by Ken McNab
Johns also remembered seeing Lindsay-Hogg’s early edit. ‘Klein saw a rough cut of it and said he didn’t want anyone else in the film but The Beatles, so everyone else who was in any shot at any time was taken out, the net result being that it got a bit difficult to watch after a while. Also, some of the stuff that I know was in there originally was extremely interesting, conversations with other people, members of the film crew, people who were just around, people visiting, like Billy Preston but Klein said that only The Beatles could be in the film and that was it.
‘There was some amazing stuff – their humour got to me as much as the music. John Lennon only had to walk in a room, and I’d just crack up. Their whole mood was wonderful, and that was the thing, and there was all this nonsense going on at the time about the problems surrounding the group, and the press being at them, and in fact, there they were, just doing it, having a wonderful time and being incredibly funny, and none of that’s in the film.’
But Klein would not be swayed and he soon persuaded the entire band that the film should be blown up from 16mm film to 35mm – a task that threw up technical challenges – and marketed as a major Beatles cinematic event. Which, of course, meant virtually recutting it from scratch, a process that would take several months and push back any possible release into the next decade. In the meantime, there was no avoiding the images of broken light that Lindsay-Hogg had captured so well. Cinéma vérité masquerading as real life.
© PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy
John Lennon invited his bandmates to his new estate at Tittenhurst Park, but there was little warmth in the housewarming as the forced smiles of each one betrayed the breakdown in relations. This was the last time all four Beatles were pictured together.
AUGUST 1969
As endings go, it was unremarkable and without fanfare. A normal turn of events, one that had been played out hundreds of times before. In the early hours of 21 August 1969, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr walked out of the EMI Studios in London’s Abbey Road and, following a few amicable farewells, made their weary way to their cars, parked nearby. It had been a long session – almost twelve hours – to apply the finishing touches to Abbey Road and find common ground, especially between Lennon and McCartney, over the album’s final running order. The discussions had been difficult, sometimes fractious, but agreement had finally been reached.
And yet this mini tableau, so familiar to them, would put the seal on a black day for millions of Beatles fans around the world. This day would go down in history as the last time these four musicians would gather in a recording studio together at the same time. Coincidentally, it came only a few weeks short of the anniversary of their first arrival in London as a quartet for their debut EMI recording session in September 1962.
Never again would they find the collective joy in creating the magic that had come to define the Sixties. Never again would they share the kind of intimacy that had seen them conquer the world. Not that, at the time, they knew it. Yet August had arrived on such an encouraging note, thanks to a new Lennon song, ‘Because’, that had the potential to recall those early days when each of them was in perfect harmony inside the studio.
Lennon had a well-founded reputation as a brash and visceral rock ’n’ roller, but his mellower side was frequently overlooked. This new song fitted easily into the same kind of tender category as ‘This Boy’, ‘In My Life’, ‘Across The Universe’ and even the lullaby lilt of ‘Good Night’, from the White Album. According to Lennon’s famous retelling, the song had its roots in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 (the Moonlight), which he had heard Yoko playing. He asked her to play the piece backwards and a light bulb went off in his head.
He presented ‘Because’ to the band on Friday, 1 August. It was the last new song that all four would work on from scratch. The song, like so many of Lennon’s most recent offerings, was lyrically sparse, just twenty-four different words in two brief verses and an even briefer chorus. In fact, the serene imagery was partly filched from Yoko’s book, Grapefruit. But that was to take nothing away from a ballad that gave The Beatles the opportunity to revisit the kind of three-part harmonies so evocative of their early years. They hadn’t attempted that kind of vocal interaction for years, but George Martin, a specialist in this kind of discipline, was convinced that it would be worth the efforts of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison to rediscover their special synthesis.
In that eight-hour first session, their long-time producer patiently coaxed the band through twenty-three takes of the backing track, while doubling Lennon’s guitar lines on a harpsichord to give it a slightly medieval tone. Starr was on this occasion a silent partner but contributed a gentle tap on the hi-hat to give his bandmates a percussive compass.
Further work on layering and refining the harmonies was carried out on the following Monday with McCartney, Harrison and Starr buoyed by Lennon’s new-found zest for a track they all loved. Everyone knew, however, that serious work would be needed to get it right. Mood and atmosphere were everything so the lights inside Studio Two were dimmed, even though it was mid-afternoon. Harrison had brought incense along to help provide a chilled-out vibe. Then he, Lennon and McCartney positioned themselves in a semi-circle with the sparse backing track playing in their headphones and they sang harmony as if they had been doing it all their lives. Which, in many ways, they had. Repeated takes were required over the next five hours to get the phrasing right, a process that required self-control and no small measure of serenity from all involved.
Among those who witnessed the song slowly coming to life was Geoff Emerick, who would later recall the painstaking efforts that went in to creating what was one of Lennon’s last significant contributions to the band.
He wrote: ‘The problem was that George Martin had worked out nine harmony parts for The Beatles to sing, but we only had five tracks to record them on. That was resolved easily enough when it was decided to have John, Paul and George Harrison sing their three-part harmony together live, instead of overdubbing each part one at a time and then have to do two additional passes in order to add on the remaining six parts. It was as much an aesthetic as it was a technical decision because their voices had always meshed so well naturally . . . they knew they were doing something special and they were determined to get it right. There was no clowning around that day, no joking. Everyone was very serious, very focused.’
The next day, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison regrouped round a single microphone to graft similarly intricate vocals on to the vine of another song, one that would become the band’s ‘cosmic’ valediction. ‘The End’, with its three-way guitar duel, proved that the band could still keep pace with the emerging school of heavy rock. Crucially, it added to the feeling that they were pooling their musical resources towards completing the album.
August also saw Harrison emerge as The Beatles’ unlikely sonic scientist. In the first week he oversaw the installation at EMI Studios of a Moog synthesiser, the pioneering keyboard-based instrument that, starting in 1969, was to become every rock star’s expensive new toy. In those days it was an elephantine piece of equipment, with banks of wires protruding in every direction. Primitive it might have been, but Harrison, the band’s most technically adept musician, foresaw limitless opportunities to expand The Beatles’ sound.
He had introduced it to Lennon and McCartney, who both immediately bought in to its seemingly infinite possibilities. Within days, they had recorded Moog overdubs on ‘Here Comes The Sun’, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ and ‘Because’. The Moog seemed to lift each song into a new, almost symphonic zone, but Harrison later acknowledged the amateurism of his earliest efforts on the instrument. ‘It was enormous, with hundreds of jack plugs and two keyboards. It was one thing having one, but it was another thing making it work. When you listen to the sounds on songs like “Here Comes The Sun”, it does some good things but they are all kind of infant sounds.’
The synergy that infused them all by working
on powerful material had provided a renewed focus. ‘When we were working on a good track, all the bullshit went out the window,’ said Starr. Equally, however, Paul, George and Ringo were painfully aware that the mood music could change in an instant, especially where Lennon was concerned. Yoko was still an unwanted presence in the studio, often sniping in stage whispers from the sidelines, ramping up her husband’s easily stoked neurosis. Adding strength to Lennon’s paranoia was his heroin habit. He was still able to mine brilliant tunes, such as ‘Come Together’, ‘Because’ and ‘Sun King’, but the words revealed a man who increasingly relied on nonsense prose. At the height of Flower Power, the lyrics to ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘I Am The Walrus’ scanned like a hippie avatar’s Holy Writs. But the obscure lyrics in his newest material read more like vacuous doggerel.
By August, the Lennons were dangerously addicted again, a situation that was even more perilous for Yoko, who was pregnant. Occasional visitors to Tittenhurst Park that summer glimpsed the tell-tale signs of drug paraphernalia in various rooms, despite Lennon’s later insistence that they ‘never shot up’. His bandmates had known for months. The subject matter had infused White Album tracks such as ‘Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey’ and ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, with their allusions to fixes. Generally, though, the topic remained off the table.
Among those watching from the sidelines was Barry Miles, former head of now-defunct Zapple and the joint pioneer behind the London underground newspaper, International Times. In an email interview for this book, he laid bare the impact of Lennon’s addled state of mind during this period.
‘John was strung out on heroin so he behaved like most junkies, manipulative, self-centred, in pain. He wasn’t on a heavy dose but he was addicted. It doesn’t matter whether you sniff it, shoot it or shove it up your ass, you’re still a junkie. You could still have an intelligent conversation with him, when Yoko wasn’t interrupting, and he seemed open to new ideas, but he had that passive-aggressive thing that junkies often have.’
This meant that those closest to Lennon had to walk on eggshells. As McCartney later said: ‘He was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into and so his songs were taking on more references to heroin. Until that point we had made rather mild, oblique references to pot or LSD. But now John started talking about fixes and monkeys and it was harder terminology, which the rest of us weren’t into. We were disappointed that he was getting into heroin because we didn’t really know how we could help him. We just hoped it wouldn’t go too far.’
In the post-Beatle years, Lennon refused to sugarcoat the reasons for his heroin addiction, pointing the finger of blame at The Beatles and the inner sanctum at Apple, whose anti-Yoko attitudes, he felt, bordered on racism. He declared: ‘We took H because of what The Beatles and their pals were doing to us.’
Since June, the Lennons’ retinue had grown to include Dan Richter, a thirty-year-old American actor and mime, who had known Yoko since 1964, and his wife Jill, whose ties with the London underground gradually gained them access to the couple’s tight-knit circle.
Always quick to seize an opportunity, Yoko suggested the Richters move into Tittenhurst. The couple quickly became their de facto personal assistants. The fact that Dan was a heroin addict simply sealed the deal and by August he had become Lennon’s ‘dope buddy’. Few people outside Lennon’s immediate circle knew of his dependence, but the clues were hiding in plain sight for anyone who cared to look. His skin was sallow, his eyes sunken and he displayed all the signs of junkie psychosis: unpredictable mood swings, lethargy, drowsiness and bouts of self-pity.
Richter, who had gained peculiar fame as the evolutionary manape at the start of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, witnessed their inexorable descent into the squalid mess of heroin. He told me: ‘I wouldn’t say he did a lot of drugs but John liked to get high. You have to put it into context. It was like they were going through a divorce. There was a lot of anger, a lot of passion. It was a very unsettling time for John. It was the end of The Beatles, you know, and that was a big, big deal. John wanted to move on. He was an immensely creative man and he felt that he was stuck in The Beatles, that he was being stifled creatively.’
Having been at the centre of a worldwide peace blitz for months, the couple finally recognised that their craving for another kind of fix – publicity – was draining away. The media circus had long ago left town but Lennon realised the need to retreat from the storm he and Yoko had created. Almost all interviews were cancelled. Only the likes of DJ Kenny Everett, a friend for years, were allowed past the Apple guards. Sanctuary lay behind the large walls of Tittenhurst, where they enjoyed an almost hermit-like existence. They officially moved in during the first week in August, but invitations for visits were rare. Not even Klein, the man in whom Lennon had invested so much faith to save The Beatles’ fortunes, was encouraged to call in.
In other ways, Lennon and McCartney’s lives were running on parallel lines. They had both chosen women born overseas as their brides. They had married within days of each other, and both their wives were now pregnant. Linda was due at the end of the month. Yoko, having already suffered at least one miscarriage with John, was not as far along. But those coincidences were rare points of common reference or even conversation topics between them. For now, all they could do was return to the songs they were singing.
Tantalisingly, by the first week in August, they almost had enough songs for an album, so their thoughts naturally turned to a title and a cover. Two years had passed since Sgt. Pepper’s Summer of Love grandiosity and a year since the frostiness of the White Album sessions. But they were still The Beatles and a new LP demanded a cover that reflected their noble status. On Friday, 8 August, the four emperors of EMI put the wheels in motion.
*
The clock had not long struck ten that morning when Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr sat on the steps outside the EMI Studios in the upmarket London suburb of St John’s Wood. Normally, it would be an ungodly hour in which to play Spot the Beatle. The foursome kept vampire hours, especially when working on an album, as they had been throughout July and August. It was a beautifully sunny day in the capital and, for once, even The Beatles’ mood matched the weather. Linda McCartney snapped away on her camera, capturing some excellent portraits as they waited for Scottish photographer Iain MacMillan to arrive for the official photoshoot.
There had already been a loose discussion over what to call the new album. Geoff Emerick smoked a popular brand of cigarettes called ‘Everest’ and an idea was floated to combine the imagery of the world’s highest mountain with the world’s biggest band. Of course, it would mean travelling four and a half thousand miles to the Himalayas and back again for a couple of pictures, but these were days when extravagant dreams outweighed commonsense practicalities.
Everyone drifted back into their private thoughts until the silence was broken by Starr: ‘Why don’t we call it “Abbey Road”, do the picture outside on the Zebra crossing and be done with it?’ As usual, it took the most grounded Beatle to provide the most uncomplicated of solutions. Soon, McCartney had sketched out a plan. And now here they were, at the appointed hour, their eyes squinting in the bright summer sun – only Harrison had shades with him – waiting patiently for MacMillan to arrive.
Lennon was dressed all in white, as was his custom these days, his leonine hair now halfway down his back; Starr was sedate in a black suit; McCartney was almost as conservative in a similar Tommy Nutter two-piece, only the sandals hinting at unconventionality; Harrison was dressed from head to toe in Levi’s denim, the rock star’s uniform of choice in 1969.
Parked in the foreground, like a happy accident, was a white Volkswagen Beetle. Tentative enquiries to see if it belonged to anyone in the studios or a local resident proved fruitless and it became an ironic – and iconic – part of the backdrop. MacMillan, a friend of Lennon and Yoko’s, was only told about the assignment a few days before.
In all, he took six shots of the band striding back and forth across the black-and-white crossing. In every one, the order was the same – Lennon impatiently telling them all to keep in step, led the way, followed by Starr, McCartney and Harrison. In three of the shots, McCartney nonchalantly cast off his sandals. He said: ‘I kicked off the sandals and walked across barefoot for a few takes and it so happened in the shot he used I had no shoes on. It didn’t seem a big deal.’
MacMillan was looking for a shot that captured The Beatles in symmetrical lockstep. Later, as he studied the negatives in his darkroom, it was evident only one would come close.
Naturally, the daylight appearance of all four Beatles attracted a number of curious bystanders, some of whom crept unintentionally into MacMillan’s viewfinder. But there were no hordes of screaming fans; August ’69 was light years from the bedlam of Beatlemania.
Watching the scene unfold from further down the street was Derek Seagrove, one of three painters and decorators who were working inside EMI Studios that day. They were part of a crew from Uxbridge-based company Fassnidge, Son & Morris, who had a regular contract with EMI to carry out work in the studios. And he just about stole into the shot that within six weeks would become part of Beatle folklore.
He said, ‘I was actually working in the studios that day. I am the guy on the right, in the bottom left-hand corner of the picture. Most people when they look at the picture think we are outside somebody’s house but in actual fact we were at the other entrance to EMI Studios as it was then.
‘I was thirty-one at the time. There were two of us on the job that day and then another guy came and joined us outside the studios when the picture was being taken. It was just a coincidence that he was also a decorator working on some flats across the road. He saw what was happening and he actually joined us . . . I was with a colleague called Steve Millwood. On the day the picture was taken we were only at the studios by chance.
