by Ken McNab
Peter Watkins was in the vanguard of a new wave of British TV directors whose gritty approach to filmmaking brought uncomfortable truths into people’s living rooms. His groundbreaking 1964 BBC docudrama Culloden was praised by critics for its graphic realism and cinéma vérité style. The War Game, screened a year later, used the same hand-held camera techniques to illustrate the aftereffects of a nuclear attack on Kent to such a chilling degree that it was banned by the corporation.
Watkins was also on the fringes of the London underground movement, many of whose followers detected like-minded, anti-authoritarian tendencies in Lennon, whose own anti-war declarations, especially on the subject of the conflict in Vietnam, had often swum against the tide of popular opinion.
Watkins wrote to Lennon, pointing out how the ‘shadowy establishment figures’ behind public corporations were still trying to control people’s lives during humanity’s most liberal and radical decade. Lennon would recall: ‘It was a very long letter stating just what’s happening – how the media is really controlled, how it’s all run, and everything else that people really know deep down. He said: “People in your position have a responsibility to use the media for world peace.” And we sat on the letter for about three weeks, thinking: “Well, we’re doing our best. All you need is love, man.” That letter just sort of sparked it all off. It was like getting your induction papers for peace!’
Lennon was the archetypal rebel without a cause. Without Watkins’ intervention, who knows what path his life might have taken? It seems reasonable to consider whether he would have been driven to write such anthemic songs extolling human brotherhood (and sisterhood) as ‘Give Peace A Chance’ and ‘Imagine’.
For his part, Watkins downplays the part he played in Lennon’s creative rebirth, an awakening that helped light the beacon for a movement that would unite millions of young people all over the world and, in no small way, help bring about the end of the Vietnam War.
In an email to me he wrote: ‘Yes, in 1969 I sent John Lennon and Yoko Ono a statement about our responsibility as public communicators. I sent the same statement to a large number of other “public communicators” in the UK. I do not have the original text of what I wrote, but I think it was along the lines of our shared responsibility as “communicators” to address serious issues facing our society.
‘I imagine that I was driven to write that statement as a counter-reaction to the banning of The War Game. Subsequently, John and Yoko gave interviews to the media about the effect that my statement had on their work. And I also received a note from them: “Thanks for your letter. We agree. We’re trying. What next?”’
That, indeed, was a very good question.
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McCartney, meanwhile, was desperately trying to head off an internal crisis. He had been forced to take stock of his life. Linda’s pregnancy was now confirmed, their baby due in August if all went to plan. But his prospective joy at becoming a father for the first time was tempered by the turbulence swirling around the group. He continued to tinker away without much enthusiasm at new songs such as ‘Another Day’, ‘Back Seat Of My Car’ and ‘Junk’, a promising relic left over from their sojourn in India the previous spring.
He had been drained by the mental toll the ‘Get Back’ sessions had exacted on him. Worse, Klein was starting to invade his dreams. ‘I used to have nightmares that Klein was a dentist and he was chasing me with a drill,’ he said.
He fulfilled the occasional Apple obligation outwith business, breaking cover to appear at a launch party alongside Jimi Hendrix and Donovan atop the Post Office Tower in London on 23 February to mark Mary Hopkin’s debut album Postcard. On the surface, he was his usual amiable self, working the room and talking up the talents of one of Apple’s prized recording artists. But his interest in the young Welsh singer was already waning. He had produced her Apple debut hit single, ‘Those Were The Days’ – it unseated ‘Hey Jude’ at the top of the UK charts – and overseen the tracks on Postcard, which included songs written by Donovan and one by Harry Nilsson.
Hopkin herself would recall: ‘I was aware that it was disorganised. I think everyone involved in Apple would agree on that. I think they were just finding their feet; it was early days for them, and a lot of them were new to it anyway. Derek Taylor mentioned in an interview that my management set-up was pretty dreadful. I had no one to represent me at the time. Eventually, my brother-in-law took over as manager, but there was no one at Apple. Paul’s priority was The Beatles and that was only natural.’
Ringo Starr was for his part hoping that the movies would make him a big star. He’d leapt at the chance of taking part in The Magic Christian in order to put clear blue water between himself and the band after the toxicity of ‘Get Back’.
A longtime fan of The Goons, he and Peter Sellers had been friends for several years before appearing together on set. Only seven months earlier, the actor had offered Starr the use of his luxury yacht moored off Sardinia as a bolthole when the drummer could no longer stand the ill-feeling that was poisoning the White Album sessions. It was while on the yacht that Starr started writing ‘Octopus’s Garden’, a song destined to become a whimsical delight on Abbey Road. For the next three months, Starr dutifully turned up on set every minute he was required. He didn’t even mind the rigid 9 a.m. curtain call. But Sellers’ frequent mood swings were harder to fathom. ‘I knew [Sellers] quite well, but suddenly there he was going into character and I got confused,’ he would recall. ‘The amazing thing with Peter was that, though we would work all day and go out and have dinner that night – and we would usually leave him laughing hysterically because he was hilarious – the next morning we’d say “Hi, Pete,” and we’d have to start again. There was no continuation. You had to make the friendship start again from nine o’clock every morning. We’d all be laughing at six o’clock that night, but the next morning it would be “Hi, Pete,” then “Oh God”. We’d have to knock the wall down again to say hello. Sometimes we’d be asked to leave the set because Peter Sellers was being Peter Sellers.’
Sellers proved to be difficult throughout the shoot. Denis O’Dell was called upon several times to get him back on track amid the tantrums and suicide threats. And he later acknowledged the part Starr played in keeping Sellers on message.
‘Ringo was the ideal person to keep Peter in check,’ he wrote in his own Apple memoirs. ‘Ringo was more famous, and had a more equable outlook on life, which could not help but have a calming influence on those around him. Although Peter would never adopt his laidback attitude to acting, I’m sure Ringo’s presence was beneficial. Even Peter Sellers would have felt ridiculous throwing a tantrum in front of Ringo Starr.’
Sellers admired the Beatle’s acting talent. Starr said: ‘He always said I was a natural mime and that I can speak with my eyes. He would always say, “It’s your eyes, Ring, it’s your eyes. They’ll be two hundred feet big up there on the screen, you know.”’
Away from extracurricular activities, ‘Get Back’, the film project McCartney hoped would be their salvation, remained firmly in limbo. More than three hundred hours of footage was in the can but none of the band could face going through the reels. That was Lindsay-Hogg’s job. Then there was the music – take upon take of lifeless, sub-par performances. ‘The most miserable sessions on earth,’ Lennon later called them. ‘It was the worst recorded shit of all time’.
Again, no one could bear to listen to any of it, even though songs like ‘Let It Be’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, ‘Get Back’ and ‘Two Of Us’ would later emerge almost unscathed. That was Glyn Johns’ job. And in late February, he was tasked with sifting through the tapes to turn them into an album that they could all at least bear to hear.
‘It was obviously a fascinating experience,’ Johns said later. ‘I was a Beatles fan, everybody was, and felt The Beatles were wonderful, but having been so incredibly busy at the period of time up to then, I didn’t really know any Beatle records, although I
’d obviously heard them on the radio from time to time – I don’t think I’d actually bought one, although I may have bought Rubber Soul, but anyway . . . the point is that I admired them, but they weren’t necessarily my cup of tea as far as what I wanted to do, although I was extremely flattered that they should ask me to work with them, and so I did.
‘The point I’m trying to make with all this preamble was that by the time I actually got into a room with them, although I was quite used to working with famous people, and was very rarely fazed by anyone I met, no matter how much I admired them, actually being in a room with The Beatles for the first time – all four of them with nobody else there – was pretty weird, and I suddenly realised how extraordinary the whole situation was, having never given it a lot of thought before. The time I worked with them was at the end of their career, obviously, and the Let It Be thing was something of a fiasco. It proved, however, to be an extraordinarily educational period for me – it obviously couldn’t have been anything else, but that was why I wanted to do it, because I knew I’d learn something.’
‘The extraordinary thing,’ he added, ‘is that they proved up to that point that they were the masters of the “Produced Record”, yet the stuff I did with them wasn’t “produced” in that way at all, it was all recorded live in a room, in a rehearsal situation. And for that, I think it has great value, because I originally put together an album of rehearsals, with chat and jokes and bits of general conversation in between the tracks, which was the way I wanted Let It Be (‘Get Back’) to be – breakdowns, false starts.
‘Really, the idea was that at the time, they were viewed as being the be-all-and-end-all, sort of up on a pedestal, beyond touch, just gods, completely gods, and what I witnessed going on at these rehearsals was that, in fact, they were hysterically funny, but very ordinary people in many ways. And they were capable of playing as a band, which everybody was beginning to wonder about at that point, because they hadn’t done so for some time – everything had been prepared in advance, everything had been overdubbed and everything. And they proved in that rehearsal that they could still sing and play at the same time, and they could make records without all those weird and wonderful sounds on them.’
That became an obsession with Johns. ‘I got the bit between my teeth about it, and one night, I mixed a bunch of stuff that they didn’t even know I’d recorded half the time – I just whacked the recorder on for a lot of stuff that they did, and gave them an acetate the following morning of what I’d done, as a rough idea of what an album could be like, released as it was. There was one thing that only happened once, a song that Paul played to the others, which I believe he later used on one of his ensuing albums, called “Teddy Boy”, and I have a tape of Paul actually teaching the others this song. I loved it, and I was hoping they’d finish it and do it, because I thought it was really good. But my version does go on a bit, and they’re just going round and round, trying to get the chord sequence right, I suppose, and the best bit is where John Lennon gets bored – he obviously doesn’t want to play it any more, and starts doing his interjections. They came back and said they didn’t like it, or each individual bloke came in and said he didn’t like it, and that was the end of that.’
Lennon was still keen for Billy Preston to stay inside the fold. He had received an Apple contract and was now a bona fide member of the band’s own musician’s union, superior to a session player but never a fully fledged affiliate. Preston was naturally keen to maintain his Fab Four CV but had a number of obligations to fulfil back home in America before he could give The Beatles his full focus.
But on 22 February he found himself at Trident Studios working out the keyboard chords to a new Lennon song, a proto-heavy-rock song known at this point simply as ‘I Want You’.
The end of the ‘Get Back’ recordings also blew the full-time whistle on Alex Mardas’s attempt to install a recording studio in the Apple basement. Geoff Emerick, a former EMI engineer who had worked closely with The Beatles up to the White Album, had been employed by Apple at the start of the month to rip out all the bizarre wiring and cables and more or less build a new studio from scratch. That work was ongoing, which meant the band had to temporarily relocate to Trident Studios.
Not surprisingly, ‘I Want You’ was at this moment a work in progress. During one jam, Preston took the lead vocal and steered the song into much funkier territory. Raw and unvarnished, ‘I Want You’ was a musical distillation of Lennon’s unceasing lust for Yoko and consisted of just thirty-four words, with the title repeated no fewer than sixteen times.
So far as Harrison was concerned, there had been signs that the band’s dark horse was ready to come up on the inside fence. One song in particular instinctively felt right. Harrison knew that in terms of melody, ‘Something’ was more than just a throwaway. The Beatles had made two passes at the song on 28 January before tossing it aside. Even George Martin had dismissed the song as lightweight and derivative. But Harrison’s non-Beatle friends loved the tune. Now, if only he could write lyrics to match the song’s irresistible melody, possibly the best he had ever come up with.
Furthermore, the middle eight also needed work. However, it was only when Harrison was laid up in a hospital bed that the fog finally cleared.
On 25 February, his twenty-sixth birthday, he stole quietly into Abbey Road to record demos of three songs – ‘Something’, ‘Old Brown Shoe’ and ‘All Things Must Pass’ – which The Beatles had half-heartedly tried to record during the ‘Get Back’ sessions. Harrison liked them so much that he privately reckoned they might be wasted on The Beatles. He had already mentioned to Lennon that he was mulling over the idea of a solo album. Still, he was in two minds as he committed the songs to tape on 8-track. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. It is likely that the recordings were meant as demos for the other Beatles to learn their parts from.
On ‘Old Brown Shoe’, Harrison recorded two takes with vocals and piano, onto which he overdubbed two electric guitar tracks. One of these guitar overdubs was played low on the fretboard, and was later adapted by McCartney for the bass part on The Beatles’ recording, while the other was higher and included a solo.
Harrison then recorded two takes of ‘All Things Must Pass’, singing live to his tremolo guitar accompaniment. A second track also featuring guitar and vocals was then polished off. ‘Something’ also featured vocals and electric guitar, with a piano overdub. The songs were mixed and cut to acetate discs for Harrison to listen to at home. At this point he was considering handing ‘Something’ to Joe Cocker to record, the Sheffield singer with the rasping vocal having already enjoyed a massive hit with his cover of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. For now, however, all three demos remained locked away in an unmarked mental compartment beside at least two dozen more. As The Beatles’ winter of discontent gave way to the first snowdrops of spring, an emboldened Harrison was already starting the process of folding away all his yesterdays. At last, he thought, here comes the sun . . .
© PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy
Paul McCartney and bride-to-be Linda Eastman prepare to leave for their wedding ceremony on 12 March.
© Simpson/Express/Getty Images
Standing in front of the Rock of Gibraltar, on 20 March, the newly married Lennons proudly show off their wedding licence before heading to Amsterdam for the world’s most public and bizarre honeymoon.
MARCH 1969
The last time John Lennon stood on a concert stage in full view of an audience was The Beatles’ last moment as a touring band. Pausing only for the pop world’s first selfie – Lennon had left a time-lapse camera mounted on Starr’s drum kit to document the significance of the occasion – the band sprinted along the diamond contours of Candlestick Park, home to Major League Baseball’s San Francisco Giants, for the safety of the windowless ‘meat wagon’ – the nickname a metaphor for the claustrophobia of their own fame – that protected them from 25,000 screaming fans. And it was Lennon, typically,
who minutes later called a permanent halt to The Beatles’ incessant record-tour-record-tour treadmill.
Now, nine hundred and sixteen days after that final performance, Lennon was back on the boards (the January rooftop show having hardly qualified as a real show). Yet hardly anyone among the four hundred-strong audience inside Lady Mitchell Hall in Cambridge University recognised the Beatle in their midst on Sunday, 2 March.
Lennon’s hair reached halfway down his back. Clad in black denim jeans and jacket, he looked deathly pale and his famous horn-rimmed glasses made his thin face seem owlish and slightly threatening. And right now, in this setting, he was way out of his rock ’n’ roll comfort zone. This was, after all, Yoko’s gig, with Lennon her mere wingman. Still, it was a rare moment, only the second time any Beatle had ever performed on stage without the others.
Months earlier, Yoko had accepted an invitation from poet Anthony Barnett to play at an event called Natural Music: International Avant-Garde Concert Workshop, a freeform jazz showcase featuring some fifteen prominent musicians, notably John Stevens on percussion and piano and Danish saxophonist John Tchicai.
Yoko said: ‘Near the date, they called me, asking if I was still coming . . . they didn’t know if my plans had changed or not. “Tell him you’re coming with a band,” John whispered from the side. John and I thought it was a riot, but we didn’t know how they would take it at the other end of the phone. Was it all right to bring a rocker? But the guy held his ground well. It was Cambridge, so the greeting committee was cordial but cool. John took that in, of course.’
The curious thing, of course, was that Johnny hated jazz. But on the day he put his misgivings to one side and took up position with his back to the audience and coaxed feedback and atonal noises from his Epiphone Casino guitar while Yoko announced a piece called ‘Cambridge 1969’ and started to howl and shriek into a microphone.
