by Ken McNab
The McCartneys invited the drummer and his wife Maureen to Cavendish Avenue for dinner. With Linda on cooking duty, the evening was going well until the host gingerly brought up the subject of Apple and, inevitably, Klein. Sensing a set-up, Starr shuffled uncomfortably and politely refused to shift allegiances, especially since it would mean going behind the backs of the other two. Suddenly, Linda burst into tears and declared: ‘Oh, they’ve got you too.’ It was a cack-handed attempt at emotional blackmail and Starr wasn’t falling for it.
Meanwhile, Harrison took advantage of the pre-booked studio time at EMI to do a little moonlighting. By the summer of 1969, London had replaced San Francisco as the new epicentre of the Hare Krishna movement. Up and down Carnaby Street and the King’s Road, shaven-headed Krishna devotees, draped in orange robes and carrying their prayer beads in a bag, mingled with ordinary shoppers, bowler-hatted bankers, mini-skirted secretaries and long-haired hippies. Harrison was a closet Krishna, happy to chant his mantra for hours on end but unwilling to commit to some of the religion’s more disciplined tenets, such as no illicit sex and abstaining from alcohol and drugs. For a Beatle with strong appetites, that was a step too far. But no one was in any doubt about the sincerity of his support – financial and practical – for a movement that had set up its own HQ in London and to which he felt a clear spiritual affinity. And it wasn’t long before the Krishnas zeroed in on Apple, treating the offices in Savile Row almost like a transcendental annexe. Lennon and McCartney were both known to take cover when the street-level chanting announced the devotees’ arrival on their turf. Derek Taylor, bounding sharply from his chair, was more to the point: ‘Christ, it’s the bloody Krishnas! Lock the door.’
But the devotees knew that with Harrison’s patronage they were Beatle-proof. Not only that, he could be the key that could bring others to join them at a time when millions of young people were turning away from orthodox religions and seeking some other inner light. The answer was obvious to all parties – turn the Hare Krishna mantra into a record and have the world’s most famous adherent play on it.
Harrison bought into the idea right away. In fact, he was the prime mover behind the sessions at Apple and Abbey Road to turn the sixteen-word ‘Great Mantra’, the chant that underpinned the Hindu religious organisation, into a three-minute, radio-friendly pop song.
He corralled Ken Scott, a veteran of Beatles sessions, to act as engineer. Having sat through the dysfunctional White Album sessions from twelve months ago and having also witnessed the efforts by the Lennons to tip over the Beatle boat, Scott thought he had seen it all. But the sessions for the Hare Krishna mantra during that first week in July took matters to a new and surreal level.
‘On the surface it all seemed pretty bizarre to see them there in the studio with the robes and the beads,’ he recalled. ‘But then again I had seen a lot of strange things over the years so it didn’t faze me that much. The important thing was to help George get the job done and he knew where he was going with the session.’ Indeed, Harrison acted as producer for the session as well as playing lead guitar and bass guitar. Elsewhere, other devotees were roped in to beat time with a pair of kartals and Indian drums, while someone was commandeered to strike the gong at the song’s climax.
Among them was Joshua Greene, a young American student newly arrived in London from the Sorbonne in Paris. Greene had already tapped into his Krishna consciousness when he found himself at the Radha Krishna Temple in London. He said, ‘I just found the nicest people on Earth. They were asking about me and I just happened to mention that I had been in a college band and they said, “Really? Come with us.” We then piled into a Volkswagen mini-bus and pulled up outside this building with a big number three on the outside.
‘We walked inside and there was this big green apple on the wall and then I found myself in a recording studio. And suddenly I’m standing next to George Harrison. He went over to hug some of the devotees and then he hands me a harmonium and says just play along. So I’m just jamming on the harmonium and I start thinking to myself, “If I stay with these people I get God and The Beatles. Okay, I’m in.” ’
When they reassembled at EMI Studios a few days later, having listened to playbacks, Harrison wanted a bigger chorus and so gathered an ad hoc group of backing singers from every nook and cranny inside the warren that was EMI Studios to help bring the track to a multi-layered crescendo. Chris O’Dell, the American who had drifted into the band’s social circle, was also roped in to help. She later said singing the mantra had left her feeling ‘physically and spiritually changed’, adding that ‘chanting the words over and over again was almost hypnotic . . . there was a point of freedom where there was no effort at all, no criticism or judgement, just the sound generated from deep inside, like a flame that warmed us from the inside out.’
Harrison was delighted with the track, which he saw as his gift to help the Krishnas spread the word of God to a cynical world. Speaking of the sessions years later, he said, ‘Well, it’s just all a part of service, isn’t it? Spiritual service, in order to try to spread the mantra all over the world. Also, to try and give the devotees a wider base and a bigger foothold in England and everywhere else. There was less commercial potential in it, but it was much more satisfying to do, knowing the possibilities that it was going to create, the connotations it would have just by doing a three-and-a-half-minute mantra.
‘That was more fun, really, than trying to make a pop hit record. It was the feeling of trying to utilise your skills or job to make it into some spiritual service to Krishna. It was just like a breath of fresh air. My strategy was to keep it to a three-and-a-half-minute version of the mantra so they’d play it on the radio, and it worked.’
He added: ‘I did the guitar track for that record at Abbey Road Studios before one of The Beatles’ sessions and then overdubbed a bass part. I remember Paul and Linda arrived at the studio and enjoyed the mantra.’
Karma, though, did not extend to another rock god. On 3 July, the morning after Paul, George and Ringo regrouped at Abbey Road, came the news that Brian Jones had been found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool. The founder of the Rolling Stones had tragically become the founder of the ‘27 Club’, so named after the company of stars who would be cut down in their prime at the same age. Jones had gone from golden-haired deity to bloated junkie. His demise – the official verdict was death by misadventure – came after he had been fired by the Stones for no longer being able to function as a musician. Even so, Jones’s death was still shocking.
Strangely, none of The Beatles commented directly on his death. Apple produced a perfunctory statement that was devoid of any genuine sentiment. Lennon, perhaps the Beatle who was closest to Brian, remained incommunicado to the dwindling group of journalists parked on the lawn outside the Lawson Memorial Hospital in Golspie.
Jones had even once joined in on a Beatles session, adding some ropey sax to the novelty number ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’. Only seven months earlier, John had hung out with Jones on what would be his last public appearance as a Stone at the band’s chaotic film, The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. Even then, Jones, his eyes glazed and sunken and his skin parchment-white, had the whiff of death about him.
Lennon recalled: ‘He was one of them guys that disintegrated right in front of you. In the early days he was alright because he was young and confident. But in the end you dreaded he’d come on the phone – you knew it was trouble. He was in a lot of pain.’ It was a reminder that even rock gods are not immortal.
*
After the media frenzy of the previous few months, the hospital stay provided the Lennons with some splendid isolation, a time of much needed introspection away from the self-induced narcissism that had permeated both their lives. News, though, travelled fast. Within hours of being admitted to the Lawson, the news wires were chattering out bulletins from the Highlands to Fleet Street and on to television autocues.
Watching at home, no one was more surp
rised at the broadcasts than Cynthia Lennon, who knew nothing about her former husband’s trip to northern Scotland with their young son. As far as she was concerned, they were still in Liverpool. She knew more than anyone that John was a bad driver and that, given the length of the journey, this was literally an accident waiting to happen.
Alarmed, she contacted Peter Brown at Apple and made hasty plans to retrieve the youngster, who was by now in the trusted care of Lennon’s Aunt Mater in Durness. It was a long journey, not helped by the fact that she accidentally first boarded a plane for Ireland instead of Scotland.
En route to Durness, they stopped at the hospital but Lennon couldn’t find a reason to speak to the woman who had been his college sweetheart and the mother of his son. A ward nurse was summarily dispatched to tell Cynthia that John and Yoko didn’t want to be disturbed.
One person who did breach the NHS-fortified Maginot Line was the Reverend David Paterson, a minister in the ultra-conservative Free Church of Scotland. His position gave him unfettered access to the wards and the opportunity to lock horns with the man who once declared that The Beatles were ‘bigger than Jesus’.
On the surface, the two men appeared to have little in common. But Lennon welcomed the chance to debate the issue with a man of the cloth away from the flashbulbs and scribblers. They quickly struck up a friendly rapport on a whole range of subjects encompassing religion, philosophy, war and peace while agreeing to disagree on the overall message of Christianity.
Overall, however, visitors from the outside world were discouraged. Persistent press requests for interviews, once a part of the couple’s daily routine, were simply ignored. Even the UK release of ‘Give Peace A Chance’ on 3 July – the same day Brian Jones’s death dominated the news headlines – passed without any hint of bedside self-promotion or even a pre-recorded statement. ‘Give Peace A Chance’ confused many Beatle fans, who initially thought it was the latest release from the Fabs, especially since the song was credited to Lennon and McCartney. Lennon would later say, ‘I didn’t write it with Paul, but again, out of guilt, we always had that thing that our names would go on songs even if we didn’t write them. It was never a legal deal between Paul and me, just an agreement when we were fifteen or sixteen to put both our names on our songs. I’d put his name on “Give Peace A Chance” though he had nothing to do with it. It was a silly thing to do, actually. It should have been Lennon-Ono.’
The single, in retrospect the start of Lennon’s solo career, saw the introduction of the Plastic Ono Band, a conceptual group which was more a nod to Yoko’s idiosyncratic art than any notion of ground-breaking rock ’n’ roll by Lennon.
With Lennon absent, Starr and Maureen stepped into the promotional breach to help officially launch the Great Peace Anthem at a press bash at Chelsea Town Hall. Lennon’s silence seemed like an opportunity lost given the message contained in the song’s grooves. But he was strangely happy to keep the media blindsided.
Dr Milne was impressed by his patient’s lack of starry self-absorption, contrary to a public image that suggested a rampant conceit. He told me: ‘I had long chats with John and he just seemed like an ordinary bloke. We covered a wide range of subjects. We spoke at length about the life he had been leading. He told me he had been through it all from religion to drugs. He was very honest. He didn’t give the impression of being a pop star, he was extremely ordinary and down to earth.
‘One night he went down to the kitchen and said, “Have you got any leftovers?” I remember another night a group from his Apple organisation had flown up to Inverness and then taken a taxi from Inverness up to Golspie. They arrived at 9.30 p.m., and I went to John and said, “Some of your mates are at the door.” And he said, “I didn’t ask them to come. Tell them to go away.” He said, “Don’t be fooled, I’m paying for all this.” He seemed very intelligent to me, well read and very well up on world events. I thought he was quite an impressive figure.’
Dr Milne practically became the Lennons’ unofficial press spokesman for the week, wheeled out before the cameras and print journalists to give regular condition updates. In truth, there was very little he could tell them that would spark the call to hold the front page. Today, there would be fifteen-minute updates on Sky News, CNN and BBC News 24. But almost fifty years ago, the column inches generated by the Lennons’ hospital stay amounted to little of substance. A trawl through the archives of Scotland’s Daily Record, the Scottish Daily Express, the Mirror and the Scotsman reveal few headlines and prove that Lennon succeeded in his bid to recharge his drained batteries away from the media spotlight. Even Cynthia’s ill-fated arrival at the hospital after that turbulent flight to Glasgow to collect Julian failed to ignite any serious coverage.
Dr Milne added: ‘I was actually quite impressed by the media. They had a rough time because they just had to sit out in the car park night and day. They were scared to leave in case they missed something. If their editor phoned and they couldn’t answer right away they would be sacked. I used to go down at nine o’ clock at night to tell them, “Look, they’ve gone to bed for the night, you’d be as well to go down to the pub.” But they said they daren’t do that.
‘Part of their orders had been to get a photograph and apparently some painter or someone who was working at the hospital had got in and surreptitiously taken a photograph, which he then tried to sell to the newspapers.’
Nevertheless, Lennon didn’t fully pull up the drawbridge on the outside world. He sent a typically witty postcard with deliberately misspelled words from his hospital bed to Derek Taylor. He began by declaring, in capital letters, ‘THIS IS NOT A BEGGING LETTER.’ Lennon, an inveterate postcard doodler, then went on: ‘I am a crippled family who need som mony to git out of Scotcland [sic] a few hundred will do.’ At the bottom of the card he signed off as ‘Jack McCripple (ex seamen).’ The card is addressed to ‘Dirty Tayler MBE at the Apple HQ in London’. The front of the card shows a castle and Lennon has drawn a line to one of the windows and written ‘held prisner’.
But if Lennon liked to believe he was indeed a hostage to misfortune, his scheduled release date was coming up fast. Six days after being admitted to the Lawson bleeding and bruised, the couple prepared to face the world again. For the hospital, this would mean an end to the constant phone calls from worried fans that had almost caused the switchboard to go into meltdown. And for the staff, a sense of relief that business would go back to normal, even if the Lennons’ stay had interfered little with the normal running of the hospital.
Joyce Everett was one of several young nurses who often attended Lennon and Yoko and, like her colleagues, remembers only a husband and wife who had been injured in a car accident and not the stellar couple of pop culture folklore. During the Lennons’ recovery she was the only staff member to speak to not just one Beatle, but two.
‘My outstanding memory is picking up the phone one night and it was Paul McCartney,’ she said. ‘He was my favourite Beatle, so that was nice. He was just asking how John was. It was a coincidence that I picked up the phone. But I just stayed quite cool about it and told him how he was. There was no facility in the hospital to pass Paul’s call through to him or anything like that. But the message was passed on that Paul had phoned to ask how he was and I suppose he was quite pleased about that.
‘This was at a time when they weren’t supposed to be getting on so it’s nice to know there was still a friendship there. During the time they were in the hospital they were fine . . . They kept themselves to themselves and there were never any problems. They also had a ward to themselves, so that kept them out of the way of the usual running of the hospital. And it meant that the other patients weren’t disturbed in any way by what was going on. I mean, they knew that someone famous was in the hospital especially since so many journalists were camped outside the main entrance. You couldn’t help but notice, but there were no paparazzi with mega lenses or anything like that.’
On Sunday, 6 July, twenty-four hours after the Rolling Sto
nes played a free concert in London’s Hyde Park to honour the memory of Jones (McCartney, heavily disguised, was rumoured to be among the crowd), the Lennons got ready to re-enter the public domain. On the morning they left, a helicopter landed on the hospital lawn to take John, Yoko and Kyoko to Inverness airport where they would fly by private jet back down to London.
Before departing, the couple went out of their way to thank all the staff who lined up outside the entrance to wave farewell to the most famous patients in the hospital’s history. They handed out signed pictures and albums, one of which was given to Dr Milne as a token of goodwill for his discretion as much as his bedside manner. He recalled: ‘I got an autographed record – I can’t remember which one now – that I gave to one of my sons.’ The waiting press finally got their picture. One group shot still hangs in the entrance to the hospital.
They also got their parting soundbite, a mere twenty-four words to sum up six restful but nevertheless long days: ‘If you’re going to have a car crash, try to arrange for it to happen in the Highlands. The hospital there was just great.’
John, wearing a large floppy black hat, shook everyone’s hand and then, with one final flourish, they stepped aboard the chopper. As the helicopter banked south towards Inverness, Lennon could not have known he would never again visit his beloved Scottish Highlands, an affair that had begun when he was nine years old.
There remains, however, the perfectly legitimate question about why they were allowed to remain in hospital for six days. Under normal circumstances, they would have been discharged after being kept in overnight for observation. Yoko, though, was in the very early stages of pregnancy again, a fact unknown to all but a select few. And given her previous miscarriage, the hospital’s medical staff decided to monitor her for longer. But that revelation still didn’t kick into the long grass of history one theory that the Lennons used their surroundings to again try to purge their bodies of drugs, specifically the heroin they still used. What is beyond scrutiny is the fact that they couldn’t be seen to be taking drugs in hospital. For one thing, it simply wouldn’t be tolerated. And the breadcrumb trail of clues would be impossible to conceal from trained nursing staff, as Yoko herself confirmed. ‘We wouldn’t kick in a hospital because we wouldn’t let anyone know.’
