The Beatles (140 page)

Readers who leafed through the London dailies on the morning of April 20, 1968, stopped paging as they came upon a peculiar-looking advertisement. It was so outlandish, so
un-British,
that it was impossible to ignore. Most people who saw it and read through the copy couldn’t help but grin abstractedly as they realized who was behind the shenanigan.
THIS MAN HAS TALENT
, the banner read. Underneath it sat a bespectacled little busker in a pegged suit and bowler hat (Alistair Taylor, pressed into the role over strong objections) with a bass drum strapped to his back, a harmonica poised at his mouth, a litter of instruments, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a washboard, and other musical paraphernalia scattered around his feet, bent over a guitar and singing into a microphone: a one-man band. “One day he sang his songs to a tape recorder (borrowed from a man next door),” the ad continued. “In his neatest handwriting he wrote an explanatory note (giving his name and address) and, remembering to enclose a picture of himself, sent the tape, letter, and photograph to
apple music,
94 Baker Street, London, W.1. If you were thinking of doing the same thing yourself—do it now!
This man now owns a Bentley!
”

It had the Beatles’ fingerprints all over it. Only two weeks after arriving back from India, they launched Apple with their customary fireworks, in a way that would demand instant worldwide attention. They had kicked around ideas for over a week, trying to decide how to best express the company’s philosophy and make the proper splash at the same time. “
We want to help people
, but without doing it like a charity,” explained Paul,
whose brainstorm produced
the ad. “We’re in the happy position of not needing any more money, so for the first time the bosses aren’t in it for a profit. If you come to me and say, ‘I’ve had such-and-such a dream,’ I’ll say to you: ‘Go away and do it.’ ” Apple would cut a check to underwrite the project, just like that.

This announcement touched off a gold rush. The promise of a blank check
and
the Beatles was too much for anyone to resist, whether they had talent or not. “
Overnight, we were swamped
with calls and kids who wandered in, demanding an audition,” says Alistair Taylor. “Everyone tried to get through the door in the next couple of weeks.” Worthy artists made their pitch—but so did schemers and crackpots. George, the resident skeptic, called it “madness” and was not too far off the mark. “
By the time I came back
[from India],” he recalled, “they’d opened the offices in Wigmore Street. I went in… and there were rooms full of lunatics, people throwing
I Ching
[John had hired a fortune-teller named Caleb who advised him on business matters based on the readings] and all kinds of hangers-on trying to get a gig.” Through it all, the spirit of peace and love abounded—a spirit dedicated to the notion that what goes around comes around. Kids wearing loose-fitting flowered shirts and wide bell-bottoms, with strings of beads around their neck, were camped out, smoking dope and grooving on the vibes. It all seemed positively blissful, but their ultimate objective only betrayed the greed and sloth emblematic of the hippie movement. Everyone’s heart was in the right place, George supposed, but “basically, it was chaos.”

In fact, among the Beatles, Apple was anything but a collective affair.
George, by choice, “had very little to do
” with the company. “
I hate it
,” he confided to Derek Taylor on his first day back from India. He’d considered it a “ridiculous” idea from the start and kept himself otherwise preoccupied, scoring a small independent film called
Wonderwall
and communing with the spiritual world. As for Ringo, business wasn’t his forte. He was happy to be included in the creative sessions, but as for decision making, whatever the others wanted was fine by Rings. “
Paul, for the longest time
,
was
Apple,” says Peter Brown. “It was his baby. He was coming in every
day, and decisions were made by either Neil or me going to him and saying, ‘Do you approve?’ ‘Yes.’ Okay, it was done. Paul oversaw everything, from building the offices to designing the layouts.” Technically, George and John were also directors of the company and, therefore, necessary to any major decisions, but Brown, as much as possible, avoided getting either one of them involved. “John wouldn’t give me an answer,” he says, “and George would give me a runaround.”

For several months the structure established at Apple was the structure Paul devised. And for the most part, it was a pretty efficient and effective one. The company was run like Decca and EMI, but more relaxed and communal, which is how all record companies were run thereafter. Paul had the young staff hopping—one employee said that “
he’d stay there all day
and he’d go around checking on things, little weird things, like was there toilet paper in the bathrooms”—but feeling that they were an essential part of the show. Without John hanging over his shoulder, Paul had complete control.

Which only made things worse for John. By all accounts, John had hit an all-time low. “
John was in a rage
because God had forsaken him,” George recalled. “Then he went and completely reversed himself. He turned from being positive to being totally negative.” According to Pete Shotton, who was spending time with John at Weybridge, there was an overriding feeling of humiliation—from the Maharishi, from the Apple Boutique shambles, from his deteriorating marriage, from what he felt was his shrinking position in the Beatles. “
He was more fucked up
than I’d even seen him,” Shotton remembers. “
It seemed like everything
was going to the dogs. He’d been desperately grasping [at] straws, as far as I was concerned, and there wasn’t even a straw there.” The nonstop drug-taking had left John hollowed-out. Stoned and cranky during his brief outings to the Apple office, he growled at the inexperienced young staff, firing off obscenities at the most insignificant provocation. Otherwise, he just checked out.
At a London party
on April 18 for the launch of Bell Records, an independent pop label, John arrived already higher than a kite and drank so much champagne that he passed out at the table and had to be carried to his car.

Something had to give. It came as a welcome relief that John and Paul, along with Neil Aspinall, planned a quick trip to New York on May 11, where several press events had been scheduled to announce Apple Records in the States. Friends agreed that getting John away might do him a world of good; being alone, with just Paul to steady him, might have a calming influence. But Paul was grappling with his own set of anxieties. “
We wanted a grand launch
,” Paul said, “but I had a strange feeling and was very nervous.”
Drugs, he later admitted, may have been at the root of his problem; there was a lot of dope-smoking before takeoff and even during the transatlantic flight. But Jane Asher also helped spike Paul’s mood. The grudging engagement between Beatle and actress had been ticklish at best. But since traveling together in India and a subsequent ten-day trip to Scotland, Jane’s eccentricities rankled. Paul was having serious second thoughts about the relationship, which had reached a kind of critical, now-or-never stage.

Between John’s attitude and Paul’s paranoia, the Beatles were a PR nightmare. “
It was a mad, bad week
in New York,” recalled Derek Taylor, who met the two Beatles there to chaperone a round of press conferences, followed by interviews. Taylor had fashioned himself into a debonair drug aficionado since the Beatles first dosed him at Brian Epstein’s housewarming party, and now he and John gorged themselves on speed and a “
mild and extremely benign hallucinogen
” called Purple Holiday, courtesy of their New York chauffeur. The effect of it came through in the interviews. John was gallingly withdrawn and dismissive, Paul unusually distracted—which made them come off as two rich, snooty rock stars peddling another product.

Once two major press conferences and a television appearance were stumblingly completed, John and Paul headed to yet another press party. There the Beatles worked the room, performing their duties with élan. At one point Paul noticed a woman taking photographs of the crowd. In fact, he’d seen her earlier that afternoon, at the Americana function, where she’d also caught his eye. He remembered her from Brian’s house, when she’d squatted at his feet and shot two rolls of close-ups, and the allure he experienced then hadn’t abated.

“He said, ‘We’re leaving
, give me your number,’ ” Linda Eastman recalled, “and I remember writing it on a check.” By the time she got home that night, he’d already called. There was no time for a drink or an informal walk. He and John were leaving the next afternoon, which made the rest of their schedule airtight. Instead, he invited her to join them in a limo for the ride out to the airport. “
There was something awfully steamy
going on in that car,” recalls Nat Weiss, another passenger to Kennedy, “a lot of heavy checking out, a lot of body heat. It was palpable; you could feel it.” There had always been hordes of available women about, but this was the first time, according to Weiss, that he sensed something more than a quick hustle. “Paul’s whole demeanor—that cocky defensive shield he wore like armor—melted away and, for a moment, he seemed fairly human.”

Despite later claims that he “
didn’t think she was particularly attractive
”
and “[a] bit too tweedy,” John couldn’t have been surprised by Paul’s interest in Linda Eastman. She was certainly his type—blond, “
high-breasted
and extremely attractive,” a bit aloof—and she had a pedigree that impressed. He also knew Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher was flagging. The irony of it couldn’t have been lost on John that he and Paul—increasingly different in so many ways—were on the same timetable with regard to their changing relationships.

On the plane ride home, they talked about Ron Kass, a man they’d met in New York. Kass had been the top executive for Liberty Records in Europe, serving at the company’s outpost in Switzerland, and he’d come highly recommended by people at Capitol. “
He was a fairly hip person
, and very sophisticated,” recalls Peter Brown, “he’d been around. The key for us, however, was that he was an American who lived in Europe and understood the international complications of the music business.” After Paul and John had given Kass the once-over, the decision was made to provide him with the tools necessary to launch Apple Records. Anyone who thought the Beatles would relinquish creative control to an outsider was, however, seriously mistaken. This very point was demonstrated immediately upon their return, when Paul dined with Twiggy Lawson, who urged him to check out the recent winner of the talent-discovery TV show,
Opportunity Knocks,
a seventeen-year-old chanteuse named Mary Hopkin. Paul tuned in the next week to watch the girl defend the title and was enchanted by her voice. Besides, he recalled, “
she looked very pretty
, young girl, blonde, long hair, so I thought, Okay. Quite right. We should sign her for Apple, maybe make an interesting record with her.”

That was the way the process would work at Apple: see it, hear it, sign it. There would be none of the drawn-out, arduous auditions that had disappointed the Beatles in the early sixties, none of the nitsy policy battles with label functionaries and bean counters. Auditions were “a drag,” as the boys saw them. Record executives—“a drag.” Mazy contracts—“a serious drag.” Expedience became the highest priority. In fact, no sooner had Peter Asher come on board at the end of May than he officially signed Apple’s first outside artist, a lanky, twenty-year-old folkie named James Taylor. “
He is an American song writer
and singer who is extremely good,” Asher explained with typical understatement, in a June 1 memo to Ron Kass. “We intend to start recording him 20th June…. He is ready to discuss contracts and things as soon as you are.” An introduction, a recording date, contract discussions—that was Apple expedience in all its glory.

George, too, was busy with his own Apple project: recording an album
with northern guitar swordsman Jackie Lomax, with whom he had developed an enthusiastic relationship. A lot of theorizing about music, about
playing,
went into their daily rehearsals, long unconscious jams exploring new interpretations and techniques. Paul, a prodigious innovator in his own right, might have satisfied George’s hunger when it came to musicianship, but Paul had never given him the time of day; like an unfulfilling marriage, George had to get it from someone else. “
It all came as a shock
, with the freedom Apple brought, when the Beatles started playing with other musicians and finding out what other people did,” recalls Tony Bramwell. “They had never played with anyone [outside of the other Beatles], they’d never jammed. When George prepared his Jackie Lomax record, he suddenly found himself playing with other musicians—and
loved
it. He discovered there was another world outside of the Beatles, and it eventually drove a wedge between the boys.”

Not that by now animus or infighting would require a great deal of effort. Record production, movies, music publishing, clothing boutiques, electronics… “They could never agree on
anything,
” Bramwell says. “Ego started becoming more important than success. John automatically blackballed any of Paul’s suggestions, Paul killed George’s, George rejected John’s. I can’t remember one decision that was unanimous or even near-unanimous.” Even their forthcoming recording sessions for a new album, drawn from the “
tons of songs
” written in Rishikesh, produced fresh tensions, riven with indecision. Each of the Beatles’ chief writers—John, Paul, and more recently George—lobbied fiercely for his personal efforts, extra-sensitive that one of the others’ might upstage his individual contributions. “
The Beatles were getting real tense
with each other,” said John, who pegged Paul and George as being “resentful” with regard to his songs.

The resentment might have been coming from a different place. With his marital problems still unsettled and Cynthia gallivanting around Greece, drugs continued to govern John’s fitful moods. He dosed himself continuously with LSD, tweaking its random effect with any spare pills he happened to find lying around the house. In the right company, it plunged John into a deep, unfathomable trance that altered between indecipherable rambling and deadpan silences. At Weybridge, into which Pete Shotton had moved in order to keep his friend company, he stayed up nights, tripping and battling wave after wave of incendiary rage. One night, after the usual snack of hallucinogens, Shotton says he noticed John moving his arms around very slowly in a circle. “
I said, ‘What are you doing?’
” recalls Pete, “but John couldn’t explain it. He said, ‘I can’t stop. There’s something
making me do this. I can’t help myself.’ ” Tears followed, uncontrollable rivers of tears, intermingled with hideous laughter. When Shotton tried to comfort him, John resisted. “I’m not crying,” he insisted peevishly, wiping his eyes with the back of a hand. Suddenly John declared that he was Jesus Christ, back from the grave. “He was convinced of it,” Pete recalls, “saying… ‘This is it,
at last
—I know who I am.’ ” The next day the Messiah convened an emergency meeting at Apple to announce his identity to the other Beatles. Unimpressed, they said: “Yeah, all right then. What shall we do now?” After someone suggested lunch, the matter was dropped.