘serious’ composition. ‘Stockhausen sent him records of his, and he was listening a lot.’

  Apart from the eclectic nature of the Apple artists, it was striking how often Paul’s instincts proved right. Paul gave another Apple signing, the band Badfinger, a simple but nonetheless catchy song he’d written entitled ‘Come and Get it’, and told the group exactly how to record it. When the band did what he said, ‘Come and Get It’ became a top ten hit. Even more spectacular was Paul’s success with Mary Hopkin, a Welsh folk singer who was drawn to his attention by the model Twiggy, a good enough friend to be invited to dinner with the McCartneys at Rembrandt. Twiggy mentioned to Paul that she had seen Hopkin on the TV talent show, Opportunity Knocks, the show George Harrison invoked sarcastically when Paul first performed ‘Yesterday’ live on stage in Blackpool. ‘Twiggy said she had seen a great girl singer on Opportunity Knocks and luckily as it turned out this was the time we were looking around for singers for Apple Records.’ When he got back to London, and heard other people talking about Mary Hopkin, Paul invited her to London.

  Mary was a shy 18-year-old with an ethereal voice reminiscent of Joan Baez. Paul didn’t like the Baez sound personally, but he thought he might have the right song for Mary to sing. Alongside his interest in the avant-garde, Paul never lost his love of traditional entertainment. As often as he would attend a performance of electronic music, or see a play at the Royal Court, Paul would go to concerts by crooners and watch cabaret acts at the Blue Angel in Mayfair. He’d recently seen Gene and Francesca Raskin at the Blue Angel performing ‘Those Were the Days’, their own arrangement of a traditional folk song. Paul wanted Mary to record a cover. The teenager found the nostalgic, world-weary lyric hard to empathise with and sang it at first as though she didn’t mean it. ‘I kept showing her the way she should sing it and generally worked on it and suddenly she got it …’ said Paul, who instinctively felt he knew best. As with Badfinger, he was right. When Mary sang the song Paul’s way, it went to number one in 13 countries.

  LINDA AND YOKO

  John and Paul flew to New York on Saturday 11 May 1968 to further promote Apple, taking Magic Alex along for the ride. Though their arrival at Kennedy Airport lacked the hysteria of their first visit to the States four years previously, there was a sizeable crowd of fans and press to greet the two Beatles and trail them to the St Regis Hotel. Not wanting to be prisoners in the hotel, as they had once been at the Plaza, the boys called Brian Epstein’s former partner Nat Weiss, who invited John and Paul to use his apartment on East 73rd S
treet while he stayed in their suite.

  On Sunday John and Paul left Nat’s apartment to take an Apple board meeting on a Chinese Junk sailing around the Statue of Liberty, and to meet the press, explaining Apple and appealing for more ordinary people to come forward with their ideas. ‘We really want to help people, but without doing it like charity or seeming like ordinary patrons of the arts,’ Paul told reporters earnestly. Their intentions were laudable, but Paul and John appeared astonishingly, and endearingly, naive. It is almost impossible to imagine a major star today saying as Paul did in New York in 1968:we’re in the happy position of not really needing any more money, so for the first time the bosses aren’t in it for the profit. If you come and see me and say, ‘I’ve had such and such a dream,’ I will say, ‘Here’s so much money. Go away and do it.’ We’ve already bought all our dreams, so now we want to share that possibility with others.