by Bryce Zabel
Kesey’s poetry aside, the Pleasure Crew found the day’s adventure to be a combo Acid Test/Mystery Tour. John, Paul, Ringo, and their wives led the interlopers from Apple to Liverpool, a four-hour drive. There they showed them the sites—where they grew up, their schools, even docks where Hells Angels had no guarantee of being the toughest on the street.
By nightfall, while the Pleasure Crew was busy drinking to excess in the celebrated Cavern Club, all three Beatles and their spouses, plus Ken Kesey, were hustled outside to a waiting van and driven back to London. When the night was over, Mal Evans explained to Billy Tumbleweed and Frisco Pete that the Beatles wanted the Pleasure Crew to enjoy touring Britain on Apple’s account for the next week, that they were not to return to the offices, and that Evans himself would be their driver. Just to make sure that there were no hard feelings that would lead to trouble, Peter Brown hired twenty London soccer toughs to stand guard at Apple for the next week in case the Pleasure Crew returned, but they never did.
“For the moment, these bearded men seemed no different from the rockers who had run across London in A Hard Day’s Night,” Kesey concluded in his Esquire article, marveling at the sheer fun he had witnessed. “They disposed of a threat, but did so in that cheeky way that made the world love the Beatles, even when they misbehaved. To see John, Paul, and Ringo escaping a pack of motorcycle outlaws and making it look like a week of entertainment was to know that if the band could have more days like this, the Beatles actually could play forever.”
It was a grand, chaotic affair unfolding at a time when everyone should have been focused on A Doll’s House rising meteorically to the number one chart position in the United States. Instead, everyone’s attention was occupied by the party crashers who had to be gaslighted into riding in a massive prop for a failed film. Still, the plan worked. Mal Evans received a bonus payment of £1,000 for his skill as a chaperone.
The three Beatles who were a part of the manic bus trip wrote George Harrison a telegram the following day: “We have finished hosting the Hells Angels,” it read, “and gotten some good press out of it. Apple secured. Happy Xmas.”
Part metaphor and part nightmare, the arrival of the Hells Angels made clear to all who saw it that Apple Records, in existence less than a year, was already in serious trouble. No business could tolerate such danger, excess, and incompetence, and yet there it was. It would have to be fixed or else. Nothing less than the survival of the Beatles was at stake.
Chapter Two:
EVEREST (1969)
Roundhouse Punch
Recording sessions for a proposed The Lord of the Rings soundtrack started in January under a cloud of negativity. John Lennon had given an on-the-record interview to the British pop weekly Disc and Music Echo and was far too off-the-cuff, remarking, “We need these itty-bitty Hobbits to save us, don’t we, because without ’em, the Beatles will be bankrupt soon, the way that Apple’s being run into the ground.”
Lennon was his usual indiscreet and hyperbolic self in choosing those words and that timing, but he was not wrong. There was a whiff of desperation regarding producing a soundtrack album for a movie yet to go before the cameras. And with over 150 people now working at Apple, including an astrologer named Caleb who also served as a fortune-teller for the staff, the company did look like an undisciplined mess.
Apple had been lumbering along under the direction of ex-Beatle road manager and now managing director Neil Aspinall. Working closely with Aspinall was the late Brian Epstein’s personal assistant Peter Brown, who had continued on as social coordinator to the Beatles. New to the team was PR man Derek Taylor, whose office was always stocked with potent marijuana and fine whiskey.
Bright and attentive as the trio could be, running a company of Apple’s magnitude and complexity was not in the direct wheelhouse of any of the men, and they were the first to admit it. No one was up to the job, especially given that the job had never been defined.
What all three men agreed upon was that having the Beatles on the docket encouraged new artists that they, too, could be wrapped up in the magic by joining Apple. There had already been good signings, such as James Taylor and Mary Hopkin, and others, like David Bowie and Fleetwood Mac, were becoming a possibility.
A newly formed group—Crosby, Stills & Nash—had just arrived in London to audition for Apple Records. George was favorably impressed, but John dismissed their sound as “twee nonsense” that was no better than elevator music. Paul argued that it was smart to sign a group whose members came from the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Hollies. With the band departing for the airport to sign contracts with Atlantic Records, Lennon relented in his opposition, and CSN signed their contracts in the classic Belmond Cadogan lobby at the last possible moment.
The biggest part of CSN’s attraction to Apple was, of course, being on the same label as the Beatles. And so John, Paul, George, and Ringo dutifully reported to Twickenham Film Studios to begin work on the soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings. The idea was to lay down a single album side’s worth of songs (the other would be scored by George Martin as he had done for Yellow Submarine) and the entire session would be filmed by documentarian Michael Lindsay-Hogg to accompany the final movie.
There were plenty of solid reasons to record the soundtrack at Twickenham, and getting away from the madness at Apple was among them. But recording there also had its distinct disadvantages.
The space was gargantuan, not intimate like Abbey Road or even like the new studios under construction over at Apple. Several camera crews were constantly filming there, putting the Beatles and their process on public display. The lights turned the entire space into a hot box within hours.
They started work under difficult conditions. The Beatles, with the exception of Paul, liked to come in late and keep going until the sun came up. Now they came to work first thing in the morning and, thanks to the union regulations of the camera crew, knocked off at bankers’ hours.
All of this might have been taken in stride if the Beatles’ relationships with each other had not already fractured. Even after their high-spirited caper to deport the Hells Angels from Apple, the Lennon and McCartney relationship had resumed its previous dysfunction. Meanwhile, Harrison chafed at his second-tier status, while Starkey wanted only to live again in the harmony of the band’s earlier days.
Their frustrations boiled over into open revolt against the studio that was paying for the sessions. The Beatles began by angrily rejecting a request from United Artists that all four of them appear in costumes as their characters. With that idea soundly refused, UA had cardboard cutouts made and shipped to England to make the background more colorful. Staring at themselves in Hobbit gear did nothing to improve the moods of the musicians.
[Ringo] “We’d made fun of this kind of business with the Pepper album, having the Moptop versions of us on the cover. But that was making fun of the past and this was the future making fun of us. We all thought we looked silly. Plus, our heads were too small. This was probably the first time any of us had said that about John and Paul, you know.”
Through it all, there was the divisive influence of Yoko Ono’s presence and John’s silent arrogance about it. Yoko had been on hand for A Doll’s House the year before, but now Paul, George, and Ringo felt it had gotten completely out of hand.
The Beatles could have tried to establish some kind of artistic understanding with Yoko, but John routinely acted to prevent this. He seemed to fear that she could somehow be taken from him when, in reality, the others simply wanted her to not attend sessions, to respect their work methods as their own wives and girlfriends had always done. Now she was a fifth presence, one that wore a continual face of boredom and apathy. And that presence was the only one that mattered to John. His vote had been hijacked.
Yet there they were, day after day, forced together for the cameras that recorded their increasingly sour moods toward each other. To anyone watching only the video, it would seem like they hated working on The Lord of
the Rings, when, in fact, it was the one part of the experience they all supported.
Inflamed over what he saw as Yoko’s constant negative judgment, George ended up in an actual physical fight with John and left the band as Ringo had done the summer before.
[George] “I knew that the girls we all had were part of the Beatles scene now. None of them were Beatles, though, but in John’s mind Yoko had all the rights and privileges. She told me how to play my guitar one time too many, I suppose. Anyway, John pushed me so I pushed him back. He was so high I know I could have hurt him so I left instead. Then I realized I had nowhere to go so I came back.”
In reality, George came back because he sensed the soundtrack sessions were his opportunity to step out of the shadow cast by Paul and John. He showed up with the most material, much of it spiritually tinged and able to fit the constraints of a fantasy film project, including the songs “All Things Must Pass,” “What Is Life,” “Beware of Darkness,” and a re-working of “Let It Down” that now referred to the ring itself, newly re-titled as “Put It On.”
Even in this disaster area, however, there were seeds of salvation for the group. The Beatles’ relaxing and showing off for the cameras by playing songs that would never make it on The Lord of the Rings soundtrack generated a historic creative output far too valuable to waste. Many of the songs that didn’t make the film soundtrack appeared on future albums put out by either the individual artists or the group as a whole.
Through the highs and more abundant lows, the cameras rolled, capturing the insults, staredowns, silent treatments, and walkouts. They continued to roll on January 11, and they recorded the most dramatic moment in the entire documentary when Stanley Kubrick dropped in unexpectedly at Twickenham Film Studios.
A secretary working for Kubrick had given him Lennon and Ono’s Two Virgins album, featuring the frontal nudity of both John and Yoko, a few days prior. Remaining open-minded, the director tried to listen to it and found it “gave me a major headache.” The brain pounding he experienced from the recordings, however, was not as bad as the one he was getting from his battle with the screenplay he could not seem to tame. He said that he had come to realize how immense the project was in terms of story, locations, extras, and battles. He thought it would take too much time, particularly with “an untested talent pool.”
Paul tried to buck up Kubrick by assuring him that director Richard Lester felt they’d all held their own on A Hard Day’s Night and Help! “That wasn’t exactly Shakespeare now, was it?” mocked Kubrick.
This, of course, was the wrong thing to say to a group whose leader, John Lennon, had risen from the streets of Liverpool and done so by never backing down from a fight. “You’re afraid,” he said to the director. “You don’t think you can pull it off.” Kubrick assured him that he certainly could pull it off if he felt like it. “Prove it,” said Lennon. “Show us your screenplay.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” said Kubrick.
Ringo suggested that maybe they should all retire to the pub a few blocks away and talk it out. They could leave all these camera crews at Twickenham to film themselves filming themselves.
Kubrick didn’t want to have a pint with the Beatles and said so directly. He had no desire to strike up a friendship, he said—his primary concern was that as a director, he was losing confidence in the impact their casting would have on his project.
Before the contemplated dissolution could happen, however, those same cameras recorded that George, who said not a single word in the encounter, looked ready to abandon his spiritual principles and come off his chair to kick Stanley Kubrick’s ass. “You can’t fucking fire the Beatles,” he told him.
“I’m very sorry this hasn’t worked out,” said the uncomfortable filmmaker, who then quickly took his leave.
As the door closed, John Lennon pronounced his verdict. “Bloody hell!” was all he said before setting to work, kicking over all the cardboard posters and characters. He dragged them into a pile in the center of the room and proceeded to urinate on the whole lot of them, even as the cameras continued to roll.
The next day, January 12, the four Beatles convened at Ringo’s house to make a plan. Incensed at their situation, they all agreed that Stanley Kubrick had made fools of them for prematurely recording songs for an album that would never be. As it was, this “enemy of my enemy” anger was enough to cause all four men to behave for the briefest moment as they had at the band’s beginning, when they felt it was them trying to prove themselves to the world. Kubrick’s betrayal had given them someone to be mad at besides themselves, or each other.
The easiest decision of the day was to stop the sessions for The Lord of the Rings literally in their tracks and to leave the soulless ambience of Twickenham at once, never to return. They elected to move to the recently constructed studio in the basement of Apple’s plush headquarters at 3 Savile Row in London’s West End, even though none of them had yet laid eyes on it.
They determined to continue filming the documentary, paying for it out of Apple’s pocket instead of UA’s. Now, instead of showing how the soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings was made, the film would provide a final burial to that dream and showcase the beginning of another one. Before the warm embers from the fireplace around which the studio had been built, the Beatles began work on a stripped-down roots rock and roll album to be known as Get Back.
They would, as John put it, “stick our finger up Kubrick’s ass and watch him jump to the fuckin’ Moon.” Apple PR man Taylor later spun that sentiment into, “The Beatles and Mister K have suffered from creative differences and all have agreed to move on to other world-changing ideas.”
“We’ve been misinterpreted in film before,” Paul said to the press days later, choosing not to give voice to the band’s active participation in the misinterpretation, “so we’ve all just decided to get back to doing what we do best, to be a rock and roll band.”
Paul had gotten what he most wanted: everyone was on the same team making an album together. To celebrate, the marijuana came out, and then Paul pushed just a bit harder. He suggested that the ultimate ending to the documentary and the process of making the album be a live performance of the album in its entirety.
This inspired much loose talk of performing before both Houses of Parliament or on an ocean liner or even in front of the pyramids, but every option seemed like too much trouble. McCartney, trying to keep the balloon of optimism inflated, suggested trying north London’s famous Roundhouse, an engine room of creative expression and home to an increasing number of British rock performances.
Showing up unexpectedly at a London venue to play would create a legend, said Ringo. “And besides that, it’ll support local bands because they can always leak out a rumor that the Beatles may turn up.”
As John and George resisted even the local one-off, everyone agreed that if the songs were ready when the time came, they would embrace the Roundhouse concept. But first, they had an album to create.
The Beatles rang up Alexis Mardas and told him to get the Apple studios up and running. Mardas, also known as “Magic Alex,” was considered to be the mad genius of Apple. A Greek national in his mid-twenties, he was always coming up with pie-in-the-sky ideas, like phones that could recognize your voice, a force field around a home as a security system, and even a functioning flying saucer. None of these, however, had ever come to fruition, although he was on the Apple payroll to the tune of £6,000 a month and during his tenure was thought to have spent over £300,000 on his various projects.
In any case, Mardas had claimed over a year earlier that he could build a groundbreaking studio that would easily eclipse the antiquated 4-track they were used to at EMI’s Abbey Road. He said he could make a 72-track tape machine and mixing console where each track, incredibly, would also have its own speaker.
When the Beatles showed up to inspect the new facilities, they were shocked by what they saw. There was no 72-track tape deck, no soundproofing, no intercom, and not even
a patch bay to run the wiring between the control room and the sixteen speakers that Mardas had fixed haphazardly to the walls. The only new piece of sound equipment present was a crude mixing console which Mardas had built and which looked like bits of wood and an old oscilloscope that was to operate as a sound level meter. Harrison lost his cool immediately, calling the chaotic tableau “medieval.”
Called in to render a second opinion, producer George Martin agreed with Harrison’s assessment at first glance. He immediately set about borrowing two 4-track recorders from EMI. Longtime Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick was given the task of building and setting up a studio with portable equipment. Mardas was banished from the premises, relegated to his workshop at Apple Electronics in the Marylebone area of London. He was about to lose his job in the most spectacular way.
What the Beatles, Martin, and others closely involved with Apple did not yet know was that in building his self-perceived studio of the future, Magic Alex had knocked down a wall to create a more “open” space, a tactic he expected would be the best way to capture the sonic imagination of the Beatles. The problem was that Mardas, a man with no construction or architectural experience, had removed a load-bearing wall. No one at Apple understood the danger either and had simply deferred to his presumed expertise.
Three days later, George Martin, Geoff Emerick, several Apple employees, and a team from Abbey Road were hard at work removing all traces of Mardas’s technological incompetence and replacing it with a functioning studio set-up. As they worked, they heard a terrible groan from above. Pieces of plaster began to crash from the ceiling. Within seconds, one of the Apple secretaries shouted down to them: “Get out!”
As the basement ceiling began to crumble, the floor above it lost its own structural integrity. It had been strained from the moment Mardas removed the wall two weeks earlier and had finally given way to physics. When ignored, gravity will slowly exert its sway, and it always wins.
