by Peter Brown
The final blow came when the boutique caused them to be publicly embarrassed and derided. A newspaper column criticized the Beatles for having turned into shopkeepers. This infuriated John and Paul so much they decided to close the store without delay. Characteristically, they decided to liquidate the stock, not through sale but by giving it away. I was told that John and Paul had decided that on Wednesday, July 31, the entire contents of the store and stockrooms were to be opened to the public, who could take whatever they wanted.
The Monday night before the giveaway, Yoko Ono and John arrived at the shop. Before the amazed employees, Yoko spread large swatches of fabric out on the floor and began to pile merchandise onto it waist high. Then she knotted the corners of the fabric hobo-style and dragged it out of the store on her back, like an Oriental Santa Claus, into John’s Rolls-Royce.
The morning of the giveaway, which had been well publicized in newspapers and on TV, there was a queue three blocks long. The basement door was opened so that people could walk in the front way, wander around, and then exit from the other end. According to the Beatles’ strict instructions, there was to be no restriction on the amount any one person could take. As much as you could carry was the rule. Rack after rack of Hobbit clothing was brought down and fed to the ravenous public. People got back on line two and three times, snatching at articles like sharks at a frenzied feeding. When all the merchandise was gone, the bolts of raw silks and velvets were torn apart by the crowds. They took the hangers and the store fixtures, too, and no one stopped them until one woman tried to pry the carpeting off the floor. By noon it was all over.
Less than a month later, Apple Corp. moved into new headquarters more befitting its grandiose intentions. The Beatles purchased, at a cost of nearly £500,000, a beautiful five-story Georgian town house at 3 Savile Row, in the heart of the custom tailoring district. This imposing brick structure was once a popular gambling club called the Albany and was rumored to have been the sometime love nest of Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson. Gamblers and lovers that the Beatles were, they set about transforming the building into their new home.
Each executive was given his own spacious office and allowed to decorate it. On the first floor, just off the glittering mirrored reception foyer, Ron Kass had a gleaming white office with a white desk and liquor cabinet and white leather Wassily chairs. On the second floor, up a flight of apple-green carpeted steps, was a large office for the Beatles and Neil, overlooking Savile Row. This office was never completely decorated, for as was the Beatles’ wont, they changed their minds so many times about what it should look like they never made any progress. I remember that only a short time after wall-to-wall carpeting was installed, they had it pulled up and the wood-plank floors polished. On the third floor was the press office, now presided over by Derek Taylor. My own office was across from the Beatles, on the second floor rear. It was a huge rectangular office with elaborate, handsome moldings around the ceiling. In lieu of a chandelier, Ringo had given me a huge lighting fixture of chrome headlights, designed by a firm he had invested in. At one end was a marble fireplace and four comfortable armchairs, and at the far side of the room there was a large, octagonal rosewood table. It was around this table that the dissolution of the Beatles would occur, as well as hundreds of other unhappy meetings over the next two years. On the higher floors were the A&R offices, a film department, accounting offices, music publishing, a film library, and an office for office management, headed by ever-loyal Alistair Taylor. In the deep basement Magic Alex set to work with a construction crew to build the Beatles’ own private studios, complete with, he promised, 78-track recording.
There was also, for executive use, a stately wrought-iron lift, and on the third floor, a well-appointed kitchen and pantry stocked with everything from bacon butties to caviar. Two Cordon Bleu chefs prepared an endless array of dishes all hours of the day, including ham and eggs for Ringo and roast leg of lamb for business lunches. The front of the building was sandblasted and whitewashed, and a flagpole was installed so that it looked like an embassy. A full-time footman-bouncer was hired and dressed in a Tommy Nutter frock coat. On the front steps, in every possible kind of weather and at any time of day, waited four girls the Beatles nicknamed the Apple Scruffs and whom George later immortalized in song. They stood vigil on those front steps as the weirdos and wackies of the world descended upon us.
In addition to John’s and Paul’s incautious proclamation on the “Tonight Show” in America soliciting projects for Apple, a poster and newspaper campaign appeared that summer asking aspiring artists to bring their wares to Apple. Alistair Taylor was recruited to appear in the advertisement costumed like a “busker” or street musician. He was pictured playing a guitar with a harmonica braced to his mouth, a drum hanging from his back, and a washboard glued to his foot. The headline announced, THIS MAN HAD TALENT. The copy read, “One day he sang his songs to a tape recorder (borrowed from the man next door) ... sent the tape, letter and photograph ... if you were thinking of doing the same thing yourself, DO IT NOW! This man now owns a BENTLEY!”
Lots of people wanted Bentleys, it turned out, and most of them appeared at 3 Savile Row.
The list of people with schemes and plots and plans is as long as it is sometimes astonishing. There was an American man who wanted the Beatles to purchase anonymously six square miles of Arizona land to hold a three-week rock and roll orgy attended by three million people to climax in a live performance by the Beatles. There was a man with a formula for a pill that could make you into whomever you wanted to be. There were several messiahs and one or two prophets of doom. There was a plan to save whales and a plan to build a commune in India. There was a woman who made tactile art from patent leather covered in oil. There were people who had seen flying saucers and God and needed money to go up, or down, or around in circles. Often they were stopped at Heathrow Airport for having no money or passports, and they simply gave John Lennon’s or Paul McCartney’s name as their sponsor. A family of psychedelized California hippies virtually moved into the Apple building, en route, they said, to the Fiji Islands, and they needed John’s aid in setting up a commune. The mother, a fortyish woman named Emily, would blithely breast-feed her youngest in the reception room, while a half dozen other totally naked children ran from office to office. The proposals and schemes sent to the office could fill a volume in themselves. They were piled into stacks in a storage closet nicknamed the Black Room, where they threatened to bury anyone who got near them.
If there was a source of energy at 3 Savile Row, it was Derek Taylor. In some ways Derek was the most brilliant choice of all the department heads, and in other ways he was the worst. On the good side, he was one of the few people who could plausibly and concisely encapsulate the purpose and idealism of Apple Corp. Derek believed in the Beatles’ good intentions, and his enthusiasm was infectious. He was also blessed with the gift of charm, wit, and imagination. But Derek, at the time, was also a man with a great capacity for alcohol and drugs. As a kind of inebriated, psychedelic visionary, he was the dispenser of Apple’s good vibes, and it became Derek Taylor and his brand of inspired lunacy the world saw as Apple’s best foot forward. It was hardly the best foot. From his second-floor office, Derek encouraged a kind of benevolent anarchy to develop. Derek’s specific responsibility was to deal with the press, enough of a chore in itself; but since no one in the organization could really deal with the collection of freaks who turned up in the entrance hallway, Derek took it upon himself to screen these people, too. He sat behind a large desk in a fantail wicker chair, cigarette or joint in hand, scotch and Coke before him, greeting a never-ending stream of visitors. The office shades were always drawn, and the majority of light was contributed by a light show of a giant amoeba projected on the wall.
Derek had all the screwballs. When someone came into the building announcing he was Adolf Hitler, Derek might invite him up for a drink and ask about Eva’s health. Someone, or something, nicknamed “Stocky” was allowed
to sit on the file cabinets all day and draw pictures of genitalia. The receptionist at the front desk didn’t even blink when one day a young donkey named Samantha was walked into the lift and sent up to Derek’s office. Derek and I only now remember the persistent phone calls from someone named Squeaky Fromme in Los Angeles to talk to us about Charles Manson. I took many of those phone calls or transferred them over to Derek. Derek’s bushy-haired assistant, a young American lad named Richard DeLillo, began squirreling away notes and clippings about the Apple madness for an hysterically funny book called, quite appropriately, The Longest Cocktail Party.
And a party it was. The kitchen was kept busy preparing snacks and elaborate lunches. A fifteen-day tally of the supplies for Derek’s office alone included 600 packs of Benson and Hedges cigarettes, four bottles of Courvoisier brandy, three bottles of vodka, two dozen of ginger ale, one dozen of tonic water, two dozen of bitter lemon, one dozen of tomato juice, three bottles of lime, and four cases of lager. The office manager, Alistair Taylor, noted with relief that the provision list had decreased; the previous one had included two cases of J&B Scotch. The liquor bill eventually peaked at £600 pounds a month.
At the beginning of Apple’s inception on Savile Row, the Beatles took great interest in the company, particularly Paul who acted like a kid with an expensive set of new trains. The first few months he arrived at the office bright and early every morning and went over details of running the company, including whether there was enough toilet paper in the bathroom. His personal pride and joy, however, was the record division. Paul insisted that the company be a class production. Ron Kass struck a distribution deal with EMI in Great Britain. EMI was not particularly happy when he informed them the Beatles intended to start their own record label. At the time the Beatles were still being distributed on the Parlophone label in Great Britain, a label that existed virtually for their benefit. For EMI to let them out of their contracts to distribute the Beatles on their own label was of no value, and they were reluctant to change the structure without a fight. To put pressure on them, Kass threatened to sign Apple in American distribution to a company other than the EMI-owned Capitol label. In the end the EMI executives gave in and signed a new agreement to release Apple records worldwide. Kass’s next task was to buy back George Harrison’s publishing in America, which had been sold off to Terry Melchior by an inexperienced Terry Doran.
Audition tapes for Apple Records arrived by the tens of thousands at Savile Row, so many that Ron Kass estimated that five men in five years couldn’t finish listening to them all. In general, the prevailing attitude at Apple Records was “Sign ’em up!” With the newfound power of being starmakers themselves, almost everybody in the entourage believed he had “discovered” the next major pop star. Terry Doran signed a group of teenagers called Grapefruit, who set about recording an album; Mal Evans discovered the Iveys, who were signed on the basis of a demonstration tape and sent into the studios; George signed Jackie Lomax, a singer from Liverpool, the singers of the Hare Krishna Temple, a husky-voiced black American R&B singer named Doris Troy, and noted session keyboard player Billy Preston; a Swedish group called Bamboo was flown to London for a live audition; John gave a contract to a group called Contact, who sang a tune called “Lovers from the Sky” about flying saucers. To give the Apple label “broader appeal,” Paul signed the winners of the English brass-band competition, The Black Dyke Mills Brass Band, and the prestigious Modern Jazz Quartet. A “spoken word” series was created to record famous writers and poets reading their own works, and Ken Kesey, the American writer who had in part inspired Paul’s conception of the Magical Mystery Tour, was imported to London and given a typewriter and a recording contract.
Some of Apple’s discoveries were especially promising. Peter Asher had signed a young American boy named James Taylor. Taylor played acoustical guitar and sang bittersweet love songs with a world-weary resignation, although at the time he was so young his father had to cosign his contracts. Asher believed so strongly in Taylor that he wanted to manage him too. The only reluctance in awarding Taylor a contract was that his sporadic heroin use was not a promising addiction for a young musician. Taylor was eventually signed and sent to the studios to record a single, “Carolina on My Mind,” and later he made an LP. Paul also had high hopes for a seventeen-year-old Welsh singer named Mary Hopkin. Hopkin had been brought to Paul’s attention by the model Twiggy as the three-time winner of a TV talent show called “Opportunity Knocks.” Paul was producing a single with Hopkin called “Those Were the Days,” a folk-rock song with an eastern European flavor, written by songwriter Gene Raskin. “Those Were the Days” was being included in a specially boxed introductory set of new Apple releases called The First Four. A copy of The First Four was dutifully delivered by hand to Buckingham Palace. The other tunes were a George Harrison composition entitled “Sour Milk Sea,” sung by Jackie Lomax, and the Black Dyke Mills Band playing a Lennon-McCartney composition called “Thingumybob.”
The Beatles’ personal contribution to The First Four was the single “Hey Jude,” backed with John’s “Revolution.” “Hey Jude” had turned into a pop epic. Beginning with Paul’s plaintive voice against simple instrumentation, it built to a melancholy anthem of forty instruments and a chorus of one hundred voices chanting a four-minute coda. To help publicize the release of “Hey Jude,” Paul decided to put the closed boutique at Baker and Paddington Streets to some good use. Late one night he snuck into the store and whitewashed the windows. Then he wrote HEY JUDE across it in block letters. The following morning, when the neighborhood shopkeepers arrived to open their stores, they were incensed; never having heard of the song “Hey Juden” before, they took it as an anti-Semitic slur. A brick was thrown through the store window before the words could be cleaned off and the misunderstanding straightened out.
As it turned out, Paul need not have worried about such a small publicity gimmick; “Hey Jude” became one of the biggest selling singles in England in twenty years. Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” sold almost as well, and throughout the summer both songs fought for the top spot on the record charts, selling a combined thirteen million copies in all.
In its own right, the Beatles’ new double album was no less successful. Entitled The Beatles, the album became known to the public as the White Album, because of its stark, glossy-white laminated jacket, with the words, “The Beatles,” in almost invisible raised lettering. It was Paul’s idea to have each album individually numbered, like fine lithographs. And indeed, the White Album was a work of art. The thirty songs on the two-record set took them an unprecedented five months to record and mix. The critics were ecstatic at the huge selection and diversity of taste on the LP, ranging from John’s “Revolution 9,” a taste of his experimental tapes with a strong influence from Yoko, to Paul’s pudding-sweet “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.” Tony Palmer, in the London Observer, raved, “If there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters since Shubert, then ... [the White Album] ... should surely see the last vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of joyful music making....” None of the critics noted, however, that perhaps some of the album’s diversity was due to the work of individuals rather than the four Beatles working in collaboration. By the time of the White Album sessions, the Beatles’ working relationship had disintegrated to the point where the only way for them to get anything accomplished in the studio was for one of them to wrest control for the recording of his own composition while the others played “backup band.” This put Paul at the controls most of the time, with John in second place, and George in a poor third with only four of his own compositions on the finished album. George had so much trouble getting John and Paul’s attention that he even brought famed guitarist Eric Clapton into the studios with him to use as his “session guitarist.”
Ringo contributed hardly at all. He had finally become superfluous to the Beatles. Most of the time he spent in the studio he sat in a corn
er playing cards with Neil and Mal. It was a poorly kept secret among Beatle intimates that after Ringo left the studios, Paul would often dub in the drum tracks himself. When Ringo returned to the studio the next day, he would pretend not to notice that it was not his playing. The fans never knew, but it must have cut him terribly. The message from Paul and the others was clear; this little man who had lucked into the group and sailed with them to the big times was not good enough musically to play with them.
One day Ringo arrived home after a recording session during which Paul had lectured him on how to play, and he told Maureen tearfully that he “was no longer a Beatle,” that he had quit. Maureen was terrified at first. Ringo sat at home for the next few days and brooded or played with his kids while the recording sessions went on without him. When he got bored and peeved that the others had not attempted to draw him back, he sheepishly announced that he was “returning to the Beatles.” The evening he arrived back in the studios the other three arranged to have his drum kit smothered in several hundred pounds’ worth of flowers. Ringo was delighted and all was forgiven, but the rot had already set in; the foundation of the group was cracking, and no amount of flowers would be able to cover it up.
chapter Sixteen
And they were both naked, the man and
