John Lennon: The Life (74 page)
As much as a business, Apple set out to become a kind of alternative welfare state. Plans were announced for an arts foundation that would award regular stipends to deserving applicants, even an “Apple school,” where the Beatles own children and those of their followers would be educated side by side. John took a particular interest in the school project, insisting it must bear no resemblance to the disciplined academies he and Paul had both attended, and bringing in their mutual childhood friend Ivan “Ivy” Vaughan, now a noted educationalist, to develop it. John’s other main protégé or charitable interest—depending on one’s point of view—was Magic Alex, by
now established in a well-equipped workshop under the banner of Apple Electronics and supposedly at work on life-transforming inventions of every kind.
Apple Films also acquired its own chief executive and burgeoning staff, and continued to issue grandiose mission statements—although, after the mauling given to
Magical Mystery Tour
, potential follow-up projects were being sifted with understandable caution. Fortunately, its obligations did not include supplying the third feature production that the Beatles owed to United Artists. In 1967, Brian had sanctioned a feature-length cartoon, translating their children’s song “Yellow Submarine” into a psychedelic fantasy in which their characters were voiced by soundalike actors. The plot conflated the song’s lyrics and
Sgt. Pepper
, with the cartoon Beatles voyaging by canary-colored submersible to a place called Pepperland to defeat a tribe of music-hating trolls called the Blue Meanies.
A quartet of writers were involved, including the future bestselling novelist Eric Segal; even so, additional input had to be frequently sought from John. “Brodax [the producer] got half of
Yellow Submarine
out of my mouth,” he would recall. “[The writers] used to come to the studio and chat: ‘Hi, John old bean, got any ideas for the film?’ And I’d just spout out all this stuff, and they went off and did it.”
The Beatles’ only direct involvement was with the music sound track, and that was hardly onerous. In addition to its iconic title song, the film recycled “All You Need Is Love” and demothballed three unreleased tracks from the
Sgt. Pepper
period, Paul’s “All Together Now” and George’s “It’s All Too Much” and “Only a Northern Song.” The rest of the score consisted of orchestral pieces composed and conducted by George Martin. Fearing that all this looked rather thin, the producer begged an original composition from John, who obliged with “Hey Bulldog,” “a good-sounding record,” so he later said, “that means nothing.” Genuinely witty and charming, the film managed to create Beatle magic by proxy and became a must-see that summer for anyone under thirty. However, its less-than-bumper-value sound track album was held back from release to prevent any conflict with the new song cycle still arduously taking shape at Abbey Road.
By June, Apple had outgrown its Wigmore Street office and moved
into a £500,000 Georgian town house at number 3 Savile Row, the heart of Mayfair’s bespoke tailoring district. The interior was painted white, carpeted in thick-piled apple green, filled with expensive furnishings, pictures, and fabrics, and equipped with a Cordon Bleu kitchen. A doorman in a gray frock coat was engaged to control the knot of girls—nicknamed Apple Scruffs by George—who instantly formed a round-the-clock guard beside the front steps. The basement was earmarked for a recording studio where the Beatles and other Apple talent could work in privacy and comfort. Laughing to scorn the comparatively simple technology that George Martin still used at Abbey Road, Magic Alex set to work designing a recording desk with a promised seventy-two-track capability.
Mayfair also provided the setting for John’s first-ever solo art exhibition, which opened at the Robert Fraser Gallery in Mount Street on July 1. Since turning Paul McCartney on to Magritte, the gay Old Etonian Fraser had risen to even greater eminence among rock ’n’ roll’s demimonde. In 1967, he had been jailed for drug offenses alongside Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, but unlike them—the drug in his possession having been heroin—he had served his full term.
The Fraser Gallery show, which John dedicated “to Yoko with love,” was saturated in her influence yet also as much a reflection of his childhood as any song he’d ever written. Its title,
You Are Here
, was a phrase familiar from map boards in the sprawling Liverpool parks of his boyhood, now given extra resonance by his sense of finally having found his way to himself. Spectators first encountered a series of charity collection boxes, among them the plaster orphan girl with one leg in braces who had stood outside so many High Street shops in the 1950s. As much as conceptual art, it seemed like self-prescribed therapy, finally laying to rest the fear and loathing he had always felt toward “cripples.”
The exhibition proper consisted of a white canvas circle inscribed “You are here” in John’s handwriting, and an upturned hat with a handwritten card: “For the artist. Thank you.” At its opening, 360 helium-filled white balloons were released over Mayfair’s rooftops, each with a label repeating “You are here” and inviting its finder to write to John care of the Fraser Gallery. (A large number of replies
subsequently came back, many expressing disappointment in his recent conduct or making racist comments about Yoko.) In a sarcastic comment on the show, a group of students from Hornsey Art College left a rusted bicycle outside, which so amused John that he instantly set it among his other exhibits.
There seemed to be nothing that could distract his attention from Yoko, but, late one afternoon just before Apple’s move to Savile Row, something did. Yoko happened to be otherwise occupied, and John was at 75 Wigmore Street, discussing with Derek Taylor how to fill the next few hours, when a telephone call came through from the Mayfair Hotel. Brigitte Bardot was in town and would love to meet the Beatles or any individual one who might be available. John and Taylor each took a “sparkle” of acid, just enough to make the world shimmer hilariously, then went over to the Mayfair Hotel in John’s Rolls.
But, as he had already found with Elvis, meeting an idol seldom lives up to the dream—or, in this case, wet dream. The Bardot of 1968 was no longer the bewitching “sex kitten” of ten years before. The ponytail had been replaced by an unkempt blonde mane, the dew-fresh face had coarsened, the once-mischievous eyes were thickly outlined in black. With her, even more disappointingly, were two male companions who took turns in acting as her translator.
The encounter grew increasingly sticky, with John seated guru-style on the floor, dragging on endless Gitanes, while Derek Taylor and Bardot’s two minders struggled to keep the flow of pleasantries alive. Bardot proposed going out to dinner, but John declined to move, and he and Taylor were left alone in the suite. When Bardot’s party returned some hours later, they found their guests still there, rendered oblivious to passing time by the usual chemical means. Taylor was vaguely aware of John singing a song for Bardot, then soon afterward passed out on her bed. So all those group wanks at the sound of her name turned out to have been as exciting as it got.
With the move to Savile Row came the first casualty in Apple’s commercial Garden of Eden. Seven months after its bravura launch and massive media send-off, the Apple boutique in Baker Street had conspicuously failed to become another Biba, Bus Stop, or I Was
Lord Kitchener’s Valet. By July, losses had reached such a level that the only option (other than recruiting hated “men in suits” from the mainstream retail trade to halt the endemic shoplifting) was to close it. In the spirit of Apple’s “Western Communism,” it was decided to give away the entire stock. Derek Taylor counseled against such an ignominious end, but in vain. “I was running the office at the time,” John remembered. “Paul had called me up one day and said, ‘I’m going away. You take over.’ It was as stupid as that.”
On the eve of the closeout, July 30, the Beatles and their partners and favored cronies went through the boutique helping themselves to the choicest items. “It was great…like robbing,” John said, even though he’d robbed nobody but himself. Next day, print and television greedily recorded the frantic public scrimmage for what was left, with flower children fighting fiercely over the same Buddhist tract on brotherly love and cabbies leaving their motors running while they gathered armfuls of embroidered cushions or tore kaftans from racks. It was left to Paul, that consummate PR man, to suggest that the Beatles had not so much lost a fortune as withdrawn in the nick of time from an activity far beneath them; they were, he said, “tired of being shopkeepers.”
The boutique balls-up vanished from memory on August 11, when the first fruits of the Apple record label were simultaneously released. In addition to a new Beatles single, these comprised Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days,” produced by Paul; the Black Dyke Mills Band’s “Thingumybob,” written (for a TV series) by Paul; and Jackie Lomax’s “Sour Milk Sea,” written and produced by George. The four disks came packaged together in a shiny black presentation box, emphasizing the Beatles’ kinship with their protégés, and the democratic all-inclusiveness of the target audience was made clear from the start. On release day, boxes were hand-delivered to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, the Queen Mother at Clarence House, Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace, and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, at 10 Downing Street.
At the time, it struck no one as odd, to say the least, that four musicians ranked as Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire should send their sovereign, not to mention her mother and
sister and chief minister, a song entitled “Revolution.” This was not, however, the version of John’s song that he’d taken forty hours to record in June. Neither George Martin nor the other Beatles had been happy with that long, chaotic, Yoko-assisted performance, thinking its tempo too slow and the distortion on John’s lead guitar too extreme. In July, therefore, he had cut a new, shorter, and obviously more commercial version. On this one, his intro was a two-note electric scrawl, echoing a childhood radio favorite, Khachaturian’s “Saber Dance.” The six-minute playout of screams with Yoko disappeared, and the ambiguous final message crystallized into “Count me in.” But even in this form, Revolution was deemed fit only for the sliced-apple B-side of the Beatles first release on their own label, the whole-fruit A-side going to Paul’s “Hey Jude.”
John had not only lost pole position on arguably the Beatles’ most important singles release since “Love Me Do”; he had lost it to a song about his private life, and one that—albeit very obliquely—criticized his behavior. For “Hey Jude” had started out as “Hey Jules,” Paul’s consoling message to the five-year-old son who had been left behind at Kenwood, apparently without a backward glance. Though the name had since changed to the more Hardyesque and gender-ambiguous “Jude” and the lyric evolved into a conventional love song, Paul’s original, good-hearted intention still colored every line: to comfort and reassure and cheer up Julian and, in however small a way, “make it better.”
As John saw it, “Hey Jude” was all about his relationship with Yoko, and Paul’s feelings about being superseded as his creative other half. “‘Ah, it’s me,’ I said when Paul first played it,’ he would recall. “If you think about it, Yoko’s just come into the picture…. The words ‘go out and get her’…Subconsciously he was saying ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ But on a conscious level he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel inside him was saying ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all because he didn’t want to lose his partner.” Whatever its subtext, John recognized the song’s potential as a crowd-pleaser, even if its length of more than seven minutes (possibly in a competitive spirit with the ten minutes of “Revolution 1”) might be daunting to many radio deejays of that time. In its initial tryouts, one verse still
had an unwritten line, which Paul filled in with “The movement you need is on your shoulder.” At John’s urging, the words stayed on the finished track.
Two television appearances with David Frost in the space of a couple of weeks gave notice where his priorities now lay. On August 24, Frost was granted the first interview with Yoko and John together, on condition that it dealt with his new artistic consciousness, not his private life. When Frost announced them, the two loped onto the set hand in hand, in matching all-black outfits, like latter-day Quarry Bank truants. The encounter included a demonstration of Yoko’s
Hammer a Nail In
exhibit, with volunteers from the studio audience, and finally Frost himself, hammering their own nail into a board and describing the emotions they felt—in every case, less than overwhelming. There was also a clip from
Smile
, the filmed close-up of John’s barely moving face. “The thing is, there’s no such thing as sculpture or art,” he explained. “We’re all art, art is just a tag…. Sculpture is anything you care to name. This is sculpture, us sitting here, this is a happening, we are here, this is art.”
In
New Musical Express
, the Alley Cat’s back-page column called his performance “boring”—the first time that word had ever been used of him. Even the Beatles’ official fan magazine reported dismay and disgruntlement among its readers. “I only wish John would stick to things he’s good at,” was a typical reaction.” I don’t mean just music because I think his writing is brilliant…. There’s no meaning to the things he’s doing with Yoko Ono. A film of someone smiling isn’t art. Nor can we appreciate knocking nails into a slab of wood. Well, I ask you, surely John is losing his touch if he really thinks we ought to be praising him for that!”
Then on September 8, Frost’s program was used to launch “Hey Jude” on its way to an eventual three-million sale. It was, in effect, the Beatles’ first live performance since August 1966, filmed in front of a three-hundred-strong audience with an introduction by Frost to make it seem like part of his regular show. “The world’s greatest tea-room orchestra,” as their host announced them, played sitting down, with Paul at an upright piano and John and George together on his left. John contributed almost nothing to the opening badinage with
Frost, and barely seemed to be either singing or playing. From the emollient opening chords to the final, extended sing-along chorus, Paul buttonholed the camera with his shiny hair, red velvet coat, and commiserating brown eyes.
