Fab

by Howard Sounes

  ‘You’re not annoying me …’

  ‘But you know what I mean …’

  ‘You take it the wrong way …’

  ‘I’m not trying to say that. I’m not trying to say that. You’re doing it again as though I’m trying to say that. [Like] we said the other day, you know, I’m not trying to get ya,’ said Paul, referring to the ‘Hey Jude’ sessions during which he’d asked George not to play so much guitar, which still rankled with Harrison. ‘I really am trying to just say, Look lads, the band, you know, shall we try it like this?’

  ‘Well, I don’t mind. I’ll play whatever you want me to play, or I won’t play at all if you don’t want to me to play,’ George replied with the patience of a yogi. ‘Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it …’

  All this was captured on film. ‘That particular day’s rehearsal was slightly fractious anyway, and when you see [the film] you’ll notice that the shot of Paul is down on him from above, and the shot of George is over Paul’s shoulder,’ explains Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who continued shooting knowing the Beatles had final say on what was used, but being careful to keep his distance. ‘It’s a fairly fuzzy camera look, and that’s because I felt [a] row was going to break out amongst some of them, and I wanted to pull the cameras away from them so they wouldn’t be inhibited.’

  Michael and his crew were eventually asked to leave, so the Beatles could continue their argument in private. The upshot was that George walked out of the sessions, going home to write his song ‘Wah Wah’. He had been unhappy at work for some time, ‘bringing home bad vibes’, as Pattie Harrison says. Now he’d followed Ritchie’s lead. The roots of this particular problem were deep in George’s relationship with Paul and John, dating back to when Georgie carried the older boys’ guitar cases, always condescended to because he was that bit younger. Stupid. Despite all the time that had passed, and all they had done together, things hadn’t changed. ‘He didn’t like the feeling that John and Paul were more dominating. They were older. They’d been older all the time,’ observes Lindsay-Hogg. ‘I think he felt under the thumb of the other two and I think the other two saw him the way they’d seen him when he was 15 years old. He was talented but he had to be - I always felt - kept down a bit.’ John, Paul and Ritchie held a crisis meeting, whereby John suggested they might hire Eric Clapton to replace George. Paul assumed John was joking. Then they all went over to Esher to tell George they loved him and needed him, and he agreed to come back on the understanding they leave Twickenham, which he hated, give up the idea of a live performance, and continue their work at Savile Row.

  For the past few months Magic Alex had been working on a new recording studio for the basement of the Apple building, an advanced multi-track facility that would make EMI’s Abbey Road look antique. When the Beatles came back from Twickenham, this bespoke studio facility proved useless. Alex’s idea of a 16-track system was, ridiculously, to equip the studio with 16 individual speakers, whereas any junior engineer could have told him only two were needed for stereo; he’d also built the studio in a room where the boiler was located, meaning the Beatles had to turn the heating off to avoid it being heard on their recordings; and they couldn’t use the control room anyway because Alex had neglected to cut holes through the wall for the cables; while the recording console looked to Glyn Johns’s eyes like something from Buck Rogers. ‘It was just hysterical,’ says Johns.

  Unfortunately, George Harrison, who I think was probably the main team leader as far as the studio was concerned, George was rather upset that I refused to have anything to do with this load of shit. It was just like the king without his clothes, they’d just been taken - completely and utterly. It was just a joke! An absolute joke. And George wouldn’t let go of the fact that he thought Alex was a good guy. Anyway, George wasn’t best pleased when I threw it all out. So we borrowed a bunch of gear from Abbey Road and carried on.

  Once these technical difficulties were resolved, everybody relaxed. The new basement studio was at least cosy, with a fireplace and thick apple-green carpets extending throughout the building. There was a staffed kitchen next door to serve them with snacks, and four floors of mates upstairs to hang out with. George suggested that keyboard player Billy Preston sit in with them, Billy being an old pal from Hamburg, when he’d played in Little Richard’s band, and the presence of a guest had a civilising influence on the band, as did a visit from Linda and Heather See, a blonde moppet of a child wearing a fringy Western jacket. ‘Hello Heather!’ John called out with avuncular gruffness when she entered the room. Uncle Ringo let Heather have a bash on his drums, clutching his ears in alarm as she did so, which made her laugh. As Daddy led the boys through covers of old favourites, including ‘Besame Mucho’ and ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’, Heather danced around and around until she fell over giddy, the Beatles smiling at each other over their instruments, everybody now in a much better mood.

  In playing these old songs, and in their conversation between numbers, the Beatles showed themselves already nostalgic for their past. One of the songs they were working on, ‘One After 909’, had been dredged up from the cache of 100 or so tunes John and Paul wrote as kids, but had thought too simple to bother with.

  More significantly as far as Paul was concerned were two substantial new ballads he had composed, ‘Let it Be’ and ‘The Long and Winding Road’, both similar in structure to ‘Hey Jude’ in that they were piano-based numbers, starting with Paul at the keyboard, the band coming in behind him, building to a climax. ‘Let it Be’ was inspired by memories of Mary McCartney, specifically by a dream Paul had of his mother, while the hymn-like lyrics had the ability to evoke personal nostalgic feelings in others. ‘The Long and Winding Road’, with its theme of returning home, also had this nostalgic quality, while reflecting the journey the boys had been on since they were teenagers. It was also a song about Scotland, and the search for true love. Like many successful songs it can be read in multiple ways. Paul had started work on ‘The Long and Winding Road’ in the autumn of 1968, and in that context it could also be seen as addressing the chaos of his personal life at that time, having just split with Jane, not sure who he wanted to spend his life with. This is a reading given corroboration by Paul in Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, where he says the song was written when, ‘I was a bit flipped out and tripped out…’Many times I’ve been alone,

  And many times I’ve cried,

  Anyway, you’ll never know

  The many ways I’ve tried.

  And still they lead me back

  To the long, winding road.

  It was Paul who also contributed the theme song to this new movie project, the country blues ‘Get Back’, evolved from a satire he had written entitled ‘Commonwealth Song’, lampooning Britons who were saying that immigrants from the nation’s former colonies should ‘get back’ to where they came from. This was a common sentiment in the UK at the time, given dramatic expression by Enoch Powell in his 1967 ‘rivers of blood’ speech, predicting that mass immigration would result in civil war. Paul had subsequently changed the words to make the song about a character named Jojo in Tucson, Arizona.

  Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner,

  But he knew it couldn’t last.

  Jojo left his home in Tucson, Arizona,

  For some California grass.

  Get back, get back,

  Get back to where you once belonged.

  Although Paul has stated firmly that Jojo is a fictional character, neither man nor woman in his mind, fans have long wondered whether the words were a veiled reference to Linda’s ex-husband, Mel See, whose given first name was Joseph, and who lived in Tucson. In an interview for this book, Mel’s partner during the last years of his life reveals that Mel himself felt that ‘Get Back’ referred to him. Specifically, the song seemed to Mel to be about Linda and Paul pushing him away when he tried to have contact with Heather during the early part of her time with Paul. ‘I guess at one time they really wanted to avoid him,’
says Mel’s former partner Beverly Wilk, adding that Mel didn’t blame Linda for not coming to Africa with him in 1964; rather he felt he had been selfish and, when he returned to the USA, he regretted the fact that his action had led to losing contact with his daughter, who was now living in England with another man, although he believed Paul would make a good father. When ‘Get Back’ was released in the spring of 1969 it was a US number one for five weeks, so Mel could not avoid hearing the song, and the lyrics seemed to relate to his attempts to reconnect with Heather. ‘People said they thought that [it was about him]. He thought sometimes it was,’ says Beverly. ‘Well, they didn’t want him around. So, Get back. Go home, go back to where you belong.’ When Mel tried to contact Heather, Beverly says, ‘it was all excuses’ as to why he couldn’t see his daughter. ‘They weren’t really nice to him in the earlier years.’

  THE ROBIN HOOD OF POP

  During the making of Get Back, John Lennon gave an interview to journalist Ray Coleman of Disc magazine complaining that Apple was a financial mess and he was down to his last £ 50,000 ($76,500). ‘If it carries on like this, we’ll be broke in six months,’ he said. The remarks were picked up by newspapers and magazines around the world, read with particular interest by the Rolling Stones’ manager Allen Klein, who set out to persuade Lennon that he could rescue the Beatles.

  Klein was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1931, son of a kosher butcher. At the age of two, following the death of his mother, he was placed in an orphanage, later raised by an aunt. He became an accountant who built a reputation as the ‘Robin Hood of Pop’ by recovering royalties owed to his pop star clients, in return for a commission. Before long he was representing a number of well-known artists including Sam Cooke, whom he once offered to Brian Epstein as a support act for the Beatles. At the same time Klein suggested he might take a look at the Beatles’ books. This impertinent offer was rebuffed, but over the years Klein edged closer to the biggest act on Earth, signing Paul’s friend Donovan, then the Stones, for whom Klein negotiated that thumping $1.25 million advance from Decca. Paul was impressed, but Klein made no real headway with the Beatles until John’s ‘six-months-from-bankruptcy’ interview.

  Paul was furious when he read John’s comments in print, berating Ray Coleman for reporting Lennon’s loose talk: ‘You know John shoots his mouth off and doesn’t mean it!’ The quote was misleading. John may have been down to his last £ 50,000 ‘in readies’, as Paul would say, but that was a lot of money in 1969, and in reality they were all rich men. John and Yoko lived like royalty, chauffeur-driven to the studio in a white Rolls Royce, dining on caviar, soon to move into Tittenhurst Park, a mansion near Ascot set in 72 acres of grounds. John wasn’t alone in living extravagantly. George and Pattie Harrison were about to move into a similarly vast pad, a gothic mansion at Henley-on-Thames named Friar Park; it featured 25 bedrooms and two lakes, one of which extended under the house. Ritchie was also acquiring expensive tastes. Only Paul lived modestly, owning one substantial but not ostentatious London home, a Scottish hideaway, some judiciously purchased works of art, and a couple of nice cars.

  Paul was losing money, too, of course, because of Apple’s crazy schemes, lack of business discipline and day-to-day expenses. Derek Taylor’s press office operated as a free all-day bar for Derek’s journalist mates while Peter Brown enjoyed cordon bleu luncheons in his office. Nevertheless, Brown insists that the core business, Apple Records, made money. ‘I will always [maintain] that Apple was a very successful company,’ he says trenchantly.

  All this about people ripping us off and all that kind of thing - of course there was some latitude. It was marginal in the big picture, and also part of our image was that we had to be nice people - cool people and nice people - it was the culture of the time. You didn’t do nasty things. You’re not cruel. We were artists, and we were treating people with more respect than maybe the rest of the business world. So I always feel that Apple, the reputation it got for being mismanaged or out of [hand], was unfair.

  Allen Klein was very different to the cool, nice people at Apple. A small, squat American with a pugnacious face, slicked-back hair and a fat belly, Klein looked like a truck driver and had a calculator brain. He also had the ability to charm the credulous, which for all his wit and cleverness Lennon was. When he met Klein at the Dorchester Hotel, John warmed to a man who told him that he, too, had had a tough upbringing, being an orphan and all; Klein exhibited a wide knowledge of John’s music, which was nice to hear; and, cleverly, Klein was attentive and respectful to Yoko, whose influence he discerned. The meeting went so well that John drafted an immediate memo to Sir Joseph Lockwood, informing the EMI chairman that Klein was authorised to represent John’s interests forthwith. With the issuing of this missive, the Beatles’ end-game began.

  WHY DON’T WE DO IT ON THE ROOF?

  Despite George Harrison’s declared opposition to Paul’s movie/TV special, and John’s complete lack of interest, Michael Lindsay-Hogg had continued filming the Beatles at Savile Row, while Paul tried to persuade his band mates that they needed to return to live performance, to end this film project, and for the long-term health of the group. But the others seemed to have developed stage fright in the two and a half years since they’d bowed out at Candlestick Park. When Paul argued that once they were on stage again it would be fine, John looked very doubtful.

  Many novel venues were suggested for the show, including the Sahara Desert and a concert on a boat. ‘It’ll have to be a bloody big boat,’ George observed, thinking of the space needed to accommodate the band, film crew and audience. ‘It’ll have to be bigger than the Royal Iris,’ he added, in reference to the dances they’d once played on the Mersey ferries. As the boys bantered back and forth, Paul tried to pull them into line. ‘All right, we can’t go on like this … can we? We can’t go on like this indefinitely,’ he said, sounding like teacher again.

  ‘We seem to be,’ said Ritchie.

  Lindsay-Hogg claims credit for suggesting the Beatles do the concert on the roof of the Apple building. The date was set for Thursday 30 January 1969, Glyn Johns running cables down through the stairwell to the basement so he could record the show, though the whole thing remained unconfirmed until the last minute. ‘We were going to go up at 12:30, to get the lunch-time crowd, and they were still sort of batting it around amongst themselves - were they going to do it, were they not going to do it?’ recalls Lindsay-Hogg.

  George didn’t want to do it. And Paul was saying, ‘Please, why not? What’s wrong with it? We’re just going to go up there. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll just drop it in the ocean.’ And they didn’t decide. George was sort of a no; Ringo was on the fence; Paul was, ‘This is going to be fun.’ And then John said, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it!’ Then they went up on the roof … That was the last time they played together.

  It was a cold, grey day. The Beatles wore warm clothes accordingly. John had on his ex-wife’s fur jacket. George wore a black jacket with lime green trousers, Ritchie a red waterproof. Paul, still with a full beard, wore a buttoned-up three-piece suit. With Billy Preston on the organ, the Beatles played for just under three-quarters of an hour that Thursday afternoon, performing all new songs including ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘Get Back’, which they started and ended with. Although the concert, if indeed it could be so called, was intended as a public event, people on the street five storeys below couldn’t see the Beatles on the roof, while their music blew about on the wind. Still, a sizeable crowd gathered below and the police were eventually summoned, by complaints about the noise, from the station at the top of Savile Row, as the Beatles guessed they would be. Lindsay-Hogg had a camera set up in the hall to film the officers when they arrived to shut down the gig. By the time Mr Plod emerged on the roof to ask the Beatles to desist, the boys were ready to oblige, having played until their fingers were cold. They ran through ‘Get Back’ one last time, Paul and John exchanging happy, comradely looks, Lennon coming up with the perfect ad-lib endi
ng: ‘I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition.’ Maureen Starkey and Peter Brown led a smattering of applause.

  WEDDING BELLS ARE BREAKING UP THAT OLD GANG OF MINE

  Glyn Johns attempted to make an album out of the tapes he’d amassed over the past few weeks, including the rooftop concert.

  The whole reason why I came up with the idea for my version of [the record that became] Let it Be to be the way it was was because I had sat and witnessed them having a laugh, basically, and being hysterically funny, and just behaving like normal musicians, and they had at this point made the most stunning ‘produced’ records you could possibly conceive of in popular music, they’d broken all the barriers, they’d reinvented the recording process, all kinds of things, and I’d seen them sitting round playing live and singing together and behaving like normal people, basically. [So] I just thought how fantastic it would be to have an album not only of them playing live with new material, but actually to show that they were human beings, that they could have a laugh … I went to Olympic Studios one evening and I mixed, very roughly, a bunch of rehearsals of the day. I left false starts in, and I left them taking the piss out of each other or whatever in, and I had acetates cut for each of them. [I] said I thought this was a good idea that they might like to consider for the record, and they all came back the next day and said no - It wasn’t what they wanted.

  Meanwhile, Lindsay-Hogg worked on a rough cut of the film that, like the album, came to be known as Let it Be. Work was hampered by the fact that nobody had kept a record of continuity, which took months to sort out. ‘I was very keen to try and get what became Let it Be in shape as quickly as we could, so it was in motion and nothing would happen to it.’ The director was right to be fearful. Almost as soon as they came down from the roof of the Apple building, the Beatles lost interest in the whole project, and started work instead on a new set of songs at Olympic that would constitute their final album, Abbey Road. Before they got too deeply into this, however, Paul took time out to get married.