Once There Was a Way

by Bryce Zabel

  [George] “I had no real opinion, other than I just wanted my songs on the record, you know, because I knew how strong they were. But when I heard that John was opposed to the idea of the suite or whatever because it was too weird, well, coming from him, I thought we ought to try it. I took a bit of pleasure in driving him mad because he’d certainly done it to me a few times.”

  McCartney was alone and in a troubled mood in Abbey Road Studios that first weekend in July. The Rolling Stones had just held a free concert for a quarter of a million fans in Hyde Park. They had been introduced as “The greatest rock and roll band in the world!” and had debuted their new song “Honky Tonk Women.” Paul hated that Jagger’s band seemed so at home on the stage. It was all he wanted for the Beatles.

  These thoughts consumed him until he heard the news called in from Scotland. John had been holidaying in the Scottish Highlands with Yoko, her daughter, Kyoko, and his son Julian. Now there was a hospital on the line, saying that all four of them had been taken there after a bad car accident. Paul heard the news, rang up Linda at their home, and told her to pack for Scotland.

  Lennon was a notoriously bad driver. Shortsighted and inexperienced, he hadn’t even gotten his license until he was twenty-four. Still, he decided to drive the 700-odd miles to where John’s relatives lived near Edinburgh. Les Antony, a chauffeur for the Beatles, had offered to drive them, but John and Yoko were determined to have a back-to-basics experience without all the usual rock star affectations.

  Squinting into the distance, John saw another car coming at him on a very narrow Highland road, near the Kyle of Tongue. The other driver was a German tourist, equally ignorant of the rules of the road, and the two of them were on a collision course. John swerved his white Austin Maxi out of the other car’s path.

  The Lennon vehicle soon was out of control and took a hard landing in a ditch where John and Yoko, in the front seat, received the full impact. Soon an ambulance arrived from nearby Wick to ferry all four of the Lennons and Onos forty miles south to Lawson Memorial Hospital in Golspie.

  Both John and Yoko needed facial stitches. During this procedure, doctors were told that Yoko was in the early stages of pregnancy. She was immediately rushed to another wing to be looked at by doctors with neonatal experience, particularly important given her miscarriage the year before.

  John insisted that he and Yoko be given beds side by side, but that broke the hospital’s rule of separate wards for men and women, which the hospital administrators insisted must be adhered to. They assured him they would look into it even as they gave the Beatle a strong sedative so that he could sleep.

  Unexpectedly, when John woke up in his room, it was Paul who was sitting there watching him. “Here’s Johnny!” were the first words John Lennon heard spoken to him.

  Paul assured him that everything was under control. He had Linda watching Yoko, and both of the kids were with a private nanny who had just been hired.

  “Why bother?” John was honestly perplexed.

  “You saved me from the Hells Angels,” said Paul with a shrug. “Least I could do.”

  As the hours drifted by, John defended his relationship with Yoko. “She’s my thing now,” he explained. “You all need to understand that.”

  Paul said that he did. In fact, he pointed out, he and John had traveled a similar path. In the beginning, in Liverpool and in Hamburg and the other small venues, there had always been the new girl every night, if they ever wanted one. No strings attached. “A real shagfest, it was,” agreed John.

  “I love Linda just as much as you love Yoko, you know,” Paul told his partner.

  After the small talk died out, Paul brought up a piece of band business. There was going to be a concert in the Woodstock area of New York State. Nearly half a million people would be in the audience for three days of rock and roll. Of course the organizers wanted the Beatles.

  “You wait until I’m weak and sickly with no resistance at all and then you try to pull us back out onto some stage in Woodfuck, New York?” asked Lennon.

  McCartney shrugged. “That’s about the size of it, mate.” He tried his best attempt at reverse psychology. “You’re right. It’s better to just play it safe.”

  “You see? You’re doing it.”

  “George and Richie said they’d do it, if you were healthy enough.”

  “George said he would play at Woodstock?”

  “Bob Dylan has a place up there. Says it’s nice.”

  “On one condition. We have to play ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and ‘Cold Turkey.’”

  Paul would have negotiated the terms except that John had fallen asleep, heavily medicated as he was, during the conversation.

  After watching him for another hour, Paul went out into the hallways and chatted with Dr. David Milne. He assured the doctor that he well understood the reason why the hospital frowned upon men and women sharing a room, but he explained that John and Yoko were so close that it would naturally speed up their recoveries.

  Milne, by this time, knew very well who his patients were. The tiny cottage hospital was already playing host to a media circus of reporters and TV crews that had snatched up every spare B&B in the area.

  “Maybe I can get them to behave for you,” offered Paul. “Let’s make everybody happy.”

  With that, Paul went outside to meet with reporters and fans. He gave journalists the perfect sound bite: “This is what happens when you let John Lennon behind the wheel.” After some friendly Q and A, he played an acoustic version of “Two of Us” on a guitar thrust before him by a fan and dedicated it to John and Yoko’s speedy recovery.

  Inside, Milne had asked for volunteers to move John next to Yoko in the maternity ward. All the hospital staff wanted to help. The move was accomplished in record time, and John agreed to sign autographs if everyone else at the hospital agreed to no photos because both he and Yoko had suffered facial cuts.

  Once John and Yoko were side by side, it was “as if Linda and I’d disappeared or were invisible,” said Paul. The McCartneys then took their leave, having spent just a few short hours on their mission of mercy.

  Even so, they had shown up, making it one of the greatest respects that can be paid to a partnership or a friendship, and, as a consequence, the Beatles were going to play Woodstock.

  By the Time They Got to Woodstock

  By late July, John Lennon was back in the studio where the Everest recordings were in session at Abbey Road. Yoko was there, too, in a bed that the couple had moved in so she could rest and take it easy on her back. She did so for three days and then declared that the recording sessions were giving her a headache and that she would feel better back at their home. John said he would stay with her, but she insisted that he continue his work.

  With Ono departed, there were moments of cohesion between Lennon and McCartney, particularly as they worked to fit together fragments of different songs. By the end of the month, they had their rough draft of the song medley that ran from “You Never Give Me Your Money” through “The End.”

  In just two weeks, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair would be underway in New York, and the band still had not decided as a group if they were really going to play. The incentive was that Woodstock was expected to be the largest rock concert of all time, scheduled to last for “three days of peace and love” and attract up to a quarter-million music lovers. If they didn’t go, Apple would be represented by the new group they’d signed, Crosby, Stills & Nash. This, apparently, bothered John Lennon so much that he decided that the only band to represent Apple would be the Beatles.

  [John] “I was out of my mind, of course. CSN was a great band, like we were a great band. I guess they were the competition that got my out-of-size ego to say yes. Once we were committed though, I mean, we’d played before five hundred people at the Roundhouse, and this was going to be five hundred thousand. And we had nothing prepared for a live show. We had two weeks. Paul’d put it in our heads, in that way he has, and we were sunk.”


  Allen Klein was informed that the Beatles would be playing between eight and twelve songs, a mix of released material and some new songs they had written this year but not as yet recorded. He also managed to keep CSN on the schedule, despite Lennon’s wishes.

  The Beatles set to work rehearsing in the Abbey Road Studios. Engineers recorded everything, and much of it has been released over the years. The focus, however, was on the performance. It was an excruciating timeline for a concert where expectations could not be higher.

  [Paul] “John was freaking out for about three days, I seem to remember. Then he came in one day, very intense, we’d seen that look before, and he says, ‘If we bail, we fail.’ The thing is, John Lennon had not seemed like the leader of the Beatles or anything for years by this point, but he did then. I just saluted him and said, ‘Permission to come aboard.’”

  Even George thought Woodstock was a good idea because his mentor, Ravi Shankar, was scheduled to play on the first day. Ringo’s primary concern was that they should bring their own food and not trust what was being served in the August sun in upstate New York. The only thing that George and Ringo wouldn’t do, they told Klein privately, was get on a stage with Yoko Ono. It was either a Beatles performance or it was not, but Ono was not a member of the band.

  Klein, no fool, never passed these thoughts about Ono on to Lennon. Instead he told him, “John, I know you’ll be worried about Yoko, knowing that she’ll need to stay here in London and not travel, for her own safety. But I want to give you my absolute word that she will be taken care of round the clock.”

  Up to that point, John had assumed that Yoko would go with him. Now he was being complimented for his concern over leaving her behind and given assurance that Apple had his back over her care.

  “Don’t think this is going to fix the Beatles,” Lennon told Klein. “I can’t just keep playing on and on telling myself that it’s the last time, and then there’s another last time, and the madness never ends. It has to stop sometime.”

  After sharing a joint together to think on it more clearly, the two men agreed that the band would end after the concert and after the new album. Klein agreed to this scenario, buying time for Lennon to change his mind.

  Festival organizer John Roberts and Apple agreed the appearance of the Beatles should be a secret until they actually showed up on stage, the same way it had gone down in London at the Roundhouse. Roberts agreed because the concert was a guaranteed sellout, and logistics were already overwhelmed.

  The Beatles disembarked without incident at New York’s JFK International Airport on Saturday, August 16, the second to last day of the concert. Personnel from nearby Stewart Air Force Base were available to assist in getting the Beatles in and out of the concert venue. Sullivan County, where the concert was taking place, had already declared a state of emergency.

  That same morning, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered ten thousand New York Army National Guard troops to the festival.

  “The situation is too volatile, and it’s an unacceptable risk to the health and safety of the band,” argued Peter Brown. He strongly urged everyone to get back on a plane and return to England.

  If the imminent presence of troops wasn’t enough trouble, the concert was also hopelessly behind schedule. Woodstock had swelled to nearly five hundred thousand-plus concertgoers, who became, in and of themselves, a giant counter-culture rumor mill, churned by the chaos of bad weather, overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, too many drugs, and not enough sleep.

  The Beatles arrived at Max Yasgur’s farm by a helicopter which dropped and swayed because of the turbulence, just as the approaching thunderstorm stopped the concert in its tracks. Joe Cocker played his last song, a cover of “With a Little Help from My Friends,” and then the stage went dark, and the heavens fell in buckets.

  Cocker’s song choice seemed to confirm the rumors about the Beatles’ surprise appearance. Over half of the audience stood in the rain and mud and waited. When the Beatles were finally brought in by the airmen of Stewart AFB, fans threw things at them, thinking they were part of the dreaded National Guard response. The group was transferred into hastily acquired panel trucks from a local bakery.

  It became obvious there was not nearly enough security to protect them from the crowd. When the Beatles had to exit their vehicles, unruly fans pushed over a cyclone fence and nearly crushed the Beatles to death with their affection. Not since Beatlemania had the threat of trampling been so real.

  The raging thunderstorm had created a power outage that roadies were working mightily to overcome. One man, Jason Andreason, suffered an electrocution that nearly killed him.

  It was at that point that Nelson Rockefeller’s contingent of National Guard troops actually showed up in force. Their uniforms and guns set off the crowd as it had never been set off during the previous two days. It was one thing to stand in line for three hours for an overflowing portable toilet, but it was something else entirely to see a police presence rolling up.

  Backstage, it was clear to the Beatles and their entourage that this was turning into the closest call the band had experienced since an airport stand-off with the Philippine government during Beatlemania.

  The four Beatles huddled together to determine what to do. Safety was already compromised, but now that the crowd was getting angry and belligerent toward the distant troops, the chance to escape was looking more and more time-critical.

  “If we don’t get up there and play,” said McCartney, “this crowd will tear us apart.”

  “They’ll tear us apart either way,” said Lennon, his eyes flashing.

  “If we’re going to make a run for it, we should probably get moving,” said Ringo, lighting a cigarette. “Or stay. Either way a dying man gets one last smoke.”

  George, as described by stagehands, had closed his eyes for what seemed like a minute while his bandmates argued. Ringo held up a finger to quiet them. “Careful, boys, we don’t want to wake him.”

  When George opened his eyes again, he spoke as if it was glaringly simple, an answer in front of them the entire time: “The way out is the way in. Play on.”

  Harrison’s line is now a legendary part of rock and roll history. In 1998, the Nike shoe company licensed this phrase for its re-branding campaign from “Just Do It” to “Play On.”

  The Beatles took the stage at 3:57 p.m. as the clouds began to clear, and some ten thousand National Guard troops fanned out around the crowd. The internal debate that had swirled about for days as to whether they would begin with a McCartney or a Lennon song was solved by circumstance in favor of a Harrison song, in particular, “Here Comes the Sun,” which they had learned how to play only in the last month.

  At the end of the song, Lennon addressed the crowd:

  [John] “That’s a song by George that’ll be on our next album. Some of you may have noticed that more people have just shown up here, some music fans that the State of New York has given a day pass in order to join us. This next song’s for them.”

  With that, the Beatles broke into “Come Together” from the Get Back album, followed by “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Let It Be,” and “All You Need Is Love.”

  While the band had prepared only these songs for performance, they were informed between songs that the promoters were in conversation with the governor’s office in hopes that Rockefeller would pull the National Guard troops back beyond the venue to the outside perimeter. If the Beatles would only keep playing, the crowd would focus on them and then once the deal is concluded, the band could make the announcement. It was a way to avoid violence.

  After playing some jam-session quality versions of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and “Glass Onion,” the band could pass on the good news.

  [John] “We’ve just been told that the National Guard has enjoyed the concert very much, and have agreed to start heading home. We want them to remember their visit, so we thought we’d sing them out of here. You know t
he words.”

  With that, the Beatles launched into Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” a song everyone knew the lyrics to. The performance became a sing-along as troops began a more or less orderly withdrawal through the mud, setting up perimeters at the Yasgur property lines.

  This, of course, left the Beatles with one big problem. Now that they were done playing, they, too, wanted to make a strategic retreat. Only now all the concertgoers knew that any rumors they might have heard about the Beatles were true.

  In the end, subterfuge won the day. Allen Klein, who had come with them on a mission he told people was worth risking his life for, put together a matching team of hippies with approximately the same hairstyles and beard growth as each of the individual Beatles. Then he had John, Paul, George, and Ringo swap clothes with them.

  [Ringo] “It was straight out of one of our movies. George ended up with pants that were too big and almost fell off him. I ended up with pants that were too tight, but that was okay. It made me feel I was back in Liverpool starting my career.”

  The imposters left with an impressive security guard, heads down, and did a feint to the left. With crowd dynamics at work, the four Beatles, their entourage, and a better security detail went out to the right.

  Once they were safely back at New York’s JFK, Lennon minced no words. “I shat my pants. Fortunately, they weren’t mine to shat upon, and all is well again.”

  As it turns out, the four stoned hippies who swapped clothes with the Beatles made it out alive, too. There were tense moments when the crowd discovered that they were not the Fab Four but just average guys like themselves. Scott Colosimo, one of the four decoys, summed up his experience: “I wish I hadn’t been on acid when I agreed to do it,” he said. “I didn’t even know what was happening, and when I woke up in the mud the next day, I was naked. People knew I was wearing George’s clothes, and I guess they just helped themselves.”