Although far less than he could have gotten for the sale of NEMS on the open market, in 1967 half a million pounds was still a very large sum of money. Brian believed it would be sufficient. In the end, although it was legally complex, he tempered the deal by deciding that he couldn’t let his protégés down: he would retain exclusive management rights over Cilla and the Beatles. Part of this decision was based on the fact that in the new nine-year record contract he had recently negotiated with EMI for the Beatles, he had written in 25 percent for himself. Regardless of whether he managed the Beatles or not, he would still get 25 percent of their earnings from record sales for nine years. This subtlety had somehow escaped the Beatles, but it bothered Brian. It gnawed at his conscience because in his heart he knew he had conned them. This is probably why he decided to keep them back from the NEMS deal with Stigwood, so he couldn’t be accused of cynically exploiting them—which he was.
I had gotten to know Stiggie quite well because I was the one who promoted the groups he managed, such as Cream and the Bee Gees. I even saw more of Stiggie than I intended. One afternoon Chas Chandler and I were walking back to the offices from the BBC in Portland Place, when we passed Stigwood’s luxury home and decided to pop in for a drink. The front door was never locked (few doors were at the time) and we walked along the hall to the living room, the door to which stood wide open. Directly in front of us was a big pouffe upon which a sexual act was taking place between Stiggie and a soon-to-be pop star who wanted to be managed by him. Chas and I backed out and crept away, closing the door very quietly behind us. In the street we laughed like lunatics.
While Rome burned and Brian was deranged, business back at the office continued as usual. Thinking we were inventing the wheel, we started experimenting with our promo videos, making them more complex by acting out the story of whatever song was about to be released. We had no format to follow. Our creative efforts were the precursors of the modern-day storyboarded video, every one a nice little mini movie. We didn’t know we were giving birth to a new industry. Brian loved all this stuff and would discuss it endlessly, asking how it was going, dropping by to watch. “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” were the first really creative ones, then some of the Sgt. Pepper songs were done shortly after. After some experimentation, we shot them on film because we’d done “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” on the first color videotape when it came out, but the tape was still very unstable. One of the plusses of this new format was that you could rewind and shoot again, but if you did that a couple of times it just shredded, which was useless for editing and you’d end up with a truckload of damaged tape. We did shoot them on video first, but as a standby we shot them again on film and transferred them to video.
They were beautifully done. I got in Peter Goldman, an avant-garde Swedish TV director, for “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields.” Michael Lindsey-Hogg did the Beatle shots in “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” which were filmed in Chiswick House in London. “Strawberry Fields” was filmed at Knole Park, which surrounded the stately home of the same name, at Sevenoaks in Kent. Knole was a perfect location and we used Bright’s Hotel, an old-fashioned solid former inn on the old coaching road in the heart of Sevenoaks, as our base during filming. Peter and I, as well as the small crew, stayed there, but the Beatles were doing their usual twenty things a day, and stayed in town. They came and went as needed, whisked down in one of the limousines.
During a break from filming, John and I were strolling back to Bright’s for a pot of tea and a sticky bun, when John spotted Ye Olde Antiques Shop on the High Street next door to the hotel.
“Hey, let’s go in here,” he said. John loved junk shops and church sales and bazaars and was always picking up junk to cram into his overdecorated house, perhaps to compensate for what he called its posh look. He forged in ahead of me and we started to browse.
“Hey, Tone, what do you think of this?” he called from the depths of the dark interior. I ambled over. John was holding up a small circus poster mounted on a board. It had subtle colors and a nice old-fashioned typeface that read: FOR THE BENEFIT OF MR. KITE. He liked quirky things like that.
I nodded. “It’ll look good on your kitchen wall next to the milk safe.”
John grinned. The idea appealed to him. But I think more than that, he was already getting the idea for a song. He paid a couple of pounds and carried it back to his limo. I was in the studio a few months later during the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band sessions, while everyone sat around for endless days getting stoned, while he wrote the song. It was indeed a flash of brilliance, pure John. All he did was virtually lift the words from the poster and then put them to a tune. It was a pretty nifty two-quid’s worth.
The establishment, or atmosphere, shots for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” were done separately up in Liverpool in and around the actual places described: the barber’s shop, the man from the bank and the fire station with the clean machine. The entire lot was done in two days. We all had a great deal of fun, in marked contrast to the almost oppressive atmosphere at the office. It seemed to me that there was just too much money to handle, too much business to take care of. Even though the Beatles had given up concerts and touring that year, the money from the record sales alone was like an unstoppable avalanche. It might have been only on paper, but it had to be dealt with, taxes had to be paid, legal ways of hiding it devised. I believe it was around this time that Brian reputedly hid vast sums in Swiss banking accounts. If he did—and he could have forgotten about them—they have never been found.
As a retreat away from it all, Paul had bought a near-derelict farm in western Scotland, overlooking the Isle of Skye and the Mull of Kintyre, where he could live the simple life. John promptly bought an Irish island and floated a gypsy-hued caravan across the sea to live in while building the house of his dreams, which never got built—something else that never happened. It was while Paul was at High Cross farm, watching the rain drip through a hole in the roof, that he first got the idea for “Fixing a Hole.” He went on to write it in his psychedelic den at Cavendish Road. While it was memorable to hear Paul come up with the lyrics, that’s not what I remember most about that night. Something else is foremost in my mind, further proof that the Beatles, in those early days, were naive boys when it came to money. Gradually the den had filled up that night until there were half a dozen musicians and friends, all hanging out, all doing our peace and love thing. As the hours passed, everyone grew hungry.
“Tone, do you mind popping out to get us a load of tandoori curry?” Paul asked.
“No problem,” I said. Since I assumed the guys down at the local curry house were not likely to let me have a take-away on credit, I added, “Have you got any cash?”
“Yes, I’ve got a bit,” Paul said. He pulled open the door of a little safe in the corner of his den and the accumulation of years of little blue Kalamazoo pay packets fell out, one after the other, tumbling onto the floor. There were a couple of hundred of them; the kind with holes punched in them so you could see the folded notes inside. He’d get home on a Friday and throw another one in the safe (which wasn’t locked anyway) with all the other packets. It was as if he’d done a wages snatch, hiding it all until the heat went down and the gang would come around for the split.
“Here,” Paul said, handing me one of the unopened packets. “That should cover it.”
“Paul, have you any idea how much is in this pay packet?” I asked, out of curiosity, as I opened it. I pulled out some folded five-pound notes and a few coins.
“Course not, not the foggiest.” Paul said, smiling and stealing a quick look.
“It’s fifty pounds plus small change. You’ve even got a pay slip,” I said, as I unfolded it.
“Let’s have a look,” Paul said. I handed it over and he started to laugh because it was so ludicrous, given the amount of money they actually spent.
I was now on a thousand a year and also had a pay slip—a ge
nuine one, with my taxes deducted. It occurred to me that I was ligging around London, having a great time and spending, one way or another, ten times that. Paul, and George, to a lesser extent, were always quoting how much their dads earned.
Shortly after the pay packet incident, I again discussed the cost of living with Paul. He seemed to think that whatever his dad earned was a benchmark for honest wages.
“I think me dad’s on about six quid a week,” Paul said, “and if that’s what me dad gets, it must be about right.”
“Brian pays me tons more than that, Paul,” I said. His response was that if that was what Brian paid me, then that must be right, too. It never dawned on him that, ultimately, the four Beatles paid for everything and everyone in the organization. It was as if it was all Brian’s money and wasn’t he a fine and generous chap for settling all their bills without being pissed off?
The fast pace of the money machine became too much even for Brian Epstein’s quick mind to fathom. In Britain there were no so-called showbiz lawyers who could handle what was happening in the sixties pop explosion. They were all old-school solicitors like Lord Goodman, dealing with such matters as divorce and the odd libel action and disgraced politician. None of them had studied what was already happening in the States. Before the Beatles, no British band had toured the U.S. in the way that American artists had always come to Europe. In fact, as a nation, the British (known then as “the English”) went nowhere beyond these shores unless they were Burton and Taylor, or aristocracy with a villa in the South of France. Package tours to Spain were in their infancy. The English stayed at home, consumed loads of chips fried in lard—which still cooks it best, according to top chefs—and paddled in the freezing seas at Frinton or Rhyl in sleeveless Fair Isle sweaters and with handkerchiefs knotted on their heads. Avocado pears, garlic and lager were disgusting foreign gunk and you bought olive oil in little bottles at the chemist to use for medicinal purposes, like cleaning your ears. Little wonder then that words such as songwriters and copyright and royalties and the entire jargon of the music industry were almost foreign words to the lawyers of London Town. Little wonder that the Beatles sold their “recorded performances on record” to EMI for next to nothing. Little wonder that valuable rights were virtually given away, willy-nilly.
Many years later, when Paul was negotiating his own record deal with EMI, he demanded something like 27 percent on his future record sales, remembering how EMI had originally stitched them up for one old penny (less than half a new pence) per record divided among the five of them (including Brian Epstein) when a single retailed at six shillings and fourpence (thirty-seven and a half new pence).
The Beatles went from being broke to being incredibly rich and not really knowing it. One day, almost idly, while we were chatting, Paul opened an envelope from Barclays Bank at St. John’s Wood, his local branch. He was about to toss it to one side, as all the Beatles did with most “bits of paper.” Suddenly, his attention was caught and he gazed at the statement with the strangest look on his face.
“Here, have a look at this. Tone,” he said, handing the statement to me with a deadpan expression. I took the piece of paper and read the writing at the top: Paul McCartney, Esq. Current account. My eyes traveled downward and focused on the figure in the final column. Then on the load of zeroes after it. Dosh, real dosh.
“Fuckin’ hell! A million pounds!” I exclaimed. It just didn’t seem real. “You’re a millionaire!”
Paul took the statement back and gazed, as if mesmerized. He started to giggle nervously, out of sheer panic, I think. It was as if he felt he was dreaming and would wake up. It was “Nudge nudge, wink wink, I’ve done it! I’m a fucking millionaire!” But in his eyes it was, “Bloody hell, what do I do now?”
The irony was that it was only a fraction of what was in the Beatles’ business accounts. Although the Beatles gave the impression that they were worldly and wise, in business terms they knew very little. They were very like Elvis Presley with Colonel Parker in this respect. I believe that Elvis invented that magic phrase, “TCB,” or “taking care of business,” which is what the colonel did for him, and the Beatles were quick to understand that what it meant was that they didn’t have to be responsible. I don’t think they were capable of running their own lives, much less their careers, for some years. They presumed Brian and his secretary and people like me were there to TCB, and doubtless things would have continued to run on a fairly even keel, probably to this date, if Brian had not died.
Right from the start, it was almost as if there was a tacit understanding that Brian would handle everything, no matter what it was. If they had requested a sack of fresh manure, Brian would eventually shuffle the order down the line to some poor sod like me, who went out and found it. Then I would hand the sack to Brian, who would hand it to whichever Beatle had requested it. Then John, or Paul, or George, or Ringo would smile and say, “Thanks, Eppy!” as if Brian himself had done the job.
For a long time the four of them had no idea of what it took to get through a day. They had gone straight from regular school or art school or playing in a band at Butlin’s holiday camp and had never done any real work. George had been the local butcher’s Saturday delivery boy, and then, briefly, an apprentice electrician. As far as I know, the only job outside music that Paul and John had ever done was during the summer of 1960, when on holiday from college and school. They found work behind the bar of the Fox and Hounds, a pub at Caversham, near Reading, that was run by Paul’s cousin, Elizabeth “Bett” and her husband, Mike Robbins. In return for pouring beer and wiping down the bar top, waiting on tables, sweeping up and being general dogsbodies, the boys were allowed to entertain the regulars on Saturday nights. Most of the money they legitimately earned was from gigging around Liverpool or Hamburg. When they went to Germany, not paid enough to eat properly, they had fallen into an almost deranged time of hunger and pills to keep them going.
In those days, it was very unusual for anyone to go off and do their own thing without ever having had some kind of day job first. Cliff Richard had been Harry Webb, a bus driver. Tommy Steele had been a merchant seaman, and Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers had been a milkman. Everybody had a job, or was expected to get one. When you went to the Labour Exchange at that time, the bastards gave you a job, not a benefit check. If you didn’t like that job, they gave you another one until you got the message.
The postwar generation bought stuff on the hire purchase, or saved up for it. There were no credit checks as there are today, and very few people had bank accounts. The banks treated ordinary people like scum. In order to get credit you needed to have rent books and a regular job that you’d had for several years. But for the Beatles when they first started out, doing anything as mundane as applying for an H.P. agreement would never have crossed their minds anyway—unless it was for a guitar, which was a different matter entirely. They didn’t have rent books and gas bills, so if they wanted anything, they had to save up for it and pay cash. Even after they came down to London, they had no real concept of the outside world. Their world was Beatledom, which meant being silly and comic, as well as “creative.” But that was about it. There was no track record before the Beatles, no blueprint to say, “This is how a pop star operates, this is how you run your life and your finances.”
Their biggest decisions in life, even up to this point had been about sex and drugs, so it was not surprising that they were ill prepared to deal with a business that was generating millions. Everything connected with them turned to gold. Take T-shirts for instance. When I first asked Brian how much we should sell them for, he hadn’t a clue. He looked in bookshops and libraries for some sort of manual, but all this was virgin territory, literally, a new frontier in business terms. There was no how-to book to follow. He even asked the old-time managers and had them flummoxed. In the end, all they could say was, “Charge whatever the market will stand.” Brian should have gone to see Colonel Parker, and had a chat.
Howe
ver, the money was flooding in and the Beatles were kept completely in the dark. Brian still made up their regular little pay packets, containing about fifty pounds after deductions, in five- and single-pound notes and the odd two-bob bit or half-a-crown. It was all a bit nonsensical because from the time they were in London, although they continued to get the pay packets, all aboveboard and correctly done, they stopped using cash. Houses were bought for cash through NEMS. Flats, cars, clothes, restaurants, groceries, were all on account, the bills paid by the office. They moved from being skint but having a few pound notes in their pockets, to being very rich and having none at all.
During their hippie period, they walked around barefooted, signing for everything. If they signed a check people would rarely cash it. They’d frame it. They were normal kids and grounded. They didn’t overspend and run around making fools of themselves like a lot of the next generation of rock stars did. If one reads the press clippings from their early days, it’s clear that they didn’t embarrass themselves. There wasn’t a breath of scandal, not a blemish until the little drug busts started. Journalists like Don Short, who got to know them well, said that looking back, it’s incredible how well behaved they were even out on the road and under intense scrutiny and pressure. If you were in your midteens when you got into the Beatles, chances are your mum and dad liked them too. They were set up as role models and kept on their pedestals right up to the Summer of Love, when the Haight-Ashbury arrived in everyone’s consciousness.
15
Songs were what John and Paul had always knocked out while bunking off from school, or on the way to gigs in the back of the van between a week’s residency at Llandudno and nipping down to Birmingham to do Thank Your Lucky Stars on television before heading off to some theater at Great Yarmouth. Pop songs were a doddle.
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