by Bryce Zabel
Once There Was a Way
What if The Beatles Stayed Together?
Bryce Zabel
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2017 by Bryce Zabel
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition December 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68230-320-7
Also by Bryce Zabel
Surrounded by Enemies: What if Kennedy Survived Dallas?
A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact (with Richard Dolan)
This is a fictional work of alternate history. Although its form is that of a journalistic account, it is not one. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are drawn from the historical record, then altered and used fictitiously. The characters of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Richard Starkey, and others have been projected into an alternative reality and, therefore, have no factual basis. Dialogues and action in the novel reflect the fictitious characters only and not real individuals. Any resemblance to other actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
As always, for Jackie, with all my loving.
Introduction
Imagine an alternative reality—it’s easy if you try.
Back in June 10, 1976, I was a brand-new reporter at KZEL-FM, a counter-culture radio station in Eugene, Oregon. For the first time, Paul McCartney was touring America with his new band, Wings, when my program director came to what we called the “News Cave” to see me. “I just got a phone call,” he said. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen tonight.”
“It” was the much-discussed, always out-of-reach Beatles reunion. I was given a show ticket, told to get in my 1965 Ford Mustang and start driving immediately to Seattle, about six hours away.
The entire ride up I could feel the very atoms of my being vibrating with anticipation to see John, Paul, George, and Ringo back on stage as the Beatles. As it turned out, the Beatles didn’t get back together that night up at the Seattle Kingdome when sixty-seven thousand fans showed up, eclipsing the live audience record of the Fab Four. Instead, McCartney gave his audience a riveting run-through of Wings music but played less than a half dozen Beatles songs late in the show. I had seen a Beatle play live, and it was amazing beyond belief, yet there was still disappointment on the way out to the parking lot. Such is the power of the Beatles and the desire of fans to see them together.
Half a lifetime later, this attraction remains the greatest “What if?” in rock music history, even though Lennon’s murder and Harrison’s cancer and decades of time have removed any possibility at all of it ever happening. Still, the mind and the heart want what they want.
What if John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey had actually worked it out at the end of the 1960s and kept making music as the Beatles for a few more years? Or longer? Or just kept going like their contemporaries, the Rolling Stones?
Once There Was a Way is the answer. Or at least one answer.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.
Bryce Zabel
December 5, 2017
Los Angeles
“No one’s more surprised than I am that the Beatles made it. Maybe Yoko.”
—John Lennon
“Play, quit, repeat. That’s been the secret.”
—Paul McCartney
“Spiritual wisdom means not wasting the gifts of the Universe, even if it’s the three of them.”
—George Harrison
“We all quit. We just never all quit for good at the same time.”
—Ringo Starr
From interviews with Rockstar editor, Booth Hill.
From the Editor of Rockstar Magazine
Americans of a certain age still remember vividly how inevitable it once was that the world’s greatest rock group would break up. The four youthful Moptops who seemed like best friends had become four angry men who acted like mortal enemies. From 1968 to 1971, virtually everyone knew the Beatles would be finished sooner than later.
And yet they were not. Somehow history broke in another direction. As a consequence, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey aged in place on performance stages and recording studios, playing a part in our lives from the moment they came to America in 1964, over fifty years ago.
From 1968 through 1975, the years of maximum danger, the Beatles, always on the edge of dissolution, still continued to produce a creative output of outrageously honest poetry, tuneful rock operas, and passionate tributes to a higher power. They took long vacations from each other, yes, but still found their way back home time and again.
If the Beatles had disbanded in 1970, they would still be fiercely remembered today, and they might even be far more mythic and legendary. By staying together through thick and thin, they convinced us that they would always be there for us. While we never took them for granted, we began to see them as part of our current musical landscape. Not a bad thing.
To source our facts, Rockstar has drawn from its own archives a great deal, and, in particular, we have revisited virtually all of the classic sit-down interviews our magazine has conducted with the Beatles over the course of the band’s years together. We also put three of our youngest and most expressive journalists on the job—Coleman Birdwell, LeAnne Falby, and Emmer Hoffman—and told them to talk to everyone again. None of this trio was even alive when the Beatles nearly broke up in 1969. They have spent the better part of a year talking to spouses, children, friends, collaborators, enemies, competitors, and fans of the Beatles, and they have merged it into a fresh perspective.
The truth that they have reported here is universal. The Beatles were not destined to break apart or stay together. They made a choice to look beyond the slights, the disagreements, and their individual desires. They chose to remain the Beatles. This is how they did it.
Booth Hill
Editor, Rockstar
Chapter One:
A DOLL’S HOUSE (1968)
They Blew His Mind Out in a Bar
In May 1968, Paul McCartney and John Lennon traveled together to New York City to tell the world that Apple Corps Ltd. was the new company behind the Beatles. The New York Post headline proclaimed “Beatles Pitch Apple in the Big Apple.”
McCartney and Lennon labored through multiple press briefings and interviews to explain why they had done it. McCartney took the position that it was a natural extension of the brand, a way to control their own destinies. “The Beatles are more than records,” he explained. “We’re a bit of everything these days, aren’t we? We have to watch out for ourselves.”
The reality was that Apple had been conceived as a tax dodge shortly after the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in the late summer of 1967. Truly on their own then, the Beatles had received sobering news that over £4MM would need to be paid in taxes by the Beatles unless the money was used for business purposes. It was simple survival math since corporate tax rates were far lower than those for individuals. Under the new arrangement worked out by lawyers and accountants, each Beatle would own 5 percent of a company known as “Beatles and Co.” and Apple—owned collectively by all four Beatles—would own the other 80 percent.
This line of reasoning played out as far too mercenary and boring for John Lennon, who chose to cast the entire decision as primarily a creative
one. “It’s so people who want to make a record or a film, you know, don’t have to go on their knees in an office, begging for a break. They can just come to us and sit in one of our chairs if they want.”
There was pushback everywhere to this idea that, inspired by capitalism, Apple could be embraced by its owners as a counter-culture answer to capitalism, opening its doors and its cash reserves to strangers while almost simultaneously trying to extend its brand to everything from clothing to technology. It was clearly a risky affair, given that the primary talent of the Beatles, up to that point, was making music.
At a St. Regis Hotel press conference, American journalists seemed as skeptical as their English brethren that these drug-taking leftist musicians could manage a real-world business. Worse than the skepticism, however, was the palpable lack of interest. Most reporters seemed uninterested in the new venture but fixated on the idea that the behavior and the music of the Beatles were alienating them from their fans.
Only a few days into the New York visit, after some back-and-forth with the press, both Lennon and McCartney found their moods darkening. Playing businessmen was supposed to be fun. Otherwise, what was the point?
On Tuesday, May 14, the two Beatles were scheduled to appear on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where eleven million viewers could hear their pitch. When Apple publicist Derek Taylor broke the news to them on Monday that Johnny was unavailable the next night and that they would be appearing with substitute host and former baseball player Joe Garagiola, John had had enough.
“Fuck that,” he said. “Let’s just go home.”
With twenty-four hours’ notice, the celebrated team of Lennon and McCartney sent their regrets to the bookers of The Tonight Show. A miserable staffer, Craig Tennis, was sent to the hotel where John and Paul were staying to plead for them to reconsider. According to Tennis, Mister Carson was performing in Gaithersburg, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. It was something that was booked long before they ever knew that John and Paul were coming to America. Tennis explained that his boss “feels strongly that you need to be at the studio as was negotiated.”
John Lennon gave Tennis the middle finger. “Negotiate this.”
Paul, ever the perfect host, sent the staffer away with this message: “You just tell them back at the show that we always wanted to meet Johnny, you know. King of Late Night, they say he is, don’t they? So maybe next time we can do it. No hard feelings.”
Johnny Carson, not a fan of guests dictating terms to him or his show, still knew history when it called, and while he had made his peace with Garagiola getting this big one, he would be damned if he was going to lose two Beatles as guests at the height of their popularity. Carson knew this was a “get” that would be good for both him and his show and might introduce him to a younger audience. He sent back the flustered Tennis with only one condition: Carson would come back if Lennon and McCartney agreed to do the entire show and promised to sing at least one song.
Fortunately for the NBC-TV network, Carson’s stipulation gave the two Beatles a chance to get away from the irritating interviews with stodgy reporters and change the subject a bit. They had shown their dominance again the past November with a number one single featuring McCartney’s “Hello, Goodbye” on the A-side and Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” on the B-side. John had never been happy with that, thinking that his song was the superior choice. Paul, having won that battle when producer George Martin sided with him, saw a chance to throw a peace offering to his partner.
“Let’s do it, John. You sing ‘Walrus’ and we’ll blow his mind.”
As a result, on that Tuesday, Johnny Carson canceled a gig at the last minute, returning to New York City. And John Lennon and Paul McCartney got in a limo, smoked a joint, and cruised over to Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan, where The Tonight Show was broadcast from NBC Studio 6B.
Although the show felt live, it was actually taped hours earlier than it aired, at 7 p.m. Mayor John V. Lindsay, a Republican, and half his staff were there. Simon and Garfunkel tried to attend, but imposters had taken their tickets and they were turned away at the door at the last minute. The two Beatles had to be smuggled in through an underground tunnel to avoid a possible public incident.
The show began with Carson asking a block of getting-to-know-you questions focused on why rock stars adored by millions of available women would want to start balancing spreadsheets. Lennon and McCartney described the state of Apple to Carson before the commercial break. Soon Carson and the two Beatles were reminiscing about their 1964 arrival at Kennedy airport and the appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Lennon was as clever as his reputation made him out to be and McCartney was cheeky enough that every comment seemed to come with a wink. Carson seemed engaged and informed. McMahon chortled at everyone’s jokes.
It was good television, and the show was only half over.
What Johnny Carson didn’t know was how the two men sitting side by side on his couch were at a crossroads in their friendship. They were soldiering on with this trip to America, but back home they had been drifting apart for over a year or more. Carson saw them as close friends and pressed them for the secret of their friendship. He pointed out that he and Ed McMahon socialized together outside the show all the time. They’d had coffee just last week.
“Oh, we’re great friends like that, we are,” assured Paul.
Lennon did not miss a beat. “Although coffee’s not exactly our drug of choice.”
The audience held its breath to see how this confession from the long-haired Lennon would play with the straight-arrow Carson. The host timed it perfectly. “Of course not,” he deadpanned. “Coming from England, you probably favor a strong cup of tea.”
Another break, and then the magic came. Johnny asked them to play a song. Both Paul and John knew what a big deal it was. If they performed, it would be the first time they’d played before an audience of any kind whatsoever since they ceased touring in 1966.
“Well, you see, Johnny,” Paul deflected, as if it hadn’t already been discussed and decided, “it seems we’ve forgotten our guitars.”
Doc Severinsen fixed that with a couple of instruments the band had procured in anticipation of the two Beatles playing on the show. In return, John reached behind the couch and presented Johnny with a tambourine. “We’re not used to playing by ourselves. It’s better when we have a quartet, you know?” He then turned to Ed. “Just sing along with the words that you know.”
John began to pick out the opening chords to “I Am the Walrus.”
“What does that mean,” asked Johnny. “Why are you the Walrus?”
“We’re all the Walrus,” said John. “Maybe the Walrus was Paul.”
“Johnny could be the Walrus,” suggested Paul helpfully.
“No, no,” the host said, waving them off. “The tambourine is all I can handle.”
“It’s just a word,” John said, continuing to play. “It could be an Apple. We rather fancy that word now.”
With that, John, Paul, Johnny, and Ed launched into a shockingly good but stripped-down version of “I Am the Walrus,” complete with accompaniment from The Tonight Show band. Only this version banished the word “Walrus” in favor of “I Am the Apple.”
As it ended, the audience gave the performance a standing ovation. Pumped up by the reception, it was John who suggested spontaneously that they do another. “Let’s do the A-side,” he said to Paul. “I wrote down your words, just in case.” John produced a folded piece of paper with the lyrics written in his distinctive handwriting. “Your words” is how he had phrased it, not “our words.” It was one of the first public acknowledgments that the unity implied by the Lennon-McCartney brand was part spin. The reality was clearly different.
John and Paul then delighted The Tonight Show audience with an acoustic version of “Hello, Goodbye” that they managed to turn into a Lennon-McCartney song instead of a McCartney solo.
Paul: “You say yes…”
John:
“I say no…”
Paul: “You say stop…”
John: “And I say go, go, go…”
Paul/John: “Oh, no…You say goodbye and I say hello…”
As the broadcast came to an end, Johnny asked John and Paul if they were working on a new album. Not yet, they said, but both talked about all the new material they’d written while away in India. Ed McMahon wanted to know what they would call it.
“Well, we might call it A Doll’s House, couldn’t we? Or anything else that we might imagine,” said Lennon. “Because it’d still be a Beatles album no matter what we call it.” It was the same argument he made for changing “Walrus” to “Apple” in the song lyrics. Names were just labels and labels were not reality.
After the show, at Carson’s suggestion, Carson, McMahon, Lennon, and McCartney went to The Tonight Show host’s favorite watering hole, Danny’s Hideaway. There, Carson and McMahon introduced the two Beatles to their favorite drinks—vodka sours and J&B scotch and water.
Years later, Ed McMahon would still describe the night as “fraught with danger.” By that, Carson’s sidekick meant that it soon became obvious to him that the famed Lennon and McCartney partnership showed distinct signs of having run its course. “These two brilliant young men had been placed under such pressure in extreme circumstances over the past five years that they were about to explode,” he said. “They needed to push back against something and, particularly for John, that was Paul.”
McMahon saw his own partner, Johnny Carson, wink at him before he turned to Lennon and McCartney and raised the first of several glasses. “A toast,” said Carson, “to showing up.”
Showing up, Carson and McMahon explained to Lennon and McCartney, meant that friends turned up for friends even when it was not convenient or fun or even appreciated. That’s what Johnny and Ed had done for each other over the years. They joked that with all the marriages they had each been through, showing up to each other’s respective weddings was the ultimate test of their commitment to their friendship.
