The Beatles on the Roof

by Tony Barrell

  There were small puddles on the roof from recent rain showers, and the surface must have looked uninviting to Paul, who made the practical suggestion that it be reinforced or shored up somehow to carry the group and all the equipment they needed. And they settled on the coming Wednesday as the big day for their concert on the roof.

  Mal Evans had a slightly different memory of the idea’s genesis, writing in ‘Mal’s Diary’ for The Beatles Book Monthly that the idea for the rooftop concert came following lunch on the Sunday, “after we’d taken a breath of fresh air on the roof”. In Michael’s account, the idea was suggested by him over lunch downstairs; in Mal’s version, they went up to the roof to take the air, and the lightbulb moment occurred there and then.

  Glyn Johns’ version, like Michael’s, began with lunch at Apple but took a different course: “Ringo and I were in conversation about the building and its attributes and he asked me if I had ever been up on the roof, saying it had a wonderful view of the West End of London. So he took me and Michael Lindsay-Hogg up there, showing us a large area of flat roof with wonderful views of the city stretching away to the southwest. I suggested that if they wanted to play to a large crowd, why not play on the roof to the whole of the West End? We went back downstairs and put it to the others, and after some discussion it was agreed.” That account, which involves only Glyn, Ringo and Michael, seems at odds with Ethan Russell’s photograph from that weekend, which also shows Paul, Mal, Kevin and two cameramen – unless there was more than one roof sortie.

  In yet another version, that of Billy Preston, the rooftop idea came from a different Beatle: “We were trying to figure out where we could have a concert, where everybody could come. So John came up with the brilliant idea to just play on the roof and play for everybody.” Alternative accounts credit Ringo with the idea. Michael Lindsay-Hogg has joked that there are so many claimants to the rooftop idea that they include “the cook who made the apple crumble”.

  Michael wasn’t aware that Jefferson Airplane had already played a rooftop gig in New York the previous month. “That December for me was really pretty busy,” he explains. “We finished Rock And Roll Circus, then took a couple of days off, then I was starting to cut the Circus and also talking to The Beatles about the television special, and we decided we’d go in January. So I didn’t have much else in my mind.”

  Ironically, although he had been dead set against a live performance, it was George Harrison’s actions, more than those of his bandmates, that paved the way to the rooftop. Both of his stipulations in that January 15 meeting were crucial here: not only the cancellation of a grand official gig, but also the move to Apple. They didn’t need to ask the permission of the building’s owners to play on this roof, because they were the owners. That gave them the freedom and flexibility to be spontaneous, and it also offered them an ideal London location. If they had played a concert somewhere in Twickenham, it is likely to have required more planning and wouldn’t have pulled the size or quality of the crowds they achieved in Mayfair. On top of all that, George helped to create The Beatles’ “rooftop sound” by inviting Billy Preston to their January sessions.

  As Monday dawned, with a new goal in clear sight, the group sharpened up their act, refining their slim pickings of new material so that it was gig-ready.

  ‘Get Back’ was in a decent, finished state, with all the lyrics present that would appear in the recorded version. Although it had been partly inspired by news stories about immigration, it had evolved into one of Paul’s stock of “character” or “story” songs.

  An instinctive songwriter, Paul often allowed his lyrics to develop in a euphonic way without any serious analysis of their meaning, tossing in names of characters to add colour and interest. Asked in 1976 about some of the words to his songs, he explained: “Somebody says, ‘What did you mean by that?’ and really I don’t know. It just comes into your head… The whole meaning behind it starts to occur to you after you’ve written it. I suppose it’s like going to a psychiatrist: you have a dream and you take it to the psychiatrist, and I suppose it’s filled with meaning, but it’s down to the psych to get it out. You just tell him you dreamed about walking round in your knickers, and he says, ‘Well, this means…’ It’s a bit the same with a song: you write a song in order to put some words to your tune; stuff just comes out… You hum along to your tune and something comes out, you start to get the idea.”

  Nearly 40 years later, he was still writing story songs and talking about them: “I think a lot of them, besides ‘Eleanor Rigby’, tend to be comedy. It’s me doing the tongue-in-cheek thing, whereas ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was more serious. I think that’s why it was more successful… It’s quite a fun thing to do, to just dream up a name of a character and just try and write the story of that character and then make it fit with another character.”

  While he may have seized on the city of Tucson, Arizona, because Linda had been to university there, Paul has denied that the characters in ‘Get Back’ are based on real individuals. “Many people have since claimed to be the Jo Jo and they’re not – let me put that straight! I had no particular person in mind: again it was a fictional character, half man, half woman, all very ambiguous. I often left things ambiguous. I like doing that in my songs.”

  Reasonably happy with their achievements in the basement, The Beatles decided there was still time for some larking about. Confident with ‘Get Back’ now, Paul launched into a playful foreign-language version, calling forth fragments of passable German that he recalled from the group’s Hamburg days at the other end of the sixties. “Geh weg!” he sang (“go away”). “Geh raus! (“get out”). He also added a little French towards the end. Another performance of the song, in English again this time, was so strong that it was used for the ‘Get Back’ single and the Let It Be album.

  Mal Evans wrote in his personal diary that an engineer had visited the Apple building that Monday to inspect the load-bearing qualities of its flat roof, with the conclusion that it would support 5 pounds per square inch. Amplifiers, speakers and a Fender Rhodes piano, plus the weight of five grown musicians, a film director, cameramen and assorted technicians, would create a load of many hundreds of pounds, so measures were taken to reinforce it. Scaffolding was hired and erected across the roof, and wooden planks were ordered and fitted on top of the scaffolding, running parallel to the front and back of the building. In addition, metal poles were fitted beneath the roof.

  Debbie Wellum was working in Apple’s reception while the work was carried out. “My reception was littered with things like scaffolding and planks, and bags of tools. They hauled most of the planks up from the outside of the building.” Taking no chances, Mal arranged for the roof to be reinforced not only on top, but from underneath as well. For several days, Chris O’Dell, trying to concentrate on her A&R work in her top-floor office, was continually distracted by the sounds of workmen erecting poles to provide additional support from below. The noise of the work, and the comings and goings of vans and strong men in overalls, did not go unnoticed by the Apple Scruffs and other fans hanging around The Beatles’ headquarters that week.

  On the Tuesday, the group continued with run-throughs of ‘Get Back’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’. They also played ‘One After 909’, and John recollected that he had offered the song once to The Rolling Stones, who hadn’t been interested (the Lennon/McCartney song ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ had a better reception, and became the Stones’ second single). That day The Beatles also tackled two of George’s compositions: ‘Something’, whose lyrics he was still struggling with, and ‘Old Brown Shoe’ (which would become the B-side of ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’, released in May that year).

  John brought in a new gadget he had just discovered: a Stylophone, a small electronic, monophonic instrument whose flat 20-note metal keyboard was played with a stylus attached to the machine by a short wire. As George ran through the tricky chords of his song, other members of the band continued to foo
l around with the toy, leaving the vibrato switch on and playing off-key solos.

  On the same day, John and Yoko had a meeting with Allen Klein in his suite at the swish Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. Impressed by the tough-talking wheeler-dealer, John sent a message to EMI, saying that “from now on Allen Klein handles all my things”. In early February, to Paul’s displeasure, Klein would become the new Apple manager, sowing one of the seeds of The Beatles’ break-up.

  But now, on Tuesday, January 28, The Beatles had a more pressing concern. When they woke up the next day, they had a gig to play. They were set, as far as they were concerned, to play the roof. But Michael Lindsay-Hogg suddenly spotted a problem. “Tony Richmond and I looked at the weather projections on TV that night, because we had to get everything totally ready if we were going to shoot the next day. But the weather didn’t look good enough: it was too gloomy. And then we woke up in the morning – the cameramen were on standby – and we saw that it was indeed very cloudy and very dull, so we pushed the shoot back a day. If the weather had been good enough, we were also going to use a helicopter for some aerial shots. But we certainly couldn’t have used it on that day.”

  The idea of using a helicopter for the concert on Thursday was ultimately abandoned for legal reasons. As Mal Evans wrote, “We’d have loved to get a helicopter shot to show both the fellows on the roof and the crowd in the street but the law won’t let you fly one over London and it was too late to borrow a balloon!”

  “Whether there was an air-traffic problem with using a helicopter I don’t know,” says Michael, “but it may have been that we were told we couldn’t do it. Lots of times in that period, you had the idea and you went forward with it as much as you could, until someone told you, ‘You actually can’t do this. You’ll be arrested!’”

  The Beatles continued their rehearsals in the basement. During a long conversation with John, even as the rooftop concert was looming, Paul was still advocating the idea of the group performing their new songs in front of the cameras in a studio or theatre. Mal Evans told Paul he had just had a dream about The Beatles playing a fantastic show, and this was something Paul still hankered after: they could play to an invited audience at the Saville Theatre, he suggested. But, as when Paul had criticised George’s playing back at Twickenham, Paul was listening to himself again and disliking the way he sounded: like someone badgering the group to make a Judy Garland-style comeback.

  With 885 days separating Thursday’s performance from their last concert at Candlestick Park, they were unaccustomed to playing live and were nervous about doing it again. Paul reminisced about how jittery they had been when they played concerts back in the early sixties, but how the feeling had waned with subsequent performances. His message was that the only way to conquer their nerves was to play more gigs.

  After a day of lacklustre rehearsals, The Beatles talked optimistically with Michael Lindsay-Hogg about the big plan for the next day. George, who seemed to have an offbeat vision of how the rooftop concert would look, asked Michael if he was still expecting them to be “on the chimney with a lot of people” the following day. The director, who had been through so many abortive discussions about unrealised concerts, joked that he didn’t use the word “expecting” any more. But like the others, George sounded upbeat about the imminent event. He was fine with it – he’d do it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Up On The Roof

  Dawn broke almost imperceptibly over the West End of London on Thursday, January 30, 1969. The overlapping clouds, in varying shades of grey, were so thick that they allowed only a glimmer of sunlight to penetrate. Every so often, as the clouds shifted like airborne tectonic plates, a patch of greyish-blue sky became visible, only to be obscured minutes later.

  It was dry, and not terribly cold; late December had been much worse, with Arctic winds, blizzards and deep snow drifts causing disruption in much of Britain. The month of January had been relatively mild, though the wind was brisk today, blowing at more than 11 miles per hour, creating a significant wind-chill factor. Most of the people in the streets early that morning were wrapped up in coats, scarves and gloves as the west-southwesterly wind whipped up Piccadilly, Pall Mall and Shaftesbury Avenue, and gusts funnelled into narrower thoroughfares including Duke Street, St James’s Square, Wardour Street and Savile Row, blowing sweet wrappers, cigarette butts and the other litter of the previous evening around.

  The gloom was punctuated by the headlights of a few early-morning vehicles on the roads, orange lights on top of taxis and lights in the windows of offices being cleaned ready for the influx of staff. Electric light spilled from sleepy Mayfair hotels, the Ritz on Piccadilly, Brown’s on Albemarle Street and Claridge’s on the corner of Brook and Davies Streets, and the lights were on in West End Central, the main police station in Savile Row, near the junction with Burlington Street, as uniformed officers went about their business.

  The police would intervene in The Beatles’ rooftop concert much earlier than most people imagine. In fact, they came close to scuppering it before it had begun. Up in the Chiltern Hills, to the north-west of London, Dave Harries and another technical engineer, Keith Slaughter, were leaving Dave’s home in the market town of Chesham and driving to Savile Row. The previous day they had paid a visit to the studios at EMI in Abbey Road, collecting the best amplification equipment they could find for the open-air show and loading it into a vehicle from the EMI carpool, and now they were motoring towards the capital through the early-morning gloom.

  “It was really early, about four o’clock in the morning,” remembers Dave, “and we looked really dodgy, because we had ropes and speakers and amps in the back, and we were all dressed up in big coats with hats and scarves. And suddenly the police pulled us over. We must have looked like burglars, I suppose. They said, ‘Where are you going?’ But the concert was all hush-hush, and we weren’t supposed to say anything about it. We said we were sorry, but we couldn’t tell them where we were going. We told them it was a film shoot and that we were working for EMI Records. And fortunately, it wasn’t Keith’s car, it was an EMI pool car, so Keith said, ‘If you check the ownership of this vehicle, you’ll find it’s an EMI pool car.’ Which they did, and they let us go. Had we told them what we were doing, what it was all about, they might have stopped everything at that point.”

  Arriving in Savile Row after their close shave, Dave and Keith unloaded the gear, including several speakers, hauled everything to the roof and began setting it up with the help of Alan Parsons. “The speakers were on stands and could be swivelled downwards,” says Dave, “and we positioned them at the front of the roof, facing the street, and we had as many power amps as we could get. We were trying to make it as noisy as possible.” Down in the basement, they connected three recording desks and ran long cables all the way up to the roof, and checked that everything was working.

  Down at street level, the signs outside London’s darkened theatres promised a rich mix of entertaining shows, whose stars were currently slumbering in theatrical digs and hotel rooms. As you travelled down Shaftesbury Avenue, there was Hair, still packing people in at the Shaftesbury Theatre. At the Saville Theatre, which Brian Epstein had leased not long ago for a series of rock concerts, there was Queen Passionella And The Sleeping Beauty, a “Pantomime Extraordinaire” starring the female impersonator Danny La Rue in the lead role – a show that, according to one reviewer, was “not only unsuitable but, to judge from the few I saw around me, deeply boring for small children”.

  The Queen’s Theatre was staging The Servant Of Two Masters, a modern adaptation of an 18th-century Italian comedy, starring the pioneering British rock’n’roll star Tommy Steele as the hapless servant Truffaldino. The nearby Globe had There’s A Girl In My Soup, a romantic farce starring Jon Pertwee and Donald Sinden, which for a while would hold the record as London’s longest-running comedy stage show.

  Two old Liverpudlian friends of The Beatles were also treading the boards here. The Adelphi in the Strand
was presenting the hugely popular musical comedy Charlie Girl, starring Gerry Marsden of Gerry & The Pacemakers, while the London Palladium had the pantomime Jack And The Beanstalk, starring the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck as the boy who trades a cow for some magic beans. Jimmy had attended the same primary school as John Lennon, and when John had played Jimmy The Beatles’ first record, ‘Love Me Do’, he told John he should sell the song to The Everly Brothers – a remark that the Beatle would often laughingly throw back in the comedian’s face after his group had become global superstars.

  Over at the Ambassadors near Cambridge Circus, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap was already in its “17th inexorable year”, and still pleading with its audiences not to reveal the play’s surprise twist ending to anybody. Further south at the Victoria Palace Theatre, opposite Victoria Station, The Black And White Minstrel Show somehow continued to entertain thousands of punters, with its white male performers “blacking up” to play grotesquely offensive caricatures of African-American singers. In 1967 the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination had delivered an unsuccessful petition to the BBC asking for the Minstrels’ massively popular TV show to be taken off air.

  The traffic picked up as the early car commuters began arriving, and muffled car radios could be heard playing classical music broadcast by BBC Radio 3 and pop music on Radio 1. Fleetwood Mac’s sedate, blissed-out ‘Albatross’, number one in the charts, was played at regular intervals, and other discs on heavy rotation were Stevie Wonder’s ‘For Once In My Life’, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In The Street’, The Move’s ‘Blackberry Way’ and Sandie Shaw’s ‘Monsieur Dupont’.