If it all seemed over-hasty, it’s because it was. Hardly had Brian been buried than his secrets were being divulged, realisation was dawning, various plans for the future were being suggested and arguments were breaking out as to what to do next.
But first there were things that the Beatles hadn’t known about, or hadn’t bothered to know about, that had to be confronted, such as the crippling UK tax debt their accountants told them they were facing. Then there was the estimated 100 million dollars they had never had as Brian had accidentally signed away 90 per cent of a merchandising licensing deal for Beatle T-shirts, wigs, lunch boxes, buttons, toys, trinkets (and just about anything else that anyone could stamp the word ‘Beatles’ on) when they’d first arrived in America in 1964 and half of that nation had gone Beatle-crazy. It had been the innocent mistake of a young man, who, not much earlier, had been managing a Liverpool record shop and who knew nothing about mass merchandising in America. A streetwise operator had seen him coming.
More disturbing, and especially for John, was the realisation that Brian may have been slightly underhand in not drawing the Beatles’ attention to the fact that when they’d re-signed with EMI the previous January for a further ten years at a better royalty rate, NEMS were also still in the deal and would be receiving 25 per cent of their income for another decade. An independent lawyer might have suggested they look more closely at that clause, but they hadn’t sought advice outside Brian. ‘Brian did a few things that show that he cooked us,’ John would later sadly reflect. ‘He would say “sign for another ten years”. And who got the benefits? Not us. We were the ones who were tied by the balls.’
Once again this was John on an exaggeration rap. Brian had got the best deal he knew how to get out of EMI when the contracts had been renegotiated, so the Beatles had done well. It was just that Brian and NEMS, considering their input, had done even better; as Dick James had done, and would continue to do, far better than Lennon and McCartney out of Northern Songs.
Coming to terms with so much new business information in the days after Brian’s death was upsetting. But that turned to joint anger when the Beatles learned of a secret agreement Brian had made with Australian wheeler dealer Robert Stigwood, who had recently joined NEMS and brought with him a new group called the Bee Gees. Exhausted by the demands of his mushrooming show business empire, when the only parts that now interested him were the Beatles and Cilla Black, Brian had agreed an option that gave Stigwood a 51 per cent controlling interest in the company if he could come up with half a million pounds. This meant that, with Brian’s death, the Beatles might now be joint-managed by Stigwood and Brian’s brother, Clive Epstein, who had no interest in show business and was happy to remain running his family’s Merseyside furniture business.
The Beatles may not have been seeing eye to eye on everything any more, but, with their NEMS contract up for renewal that month, one thing they all did agree on was that Robert Stigwood was not going to be their new manager.
But, if it wasn’t Stigwood, who was going to manage them?
After consultations with their tax accountants, they held a meeting at Paul’s house where they made their decision. They would be their own managers. Their contract with NEMS wouldn’t be renewed.
Instead, a new company owned by the Beatles would be formed to take control of the group’s earnings. The individual Beatles would no longer be paid directly, as they had been under Brian, but would instead draw their personal expenses from their own company. It was called Apple Corps and had already been set up. Now it would become the centre of their various different interests. Staffed mainly by their friends who had come down with them from Liverpool, it would be headed by Neil Aspinall, their former road manager who had been studying to be an accountant when they’d enticed him away.
The trouble was, as Neil would quickly find, so little had been the Beatles’ interest in business, and so total their trust in Brian, not one of them could find a copy of a single contract or document that they had signed. And, instead of having one boss, they now had four . . . each other. What were the chances of them all agreeing on anything?
For the first time since Brian had come into their lives, the Beatles had to think about something other than music. Whether his deals for them had been good or bad, Brian had represented security. They were all going to miss that. In a business sense they had been orphaned. ‘We just weren’t ready for it,’ said John.
Ready or not, within a month there would be a nursery of Apple companies, starting with the Apple retail store on London’s Baker Street, which sold flamboyant, psychedelic hippy clothes designed by an Anglo-Dutch collective of fashion designers who called themselves The Fool. John’s friend Pete Shotton was put in charge. Other projects would soon follow.
In the meantime, the Beatles had to get on with their proper jobs, and, in the absence of any energy from John, Paul had come up with an idea for a television film. It was called Magical Mystery Tour and filming was to begin in two weeks’ time. While loosely based on the adventures of author Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who had driven a psychedelically painted school bus across America while high on LSD, Paul’s vision was more innocent. His journey would be a mystery tour in a charabanc, like those he’d been taken on to see the Blackpool Illuminations when he was a boy. And, rather than sky-high hippies, his coach would contain a clown, some eccentrics, a fat lady and a dwarf, and, of course, the Beatles, who would sing now and again. Some of the songs had already been recorded.
So, on Monday, 11 September, a large, yellow luxury coach emblazoned on both sides with psychedelic adornments and the title ‘MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR’ set off from London. Picking up Beatles as it made its way towards the west of England, it was followed all the way by a half-mile-long procession of cars containing journalists – including this writer, television crews and, obviously, fans who were getting their last bit of fun before the end of the bizarre ‘summer of love’ that was 1967.
Throughout the meandering journey, John generally kept out of sight – that is until, on the second day, when the coach became wedged on a narrow Devon bridge over a river on the road to Widdecombe – famous for its fair – and he lost his temper with the following trail of press and fans. Leaping down from the coach he ripped the words ‘MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR’ from the sides of the vehicle. Even when the Beatles had first started touring and looking to attract a following, they hadn’t made themselves so easy to recognise.
Normally when a star knows he or she is going to be filmed, attempts will be made to look attractive. Paul did, dashing about in a colourful little Fair Isle sleeveless pullover as he played at being the director. But John did the opposite. Wearing what looked like a brown, pinstriped, 1940s ‘demob suit’, and sometimes a little trilby hat, he resembled nothing so much as a spiv bookie.
Somewhere at the back of Paul’s mind, and possibly John’s too, there was a good idea for a film. But with no script, few thought-through characters or plotted scenes, no director and no producer, Magical Mystery Tour was being made up on the hoof. Its making was, in fact, a perfect example of a hippy pipedream that George Harrison would later sum up very well in The Beatles Anthology.
‘It was a problem with the hippy period . . . you’d sit around and think of all these great ideas, but nobody actually did anything. Or, if they did do something, then a lot of the time it was a failure. The idea of it was much better than the reality.’
The Beatles knew very little about film-making, but a great deal about music. So, not surprisingly, the songs for Magical Mystery Tour were their main interest, one of which, ‘I Am The Walrus’, would become a Lennon classic.
Its shape had come to him one day that summer as he’d been sitting in his garden with Beatles biographer Hunter Davies, and he’d heard the two-tone siren of a police car passing in a nearby lane. The sound stayed in his mind after the police car had gone, and going to his piano, he played the notes and then recorded them for future reflection. Lyrics then came to him over several weeks as a litany of images, some suggested by LSD flashes, and others scrambled together from memories of childhood rhymes. Finally, he’d taken what had become a song to the studio to play to George Martin, who had then excelled himself by matching the chain of disparate thoughts with extravagant, note-bending orchestrations and abrupt changes of tempo. It was a triumph for the two of them, and John was proud of what he’d achieved – even if there was an element of tongue-in-cheek cunning involved.
He didn’t admit it then, but he’d been becoming increasingly amused by the interpretations that Beatles fans were ascribing to his lyrics. A few years later he would let the world into his secret.
‘In those days I was writing obscurely à la Dylan . . . where more or less anything can be read into lyrics . . . There has been more said about Dylan’s wonderful lyrics than was ever actually in them. Mine, too . . . Dylan got away with murder. I thought, I can write this crap, too. You just thread a few images together and you call it poetry.’
For ‘I Am The Walrus’ the inspiration had come from The Walrus And The Carpenter, the poem that Mimi had read to him when he was a little boy. Little could Mimi have imagined what her attempts to give her young nephew a grounding in English literature might lead to when sauced with LSD.
Ironically, John, unlike the ‘intelligentsia’ who, he believed, over-interpreted his lyrics, had done the opposite and failed to understand the meaning behind the original story. ‘To me, it was a beautiful poem,’ he would say. ‘It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant.’ Only after the record had come out did he go back and read the poem again and realise that ‘the Walrus was the bad guy in the story and the Carpenter was the good guy . . . But it wouldn’t have been the same, would it, “I am the Carpenter . . . ”?’
Other people might see depth in them. But not him. ‘The words didn’t mean anything,’ he said. ‘People draw so many conclusions and it’s ridiculous.’ Asked what it really meant when he sang. ‘I am the egg man’, he would just shrug. ‘It could have been the “pudding basin” for all I care. It’s not that serious . . . It didn’t mean anything.’
All the same he was disappointed when ‘I Am The Walrus’ was used only as a B-side on the next Beatles single, in favour of Paul’s ‘Hello, Goodbye’. That was the trouble with being a Beatle, especially with someone as prolific and commercially minded as Paul in the group.
The letter from his father didn’t come entirely out of the blue. Despite his promises, Freddie always seemed to be hovering somewhere in the background, with his photograph likely to pop up in a newspaper on any given day. He regretted now that he’d embarrassed his son with his record about his life, and at the urging of his brother, Charlie, he wrote to John asking for an opportunity to explain himself. To his surprise, he got a reply.
‘Dear Freddie, Fred, Dad, Pater, whatever . . .’ John began, wondering how to address the man he hardly knew, and then explained how they would be meeting again very soon. His attitude had softened. A few weeks later John sent his driver, Les Anthony, to pick up his father from outside Kingston Post Office and bring him to Kenwood, where Freddie stayed for several nights.
Being a Beatle had some disadvantages, but one huge advantage was that it was possible to throw money at almost any problem and solve it. John had fixed Mimi’s situation of being under siege from fans in Liverpool by buying her a house in Sandbanks; then, fed up with Cynthia’s mother’s presence around the house, he’d rented a place for her in nearby Esher. Now he did the same for his father, the staff at Apple being despatched to find a one-bedroom flat, with John instructing his accountants to pay Freddie ten pounds a week – the same amount his father had been earning washing up in the pub. Now, however, he would be living rent-free.
All wasn’t quite resolved, however, as Freddie then revealed that he had a nineteen-year-old girlfriend, a student at Exeter University called Pauline Jones, who had nowhere to live, other than going home to her mother. That she didn’t want to do. If John was impressed by the idea of his father being able to attract a girl almost thirty-five years his junior, we don’t know. But he was a contradictory character and when he was in a welcoming mood, not much stopped him. So, Pauline was quickly engaged as a live-in fan-mail secretary for him at Kenwood. We can only guess what Mimi would have said about all this, if indeed she was ever told.
Without the guidance of Brian, events in the autumn of 1967 progressed at a hectic pace. Having been told by their accountants to invest in new projects rather than give a large part of their money to the government in income tax, an expensive new Busby Berkeley-type scene for the song ‘Your Mother Should Know’ was added to the self-financed Magical Mystery Tour; while the fashion designers The Fool were given a hundred thousand pounds (£1,700,000 in today’s money) to set up the Apple boutique, a portion of which was spent on a giant psychedelic mural on the wall outside the shop. Decorated with stars, moons and mystical figures, the mural would draw crowds of sightseers – until Westminster Council ordered it to be painted over. Yet again the Beatles were in the headlines.
‘A clothes shop’ wasn’t, however, exciting enough for John, and soon additional little companies began mushrooming all around the Apple concept. Friend Magic Alex was given Apple Electronics to run, while Jane Asher’s brother Peter became the head of Apple Records. Then there was Apple Films, Apple Books and even a company called Apple Hair.
Throughout all this, John was continually being reminded of Yoko Ono, who kept up a pursuit of him by letter. She wanted John to be her sponsor. He was a multi-millionaire rock star with money to burn, and she was a struggling, scarcely known artist, but one whose ego was so dominant she seemed immune to insult or rejection. Finally sufficiently intrigued, John agreed to sponsor one of her installations at London’s underground Lisson Gallery in mid-October, a display that consisted of half of everything, a bed, a chair and a room – all painted white. ‘I didn’t even go to the show,’ John would say. ‘I was too uptight.’ But little by little Yoko was getting under his skin. Not that Cynthia knew yet. And not that anything romantic had occurred between the two of them.
Not everyone around Apple in their temporary offices in London’s Wigmore Street was convinced that Magical Mystery Tour was going to be the smash hit that the Beatles assumed. Peter Brown, who was now their personal manager, certainly wasn’t. But, then again, not many friends and employees were able to tell their four bosses what they really thought, not even after the American TV networks had turned the film down. The emperor’s suit of clothing was alive and well at Apple in 1967. And when the BBC bought the film for a prime-time Boxing Day viewing, it seemed that the Beatle nay-sayers had got it wrong again.
When, just before Christmas, Apple threw a lavish fancy dress party at the swish Royal Lancaster Hotel to launch their first project without Brian, confidence was therefore so high that John and Cynthia took Freddie and Pauline in their Rolls-Royce to celebrate with them. John went as a Teddy boy, in a costume more elaborate than any he would have dared wear when he was considered outré at art college, while Freddie, with a joke against himself, dressed as a dustman. Pauline, his teenage girlfriend, wore a gymslip, while Cynthia chose a Victorian-style crinoline and bonnet, which she thought made her look like ‘the lady on the front of a Quality Street tin of chocolates’.
John loved the evening. They showed the film, all the guests said they liked it, and he had a great time. The very pretty Pattie Harrison had chosen to go as a belly dancer, and, as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band played, John, who had always fancied Pattie, made such a point of dancing with her that eventually pint-sized pop singer Lulu, in a Shirley Temple outfit and holding a large lollipop on a stick, berated him.
He should be ashamed of himself for ignoring his wife, Lulu shouted in her broad Glaswegian accent. But he wasn’t ashamed. He got drunk, and, according to Cynthia, the evening ended with John and Freddie, father and son, dancing drunkenly together, while she was ‘thoroughly miserable. I had been about the only person John hadn’t danced with.’
John wasn’t insensitive to her feelings. He just didn’t care any more.
Freddie and Pauline stayed at Kenwood for Christmas. It may have been the only Christmas John ever spent with his father. Certainly, it was the only one he remembered, and presents were exchanged. Then, like millions of other British families, they all sat around the television on Boxing Day night to watch Magical Mystery Tour on the BBC. It was surrealism, something different for Christmas.
It was only the following day, with the rest of the country back at work, when the newspapers published universally lacerating reviews, that the Beatles realised that it was too different. John, who had always been lukewarm about the project, now loyally defended it by saying he loved the film and its dream sequences, only later to admit that it was probably ‘the world’s most expensive home movie’.
Paul took the setback with a winsome grin. ‘I suppose if you look at it from the point of view of good Boxing Day entertainment we goofed really,’ he told me that morning.
Actually, the film wasn’t as bad as the reviews said. It was simply shown on the wrong day at the wrong time to the wrong audience on the wrong channel. Rock video makers have been making some of the same mistakes ever since. Wanting to see themselves, in their new post-touring world, in the tradition of art school students who had been given a movie camera and a few rolls of film with which to play, off the Beatles had gone into the world of Fellini and Magritte. And, armed only with vague ideas and lots of money, but without expertise or discipline, it hadn’t worked.
Had they felt artistically invincible after the overwhelming success of Sgt. Pepper? Probably. But now they knew they weren’t.