Derek survived the terror, protected as he was by his friend George Harrison, but many others went. Alex Mardas was given the chop, as was Apple Electronics. The Beatles finally got rid of ‘Measles’. Denis O’Dell, head of Apple Films, left. Zapple was shut, leaving Barry Miles stranded in New York where he was recording a spoken-word LP with Allen Ginsberg. ‘We’d done two tracks, and suddenly the recording studio said, “We’ve been told that’s the end of it.” I said, “What? It’s news to me.” I tried of course to call the Beatles. No way. You know. They just mysteriously disappear.’ It fell to Peter Brown to tell Alistair Taylor that his employment with the Beatles was also over. Alistair was one of the original gang who’d come down from Liverpool with the boys, part of the ‘family’, and he took his sacking badly, breaking down in tears. He tried to call Paul. ‘But Paul refused to come to the phone,’ Taylor later told Bob Spitz. ‘Nothing in my life ever hurt as much as that.’ Another Apple employee who’d been close to Paul was Peter Asher who, despite Paul’s split with Jane, had been running Apple Records with Ron Kass, who was now fired. Reading the writing on the wall, Peter quit. The Ashers were mourning a shocking death at the time. Jane and Peter’s father had been found dead in the coal cellar of their Wimpole Street house on 2 May. The coroner found that Dr Asher, always an eccentric character, had killed himself with an overdose of barbiturates.
THEIR LAST AND GREATEST ALBUM
Paul and Lin took Heather on holiday to Corfu in May, then returned home to continue the Apple battle. The McCartneys invited Ritchie and Mo Starkey to dinner at Cavendish in the hope of talking the drummer round. Such an invitation was a treat; Linda was a superb cook. In the days before she turned vegetarian she did wonders with a chicken. After giving the Starkeys a feed, the McCartneys tried to persuade Ritchie to join them in the fight against Klein. When the drummer demurred, saying Klein didn’t seem that bad to him, Linda started crying. ‘They’ve got you, too!’ she sobbed, as though Ritchie had been taken over by zombies.
John Ono Lennon, as he was now known, having changed his middle name from Winston, was also beyond reason. He and Yoko were in a world of their own, looking and behaving like members of a religious cult. Doped up and dressed in white, they floated about London conducting bizarre happenings that were part art events, part sincere peace campaigning and also clearly a grab for attention. One of their nuttiest ideas was that Apple should send an acorn to every world leader to plant for peace. Apple Staff were despatched to the royal parks to gather the acorns, only to find that it was the wrong time of year. The squirrels had already eaten their stores. Then John and Yoko flew to Canada to conduct their second bed-in for peace, at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, demonstrating in the process that, despite his whacked-out appearance, John still possessed a genius for music-making. He made a compelling in situ recording of ‘Give Peace a Chance’. With overdubbed drums by Ringo, the song was released on 4 July as a single, not by the Beatles, but by a new entity, the Plastic Ono Band, a clear indication that John wanted out of the Beatles.
It therefore came as a considerable surprise to George Martin when Paul telephoned to say that the Beatles wanted to make one more album with their old producer. With no sign of the recently recorded Let It Be tapes being released, and with John so strange, distant and unpleasant recently, Martin had assumed his working days with the boys were over.
My immediate response was, ‘Only if you let me produce it the way we used to.’ [Paul] said, ‘We will, we want to.’ ‘John included?’ ‘Yes, honestly.’ So I said, ‘Well, if you really want to, let’s do it. Let’s get together again.’ It was a very happy record. I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last.
Geoff Emerick would again be their engineer. Having had the courage to walk out on the Beatles during the White Album sessions, when they had behaved so badly, the engineer had won the musicians’ respect and trust. They rewarded Geoff with a job at Apple, and he would work with Paul on various projects for years to come.
So the old team was reunited in Studio Two at EMI seven years after the Beatles started their recording career with George Martin in this same lofty room. Remarkably, the boys’ last hurrah would prove for many listeners to be their best LP. In common with the White Album, the record that would be named Abbey Road had a variety of music, ranging from loose, blues-based rock ’n’ roll to sophisticated song suites, yet it was assembled more selectively, creating one immaculate disc that can be played endlessly without sounding stale.
The record didn’t get off to a promising start. When the band assembled at EMI on Tuesday 1 July there was no sign of John. Their founding member had recently gone on holiday to Scotland with Yoko, Julian and Yoko’s daughter Kyoko, with the intention of visiting John’s Scottish relatives. With poor eyesight, and limited experience as a motorist, Lennon crashed the Austin Maxi he was driving into a ditch the day the Beatles were due to start work in London, with the result that the family were taken to hospital in the Highlands town of Golspie. All save Julian needed stitches, John requiring 17 to his face. Yoko had injured her back.
As the Lennons convalesced in Scotland, the other three Beatles started work at EMI, Paul beginning proceedings with ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, the tune dreamt up on that carefree day with Lin and Heather in New York, while the lyric was seemingly inspired by his acrimonious dealings with Allen Klein. Paul also recorded the cheeky ditty ‘Her Majesty’, which would close the album with a flirtatious wink at the Queen. More substantial was the song suite ‘Golden Slumbers’/‘Carry That Weight’, the lyrics to the first part adapted from an Elizabethan verse:Golden slumbers kisse your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise:
Sleepe pretty wantons doe not cry,
And I will sing a lullabie …
These are the words of English poet Thomas Dekker (1572-1632), which Paul had seen on sheet music, at his father’s house on the Wirral, set to a lullaby that Paul’s stepsister Ruth had been learning to play on the piano. Although the words were originally meant to rock a baby to sleep, Paul reinterpreted the 400-year-old rhyme in a radically different way, creating music that starts sweetly, then plunges dramatically, with Paul roaring out Dekker’s words. Seguing from this brief piece of music into ‘Carry That Weight’ was a trick Paul and John used repeatedly on this their last album, using up scraps of music and general leftovers. That this worked so well is a tribute to the superb musicianship throughout, not least Paul’s bass-playing and Ringo’s drumming, which had never sounded better. George Harrison’s guitar parts were also judicious, while Harrison finally came into his own as a songwriter on Abbey Road with ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’, respectively the best and second best songs he ever composed. Ringo’s ‘Octopus’ Garden’ was also enjoyable in the tradition of the Beatles’ children’s songs, while Paul’s ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ introduced one of several creepy characters to Abbey Road, the maniac medical student Maxwell Edison. Paul explained Maxwell’s hammer to Barry Miles as ‘an analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue’, though it might also be interpreted as wishful thinking on his part. How Paul must have longed for a hammer to come crashing down on Allen Klein’s head. Or John’s. Or Yoko’s.
Without Lennon, the early Abbey Road sessions were happy and harmonious, with Paul sliding joyfully down the banister from George Martin’s control room like a carefree young Beatle. There was one spat with Harrison, but it blew over. Then John and Yoko appeared, dressed in matching black, a tow truck following with the smashed-up remains of their touring car, a memento of their brush with death. Men from Harrods also came with a bed, which they erected in the studio so that the injured Yoko could lie there watching the boys work. ‘I thought I’d seen it all,’ Geoff Emerick noted in his memoirs of this supremely strange moment in the Beatles story, ‘but this took the cake.’ John asked for a microphone to be suspended over the bed so Yoko could make comments on what she heard, and she didn’t hol
d back. ‘Beatles will do this, Beatles will do that,’ she’d say, omitting the definite article.
‘Actually, it’s the Beatles, luv,’ Paul corrected her, just about controlling his temper. This bizarre scene became stranger still when Yoko put on a tiara.
Before continuing, the Beatles and their partners watched a rough cut of Let It Be. ‘There was a lot more of John and Yoko than was in the final cut,’ says the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who went out to dinner afterwards with the McCartneys and Lennons. Everybody seemed to be getting along fine, John and Paul reminiscing about old times, which was safe territory. ‘Talking about their time in Liverpool when they were kids and what it was like growing up - a nice kind of cosy evening.’ Lindsay-Hogg went home from the restaurant with a good feeling about the project, to watch Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. A day or two later, Peter Brown called to say there was too much John and Yoko in the first cut of Let It Be. Brown had received three phone calls. ‘So I think it was the others, and of course the central voice will always be Paul,’ says Lindsay-Hogg. ‘The others thought it maybe had slanted too much to John and Yoko.’
As the director returned to his cutting room, the Beatles completed Abbey Road. Following in the footsteps of Maxwell Edison, John introduced two more sinister characters to the record: Mean Mr Mustard, a dirty old man, and the androgynous Polythene Pam. The latter was seemingly inspired by a long-past conversation of John’s with poet Royston Ellis, whom the boys met in Liverpool, then hooked up with again on tour in the Channel Islands in 1963. While they were on Guernsey, Ellis introduced John to a girlfriend named Stephanie, whereupon they all dressed up in oilskins and polythene for a sex romp, though Ellis can’t recall the exact nature of the couplings. ‘There was some sexual encounter, put it like that, with John and Stephanie and myself. But I can’t remember [the details].’
‘Pam’ was paired as another song suite with Paul’s ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’, inspired by a recent break-in at Cavendish Avenue. Having scaled Paul’s garden wall, Chris the Apple Scruff had opened Paul’s gate and ushered in Little Sue, Big Sue, Emma, Di and Carol Bedford. The girls then put a ladder up against the back of Paul’s house, sending Di up first, because she was smallest.
‘I’m in the bathroom!’ she called down.
Carol went up the ladder next and made it through the bathroom window just before the ladder fell over, as she describes in Waiting for the Beatles. The two girls then ran downstairs and opened the front door to let the others in. They rootled through Paul and Linda’s things, marvelling at Ringo’s stage drums, seizing armfuls of Paul’s clothes, Di swiping a framed photo, another girl scooping up photographic slides.
The following day Margo called at Cavendish with Bam Bam, having prearranged to take Martha for a walk. Some of the other girls were with her. Rose ‘Rosie’ Martin, a Cockney cleaner who’d recently started working for Paul, and would remain in his employ for the rest of her working life, told the girls that Paul wanted a word with them. He came outside with Linda, both looking serious. ‘It seems someone broke into my house on Sunday afternoon,’ Paul told the Scruffs. ‘I hate to say it, but I think it was some of the girls.’
‘What makes you think that?’ asked Margo.
‘By what they took. Pictures mostly. Anyone else - a real burglar - would have taken more expensive things.’ Paul said the slides were Linda’s, pictures she’d shot of the band, while the framed photo was of sentimental value to Paul, being a picture of him and his dad. He asked the girls to put the word around that he’d like the pictures back. They could keep the clothes. The girls returned the framed photo, and some slides, but many pictures were never recovered. This was just one of a number of burglaries Paul suffered at Cavendish over the years, in the course of which he lost a lot of memorabilia, including his home movies. ‘Everything was stolen by fans, this is the sad thing,’ says Barry Miles. ‘He owns hardly anything. This is why he occasionally buys stuff from Sotheby’s.’
A few days after the bathroom break-in Paul told the Scruffs he’d written a song about the girls who broke into his home.
‘A tribute, huh?’ asked Carol Bedford, missing the point. ‘What’s it called?
‘“She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”’
This tune forms the centrepiece of the long medley of song suites that takes up most of what was, in the days of long-playing records, Side Two of Abbey Road, the long medley being one of the most glorious achievements of the Beatles’ recording career, beginning quietly with Paul singing his lament, ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’, and concluding with the aptly named ‘The End’, in which the Beatles seem to ascend to Heaven on a cloud of raucous rock ’n’ roll, John, Paul and George locked in a three-way guitar duel as Ritchie drums furiously, the patron saints of pop dispensing groovy benedictions to the world as they depart: love you; love you … The sky clears, a simple piano motif plays, and the words of Paul ring out as he sings that, in the end, the love we take is equal to the love we make.
Fab. The best lyric Paul McCartney ever wrote was the perfect ending to the Beatles’ last and greatest album, emphasising that, ultimately, their message had been one of love.
Having considered naming the LP Everest, indicating that they had reached their peak, also incidentally a brand of cigarettes smoked by Geoff Emerick, the boys decided instead to title the album Abbey Road. It made sense to name the record after the London street where they had made so much wonderful music (and as a result of which the studio was later officially renamed Abbey Road Studios, hereafter referred to as such). Again Paul came up with the cover concept, sketching a drawing of the Beatles walking across the zebra crossing in front of the EMI buildings. They did so on the morning of Friday 8 August 1969, one of those glorious mid-summer days when London basks in sunshine, the trees in leaf, the red geraniums seeming to smile cheerfully from their window boxes at the red phone boxes and red pillar boxes, which stand to attention like guardsmen under forget-me-not skies.
How different the Beatles themselves looked to the four boys signed by George Martin in 1962! Seven years on, John resembled an Old Testament prophet as he strode across the zebra crossing, dressed in white with a bushy beard. George Harrison’s long hair and beard emphasised his serious, cadaverous features, making him look much older than 26. Ringo had started to take on the flamboyance of a playboy millionaire. Paul was the least changed. Having shaved off his Fenian beard, he wore a crisp white shirt and a blue suit for the photo session, kicking off his sandals on what was a very warm day, presenting a handsome, mature version of his younger self. A week later he became a dad for the first time (setting aside the paternity claims against him) when, on 28 August 1969, Linda gave birth at the Avenue Hospital, around the corner, to a daughter they named Mary after Paul’s mum.
‘THE BEATLES THING IS OVER’
Before Abbey Road was released John went to Toronto, with Yoko, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann, to perform as the Plastic Ono Band. During the Canadian trip Lennon told Allen Klein that he intended to leave the Beatles. Klein begged John not to say anything to the others, because he was renegotiating their contract with Capitol Records. But when the Beatles met in London on 20 September, John blurted out his news.
Paul was talking about the band going back on the road, playing small venues at first to regain their confidence. He was certain this was the right thing to do, reminding John that whenever the Beatles played live they played good. It was touching the way he spoke about the band; Paul loved the Beatles. ‘Well, I think you’re daft,’ Lennon interrupted. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you until we signed the Capitol deal, but I’m leaving the group.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean the group is over. I’m leaving … I want a divorce,’ said John, thrilled to be cutting free of the band, as he had cut himself loose from Cyn.
Because Klein didn’t want Lennon’s decision made public, and thinking perhaps that John was just shooting his mouth off, as he
liked to do, no official announcement was made, and the Beatles bumbled on almost like before. Things had changed, though. Abbey Road was released the following week, without a single to herald it, uniquely, but went to number one all the same. Then the Beatles whimsically put out ‘Something’/‘Come Together’ as a single; it made number four in Britain, number one in the USA. There was a new promotional film for ‘Something’, showing the Beatles with their partners. Paul and Linda were filmed at High Park, where they had retired after the birth of Mary. Paul, who had let his beard grow again, took to carrying Mary about in his fur-lined leather jacket, the epitome of a proud father.
The McCartneys were at their farm when the Apple press office started to receive enquiries from the United States asking if Paul had died. Weird though this sounds, a similar macabre rumour had gone around more than once before, usually as a result of Beatles fans - in order to try and deduce his actual whereabouts - ringing the newspapers with spurious enquiries about Paul being in car accidents. Tony Barrow explains: ‘If they rang up and said, “We hear he’s been in a car accident, hasn’t he, down in Surrey?” they were hoping for the answer, “No, of course not, he’s in [London].”’ This time, however, the rumour started in the USA, where fans had begun to see ‘hidden signs’ that Paul was dead on Beatles albums. There were apparently a host of clues on the Abbey Road sleeve, including the fact Paul was walking barefoot across the zebra crossing with a car number plate behind him, the last four characters of which were 28IF. Supposedly this meant he would have been 28 if he’d survived a fatal accident that the Beatles had hushed up, replacing Paul with a double so they could continue as a band. This was preposterous, not least because Paul appeared the least changed of all the Beatles. Anyway, the death of a musician does not automatically mean the end of a band. Brian Jones had died earlier that summer. The Rolling Stones simply replaced him. Nevertheless, the Paul is Dead story grew, fuelled by the fact Paul had been out of the public eye recently, spending time in Scotland with Linda and Heather and the baby. When Paul didn’t show his face, a student at Hofstra University in New York started a society: Is Paul McCartney Dead? Disc jockeys began playing Beatles records backwards to reveal hidden audio clues as to what had happened. Finally, Life magazine despatched a reporter and photographer to Scotland to get to the bottom of the story.
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