Once There Was a Way

by Bryce Zabel

  Even Ringo was working on an album called Sentimental Journey, a collection of standards so square that he hoped they might actually be hip. Mostly, having been bitten hard by the film bug after his appearance in The Magic Christian, he was looking for a path to more screen work since the buzz on The Lord of the Rings was already huge. Ringo found himself in negotiations with B-movie producer Russ Meyer to appear in his next film, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and while he’d at first jumped at the opportunity, he soon had agents telling him he could do better.

  Paul McCartney was still at his home at St. John’s Wood, where he had reluctantly started his own solo album just before Christmas. He’d always wanted the Beatles to succeed more than the others had and was now determined not to be the only one standing empty-handed musically if this was truly the end. McCartney, the Beatle most likely to go commercial and add the producer’s extras, wasn’t even playing with a band. His concept involved doing everything himself, including the drums, with just minor assistance from Linda.

  Still hanging over all this activity was the critical decision about how to properly run Apple. The manager’s job was not exactly Allen Klein’s, nor did it belong to either of the Eastmans. The differences had been papered over and the group had lumbered on. Yet if Apple was to be truly righted, it wouldn’t happen with only solo albums and emerging artists.

  Everyone knew that success had a name, and that name was the Beatles.

  • • •

  As if to force the issue, John Lennon awoke on the morning of January 27 with the song “Instant Karma!” in his head and made plans to record it the same day. As it happened, Phil Spector, the legendary American producer known for his signature Wall of Sound technique, was in town, looking for work after his self-imposed retirement in 1966. That same night, the Lennons and Spector converged on London’s Abbey Road Studios, along with George Harrison representing the Beatles, Billy Preston, and Klaus Voormann. George Martin was not asked to attend.

  Lennon’s goal with “Instant Karma!” was to write, record, and release it within a period of mere days, making it one of the fastest released songs in pop music history. He intended it to be a Plastic Ono Band song, not a Beatles song.

  The concept had emerged during the Denmark vacation when the Lennons were introduced to the idea that the eternal Buddhist law of cause and effect could be instantly achieved and not spread out over a lifetime. For the always impatient Lennon, it meant, for good or ill, your actions could catch up with you overnight.

  When he played the rough song for Allen Klein, hoping it would help explain his vision of a John Lennon solo single, Klein explained back that John needed to play by the rules currently in effect until they were not in effect anymore. Translated, this meant that if “Instant Karma!” was to be released as a single, it still needed to be a Beatles single, and the writing credit would still have to be in favor of Lennon-McCartney.

  “You asked me to wait, and I have, but when is that over?” asked John. “I’m paying you to represent me, so fucking represent me, Allen.”

  “John did it the Beatles way over ‘Revolution 9’ and ‘Cold Turkey,’” Ono reminded Klein.

  Klein had no choice but to agree that the time was at hand for a real sit-down to determine the fate of the band. He would set it up as soon as everyone returned from the film shoot in Ireland, nearly six months in the future.

  Stranded in Middle-Earth

  The Woodstock documentary and its accompanying soundtrack were released while the Beatles were freezing on the set of The Lord of the Rings in a harsh Irish winter.

  Copies were messengered from London to their hotel, one for each Beatle. Each of them and their wives, girlfriends, and family members, plus the associated Apple polishers, all piled into the pub. The room had a turntable and a sound system that was only modestly bad, and cranked up, the distortion actually sounded edgy. Crew members, hotel staff, and patrons were all forced to stand outside the closed door, listening. The only outsider allowed to attend was the bartender, Innis Magruder.

  Every member of the group still harbored mixed feelings about the Woodstock performance, or “debacle,” as Lennon dubbed it. The experience produced an adrenaline-inducing surge they had never felt before, yet all four would go on to describe the events of that day as the most terrifying they had ever endured in their entire lives.

  That day in the pub they played the entire album from start to finish in the order it was built. Everyone talked back and forth through much of it, and pints were downed in the process. When it came to the side devoted to the Beatles, however, no one spoke.

  It was a miracle set, however. Not only had the Beatles survived, literally, their encounter with their fans on Max Yasgur’s farm, but they were all so amped up from the experience that their playing maintained an urgency and power that surprised everyone.

  At the end, Ringo lit another cigarette and broke the ice. “Too bad Apple doesn’t have a bigger piece of that one.”

  Apple did not distribute the Woodstock project. Until the last minute, it was unclear whether Apple would allow the performance by the Beatles to be included in either the film documentary or the soundtrack. A deal was struck after concert promoters threatened to sue the Beatles for using the iconic image from Woodstock for their own Everest album.

  • • •

  During the long winter and spring of 1970, the members of the Beatles were writing songs but most often keeping them to themselves. The leadership at Apple Records, feeling desperate for a new product and cash flow, kept a wary eye on this dynamic.

  The public had a voracious appetite for any product from the Beatles. Allen Klein wanted new songs, but he would settle for what he could get.

  With the help of Neil Aspinall, Klein began relentlessly dissecting the Beatles catalog for songs that hadn’t made the cut in past sessions and remained unreleased but recorded. He also inventoried all the singles. It had been standard method for Apple not to release singles on albums (“Let It Be” being the exception on A Doll’s House), making the buyer pay twice for a song. But if they could all be collected and combined with a handful of unreleased new songs, that could provide a lot of value for fans.

  Klein’s intense commercial assessment of product practically guaranteed that The Beatles Again would be an album with no cohesive theme in content or production legacy. It was simply a packaging by him and Aspinall, a “cleaning up” of the catalog as it were, a chance for fans to own all the songs on thirty-three LP albums and not just forty-five RPM records.

  Even so, it was a Beatles album. It was even one that John Lennon had to love, or at least not completely hate, because it included his “Cold Turkey,” now formally embraced into the canon of the Beatles. And Yoko approved of the inclusion of “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”

  George liked the fact that he got three songs for the first time. Ringo did not place a song but, as always, made his point with humor. “There’s so many incredible songs of mine to choose from, who can really blame them? It’s impossible to pick just one.”

  Lord Beeching loved The Beatles Again, too, even though he never took to the music himself. He felt victorious that the recording of “Goodbye,” a song that had been designated for Apple artist Mary Hopkin, had been pulled back into the Beatles universe through some behind-the-scenes politics.

  So, for a thrown-together pile of yesterday, it remained a tasty meal. The album was still the dominant form of music for almost all Beatles fans. They wanted these singles on an album they could enjoy without having to change records. Even the fans seemed happy.

  The question, then, was whether a brand-new album by the Beatles would suffer the same analysis. Would it sound like a set of tracks that had no relation to each other, like the Lennon-inspired anarchy of A Doll’s House? Or would it sound like the magical McCartney-fueled polish of Everest?

  • • •

  Late in 1969, the script for The Lord of the Rings had been greenlit by United Artists, which was
something of a formality given the famed director had been working on pre-production since the year before, and then some. Making it official, however, meant that the Beatles had an obligation to perform, a stipulation they’d agreed to almost two years prior when they affixed four individual signatures to a contract.

  Soon messengers arrived at Apple Records with copies of production schedules detailing the scenes each Beatle would be in and on what days, and on and on. Work started the next month.

  “At that point, I was only interested in one thing,” said John. “How much of my life did they want?”

  As it turned out, the production requested four entire months of their lives, with the option to call them back for shoots of up to three weeks. Because the four characters never all appeared in the same scene, there was individual time off planned into the schedule, and Lennon received more of it than any of the others.

  Kubrick had decided on the gear he would take into battle—a Mitchell BNC camera and a pair of ultra-rare Carl Zeiss prime lenses. They had been created for NASA to use in the Apollo space program and were modified especially for the director to create a painterly and cinematic Middle-earth.

  The war he intended to wage was in the service of one mission—to shoot The Lord of the Rings in natural light. His soldiers included the Beatles, and he openly questioned their readiness for the task ahead. Still, he thought, he could bend them to his will if he had to. To make his human actors appear to scale as the Dwarves, he decided to have oversized settings and giant props, meaning that there would be arguably way more special effects than were used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  What the four Beatles didn’t know at this moment was that J.R.R. Tolkien had balked strongly at their casting and demanded that the production be stopped. In an act of supreme and unheralded irony, Kubrick got on a plane bound for Los Angeles to meet with UA executives late in 1969 and told them he had come around on the Beatles.

  “I do not personally like these young men, nor do I listen to their music,” he stated. “But I know they have something special to give as artists, and it will be a cultural loss if we do not make this statement on film this year.”

  Tolkien was then told that the contract he signed would be honored, but that contract did not give the author creative rights over the film version of his books. The studio made the decision to give that authority to Stanley Kubrick, said the lawyers, and Kubrick had exercised his authority properly in the casting of the Beatles.

  Tolkien, 78, let the matter go, knowing that at his age he might not be alive for another attempt at the material’s adaptation and secretly breathing a sigh of relief that it would be a live-action film and not an animated one. His rationality paid off. The pre-production screenplay began with a character known as “The Author,” who sat in a book-lined study. The part was offered to Tolkien himself, and he accepted.

  It was against this backdrop that the Beatles reported in the winter of 1970 to the freezing Irish countryside.

  The production took over Ireland’s Ardmore Studios and fanned out across surrounding County Wicklow, with a couple of side trips to the highlands of central Ireland. Kubrick had set an army of carpenters and set designers to work, and when the Beatles and their families arrived, they were able to walk through a model of Middle-earth as big as a Hollywood studio. Annamoe, a small hamlet some thirty-two kilometers south of Dublin, became the base camp for the production and for the Beatles. The Glendalough Hotel was ground zero.

  Overall, the Beatles had arrived in poor spirits, miserable about being forced together by a signed contract with UA for a project that they wished they could abandon.

  [George] “I don’t know if they’ll admit it even now but we were all scared to death. Kubrick was the most intimidating man I’ve ever met. And I knew Allen Klein.”

  When they were on set, they would just often as not ignore each other. If the breaks were long enough, they would return to their individual trailer to work on songs and hang out with their wives and families when they visited the set.

  Over the next five months, the Beatles would be together often, each trying to satisfy their collective commitment to the production of a movie that grew more complex with every passing day. Yoko was the only one of the wives to have shown up on the first day and remained at John’s side the entire time. When he was on set, so was she, often seen sitting quietly in a director’s chair. She spoke to John often but rarely to anyone else.

  Soon, Linda McCartney joined Paul, along with their children, Heather and Mary. Linda tended to stay near the hotel as her base camp and was rarely seen on the set. “I know nobody really needs me there,” explained Linda to the locals in town, “and I see Paul every day as it is when he comes home.”

  Eventually, both Maureen Starkey and Pattie Harrison turned up as well. Over the five months, the spouses came to know each other “too well,” as the joke went. Sides were chosen; first, Maureen and Pattie against Linda or against Yoko. In time, this led to an awkward alliance between Yoko and Linda, who both felt that they were each more special than the others, mirroring the feelings their husbands had to their own bandmates.

  At first, the antagonism the Beatles felt for each other did become visible, both on set and at the nearby Glendalough Hotel, a smallish accommodation that was thoroughly unprepared to host the film crew and the Beatles at the same time. As the days turned to weeks and then to months, however, some of the bandmates were working together by virtue of proximity, usually involving George as the catalyst. Slowly and steadily, the work allowed them to hate each other less by aiming their tired and negative feelings at the man who never let them forget that he was in charge: Stanley Kubrick.

  Kubrick felt that the Beatles, John and George in particular, were not professional enough, not committed enough to the movie. George was quiet in his defiance, while John was another matter entirely. The problem was that each represented an iconic Lord of the Rings character. There was no cutting any of them from the film.

  George was cast perfectly, most people agreed, as Gandalf, a characterization that allowed him to stand on a height-conveying apple box in each dialogue scene. Apple had their own branded apple boxes made up and sent over during the production. Both Harrison and Kubrick agreed they were too cheesy to use, and the boxes were given away to fans who plagued the production from the first day. Within a year, they could fetch a price of over $1,000 each.

  John was often vocal, quick with a put-down or an ironic dismissal, or stoned and, on occasion, drunk and belligerent. On the other hand, he was playing Gollum, another inspired piece of casting. He had even submitted to a near head shave. “Near” because the director had the hairdresser cut Lennon’s hair in such a way that it seemed to be falling out as if from a terrible affliction.

  “I’m just being a method actor, I am,” explained John to Kubrick on one particularly trying day. “I can’t just turn on and off being a complete arse like it’s a switch. You have to get your head in the game.”

  Kubrick tolerated Paul as an inconvenience to be overcome in his filmmaking process but drew the line at letting Paul shadow him to “pick up a few directorial tricks and such.” Playing Frodo made Paul the most important of Kubrick’s untested actors, and the director knew his performance would either hold the movie together or launch it into space. He was dedicated to suppressing Paul’s overt charms and replacing them with a more brooding Hobbit attitude that he described as “happy-go-lucky meets the end of the world.”

  Ringo was dismissed as “just an actor,” a statement that Ringo agreed with. In this context, the drummer knew from his other non-Beatles film experiences that it was best to put everything you could aside and think about the job at hand. Ringo took the role of Samwise Gamgee quite seriously and went so far as to have an acting coach flown in.

  The production ground on. Kubrick was as precise and tyrannical as his reputation and had a very clear image of what he wanted, down to storyboard and planned shots. Ringo, while professing his
desire only to act, was also on the set most days, obviously watching.

  [Ringo] “He would take lenses and a viewfinder and get on the set with the actors, us or whoever, and maybe a grip with some tape. We’d have to go through the scene ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty times while he looked at every possibility with every lens and figured out his first shot. Then everything grew out of that first shot, including you. Exhausting, man.”

  While Kubrick’s reputation as a control freak was huge in the industry, the truth as experienced by the Beatles was different. They saw a filmmaker who seemed to be always trying things out and experimenting. Often, Kubrick would ask the Beatles to improvise a scene or a line of dialogue, and if something interesting came out of it, he would push it even further.

  By far the most unexpected by-product of the filming of The Lord of the Rings was the chance encounter between Lennon’s father, Freddie Lennon (and his wife, Pauline), and Paul’s father, Jim McCartney (and his wife, Angie).

  It began with the arrival of Lennon’s father, a man by whom John had been cruelly abandoned as a child and never involved with after. According to the son, “Now he’s just showing up with his hand out.”

  Suddenly, Freddie and Pauline had a room at the Glendalough Hotel, courtesy of the production team. They hoped that by helping out Lennon with his family, he would be more compliant to their needs. “They should have barred him at the door if that’s what they wanted,” John shouted when he heard the news.

  Over breakfast, Freddie and Pauline ran into Paul and Linda, who were sleeping in because of Paul’s late call that day. Paul told Freddie about his own father, James, and what a fine musician he still was. Freddie, known for playing the trumpet and singing, said that they should get together and that he just knew they would hit it off.