No, they did not get on. Ginsberg apparently adopted the asana position and was doing a quick “Ommmmmm.” He invited Klein to join in to get the right vibes going. Klein would have none of it. He shouted, “Get offa my carpet and outa my office, you goddamn queer hippie!”
Soon, strange as it may seem, Klein withdrew all Zapple funding and scrapped the whole idea forthwith. Miles was mortified. He was stuck with all these tapes and living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, absolutely out of money, out of everything, and going out of his mind. Eventually he got his tapes compiled and they were released by various other specialist labels.
Paul had put money into the Indica bookshop, which Miles ran, above which Ginsberg came and lived for a while. Ginsberg had been heavily involved in the great Pro Pot rally at Hyde Park, at Speakers’ Corner. Gonzo Ginzo, as we called him, had gotten up on a soapbox, played his little squeezebox and declaimed his poetry, but most of the thousands of people who went along that sunny afternoon did so because Eric Clapton was playing. As for Bukowski, I met him in Los Angeles, but it was impossible to hold a conversation because he was always falling over drunk. Mickey Rourke played Bukowski in a movie, but William Burroughs was a different kettle of fish. A beat novelist as against a beat poet, he was around London all the time and came into Apple a lot. For a while, like Ginsberg he lived virtually next door to the Indica bookshop in Masons Yard. Eventually, Zapple joined Apple Electronics and the Apple Boutique in losing money and being closed down.
33
I had met Phil Spector for the first time when Brian was still alive. He’d come to England for a tour with Billy J. Kramer, who was signed to NEMS, although I don’t recall what Phil was actually going to do. However, Andrew Loog Oldham gave him the complete living legend treatment and I was delegated to promote the tour. Cilla had also recorded a cover version of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” Phil’s big hit with the Righteous Brothers. Before they even knew him, the Beatles were in awe of Phil Spector’s music. They did his big hit, “To Know Him Is to Love Him” at their failed audition for Decca. Despite the failure of the audition, the Beatles were still in awe of Phil Spector’s work when they met him.
Paul’s rejection of Spector originated from when Klein secretly called Spector in to “rescue” the Get Back tapes, which had never been issued. After the rooftop sessions and the filming at Twickenham, the masses of film and all the tapes were put into storage. Some of it was accidentally thrown away and was stolen. (Down the years, it got released out of Holland by bootleg pirates.) From going through the Abbey Road accounts and discovering that studio time had been charged for work that hadn’t been used, Klein did some detective work and learned about the Get Back sessions. Well, to him, this was potential gold dust. It was lost Beatles material that could be issued and earn him tons of money.
John and George were keen on Phil Spector and when Allen Klein, who was busy trying to please them, asked them who could rescue these tapes, they suggested Phil. In the spring of 1970 Phil smothered the lot with strings, horns and female choruses, and it was released as Let It Be.
When Paul heard it, particularly what he referred to as Spector’s sickly sweet version of “The Long and Winding Road,” he was furious. He rushed straight into Apple and berated Klein so loudly you could hear him throughout the building. “It’s not us anymore!” he shouted.
Klein’s rude comment was, “Your original material sucked. It was unusable. John thinks Phil is a genius and I agree with him.”
Ironically, the movie Let It Be won an Oscar in 1971 for best original score. The only ones who bothered to attend the ceremony were Paul and Linda, who picked up the statue on behalf of the Beatles. (Thirty years on, Paul and Ringo got together and had the album de-Spectorized for re-release.)
Phil took a shine to me, perhaps because I was a good listener and he was a world-class talker. Every time he flew over, he would come into Apple and perch himself on the end of my desk like a little fishing garden gnome. He talked about Life, about anything and everything. Mostly, he talked about himself, so I got to know him and his phobias quite well. He was still married to Veronica, “Ronnie” of the Ronettes, for whom he produced his Wall of Sound–style hits, like “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby” and “Baby I Love You,” records that took the pop world by both storm and surprise. The American music industry’s surprise that he could do so much so well soon turned to hate. He was the first pop multimillionaire with about $38 million in the bank, but he was also a renegade who refused to follow the rulebook. It infuriated and baffled them. His black groups had pushed many white stars off the stage. The music industry couldn’t stand uncontrollable geniuses and Phil was convinced that they were conspiring to get rid of him because he was just too powerful. His reaction was to fan the flames of his natural New York poor boy paranoia by hiring a huge bodyguard by the name of George, and equipping him with the biggest handguns imaginable.
I don’t think I’d seen a gun carried by anyone until I met Spector. George had been a cop in L.A. and was licensed to carry arms around the world. “He’s licensed to kill,” Phil told me, telling George to show me his two shoulder holsters. Phil didn’t have a gun license in the U.K., but he always told me that he was never without his big U.S. police .38s—which he kept stuffed into his belt and in a shoulder holster concealed beneath his cloak. John was fascinated by the weapons and discussed them at length with Phil or mostly George, who would show him how to load and unload and do the cowboy twirl.
Phil was a self-confessed ex-control freak, self-confessed ex-schizoid paranoiac, who carried around more baggage than Pan Am. He was so terrified of flying that when he arrived in London after a flight, for a few hours he would be at the speechless stage beyond rant. When the Beatles and Phil flew to New York once, Phil wouldn’t sit down, but walked up and down the aisles. Ringo said, “He’s as mad as a hatter. He walked the Atlantic, you know?” Another time that we flew, Phil got some kind of psychic warning. He freaked out and refused to get on the plane, so we all had to wait for the next flight.
When his father killed himself in the garage in New York with exhaust fumes, his mom put on his gravestone the epitaph: TO KNOW HIM IS TO LOVE HIM. Phil went one step further and turned that epitaph into a song. Always a manic-compulsive-obsessive, no doubt part of his peculiar attraction, charm and success, he decided to overemphasize by doubling up the words of the catchy little mantra—“To know-know-know him is to love-love-love him . . .”—and it shot to the top of the charts with the Teddy Bears, who consisted of seventeen-year-old Phil and two friends.
Sometimes, he talked about England. As an example of his schizoid personality, he would rant on about how much he hated England because his best friend, Lenny Bruce, had been deported from London. “Bastards!” he shrieked. “This country sucks.”
John was a bit of a renegade; he’d nod in agreement and make his rude V sign, but Paul was very patriotic. “If you don’t like it, go home,” Paul would say.
Phil would glare and squawk, “Hell, no! This is a great place! I love it here.” He could be quite bizarre because his mind didn’t work like most people’s. He might have been a record-producing genius but he was also out of his tree. He would get worked up over almost anything and yell like a little Demosthenes. Unlike Paul, I let him rant. I nodded and now and then said tentatively, “Y-e-s,” like a Norman Rockwell professor who was Professor Emeritus of Rant at Columbia encouraging someone to elaborate—although Phil needed little encouragement.
It didn’t help that he looked weird, with his little velvet outfits, his strange wigs and his cloak. There was the time he went to Berkeley Square to buy a Rolls Royce wearing the cloak and looking like his friend, Bela Lugosi. The sales staff thought he was a deranged tramp and gave him a hard time. When they refused him permission to take the car on a test-drive, he jumped in behind the wheel of the latest model and drove it out through the showroom window, singing “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” at the top of his
voice. He told me all about it from his usual perch on my desk and asked me to get him the whole lyric. Laughed like a maniac. Said he’d produce it. Take it round the showroom and put it through the mailbox. Lennon thought this was hilarious and the two of them cackled like witches. Yoko had no sense of humor at all and she loathed Phil as much as Phil hated her. Each of them was implacable and paranoid.
But if someone else from the outside was going to produce them, she didn’t see why it couldn’t be her. When Yoko and Phil confronted each other, sparks would fly and I fully expected Phil to grab a gun or karate chop Yoko into slices. Phil was very good at martial arts. I don’t know who had taught him, but they included experts like Bruce Lee and Elvis’s bodyguard, Mike Stone, who was to run off with Priscilla. I was surprised, then, when Phil told me that he’d had a punch-up with David Geffen, Spielberg’s partner in DreamWorks. Weedy though Phil was, he could have killed the record mogul, but restrained himself. So obviously, he did know how far he could go.
When Phil came over to rescue the “Let It Be” recordings, which had gone horribly wrong and which the Beatles had lost all interest in, we had to sort through the hundreds of tapes stacked up all over the place, offcuts of music and hours of conversation from shooting the film. There were so many that many were dumped and surfaced as part of the stash that was “discovered” in 2003 by the police and said to be worth millions.
Phil carted them all off to Abbey Road and holed up for months while he worked. He seemed to live on tandoori chicken takeaways during this time and ordered it in by the crate. It was his passion for this dish that introduced us to it big time and it became an Apple staple. When the Beatles finally heard the finished tape, John and George loved it. “It’s not the Beatles,” Paul said stubbornly, refusing to be convinced. “It’s not our sound.” It got so bad that Paul couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Phil. When Phil walked in, Paul walked out—as he did very publicly many years later, during an awards ceremony. However, when the album won a Grammy, it was Paul who collected it—like he had also collected the Oscar for the film score.
With Christmas approaching, Klein decided we would put out Phil’s famous Christmas album again. Phil’s genius had been to take straightforward Christmas songs like “Rudolph” and “Frosty” and turn them into Wall of Sound works of art. The album had been released a few years earlier, on the day that John Kennedy died, but those in the music industry said it was the day the music died because record sales plunged. Nobody wanted bright Christmassy stuff so Phil’s record was withdrawn. Since then, it had become rare and very collectable.
Klein’s idea for the reissue was sound, but Phil didn’t help. I arranged some interviews with him with the press, who hated him, and which he did with very bad grace. He was scathing about everything in his horrible, squeaky, high-pitched little voice that came out of the kind of neck most people would want to throttle within a minute or two. He just seemed to go out of his way to aggravate everybody with his attitude. As I have said, great producer—pity about the man. However, everyone likes a nice Christmas album and there was no doubt his production was brilliant. Apple’s coffers—and Klein—garnered several million more pounds.
Phil’s guns and his bodyguards were always much in evidence and eventually he retreated and got fortressed up in his own asylum with his own rules. It was to prove impossible to deal with him, although I admired his talent so much I tried over many years. I put my heart and soul into trying. I worked with him, managed him at one time, promoted him, visited him—and almost ended up as crazy as he was.
34
While the Beatles had split up—at least emotionally and creatively, though not legally—and were doing their own thing, I continued to do whatever was required of me at Apple, and indeed at NEMS, which was still in existence. Mostly, I promoted records or brought in new talent. However, I did have bags more spare time than I had before, and my social life expanded accordingly. In many ways, I saw far more of the daily “in” life of London, because I was always around, dropping in on places and meeting people the Beatles couldn’t because of their fame.
I was always running into enfant terrible Keith Moon around town. He was known for greater excesses than any of the other rock stars. Even the Stones were tame in comparison. I liked him because he was so amusing. One evening, Moon gave me his flat, “just like that,” as comedian Tommy Cooper would say. The lease on my flat in Chelsea was about to expire and having been too busy to pay attention to such domestic details as renewal letters from the agent, I suddenly found myself homeless. This coincided with Jack Oliver having difficulties with his wife. She asked him to leave their Chiswick flat, or he wanted to. At any rate, we decided to drop into the Speakeasy and have a few drinks. The solution to our problems arrived unexpectedly. Keith Moon was there and soon was a party to our tale of woe.
“Dear boy, dear boy, fret no more,” Keith said to me. “I have a flat in Highgate, above a car showroom as it happens, very handy when you run out of cars. You can have it, Tone. It’s at Thirty-two Highgate High Street. Here you are.” And he handed me a set of keys.
“Have it, Keith?” I asked, picking up the keys. “What do you mean by have it?”
“It’s yours, dear boy, lock stock and barrel. I own it. It’s furnished, everything’s kosher, you won’t need a thing.” I looked at him suspiciously.
Rather like that story where the Austrian prince is told that the Russian ambassador has died, and says, “Really? I wonder what his game is?” I said, “What are you up to, Keith?” I had visions of him having sawed a large circle in the living room floor above the car showroom. Jack and I would walk in, descend rather rapidly in a sea of plaster, get taken to the hospital, where Moon would turn up with flowers, laughter, brandy and dynamite, asking “How are you, dear boy? Have you got a match?”
“I’m bored with it,” Keith said. “I don’t want it anymore.” That made sense and I pocketed the keys.
Some time after midnight, Jack and I hopped into a taxi and I gave the address. In that world, in those days, life really was a magical mystery tour and anything was possible. The flat was just as Keith had assured us, fully and very comfortably furnished, which was more than you could say for most hotel rooms after Moon had occupied them. A nice decorative touch was the bottom half of a bottle of champagne sticking out of the living room wall. Apparently, in a familiar fit of pique, Moon had flung a full magnum at the wall and instead of smashing, as champagne bottles tend to when hurled at walls or prows of ships, it had embedded itself deep in the plaster. Later, I put a nice frame around it, making an instant objet d’art. I lived in Keith Moon’s flat until I fell for Julie Ege. In March 1970 I moved to Belgravia with her, leaving the flat to Jack, where he continued to live, rent-free.
Julie Ege, a Norwegian film star and model, was my girlfriend for five or six years. Rosemary Frankland, my previous girlfriend, had been Miss World and Julie represented Norway in the Miss Universe competition. Both of them were incredibly beautiful. When I met Julie, she had just made a film with Marty Feldman called Every Home Should Have One. After that she took off like dynamite as the “sex symbol of the 70s.” You couldn’t open a newspaper or a magazine without seeing her photograph. Literally every day, there she was, naked and gorgeous, in the papers, on the front mat. We must have gone to a million showbiz parties simply because I was with the Beatles and she was in the nude. That is to say, in the papers she was often photographed in the nude. For a while we lived in a flat in Chesham Place, just off Pont Street, Belgravia, a very smart central district of London between Buckingham Place and Victoria Station. However, I yearned to live in Barnes again. One of the first places I rented when Brian moved NEMS down to London was a two-up two-down by the river in Barnes. I liked it because while it felt like a real country village, the kind of place you’d escape to for the weekend, it was just twenty minutes on the train from the West End. I convinced Julie that it was the perfect place to live, and when we found a lovely four-b
edroomed house with a big garden in Suffolk Road just around the corner from where I had lived before, we took it. We finished moving in the late afternoon, early evening. The place was still piled high with unpacked tea chests and suitcases, but we were starving so after the removal van left so did we. We just locked the door and went to the nearest Indian restaurant, where we met some people we knew. Afterward, we went to the pub and had a jolly time. When we strolled back home at about twelve thirty to one o’clock, we found the place had been stripped. We’d moved in; burglars had moved us out.
It was very depressing. Julie was just about the top photographic model in the country and had lots of really good jewelry. I think she was probably targeted—maybe someone was even watching. They probably followed us as far as the Indian restaurant and knew that they had at least a couple of hours. The police came and looked at the open window that we pointed at and said, “Yes, they came in through there.” Then they licked the stubs of their pencils, made a few notes and left. That was that. We lay down on the bed and went to sleep. But the next day it got much worse. I called the insurance company to tell them we’d been burgled and they denied liability on the grounds that we hadn’t told them that we were moving from Chesham Place to Barnes. “Read the small print,” they lectured smugly. “You should have called us,” they said. “Every area is different, but even so, we can’t transfer the insurance unless you call us.” To be honest I had to admit that they did have a point. When we started to list what was missing, I suddenly realized that all my Beatles memorabilia had gone, all the presents the boys and Brian had given me over the years. The list is too long to give here, but it included a very nice inscribed gold Rolex watch engraved FROM THE FAB FOUR; a lighter that said FROM J & Y; gold discs. All gone. They’d even taken my heirloom Faberge cuff links with the family crest.
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