by Ken McNab
By 1969 sales had slumped, leaving only a rump of hardcore subscribers. And The Beatles now wanted nothing to do with it, forcing its publisher to confront an unavoidable truth. On 1 December, the last issue limped off the presses with a tell-tale front cover from the gloom-laden August photoshoot at Tittenhurst. But O’Mahoney was not about to go quietly. He used the last edition to publish a five-page editorial castigating the band over various things: drugs, their appearances, for being poor role models and for their non-cooperation with the magazine that bore their name. Oh, and the whole thing was no longer fun.
Employing the tone of a finger-wagging, disapproving parent, he wrote: ‘The real reason why The Beatles Monthly is stopping publication is because it was The Beatles’ publication of the Sixties while The Beatles were in their twenties. Now, as The Beatles approach their thirties, I feel – and I believe they do too – that we can’t do the job in the Seventies. This is the real crux of the matter.
‘The magazine was first published to keep the fans informed about the activities of The Beatles because John, Paul, George and Ringo were very happy to accept the one identity. I don’t think this is true anymore. Two of The Beatles have made quite a number of statements about their future intentions. Indeed, if one took them literally, one can only assume that they are rejecting The Beatles’ ‘image these days.’
Later, he came at them with another stiletto: ‘I can’t close The Beatles book without mentioning the drug problem. On several occasions, The Beatles have made it very plain that they have experimented with drugs. Many of their close associates have said that they consider mild drugs like pot are okay. I had always hoped that The Beatles would have come out with a straightforward condemnation of drugs. Although I’m sure at least one will, eventually, personally I believe that to experiment with drugs is utterly stupid. To accept the theory that your own mind is not good enough without taking extra, dangerous chemicals to alter its natural processes seems to display a certain lack of self-respect. The pro-pot brigade will say that pot is no worse than alcohol or smoking and it doesn’t lead the user on to more dangerous drugs like heroin. The facts don’t bear them out . . . too many girls and boys have died already, starting on pot and going on to something stronger, for there to be any real argument.’
Blissfully unaware of such a character assassination, McCartney remained in rural isolation in Scotland with his new family, wrestling with a nervous system that was now tilting badly and a future that looked utterly forlorn.
Lennon, typically, found himself at the centre of another media storm, though this time not one of his own making. On 2 December he was one of three men nominated as ‘Man of the Decade’ for an ITV documentary. The other choices were John F. Kennedy, chosen by the British writer and broadcaster Alistair Cooke, and the North Vietnamese President, Ho Chi Min, nominated by American novelist Mary McCarthy. Lennon had been put forward by Desmond Morris, the eminent anthropologist, who spent several hours interviewing him about his musical career and his political activism, now fully revived following the exposure given to ‘Give Peace A Chance’ in Washington.
He and Yoko were also being shadowed by a BBC film crew for a documentary entitled The World of John and Yoko.
To his detractors, a mere pop star like Lennon simply didn’t belong in the same rarified atmosphere as a slain, much loved American president. But Morris made a compelling case, citing Lennon’s influence on the world’s youth through his music and his stated aim to make the planet a safer place despite the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cold War. Endorsing Lennon for his counterculture credentials, and urging viewers to consider his journey from happy-go-lucky moptop to the decade’s Pied Piper of Peace, Morris declared: ‘For many people, John Lennon’s serious statements are completely at odds with the zany, eccentric way he chooses so often to present them to the public. He’s frequently, and quite unfairly I think, been written off as a publicity-hungry clown. But you see, this eccentricity of his is more than a mere anti-establishment device, it also represents a plea for fantasy in an unromantic age, a plea for the unofficial and the inconsequential in an age of officialdom over organisation, a plea for unsophisticated fun in an age of sophisticated weapons. Above all – it’s a plea for optimism.’
The two men were filmed at Tittenhurst, strolling through the grounds alongside the giant weeping cedars, with Lennon delighted at having been recognised for being the person who had made the biggest impact on the decade. Among his contemporaries in the rock firmament, it put him above Jagger, Dylan and, especially, McCartney, and he took it very seriously. His unbridled optimism for the Seventies as the sun set on the Sixties was infectious, confrontational and contradictory.
Grinning broadly, he told Morris: ‘This is only the beginning. The Sixties was just waking up in the morning and we haven’t even got to dinnertime yet. And I can’t wait, you know, I just can’t wait. I’m so glad to be around. And it’s just gonna be great and there’s gonna be more and more of us. And whatever you’re thinking there, Mrs Grundy of Birmingham-on-Toast, you know, you don’t stand a chance. A: you’re not gonna be there when we’re running it, and B: you’re gonna like it when you get less frightened of it. And it’s gonna be wonderful; and I believe it. Of course we all get depressed and down about it, but when I’m down or John and Yoko is down, somebody else will be up. There’s always somebody else carrying the flag or beating the drum, you know. So “they” whoever they are, don’t stand a chance because they can’t beat love . . . I’m full of optimism because of the contacts I’ve made personally throughout the world including yourself, whether seeing you on TV or whatever, knowing that there’s other people around who I can agree with. And I’m not insane and I’m not alone. That’s just on a personal level.
‘And of course the Woodstock, Isle of Wight [music festivals] all the mass meetings of the youth is completely positive for me and the fact that now we’re all getting to know a way of showing our flags. And when you show your flag you’re not alone.’ It was a typical Lennon rap – high on idealism, low on reality – but the programme, which would be broadcast on 30 December, kept him firmly front and centre as the spokesman for disaffected youth the world over.
It was a Lennon party political broadcast for peace, though he admitted he was the last person to know how to fix the world’s problems. ‘The bully, that’s the establishment, they know how to beat people up, they know how to gas them and they have the arms and the equipment.’ he declared. ‘The mistake was made that the kids ended up playing their game of violence, you know, and they couldn’t be violent because they’ve been running it on violence for two thousand years or a million or whatever it is. And nobody can tell me that violence is the way after all that time, there must be another way, but a lot of people fell for it and it’s understandable in a way when the bully’s right there, it’s pretty hard to say, “Turn the other cheek, baby.”’
Only a few days later, Lennon’s overtures for young people to come together in peace seemed like a hollow sermon.
Saturday, 6 December, should have been the grand finale to the Rolling Stones’ first American tour in three years, but a group of Hells Angels turned the venue, a speedway track in Altamont, California, into Satan’s playground. Hired as ‘security’, they enforced their credentials by lashing out with whatever weapons came to hand at anyone who gave them a withering second glance. Eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was just one who caught their eye and soon a scuffle broke out as Mick Jagger, just feet away, sang ‘Under My Thumb’. The Angels were convinced that the African American had a gun and was ready to invade the stage and shoot Jagger. Minutes later, his life was ebbing away after being stabbed by one of the Angels.
Hunter’s shocking death drew a red-stained veil over the peace and love decade. It stunned Lennon, the era’s biggest advocate for non-violence, but it didn’t deter him from pitching his latest idea – a free festival in the name of peace to be staged in Toronto the following summer. In an attempt to put Altamont
into perspective, he said: ‘If you create a peaceful scene you stand a better chance.’
Good intentions, though, were occasionally cancelled out by hippie naïveté. He and Yoko had been persuaded to use their fame to shine a light on one of the most heinous crimes of the decade. In 1962 James Hanratty, a petty thief, was found guilty of murdering scientist Michael Gregsten (36) and shooting his lover Valerie Storie (22) in a case that became known as the A6 Murder. It was alleged that, after surprising the pair in a cornfield in Dorney Reach, Berkshire, Hanratty forced them to drive to Deadman’s Hill, south of Bedford, where Storie, a laboratory assistant, was repeatedly raped and then shot along with Gregsten. She survived despite being shot five times. Hanratty (25) was hanged two months later for the crime but his family had always protested his innocence, in what became one of Britain’s longest-running alleged miscarriages of justice.
Lennon and Yoko were put in touch with his parents and immediately agreed to join the campaign which had already garnered support across the political and legal spectrum but which still divided public opinion. On 10 December, the Lennons held a press conference at Apple to announce their backing for the campaign to overturn the conviction. Flanked by Hanratty’s parents, John said, ‘I am taking up the case in the hope of forcing a public inquiry into this man’s hanging . . . the people who executed Hanratty are the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the street . . . we’re not down on any side of the guy’s innocent or not; we’re anti-killing. But the thing that hooked us on this case, apart from the parents trying and trying, just these two people, eight years going through every channel and being given the runaround and the police saying “you’re interfering with the cause of justice” all that bit.’
Lennon was sometimes a pushover for causes célèbres like this, an advocate for any devil that crossed his path. As usual, he dived straight in. Two days after his Apple press conference, Lennon and Yoko hijacked the British premiere of The Magic Christian, upstaging bandmate Ringo by turning their arrival into a pro-Hanratty protest. Drawing up outside the Odeon Theatre in Kensington, they emerged from John’s white Rolls-Royce brandishing posters declaring ‘Britain Murdered Hanratty’. Their car was festooned with similar bumper stickers. Deliberately provocative to ensure maximum publicity, the stunt was also perfectly timed. The Lennons emerged almost at the same time as Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, thus provoking a mad rush by the local cops anxious to ensure the Lennons didn’t come within camera range of the Queen’s younger sister.
But this time their overexposure and obsession with column inches worked against them. The country’s press barons formed a gentleman’s agreement to choke off the oxygen of publicity in all their newspapers. Lennon said, ‘All the police were trying to get the crowd to pull it [the poster] off and we also came behind her [Princess Margaret’s] car – bang, like that. The press were going berserk, TV and everything and the next day not a peep. Even if they hadn’t had the posters, they would have put “Lennon insults Margaret and Tony”, but they don’t want to know about the hanging case because most of the newspapers are already set on that. All their crime reporters are in with the cops anyway.’
Hanratty, however, was a fleeting diversion from the main event. By December, Lennon was back in full-flowing ‘Give Peace A Chance’ mode. His office at Apple was turned into a command centre from where they conducted dozens of interviews. One of the most abrasive saw them trade verbal blows with Gloria Emerson, the eminent UK bureau chief of The New York Times, who derided their peace protests and dismissed Lennon as a fake who lived in a ‘never-never land’. She harangued him over his headline-grabbing decision to return his MBE in protest over Britain’s involvement in the Biafran war. His campaign, she insisted, had not ‘saved one life’.
In a highly charged, rancorous exchange, Lennon accused Emerson, ironically a liberal anti-war campaigner like himself, of still seeing him as a lovable moptop rather than a mature artist. He told her: ‘We did a very big advertising campaign for peace, can’t you understand that? You want nice, middle-class gestures for peace and intellectual manifestos, written by a lot of half-witted intellectuals and nobody reads ’em . . . that’s the trouble with the peace movement.’
Every interview, of course, had the potential to expose all The Beatles to the Big Reveal but Lennon held true to the promise he had made to McCartney and Klein in September. Unlike Paul the previous month, Lennon continued to tiptoe around the ongoing issue over the future of the band, compromising his usual candour. When another interviewer asked how long he could go on as a practising Beatle, he stuck rigidly to the party line: ‘It depends how I feel and how they feel, you know, when it happens, there comes a time when it’s time for a Beatle product and we always make that decision whether to make it or not, because sometimes we go through hell recording, and sometimes we don’t, you know, and sometimes it’s not worth it.
‘The problem now is – in the old days, when we needed an album, Paul and I got together and produced an album, or produced enough songs for it. Nowadays there’s four of us – three of us writing prolifically, and trying to fit it on one album – and it’s not like we’re wrestling in the studio trying to get a song on, we all do it the same way, we take it in turns to record a track, but usually George lost out because Paul and I are tougher. But we don’t want to fight about it.
‘Now,’ he continued, ‘half the tracks on Abbey Road – I’m not on “Something” – half the tracks on the double album, and way back, it depends, we’re not always on, sometimes there’s only two Beatles on a track. But it got to the situation if we had the name “Beatles” on it, it sells, and when we begin to think like that then there’s something wrong, you know. Then you begin to think, “What are we selling?”’
The only thing Lennon was selling now was world pacifism even if it meant pimping out his own celebrity. Man of the Decade or a media prostitute? It didn’t matter. What did matter was the message and it was finally getting through, especially in America. Its northern neighbour, Canada, that most pro-Lennon of countries, was also calling him back. And provisionally pencilled in the diary for later in the month was a meeting with the hippest world leader on the planet . . .
*
The sound of tyres scrunching on the gravel was the cue that his ride had arrived. Parked in the driveway of Harrison’s day-glo painted bungalow in Esher was a 36-seater, single-decker bus containing a gang of musicians, roadies and liggers, shoehorned in alongside a battery of instruments, amps and endless cables. It was just past 10 a.m. and this motley crew were either still banjaxed from the night before or wide awake from the pure buzz of being a band on the run.
The previous evening, 1 December, Harrison and Starr, together with their wives Pattie and Maureen, and Eric Clapton, had been at the Albert Hall to see the group that had already been dubbed the musicians’ musicians. Delaney and Bonnie was a turbo-charged collective of session hotshots from America’s Deep South that fused country-soul grooves with rootsy blues-driven gospel music. Chiming with the rustic new wave popularised by the likes of The Band, out of the South they came to seduce the rock-star elite – and their followers already included Clapton. The group was fronted by husband-and-wife team Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, but it was more of an interchanging musical ensemble and an instrumental tour de force that could include, at any given time, the likes of Duane and Gregg Allman, Bobby Whitlock, Leon Russell, Dave Mason, Carl Radle, Jim Gordon, Jim Price, saxophonist Bobby Keys and backing vocalist Rita Coolidge.
Clapton had fallen under their spell when they were on the bill for the American leg of Blind Faith’s ill-fated debut tour a few months earlier. So smitten was he that he instantly disbanded his post-Cream group and started gigging with Delaney and Bonnie. Struck by a musical epiphany, he felt it was his duty to spread the gospel back home – but Harrison had, in fact, been converted to this new brand of southern comfort months earlier.
He had already recomme
nded them to Apple after hearing their debut album, Accept No Substitute. Early pressings of the album were manufactured by Apple for release at the end of May, but the deal bombed over a dispute with their previous record company, Elektra. The Albert Hall show, meanwhile, was followed by a post-gig party at the Speakeasy Club, where the band hit the stage again and repeated their performance. Harrison was impressed by the easygoing camaraderie that existed between all the musicians – egos were parked by the roadside to allow the music to soar.
Harrison said, ‘I remember two occasions being at the Albert Hall thinking, “That’s a great band, I would love to be playing with them.” One was The Band when they played with Bob Dylan and the other was the Delaney and Bonnie show with Eric.’
Having Harrison in their midst, and hearing him rhapsodise about his band, prompted Delaney Bramlett to throw out an impromptu offer. ‘I just said to him, “So are you coming on the road with us? . . . We’ll come by your house and pick you up in the morning.”’
To his amazement, Harrison agreed, though he thought it highly unlikely they would make good on the invite when everyone sobered up in the morning. Yet, hours later, eyes squinting in the winter sun, here they were, standing outside his front door. Grabbing his Rosewood Telecaster guitar – the same one he had played on the rooftop at Apple back in January, and a twenty-fifth birthday gift from Fender – he found himself briefly back on the concert carousel for the first time since Candlestick Park.
‘I thought, why not? And I just grabbed my guitar and an amplifier and went with them. It was fun,’ he said.
It was also an extraordinary turnaround for Harrison, who still carried the mental scars of Beatlemania. He had always been the Beatle most consistently opposed to McCartney’s entreaties for them to go back to their roots as a touring band. ‘I didn’t want to go through all that again with The Beatles,’ he said. ‘I agreed with John, the expectations would be too high.’ But the deal, naïve though it sounded, with Bonnie and Delaney was simple. He would be the invisible guitarist standing at the back, playing second string to Clapton, and there would be no fanfare about the Beatle in their midst.
