The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  Like McCartney on that first day of filming, the other Beatles didn’t always arrive on time for their rehearsal duties. Though their individual timekeeping was erratic, The Beatles nonetheless became everyday commuters at one of the worst times of the year, the middle of winter. The weather wasn’t the main problem: in fact, January 1969 was an unusually mild month, thanks to a gentle airstream caressing England from the south-west. It was the shortness of the days: the fact that the sun didn’t come up until around 8 a.m., but went down again as early as 4 p.m. At this time of year, many ordinary commuters know the misery of leaving their homes before sunrise and returning to them after sunset, as each day’s window of light is eclipsed by their hours in the workplace.

  The Beatles would have suffered – more than many office and shop workers, who at least had windows to look out of – from daylight deprivation. The term “seasonal affective disorder” (SAD) had yet to be coined (it wasn’t named in print until 1985) but these short days would likely have had a negative bearing on the musicians’ wellbeing, mood and mental health. SAD is a form of depression, whose symptoms can include lethargy, anxiety and irritability.

  Moreover, getting up every morning for work was not something to which they were accustomed, and would possibly have brought back unpleasant memories of their days as ordinary jobbing teenagers. Just 10 years before, John had briefly toiled as a labourer on a building site, which he loathed. Paul had once spent numbingly tedious days winding electrical coils, while George had worked as an apprentice electrician, and Ringo had been a railway delivery boy, a barman on a ferry and a trainee joiner.

  The idea was still for The Beatles to develop new material for a series of concerts in a location that had yet to be decided. The concerts would be filmed for the TV special and recorded for a live album. “We went into the filming with no plan for where the concerts would take place,” says Michael Lindsay-Hogg, “and the idea was that the plan would come as we talked and we all turned up at the soundstage on January 2nd.”

  That day at Twickenham, the group ran through no fewer than three of the new songs they would eventually play in the rooftop concert – though, of course, they had no idea then that they would be playing from the top of the Apple building. They sat in a huddle on the soundstage to play music – as Elvis and his band had done in the Comeback Special, and as members of The Rolling Stones had done in Godard’s Sympathy For The Devil.

  Before Paul arrived via his public-transport adventure, the others got off to a reasonable start, playing embryonic versions of Lennon’s ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘Dig A Pony’. Other songs were performed that would have no place in the concert, and indeed would never properly be recorded by The Beatles as a group. These included George’s poignant ‘All Things Must Pass’ and John’s ‘On The Road To Marrakesh’.*

  Later, the whole group would tackle ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, on which John and Paul had evidently collaborated before these rehearsals – Paul having written the main hook, and John contributing the “Everybody had a hard year” tune from his December cassette recording. By now they had become quite adept at fusing Lennon song fragments with McCartney fragments, as they had done with ‘We Can Work It Out’ (John adding the “Life is very short” middle section to Paul’s jauntier verses and chorus), ‘A Day In The Life’ (Paul adding the section about getting out of bed) and ‘Baby, You’re A Rich Man’ (Paul adding the chorus to Lennon’s verses).

  On that opening day of the sessions they complained about the cavernous space in which they were having to perform. This was Stage One, the studios’ biggest soundstage – a spartan cuboid box 118 feet long and 64 feet wide, with a 34-foot-high ceiling. In happier days, they had filmed most of the interior scenes for A Hard Day’s Night and Help! here. Today it was quite cold – recalling the site’s earlier use as an ice rink – although occasionally they would receive bursts of heat from the lights suspended around them, illuminating the scene for the cameras.

  Kevin Harrington, the 18-year-old red-haired Londoner who had helped Mal Evans see to The Beatles’ everyday needs during the making of the White Album, could immediately see that this setting wasn’t conducive to creativity and contentment. “It just didn’t feel right,” Kevin recalls now. “I’d spent months in this nice environment at Abbey Road, and then we were suddenly plonked in this aircraft hangar, with The Beatles in the middle and all these people around them, and they were under all this pressure to perform.”

  Paul Bond was 22 and the youngest member of the camera crew. “I was the clapper boy, spending a lot of the time loading and unloading films. But it was lovely to be working in January, because traditionally the film industry here doesn’t work then. It was a month’s work, plus we were working with The Beatles, so it was just heaven. I was Charlie Hot Potatoes to all the girls I knew. But the group were playing in this vast, empty space, and it seemed wrong.”

  There were consolations for George and Ringo, who had some shiny new equipment to play with. George had taken delivery of a new electric guitar, a Rosewood Telecaster custom-made for him by Fender in the USA, which had its own seat on the aircraft that transported it to London. Ringo had a new Ludwig Hollywood kit, with a maple finish, though he preferred to use an old Ludwig snare drum instead of the all-metal snare that came with the Hollywood kit. John was still playing the Epiphone Casino hollow-bodied electric guitar he had been using since the Revolver album, though during the recording of the White Album he had removed its sunburst finish; it had been sanded down to the bare wood, which had then been lacquered. Paul was playing a Blu¨thner piano and his old Ho¨fner violin bass, which still had the setlist from Candlestick Park taped to it. During the sessions, he would remove a “Bassman” sticker from his bass speaker cabinet and whimsically affix it to his Ho¨fner as well.

  As the first day of rehearsals progressed, there were tentative discussions about the locations for the upcoming concerts they were expected to play. “We talked about it a bit, and they all had different ideas,” says Michael. “I think Ringo had the idea to go back to the Cavern in Liverpool, where they’d played in the early days, and do the special there. But my feeling was that the world had changed so much since they’d started, and their world had changed so much, that it needed a bigger stage than that. And I’d heard about this amphitheatre on the coast of Tunisia. It may have been that I was talking to someone who was vacationing in that part of the world and said something about that amphitheatre. It could have been a friend, because at that period a lot of people in the rock’n’roll community, and the hippie community, were spending a lot of time in northern Africa – in places like Morocco and Algeria.”

  The building in question was the huge amphitheatre at the town of El Djem, near the coast of Tunisia, which was built by the Romans in the 3rd century AD. This was the setting for gladiatorial combat and chariot races in ancient times, and it could accommodate 35,000 seated spectators.

  “It seemed to fit the bill for a variety of reasons: one, because it would be the world stage they were on, as opposed to just the Liverpudlian stage they were on, and because of the scale of the thing; and two, I also had these images of it starting at dawn, and the dawn in North Africa can be very beautiful. The stage would begin to be set up at dawn – I don’t think The Beatles would be up at dawn, but it would be Mal or whoever would be setting up the stage – and then the sun would start to come up. That part of the world had a variety of people: Arabs, Muslims, Christians, black, white, but in any event we would make it a kind of melting pot, so when The Beatles began to play, the idea was that the music would start to float across the desert – an aerial shot would pull away from the desert and little musical notes would appear on the screen and fade into the distance, and from the distance would come a variety of people of all races and creeds – because The Beatles were ecumenical in their beliefs about how we should all get on. So by the end of the show, when it was dark and 10 or 11 o’clock at night, the idea was that the amphitheatre would be fille
d with the world. And so when they were playing ‘Let It Be’ or ‘The Long And Winding Road’, it would be the world and The Beatles, all together. That was my idea, which I still think is a pretty good one, actually.”

  But already the group showed little enthusiasm for a big overseas show, and Paul pointed out that Ringo had ruled out the idea of travelling abroad, not having enjoyed the food in India. At this point, even Paul seemed to favour the easy option of broadcasting their TV special from these Twickenham studios, with a finale of some kind staged here or at a smaller venue, or perhaps even outdoors.

  Back they came to Twickenham on the second day. This time Paul was an early arrival, and he amused himself with some well-known tunes on the piano, including ‘Tea For Two’ and ‘Chopsticks’, before toying with the theme tune for Torchy The Battery Boy – a children’s puppet drama series directed and co-produced by Gerry Anderson* and shown on Britain’s ITV network between 1960 and 1961, during the formative years of The Beatles.

  During that Friday, they managed some decent run-throughs of ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, with Paul leading them through the bluesy, screaming bridge, which they tried out on one occasion in two-part harmony. John was still adjusting his words for the “hard year” section, and everybody was having a “facelift”, a “knees-up” and a “soft dream” – though he had begun using “wet dream” instead by now.

  Paul was enthusing about the idea of being filmed like this as they refined new material. He likened it to a film about Picasso painting, in which the artist might start with a blank canvas and end up with a finished work – suggesting that they were also starting from nothing, but would end up with a priceless TV show.

  They made more than a dozen attempts at George’s ‘All Things Must Pass’, and played Paul’s new song ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, but there was a lot of fooling around as well, and they were continually drawn to old material – other people’s songs, such as ‘Hitch Hike’, ‘What Do You Want To Make Those Eyes At Me For?’ and ‘Piece Of My Heart’, as well as songs from their own back catalogue, such as ‘I’m So Tired’ and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ from the White Album.

  Every time they dropped their new songs and burst into an oldie, it was an act of procrastination: they were retreating from the task at hand, and lazily seeking solace in numbers they already knew and required no work. They would have been wise to the fact that the new material demanded discussions about how it should be arranged and played, creating the potential for conflict between them (which did actually happen several times during these sessions), while old songs could be dashed off casually and comfortably. And in the absence of a strict musical director, they were at liberty to hop haphazardly from one song to another at will, often leaving numbers unfinished. It certainly wasn’t the best recipe for job satisfaction.

  Their adoption of a loose, stripped-down sound – turning away from the overdubbed complexity of some of their mid-period work, such as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to make what John called “honest” recordings – was partly inspired by the music and working methods of The Band, the rootsy Canadian-American group that had released their debut album, Music From Big Pink, the year before. However, as George Harrison’s biographer Graeme Thomson has pointed out, The Beatles’ situation was a million miles from that of The Band’s: “The parallels in reality were almost non-existent. The Band worked in a comfortable old wooden house in the Catskill Mountains, making music all day, playing American football in the yard and chess and cards in the living room, eating and drinking together. The warm, easy sound they made was a natural extension of their friendships and the lives they were living. The Beatles, by contrast, were recording in a sterile film studio and were finding it increasingly hard to be civil to one another. Not only that, they struggled to function as a band any more.”

  It must have occurred to The Beatles that less than nine months before, they had played in an environment that was the polar opposite of these studios. They had enjoyed sunny days and balmy evenings in Rishikesh, India, where they meditated and recited mantras with the Maharishi and sat around jamming blissfully on acoustic guitars. One of the Beatle wives who accompanied them, Pattie Boyd, paints a vivid picture of those days: “The environment was very inspiring, and Paul and John were in a very mellow mood, which was not always the case when they were songwriting in London. They were all on the same plane, and it became much easier for George to join in with them and write songs and not be rejected. They got on creatively really, really well in Rishikesh. We were there for a reason and it made everybody really mellow. Plus, I have to say – no drink or drugs. There was no outside stimulating interference, which was a major factor…”

  Another major factor was that they hadn’t been sent expressly to India to prepare for a musical project – although in the end, perhaps precisely because they were lacking that kind of career pressure, they wrote a heap of songs, many of which ended up on the White Album. In fact, when McCartney reverted to type in Rishikesh and started to plot The Beatles’ next move, he was brought up short by Harrison. “George actually once got very annoyed and told me off,” he remembered years later, “because I was trying to think of the next album. He said, ‘We’re not fucking here to do the next album, we’re here to meditate.’ It was like, ‘Ooh excuse me for breathing!’, you know. George was quite strict about that.”

  During their discussions in Twickenham, it emerged that there was a problem with the new material – apart from the fact that there wasn’t that much of it. Both George and Paul admitted that many of the songs they had written were slow numbers, echoing John’s complaint about his own songs the day before, when he had suggested they try to write some rockers.

  One uptempo song that they played that day was new to most of the people around them – the film crew and the sound technicians – although it wasn’t new to the group. ‘One After 909’ was a song begun by John as a teenager back in the late fifties: a juvenile homage to the American tradition of songs about trains, and to skiffle numbers like Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’. The Beatles had recorded it at EMI back in 1963, but it hadn’t been deemed good enough to release. Now they dusted it off, though they had reservations about the words.

  “I never, sort of, knew what it was about before,” admitted Paul. “So she’s on a train and he, sort of…”

  “He goes to the station and misses it,” explained John.

  “But he goes back and finds it was the wrong number,” said Paul.

  “Wrong location,” said George.

  “To rhyme with ‘station’, you know,” said John.

  Paul added that his brother, Mike, had been suggesting for years that The Beatles use the song. “But I said, ‘Well, you know, Mike, you don’t understand about these things, you know.’”

  George made a case here for meaningless song lyrics. “Most people just don’t give a shit what the words are about, as long as it’s ‘pop of the month’,” he said. And John confessed that “we always thought it wasn’t finished. We couldn’t be bothered finishing it.”

  The song is certainly questionable. While the railway-flavoured lyrics fit the tune nicely as it chugs along, they don’t make sense in the cold light of day. After the narrator’s “baby” has informed him, perhaps with a deliberately cryptic vagueness, that she is taking the train behind the one scheduled for 9.09, he tells her to “move over, honey” because he is also “travelling on that line”. The narrator runs to the station, laden with luggage, only to be informed by a “railman” that he’s in the wrong place. We aren’t told whether or not the railman was helpful enough to tell him where the right location is. Apparently not, because our hero then runs back home with his bags, and somehow discovers that he “got the number wrong”. That’s the end of the story, and we don’t even know if his baby was travelling on the one after the 9.09 a.m. or after the 9.09 p.m., which would have made a considerable difference to his romantic plans.

  Betw
een rehearsing songs, John was making improvised quips, as he was wont to do, parodying the lyrics of songs such as ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ (“Desmond had a sparrow in the parking lot”) and composing humorous dedications to an imaginary audience. He pretended to have received a request from “the Cement Mixers’ Guild”, which was the actual name that a coterie of female Beatles fans had once given themselves.

  The Beatles had only played for two days, and now they had the luxury of Saturday and Sunday off, which ought to have raised their spirits a little. Back home, George wrote a new gospel song, ‘Hear Me Lord’. Paul, in a more retrospective frame of mind, put Sgt. Pepper on his turntable. They also watched some television.

  The BBC had some interesting TV shows that weekend. Saturday evening brought Happening For Lulu, a variety showcase for the eponymous pop singer, broadcast from the corporation’s Shepherd’s Bush building and entailing a bit of singing, dancing and comedy plus some special guests. The Daily Express, which described Lulu as “that explosive little cracker from the Glasgow backstreets”, warned that each show “will be informal and unscripted, with an audience of teenagers”. The show was also live, so there was no telling what might happen. The guests that evening included The Jimi Hendrix Experience, performing ‘Voodoo Chile’ and a couple of minutes of ‘Hey Joe’ – at which point Jimi departed from the script.

  “We’re gonna stop playing this rubbish,” he announced (you could almost hear the distant wailing from his public-relations team), “and dedicate a song to the Cream… I’d like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.” They immediately tore into a cover of Cream’s ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’, which ended up crashing the sacred evening news slot and prompted the producers to take the show off air. The following week, the programme was billed simply as Lulu, the Happening no doubt dispensed with for fear of something similar occurring again.