Good-bye to the Boys in the Band! Good-bye to the Boys in the Band!The question they all ask is—have they gone off their heads?” That was the eye-popping headline above Don Short’s long-awaited feature about the Beatles in a summer issue of Melody Maker, and not an unfair topic at that, considering the stories swirling around John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Opening a boutique and meditating with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had given the press and fans plenty to fret about. Magical Mystery Tour had provided the first signs of their fallibility. Now each new report out of Apple made the Beatles seem harebrained, if not mad. Except for George’s coy reference to “a hectic recording scene,” there was hardly any mention of plans for another album on par with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which remained a fixture in the charts a year after its release. No new Beatles film was slated for production, no concert in the works. “It seemed to many of us who followed their exploits that the Beatles had lost their focus,” recalls Short.
An Apple press release announcing the May 23 opening of a second boutique caught even the most stalwart Beatles watchers by surprise. It was no secret to anyone that the original shop on Baker Street was a colossal bust. Peter Brown maintains that “the Beatles were embarrassed by the dreadful place.” So, who in their right minds, one might ask, would repeat that mistake? To this day, no one seems to have an answer. The most that can be ascertained is that by now they did whatever they liked on impulse, regardless of the cost or consequences. In this case, the impulse was for brightly colored handmade suits that couldn’t be had off the rack. Throughout 1967 and most of 1968, the Beatles and their entourage were VIP customers at John Crittle’s ultrahip, eponymous tailor shop in New Kings Road. “We bought a few things from him,” George recalled at the time, “and the next thing I knew, we owned the place!” Apple bankrolled 51 percent of Crittle’s new line, took over his pricey lease, and transformed the shop into Apple Tailoring (Civil and Theatrical), which bore their imprimatur.
Owning another boutique, however, wasn’t enough to contain the folly. Paul insisted they produce “de-mob” suits, a double-breasted pinstripe number modeled on the demobilization suits given to former soldiers after the war so that they could return to the workplace in appropriate attire. He was “absolutely fascinated” by the outfit and was convinced they would catch on, wearing them himself to help promote the line. But the public was hostile and appalled. So were John and George when the suits piled up in a basement storage room. John’s attitude toward money was indifference, if not disdain—“I had to give it away or lose it,” he liked to say—but his attitude toward Paul’s money-losing schemes steamed his glasses. For him, it wasn’t so much the money as it was Paul’s “headtrip,” his wholesale decision making, hogging the spotlight and calling the shots, while George chafed at the extraordinary waste of funds. It infuriated George that John and Paul “blew millions” of pounds on rubbish, income in which he and Ringo had a rightful share, and it served as a lesson, he said, to discourage anyone from contemplating a partnership.
Even as their accountants panicked at the indiscriminate outlays, the Beatles were shelling out generous advances to scores of strangers who had responded to Paul and John’s invitation for an Apple grant. There was no effort whatsoever to cut back expenses, no attempt to conserve chunks of income that might provide them with a reasonable nest egg should the bubble finally burst. By the time any one of them raised an eyebrow, it was already too late. After they appeared on The Tonight Show in New York, “tens of thousands” of requests arrived daily begging for monetary support. “Suddenly Apple was a free-for-all,” George recalled, with “every weirdo in the country”—in many countries—turning up in the Apple foyer, demanding an audition or the opportunity to present some screwy scheme. “Any numbskull could walk in and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea,’ ” says Alistair Taylor, “and the Beatles would get out the checkbook. ‘How much do you need?’ ”
Everyone came to Wigmore Street seeking a handout. And when Wigmore got too overrun with beggars and schemers, the Beatles simply bought a larger place, plunking down nearly $1.5 million for an eighteenth-century building on Savile Row, the former base of entertainment magnate Jack Hylton, to serve as headquarters for “the chaos.”
“I remember going round there when we were thinking of buying it, and the basement was fantastic,” recalled George. “There was a huge fireplace and oak beams…. We thought, ‘This is great! We’ll be down here writing and making records.’ ” In addition to their new record and film companies, their electronics division and merchandising, their sumptuous dining room and private offices, the Beatles saw the opportunity to build a state-of-the-art recording studio where Hylton’s private screening room once operated. Why should they put up with the logjam at Abbey Road? Or its antiquated consoles? The seeds of discontent had already been sown. According to George Martin, “Magic Alex said that EMI was no good, and he could build a much better studio.” Everyone, including Martin, agreed that the four-track system they’d used for Sgt. Pepper’s was prehistoric. It was being updated to a bulky eight-track configuration, but Alex promised to deliver a whopping seventy-two. All it took, he said, was an infusion of the Beatles’ funds.
With Alex at work on this latest knickknack, the Beatles pumped money into several other projects, beginning with Apple Films. No sooner had Denis O’Dell arrived to head the motion picture division than an ambitious slate of films was announced for immediate production. The pace was furious for such a start-up. O’Dell, who had worked with Stanley Kubrick and Richard Lester, brought with him a Julio Cortázar short story called “The Jam,” which John Barry was poised to adapt, then soon after hired Nicolas Roeg to direct a script called “Walkabout,” set in Australia. Negotiations had also been completed for the purchase of another script, “Some Gorgeous Accident,” based on a popular novel by James Kennaway. There were preliminary discussions about using the Beatles’ own 16mm footage for a documentary feature about the Maharishi. And John was tinkering with writing a screenplay based on his books, A Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write.
A more immediate concern of Apple’s new film division would be the upcoming full-length cartoon feature, Yellow Submarine. The Beatles had played virtually no part in its production, aside from contributing a mix of four original songs to the soundtrack. As far back as 1965 Brian Epstein had dealt away the rights to their animated images to an American producer backed by King Features, which put out a series of approximately sixty rather charming cartoons based on the Beatles and their songs. It seemed like a marginal matter at the time, a low-level licensing deal (while netting them a high-grade 50 percent of the profits), like other assets in the NEMS portfolio. But buried in the deal was Brian’s promise for cooperation on a feature film, along with the Beatles’ personal endorsement, which, seemingly negligible at the time, became more valuable as each month passed.
It didn’t take King Features long to call in its chit. After seeing the results of the cartoon series, the producers submitted a succession of proposals for a snappy vehicle that combined the Beatles’ droll personalities with “Fantasia-like” animation. They’d even hired Roger McGough, a Liverpool poet and bandmate of Mike McCartney’s,* to contribute sly, Scouse-like dialogue and in-jokes. But for all the attempts at appeasing him, Brian had not been reassured. He knew the Beatles would hate the whole idea of a cartoon. “He dreaded going to them with it and asking for their involvement,” recalls Tony Barrow, “and so, in typical fashion, he dodged the project for as long as was humanly possible, making himself and the Beatles unavailable.”
In the meantime, the producers cobbled together a story based loosely on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s alter egos, laced with hip, karmic dialogue and acid-soaked imagery, and hired actors to imitate the boys’ voices. The Beatles themselves were the most superfluous component. “We only had one or two meetings maximum with them,” George recalled, “[B]asically there was very little involvement from us.” The entire movie was completed with little or no awareness from the Beatles. Even the commitment to provide a soundtrack, which they decided to honor in deference to Brian, was regarded like an albatross. “Their reaction was: ‘OK, we’ve got to supply them with these bloody songs, but we’re not going to fall over backwards providing them,’ ” recalled George Martin. “ ‘[W]e’ll give them whatever we think is all right.’ ” And that is all they did, the bare minimum, ponying up “All Together Now,” “Only a Northern Song,” “It’s All Too Much,” and “Hey Bulldog,” which, in the scheme of things, were basically throwaways. But now, with Brian dead and the movie out of their control, the Beatles still had to contend with the clatter surrounding its release.
Yellow Submarine had its premiere at the London Pavilion on July 17, 1968, with the fans’ reception around Piccadilly Circus exploding into a scene reminiscent of Beatlemania. Thousands of people flooded the garishly lit esplanade, shrieking as the Beatles and their guests arrived in a whirlwind of old-fashioned excitement. With few exceptions, the critical reception was equally enthusiastic. The Daily Telegraph hailed the film as “brilliantly inventive” and urged audiences of all ages to give it a whirl, seconded by the Christian Science Monitor, which praised its strong “visual imagination” and “romantic emotion.” “The film packs more stimulation, sly art-references and pure joy into ninety minutes than a mile of exhibitions of op and pop and all the mod cons,” rhapsodized the Observer. Even the Beatles had to admit it was loaded with charm. Ringo, who crooned the main theme, naturally “loved Yellow Submarine,” while George, normally the slowest of the four to warm to such a contrivance, flat-out “liked the film,” and said, “I think it’s a classic.”
The strongest reaction to it came from the Daily Mail. Trudi Pacter, the paper’s crackerjack entertainment columnist, reproached the Beatles for blowing so far off course. “The Beatles stubbornly continue to experiment,” Pacter complained, which seemed the real focus of her displeasure. There was a commingling of too many new elements, too many deviations from the simple, happy formula that had amused the world for so long through the Beatles’ clever wit and joyous songs. Every week, every day, seemed to bring a new announcement from the Beatles of another fabulous project outside of their traditional province. The fans needed to know that they weren’t being patronized, they needed something familiar to grab onto, some validation of their faith. They needed to know that there was music in the mix.
On May 30 the Beatles met at George’s house to discuss the next album. Unlike their previous launches, there was a surplus of material to choose from—the luxurious outpouring of songs written in India, as well as several that had been completed in the intervening months. For most of the afternoon they demo’ed the songs, spitting them out like table talk, almost impressionistically, on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. There were twenty-three in all—seven by Paul, eleven by John, and five by George—with others in the hopper, waiting to be reshaped.
Listening to them played back convinced the Beatles they had something powerful to build on. The songs were bolder and more emotional, though less self-conscious, than Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s. And yet, there was clearly something uneven in their collective tone, something that seemed to pit the songs against one another in rhythmic apposition, as if to keep the next phase of the recording process from turning into a rote exercise. “They have a different feel about them,” John reflected in glorious understatement, perhaps mocking the jarring irregularity of the material.
The new repertoire, almost to a song, had lost its collaborative aspect. They were individual efforts—John’s songs, Paul’s songs, George’s songs, written alone—and bore few of the familiar qualities that identified them as Beatles songs. That wasn’t to say they were less accomplished or any less interesting; nor did it say they wouldn’t record them as a group, with the same kind of interplay vital to other sessions. But it was a clear indication that each of the writers had evolved in different, aggressively distinctive ways; they were more confident about their work and, therefore, were less willing to compromise.
It also meant that the writing process would forgo the critical feedback—the suggestion of a phrase, a few bars, or a middle eight—that helped shape a Lennon-McCartney song in the past. One of the key ingredients unique to John and Paul’s partnership was their reliance on and trust in each other to fine-tune, or, as John described it, “just finish off the tail ends” of each composition. Even with songs that were written almost entirely by one person, some last-minute advice would polish it to perfection. That give-and-take had been instrumental to their success from the very beginning. But now, as Paul pointed out, “it meant that I’d hear some of the songs for the first time when [John] came to the studio, whereas in the past we checked them with each other.”
Even though he no longer depended on it, Paul regretted the loss of John’s influence, blaming the intensifying emotional crisis in his partner’s life for the breach. Over a few weeks in May John’s affair with Yoko Ono had all but thrown his life into complete upheaval. After that first encounter John stumbled through the early days of summer in what he described as “my love cloud,” admitting, when it came to Yoko, he’d “never known love like this before.” It must have been as unnerving as it was exhilarating. He managed to fill those scattered weeks with mundane Apple business but became too distracted, too rocked by the constant clash of emotions. John later claimed that every time he was in Yoko’s company “my head would go off like I was on an acid trip.” One “sniff” of her potent mojo and he “was hooked,” he said, mixing drugs and metaphors in equal measure. “She was the ultimate trip.”
For John, the very heat of this relationship only underscored his disaffection for Cynthia. Finally, on the afternoon of May 22, a situation developed that would speed things toward the end. Cynthia decided to return from her vacation in Greece a day earlier than anticipated and, during a stopover in Rome, attempted to call John so that he would expect her. It did not faze her that no one answered at Kenwood; John could be any number of places, possibly asleep or possibly stoned. But when Cynthia arrived at the house about four in the afternoon, she was surprised to find the lights ablaze and the door open. That was odd, she thought. Someone should have been around to greet her—the housekeeper or the gardener—but the place seemed deserted and “eerily silent.” With Jenny Boyd and Magic Alex trailing noisily behind, Cynthia wandered through the warren of neglected downstairs rooms, calling to John. Receiving no reply, she bounded into the sun-drenched breakfast room and stopped dead in the doorway. “John and Yoko, wearing nothing but matching purple dressing gowns, turned to look at me,” she recalled.* Curled comfortably into a scarlet-cushioned settee, John didn’t so much as bat an eye at his wife’s unexpected appearance. He calmly put down a mug of tea, stubbed out a cigarette, and said, “Oh, hi.”
Struggling to maintain her composure, Cynthia began to babble uncontrollably about the trip back to England. “I had this great idea,” she rattled on. “We had breakfast in Greece, lunch in Rome, and Jenny and Alex thought it would be great if we all went out to dinner in London to carry on the whole holiday. Are you coming?”
John, staring expressionlessly at her, replied: “No, thanks.”
Panic-stricken, Cynthia held her ground, holding out hope for a last-minute compromise, something that might at least temporarily salvage their marriage. She’d always been willing in the past to ignore his infidelities. It was the ultimate act of love. For John, however, there was no going back. Finally a line had been drawn. “You bastard!” Cynthia cried, and darted out of the room.
Cynthia spent the next few days “in complete shock,” camped out at Jenny Boyd’s flat. But one night in that desperate, wounded span, either out of anger or revenge, she slept with Magic Alex. “She knew it was a mistake the moment it happened,” says Peter Brown, “especially with Alex, whom she’d never trusted, nor even liked.” If Cynthia believed there was any chance of a reconciliation with John, this indiscretion ended it forever. Alex had John’s ear, and Cynthia knew it.
Whatever her reasoning, Cynthia remained determined to see the marriage through. Convinced that John still needed her, she returned to Kenwood, mollified by his apparent denial that anything improper had occurred. “For a while, everything was wonderful,” she recalled. “We could speak more openly and honestly with each other, and there really was a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.”
But the tunnel was short, and the light soon faded. Within weeks their life together had disintegrated into a revolving state of solicitude and withdrawal, resignation and despondence. Following a stretch when John became disturbingly incommunicative, Cynthia packed once again, escaping on still another vacation to Pesaro, Italy, with her mother, Julian, and a favorite aunt and uncle. It was there, returning at dawn after an uninhibited night “on the town,” that she encountered “a very agitated” Magic Alex, pacing along the sidewalk outside the Cruiser Hotel. Over breakfast, Alex confessed that he was there as John’s emissary, to demand a divorce on grounds of adultery. Embarrassed but unfaltering, Alex admitted that he’d agreed to be named corespondent and to testify in any proceedings.
Cynthia may have been “absolutely devastated” by the slimy tactic, but she could not have been entirely unprepared for it. A few days earlier, while recuperating from a bout of tonsillitis, she’d opened an Italian newspaper to a picture of John and Yoko, arm in arm, attending the June 18 premiere of In His Own Write at London’s Old Vic. “I knew when I saw the picture that that was it,” Cynthia told Ray Coleman. John would never have taken Yoko public, she concluded, if he wasn’t ready to file for divorce. He knew the press would pounce all over their appearance together—and he was obviously prepared for the consequences. But he wasn’t prepared for the outcry.
John had been planning for some time to step out in public with Yoko. The groundwork for it had already been laid at the Apple Tailoring launch party on May 22, at which she was introduced as his date. “They were like two nervous lovebirds,” says Alistair Taylor, recalling how Yoko clung coyly to John’s arm that evening as they paraded through the shop, “but it upset those of us who had known Cynthia from the beginning.” Most of the old Liverpool contingent avoided them out of embarrassment. If the other Beatles experienced any uneasiness with this development, they kept it to themselves; nothing, as far as it is known, was ever said about it for the record. What John did in his personal life, especially with other women, was John’s business; none of the Beatles made those kind of judgments about one another. Only Derek Taylor, whose “loyalty to and affection for Cynthia Lennon” were unconditional, had the courage to confront John about Yoko. A few days after the party, the two men had lunch at a Japanese restaurant in London, where Taylor, fearful of an imminent media backlash, was barely able to contain his outrage. Do you have any idea what you are doing? he wondered. “As your friend and press officer, it is my duty to inform you that despite my sealed lips anything you say will be taken down and blown up and broadcast to a waiting world. Not to mention Cyn, Julian, Mrs. Powell, and other loved ones.” John warned Derek to mind his own business, indicating that from now on things were going to be different in his life. “So that is it—you and Yoko?” Taylor wondered. “Yes,” John replied coolly. “That’s it.”
The turning point occurred a month later at the Old Vic, where the press was lying in ambush. “Word had circulated through the channels that John’s marriage was over,” recalls Don Short, “and everyone was waiting for the chance to uncover it. This was it.” When John got out of his limo, clutching Yoko’s tiny hand, flashbulbs lit up the sky and an indignant outcry erupted, the hostility of which caught him by surprise. “Where’s your wife? Where’s Cynthia?” reporters shouted over one another. A look of panic crossed John’s face as he fought his way through the crowd. “Who is this?” they demanded. “What happened to your wife, John?”
“I don’t know!” he blurted angrily, but it did nothing to staunch the controversy.
If the press and fans were predictably outraged by Yoko’s appearance, public opinion was nothing compared with the difficulties it stirred at Apple. The Beatles were days away from beginning work on an important new album, and suddenly domestic issues, not music, had become the group’s primary focus. Naturally, everyone’s concern was for John’s immediate welfare. He had become homeless in the ensuing uproar, having moved out of Kenwood in order to be with Yoko, and needed a place to crash. But where? Hotels were out of the question because of the swarming press. Ringo’s old flat at Montagu Square, once the hideaway of Jimi Hendrix, was currently occupied by Cynthia’s hostile mother. Brian’s place in Chapel Street, as well as the country estate, had been sold. The prospects for a superstar were surprisingly small. Not surprisingly, Paul McCartney rushed in to provide John with instant refuge.
“Paul, in his usual way, tried to be the nice guy and was open-minded about John’s weird choice,” says Brown. “He invited them to stay at [his house in] Cavendish Avenue for a while.” The day after Cynthia’s return, they moved into the second-floor guest bedroom and made themselves at home. “But the problem was that Yoko wasn’t a very warm person—not even able to say thank you in response to anything Paul did for them. And he went miles out of his way to make them feel welcome, being a nice guy. So that didn’t last very long.”
Feeling unwanted—and fed up with what they perceived as Paul’s insincerity—John and Yoko moved into Peter Brown’s flat, which was in the midst of being repainted, then stayed with Neil Aspinall for a week until they brokered a solution: Cynthia could remain in Kenwood for the time being, as long as she agreed to take her mother with her. John and Yoko wanted the basement flat in Montagu Square for themselves. The place was perfect—centrally located, with a nifty escape hatch (Ringo had installed a rear window over the kitchen sink, which led into an unseen alleyway), and dark. The latter condition, as it happened, was most essential to their needs: wearied by itinerancy and the accumulation of tension around them, John and Yoko had begun a chilling dependence on heroin.
Paul assumed that his hospitality would have a therapeutic effect on John and Yoko, that they would enjoy a carefree, homey stay and start off life together on the right romantic foot. Instead, they spent almost all their time at Cavendish camped out on his couch, watching television and staring vacantly into each other’s eyes—activities, that, according to Barry Miles, made “Paul [feel] uncomfortable.” Miles put much of the blame on “their drug use [which] made communication difficult,” but attributed it to smoking weed and “eating hash cookies that Yoko baked.”
Paul, however, knew different. “[John] was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into,” he recalled, crediting it to a sinister liaison with the junkie art dealer Robert Fraser, who’d only recently gained his release from prison on a drug charge. It was Fraser, according to Paul, who introduced John to heroin before the Beatles left for India, and he’d begun sniffing it with Yoko soon after their return. The residual effects both troubled and “disappointed” Paul, as well as the other Beatles. Outwardly, the drug manifested itself, he said, in John’s “adversity and… craziness,” but the underlying influence had also crept insidiously into the songs.
It was evident right off the bat, when on May 30, 1968, the Beatles began work on the new album. The first song they tackled was John’s indecisive but audacious, bluesy “Revolution,” which kicked things off in tantalizingly chaotic fashion. Eventually, three versions of the song would find its way into release, but the foundation of this track set the tone for the contradictory rhetoric that followed.
“Revolution” may have sprung from the anger and disillusionment that fractured mainstream society in 1968, but it was written in the peaceful splendor of Rishikesh, which, as John later noted, wrapped a “ ‘God will save us’ feeling about it.” In the days just preceding the recording, however, the news was full of the student rebellion and subsequent strikes in Paris. John put little faith in the outcome of student violence. His vision was utopian; he didn’t believe in overthrowing governments; he wanted to revitalize them, to change the world peacefully by forcing blissful smiles onto the faces of bureaucrats and ideologues who wielded the power. The way to best serve that, said John, was through talk, through communication, by putting faith in the people. “I really thought that love would save us all.” But Paris was on his mind as he entered the studio.
The Beatles recorded an initial eighteen takes of “Revolution” in a blistering ten-hour session that stretched from the afternoon of May 30 well into the night. In its original version, the song swung into a smoldering, bluesy groove that built gradually and coasted into a fade after about five minutes of upbeat jam. On the last take, however, the Beatles let it all hang out. There was more of an edge to John’s performance, which signaled the rest of the group to stay alert. They knew the score: anytime a vocal turned hot, there was magic to be mined. And John sounded torrid. He hit all the phrases with particularly sly accents. As the arrangement drew to the usual close, John shifted gears and all hell broke loose, punctuated by fractured chords and strings of shrill violent feedback, with mournful screams riding up over the runaway passage. If the additional six-minute free-form jam was meant to convey the sound of revolution, as he said, it succeeded, thanks to the tumultuous explosion of sound. The squall picked up speed from its own momentum, and the Beatles tore forward for ten minutes, until John shouted: “OK, I’ve had enough!”
The first part, the blues, became known as “Revolution No. 1.” (The rest of it was lopped off and used as the groundwork for what would become the inscrutable blockbuster, “Revolution No. 9.”) Honest but conceptually clumsy, the song was never intended as a galvanizing anthem for the radical New Left. “He doesn’t really get off the fence in it,” Paul said much later. Clearly, John grappled with his position. The next day he took a pencil to it, trying to sharpen his central theme, rewriting the song right up until it was put on tape. Even then he appeared uncomfortable with the point of view. During rehearsals, a studio technician observed John struggling with the lyric—“hedging his bets,” as Paul described it—tweaking crucial phrases each pass he made through the verse. “He seemed to be particularly focused on one specific line, testing it again and again with alternative endings.” Perched atop a barstool, curled closely over his guitar, John sang, “When you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out,” following it with “… you can count me in.” Out… in… out… in… “I don’t think he was sure which way he felt about it at the time,” Paul recalled, and on the album version they covered all bases: singing “out” and “in.”
Throughout each successive take, Yoko Ono sat “perversely” by John’s side. “It was fairly shocking,” recalls Alan Brown, a technical engineer who had begun working at Abbey Road only a few weeks earlier. Even though Brown was relatively new on the scene, he knew the golden rule: outsiders were prohibited from entering the studio when the Beatles were recording. The boys themselves never allowed visitors to watch them work. Never! Even Brian Epstein and Dick James had entered at their own risk and stayed only long enough to conduct some piece of vital business.
Now, suddenly, Yoko had landed in the thick of things. She “just moved in,” according to George, who was not at all pleased. “John brought her into the control room… at the start of the ‘White Album’ sessions,” said Geoff Emerick. “He quickly introduced her to everyone and that was it. She was always by his side after that.”
Yoko’s appearance in the studio functioned as a declaration of war. John knew the bombshell he’d drop by pulling such an aggressive stunt, and he seemed perfectly willing to light the fuse. The look on his face “dared the others” to say the wrong word. He almost longed for the opportunity to stage a showdown. Of course, at that very moment, someone should have stood up to him. Someone should have taken John aside and ordered him to get his act together. Someone should have demanded that Yoko leave the studio immediately. Someone should have laid down the law. Incredibly, however, no one did a thing. The other Beatles pretended that nothing unusual had occurred. Inside, they seethed and cut one another tense glances, furious at the intrusion but reluctant to confront John.
Why did they refuse to defend their sanctuary? Why did they shrink from such a petty schoolyard challenge? The Beatles, like everyone else, were caught in the undertow of John’s addiction. They were shaken and terrorized by his volcanic mood swings. He had become more irrational, more hostile toward his mates, erupting unpredictably and without provocation in violent rages. He was always on edge. Of course, the more explosive John became, the more careful the Beatles were to avoid setting him off and the harder they had to stretch to look the other way. During a rehearsal at George’s house, he swept a tape recorder off the table, sending their work scattering in every direction. Even Paul was unable to bring him under control with a well-placed comment. The emotional ups and downs were simply too difficult for them to fight.
As John waded deeper into the junk, his bond with Yoko strengthened. There wasn’t anywhere he went that she didn’t follow. If John entered the control room to speak with George Martin, Yoko accompanied him. If he huddled with Paul regarding a song or arrangement, Yoko joined the discussion. Whenever Neil arrived to review personal group business, Yoko sat among them. Studio grunts watched in amazement as she followed John into the bathroom.
What’s more, she refused to remain a spectator. From the very first session of the new album, Yoko made it clear that she intended to participate, hijacking John’s mike during the long “Revolution” jam and moaning or uttering some mumbo jumbo, like “you become naked.” The other Beatles had good reason to be pissed off. To them, this behavior violated their unwritten pact. They had put up with John’s hair-trigger tantrums, his drug “talk about fixes and monkeys,” his increasingly strange and fragmented songs, and his hallucinations. But by allowing Yoko Ono to interrupt their session, he had crossed the line. “[The studio] was where we were together, and that’s why we worked so well,” Ringo explained. “We were all trying to be cool and not mention it, but inside we were all feeling it and talking in corners.”
A sticky tension quickly developed in the studio. The Beatles barreled through forty hours of work on “Revolution,” trying to overlook the intrusion, but Yoko made herself difficult to ignore. Wherever they turned, she was in their face. On “Revolution No. 9,” which meandered on for days while John tinkered with sound effects, Paul remembered: “Yoko was there for the whole thing and she made decisions about which loops to use.” She listened to playbacks and critiqued their work. She instructed George Martin to discard takes that everyone else thought were acceptable. Even while the Beatles recorded “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Blackbird,” John and Yoko remained locked away in Studio Two, experimenting with more loops for “Revolution No. 9.”
“Blackbird” was built on a lilting passage from a Bach bourrée that George and Colin Manley had taught Paul at Liverpool Institute. “I bastardized it,” he admits of his earnest recitation, “but it was the basis of how I wrote ‘Blackbird,’ the voicing of the notes… [with] the B string open and the bass G.” Its placement on the record may have suggested a group decision, but the song was anything but an all-out Beatles effort. George and Ringo weren’t even in the studio, having flown off to the States for a brief visit.
It was only a matter of time before tensions boiled over. Paul tiptoed around John and Yoko like a guarded diplomat, but he was clearly disgusted. Wanting nothing more than to work on the music, Paul spent half the time at EMI deferring to the couple’s head games. Finally, the second week in June, he gave John a piece of his mind. Given their rivalry, the others must have been surprised that it took him so long. “I could hear them going at it in the hall,” recalls an EMI employee who had stopped in his tracks, “and it was terrifying. Paul was positively livid, accusing John of being reckless, childish, sabotaging the group.” But the more Paul fumed, it seemed, the less John responded. “It wasn’t making the least bit of an impression.”
John thought he did his best to appease the others, but his hostility was impossible to contain. He decided that by ignoring Yoko, they’d insulted her. It infuriated him that the Beatles refused to welcome her as they would any other musician. “She came in and she would expect to perform with them, like you would with any group,” John argued. But when she tried to jam with them, “there would be a sort of coldness about it.” That was putting it mildly! Referring to the deep freeze toward Yoko that followed, he later said, “Why should she take that kind of shit from those people?”
But Yoko only brought to the surface resentments that had been brewing among those people for the past year. John couldn’t stand Paul’s crowd-pleasing attitude, nor his insistence on doing things a certain way—his way. He was “fed up [with] being sideman for Paul.” The type of music he wanted to play was being obliterated by the kind of “cop out” material Paul was churning out for the masses. And Paul, of course, was tired of dealing with a drug addict who was more interested in staring blankly at the television set than in making records.
Just when a showdown seemed inevitable, Paul left on a weeklong visit to the United States, where he planned to promote the Apple agenda at a Capitol Records sales conference. On June 21 he flew to Los Angeles with Ivan Vaughan and Tony Bramwell, while John and Yoko edited “Revolution No. 9” and launched the basic track for “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.” It would not be the last time that maintaining peace necessitated separating John and Paul from each other by different continents.
In Los Angeles, Paul issued a proclamation that took EMI by surprise. “From now on,” he told the stunned audience of adoring execs, “our records will be released on the Apple label.” That was news to the Capitol crew, who regarded the Beatles as their star attraction. Convinced of the Beatles’ Midas touch, the American label was eager to tap into the promising Apple pipeline.
With Apple at their disposal, assuring them of financial success, the Beatles decided they no longer needed anyone else. In June they had Ron Kass notify EMI that henceforth they would be releasing their own records and expected the company to handle distribution. Sir Joe Lockwood was more annoyed than opposed. Recognizing the Beatles’ valuable association with EMI, he became a reluctant ally. He’d allow it for Europe, as long as the group’s Capitol identity remained intact. The American label depended heavily on the Beatles’ star power as a magnet to attract top talent, and EMI was not about to let them out of the Capitol contract without a fight. But Ron Kass held trump. “Finally, he just told EMI to forget it—that Apple intended to sign a distribution deal in America with another label, at which point they withdrew the demand and agreed to a worldwide arrangement.”
In the age when any establishment intervention—“kneeling before the big men,” as John put it—was viewed as an affront, the appearance of sticking it to the old ruling class was a satisfying one. Paul certainly felt vindicated after his Capitol address. Despite the sobering message, he was still embraced by the audience, who besieged him for autographs and pictures throughout the short visit. The personal triumph was no less gratifying. During the convention, he’d acted like a businessman, not a rock star. When pressed for facts and figures, he had the right responses. Ron Kass may have worked the crowd, presenting the image of a label head that everyone required, but it was Paul who discussed the intricacies of the deals and the Beatles’ goals for Apple.
Paul celebrated by retiring to a bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where, according to a pointless account in The Love You Make, he spent the remainder of the weekend ping-ponging between rooms while servicing two young women. The details of his escapade aren’t important, other than that it ended prematurely when a third woman appeared on the scene. Casually, very casually, Paul had invited Linda Eastman out to L.A. that week, promising nothing more than “I’m here if you show up.” He didn’t act surprised that she turned up as much as how cool and unfazed she was by the crazy scene. “The moment Linda arrived that was it, as far as other girls were concerned,” says Tony Bramwell, who was barricaded in an adjoining room, enjoying his own randy frolic. “Paul was drawn to her in a completely relaxed way. It was a mood I’d never seen him in before.”
“[I’d] always found Linda a very fascinating woman,” Paul says now, upon reflection, but at the time, the vibe she gave off packed a powerful punch. She acted more “like a mate,” he thought, which paralleled John’s first take on Yoko. There was nothing coy about her, none of the wrestling that went on with the other “birds.” Nor was she hung up about drugs, rock ’n roll, or even her career, unlike Jane Asher. What he liked best about Linda, Paul recalls, was her take-it-as-it-comes attitude toward life. “We both played the field…. We both had quite a few relationships.” Linda appeared able to take the larking, to say nothing of his ego, in stride. When a very pretty TV star knocked on his hotel door to declare her undying love, Linda “seemed amused,” rather than intimidated. It was a relief from the proprieties that Jane required.
Over the next day or two, Paul and Linda exchanged a wealth of personal information. “Her family was the most academic family on the planet,” Paul says, impressed by the firepower of their diplomas. “Her dad, Lee, got a scholarship to Harvard… and her brother, John, went to Stanford.” Even if Linda didn’t attend Smith, as was traditional for the Eastman women, the University of Arizona sounded to Paul like “a very good school.”
Their brief encounter was too short to seal the deal. Afterward, stopping at JFK to drop off Linda on his way back to London, Paul intimated they would be seeing more of each other. But he made no promises. Jane still loomed large in his life, if not in his heart. They’d gone through so much together, and she was a lovely girl. But the demands of her work were ceaseless and Paul viewed them ungratefully. Once again she had left on what seemed like an open-ended tour, “abandoning him” for much of the summer. There were plenty of distractions; Paul had never restrained himself when it came to meaningless affairs. But he was getting tired of meaningless and envied John and Ringo their children.
Julian, especially, had been on his mind. Paul “felt particularly sorry” for the boy, who was sandwiched between warring parents. Julian was “a fragile little kid” to begin with, wounded and insecure but touchingly luminous when Paul came to visit. How wonderful it would be, he thought, to give the boy’s spirits a lift.
A week or two after returning, Paul decided to drive out to Kenwood to see Cynthia and Julian. This took some cheek—he wasn’t certain how John would interpret the gesture—but he decided it was the decent thing to do. Cynthia had been cut off very quickly from the Beatles’ family, a victim of what one insider called “the Law of the Husband.” “I thought it was a bit much for [her and Julian] suddenly to be personae non gratae and out of my life,” Paul recalled. Cynthia had been involved from the beginning, even before the Beatles odyssey, when he and Dot Rhone made up half of another fearless foursome. There was something heartbreakingly tragic about erasing her from the scene. Not waiting around for anyone’s approval, Paul jumped in his Aston Martin and drove out to Weybridge to “try to cheer them up.”
The route from Cavendish Avenue to Kenwood took about an hour in all, during which Paul passed the time singing, improvising a lyric to serve as “a hopeful message for Julian”: “Hey Jools—don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better…” His voice glided over the tune, a poignant, wavering melody that draws the listener below its gentle surface like a lullaby. Nothing in his recent repertoire was as openly tender and genuinely stirring.
Paul, being Paul, knew instantly he’d hit upon the pot of gold. The whole rainbow of magical musical elements had fallen right into place. Throughout his visit with Cynthia and Julian, the tune kept turning over in his head, and by the time he returned home he was ready to put on the finishing touches.
Paul tied the song up neatly in one sitting, changing Jools to Jude, after one of the characters in Oklahoma!, whose name had the right ring. In his enthusiasm, he rushed to play “Hey Jude” for John and Yoko, who had arrived upstairs in his music room as it all came together. The couple, stoned and sullen, were not so easily impressed, but John later acknowledged the song as “one of [Paul’s] masterpieces.” His account, however, differs as to what the lyric really means. “He said it was written about Julian, my child,” John told Playboy in the days preceding his death, “[b]ut I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it, Yoko’s just come into the picture [and]… the words ‘go out and get her’—subconsciously he was saying, Go ahead, leave me.”
Of course, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a lullaby is just a lullaby. Whatever the case, “Hey Jude” was thrust into the queue of great material still waiting to be recorded. Unlike with the songs written in India, the Beatles held it aside, knowing it was destined to be a single. In fact, they had been looking for the perfect two sides to single out before the album was finished. John was holding out for “Revolution,” which he felt was more relevant for its political content and a statement the group needed to make. But “Revolution” had developed problems in the studio, and the group was still on the fence about making it the A-side.
“Hey Jude,” on the other hand, sounded like an obvious choice. The Beatles began recording it on July 29, 1968, after receiving a last-minute polish by Paul and John. Instead of settling into Abbey Road, as was customary, they took it to Trident Studios, an independent, thoroughly modern eight-track facility in Soho, where George and Paul were simultaneously producing other Apple artists.
The scenery, however, was the only thing that changed. Paul’s decision to instruct the other Beatles to play “Hey Jude” exactly how he wanted it to sound raised the resentments of the previous session to the boiling point. John clenched his teeth while George sizzled with anger. During the verses, George had answered every line by playing a riff mimicking Paul’s vocal. As a flourish, it was tired and weakened by overkill, but instead of finessing a potentially delicate situation, Paul, in his bone-dry schoolmaster voice, snapped, “No, George… You come in on the second chorus maybe….” He might have slapped George as well for all the hostility it created. Ron Richards, who observed countless Beatles sessions, notes that Paul was “oblivious to anyone else’s feelings in the studio.” He was determined to make the most exciting record possible, no matter what the emotional cost, “especially,” Richards says, “when it came to his own songs.”
John was better equipped to deal with Paul’s business because of the impregnability of his own success, but for George it stung—and doubly so—from years of mistreatment and insecurity. He’d been spending mornings down the hall, producing “Sour Milk Sea,” a single he’d written for Jackie Lomax, and even had the structure for a new song, “Something,” pretty much down. And while it was no “Hey Jude,” the Beatles only days earlier had finished laying down a demo of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which is as close to brilliance as George ever got. No, George had come a long way since that evening he played “Raunchy” on the upper level of a Liverpool bus, and he’d had about all the bullshit he was going to take from Paul McCartney—and he told him that, in not so many words.
This was becoming a familiar scene as the sessions for the album grew more complicated—and intense. Hardly a day went by when one of the Beatles—or more—wasn’t at one of the other’s throats. The pitch of antagonism in the studio ran about as high as a Yoko Ono vocal. Feelings were extremely raw and fragile owing to no small amount of outside stimuli. First and foremost there was Yoko’s unspeakable presence to deal with, along with John’s zombielike regard for her. No matter what they said over the years as a show of unity or to soothe injured feelings, Paul, George, and Ringo absolutely hated Yoko’s intrusion. It went against everything they had decided as a group, and it grew worse with each passing day. Each time Yoko walked through the door, she felt more entitled to be there and to offer unwanted opinions about the quality of the music. And those opinions, rattled off in a flat, terse delivery, grated like fingernails on a chalkboard. They weren’t intended to be constructive. A malevolent omnivore, Yoko lobbed critical bombs at the Beatles with an impudence that never lost its power to rankle. “Beatles do this…” “Beatles do that…” Every time she interrupted, it sent a chill through the studio that “made the other Beatles self-conscious and inhibited their musical spontaneity.” It was hard for them to work with the hostility she put out. “There was a definite vibe,” George recalled, “and that’s what bothered me. It was a weird vibe.”
Later, the recording process became even more splintered. “I remember having three studios operating at the same time,” George recalled. “Paul was doing some overdubs in one. John was in another, and I was recording some horns… in a third.” It was impossible to produce the songs the same way as before. “For the first time, I had to split myself three ways,” George Martin said, “because at any one time we were recording in different studios.” Instead of supervising the sessions, “looking after what both the engineer and the artist were doing” and maintaining “control over what the finished product sounded like,” he merely bounced between rooms, trying to keep everything from dissolving into chaos.
With the focus running in such contrary directions, friction was inevitable. Tempers flared whenever one of the Beatles didn’t get his way or disapproved of one of the other’s favorite songs. Paul, especially, fumed over what he perceived to be John’s obsession with “Revolution No. 9,” a self-indulgent concoction that evoked his earlier home tapes, and was “dead set against putting such a mess on a Beatles album.” Similarly, John made no secret that he always felt “hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving” the rest of the band. In an interview later on, he singled out “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” to make his point, saying, “[Paul] even recorded it by himself in another room.” By the time John heard the song, it was already a finished track: “Him drumming, him playing the piano, him singing.”
George was equally expressive, often repeating, almost verbatim, previous complaints. Publicly he would always deny envying John’s and Paul’s success, but he felt ignored by them, dismissed as a lightweight, relegated to sloppy seconds. His discontent burned hotter after the Beatles recorded “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” on August 16. They ran through fourteen takes in a dusk-to-dawn session, none of which had the right feel for George. Listening to the playback, it seemed that “there was such a lack of enthusiasm,” that John and Paul were just going through the motions. “They weren’t taking it seriously,” he recalled, “and I don’t think they were even playing on it,” or, at least, playing up to speed. Even George Martin noticed how during George’s song, “the others would join in, a little more reluctantly than they used to.” It didn’t seem fair, considering the classic it was destined to become. Couldn’t they admit he’d written a “pretty good” song? What did he have to do to get their attention?
To his credit, George’s form of rebellion was entirely creative.
Two weeks later, on his way to the studio from Sussex, scheduled to give the song another shot, he was explaining to Eric Clapton how something radical was needed to light a fire under the Beatles. “We were in George’s car, driving in London,” Clapton remembered, “and he said, ‘Do you want to come and play on this record?’ ” It was an astonishing invitation. The Beatles had used plenty of session musicians on other albums, but no one capable of upstaging them, certainly never a rock ’n roll virtuoso on the level of Eric Clapton. Clapton hesitated, unsure of what to do. He knew the other Beatles “wouldn’t like it,” but George brushed aside his reservations. “It’s nothing to do with them,” he insisted. “It’s my song, and I’d like you to play on it.”
Before anyone had a chance to object, Clapton was already in Studio Two, strapping on his Les Paul guitar and listening to the rhythm track mixed down from their work on the sixteenth. The song was pretty much there, creating an effortless, affecting groove, but it lacked a dramatic device to liberate the emotional tension that is never far from George’s caged expression. Clapton’s poignant guitar riff provided everything it needed. The way it weeps and moans, held in check by Eric’s incisive phrasing, creates the longing that gives the song its emotional center. George’s vocal couldn’t have been more enchanting as he squeezes the mournful lyric of all its desperation, until by the end, he seems to be just barely hanging on, just riding atop the surging guitar as it works to strangle his overlapping cries.
“I was recording not a band of four, but three fellows who had three accompanists each time,” recalled George Martin. Martin was an artist in his own right, a diligent arranger and a perfectionist whose new job description, as babysitter to the Beatles, held no real attraction. There was no longer much “producing” involved, at least not in the traditional sense, nothing that offered any artistic challenge. Martin wasn’t even enamored of the material they’d chosen to record, feeling the songs themselves needed a good pruning, “because some of them weren’t great.” Finally, he took his assistant, Chris Thomas, aside and said, “I’m going on holiday. You take over the Beatles for a little while.”
If George Martin’s departure was an admission of redundancy, Geoff Emerick’s was an omen of darkness. The rising tide of tension among the Beatles had taken its toll on Emerick, a gentle, affable man who worked the sound board as diligently and precisely as a surgeon. Their sniping, however, had worn him down to a nub. The whole caustic opera, with new installments every day, was playing clearly through his headphones. And despite a stellar cast, it was no treat. They were “really arguing amongst themselves and swearing at each other,” Emerick recalled. “The expletives were really flying.” Besides, trying to keep up with them in any practical sense was exhausting. He’d no sooner adjust a level or balance before being summoned to another studio for some other task. There was no continuity to his work, no way to get a handle on the music.
Emerick’s patience finally ran out during the recording of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” which had turned into a technical nightmare, taking more than ten days to complete. Everything the Beatles played sounded too tight, too ungovernable. It seemed impossible to capture the playfulness of the lyric. As such, the arrangement collapsed into a mishmash of styles. Key signatures were changed routinely, effects were layered on—then removed. Paul continuously wiped the tape of his vocal to try another approach. None of the Beatles were happy with the song, and as their frustration mounted, so, too, did their tempers, erupting in blistering arguments that caused collateral damage. On July 15, during a remix of several takes, Emerick recalled, “Paul was re-recording the vocal again and George Martin made some remark about how he should be lilting into the half-beat,” when Paul, building up a rage all afternoon long, snapped his head toward the booth and sneered: “Well, you come down and sing it.”
Emerick was disgusted. He idolized George Martin and, like everyone else at Abbey Road, deferred to his level judgment with great, unflagging respect. Talking to him as Paul had done was unacceptable, even from one of the Beatles. The next day, while John was laying down the rhythm track for “Cry Baby Cry,” Emerick leaned toward Martin and said, “Look, I’ve had enough. I want to leave. I don’t want to know anymore.”
Incidents like their in-fighting and Geoff Emerick’s sudden exit signaled the most disheartening development of all: even in the midst of such creative accomplishment, the Beatles’ rock-solid support structure was crumbling.
While in the studio, preoccupied with making music, the Beatles tended to block out the outside world; the process of grinding out an album, song by song, track by track, was intense enough. But with the cumulative buildup of tension and the cracks in their personal lives, it was all they could do to concentrate, leaving their business affairs largely in the hands of an inexperienced Apple staff. Without a strong manager at the helm, an enterprise that once ran smoothly now ran amok. There were no checks or balances imposed at Apple, nothing that answered the question, Who is in control?
The Savile Row office was nothing more than an asylum, with the inmates running the works. “None of us had any experience,” recalls Alistair Taylor, “so we were basically making it up as we went along.” For a while the company’s destiny was determined solely by the way Caleb threw the I Ching. Eventually one of the Beatles came to his senses and sacked the Apple oracle, at which point everyone on staff just did as he or she pleased.
The offices were decorated indiscriminately and at extraordinary expense. Antiques, designer furniture, imported tapestries, chandeliers, state-of-the-art equipment and gadgets—all sorts of fabulous perks—were delivered at the whim of an employee. Two attractive young women with some Cordon Bleu training were hired as in-house chefs, with the larder stocked to rival a two-star French restaurant. “We invited people to Apple for business lunches,” recalls Peter Brown, whose vast, well-appointed office doubled as the corporate dining room, thus necessitating his presence at every meal. Sumptuous four-course feasts would be laid out on his octagonal rosewood desk, accompanied by vintage wines unearthed from the company’s private cellar. The liquor bill alone could endow a small university.
Derek Taylor accounted for half of that bill. Taylor had set himself up on the third floor of the town house in what was ostensibly the Apple Press Office. A born raconteur, wonderfully eccentric and with an irresistible, ingratiating demeanor, Derek welcomed any and all to his sanctum with effusive Cyrenaic hospitality. Since returning to London, he had undergone an extreme personality makeover that left his former colleagues scratching their heads. A suave, companionable gentleman had become the apostle of intemperance. Since being dosed by George Harrison, Derek had acquired a sweet tooth for drugs that knew no limits. Acid, hash, grass, peyote, cannabis resin, speed, cocaine—whatever he could get his hands on was devoured with rapacious glee. Not since Robert Fraser had London encountered a more epicurean figure.
The extent of the fun, however, was in the eye of the beholder. One day, the Beatles might revel in the debauchery—“John wouldn’t rest until every last kid on the staff was happily stoned,” according to Tony Bramwell; another day, they would explode over the misconduct of a squint-eyed secretary. One day, Paul would face the press to explain that Apple’s benevolence extended far and wide, saying, “We really want to help people,” while eight weeks later he’d exclude cripples who were “not necessarily having a hard time of it, and even if they were having a hard time of it—it’s their hard time.” One day, Paul ordered partitions to be erected to make the secretaries more productive; another day, George grabbed a hammer and “smashed down an entire eight-by-three-foot panel, showering Sylvia,” a part-time secretary, “with plaster and wood and nails.” One day, the Beatles “were a mother’s dream,” recalls Alistair Taylor, “stopping by everyone’s desk, being fun-loving lads, and firing up spirits, in general”; another day, “they’d be at everyone’s throats, creating fear and mistrust.” Gone was the communal spirit that had sparked the original inspiration for Apple. Gone was the concept “to make business fun.” In its place was the slow, steady buildup of pressures and creative tensions inherent in an earnest, but extremely hip, million-pound corporation.
The company was still riddled by “chaos,” Paul acknowledged in an interview given later that summer, but he wrote it off to the cost of starting up a revolutionary new business venture that would ultimately give them total artistic freedom. All the missteps, all the expense and confusion, even the “foolish disregard,” as Derek Taylor called it in an open letter to his bosses, could be attributed to their inexperience as businessmen, but he remained convinced, as did the other Beatles, that they’d “get it together” and succeed. “I mean, all that can happen is that we lose all our money, which I don’t mind one bit,” Paul explained, in a tone that strained for sincerity. Except that he did mind it—a lot. And so did John, George, and Ringo.
On Saturday, July 27, the Beatles, along with Yoko Ono, met in the offices at Wigmore Street and decided they’d had enough; it was time to close the Apple Boutique.
But how could they do it and manage to save face? A big going-out-of-business sale? That was too tacky, they argued. It wasn’t in the spirit of Apple’s hippie manifesto. Besides, as George bluntly put it, they didn’t want to be “mistaken for little Jewish businessmen, getting £5,000 out of closing down.” To preserve the edge of philanthropy that was germane to Apple, a more radical scheme was plotted. According to John, “Yoko came up with the idea of giving all the Apple stuff away”* ; however, others who attended the meeting insist it originated with John and Paul. No matter, everyone aside from Derek Taylor loved the idea. A giveaway! There was only about £10,000 worth of stuff left in the shop. That seemed like a small price to pay for what John considered such “a good happening.”
Paul immediately sat down with Derek and fired off a press release explaining the closing. “Originally, the shops were intended to be something else,” he admitted, “but they just became like all the boutiques in London…. Our main business is entertainment…. Apple is mainly concerned with fun, not frocks…. Well, the answer is that it was much funnier to give things away.”
Once the decision was made, the course of action was clear. On Wednesday, July 30, the store would open punctually at 9:00 A.M. and everything inside would be free. But to be fair, the Beatles called first dibs on the leftover merchandise. “The night before, we all went in and took what we wanted,” John recalled, having grabbed a few tasty T-shirts for himself off a lopsided rack. Paul claimed “a smashing raincoat,” while Ringo and Maureen took “loads of shirts and jackets.” “It was great,” John gloated, “it was like robbing.” In all, the boys proved to be pretty considerate, choosing only a handful of items they could use. It was Yoko, however, who scored the biggest haul.
“Yoko revealed a greedy side we hadn’t seen,” recalls Peter Brown, who watched from the sidelines throughout the giveaway. “The night before, without telling John, she came along in the Rolls and filled vast garbage bags full of the clothes before the sale—and before even the Beatles made their selections.”
The official opening touched off, predictably, what one observer called a “semi-riot.” “Hundreds of people” stampeded the shop, climbing over displays and one another’s backs to grab anything they could get their hands on. “It reminded me of the running of the bulls at Pamplona,” recalls Alistair Taylor, who stood off to the side, bristling at how the Beatles regarded the scene as “just a bloody giggle.” The shop was an all-out disaster area. “Once the news got around,” reported the Daily Mail, “hundreds [more] people flocked to the shop, not only teenagers, but middle-aged women and taxi drivers.” Ringo remembered seeing “people… coming with wheelbarrows,” although this was certainly an exaggeration. Nevertheless, “it brought out the worst in people,” recalled Derek Taylor. “I thought it was one of the ugliest things I had ever heard of…. It was awful and vulgar.”
Once Apple Retail* was dissolved, the Beatles could turn their attention back to music. There was much on the agenda besides the new album, which still needed tending to, the most noteworthy being Apple Records’ first official release on August 16. The label itself was a hive of activity, with its dynamic staff—as well as the Beatles—assembling the makings of a diverse roster. Since April, Ron Kass and Peter Asher had worked hard, aggressively signing the kind of artists who would bring the label instant cachet. Asher, displaying an extremely talented ear that would sound out hits for the next several decades, had already produced James Taylor’s debut single, “Carolina on My Mind,” which warranted a full album treatment. Another promising single, “Maybe Tomorrow,” by the Iveys—later to be renamed Badfinger—was in the can. George was far enough along in his session with Jackie Lomax to devote time to working on a single for soul favorite Doris Troy. It was all humming along with proficiency.
For the first official release, however, the Beatles had selected four singles—“Our First Four”—they earmarked to make the biggest splash. One in particular, on which Paul seemed to have struck gold, was his project with Welsh talent-discovery Mary Hopkin, “Those Were the Days.” He’d been carrying the tune around in his head for several years, having heard an amateur cabaret act sing it on stage at the Blue Angel in Berkeley Square. It was a nostalgic tune of Russian Gypsy origin, far from the archetypical rock ’n roll formula, with a catchy, addictive melody that smacked of a crossover hit. The name of the act eluded him, but a call to the club led Paul to Gene Raskin, an American architect who had written the lyric with his wife, Francesca.
Paul was a perfect fit for “Those Were the Days.” It resonated with all the rinky-tink pub and music hall kitsch he’d flirted with for years, in songs such as “When I’m Sixty-four,” “Your Mother Should Know,” and, later, “Honey Pie.” There was a corny familiarity about it, something that made it suitable for wedding parties, sandwiched between “That’s Amore” and “Hava Nagila.” Paul knew a hit when he heard one, and he knew exactly what to do with it. Convinced that it was a smash, Paul originally tried to persuade the Moody Blues to record it, without luck. Then in India he went to work on Donovan, who had nearly given it a whirl, but ultimately Hopkin got it.
The version Paul cut with Mary Hopkin would go on to sell 3 million copies in its first few months in release. Later that summer Paul produced a second single for Apple’s “First Four,” conducting the Black Dyke Mills Band, a famous northern brass ensemble, in the performance of a “jaunty martial” piece called “Thingumybob,”* which NME deemed “ideal material for half-time music at football marches.” Once again Paul had the framework for it already worked out in his head. “I wanted a really different sound,” he recalled, “so we went out[side] and played it on the street,” giving the production a “lovely [effect], with very dead, trumpety-sounding coronets.”
Even though “Thingumybob” wasn’t an obvious pop hit, it brought a nice balance to Apple’s roster. George contributed the Jackie Lomax single, “Sour Milk Sea,” to flesh out the “First Four,” but the showcase of the label’s launch was strictly all Beatles. Despite the nicely conceived, eclectic mix of songs on the debut roster, neither Mary Hopkin, Jackie Lomax, nor the Black Dyke Mills Band could match the impact of “Hey Jude.” Its melody is a gorgeous collage of genuinely stirring rhythmic passages woven around an inlay of heartwarming emotions: hope, optimism, faith, strength, encouragement, affection. The lyric is loaded with empathy, and Paul’s soulful performance establishes a mood of haunting tenderness that swells at the top of each successive line.
As a three-minute song, “Hey Jude” is a tour de force. But while recording the song, something strange happened. Instead of cruising into the standard fade, as the last verse drew to an end, Paul locked onto the word better and, riding it up the register, launched a full-throttle chorale that transforms the buildup into an anthemlike extravaganza. Four minutes later, the Beatles are still going strong, with the vocals shrieking and leaping about to the accompaniment of a thirty-six-piece orchestra. “It wasn’t intended to go on that long at the end,” Paul recalled in a memoir, “but I was having such fun ad-libbing.”
The feeling was contagious. “It felt good recording it,” Ringo recalled. The Beatles took it into Trident Studios, where sessions with James Taylor, Jackie Lomax, and Mary Hopkin were ongoing, and a party spirit spilled into the icy atmosphere. “We put it down a couple of times—trying to get it right—and it just clicked.” It was a dazzling, remarkable recording and, at seven minutes, eleven seconds, the longest pop single ever released. There were plenty of other songs that equaled “Hey Jude” in melody and inventiveness: “A Day in the Life,” with its forceful, orchestrated turbulence embroidered around a commentary of modern-day despair—one of the incomparable highlights of the Beatles’ career; the surrealistic “Strawberry Fields Forever” with its fathomless layers of riddles and wordplay; “Eleanor Rigby,” tragic and lushly dramatic, with its elaborate string quartet sawing through the suds. But nothing was as ravishing or instantly accessible as “Hey Jude,” and it enchanted listeners, who made it the largest-selling Beatles record of all time, with a reign of nine weeks at the top of the charts.
For Beatles fans everywhere, “Hey Jude” was further proof that the band was still in top form. Far from dwindling into caricature or esoterica, far from sounding tired or monotonous, they were pushing into exciting new dimensions, evolving but remaining accessible to their audience. But the fans wanted more—and soon. Too much time had passed between the ambrosial Sgt. Pepper’s and a serious follow-up. Even George Martin, usually tight-lipped on such matters, expressed his impatience with the Beatles’ progress, accusing them of taking “all the time in the world” when it came to the ongoing album sessions. They seemed unfocused to him, even undisciplined. Nor was there much cohesion. Paul recorded “Mother Nature’s Son” one night after the other Beatles had gone home, not even bothering to run through it for John, as had always been the custom; George’s “Not Guilty” was scrapped after more than a hundred futile takes; a discordant, impromptu number of John’s (cowritten, he said, with Magic Alex, although more likely Yoko) called “What’s the New Mary Jane” so offended Paul that he refused to play on it; George was absent when they recorded “I Will.” There was none of the camaraderie or team spirit that contributed to their earlier successes. During the bleakest days, engineers and technicians found themselves abruptly dismissed, told to “go for a walk” or to “go have a cup of tea” while the Beatles attempted to resolve their differences.
Finally, on August 22, sensing that “the whole thing was going down,” Ringo threw his hands up and walked out, effectively quitting the group. The in-fighting had finally gotten to him. Everywhere he turned, he encountered the same crude, belligerent exchanges. The ongoing party that had been the Beatles’ recording sessions had turned cruel and forbidding. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” Ringo said upon reflection. “There was no magic, and the relationships were terrible.” Ringo had known all along that he wasn’t part of the Beatles’ exalted brain trust, but he was upset, he said, about the way he’d been treated, ignored until the band was ready for him to play. He told the others that he “felt like an outsider.” He felt unappreciated, “unloved and out of it.” He had bottomed out.
Convinced that he wouldn’t be missed, Ringo took his family to Sardinia for a vacation on Peter Sellers’s yacht. The band tried carrying on without him, recording a blistering version of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” but it took all three of them to patch together a composite drum track that suffered from being too mannered. They sorely missed Ringo’s “feel and soul,” his intuitive fills, which established the beat and kept the rhythm in check. He never got much credit, but his drumming had become a kind of center of gravity for the songs, just as Ringo’s droll deadpan helped anchor the band. From the beginning, he’d been the missing piece of the puzzle, and it didn’t take long for the Beatles to appreciate his absence.
A week later a telegram arrived at Ringo’s Mediterranean beach retreat, begging him to return to the studio. Needing no further invitation, he reached Abbey Road on September 9, in time to participate in an uproarious remake of “Helter Skelter,” Paul’s attempt at making “the most raucous… loudest,” dirtiest-sounding track possible, which had originally run on for an epic twenty-seven minutes. The Beatles’ goal was to pare down the cacophony to a sleek four minutes. In a studio crowded with perfectionists, it was not an easy task. They threw everything they had at the mikes to make the song “louder and dirtier”—distortion, feedback, echo, tape hiss, howls. John attempted to play the saxophone in a duet with Mal Evans, equally unproficient on the trumpet. Paul’s savage vocal, with backup from John and George, kept the Vu meters redlined throughout the deafening onslaught. All the while, they kept pressing Ringo to “just beat the shit out of the drums, just kill them,” as he windmilled his arms around the kit. According to an engineer on the scene, he “drummed as if his life depended on it.” After a particularly ferocious eighteenth take, Ringo flung his sticks across the room and shouted: “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” which provided the perfect ending to such an imperfect song.
The Beatles’ goal, according to John, had always been to put out a double album. He, George, and Paul had written “so much material” in India that to do otherwise would have meant scrapping too many good songs. Besides, over the four months in the studio, they’d added to their already impressive new repertoire with “Glass Onion,” “Birthday,” “Savoy Truffle,” “Martha My Dear,” “Helter Skelter,” “Cry Baby Cry,” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” There were also various versions of “Revolution” being considered. But hardly anyone aside from symphony orchestras and opera companies had ever released a two-record set. It was too expensive for a label to produce that much original material, let alone to pay writers’ royalties for so many songs. Bob Dylan had managed to pull it off on Blonde on Blonde, but he was a force to be reckoned with, an exception even to the exception.
In addition, George Martin had been dead set against a double album since the subject arose back in April. “I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album, rather than a double,” he later recalled. Ringo also thought a double album was extravagant, preferring its release as two single records, while George viewed the thirty-one songs as being “a bit heavy,” the four sides “a mistake.”
But this was said in hindsight, with the ring of the cash registers still echoing and nothing at stake. But in October 1968, after five months of hard work on the emotionally charged project, there was a consensus among the Beatles that the complete set was “definitely rocking,” and they turned their attention to choosing a suitably rocking cover.
Like the records it contained, the breakthrough album cover was a masterpiece of Beatles ingenuity. Paul decided to revisit Robert Fraser, whose insight during the Sgt. Pepper’s concept proved particularly instrumental. Fraser, he knew, represented Richard Hamilton, the motivating force behind the pop art movement and no slouch when it came to audacious design. It was Hamilton who proposed calling the album “something as utterly simple” as The Beatles and packaging it in a “prissy” all-white cover, with nothing more than an embossed title. Hamilton also contributed the idea of including a squared-off poster in the form of a collage containing family photos of each of the Beatles. As a last, unique touch, Hamilton persuaded them to stamp a number on each album to create the impression of a limited edition. The Beatles liked it so much that they forced EMI to retool its assembly line in order to print consecutive numbers on the covers.
The release of The Beatles—known forever afterward as the White Album—on November 22, 1968 (exactly five years after With the Beatles appeared), was regarded in most quarters as an international event, certainly “the most important musical event of the year,” as the Times (London) expressed it in a column that morning. Except for the news that Yoko had miscarried the night before, nothing upstaged its long-awaited appearance. The rush to buy the new record was so great and unprecedented that EMI had considered rationing its initial shipment of 250,000 copies so that supplies would be spread evenly among retailers until more could be pressed. Not surprisingly, the entire run was sold out within hours of its release, with those lucky enough to snag a precious copy scouring Richard Hamilton’s minimalist cover for clues, as if it might contain some hidden message in the absence of conventional design.
The press, most of which received copies early that morning by special messenger, responded with fitful delirium. “It isn’t revolutionary and won’t change the face of music, but… [i]t is beyond comparison,” argued the Record Mirror’s ambivalent critic. “Skill and sophistication abound,” declared Newsweek, “but so does a faltering sense of taste and purpose.” Nik Cohn, writing in the New York Times, called The Beatles “boring beyond belief” and denounced “more than half the songs [as] profound mediocrities,” while elsewhere in the newspaper’s pages, Richard Goldstein, who had infamously blasted the beloved Sgt. Pepper’s, hailed the White Album as “a major success,” proclaiming it “so vast in its scope, so intimate in its details, and so skillful in its approach that even the flaws add to its flavor.” There was such an extravagance of music on those four sides, so many sprawling themes and styles to sift through, so much energy and vigor in the grooves, that taken as a whole, the album stymied critics as to how it figured in the Beatles’ canon. THE BRILLIANT, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, headlined NME, whose editor, the usually rapturous Alan Smith, described “Revolution No. 9” as “a pretentious piece of old codswallop… a piece of idiot immaturity and a blotch on their own unquestioned talent as well as the album. For most of the rest,” Smith concluded, “God Bless You, Beatles!”
Though the White Album was a somewhat controversial recording, it was nowhere as controversial as what was yet to come. Only one week later, on November 29, Apple released an experimental album by John and Yoko, a composite of their recorded hijinks that first blissful night at Kenwood, called Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. On the front and back covers John and Yoko posed stark naked. “It was a bombshell,” recalls Tony Bramwell, who responded to John’s request for help with the jacket photo. Bramwell had no idea what he was in for when he arrived at the Montagu Square flat on an afternoon in early November. “John intended to take the picture himself, but about all he could do with that camera was press the shutter. So I adjusted everything for him, worked out the lighting, showed him how to use the ‘delayed action’ feature, and then left.”
For John, the shock value of these dramatic shots of him and Yoko au naturel seemed worth the uneasiness it produced and “the howl that went up.” Nothing excited him as much as upsetting the status quo. He’d originally planned to issue the record as a solo vehicle for Yoko, accompanied by a nude shot of her on the cover “because,” he said, “her work is naked, basically simple and childlike and truthful.” But once they came up with the “two virgins” concept, he was determined to appear in it with her.
Their pose, arranged rather hastily by John, was a grainy, unglamourous image of them standing in front of an unmade platform bed, his arm draped protectively around Yoko’s shoulders. There is nothing erotic about the picture; neither of their bodies is particularly attractive or appealing. There is no come-on in their slack, trancelike stares, nor anything to suggest a postcoital lassitude. “What we did purposely is not to have a pretty photograph, not to have it lighted so that we looked sexy or good,” John insisted. “We used the straightest, most unflattering picture just to show that we were human.”
For John, it was yet another shot aimed at an uptight establishment and a chance to instigate more flak among the other Beatles, who had seen more than enough of Yoko Ono, with or without clothes. He was still steamed over what he perceived as their open hostility toward Yoko, the way “they all sat there, with their wives, like a fucking jury, and judged [her].” Well, he’d take his revenge where he could get it.
Paul remembered John showing him the cover and being “slightly shocked” by the nudity, but Ringo, following his initial embarrassment, turned to John in exasperation and said, “Ah, come on, John. You’re doing all this stuff and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer… for it.” How, he wondered, was this going to affect the Beatles’ image as musicians? How were they supposed to explain it to the fans? And not just the cover photo, but the so-called music on the record. “Ringo and Paul hated every last note on that album,” says Peter Brown, who admits doing his share to stall the project as long as he could. Mostly everyone agreed there wasn’t a redeemable measure on it; it was “a collection of bizarre sounds and effects… neither surprising nor important musically,” a complete put-on. The kids who bought it, thinking that somehow the Beatles were involved, were sure to feel ripped off.
No one other than John wanted to put it out, but he insisted. Referring to Apple’s current lineup, he pointed to the others’ pet projects—Paul with Mary Hopkin and the Black Dyke Mills Band, George with Jackie Lomax—as examples of the label’s artistic freedom. They had even signed a classical artist, John Tavener. According to John, he had intended all along to produce an album with Yoko and demanded they accept Two Virgins as his contribution.
Sir Joseph Lockwood made EMI’s position perfectly clear: the company would press the album but had no intention of distributing it (Two Virgins was eventually released in London on Track Records, and in the United States by Tetragrammaton). The weekly music magazines—Disc, Melody Maker, and NME—refused to run ads for it, citing the ages of their impressionable young readers. And the Beatles’ accounting firm, Bryce Hammer, resigned in protest over the cover. But the antagonism that Two Virgins aroused gave new impetus to John’s conviction that the Beatles had become passé and were, moreover, useless to him. As he saw it, the band was content to continue making more Beatles records, content to hone their image as the lovable lads from Liverpool, content to go on treating one another as if they were indispensable friends. And worse: just content. The “togetherness had gone…. [R]ound about Sgt. Pepper’s it was wearing off,” John recalled. “There was no longer any spark.” As far as creativity was concerned, it seemed that they were headed in opposite directions. He had nothing left to give them. The collaboration with Paul was over, as was his marriage. The Beatles’ music no longer intrigued him. Yoko offered John a way out, a way to liberate himself from the stagnation, as well as a radically different perspective. “I decided to leave the group when I decided that I could no longer get anything out of the Beatles. And here was someone who could turn me on to a million things.” Yoko represented his ultimate rejection of the Beatles—a rejection that John had been entertaining for some time. With Yoko there to stimulate him, John said, “the boys became of no interest whatsoever, other than they were like old friends.” From that moment on, he told Ray Coleman, “It was ‘Goodbye to the boys in the band!’ ”