“I’m Backing Britain” campaign – Assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy – Luxury liner, QE2, launched – Student protest in France – Invasion of Czechoslovakia – Two-tier postal service introduced.
In January 1968, there was a hive of activity, both personally and professionally around the Beatles. John Lennon was reunited, albeit rather spikily, with his father, Freddie. The Beatles’ new business venture Apple opened for business at 95 Wigmore Street, close to Oxford Street in London. On paper at least, it seemed like a good idea…
There was a press reception to launch their signing, Grapefruit, the name coming from John Lennon and the title of a book of poems by Yoko Ono. A single on RCA, ‘Dear Delilah’, was released as there was no Apple label as yet. Although the Beatles were to offer Grapefruit encouragement, they did not play on their records. For their album, Around Grapefruit (1968), Lennon and McCartney produced ‘Lullaby’ to which strings were added for their album. Lennon suggested the horn arrangement on ‘C’mon Marianne’ and McCartney produced ‘Yes’.
Starting in March 1968, Cilla Black’s new BBC-TV series, Cilla, attracted audiences of 7 million. Cilla Black recalls, “Paul McCartney said to me, ‘How are you going to open your TV show?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ It was a problem because variety shows like The Billy Cotton Band Show had dirty big openings with big band arrangements. He said, ‘I think you should have a friendly song, a more intimate thing, and I’ll write you one.’ Paul wrote ‘Step Inside Love’ and he had the idea of beginning the show with opening doors. When I first sang it live on the telly, I forgot the words because I was so nervous. I made up some words and thought it didn’t matter because no one had heard the song before. Paul was watching the show and was upset because he thought the producers had been at me to change his lyrics.”
March 1968, And the Sun Will Shine/ The Dog Presides – Paul Jones (Columbia DB 8379)
Paul McCartney, drums
Having left Manfred Mann, Paul Jones formed his own supergroup for a single – Jeff Beck (guitar), Paul Samwell-Smith (bass), Paul McCartney (drums) and himself on harmonica – which was produced by Peter Asher. “Paul McCartney wanted to play drums and Peter Asher told me he was good,” says Paul Jones, “When we did ‘The Dog Presides’, Paul went ‘Ay, ay, its one of those songs.” Session men were known as Cromwell’s army and the Ironsides in the song are session men working for the dog (EMI).
March 1968, Lady Madonna/ The Inner Light (Parlophone R 5675, UK No.1, US No.4)
The Beatles’ first single of the year, ‘Lady Madonna’ was released in March and went to the top. It was a Paul McCartney song, inspired by Humphrey Lyttelton’s 1956 hit, ‘Bad Penny Blues’. This could have been a ‘My Sweet Lord’/ ‘He’s So Fine’ moment for McCartney.
Humphrey Lyttelton: “A number of idiots came up to me and said, ‘They’ve borrowed the introduction to ‘Bad Penny Blues’. What are you going to do?’ They wanted me to sue them but I told them not to be so stupid. You can’t copyright a rhythm and the rhythm was all they’d used. Anyway, we’d borrowed it from Dan Burley. It was absolutely stupid and I’ve never had any sympathy with the notion of ‘Here are some guys, they’re worth a fortune, let’s try and get some of it by suing them’. In fact, I was very complimented. Although, none of the Beatles cared for traditional jazz, they all knew and liked ‘Bad Penny Blues’ because it was a bluesy, skiffley thing, rather than a trad exercise.”
Note too the nursery rhyme reference to ‘Three Blind Mice’ in ‘Lady Madonna’. Both that and ‘I Am the Walrus’ refer to nursery rhymes but it’s not out of the ordinary as many popular songs contain such references. The B-side, George Harrison’s ‘The Inner Light’ set the teachings of Tao Te Ching to music, and the backing had been recorded at the EMI studios in Bombay.
At the end of February 1968, the Beatles flew to India and headed for the Maharishi’s base in Rishikesh. Ringo and Maureen only stayed a few days, Ringo likening the place to Butlin’s (surely not).
Donovan: “Going to India was excellent for songwriting. I wrote ‘Lord of the Reedy River’ which was a dream that I had there. It was a magnificent experience to be in a tropical land on the banks of the Ganges under tropical stars with peacocks flying through the jungle, monkeys jumping on the table and taking your breakfast, and elephants roaming the forests. This was amazing. Nobody can go to India without being influenced.”
Dory Previn: “When John went to India, somebody told me that he was sitting on a bank of the Ganges and he was playing ‘Goodbye Charlie’, which Pat Boone recorded. Someone said to him, ‘Why are you singing that? Who wrote it?’ and he said, ‘It’s by Dory and André Previn and it’s my favourite film song.’ I thought that was terrific.”
By April 1968, all the Beatles were back in London. Donovan: “It cannot have done anyone any harm to have met Maharishi but there was some trouble in India. I had a great time but there was controversy between the Beatles and Maharishi. I wasn’t involved and if the truth be known, it seemed like something extremely human happened and Maharishi crossed over the line between teacher and pupil. We found out that he was a man, not a god, and this was important. It destroyed the Beatles’ faith in the man but it didn’t destroy their faith in meditation.”
Donovan is alluding to the ill feelings because the Maharishi apparently made overtures to Mia Farrow’s sister, the Prudence of ‘Dear Prudence’. “Why are you leaving?” asked the Maharishi. “If you’re so bloody cosmic, you should know,” replied John. Later, John said that the Beatles relied on him for the dirty work, but where was John when Pete Best was sacked?
Those who have had world acclaim often find no satisfaction in it, hence the considerable number of star names who have taken up religion or cults. The Beatles’ mysticism was, however, unusual in that many fans - and musicians - followed them. This indicates the extent and the depth of their popularity.
May 1968, McGough and McGear LP (Parlophone PCS 7047)
Paul McCartney, producer
Paul McCartney produced this mixture of original poems and music for two of Scaffold: his brother, Mike, and Roger McGough. Jimi Hendrix plays guitar on ‘Ex-Art Student’, the title indicative of the LP’s market. McCartney himself plays bass and keyboards on occasion but he is not to the fore. He and Jane Asher supply backing vocals.
Paul McCartney had an Old English sheepdog, Martha, and he was to record ‘Martha My Dear’ for The White Album. Roger McGough of Scaffold: “I had a dog called Bran and Paul’s dog, Martha, was his mother. I would regularly jog through Sefton Park with him and one day, two young girls jumped out at us. By then, I always carried a pen for autographs but it wasn’t me they wanted. They had an ink pad and they pressed one of Bran’s paws into their autograph books.”
Apple was besieged with tapes from young hopefuls. I can vouch for this as I was to visit Apple with the folk singer, Timon, later Tymon Dogg, and I saw them piled up in Peter Asher’s office. “Are you going to play them all?” I asked. “How can I?” he replied. As far as I know, no one was signed as a result of these tapes and Apple’s most successful signing, Mary Hopkin, had won the ITV talent competition, Opportunity Knocks.
Rather cleverly, the fact that the Beatles didn’t want to make a third film was turned into a creative opportunity. A crack team of animators were recruited for Yellow Submarine, a feature length film that was premièred in London in July 1968.
The Beatles showed little interest in the project, even though it was getting them out of a hole, and film producer Denis O’Dell, although not officially working on the project, spoke to them: “I did try and persuade the Beatles to take more interest in Yellow Submarine. I went to see some of the stuff that they were shooting as they wanted the Beatles for the dialogue. It was really good animation and the art work was terrific, so I told the Beatles that they must not have idiots doing their voices, they must do it themselves. They wouldn’t hear of it. Eventually they saw some of it and appreciated the quality of it, so they added the end sequence. I think, in the end, that they would have liked to have done it and if they had, they would have invented so much stuff.”
Roger McGough: “I was brought in as the 13th or 14th scriptwriter for Yellow Submarine and I followed the man who wrote Love Story, Erich Segal. Though it was about Liverpool, nobody from the city had been working on it and the script had been targeted at US audiences. The script was full of Americanisms – Ringo was making jokes about bagels and bar mitzvahs – and so my job was to make it more Liverpudlian. I also wrote some scenes like the Sea of Monsters. I was paid $1,000 which was the original agreed fee, and they wouldn’t budge on not paying for extra work. Also, I didn’t get a credit which is very annoying. I’d like to be there.”
Film critic Ramsey Campbell: “Yellow Submarine is one of the great animated features. It was very innovative and it included techniques which were being shown for the first time in a film on commercial release as opposed to something from a film school. Without the peg of the Beatles, the film would never have been made, so we must be grateful for that.”
Music publisher David Stark, then a teenage fan: “My friend and I gate-crashed the Yellow Submarine première at the London Pavilion. I told someone that Clive Epstein had invited us. They went to find him and I saw Dick James and I said, ‘Is Clive here?’ and he said, ‘No, he is stuck in Liverpool and can’t make it.’ The cinema manager said, ‘You know people, so you can stay.’ We were standing at the back of the circle and suddenly all the Beatles came in and they sat in the front. There were a couple of seats behind Paul and John and so we sat there. Keith Richards was in the third seat along and he said, ‘Mick and Marianne are in New York, so you’re all right there, mate.’ I had the Beatles in front of me for the whole of the film and it was incredible. I loved the film. It was well ahead of its time, but it was a psychedelic film with a psychedelic audience and so it went down very well. It got some mediocre reviews and didn’t last too long at the local cinemas, but I thought it was great. I loved ‘Hey Bulldog’ and told Paul that it was a good one.”
Yellow Submarine was undoubtedly a better film than Magical Mystery Tour, but the new songs were better in Magical Mystery Tour. The evidence that the songs were not highly rated is that the soundtrack album was not issued until some months later because EMI preferred to push The White Album. Who today would release an album after the film had been and gone?
Although the film contains many Beatle favourites, there were only four new songs on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. The cheerful ‘All Together Now’ is ostensibly a children’s song but does contain the line, “Can I take my friends to bed?” The song had been recorded for Sgt. Pepper but not used.
And talk about having your own agenda, how about this? George Harrison’s ‘Only a Northern Song’ is an early example of postmodernism. A disgruntled George is commentating on Lennon and McCartney and his own relationship with Northern Songs. Now we would say it was a typical George Harrison rant and a peculiar thing to make public.
EMI historian Brian Southall: “‘Only a Northern Song’ was George’s dig at Northern Songs having his publishing. John and Paul as co-owners and directors and shareholders in Northern Songs earned almost as much as George Harrison did from his songs and that caused resentment. George felt he had been conned and it is true that he wasn’t given any independent advice. Seemingly, every lawyer and every accountant who advised the Beatles was retained by NEMS, which was Brian Epstein’s management company.”
On the fadeout of another George Harrison song, ‘It’s All Too Much’, George Harrison sings, “With your long blonde hair and eyes of blue” twice, a clear nod to the Merseys’ ‘Sorrow’ and also to Pattie Boyd, whom he’d recently married.
Although the Beatles hadn’t been keen to contribute to Yellow Submarine, they did have their own projects.
John Lennon’s play with Victor Spinetti, In His Own Write, was ready for the National Theatre. Victor Spinetti: “This young girl came into my dressing room and said that she had written a play based on John’s book, In His Own Write. She had cut out the pages, put them in a different order and stuck them in an exercise book. I said, ‘John has written fantasy and you have to put some reality in the middle of all that.’ I went to see Kenneth Tynan at the National Theatre and he said that we must do it. I told John that the National wanted to do a play based on his books. He said, ‘They must be mad.’ I said, ‘I can think of a way to do it. Let’s do it together.’ It was December 1966 and John said, ‘Hey Vic let’s go somewhere warm.’ I thought he meant another room but we ended up in Africa.”
Unlikely as it sounds, Spinetti and Lennon developed a workable script. Victor Spinetti: “We went to Africa and when we came back with the script, Laurence Olivier said to me, ‘My dear baby, you will have to direct it as none of us understand it.’ Olivier wanted to meet John Lennon and so the next day Olivier was on the steps and the car arrived with John and Yoko, white suits, hair and glasses. Olivier said to me, ‘Which one is which, my dear baby? I cannot tell them apart.’ They had tea in his office and he said, ‘My dear Johnny’, and John said, ‘I haven’t been called Johnny since I was at school’, and he said, ‘If this play is made into a film, the theatre will own 60% of the film rights.’
John didn’t move. He said, ‘Don’t you have people that you pay to talk about these kind of things who can talk to the people that I pay to talk about these kind of things?’ Olivier was livid. When they left he said, ‘What a ridiculous pair, and what is this ridiculous line in the script, ‘I wandered humbly as a sock’?’ I said, ‘It is John’s version of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.’’ He said, ‘Are you telling me that a Beatle has heard of Wordsworth?’ Oh god, yes. They were long haired gits to him.”
Apple rocked the establishment by opening premises in 3 Saville Row in Mayfair, an address synonymous with bespoke tailoring. Apple opened a boutique but within weeks, they were giving the clothes away.
Apple was full of problems, but the record label had an enviable roster of artists - the Beatles (still with Parlophone numbers), Mary Hopkin, Billy Preston (the singer/ pianist who had worked with Little Richard), Jackie Lomax (the lead singer of the Liverpool band, the Undertakers), Doris Troy, Badfinger, James Taylor and the Black Dyke Mills Band (a colliery band not really living up to its name). James Taylor, surprised to be making an album, was frantically trying to complete enough songs. Apple was the first record label to be owned by pop stars - a common occurrence nowadays - and it was soon followed by the Moody Blues’ Threshold imprint.
August 1968, Hey Jude/ Revolution (Parlophone R 5722, UK No.1, US No.1)
Following the break-up of John Lennon’s marriage, Paul had gone to see Cynthia and Julian one day and on the way home, had the idea for ‘Hey Jude’, a message of encouragement to John’s son, as it were.
Apple’s first release (though with a Parlophone number), ‘Hey Jude’ was more than twice the length of most singles and it became the longest record to make No.1. Songwriter and producer Jimmy Webb: “I know that ‘MacArthur Park’ preceded ‘Hey Jude’ because ‘MacArthur Park’ was 7 minutes 20 seconds long and when ‘Hey Jude’ came out, it was 7 minutes 21 seconds. I no longer had the longest hit single.”
Cutting engineer George Peckham: “‘Hey Jude’ was a very big challenge as three minute singles were the norm. It was in mono so you could snuggle the grooves closer together but the volume had to come down to avoid velocity movements. If you listen to it now, the tambourine cuts through in the loudest part. We limited it so that it didn’t jump too far. ‘Hey Jude’ is quiet at first which allows you to put more volume in the space that is left. I managed to gain some ground there.”
Paul Gambaccini: “By 1968 the Beatles’ work can easily be divided into the creative efforts of its individual members with ‘Hey Jude’ being Paul’s song. The single of ‘Hey Jude’, which was shown on David Frost’s TV show, totally sums up the Beatles’ appeal. They performed ‘Hey Jude’ completely surrounded by a wide cross-section of society, a real mixed bunch, and yet all of them are singing along to ‘Hey Jude’.”
It is extraordinary what some people remember. Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera: “My sisters were listening to the Beatles and Stones and had Paul McCartney posters on the walls. I heard ‘Hey Jude’ one morning on the radio as I was eating my toast and it was cold and I was getting ready for school, but it was like a spiritual experience. I knew that there was something special about it, and so from a very early age, I wanted to be a musician.”
Blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa: “My favourite Beatles track would be ‘Hey Jude’, but I was not influenced by the Beatles until I was older. They wrote the book on songwriting but at the time I preferred Free to the Beatles. Then I listened to Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road and realised how hard it would be to pull that off today with Pro-Tools, and yet these guys were doing it on four track, genius. People will remember the Beatles a thousand years from now because you can pick up an acoustic guitar and play ‘Hey Jude’ or ‘Love Me Do’. Those songs work with an orchestra, with the four piece Beatles, and with a single guy on an acoustic guitar. Having all those elements come together is genius songwriting.”
Ric Sanders, violinist with Fairport Convention: “‘Hey Jude’ was a phenomenal tune. In pop music you don’t often get tunes that can be played totally on their own as a single, melodic line in the same way that you might play a folk tune or an Irish air like ‘The Londonderry Air’. You can do that with ‘Hey Jude’. Folk melodies are autonomous; they don’t require rhythm or harmony to make them work. I play an Irish air called ‘A Lark in the Clear Air’, it’s a single note melody and it works beautifully on its own. A lot of pop tunes are punctuated by rhythm and harmony and there are even gaps. If you take ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, for instance, you couldn’t play it as a solo even though it’s great, fantastic pop music. That tune hasn’t got the same lyricism as ‘Hey Jude’. There are too many gaps or turnaround bars where the harmony takes it round to start the next line.”
The dynamic B-side, ‘Revolution’, was also recorded with a doowop treatment on The White Album. Tony Thorpe of the Rubettes: “Everything John Lennon did was totally unique. He had a completely different approach to everything. He was the first one to use massively distorted, vicious guitar sounds, ones that would have been called ugly at first, yet he made them work in ‘Revolution’. It’s ridiculously overdriven and it’s not a smooth, sweet overdrive like Eddie Van Halen. He was making a statement in the way he played.”
In ‘Revolution’, Lennon is considering his political position and looking at anarchism, but he is not sure whether he wants to be counted in or out. Student revolutionary Tariq Ali: “John had written ‘Revolution’ which our music critic in Black Dwarf described as ‘pathetic’. John wrote to the magazine complaining about the review and I contacted him proposing a lengthy interview. He wondered at first if people would take him seriously but we did the interview. The next day he rang to say that he had been so inspired that he had written ‘Power to the People’. We started to meet regularly and Yoko introduced me to Japanese cuisine. John always regretted not going on anti-war demos and apparently Brian Epstein had told them that anything like that would bring about a ban on them visiting the States. That was absolute nonsense as many people in the US were erupting against the war as well. I really miss him and I know he would be with us against this war in Afghanistan.”
Jon Savage: “The fact that we didn’t go into Vietnam made English psychedelia very different. In a way, American psychedelia is so powerful because they were reacting against the war. Group members were drafted and it was a terrible time. The whole of psychedelic rock in America is counterpointed by these violent demonstrations against the Pentagon or in Chicago or elsewhere. People felt incredibly strongly about it and that was a generational rallying call too. Think of the contrast with ‘It’s All Too Much’ in Yellow Submarine where George Harrison sings, ‘Show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea.’”
August 1968, Those Were the Days/ Turn! Turn1 Turn! – Mary Hopkin (Apple 2, UK No.1, US No.2)
Paul McCartney, producer
‘Hey Jude’ was replaced at the top by Apple’s second release, Paul McCartney’s production of ‘Those Were the Days’ for Mary Hopkin. Surprisingly, this song was covered by the hitmaker Sandie Shaw for Pye and Apple took ads in the music papers which said, “Listen to Sandie Shaw’s version and make your choice.” Not much peace and love there.
August 1968, Sour Milk Sea/ The Eagle Laughs at You – Jackie Lomax (Apple 3)
Producer: George Harrison. George plays rhythm guitar on both titles, and Paul plays bass and Ringo drums on ‘Sour Milk Sea’.
How could this single fail? An excellent vocalist from the Undertakers, a George Harrison song, and Eric Clapton on lead guitar. Jackie Lomax: “I was signed to Apple Publishing with a view to writing songs for other artists to record. George Harrison heard my stuff and wanted me to work with him. I had to wait for him to come back from India where they had been with Maharishi. George had written ‘Sour Milk Sea’ out there about the ages of the world. They believe that every 26,000 years, the world changes. In between there is a just a sour milk sea where nothing happens. It was a heavy driving rock song at a time when everyone was doing ballads and we thought it would be a hit. Apple released four singles on the same day and mine got lost in the crush.”
August 1968, Thingumybob/ Yellow Submarine – John Foster & Sons Ltd Black Dyke Mills Band (Apple 4)
Paul McCartney, producer
McCartney wrote ‘Thingumbybob’ for an ITV comedy series written by Kenneth Cope and starring Stanley Holloway, but he wasn’t satisfied with the recording by the George Martin Orchestra (which was eventually released in 2001). He felt it would sound better with a brass band and being Paul McCartney, he could employ the best, the Black Dyke Mills Band. The single was recorded in Victoria Hall, Bradford and was said to have been conducted by Geoffrey Brand and Paul McCartney. Just how do two people conduct an orchestra? With difficulty, I would have thought. Nice arrangement of ‘Yellow Submarine’ on the B-side. McCartney used the band on Back to the Egg (1979).
The authorised biography by Hunter Davies, The Beatles, appeared in September: it was very good but largely uncritical. Hunter Davies: “The only thing I don’t tell the truth about in the book is the groupies but everyone knows that they are one of the reasons for forming a band. At Brian Epstein’s country home one evening, he rang a club in London asking them to send down a few boys. They told him that he had left it rather late and all they had left was rubbish. This was done with a credit card with me listening to the entire conversation, not knowing that such clubs existed.”
Beatles biographer Steve Turner: “I liked Hunter Davies’ book because it’s very straight-forward, it’s not pretentious. It’s like the Anthony Scaduto book on Bob Dylan: they were all-round journalists and they were tackling this popular music subject, but they treated it in the same way they would have treated a book on a bank robber; they went in for quotes and details. It’s a very good book for its time. I remember John saying that you shouldn’t use the word ‘just’ in a song and also, I remember Hunter Davies saying that it was funny that, when they were in India, their minds went back to Liverpool. They wrote a lot of songs about childhood and Liverpool when they were in another country, another culture. I suppose that as a writer, he was interested in how they wrote and as a Northerner; he knew all about their background and could relate to it.”
However, the Beatles were moving so fast that it was already out of date. Brian Epstein had died while Hunter was writing the book. Magical Mystery Tour was the Beatles’ first sign of vulnerability, while John and Yoko had been charged with possession of cannabis. Jane Asher’s engagement to Paul McCartney was over. There have now been hundreds of books on the Beatles and Jane Asher is one of the few major players who has not told her story. Hunter Davies: “I admire Jane Asher for not cashing in. Everybody, who met the Beatles for 2 minutes, whether they did the gardening, the cleaning, the driving or worked in the Apple office, has written their memoirs. As a Beatles’ fan, I find there’s a little nugget in all of those books, but most of it is flim-flam. Whereas Jane was engaged to Paul and had several songs written for her and Paul lived with her in Wimpole Street.”
October 1968, I’m The Urban Spaceman – Bonzo Dog Band (Liberty 15144, UK No.5)
Paul McCartney (as Apollo C. Vermouth), producer
Writing a musical takes 2 or 3 years out of your life, and McCartney, in particular, preferred one-off projects. He produced the only hit single by the Bonzo Dog Band, ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’. It was written by Neil Innes: “Our producer was a very kind man but he was very keen on getting things done quickly and we would think, ‘Hang on, we haven’t finished yet.’ Paul said that he would produce us and he did produce ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’. He sat down at the piano and said, ‘I’ve just written this’ and it was the first time that anyone outside his circle had heard ‘Hey Jude’. I thought, ‘What is he doing? He’s wasting time.’ He played ukulele on ‘Urban Spaceman’ and our manager’s wife said, ‘What’s that? A poor man’s violin?’, and he said, ‘No, a rich man’s ukulele.’ He helped Viv record that horrible thing at the end, which was a trumpet mouthpiece with a length of garden hose and a funnel on the end which Viv swung over his head. The engineer couldn’t see how to record it and Paul said to put a microphone in each corner of the studio and we got that wonderful effect. We didn’t want to ride on his name as producer and so we dubbed him Apollo C. Vermouth with his blessing.”
In November, the BBC-TV series, Omnibus, broadcast Tony Palmer’s documentary, All My Loving, which featured many rock stars including the Beatles. Tony Palmer: “I made a film about Benjamin Britten and I was the golden boy for that weekend. Huw Wheldon said, ‘We would like you to make a film that explains rock’n’roll.’ Huw knew that there was far more to it than gyrating nubiles on Top of the Pops or what you saw on that dreadful, moronic programme, Juke Box Jury. I had met John Lennon when I was representing Varsity, the Cambridge University paper in October 1963. I rang up and left a message for him, and within a day I was having lunch with him and getting a complete ear-bashing about the appalling state of pop music on television. He said that I had a responsibility to do something about this. He said, ‘I’m going to give you a list of people who can’t get onto television, either because their act is too outrageous or they won’t do 3-minute pop songs or they don’t want to appear on Juke Box Jury. I’ll make the introductions, and you make the film. That was All My Loving, and it was a wonderful opportunity. It was a tough time – Vietnam, people being assassinated, riots in Grosvenor Square and so on – but it was the perfect moment. They all wanted to speak. Paul McCartney said, ‘We have some power and we want to use it for the good.’ He couldn’t have said that on Juke Box Jury. I think the significance of All My Loving is not that it is a particularly good or bad film, but that it broke the shackles of what rock and roll was being held in until that moment.”
November 1968, Wonderwall Music – George Harrison LP (Apple SAPCOR 1)
Apple’s first album. The film, Wonderwall, looks ridiculous now: well, it looked ridiculous then, but it was a psychedelic love story starring Jane Birkin, Jack MacGowran and that famed hippie, Irene Handl. Nonsense of course, but an interesting curio and it gave Oasis a song title. Film director Joe Massot: “I asked George at the opening of the Beatles’ boutique if he would like to do the music for Wonderwall. I told him that it was a silent film and his music would provide the emotion for the characters. Quincy Jones told me that it was the greatest soundtrack he had heard but the movie was too far out for some audiences. It did well in London though.”
Peter Tork of the Monkees: “Mickey Dolenz and I met John and Paul and George at the Speakeasy one night in London and that was very pleasant. They were very friendly and the next day George took me to visit Ringo. George showed us his sitar and we had a lovely time. George did a soundtrack album for Wonderwall and if you see the movie and hear any banjo playing, that’ll be me. George didn’t play banjo. I was playing a five-string banjo that Paul had.”
Although at the forefront of popular music, the Beatles were always aware of what other musicians were doing. Rock writer John Einarson: “Both Eric Clapton and George Harrison were very impressed with the first Band album, Music from Big Pink. Clapton wanted to quit Cream and Harrison played it to George Martin. The Band synthesized so many styles: mountain music, gospel, country and Canada too in a very unique way. The ultimate is their second album where everything came together. Look at the picture with their families on that first album. You would think it was a gathering from a village in the Ozarks, but it is from southern Ontario. They have a grizzled Arkansas look about them.”
November 1968 – The Beatles (known as The White Album) 2LP (Parlophone PMC 7067)
Produced by George Martin, 30 tracks – 1 hour 33 minutes 43 seconds
Side 1: Back in the USSR/ Dear Prudence/ Glass Onion/ Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da/ Wild Honey Pie/ The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill/ While My Guitar Gently Weeps/ Happiness Is a Warm Gun
Side 2: Martha My Dear/ I’m So Tired/ Blackbird/ Piggies/ Rocky Racoon/ Don’t Pass Me By/ Why Don’t We Do It in the Road/ I Will/ Julia
Side 3: Birthday/ Yer Blues/ Mother Nature’s Son/ Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey/ Sexy Sadie/ Helter Skelter/ Long Long Long
Side 4: Revolution 1/ Honey Pie/ Savoy Truffle/ Cry Baby Cry/ Revolution 9/ Good Night
After being Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the last LP, the Fab Four simply called the new offering, The Beatles. They wrote most of their double-album while they were in Rishikesh. Because of its packaging, the record has come to be known as The White Album. The original title had been A Doll’s House, but then Family used that phrase.
The white packaging, designed by Richard Hamilton, represents a clean slate. Peter Blake: “There are three basic branches of Pop Art. One started in America, I started one here and the other was with Richard Hamilton, Edward Paolozzi and members of the ICA independent group. Richard Hamilton did the sleeve for The White Album, which was a reaction to Sgt. Pepper. Sgt. Pepper was highly coloured, very complicated and over-excited. Richard Hamilton decided upon a plain, white cover, which was a brilliant idea and a total contrast. All it had on the front was a serial number so that the first copies were limited, unique editions. It started at No.1 and went into hundreds of thousands. Inside was a poster which was a collage of the Beatles, but the outside was perfectly plain, white, shiny cardboard. I think our two sleeves work in conjunction.”
The concept of the Beatles as a group, however, was as fictional as Sgt. Pepper’s band. John, Paul and George’s songs for The White Album are distinctive and separate, although John charitably calls Paul ‘the walrus’ during ‘Glass Onion’, seemingly to puncture a Beatles’ myth. They didn’t solely work with themselves and George, for example, asked Eric Clapton to play the solo on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
George Martin: “I didn’t like The White Album very much. They’d turned up with thirty-six songs after their Indian trip and they were pretty insistent that every song was to be included. I wanted to make it a single album and I stressed to the boys that whilst they could record whatever they liked, we should weed out the stuff that wasn’t up to scratch and make a really super single album. I didn’t learn until later the reason why they were so insistent. It was a contractual one. By this time, the contractual negotiations were above my head and I didn’t know that their current contract with EMI stipulated a number of years or a number of titles, whichever was the earlier. So the boys, in an effort to get rid of the contract were shoving out titles as quickly as they could. This was on the advice of the people governing them and there was a sinister motive behind that album.”
There were, however, plenty of happy times in the studio. Jimmy Webb: “I went to a session one night in Trident 3 where the booth is upstairs and the studio is down below. They were cutting ‘Honey Pie’. Paul was playing the piano on one side of the studio and Linda was sitting on the bench with her arms around his neck. He had a sweater tied around his neck and they looked charming. He was doing a great job playing piano. George Harrison was playing bass and was standing in the centre of the studio, and then over on the right was John Lennon, sitting down on the floor with some candles and holding an acoustic guitar. I couldn’t see Ringo as the drum booth was tucked underneath the control room, but I could hear him. It was fascinating and they played a joke on me as after they had finished a take, Paul came and introduced me to George Martin and Geoff Emerick as ‘Tom Dowd from Atlantic Records’. I was so terrified and so overawed by where I was that I did not correct this impression, and they proceeded to treat me as though I were Tom Dowd. They were asking me what I thought of this guitar solo and that guitar solo and I was doing the best I could. I didn’t want to disappoint them by telling them that I was only Jimmy Webb! Finally, after what I thought was entirely too much of it, George Harrison tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘By the way, man, I loved those strings on ‘MacArthur Park’.”
Although it is inconsistent, The White Album contains many excellent songs and performances. Their Beach Boys’ pastiche ‘Back in the USSR’ is so good that you long for a whole album in this vein. That track features Paul McCartney on drums as Ringo had walked out after an argument. ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’ could be mistaken for a Syd Barrett song. Paul McCartney wrote a light-hearted reggae song with ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, based on a phrase from a Nigerian conga player based in London, Jimmy Scott, who took them to task in the NME.
Paul had been expecting the Who’s ‘I Can See for Miles’ to be the heaviest rock track ever and he was disappointed when he heard it. In response, he wrote the manic ‘Helter Skelter’ and a longer version was not released. As it is, the stereo version of ‘Helter Skelter’ is a minute longer than the mono and includes the final line, “I’ve got blisters on me fingers.”
‘Helter Skelter’ achieved notoriety because Charles Manson used the song as a blueprint for serial killing. John ironically wrote ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, having read in a magazine that a warm gun was one that had just been fired. The song, amusingly, contains a reference to donating something to the National Trust. John wasn’t thinking ahead to the future of Mendips: this was contemporary slang for opening your bowels.
Simon Nicol: “The first gig we did under the name of Fairport Convention was the day that Sgt. Pepper was released. It was a memorable day for me though I was much more gobsmacked by The White Album. I had to go out for a long walk after I’d played The White Album to let it soak in. I thought ‘Dear Prudence’ was great.”
Donovan: “The White Album came out of the Indian experience, and I was involved with two songs in particular. I showed John Lennon the finger-styled guitar playing that I had learned from the folk scene: it comes from the Carter Family and it is called clawhammer. When anybody learns a new style, they write differently and he wrote ‘Julia’ and ‘Dear Prudence’ from this. My influence is obvious on ‘Dear Prudence’. Paul would not sit down and learn it like a good boy but would peer over our shoulders and pick up little bits as shown in ‘Blackbird’. He was like a sponge and absorbed things by listening. In return, George introduced me to Indian music and he gave me a tambura, and it is still making music. I put it on ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ and it is the drone in between the verses. George did write a verse for that song, but because of the guitar solo, we didn’t include it on the record. I include it in my concerts now. Yeah, George.”
Richard Digance: “The White Album is my favourite album, and one of my party-pieces is ‘Blackbird‘. If there are any guitarists reading this who have tried ‘Blackbird’ and don’t know how to do it, I’ll let you in on the secret. It’s impossible to play with conventional tuning and Paul McCartney tunes his guitar in a different way. You drop the two E-strings down a tone to D and use the second and fourth strings and suddenly ‘Blackbird’ takes shape. It’s a well structured song, but if you don’t know that, you won’t be able to play it.”
Harmonica player Judd Lander from the Liverpool band, the Hideaways: “The Beatles had so much money then. When I was in London, I stayed with Neil Aspinall in a beautiful flat that the Beatles had bought him as a present, with a Bentley Continental too. Neil showed me into his massive bedroom and I rang my mum in Aintree and told her than we could fit our house into his bedroom. Neil came back with an acetate of ‘Blackbird’ at 2 a.m. one morning and he said, ‘Have a listen to this.’ He said that they were going to do another mix and then he threw the acetate into the bin.”
John Lennon sang a stinging vocal on ‘Yer Blues’, the bluesiest record that the Beatles ever made. Blues legend, B.B. King, who calls his guitar, Lucille: “I like the Beatles’ songs so much that I hope one day to do an instrumental version on Lucille. I’d never sing them as my voice would never make it. I met George Harrison and he was a wonderful man. John Lennon said in an interview that he wanted to play guitar like B.B. King. I mentioned that to a record producer called Bill Szymczyk, who knew him. He called him and said, ‘Here’s John Lennon’ and John said, ‘When have you got time to give me lessons?’”
The White Album also contains John’s tender tribute to his mother ‘Julia’, his thinly disguised attack on the Maharishi ‘Sexy Sadie’ and the downbeat ‘I’m So Tired’ (cursing Sir Walter Raleigh for introducing tobacco to the UK) which were all excellent, while Paul was at his lyrical best on ‘I Will’, ‘Blackbird’ and ‘Mother Nature’s Son’.
Although written in India, George Harrison’s songwriting was returning to its English roots as evidenced by his attack on eating meat, ‘Piggies’ (George’s mum gave him the line, “What they need’s a damn good whacking!”). George Harrison knew that Eric Clapton was having trouble with his teeth, and as a joke, he wrote a lyric around boxes of assorted chocolates, ‘Savoy Truffle’.
Ringo wrote a maudlin country song ‘Don’t Pass Me By’, an odd subject for someone who was not used to songwriting and one he had written in 1963. Its theme ‘Don’t rush to conclusions’ owes something to Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter. The track sounds even more maudlin in mono as the speed was botched.
There’s much inconsequential material on The White Album such as ‘Wild Honey Pie’ (as opposed to the cheerful pre-war pastiche ‘Honey Pie’), ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey’ and ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road’, although even John’s self-indulgent ‘Revolution 9’ has its advocates. There is a snatch of an uncredited song, ‘Can You Take Me Back’, from Paul McCartney.
Mick Groves of the Spinners: “The Beatles’ talent culminated in Sgt. Pepper. I thought The White Album was full of the rubbishy bits that an artist must produce eventually. They filled up a double-album because they knew they could sell anything in those days. I remember the sculptor Arthur Dooley saying that when he became the flavour-of-the-month in Liverpool, he would take a piece of driftwood, whitewash it, stick a few nails in it, and sell it to the professors at the University. They would buy it because it was Arthur Dooley.”
‘Revolution 9’ was a piece of avant-garde music that was bought by millions. It is full of sound effects, a choir, gossip, backwards voices and a bingo caller. Liverpool artist Adrian Henri: “I’m not too fond of The White Album. It was too self-consciously arty in the way that a lot of John and Yoko’s stuff was. Up until then, I thought that the Beatles had a good balance between being poets and good writers and being rock’n’rollers and great entertainers, but by The White Album, they had lost their way. ‘Revolution 9’ was just experimentation. It was a collage and there was a lot of that around at the time. I was doing cutup poems, which had been around since 1917, and William Burroughs was writing cut-up novels. I can hear William Burroughs’ influence in ‘Revolution 9’. They were disrupting reality by trying to make you see something different by presenting it in this chopped up, edited way. It’s not a revolution in the sense of throwing bombs, but more a revolution in thinking and hearing and seeing.”
In The Observer, Tony Palmer said that almost every track was a send up of a send up, effectively making this the first post-modern album. There is some justification for this as there are knowing references throughout the album – ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Fool On The Hill’, Elvis Presley, Donovan, Little Richard, Blind Lemon Jefferson and B.B.King. ‘Good Night’ showed that they could do schmaltz as well as Engelbert and they could also rock as well as Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys.
As the Beatles did not release singles from The White Album, the songs were fair game for anyone. Graham Knight, bass player with Marmlade: “We weren’t writing anything decent in Marmalade, but we wrote B-sides and things. Dick James played us the acetate of ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ and we thought it was great. He said, ‘You can have it. I won’t give it to anyone else.’ But, of course he gave it to twenty-seven different acts. We rush recorded it in the middle of the night during a week of cabaret in the north east. Our manager, who was in America at the time, kept sending us telegrams telling us not to do it. He didn’t think that we should record a Beatles song. We expected it to be a hit because we had done well with ‘Lovin’ Things’, ‘Mary Anne’ and ‘Baby Make it Soon’ but we didn’t think it would go to No.1. We got no feedback from the Beatles. There had been so many covers by that time that I shouldn’t think they’d have been very interested.”
The White Album’s failings are as significant as its triumphs. Since then, several acts have made long, sprawling albums flowing with ideas and over-indulgence. the Clash’s thirty-six track Sandinista! (1980), Prince’s Emancipation (1996), and Prefab Sprout’s Jordan: The Comeback (2001).
The White Album was very influenced by current modern art. Indeed, you could see its very basic cover appealing to Yoko Ono. Peter Blake: “I met Yoko Ono when she came over and did a show at the Indica Gallery. That was where John met her. I taught at the Royal College and she asked me to recommend two students. They ended up building the whole thing for her. I saw a lot of the pieces and I have since thought that they were very self-concerned, rather cruel pieces. I didn’t like the art she made, but it certainly affected John. She sent John on mad errands and this was her negative side and very bad for John. The positive side was that he loved her and was very happy with her most of the time. He deserved someone to love, so in the long run she was pretty good for him.”
Yoko Ono’s reputation was as an avant-garde artist and filmmaker and her infamous film of 365 bottoms included Michael Aspel’s. George Melly: “I was asked to be one of Yoko Ono’s bottoms but I declined. I thought my bottom was not a very pretty object. I accept that wasn’t the purpose of the film, but I thought it was too silly to walk on a treadmill and have my bottom photographed. I wasn’t ashamed of showing my bottom but I thought the whole thing was phony and silly.”
Ray Coleman: “The Beatles stopped touring in 1966 and John felt very, very restless, which is why Yoko was so interesting to him, quite apart from the physical attraction which was obviously there. He was mentally drawn to her and her adventurous spirit touched a chord in John. He was desperate for something new. The Beatles were very famous, they’d triumphed in America and were very, very rich, so all the hurdles had been overcome. With Yoko, he moved into a totally new life.”
May Pang became John and Yoko’s assistant. “I was in awe of John and Yoko when I first met them. They wanted me to work on two movies with them, Up Your Legs Forever and Fly. Up Your Legs Forever was an idea of Yoko’s in which people would donate their legs for peace. I was calling all sorts of interesting people like Andy Warhol and Jackie Onassis but it was too way out for me. She wanted 365 legs, one for each day of the year, but we didn’t get that many.”
Sylvain Sylvain of the New York Dolls: “I was in a John and Yoko film Up Your Legs Forever. They shot you from your toes to your torso. Billy Murcia and I were hanging out in Central Park and we were by the fountain and this scout came round and said, ‘Hey, do you guys want to be in a John Lennon movie?’ We were smoking joints and we went round the corner and got paid $1. John Lennon gave me a Screw magazine, which is a sex magazine. He was working with someone from the magazine and it was great to get that.”
It is doubtful if the film ever promoted peace as so few people have seen it, nor the subsequent works – Fly and Erection – that May Pang was also involved with. “I particularly like Apotheosis, which is one of John’s. For five minutes you are watching nothing but a blank screen and then the blue rises above the top of the clouds and you see the sun shine.”
George Melly: “Yoko Ono brought out a side of John Lennon that he was unaware of. She made him kinder and nicer to people and, indeed, when he left her and went raving off for a year by himself, he reverted to his tough, Liverpool street persona. He was smashing windows and getting terribly drunk and staying up all night. I don’t think she was a bad influence on him but there is something pretentiously avant-garde about the bed-ins and the handing out of acorns to world leaders. I doubt if he would have done that by himself. All this symbolic minimalist art is derived from Marcel Duchamp, so it wasn’t original either. I don’t want to be too harsh because he undoubtedly loved her and he wrote some interesting songs while he was with her. Whether he would have stayed with the Beatles without her is another question, but she was certainly a catalyst for him leaving.”
Yoko Ono sat in on the recording sessions, even contributing to ‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’. Many saw Yoko as splitting up their favourite group and so she became very unpopular. Bob Monkhouse underlined the public’s mood with insulting Yoko Ono jokes on The Golden Shot. Yoko is often said to have precipitated the break-up of the Beatles. Barry Miles: “Mainly, it was John’s fault, not Yoko’s. He was the one who insisted she sat next to him on the piano stool and she even had to go with him to the toilet. Maybe she should have realised that she was doing tremendous damage to the creative camaraderie, the special sort of magic that they had when they were being creative, but she didn’t. John would have never stood for somebody else’s girlfriend or wife being there, but as long as it was him, it was all right. ‘We are Joko’, basically.”
Music writer Paul Trynka: “A lot of people don’t like Yoko’s art but she was very cutting edge. It was very difficult for her as a woman in those surroundings. She did split up the Beatles but you can blame that on John as much as Yoko. She didn’t want him out of the band, but John felt that Yoko was an escape route as the band had run its course. John was very bolshie but he lacked confidence and did need somebody to rely on.”
Adrian Henri: “Artistically they were a disaster for each other. They were very happy and idyllic as a couple, but they brought out the worst in each other’s art. She brought out a narcissistic, self-indulgent streak in his writing, and her work got more trivial, all this crawling in and out of bags, for example. She lost the artistic toughness that she had in her New York period. She also lost the company of other very good artists like Dick Higgins while he lost his Liverpool sarcasm and scepticism.”
November 1968, Unfinished Music – John Lennon and Yoko Ono LP (Apple SAPCOR 2)
John and Yoko’s first joint album was a 30 minute LP of sound effects, Two Virgins. It had the infamous nude cover for which they might have been prosecuted. A Private Eye cover had John Lennon saying, “I tell you, officer, it won’t stand up in court.” Cutting engineer George Peckham: “Those albums were fun and it was always a wind-up with John. He could throw you completely. Yoko was artistic in her own way and John was 100% behind her. We sent a copy to Richard Williams, who was based at Island Records. Back then, they would often press one side of music and the other would be a standard metal plate that had a 1K tone. Richard Williams thought it was a double album and without ringing anybody at Apple, he played the four sides. He commented in Melody Maker that the tone fluctuates from time-to-time but maintains the interest. We thought, ‘What double album?’ They were not meant to be played. I told Richard that he had sat through two tone sides – he was the joke, not us. John loved the review to pieces.”
John and Yoko appeared with the Rolling Stones in their Rock And Roll Circus. David Stark: “The Stones parodied the Beatles’ covers with Their Satanic Majesties Request and Beggars Banquet. When they finished Beggars Banquet, they made the Rock And Roll Circus TV concert. The NME had a draw for tickets and I won a couple and it was a fantastic experience. We wore smocks and colourful gear and it was in a TV studio in Stambridge Park in Wembley in December 1968. There was little security back then and at one point I went to the loo and walked past a group of Lennon, Jagger, Townshend and Clapton.”
December 1968, James Taylor – James Taylor LP (Apple SAPCOR 3) Paul McCartney, bass on ‘Carolina In My Mind’.
The album includes Taylor’s composition, ‘Something in the Way She Moves’. A few months later, we have George Harrison’s ‘Something’.
Billy Kinsley of the Merseybeats, then working on sessions at Apple: “I liked to sit in Derek Taylor’s office: he was like a guru and he told great stories. We walked in once and James Taylor was sitting in the window, and a photograph of him sitting there was used on the album cover. When he stood up, he was a giant. I thought from the start that his songs were different. The Beatles missed his potential really, and the same with Delaney and Bonnie. They had thousands of their first album pressed but the Beatles hadn’t signed a contract with them. They signed elsewhere with the same record and Apple had to give their albums away. That is typical of the chaos.”
December 1968, The Beatles’ 1968 Christmas Record.
The Liverpool DJ, Kenny Everett, who had found fame with his zany approach on Radio London and then Radio 1. The most memorable moment is when George introduces the novelty singer, Tiny Tim, doing his version of ‘Nowhere Man’. Paul sings an all-seasonal song of goodwill, ‘Happy Christmas, Happy New Year’: John reads a couple of poems and Ringo links it together.
Somewhat out of character, George Harrison had invited some American Hell’s Angels to visit them at Apple. He probably thought that they would never come. They arrived in December 1968 and intimidated everyone. There was a bizarre Christmas party for the children, hosted by Hell’s Angels and with John and Yoko as Father and Mother Christmas. Still, someone far more scary than a whole chapter of Hell’s Angels was about to descend on Apple.
Pete Shotton: “Apple was a mad house and terribly confusing. Each of the Beatles had different ideas and the Beatles would come in on different days. We had four part-time bosses. I was 25 years old and had run a little supermarket on the south coast and John asked me to run Apple! We were all going to have a good time but the Apple went pear-shaped. I wish I had put my foot down and said, ‘You need a suit; you need someone who is business minded and has had experience.’ Their attitude was if it didn’t make money but broke even, that was all that mattered. They didn’t realise that you had to make profits to develop and so their concept of business was negligible.”