by Ken McNab
But despite the last-minute bickering, they all agreed on one thing. Heard from start to finish, Abbey Road sounded like a genuine Beatles album. It was an aural sleight of hand where any friction lay undetected between the grooves of what would become their last will and testament.
By 1.15 a.m. all four Beatles headed out of EMI Studios into the light rain, each of them naturally unaware they were crossing a borderline. This was the last time all four would each be together at the same time inside a recording studio. Musically speaking, 20 August was the day when The Beatles as a band faded out of time but not out of memory.
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On 22 August, Lennon at last threw open the doors of his new estate in Ascot to his three bandmates. Tittenhurst, with its Georgian entrance, sweeping grounds, its lawns, stately trees and great walls of rhododendrons, camellias and azaleas, its avenues of Weeping Blue Atlas Cedars and lush meadows, was a pile fit for a millionaire rock star. But even in that short time, the house had become more like a rehab facility than a home.
In the weeks leading up to Abbey Road’s final sessions he had tried unsuccessfully to wean himself off heroin again. Gradual withdrawal and even methadone hadn’t worked. So he gave in to his own impulses – the only solution was to go cold turkey. It meant ‘thirty six hours rolling in pain’ wrestling with the fallout of self-cure rather than self-harm. But on the day he played host to Paul, George and Ringo at Tittenhurst, there was very little evidence on the outside that his demeanour had changed. The housewarming was decidedly chilly.
The visit had been organised by Derek Taylor, who recognised that the release of their new album would require new promotional pictures. The band was adamant they wouldn’t do any live appearances or interviews – anything to avoid the sheer banality of repeated questions about their future.
Initially, the idea was to shoot some pictures at Apple but then the location was suddenly switched to Ascot. Two photographers were trusted with the assignment: Monty Fresco of the Daily Mail and Ethan Russell, the American who had already documented the grim images from the ‘Get Back’ sessions at Twickenham in January.
Unfortunately for both men, the pictures they captured at Tittenhurst were, by and large, as joyless and morose as the Twickenham images. The Beatles were photographed at various locations in the sprawling grounds. The session began in front of the main house, the musicians standing among the pillars supporting the terrace canopy. They then trudged down the main garden path, past the statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, to a paddock of high grass, an old cricket pitch, where they stood, being photographed and filmed from all sides.
Lennon and Harrison hid their features under wide-brimmed, black hats and thick beards (Lennon’s hadn’t been trimmed since the Abbey Road photo shoot) but there was no way to disguise their jaded attitude. Starr looked more hangdog than usual, as if the whole thing was a huge effort. Even McCartney, normally the consummate PR man, struggled to raise a smile in most of the images. With them, but mostly out of shot, were Yoko and a heavily pregnant Linda.
Linda had brought along a small cine camera and casually shot some silent footage of all four Beatles smiling awkwardly while stroking some donkeys from nearby stables. Only her husband manages a half-hearted salute for the camera.
And with that gesture, The Beatles waved a hushed goodbye to the world. (There was an odd synchronicity to the occasion given that it fell seven years to the day they had first been filmed for television, by Granada TV, during a lunchtime gig at the Cavern.) More importantly, from a historical perspective, it was the final time John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr would be pictured together.
In the years that followed until the tragedy that unfolded in New York on 8 December 1980, there were plenty of two-way and occasional three-way assemblies of ex-Beatles. But as they went their separate ways that afternoon, all that remained was an unspoken truth. The game was up.
Forgotten in the mists of time is the fact that this was perhaps their most photographed session ever. The two photographers shot numerous pictures, some staged, others much more spontaneous. One photograph amid the dozens he shot stood out for Russell. It shows the morose-looking group in front of a tree with its branches bent over and touching the ground.
Russell said: ‘There are better pictures from the session, and by that I mean more interesting, but none are so quite so aggressively sad. I love this one because it’s wide and particularly dramatic. Even the tree looks sad and defeated. I call the picture “Weep”.’
George Harrison, though, was not one to shed any tears for The Beatles. ‘I can’t honestly say what I felt after that record was finished,’ said the band’s lead guitarist, who at that time was already glimpsing an open road ahead to a possible solo career. ‘But I don’t recall thinking that was it because there was so much going on all the time. There were plenty of other activities to fill the gaps. I was certainly not missing being in the band.’ He demonstrated this by ploughing ahead with various engagements. First up was a reunion with the one musician who ranked higher in his esteem than any other – Bob Dylan, rock music’s most mercurial talent. Dylan had been absent from the concert stage for more than two years following a motorcycle accident. During that time, the musical landscape had shifted out of previous recognition. Nineteen-sixty-nine was the year rock music embraced a new grown-up congregation.
Blazing a trail across Europe and America were the likes of Led Zeppelin, with a cocksure frontman who made Mick Jagger look like a cuddly uncle, a virtuoso lead guitarist who was in the process of reinventing the genre with his epic riffs, a drummer renowned for his thunderous fills and a bass guitarist whose sheer multi-instrumentalism made him an indispensable part of the equation. Zeppelin may have represented rock’s new wave but the old guard had no intention of disappearing. This month Elvis Presley, buoyed by his electrifying 1968 Comeback Special, was preparing for a month-long residency at the Las Vegas Hilton. The Who had already unveiled Tommy, Pete Townshend’s ground-breaking rock opera, and the Rolling Stones were in the process of ending a three-year-long performance hiatus to plant their flag on stage as ‘the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world’.
This was also the year of big outdoor events: the aforementioned Stones’ Hyde Park tribute to Brian Jones and the free concert at the same venue on 5 June by the Blind Faith quartet of Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker and Ric Grech. Change was in the air. So, too, was the intoxicating scent of new money. Rock was suddenly bigger and grander, its presentation leaping in scale with every new tour that was announced. Woodstock, staged on a sprawling farm site in rural upstate New York between 15 and 18 August, drew an astonishing 400,000 fans to see the biggest gathering of groups since the Monterey Festival two years earlier.
Promoters on both sides of the Atlantic scrambled to get a slice of this lucrative new opportunity. Among them were two young Englishmen, Ray Foulk and his brother Ronnie, who the previous year had staged a festival on the Isle of Wight, a beautiful island, rich in poetic history, off England’s southern coast. It had been a moderate success but in 1969 both men had set their sights on raising the bar considerably. Three names sat atop their wish list: Elvis, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. Presley was not a typical festival act and had sold his rock ’n’ roll soul for his residency in Sin City; Dylan, having shunned invites to perform at Woodstock despite the venue being almost within a stone’s throw of his home, remained in concert exile; The Beatles, though, were possibly within reach. The Foulk brothers had been encouraged by the band’s January rooftop gig to believe they could pull off the showbusiness coup of the decade. Combining youthful bravado with a sense of audacity, they put the call into Apple.
Ray Foulk told me: ‘It was a shot to nothing really but they were already falling apart. We put the call in but we got a very negative response. We didn’t have high expectations anyway because they weren’t really a functioning band. So we then turned to Bob Dylan, who said yes, and it was like winning the Lottery.
’
Dylan, along with his wife Sara and their kids, flew into the UK on Tuesday, 26 August, where among the first to meet and greet him were Harrison and Mal Evans. The two musicians hadn’t seen each other since the previous November when Dylan had allowed Harrison into his inner circle, an overture that was the beginning of a lifetime friendship between them. On this day, however, it was only the briefest of reunions; Harrison had to go back to London while Dylan was keen to check into Forelands, the farmhouse that would be his home on the Isle of Wight for the next five days ahead of the actual gig on Saturday, 30 August.
Two days later, Harrison and Pattie joined the Dylans at Forelands, and they would come and go until the night of the show. Foulk, who tended to stay out of the way, nevertheless couldn’t fail to spot the empathy that existed between Harrison and Dylan. Harrison even gifted Dylan one of his Gibson guitars to play at the concert.
Foulk said, ‘It wasn’t my style to go hobnobbing with the stars but I had to go there to deal with management problems. I wandered into the sitting room one day and there’s George Harrison and Dylan strumming their guitars and singing the Everly Brothers song, “All I Want To Do Is Dream”, which was spellbinding in a way. I also saw George starting to write a new song [“From Behind That Locked Door”] about Dylan actually, just asking him to loosen up a little.’
Meanwhile, Paul McCartney’s world had completely shifted on its axis. In the early hours of 28 August, Linda had given birth in the Avenue Clinic in St John’s Wood to a baby girl they named Mary after the cherished mother McCartney had lost to breast cancer when he was just fourteen. Like any new father, it was a life-changing moment, the day he ‘saw magic’ unfold before his eyes. The baby’s arrival left McCartney, a man who had grown up in a warm and extended family unit, ecstatic. He said, ‘It was great for me because it was a very good balance set against the tension of The Beatles at that time.’
When they returned home to Cavendish, Paul and Linda drew the curtains, literally and metaphorically, on their public persona. Linda took one or two pictures of the proud father that made their way into newspapers. But they just wanted to spend precious time together as a new family. So as far as Apple was concerned, McCartney was off the grid, even more than he had been lately. Even the knot of Apple Scruffs permanently on standby outside his home gave him some space. One said, ‘We still didn’t like Linda but we all agreed to back off a bit. Put it this way, we were told in no uncertain terms to back off.’
McCartney, so good with other people’s children (Lennon’s son Julian being a particular case in point) took to parenthood right away, ‘glowing with the whole joy of it all’. But it meant that everything else took a back seat, including any possibility of joining his bandmates and their respective wives for Dylan’s set at the Isle of Wight on the last day of the month.
Lennon and Yoko arrived at Forelands in a helicopter that landed not in a nearby field that had been set aside for such purposes, but in the gardens, destroying in the process dozens of flowers in the downdraught from the rotor blades. Harrison and Starr arrived in a separate chopper. It was the first time the three Beatles and Dylan had been in the same room since May 1965 when they all had ringside seats for the American’s Royal Albert Hall gig.
Foulk witnessed the handshakes and warm greetings. He said, ‘You could tell they were happy to see each other. I think everyone knew that The Beatles were breaking up but I didn’t see any tension between them during the time I saw them. There was only one moment, not long after they arrived, when Lennon said something like, “Excuse me, we have to talk shop for a moment.” And then they went off in a huddle for a couple of minutes but that was it really.’
Dylan was naturally apprehensive at the prospect of appearing in front of an audience of 150,000 festivalgoers, who, as Lennon later said, were expecting to see some kind of divine musical presence. So, to lighten the load and ease any pre-gig boredom, he invited all three Beatles to a game of tennis in the grounds of the farm. It’s hard to imagine a more incongruous scene. Grainy pictures, taken on Pattie Harrison’s camera, have emerged showing Harrison, his long hair blowing in the wind, and Dylan both swinging tennis racquets.
Over the years, stories about the three Beatles and Dylan on the Isle of Wight have taken on a mythic quality. They rocked out together in a superstar jam at the massive barn that had been turned into a huge rehearsal area; they drew up plans to appear on stage for the encore, but Yoko canned the idea because she was not invited to take part. Ray Foulk was quick to dismiss the gossip as the products of someone’s fevered imagination.
‘There was a lot of newspaper talk,’ he says. ‘Dylan himself actually encouraged it by saying something at a press conference like he’d love to do it, so the suggestion was in the public domain, which meant some fans left somewhat disappointed. But here’s the thing; The Beatles didn’t arrive with any instruments. If you are professional musicians like The Beatles at the top of your game you don’t arrive without instruments or not having rehearsed. That would have been completely unprofessional. There was no chance whatsoever.
‘Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, was asked, “Wouldn’t it be nice?”, and he said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go to the moon?” They knew the whole world was watching and they wouldn’t have wanted to make fools of themselves. The stories are nonsense.’
A couple of hours later, all three Beatles, along with Yoko, Pattie and Maureen, took their seats in the roped-off press section just yards from the front of the stage. Sitting beside Lennon was Tom Paxton, the acclaimed American folk singer who in the afternoon had also witnessed the ‘collegiate’ atmosphere among The Beatles and Dylan. ‘I didn’t sense any antagonism with The Beatles’, Paxton told me. ‘I saw three guys who were interacting normally and seemed very relaxed in each other’s company.’ But in the minutes before Dylan finally took to the stage at around 11 p.m., Paxton got a glimpse of what public life was like for a Beatle.
He said, ‘Bob introduced me to John Lennon. That night I sat with John and Yoko and something happened that I have never forgotten. Security was intense so there wasn’t anyone there who wasn’t in some way connected with the music business. Even so, a fellow leaned over from behind and asked John for his autograph. John, very polite and very quietly, said, “No, if I start I’ll never get to stop,” and the guy burst out with a profanity, spewing hate all over John’s head. He called him every name you could think of. Throughout this entire barrage John sat with his head bowed looking at the ground. When it was all over, I said, “Does this happen a lot?” and John said, “Every time I leave the house.” I thought, “My God, what a price to pay.”’
Lennon was not even a comfortable concertgoer, preferring instead to stick with the studio experience. Dylan’s performance left him firmly underwhelmed. Despite Ray Foulk’s observations, Lennon later held out one intriguing possibility. He declared: ‘If there had been a jam, we would have got up. It was killed before it happened. It was so late by the time he got on. The crowd was dying on their feet.’
He, Harrison and Starr then headed back to Forelands for the traditional after-show party. And it was Harrison who, in a moment of one-upmanship, furtively placed on the turntable a record that had then not even rolled off the EMI presses. Seconds later, the room was filled with the sound of a pulsing bassline and the unmistakable voice of John Lennon singing ‘Come Together’. Harrison’s test pressing was the first time anyone had ever heard the finished version of Abbey Road.
Paxton recalled: ‘It sounded fantastic. We had quite a party. Bob loved it and so did everyone else. Looking back, it was an incredible moment to be among the first people in the world to hear that record. It’s still my favourite Beatles album.’
For the three Beatles, however, the moment was bittersweet. The songs emanating through the speakers suggested business as usual. In truth, the business had hit the buffers and had been emphatically derailed in the dog days of the summer of 1969.
© Reproduced wi
th the kind permission of photographer David Nutter
Lennon, McCartney, Starr and Yoko Ono sat down with Allen Klein to sign the new deal with Capitol Records, but minutes later the meeting ended in shock as John suddenly announced he was leaving The Beatles.
SEPTEMBER 1969
So far as The Beatles were concerned, September kicked in with a feeling of sombre finality. The sense of camaraderie – brittle though it was at times – that had carried Abbey Road over the finish line had turned out to be a mirage. The band was now staring at a future that promised nothing but pain. The Abbey Road sessions, coming after the lassitude that had marked the sessions for ‘Get Back’ and the White Album, had left them all mentally and creatively drained. ‘It’s torture whenever we make an album,’ John Lennon had complained. This time it felt different, as if a watershed had been reached
The twenty-sixth of the month had been pencilled in as the UK release date for the first proper Beatles LP in ten months. It meant, of course, a series of promotional interviews, an exercise in tedium that none of The Beatles could face, particularly as the media was so fixated on the band’s future. Paul McCartney, for his part, was revelling in his role as a new father. George Harrison was plunging deeper into Krishna consciousness on a metaphysical quest to find his Eternal Self, while continuing a musical exploration with the likes of Billy Preston, Doris Troy and others on the Apple label. (He had, moreover, just learned that his mother, Louise, was suffering from cancer). Lennon and Yoko occasionally broke cover, notably on 10 September, when they hosted a screening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London of a new film they had made. It was called Smile, a fifteen-minute slow-motion study of Lennon’s penis becoming erect. John wittily predicted the critics wouldn’t touch it.
