The Beatles failed to attend the first Apple board meeting. Those who managed to make it included John’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, who had been appointed even though his only previous experience of business was owning a newsagent’s shop on Hayling Island, given him by John.
Shotton kicked off the meeting by saying that he didn’t know anything about Apple: could the other members of the board fill him in? His request was met with silence: no one else knew anything either. Presently Clive Epstein, brother of the late Brian, piped up. ‘Well, it was my impression,’ he began, ‘that Apple would manufacture greetings cards and the boys have agreed to write the little poems for them.’
As each board member spoke, it became increasingly clear that everyone present had a different notion of Apple’s aims. Eventually, Terry Doran,1 who had co-owned Brydor Cars with Brian, turned to Shotton. ‘Thank God you’re here, Pete. As you can see, nobody else really has much of a clue. We desperately need someone like you who can get this whole thing organised.’ The meeting broke up shortly afterwards, each member saying ‘Best of luck, Pete,’ and ‘Congratulations, Pete,’ as they left.
Pete then drove straight to John’s house to find out what on earth was going on. John laid out his business plan. ‘In a nutshell, what’s going on is this,’ he said. ‘The Beatles have been told that we have £3 million, which will have to be paid off in tax if we don’t put it into a business. All we’ve really got to do, then, is just fucking spend it! So why not have a go at business and have a few laughs while we’re at it?’
As it happened, the laughs were few and far between. The business unrolled, and then, just as swiftly, unravelled. Early on, the music paper Disc and Music Echo got together with Apple to announce a nationwide hunt for new stars: ‘There are hundreds of unheard-of groups who, with the right handling, could be every bit as big as today’s top pop names.’ Readers were asked to vote for the best groups in their area, on the understanding that Apple would despatch talent scouts to check out the winners. The six ‘lucky readers’ who had nominated the winning group were to be presented with vouchers for £25 to spend on clothes at the brand-new Apple Boutique.
Thousands of readers sent in nominations; almost as many posted music tapes and novels and poems. No more than a handful were ever heard or read or even opened. Instead, they were piled into cardboard boxes which were then stacked in a dark nook at the Apple headquarters that came to be known as the Black Room. Pete Shotton didn’t like to think about it. ‘It was really quite a heartbreaking sight, when one stopped to consider all those starry-eyed kids who had been left sitting on the edge, waiting to hear from the Beatles and to claim their Bentleys.’
In no time at all, every nutter and chancer in town was making a beeline for Apple, ready to be showered with fame and fortune. One young American who worked there, Richard DiLello, compared the office hallway to ‘the waiting room at a VD clinic in Haight-Ashbury at the height of the Acid Madness of ’67’. One day he was summoned to deal with a man who claimed to be able to communicate with animals, and vice versa. As proof, he produced from his pocket a poem he had transcribed at London Zoo, with alternate verses composed by himself and his friends the animals. Perhaps the only real surprise is that he was not immediately given his own department to supervise.
One of the first beneficiaries of the Apple munificence was the indomitable Japanese artist Yoko Ono, whose relationship with John was still essentially one-sided. Ono had put in an application for £5,000 to finance an exhibition at the Lisson Gallery of white objects – a chair, a table, a shoe, a hat – all cut in half. Having failed to receive the go-ahead, she waylaid John at Apple headquarters. ‘I feel like only half,’ she told him. ‘You are my other half, and I am yours. We have been lost in space searching, and now we have found each other.’
John gave her the money, on condition that his name would not be associated with her exhibition. Tony Bramwell remembered asking him why he had agreed to it. ‘To get rid of her,’ John had replied. ‘With women like that you have to pay them off, or they never stop pestering you.’
In this, Yoko was to prove him wrong. She immediately sent out a press release announcing a joint exhibition: ‘Half a Wind by Yoko Ono and John Lennon’.
1 Sometimes credited as the ‘man from the motor trade’ in ‘She’s Leaving Home’.