Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  Brian buzzed me and I went into his office. “The Shea Stadium master has come from the Ed Sullivan people,” he said. “Can you book a viewing theater so we can watch it?”

  I booked a theater in Wardour Street for the afternoon and Brian and I went along, firmly clutching the film so nobody would steal it. When it was put in the projector, we settled down on one of the wide, plushy seats and the lights went down. Fifty-four minutes later, when the lights came up, we sat in silence for a few moments, then we both reached for our cigarettes and simultaneously lit up.

  “What do you think?” Brian asked.

  “Not good, Brian,” I said.

  He took another puff. “I agree. We can’t allow it to go out like that. Do you think you can fix it, Tony?”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  In every industry on this earth there is a stock phrase. A little saying that passes for an explanation so that a work-in-progress can move on without workers and supervisors standing around and agonizing. In the music industry that phrase is, “Don’t worry. We’ll fix it in the mix.” This is a real Alfred E. Neuman, “What me worry?” MAD magazine approach if there ever was one, but we are all entitled to hope.

  When the Beatles first started recording, there was no mixing of tracks. It went down in mono on a tape machine called a BTR and what was recorded was basically what you got. It could of course be sweetened by judicious placing of microphones, use of tone controls—then called knobs—and some echo, but the executive staff at EMI and Abbey Road, for all their faults and their military approach, would always insist that if it couldn’t be done properly, it didn’t get done at all. They did not have packets of magic powder full of Stardust labeled, “For the use of: sprinkle with care!” and they knew it. The Beatles’ original audition at EMI was almost canceled because the amps were of such poor quality they crackled, hissed and popped. The engineer, Norman Smith, managed to solder something together to get them to work, a mixture of skill and good luck.

  Now, three and a half years on from that audition George Martin and I sat at CTS (Cine Tele Sound), postsynch studios in Kensington Gardens Square, in Bayswater, and watched the Shea Stadium footage. The visuals were good but the sound was awful. The Beatles’ own amps were top of the line, but still not powerful enough. To compound the problems, they couldn’t hear themselves against the noise of the crowd and were out of tune and out of time. When we finished watching, George said, “Oh dear.”

  I said, “You’re right. The pictures are good, but the soundtrack sucks. We could redo the music sound to picture and synch it.” It was standard movie technique to “loop” actors’ dialogue if, for instance, the wind on the set or a passing plane drowned out their voices.

  I knew that George was thinking. But would EMI permit this? It was one thing for a concert to be filmed live, it was another thing for the Beatles to go into the studio and cut new tracks. In simple terms, it raised thorny issues about the Beatles’ exclusive recording contract with EMI. We talked it quietly through. I said, “If we take this problem to EMI, they will agonize for months and the BBC want to broadcast it on the first of March. The other thing is, even if we do redo it, no one must know. This is being sold as an ‘original soundtrack.’ ”

  George Martin was always pragmatic. If a thing needed to be done, it got done. “Right,” he said. “There might be union problems too. They are making a big issue over miming and dubbing live performances.”

  I must admit I was a bit surprised that he had gone to the heart of the problem so quickly, and didn’t refuse to take a risk, because I always saw him as very establishment. He had patrician good looks—in fact, at the fancy dress parties, which were quite the craze then, he and his wife, Judy, always dressed up as Prince Philip and the queen, and looked every inch the part. I had always liked and admired him very much. He was very gentle, well-read and knowledgeable, not a snob in any way despite running an important record label, and had a keen sense of humor. Now, I warmed to him.

  We arranged a date for the Beatles to come in and a schedule to work from. I stressed that no one must know, and it was all very hush-hush, which intrigued them. It was a strange period in their lives. They had played their last live U.K. concerts three weeks earlier, in early December, although it wasn’t advertised as such. For the concert at the Empire Theater in Liverpool alone, forty thousand fans applied for tickets, against two houses of two thousand five hundred seats each house. Other concerts took them across England, ending at the Capitol Cinema in Cardiff, Wales, on December 12, 1965. As usual, you couldn’t hear the Beatles through the screaming of the fans.

  As John said afterward in some disgust, “I reckon we could send out four waxwork dummies of ourselves and that would satisfy the crowds. Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music anymore. They’re just bloody tribal rites.”

  Since then, unusual for them, the Beatles had done nothing very much beyond visiting friends and catching up with their social life. The last time they had been in the studio was just before Christmas, in October and November, when for the first time, they worked all night to complete their new album, Rubber Soul.

  As they filed into CTS with their instruments, I said, “Don’t forget, act naturally.” They were amused. This was the title of one of Ringo’s songs in the Shea Stadium set.

  “So what’s this all about, Tone?” Ringo asked.

  “You have to lay down a new soundtrack, sound to picture,” I said. I explained the problems and they were quick to grasp what had to be done, and why it had to be secret. “If anyone asks, the story is that the soundtrack has been sweetened,” I said, adding, “think ‘Honey Pie.’ ”

  “Sounds like ‘money pie’ to me,” said John.

  We re-recorded all the songs for the final version of the film, close-synching it all carefully to match the picture, frame by frame. Ringo didn’t sing at all in the overdubs, because “Act Naturally” was impossible to do again to picture. It was recorded again later at Abbey Road and issued as a single. George’s “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby” and Paul’s “She’s a Woman” were bad visually and orally and were cut altogether. We ran out of time to do John’s “Twist and Shout,” because postsynching is a very boring and time-consuming process and John was fed up with the time it was taking.

  “I’ve got a party to go to,” he said.

  George Martin and Paul thought we should try to carry on and tried to persuade him to stay, but he was adamant and left to go to one of P. J. Proby’s wild events in Chelsea. The others shrugged, packed up their gear and left as well. George Martin and I stayed to dub a few more things. I enjoyed spending time with him because he really was very pleasant and easy to work with. We found the final tapes of the Beatles at Hollywood Bowl concert from the year before and overdubbed some of the audience’s screaming in the right places. The film ended up forty-eight minutes long, cut by eight minutes and I took it to the labs for processing.

  When the Beatles came to view the finished work, they were amazed by the quality of the film. It was very pretty, with lots of edited-in footage of them in the helicopter, flying over New York on the way to Shea, and them backstage chatting. The sound was brilliant. The synchs and overdubs, seamless. We never told the Ed Sullivan people, or anyone else.

  The Beatles didn’t want to continue with live concerts, and even though they moaned a bit, Brian had set up several dates that they had to fulfill. The first, in June 1966 were three days in Germany. It would be their first visit to Hamburg, where once they were nobodies, in three and a half years. Many old friends were there to meet them at the railway station on their arrival: Astrid, Bert Kaempfert and even Bettina, the generous barmaid from the Star Club, who had been so kind to them when they were starving kids. Afterward, with Astrid, John and Paul slipped away and visited old haunts.

  On June 30 they arrived in Japan. The trip really stood out because the Japanese government spent Tokyo’s entire police budget for a year in just one day on security. Police stood
shoulder to shoulder all the way from the airport to the Hilton Hotel in Tokyo, where they stayed, and the security continued at the five shows at the Nippon Budokan, with one policeman to every three fans. There was a great deal of protest over using the Budokan for pop concerts, the first time it had ever been used in such a way. Many of the older generation were outraged. It was a sacred place, more usually used for martial arts displays. Later, in the 1970 and 1980s, everybody did a “Live at the Budokan” album.

  The Philippines, the next leg of the tour, was a disaster. To start with, the Philippine press thought their attitude to questions at press conferences was too flippant and therefore insulting. John’s response in private was to call them “the flippin’ Fillies.” Their biggest faux pas was not to take morning coffee with Imelda Marcos, the president, and their three young children, who it was reported were avid Beatles’ fans. Apparently, unknown to the Beatles, the Manila Times had informed their readers that the Beatles had invited the Marcos family to be guests of honor at the concerts and would also go to the palace to pay a courtesy call.

  The entire family, government ministers, friends and staff waited at the palace, while the Beatles remained in bed and refused to get up when a limousine was sent for them. They said they weren’t aware of the arrangement. The citizens were furious over this slur against Imelda, especially when the Manila Times ran the headline: IMELDA STOOD UP! Brian tried to apologize in a TV interview, but strangely, static interfered with the broadcast, stopping only when he stopped talking.

  Bomb threats were received and the concert fees were frozen. Worse, all security was withdrawn and the Beatles were chased to the airport by a howling mob. At the airport, the electricity was cut off to the escalators and the Beatles had to carry their luggage up two flights of stairs. At the top, the mob caught up with them. Paul raced out of their reach to Customs, but the others were shoved to the floor and kicked while they tried to crawl out of harm’s way. Brian got the brunt of the assault. He ended up bruised and battered and scared out of his wits.

  They flew to Delhi for a little R & R, and swore they would never go abroad again. On their return home, still nervous from the memory of the Filipino disaster, Brian told me, “I have never been so frightened in my life. Being assaulted by one person is one thing, but this was a howling mob of about two hundred. I really did think I would be killed.”

  Someone has to get the blame for a cock-up, and someone did, fairly or not. Vic Lewis was the Far East booker for NEMS and he came in for a great deal of ribbing. In hindsight, the Beatles could joke about it. Paul told me how he had escaped security at the Tokyo Hilton. The cordon was so tight, that even when the others snuck out, the police caught them and returned them to their suite. “I stuck the old fake mustache and big glasses on,” Paul said, “and wandered around sight-seeing.” He had even gone shopping for gifts, including lots of happi coats—Westerners call them happy coats. These were wide-sleeved short kimonos with various patterns on them. Paul gave me a couple. I wore them all the time at home because they were very comfortable and easy to wear. I wish I still had them.

  Despite saying that they would never go abroad again, another American tour had been booked for August 1966. The Beatles were bored and restless and said they wished they didn’t have to go, but the tour was almost canceled for a different reason than their boredom. A few months earlier, on March 4, John had given an interview to Maureen Cleave, a bright young reporter on the Evening Standard and a good friend of all of us from our first days in London. It was a thoughtful piece, written with Easter in mind, with John in one of his more introspective moods.

  “What do you think of the church and God?” Maureen asked.

  John said, “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. . . . We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”

  I remember reading the Standard and being interested in John’s comments, which to me seemed typical John. I certainly didn’t read anything into it, and by the next day, the article was forgotten about and the newspapers were wrapping fish and chips. However, a few months later on the eve of the Beatles’ new U.S. tour, Datebook, an important American magazine that obviously had been biding its time, saw fit to reprint the article under the inflammatory headline: WE’RE MORE POPULAR THAN JESUS. All hell broke loose around the world, particularly in the southern U.S. There were public burnings of the Beatles’ records and merchandise, radio stations refused to play their music; they were demonized. Even the Vatican’s opinion: “John’s remarks were made off-handedly and not impiously,” didn’t stop the furor.

  If Brian was alarmed, John was scared. He hadn’t meant to unleash the wrath of the godly against the Beatles and popular music. He meant what he said seriously enough, and if anything it was a condemnation of popular culture, and not an antireligious comment. John and Brian flew over to America to try to straighten it out. Brian gave a formal, scripted conference and later, John met the press for a question-and-answer session. He shouldered all the blame and gave his first press conference, in which his tone was muted and sincere. He ended up by saying, “Sorry, folks.”

  His apology was accepted, and the tour went ahead. However, many venues failed to sell out and sales were down. Their final concert, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, before a crowd of twenty-five thousand, was the last Beatles concert anywhere in the world. “Long Tall Sally” was the last song they sang that night. It represented a great deal to them all, and their mood was very down and thoughtful when they returned to England.

  PART III

  1966–1967

  13

  An artist of mass destruction named Yoko Ono was heading toward London from New York early in September 1966. We weren’t aware of it at the time—no one was—but she should have come with a warning stuck to her, like a cigarette packet, because gradually, inch by inch she intruded into our lives. She was connected to a New York conceptual art movement called Fluxus. Through her somewhat startling interactive shows, particularly “Cut Piece,” staged at Carnegie Hall, in which she invited people to cut bits off her clothing with scissors, and another one, “Bag Piece,” in which she sat silently in a big laundry sack for a very long time, she had drawn some modest attention to herself in some of New York’s arty circles. This led to her being invited to London and the Edinburgh Festival for the Destruction in Art Symposium, organized in part by Barry Miles, one of John Dunbar’s friends. Accompanied by her three-year-old daughter, Kyoko, and her second husband, Tony Cox, they traveled by the cheapest method, taking a freighter from Canada. Tony Cox had a gallery in New York called IsReal. In Yoko’s case, nothing was real, but plenty to get hung about, as John once wrote. What you got with Yoko was never what you expected, an image she enjoyed reinforcing by appearing to be very mysterious, dressed in black, most of her face hidden behind a dense curtain of frizzy hair.

  In London, she was introduced to metropolitan arty groups and managed to get quite a lot of reviews of her strange work in the Daily Telegraph. The Financial Times called her work “uplifting.” The FT also mentioned that Yoko’s father was a very wealthy Japanese banker, based in New York. There was even a very brief clip of Yoko’s work on an arts program on the BBC. Inauspiciously, John and Cynthia caught it while watching television at home in the sunroom one evening. John frowned and, as he told me a week or so later when we discussed her, he’d commented, “The woman’s a raving nutter.”

  Perhaps, but she was closing in on our innocence. NEMS managed Scaffold, the strange Liverpudlian poetry, song and humor trio, which consisted of the poet, Roger McGough, the comedian, John Gorman, and Paul’s brother, Mike McGear. They had couple of whacko hits, with songs like “Lily the Pink” and “Thank U Very Much for the Aintree Iron.” It was weird stuff, but sold well. They always did a full season at the Traverse Theater during the Edinburgh Festival, so Brian and I would go up to see them and also to keep an eye out for talent. Then Brian would have a couple
of joints and book everything in sight. Shortly after she had arrived from New York, that summer Yoko went to the Edinburgh Festival with the Destruction in Art Symposium. Brian drifted off on his own and accidentally caught part of her show. He showed me a catalogue and mentioned that he had seen a very boring show by an unusual Japanese woman.

  “What kind of paintings?” I asked, assuming that was what he was talking about.

  “Oh, no, paintings I understand,” Brian said. “Sculpture I understand. But I’m not sure I understand someone who sits inside a bag onstage and does nothing at all for a long time, but then, I didn’t stay long. Two or three minutes perhaps.” He looked a bit vague. “The thing is, I might have said I’d book her at the Saville.”

  “Oh dear,” I said, as Brian sighed.

  Shortly after that, Paul dropped by my desk, looking a little fed up. “Look, Tone, do us a favor, will you?

  I said jokingly, “What do you want now?” Paul managed a grin.

  “There’s this woman, a Japanese artist—” he started. It seemed Paul had first become aware of the woman at an event of performance art he had attended at the Royal Academy during his increasing forays into the avant-garde scene. Then, she started coming round to his house. Paul said, “She’s very pushy. She keeps making demands as if she has a right. First it was for old song lyrics, then it was money to put on an exhibition at an art gallery.”

  “Throw her out,” 1 advised. “Get Mal to do whatever Mal does.”

  “Well, she’s a bit persistent. She wants the lyrics to butter up John Cage, she says his hobby is collecting musical manuscripts. She didn’t seem to understand that we don’t have full scores.” Paul and John couldn’t read or write music and scrawled their songs on the backs of any scrap of paper on hand.