Fab

by Howard Sounes

  While they were in town, Lennon and McCartney also gave a press conference at the Americana Hotel. Linda Eastman, whom Paul had met in London the previous summer, showed up. ‘It was at the Apple press conference that my relationship with Paul was rekindled. I managed to slip him my phone number,’ she recalled. ‘He rang me up later that day and told me they were leaving that evening, but he’d like it if I was able to travel out to the airport with him and John. So I went out in their limousine, sandwiched between Paul and John …’ Nat Weiss was also in the car. To his mind, this was all part of Linda’s relentless campaign to make Paul her husband. ‘Linda’s been after him for the longest time. An unstoppable event, [but] I don’t think he’d made his mind up about Linda at that point.’

  As they flew home from New York, Paul and John were in fact both on the cusp of making momentous changes in their personal lives. Paul was falling in love with Linda Eastman, but hadn’t yet decided to break with Jane Asher, whom he had been with for four years, and was engaged to marry. When he arrived home, the couple carried on as normal, for now. Just as Jane had stood by Paul during these manic Beatles years, Cynthia Lennon had been John’s rock. Yet John’s eyes were also on someone new.

  There are striking similarities between Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono, two strong women who now stride into the Beatles story, elbowing aside the loyal, sweet-natured Englishwomen John and Paul had been with for so long, and taking their places as consorts. Yoko was eight years older than Linda, considerably older than all four members of the Beatles, with a complex background. Born in Japan in 1933, Yoko came to America as a girl, was educated in the USA and made the United States her permanent home, becoming almost as American as Linda herself, though Yoko never relinquished Japanese nationality. Like Linda’s father, Yoko’s daddy was a man of wealth, a financier who managed the Bank of Tokyo in New York after the war. The Ono family lived in Scarsdale, the same upstate town Linda grew up in. Even more remarkably, Linda and Yoko both attended, then dropped out of, Sarah Lawrence College. Both women then drifted into bohemian New York City, to the disapproval of their parents. As Linda became a Manhattan press photographer, with friends on the arts scene, Yoko became a conceptual artist in the city’s Fluxus movement (artists who staged happenings, concerts and other free-form events). So Linda and Yoko were still swimming in the same pool. Furthermore, both were now divorcees with young daughters. Yoko married first a Japanese composer named Toshi Ichiyanagi; second, American film-maker Tony Cox, with whom she had a child, Kyoko, eight months younger than Linda’s daughter Heather See.

  In 1966 Yoko came to London and, like Linda, made a beeline for the Beatles, specifically Paul, coming to Cavendish Avenue to ask McCartney to donate Beatles sheet music as a birthday gift for her composer friend John Cage. Paul referred Yoko to John Lennon, whom she first met at the Indica Gallery in November when she staged an art show, Unfinished Paintings and Objects. The work consisted of absurdist and humorous works in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, including Ladder Piece. John gamely climbed a ladder to peer through a magnifying glass at a sign on the ceiling. It read ‘YES’. John laughed. He was also amused by an apple Yoko had on sale for the mad price of £200. ‘I thought, “Fuck, I can make that. I can put an apple on a stand. I want more.”’ Yoko sent John an enigmatic little book she’d written entitled Grapefruit, in which were printed such gnomic sentences as ‘Listen to the sound of the Earth turning’. John, with his weakness for twaddle, invited Yoko to lunch at Kenwood, after which she deluged him with invitations to her events, one of which he was persuaded to finance. John invited Yoko in return to a Beatles session, and made a clumsy initial pass, which she rebuffed. But when John went to Rishikesh, Yoko wrote to him regularly. Cynthia Lennon became sick of Yoko’s missives and what she saw as the woman’s ‘determined pursuit’ of her husband. Poor Cyn still loved John.

  After India, Cynthia wanted to go to New York with John and Paul, but John wouldn’t allow it, so she went instead on holiday to Greece with a group of friends including Pattie Harrison and Magic Alex, leaving four-year-old Julian with a babysitter. When John returned home from New York, and found he had Kenwood to himself briefly, he lost no time in asking Yoko over. So it was that Cynthia came home to find her husband and his Japanese lover sitting in bathrobes in her sunroom, having been up all night making music and making love. Shocked and confused, Cynthia blurted out that she was going for lunch. Would anybody like to join her? John and Yoko declined. ‘The stupidity of that question has haunted me ever since,’ says Cynthia, who fled by taxi.

  A Beatle had fallen in love with a strong-minded divorcee of moneyed American background, not a classical beauty, but a tough, worldly woman who would make a formidable life partner. That describes John Lennon and Yoko Ono as it does Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman. Two men who had been like brothers since school days were falling for almost identical women.

  Born in 1942, Paul (left) around the age of seven, with his mother Mary and younger brother Michael, born in 1944.

  In the mid-1950s the McCartneys moved to 20 Forthlin Road in the Liverpool suburb of Allerton, a council or ‘corpy’ house where the family was very happy until Paul’s mother fell ill with cancer.

  Paul was nine when he posed for this school picture. He remains recognisable as the confident, happy child he was at Joseph Williams Primary School in Liverpool.

  John Lennon (centre) aged 16 with his school skiffle band, the Quarry Men, playing at St Peter’s Church Fête, Woolton, on 6 July 1957, the day he met Paul McCartney.

  This fascinating 1959 picture shows Paul and John as teenagers performing together at the Casbah, a youth club set up by Liverpool housewife Mona Best in the basement of her home. Her son Pete became the Beatles’ drummer.

  In 1960 the Beatles went to Hamburg, Germany, where they met new friends including Astrid Kirchherr, who took this iconic photograph of the band’s first line-up. Left to right are Pete Best, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Stuart Sutcliffe.

  The Beatles playing the Cavern, Liverpool, February 1961, between their first and second trip to Hamburg.

  Although he had a girlfriend at home, Paul spent much of his time in Hamburg with German barmaid Ruth Lallemann.

  A fussy young man with little experience of show business, Brian Epstein was running the family record shop in Liverpool when he became the Beatles’ manager.

  In 1962 the Beatles, with their new drummer Ringo Starr, began recording with George Martin at EMI in London. Paul learned to trust the producer, whom he remained close to into his solo career.

  In the early days the Beatles were part of mainstream light entertainment, obliged to act the fool on TV and on stage. Here they are dressed up for the first of two runs of Beatles Christmas shows, London, December 1963.

  The Beatles’ first visit to the United States was a sensation. Here they are on the Ed Sullivan Show, February 1964.

  The Beatles’ first feature film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), was their best, with all the band members acquitting themselves reasonably well on screen. Here McCartney is seen with actor Wilfrid Brambell, who played his grandfather.

  Paul met the teenage actress Jane Asher in 1963. By 1965, when this picture was taken, he was lodging with her wealthy and sophisticated family in London’s Wimpole Street.

  The Beatles at Shea Stadium, New York, on 15 August 1965. The band was playing the first ever stadium rock concert to an audience of 55,600 people.

  Paul and Jane Asher had an open relationship, with Paul seeing other women, including Maggie McGivern, who worked as a nanny for Marianne Faithfull. Paul is seen here in 1966 with Maggie as he accepts a light from mutual friend Barry Miles.

  Another attractive young woman linked with Paul was Marijke Koger of the hippie art group the Fool, which created the genie mural for the Apple shop.

  Paul is seen here with his father Jim outside the star’s new London home, 7 Cavendish Avenue, a short walk from EMI’s Abbey Road studios.

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sp; Paul and Linda Eastman gaze into each other’s eyes at a press reception for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at Brian Epstein’s London home, May 1967.

  The Beatles’ concert on the roof of the Apple building on 30 January 1969 was their last public performance. Apple executive Peter Brown is seen (with beard) between Paul and John.

  Paul married Linda Eastman at Marylebone Register Office, London, on 12 March 1969, just before the Beatles recorded their last LP. It was to be a very successful marriage.

  As the Beatles fell apart, Paul and Linda retreated to their remote Scottish farm, High Park. They are seen here on the property in 1971, with their pet dog Martha.

  Visitors to Paul and Linda’s Scottish farm were often surprised by how small and basic it was - just a little stone house with an iron roof. The location was, however, private and beautiful, with an ancient standing stone directly in front of the cottage.

  In 1971, Paul launched his new band, Wings, featuring (clockwise from top) guitarists Denny Laine and Henry McCullough, Paul and Linda and drummer Denny Seiwell.

  . Paul and Linda bought Waterfall, a rotunda hidden in woodland near the village of Peasmarsh, East Sussex, as a second country retreat in 1973. They subsequently made the house their principal home.

  12

  WEIRD VIBES

  THE BEATLES AT WAR

  Shortly after returning home from India, in May 1968, the Beatles convened at George Harrison’s home in Esher to run through 23 new songs that became the basis of their next album, The Beatles, better known as the White Album (and hereafter referred to as such) because it was packaged in a plain white sleeve. John brought the largest number of songs to the demo session including ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’, ‘Dear Prudence’, ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’, ‘I’m So Tired’, ‘Julia’, ‘Revolution’, ‘Yer Blues’ and ‘Sexy Sadie’, the last being a swipe at the randy Maharishi. George’s contributions were notably ‘Piggies’ and ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, while Paul demonstrated ‘Back in the USSR’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Honey Pie’, ‘Junk,’ ‘Mother Nature’s Son’, ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ and the delightfully silly ‘Rocky Raccoon’.

  Here then was the backbone of the only double studio album the Beatles recorded, a relative rarity in the music industry at the time, with songs to spare. Moreover, here was a wide range of musical styles, from the country sound of ‘Rocky Raccoon’ via Paul’s Beach Boys-on-the-Volga pastiche (‘Back in the USSR’) to the experimentation of ‘Revolution 9’, together with more traditional songs of love and regret, graced by some of the best lyrics the boys ever penned.

  The White Album is a boldly, unapologetically ambitious and arty record. Gone are the corny songs of Beatlemania. The Beatles were now men making mature, reflective music, the quantity and variety of which sets the White Album apart as one of their greatest achievements. This important and welcome musical variety - the variety of a box of Good News chocolates, which George references on another of his songs, ‘Savoy Truffle’- is partly a result of the fact the Beatles were no longer a harmonious team. They were increasingly at war with one another, often working individually on their own songs, sniping at each other and at odds with the studio staff who’d served them for years, which had an unexpectedly positive result in that the set-up changed; old faces left, new people and new studios were used. The format was shaken up, the Beatles getting away from making the self-consciously clever albums of the mid-1960s, culminating in Sgt. Pepper, allowing themselves instead to spread out and do as they pleased, however wild the music sounded, and indeed the wilder the better. It is when the Beatles seem to go too far that the White Album is most interesting.

  In a way Yoko Ono is to be thanked for this shake-up in the Beatles’ working methods, even if her presence ultimately proved toxic. Having usurped Cynthia and moved into Kenwood, Yoko went everywhere with John nowadays, including attending the opening of the Beatles’ new King’s Road tailoring shop on 23 May. It soon became clear Yoko was not a docile Beatles partner in the mould of Cyn, Mo and Pattie. Yoko was also unlike Jane Asher, who had a career of her own but was assiduous in not getting mixed up in Paul’s work. ‘She was great because she didn’t interfere with anything, she had her own life to lead,’ Measles Bramwell says approvingly. In contrast Yoko interfered constantly.

  When the band assembled in Studio Two at EMI to begin their new album, on Thursday 30 May 1968, Paul, George and Ringo were flabbergasted to find Yoko sitting with John, apparently intending to stay there while they recorded. In the past the Beatles hadn’t even liked Brian in the studio. Select friends were invited to watch sessions, it was true, and occasionally guests were asked to sing a backing vocal or shake a tambourine at a special event like Our World, but the Beatles’ day-to-day studio work was, in the union language of the day, a closed shop. Yoko broke the rules. She intruded, sitting with the boys among the mike stands and baffles, and when they began John’s ‘Revolution’, a blues that referenced the revolutions and uprisings sweeping the world, from Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution to the student protests in Paris, Yoko started contributing vocals - one couldn’t say singing - rather she yelped, moaned and squawked along with her lover.

  John then decided he might get a better vocal if he lay down on the floor to sing this strange new song, to which he devoted the following two weeks. Ultimately, there were three versions of ‘Revolution’, or perhaps better to say variations on the theme: a blues crawl, ‘Revolution 1’, with shooby-doo-wah backing vocals; a faster hard-rock version that would appear on the flip-side of the Beatles’ next single; and the radically different ‘Revolution 9’, a sound collage in the musique concrete style; that is music created by combining a variety of recorded sounds, as Stockhausen did in 1956 with Gesang der Jünglinge. Although the form had been around for a decade, it was new to rock.

  Then John suggested Yoko dub a backing vocal - instead of Paul. McCartney ‘gave John a look of disbelief and then walked away in disgust’, recalls studio engineer Geoff Emerick, who’d worked on every Beatles album since Revolver, but wasn’t enjoying this one. Before long, Yoko was in the control room, venting her opinion on what they’d recorded so far. ‘Well, it’s pretty good,’ she told George Martin of one take of ‘Revolution’, ‘but I think it should be played a bit faster.’ A line had been crossed. John was allowing this strange little woman, with whom he’d become infatuated, to enter into and meddle with a band that, aside from small disagreements, had hitherto been four friends united against the world. It was a shocking breach of etiquette. ‘It just spoiled everything,’ laments Tony Bramwell, who blames Yoko ultimately for the break-up of the band. ‘Yoko was the acerbation (sic) in the studio that caused the split between all of them. George called her the witch; Ringo hated her; Paul couldn’t understand why somebody would bring their wife to work.’31 There was some sexism in the attitude to Yoko, even a touch of xenophobia. Unkind remarks were made about ‘the Jap’. But one can see why Paul, George and Ringo were irritated. Yoko wasn’t a musician, at least not as they were, but the latest flaky character to have taken John’s fancy. At the same time, she was a catalyst for change.

  When the Beatles were recording, they normally started with a John song, then a Paul song. This time they went straight from ‘Revolution’ (not that it was finished) to a Ringo song, ‘Don’t Pass Me By’, which showed how strange things had become. Stranger followed. It was unheard of for band members to leave London while an album was in production. Yet Paul, George and Ringo now left John and Yoko to fiddle with ‘Revolution’, and amused themselves elsewhere: George travelling to California to take part in a documentary about Ravi Shankar, Ringo going with him for company; while Paul went up north to be best man at his brother’s wedding.

  Mike McCartney married his fiancée Angela Fishwick on Saturday 7 June 1968 in North Wales, the service conducted by Buddy Bevan, the relation who’d married Jim and Ange four years earlier. Mike’s show business ca
reer had taken off in recent months, the Scaffold scoring a novelty hit with ‘Thank U Very Much’, making Paul’s brother a celebrity in his own right under the stage name of Mike McGear. Mike deported himself like an archetypal Sixties’ dandy, coming to his wedding in a flamboyant white suit, black shirt and groovy white neckerchief. In contrast, Paul wore a conservative suit and tie to the wedding. Jane was also simply dressed. The couple posed obligingly for pictures with the bride and groom after the service, then everybody went back to Rembrandt to celebrate the union, Paul reading out the congratulatory telegrams. He and Jane seemed happy. ‘They could not have been more lovey-dovey and it was in very private circumstances where they didn’t have to put anything on for the press,’ recalls Tony Barrow, who was present. Yet as soon as he got back to London, Paul took another woman to bed.

  When Paul went on American television asking the public to send Apple their ideas, Francie Schwartz was one of those viewers who took the star at his word. A 24-year-old advertising agency worker from New York, Francie bought a plane ticket to London and presented herself at the Apple office with a movie script she wanted produced. She persuaded Tony Bramwell to let her see Paul. ‘I only introduced them because she had this strange film idea which I thought would appeal to him,’ recalls Bramwell. It wasn’t actually that difficult to meet Paul in this way. Unlike his fellow Beatles, Paul came into the Apple office most days, and made the time to listen to at least some of the new ideas that came in. Anybody who was personable and persistent had a chance of having a word with the star. It helped if you were an attractive young woman. In fact, Francie was a rather plain woman, with prematurely grey hair. Yet Paul found her pretty enough. ‘Am I impressing you now, with my feet up on this big desk?’ he asked, as they flirted in his office.