Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  By the autumn of 1969 the Hare Krishnas became George’s big passion; unfortunately it was one that nobody else wanted anything to do with. But, somehow, George charmed and suckered everyone in. I guess he had his Indian stuff like John had his Two Virgins stuff. After their experience in India, for a couple of years all the Beatles took to dressing in an Eastern way, which was also quite hippie-ish, with brightly colored satin or velvet tunics, collarless shirts, beads, floppy hats and so on. George, however, took it to extremes, draping himself in layers and layers of beads. He grew his hair and beard very long. He gave up wearing shoes, preferring sandals instead—what are called chaplis in India. At times, he even came into the offices dressed in some togalike white robes, his own cheesecloth interpretation of the Krishnas’ orange gear. To this, he added a garland of their sacred marigolds draped around his neck. He would give us all the V peace sign, which John also took up.

  We hid our smiles and condescendingly called it “George’s Hare Krishna thing,” but the seriousness that we had to treat it with was a right royal pain in the arse. Every time the subject came up, we all made loud snoring noises, looked at our watches and said, “Put the telly on and we’ll catch the Magic Roundabout.” In fact, the Magic Roundabout made more sense. (This was a cult TV show for toddlers in which some of the names were drug related, something the staid BBC producers didn’t realize—just as they didn’t realize about Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men and their friend Weed in another popular kiddies’ show—while Captain Pugwash had two characters named Master Bates and Seaman Staines.)

  We might have joked about George’s new interest, but it wasn’t very funny. Not only was it hard work drumming up sufficient Krishnas to placate George when he wanted them around, but we were all bored to death at having to go along with the bunch of dropouts who marched up and down, chanting, clanging bells and begging for money.

  The London Radha-Krishna temple, fully funded by George, was in Oxford Street and too close to our office on Savile Row for comfort. Passing by the temple, one would always catch a whiff of joss sticks and pot floating on the air. I often saw the members begging on the street, bent and shuffling along, sometimes wearing only sandals in the snow, no coats, their noses runny with cold, their pigtails ratty and their eyes red-rimmed. It was a nightmare that these same people were now turning up at our office, and in the TV studios, ringing their incessant bloody bells and looking for George. I was the one who had to deal with them most of the time, and I have little patience for people whose kids are taken away by social workers because they’re suffering from malnutrition. I happen to believe in feeding kids, not making them pray all night and live on bean shoots and curds.

  When George went into the studio with his pals we all thought nothing would come of it—how could it? But, somehow, Joe Public came to believe that this stuff was deep, like: “If you’re not into it then you must be an insensitive moron who will be punished in the next incarnation.” I saw it as emotional blackmail, a kind of weird religious peer pressure that says if you don’t give until it hurts, you’re gonna pay for it later. As John said, “The karma will get you.”

  I said, “I’ll take my chances. I’ll tell God he gave us Yoko and Klein and I was busy with them on his behalf.” At the time, John lacked his usual sense of humor, so he stared at me suspiciously.

  The Krishnas’ conviction might have been believable except for the fact that many were reformed junkies. I personally never saw a bona fide Indian among them. Most of these guys were not only British, many of them were from Liverpool! I said to Paul, “How are you going to send out for a chicken tikka masala if all the guys who work in the tandoori are down on Oxford Street with George, marching, clanging and begging?”

  Paul grinned and said, “George doesn’t clang, he’s too busy.”

  He was. When the Hare Krishnas got on Top of the Pops that September they had to be taken seriously because TOTP was the most popular TV show in England. The unlikely Krishna impetus had started during the summer of 1969, when George had released his single, “Hare Krishna Mantra,” with the temple members chanting away in the background. It had quickly gone to number one in Europe and Asia. We cynics were all greatly surprised by this commercial success. There was some jocular eating of hats and stepping over “my dead bodies.” Then the producer of TOTP rang me up.

  “Tony? How many Hare Krishnas can you lay on at the studio for this week’s show?” he inquired. Amazed, I asked George this metaphysical question.

  “How many Hare Krishnas can we get, George?” He did a slow mental head count. “Uh . . . thirty-seven,” he said, then frowned. “Hang on, maybe it’s . . . uh . . . thirty-eight.”

  Leaving George to count the pigtails, I got back on the phone to the TOTP producer. “We could let you have thirty-seven, give or take a clang,” I said.

  The man at the Beeb said. “Oh dear. We’ve only got room for five. Send us your five best chanters.”

  I had to go down to the Krishna GHQ and, feeling more than faintly ridiculous, said, “Hey, Hare, can five of you get yourselves down to Top of the Pops tomorrow?”

  “No!” they said, helping themselves to another macrobiotic onion bhajee. “We all have to do it, or not at all. Have a bhajee. Leave a peace offering.”

  I thought I was in deep water when I called the guy at the Beeb to tell him that he couldn’t break up the set. “It’s a whole temple or nothing,” I said. He groaned.

  “Well, since it’s George Harrison,” he said, reluctantly, “I don’t suppose I’ve much choice.”

  An extra corridor of dressing rooms had to be opened and a couple dozen vases brought in to hold all the marigolds. Taping the show itself wasn’t easy, considering it’s difficult to step around, and over, that many Hare Krishnas. There they all were in those orange robes, meditating, counting beads and getting in the way of the cameras, not to mention all those electrical cables that were snaking about. But the show was taped and aired, and this was how America got wind that George Harrison had a new mantra to match his raised consciousness.

  All those Krishna bells must have sounded like cash registers. As often happens when any religion rears its head, opportunists saw the political, not to mention commercial, possibilities. George and his little orange friends with the red, runny noses were suddenly big business. Capitol Records immediately sent a Magi to find that star shining in the East: the president, Stan Gortikov. Instead of frankincense or myrrh, Stan arrived bearing a big smile. He was eager to check things out, or so he told me.

  “It’s been an ambition of mine to see the Beatles in action at Abbey Road,” he confided, “with George Martin producing.” In short, he wanted to see the whole legendary shebang and it fell to my unfortunate lot to set it up for him. Unfortunately, because Stan was still stuck in the land of “She Loves You” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” what he got instead was one of those wild nights when George was doing his “Hare Krishna thing.” Most of the Oxford Street Temple was there to chant along, swaying like orange reeds. Everywhere Stan looked he saw sitars, incense, tambourines and beads. It was “Clang! Clang! Clang!” instead of “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” Yogis in loincloths sat cross-legged upon mattresses around the room, making occasional leaps into the air, using their arse muscles to propel them. Even life in Los Angeles hadn’t prepared Stan Gortikov for yogic flying. His face was a picture and I gently led him away to the pub.

  A loony September wasn’t done with me yet. John was feeling lots better after his treatment for heroin addiction in the London Clinic and several months of an attempt to use Primal Scream Therapy under Arthur Janov by telephone, to free him from his heroin addiction. He and Yoko had started dropping into the offices regularly.

  The Beatles had been invited to play the Toronto Rock Festival but hadn’t accepted, though John had muttered something about going for the Live Peace part of it. Two days before the event, I was chatting to Mal in the office when John drifted in. Something was obviously on his mind.

 
; “Oh, hi. I was thinking—” he started. Mal and I interrupted our conversation and waited for what John had to say. “Uh,” John continued, quietly summing up the situation in a detached way, “I’m going to need a drummer and a bass player, and me and Yoko, and you, Mal.”

  I suddenly realized that John was talking about a pick-up band for the concert in Toronto. It was like a Monty Python sketch: “You doctor, me patient, she nurse, you Tone, you Mal, find people, get tickets for big silver bird for heap big gig, man.”

  “Yeah, leave it to us, John,” I said. But this was Thursday and the concert was Saturday. Why had John, as always, left it until the last minute? Then again, Mal and I were interchangeable, “Appleman and Robin—superfixers!” We could have a quick nervous breakdown, get on the phone and still be in the pub by six, just like doing business in any other Batcave in London. But John was talking again.

  “I asked Allen and he said it, yeah, go ahead—do it.” I wondered why he needed permission, especially from Klein, but didn’t comment. However, I could see Mal was wondering the same thing. Then, just before John drifted off, he turned and said, “Oh, Tone, can you get us some music? And . . . uh . . . we’ll meet you at the airport.”

  “Music, John? What music?”

  “Yeah, you know, all those songs from way back when . . . uh . . . you know, those songs we used to do. All that Chuck Berry stuff and Little Richard stuff and Fats Domino stuff . . . get all the top lines for all that stuff . . . know what I mean?”

  “What about musicians?” Mal asked.

  “I’ll sort that out,” John said, which of course he didn’t do.

  Getting the lineup wasn’t easy. By then, it was Saturday, after all, and most people, like Eric Clapton, were still in a coma and not answering their phones. In the end, the lineup consisted of Eric—who was finally roused; bass player Klaus Voorman, who John knew way back from their first trip to Hamburg; drummer Alan White, whom George’s assistant, Terry Doran (demoted from being head of publishing), rounded up. At the time, Alan played for a band called Skip Bifferty, one of Don Arden’s fledgling groups. Later, he joined Yes.

  Having organized the tickets and the hotels, I was wandering around Tin Pan Alley and the top end of Charing Cross Road with my flight bag, going into publishers and buying all the rock classics on sheet music I could lay my hands on. I schlepped out to Heathrow, to the VIP lounge, where Eric, John, Yoko, Mal and the rest of the lineup were drinking green tea and mango juice, waiting to board.

  “Thanks, Tone,” John said as I arrived. He took the large package of sheet music from me. “Great stuff. We’ll rehearse on the plane, know what I mean?” I looked at the group crowding around with instrument cases and said, “By the way, the flight was full. So I’m not coming.”

  To tell the truth, I wasn’t disappointed even though I learned later that John and the rest of them had rehearsed on the plane with acoustic guitars, a rare treat for the other passengers, and one I’m sure few of them will ever forget. Back at the office when I walked in and was asked what had happened, the joke started to circulate that Yoko was given an acoustic stepladder to rehearse on the plane so that her chops would be “up” for the gig.

  They got to Toronto just in time. It was John and Yoko’s first public outing as the Plastic Ono Band. We heard that it went over extremely well, all except for Yoko, who rolled around in a white sack on stage while John was singing. Then he stepped back and said, “Well, folks, this is the bit you’ve all been waiting for!”

  Yoko wailed a lost and lonely banshee scream for twenty minutes or so. The audience wholeheartedly booed her, despite their respect for John and the others. Nonetheless, the Live Peace in Toronto album was great, with some of the best straight-ahead rock and roll you’ll ever hear.

  Many people have asked me if Yoko thought she was artistic or avant-garde. To tell the truth, I don’t really know. At parties people were saying, “Oh, yes, Yoko . . . uh . . . she’s with John, who is enormously talented, and he admires her stuff but, personally, I think, well . . . I don’t know.” Then doubt set in because some critics and reviewers gave her favorable reviews in the press and on TV. You’d find yourself wondering if you were an intellectual failure, unable to spot the hidden value in Yoko’s art and music. I can remember those discussions and the debates among John’s friends, particularly when it was obvious that John was obsessively smitten. He had a reputation as something of an intellect, so somehow it became important to judge Yoko as impartially as possible, mostly out of regard for John. The problem was we couldn’t accept that he could be so blinded.

  I wonder now if we’d all said, “John, she’s bloody awful—you know it, we know it, and the whole world knows it,” he would have realized, and maybe Yoko Ono would never have happened. But we all covered it up. We all told him she was good when he asked our opinion—as he often did at first. In retrospect, we are all to blame for Yoko’s artistic rise. It was a case of collective guilt and also the emperor’s new clothes. As a result, Yoko ended up practically fireproof where John was concerned. After a time, he was too far lost in Yoko for the truth to have mattered.

  Over the years, working closely with so many stars, getting closer to them than most people do, has led to a certain cynicism. I developed the somewhat old-fashioned attitude that a pop star’s job, if that word is correct, is to sing songs and make records, not to comment on politics, be it John Lennon or whoever. I think what led John into believing that he had the right to talk about world peace was that people took his opinion seriously on any subject, whether it was jelly babies or the bomb. Hunter Thompson once said that when people like Lennon started ranting on about politics, all they did was get in the way. People deferred to John because he looked the peacenik part. He was shortsighted and wore glasses, which made him look political and academic. He looked concerned. He probably was concerned. He looked deep, but he was not Socrates. There was a famous Rigby cartoon in the Sun at the time when John and Yoko were cutting off their long hair for peace and wrapping themselves up in bags. It was all bag-peace-love-hair. The cartoon depicted grinning dustmen picking up the wrong bag—the one with John and Yoko’s shaven heads sticking out, not the one with the hair—to throw them in the grinder at the rear of the dustcart.

  The shorn hair event was not a political issue at all. It was a stoned issue. Yoko had permission from Tony to go and see her daughter in Denmark for Christmas. During that visit, she and John were persuaded by Cox to shave their heads. It was a strange moment, and one apparently more to do with Cox convincing them that it was a good idea, but playing a spiteful prank that they simply didn’t see. On their return to England they got in thick with Michael X, otherwise known as Michael Abdul-Malik, the leader of the Black Muslims and president of the Racial Adjustment Action Society. Linked with the Black Eagles and the Black Panthers, their base was the Black House, the complex of adjoining terrace houses, shops and empty factories in Holloway Road. Described as a social commune it was financially helped by pop singers, actors, churchmen and such. John and Yoko enthusiastically endorsed all that the movement stood for and donated their shorn hair to raise money for the Black House. (In return they were given the gift of a pair of Muhammad Ali’s sweaty shorts.) Abdul Malik’s eventual fate was to be hanged in Jamaica, for murder. I often wonder who bought that hair, and if they still have it. Sometimes I have bizarre fantasies about it, like could you actually clone John from his hair?

  John rarely insulted people or was rude to anyone. Occasionally, he’d say witty little things in a Lewis Carroll or an Edward Lear way, or maybe in a Goon Show type of way, but he didn’t ever say anything racist or nasty. He would make the odd V sign behind someone’s back, but he was never frightening. On the other hand, Yoko Ono was frightening. Trying to promote her records was down-right scary.

  I can remember taking her product into radio stations. The nearest it got to a play list was the producer’s bin. Or they would smile and say, “Thanks, Tone,” and then sail the record
across the studio like a Frisbee. This was light-years removed from the avid reception I got when I went in with a new Beatles record. Deejays would interrupt their shows to put it on the turntable at once. I can remember the various studios filling up with producers, and secretaries lining the walls, just to watch the Beatles’ latest release actually spinning around on the turntable while they listened.

  The idea of Zapple, Apple’s Poetry and Spoken Word project, which had started well, and then faded with the disappearance of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, hadn’t really gone away. Paul was very open to ideas and John and Yoko were also still keen on it and they mentioned it to Klein. Naturally, he took a good look at it. I wasn’t particularly into beat poetry and all the Kerouac On The Road, Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby type of writings, and looking back, neither were most of the staff at Apple. We just liked rock music I suppose and didn’t see any market, or more to the point, didn’t really see any reason for Apple to be doing this spoken-word experimentation. But while the walls had been resonating at Savile Row with endless bickering and in-fighting, Barry Miles, one of the founders of Indica, had been out of sight and almost out of touch for months, roaming around the United States with a mobile recording unit, compiling interviews and recording sessions with the new breed of avant-garde writers.

  What killed it all stone dead was one of Miles’s big ideas to make an album in New York with the granddaddy of beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, whom he had first met in London, at Indica. Ginsberg agreed, but perturbingly businesslike for a hippie, he said he wanted some sort of special contract with Zapple, a real piece of paper with words and percentages and amounts on it. He didn’t know what a mistake this was because Klein was now involved in the financial Apple/Zapple setup. Klein said he and Ginsberg would have to have a meeting to discuss this piece of paper. Miles brought Ginsberg along. To say that the pair of them didn’t hit it off was something of an understatement. Here comes the shuffling unkempt Jewish beat poet with peanut butter in his beard talking about his projected royalties, and across the desk there’s a glaring Klein the archcapitalist Jewish lawyer/accountant, who abhorred the idea of giving anybody any royalties, especially to what he called a “fake fagellah poet.”