Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  “Whose solicitor are you anyway?” he demanded. Levison’s reply went unheard because John suddenly lost it. I don’t know where he got it from—maybe he had come fresh from the hospital from seeing Yoko and had it in his pocket—but with a manic expression on his face, he stuffed a tape into Richard’s hand. “There’s your fucking tape, a John Lennon Productions production. Get out and don’t ever come back again,” he snarled.

  Levison said, “But what’s it a tape of?”

  “Our baby’s heartbeat and eventual miscarriage,” John said, stalking off, leaving us stunned. There wasn’t a lot anyone could add to that. Throats were cleared, feet were shuffled, watches were checked and the legal conference fizzled out. It was a strange day. A week later, John’s trial came up. He pleaded guilty and was fined £150. A small amount, perhaps, but taking no responsibility for their own actions, he and Yoko said Sergeant Pilcher had cost them their baby. John’s drug’s bust was also to have endless repercussions when he decided to go and live in America.

  I have no idea what happened to that tape or whether it was used in any way. Given Richard’s admitted penchant for dressing up as a woman, maybe Ron Kass should have commissioned another version of “The Lady is a Tramp” for the young Branson. Now, that also would have been a rarity. Those were strange times indeed.

  Stranger times were to come. When George had been in San Francisco some months previously, wandering around in the Haight-Ashbury district in a daze, he’d met up with Ken Kesey and invited him to London. Ken and the Merry Pranksters had traveled America in Ken’s psychedelic bus, driven by Neil Cassady, while doing the notorious Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests. Unfortunately, the entire tribe took poor George up on his offer. They arrived with two Hells Angels, Frisco Pete and Billy Tumbleweed, and sixteen hangers-on. Ken did have the grace to contact George first, and he in his wisdom left us a note which, to paraphrase, read something like: Hell’s Angels arriving to stay at Apple. Let them hang out, be cool, don’t give them a hard time, but don’t let them take over the gaff—Love and Peace, George.

  We scarcely had time to absorb the contents of the note, which was passed from hand to hand, with rising derision, when the bikers did indeed roar in at the end of November on two gleaming Harley Davidsons they had air-freighted in at Apple’s expense. Ten more arrived in taxis and swarmed into the offices like locusts. They scattered throughout the premises to check us out, and the accommodation. Deciding on the entire top floor, they started to carry their goods and chattels up the stairs, and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Many people might think it cool to have Ken Kesey there, but at the end of the day, Apple was still a work environment.

  We’d barely gotten used to them stomping all over the place, when a family of American hippies arrived with their four children, who ran riot and added to the noise and confusion. It was like a scouting party of old, where the men went on ahead to stake claim to the land and the tribe followed behind. They spent all day smoking dope, making hash cakes and drinking their weird 150-proof whiskey-egg nog concoction which was mixed by the lethal gallon jug using the amply supplied Apple liquor store. Shortly, Derek Taylor could see over the top of his diminishing stack of spirits, but wisely, he kept his head down.

  From the start, the new arrivals were just a big interruption in the building and they scared the horses—not to mention the secretaries, who were terrified by them. They called them the Unwashed Pirates of Savile Row. Apple had their own Cordon Bleu chefs—two bright girls called Sally and Diana, who served three-course lunches at Apple every day, if you were there to enjoy it. The Pranksters took over the kitchens, raided the pantries, cooked huge hashcakes and trays of all-American hash brownies which the children guzzled, and eventually they drank Derek Taylor dry. Their washing was hung all over the fire escapes, until our grand offices in refined Mayfair resembled a tenement house in a Rio slum. The neighbors were horrified and started drumming up a petition. We’d only just gotten over the petition from the Baker Street residents which had led to the removal of the Fool’s giant mural on the boutique wall, and now it looked as if a similar situation were about to arise.

  Around this time, John and Yoko came up with the idea of a new label on Apple to be called Zapple. The original intention was to make this just for spoken-word albums. In fact, the first thing to be produced was to be John and Yoko’s unfinished music; and then George’s new electronic music. They also had a stoned wish list of other people they wanted to contribute material including Richard Brautigan and Allen Ginsberg—an eccentric American intellectual who lived in a flat above Indica, and who used to turn up and walk around Apple all the time. I think it was Ginsberg who had suggested we do his fellow beat poets, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. Expanding the idea further, Zapple would put out some Charles Bukowski, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and some old Lenny Bruce tapings.

  Some of this got turned into songs. “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the last track on Revolver, was written by John after he bought Timothy Leary’s Tibetan Book of the Dead at Indica. He took it home to read, and the next day, in Abbey Road, I watched him write one of his masterpieces. As songwriters, both John and Paul could be remarkably fast. “Hey Jude” was written on Paul’s drive down to see Cynthia and Julian when John walked out. It was recorded in one day. I’ve been with them when they sat around with nothing, then at the studio the very next morning, Paul would walk in with some perfect, polished songs tailored for the tone of the album they were working on. This would happen sometimes day after day. They were amazingly prolific.

  When Kesey arrived on our doorstep, it was about the time that he had finished One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, or maybe it was when it was just being published; but it was decided that he would also do a “Spoken Word” of Cuckoo’s Nest and maybe write and record some new stuff for Zapple. He was given an expensive tape machine to work and an IBM Golfball typewriter, which at the time were brand new to the market. They were like gold dust, even hard to get for a Beatle, and which Derek Taylor had fought tooth and nail to acquire. Both tape recorder and the Golfball disappeared immediately, never to be seen again.

  Meanwhile, Ken was practically in rags, and unwashed rags at that. He had come with no luggage whatsoever and looked as if he had gotten off the plane with what he stood up in. In my capacity as head of promotions, I was given the job of taking him off to Carnaby Street and getting him kitted out so he could be put on show and be interviewed, photographed by the media and so on. With money no object, he soon got the knack of shopping. I can’t say I blame him. It was all free, and Carnaby Street had some wonderful things to offer.

  Christmas was a big event in the life of the Beatles. Each year until they had stopped touring they had put on a wonderful Beatles Christmas show at the Hammersmith Odeon that was always sold out a year ahead. They also released absolutely unique Christmas records every year strictly through their fan club. In addition, they always threw a marvelous Apple party. In the past, Brian had organized this, with caterers and special gifts, which he himself went to a great deal of trouble to choose. Come the day, shortly after the arrival of Kesey and friends, we were astonished to see John and Yoko walk in, dressed up as Mr. and Mrs. Christmas. They wandered around, going Ho Ho Ho and Yo-ko-ko, patting people on the head, doling out presents to staff, family of staff and loved ones and significant others. We all got lovely presents. I think I got a set of goblets that year. But, as it turned out, no dinner.

  When it was time to sit down to lunch in the boardroom, and we all trooped in, we found the Merry Pranksters had already been there. They had smelled all the appetizing aromas drifting up from the kitchen and swooped down from their lair up on the top floor like vultures. The table had been stripped bare while all the present-giving was happening in another room. Our turkeys, stuffing, and plum duff were all gone, with only a few bones chucked under the table and a few crumbs of mince pies on plates to show what had been there. The Fab Four were mortified. They were still more or less norm
al and loved Christmas, but like the Grinch, the Merry Pranksters had stolen Christmas. They’d shredded the turkeys, drunk the champagne and port, scoffed everything.

  This wasn’t simply a case of a few laid-back hippies smoking a few doobies, sniffing the air and getting the munchies. It looked like a scene after a Viking raid on a village hall with some small barefoot urchins still crawling around on the huge table after the big guys had been hacking and tearing at the sumptuous food with hands, knives and axes. Most of the cutlery and glasses was unused so probably they’d just stuffed fists full of grub in their mouths and the rest in their pockets as they went. They swigged all the wine from the bottles. There was nothing left. This was before George and John and then Paul and some of the others at Apple went veggie, so there should have been enough turkeys and hams for an army. Sally and Diana were upset that their lavish, long-planned, carefully arranged gourmet Christmas banquet with crackers and candles and all the trimmings had been demolished. It looked like a battlefield.

  The Merry Pranksters had ruined the whole event and now they were seriously drunk and mean. They threw up on carpets and insulted their hosts. Enough was enough and a few days later they were turfed out of the building by George who was very embarrassed and by Derek Taylor who also shouldered some of the blame. There was a bit of a skirmish and the “guard”—me and some other big lads—was called to help them out into Savile Row. A couple of pretty girls who had come over with them stayed on as personal assistants or secretaries. Pretty girls are pretty girls.

  28

  In many ways, the Beatles were a metaphor for the 1960s. London seemed to be doing amazingly well throughout that decade, a magnet for the youth and talent of the world. Music, fashion and fun all originated in the capital. Jobs were easy to come by, there were no dossers in the streets, there was a good feeling in the air; everything was fine, all of it underwritten by our manufacturing industries. It all seemed to implode with the turn of the decade. As the sixties gave way to the seventies, the fun left. It was like a carousel on a merry-go-round slowly grinding to a halt, with the music dying and the lights going dim.

  In the wider scheme of things, I blamed the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, head of the Labour Party, and told him so. I couldn’t understand why he had suddenly devalued the pound in 1967 when everything at home was booming. Things staggered along for a while, but a recession loomed. At the same time, his thought police took over. There were enough new regulations and red tape to tie up free enterprise for years. Licenses were brought in to regulate live music in pubs and public places. One minute Swinging London was like a giant theme park, the envy of the world, then they—Wilson and his gang—closed it down. It was as if they went out and stamped on it. Live music, cinemas, theaters, pirate radio stations, Carnaby Street, the Kings Road—everything that was fun about Britain got stamped on.

  The Beatles had strong socialist convictions, as had most Liverpudlians, but we became convinced that this ’orrible little man with his smelly pipe was a Communist mole. We were depressed that in 1964, on the eve of the general election, Brian had even sent him a telegram, wishing him success. To make matters worse, he was also our local member of Parliament for Huyton in Liverpool. We felt cheated. I saw my chance to vent my feelings when I was invited on Start the Week, a morning radio magazine show presented by Melvin Bragg, and heard that my fellow guest would be Comrade Wilson, who was there to promote some kind of expo, which would put the oomph back into Swinging London. On air, I turned on him angrily.

  “It’s all gone. You’ve killed it off. You blew it. You can’t just resurrect it when it’s convenient.”

  He stopped sucking on his pipe and stared at me. He blustered a bit, but I said, “It’s no good. You’ve done us in; you’ve wrecked the country. You’re a pathetic, tawdry, horrible little man. Liverpool doesn’t deserve you, let alone Britain.” Shortly afterward, his party lost the next election; but the rot had already set in.

  If Harold Wilson was the evil emperor who had brought down England and pushed it toward a gloomy era of strikes, the three-day working week, rising crime and sacks of uncollected garbage littering the streets, then Yoko Ono was thought of as the snake-haired Wicked Witch of the East who destroyed the Beatles.

  When Yoko turned up she pushed the other three Beatles and their relationships with each other and with John to the limit. Northern working men simply didn’t take their wives and girlfriends to work. Not only would it make them look stupid, it was also against the unwritten “pal’s code.” John, it seemed, suddenly didn’t mind appearing stupid; he didn’t appear to notice—or even care—that Yoko’s constant presence was annoying and ultimately alienating his friends. The Beatles came to one conclusion: he was either mad, or had been hypnotized. Yoko herself later insisted it was because John was so paranoid, he didn’t want her out of his sight.

  I always thought she was such a core of negativity that she sucked the air out of the room whenever she entered. She wanted to possess John and she was the one who was exceptionally jealous. She could not cope with the fact that John could love three other guys. The gradual erosion of the fun and trust that had been between the Beatles from the early days was like going through a divorce. You had to be there to see it happen, to understand how powerful the anger, hate and jealousy were, the emotions that surged around them. It was like being inside the pages of Tolkein. I was around them a great deal at this time, filming their daily activities, and saw the tensions building.

  When John got the drift about how the others felt, instead of keeping Yoko away out of sensitivity for their feelings and out of concern for the group dynamics, he said, “I don’t want to play with youse lot anymore.” Paul desperately wanted things to work out. He was enormously patient. It was only his great love for John and for the whole Beatles thing that stopped it from blowing up sooner than it did. I remember the exasperation on his face away from the studio. At the time he was Abbey Road far more than John, who mostly kept away. John’s input was minimal, except on his tracks, or the ones he featured on. George’s input was pretty strong, but Paul was the most visible one, perhaps to the point of being overwhelming. Not in a nasty way, but just being creatively in the lead. I think this was because his personal life was very happy. John, newly obsessed with Yoko, should have been happy, but was exhausted and in torment. Looking for some release, he and George had even taking up chanting together.

  I think after John and Yoko got busted together they got worse. Maybe as far as John was concerned, the reality of the Beatles splitting up, a plethora of crooks and silly deals, together with the public’s absolute dislike of Yoko overwhelmed him. He was prone to wake up in a deep funk and ask: “Why am I doing this? This crap means nothing. What’s it all about?”

  From the moment Yoko was inflicted upon the Beatles, the atmosphere became grim. The previous autumn, Ringo had been the first to break. Yoko’s constant, grating presence was behind it, but it was impossible to tell John anything. When Ringo returned from a break in the studio to find Paul—who could play many instruments well—experimenting on his drum kit, all his resentment and bottled-up insecurities surfaced, and he walked out. John and Paul were in a dilemma.

  They asked my opinion. “If you want him back,” I said, “then maybe you’ll have to crawl a bit, you know, like, apologize.” So John and Paul, cap in hand, went round to Ringo’s house to plead with him to come back, but he refused. He disappeared on a holiday to Sardinia with Maureen. He always struck me as the “grown-up” Beatle, perfectly happy with his more sophisticated movie friends, like Peter Sellers whose substantial house he had bought, and on planning a movie career. If anyone could do without the other Beatles, it was Ringo.

  Eventually, he did return to the fold. The boys were so delighted they got Mal to decorate his drum kit with garlands of flowers. Nothing was said. Ringo came into the studio and simply started drumming again. For a while at least, everything was harmonious.

  Paul suggested that t
hey needed to start over again, to try to recapture whatever it was that had drawn them so closely together as more than friends—as brothers—for so many years. They had been through so many shared experiences; they clicked, their music clicked. “Back to basics,” Paul said. “I think we should play live again. It grounded us.”

  John agreed with Paul, and for a moment, there was a brief period of nostalgia as they talked of some of the fantastic moments they had shared. Nodding away at John’s shoulder like a marionette, Yoko kept butting in, describing some of her live performances. Gritting their teeth in the cause of harmony, the others ignored her. Unfortunately, the new way was to be anything but back to basics.

  Alexis Mardas probably contributed to a lot of John’s problems and insecurity by coming up with expensive, artistic, and futuristic ideas that didn’t, couldn’t work. Because his ideas were challenging in an unproven way, Yoko and John became his champions, but John ended up by being lumped in with Alex’s failed inventions. The now-legendary crunch came when Alex said he could design a futuristic state-of-the-art twenty-four-track studio in the basement of Apple HQ in Savile Row, when the most that existed then was eight-track. John believed him and Alex was authorized to order whatever he required to achieve this miracle of technology on which to record their back-to-basics album, Get Back.

  When John got enough personal clout, he always vested his money and his beliefs in people like Alex instead of talking to people who knew what they were talking about, like George Martin. Alex should have just read his copy of Future Electronics and Toys Monthly and kept schtumm. Instead he spewed other people’s inventions as if they were his own, but worse, he said he could do it “even more better!”