Shout! (67 page)

It was while Lennon fought McCartney on “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da” and “Revolution 9” that George Harrison suddenly and surprisingly gathered strength as a composer and performer. His tally of four songs on the finished thirty-track list was the highest John and Paul had ever permitted. As their joint control dwindled, so George’s presence increased: His voice, gathering confidence, sounded somehow like John’s
and
Paul’s. His “Savoy Truffle” was, after “Back in the USSR,” the album’s best piece of rock ’n’ roll. “Piggies,” a nursery-rhyme-ish diatribe against meat eaters, was mordantly humorous. Best of all was “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” a heavy rock lament, with searing guitar phrases played
by George’s friend Eric Clapton of Cream. Clapton could not believe at first that the Beatles needed anyone but themselves.

All this happened amid a constant drip of argument and bad feeling that, strangely enough, took heaviest toll on the Beatle whose placid temper was so often a strength and rallying-point. Ringo, halfway through the sessions, emerged from behind his acoustic screens looking tired and morose. He was playing badly, he said, and generally “not getting through.” To John first, then to Paul, he announced he was resigning. The others, tactfully, did not try to stop him. A week at home with Maureen and Zak and his new baby son, Jason, restored him to his old equanimity. When he returned to Abbey Road, Paul and George had covered his drums with welcome-back messages and flowers.

They had been working on the still untitled double album for five months. For all that time, by night as well as day, Margo Stevens and the other girls had waited and watched the Abbey Road front steps. “We stuck it out through all weathers,” Margo says. “We were as tough as old boots in the end. When they came in to record, we’d sleep out on the pavement. People who lived in Abbey Road saw us when they came home from work at night. In the morning when they left for work, we were still there. I got so tough, I could sleep in all weathers. When I woke up one morning, there was snow all over me.”

Margo, on these all-night watches, shared a sleeping bag with Carol Bedford, a Texan girl to whom George Harrison had once actually said “Hello.” “Normally the Beatles would go in to record around midnight,” Carol says. “They’d finish around four a.m. So we could count on at least four hours’ sleep. But once they all came out suddenly at about two-thirty. Margo and I woke up—we tried to stand up but we couldn’t undo the zipper on our sleeping bag. Both of us were hopping round the pavement, shrieking and trying to undo the zipper while the Beatles stood there, laughing at us.”

George Martin had done all he could as adviser and editor. To Martin, the thirty songs, or song fragments, on tape reeked of the argument and self-indulgence that had gone into their making. Vainly he pleaded with John and Paul to drop the double album idea; to lose the scribble, like “Goodnight” and “Revolution 9”; to cut out all the linking, meaningless shouts and murmurs and pull the fourteen best titles together for a Beatles album like
Revolver
, packed end-to-end with quality. The answer was no. On that, at least, all four agreed.

“One night, we were all outside—we could tell they’d nearly finished,” Margo says. “It got to about three in the morning. We could see John through a window, playing with a light cord hanging from the ceiling. ‘Come
on
, boys,’ we were all saying, ‘it
has
been five months.’ Then they all came out and down the steps. It was all over.”

As a tribute to their five-month wait Margo and the others were then taken into the empty Studio One to hear a playback of “Back in the USSR” and to pick up and take home as cherished souvenirs the apple cores and crisp packets littering the floor.

The doorman at Apple was a thickset, heavily genteel young Cockney named Jimmy Clark. He was, so people said, a discovery of Peter Brown’s. He wore a stiff collar, tight-fitting trousers, and an exquisitely cut dove-gray morning coat. On fine days he would bask on the Apple front step, his hands in his coattails, watching the girls who eternally watched the house. His job was to prevent unauthorized entry via the front door or the area steps to the basement studio. He would block the rush and repel it with his large, starch-cuffed, shooing hands. To the resultant boos and insults, Jimmy Clark would grin and bridle delightedly like a cat under the grooming brush.

It was, even so—as hundreds discovered—quite easy to enter the Apple house. Provided that one arrived by taxi and that one carried no banner or other sign of Beatles fanaticism, one was generally assumed to have legitimate business with Apple Corps. The girls fell back, unenviously. Jimmy Clark sardonically stood aside. The white front door yielded to a gentle push.

The front hall was much as in any half-million-pound Georgian house. To the right sat a receptionist, instructed, like all Apple staff, to believe in the bona fide of all visitors. Into a telephone, white as the
White Album
, she would murmur the information that so-and-so was here. She would then smile. “OK, you can go up. You know the way, don’t you?” Everyone knew the way, up the green-carpeted stairs, past the framed gold records, too numerous to count, and the soft-lit oil painting of two honey-colored lion cubs.

One did not, if one were scrupulous, try any of the doors of offices on the second floor. One climbed on, past more gold records, to Derek Taylor’s third-floor press and publicity office. This room, in the mornings, was bright with sun and fragrant with the scent of furniture polish.
In the late afternoon it grew dark and bewildering. The only light came under the window blinds and from two projectors that beamed a psychedelic light show of bright-colored, writhing spermatozoa shapes, traveling in perpetuity across the opposite wall. Though dark and filled with obstructions, the room was exceedingly busy. One crossed the projector beam, conscious of many shaggy heads turning, like anxious topiary hedges, in the gloom.

None but the specially important or importunate caller immediately approached Derek Taylor’s desk. If one were merely a journalist, one sat initially on a small outlying sofa, behind Taylor’s second assistant, Carol Paddon, and next to a tray of water into which several plastic birds endlessly dipped their beaks. Presently, one might move across to the small white button–backed sofa that led directly into Taylor’s presence. Already, one would have been offered tea, Scotch, and Coke, a cigarette, or perhaps something stronger. As each of Taylor’s visitors got up and left, one wriggled toward him another few inches. Eventually one would be seated immediately to the right of his huge scallop-backed wicker chair. The slender man with his neat hair and mustache and quiet, indiscreet voice, would lean over on the wicker arm that was to become split and broken with hours of leaning and listening.

Press officers by their very nature pursue journalists. It was Derek Taylor’s unique accomplishment to be a press officer whom journalists pursued. Journalists from every newspaper, magazine, wire service, and radio and TV network in the Western world pursued him, as a means of access to the Western world’s longest-running headline story. They pursued him also because Taylor, strangely enough, was not a monster. He was amiable, sympathetic, polite to a degree that would ultimately seem miraculous. As an ex-journalist himself, he believed that journalists should get their story. It was simply a matter of time, he always said, and of choosing a moment when one or another “Fab” would be amenable.

Two side doors connected the press office with other Apple departments. On Taylor’s right was the door to a downstairs kitchen where two Cordon Bleu–trained debutantes supplied meals to the directors and executive staff, and refreshments to all. On the left was a walk-in closet, presided over by Taylor’s hippie assistant, Richard, and popularly known as the Black Room. It had been used initially as a dumping ground for the entire—and entirely unread—cache of novels, poems, synopses, plans, and blueprints submitted from all over the world as
projects deserving support by the Apple Foundation for the Arts. Several thousand manuscripts lay there, forgotten as absolutely as the nearby row of high-fashion shoes that Derek Taylor had brought home from Hollywood. What the Black Room principally contained were boxes of LP records by Apple artists, cases of wines, spirits, and soft drinks, and cartons of Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

Another amenity of the press office—as of almost every other office in the building—was drugs. The presence of the West End’s major police station only a couple of hundred yards away did not prevent 3 Savile Row’s staff from puffing joints as casually as they sipped tea. Upper and downer pills of every color, compounded by the costliest amateur pharmacists, were to be found in desk drawers, along with the envelopes, glue, and staplers. A certain secretary had been nominated to gather up the entire stock and flush it away in the ladies’ lavatory if ever Savile Row’s boys in blue should decide to pay a surprise visit (which, amazingly, they never did). Another female employee brought in regular consignments of hash brownies that she herself had baked at the home she still shared with her parents and grandmother. Finding some left to cool in the family kitchen, her grandmother innocently sampled one and remained unconscious for the next twenty-four hours.

“Press,” under Derek Taylor’s tolerant regime, was a term of almost infinite elasticity. It described virtually anyone who came to Apple with the ghost of an excuse for sharing in the Beatles’ artistic Utopia. It encompassed the sculptress who wanted money to produce tactile figures in leather and oil; and the French Canadian girl, frequently pried from the basement windows, who wanted money to get her teeth capped. It corraled in the same potentially creative ambit a showman who wanted money to do Punch and Judy shows on Brighton beach and an Irish tramp who wanted money to burn toy dolls with napalm as an antiwar gesture in the King’s Road.

It encompassed, most of all, the hippies, who simply wanted money and who flocked to Savile Row in every type of flowing garment and every degree of dreamy-eyed incoherence. Several times each week the call would come to Apple from Heathrow Airport’s immigration department announcing that yet another beautiful person had arrived from California with beads and bells, but without funds or definite accommodation, to look up his four brothers in karma and Sergeant Pepper. At 3 Savile Row an entire San Francisco family, complete with
breast-fed baby, waited to accompany John and Yoko to found an alternative universe in the Fiji Islands. There was also a mysterious Stocky, who said nothing, but perched all day on a press office filing cabinet drawing pictures of genitalia. He was harmless enough, as Derek Taylor always said.

The spirit of Apple in those days is best summed up, perhaps, in a moment when Taylor’s desk intercom chirped yet again. “Derek,” the receptionist’s voice said, “Adolf Hitler is in reception.”

“Oh, Christ,” Taylor said. “Not that asshole again. OK, send him up.”

It was a consequence of the hippie age’s mingling superstition and vanity that young, fashionable people, in the young, fashionable music industry of the late sixties, endowed themselves freely with what amounted to psychic powers. Judgment of a person was made according to what vibrations—or vibes—he gave off by his presence and mood. So the people who came to 3 Savile Row were judged not by the legitimacy or sincerity of their purpose but by their good or bad vibes. A person visiting Apple in a beard and sandals, holding a lighted joss stick, portended good vibes. A lawyer, tax official, or policeman portended bad vibes. Colloquies of people, such as board meetings, created vibes proportionately stronger. It was mainly under the influence of these ever-changing, ever-unpredictable vibes that 3 Savile Row, during the next year and a half, alternately glowed with happiness and grew pale with fear.

To start with, the vibes were nearly all good. “Hey Jude,” the Beatles’ most successful single ever, had sold almost three million copies for their own Apple label. “Those Were the Days,” by Mary Hopkin, the little Welsh girl Paul had taken up, was number one in Britain and number two in America. Apple’s other new signings—James Taylor, Jackie Lomax, the Iveys, and, a prestige acquisition, the Modern Jazz Quartet—were all receiving an energetic and expensive launch as the Beatles’ favored protégés.

There had been some bad vibes, admittedly, over the Apple boutique, The Fool and their extravagance, and the undignified scrimmage for giveaway merchandise. Nor were the vibes entirely amiable downwind of the house, among Savile Row’s custom tailors and outfitters. Dukes and bishops in their fitting rooms looked on appalled at the daylong riot, the banners and chanting, the shrieks whenever a white Rolls-Royce
appeared. But, in general, the West End treated Apple with indulgence. The scene around the front steps made even passersby with bowler hats and rolled umbrellas smile.

Best of all were the all-powerful vibes given off by the Beatles’ own frequent presence in the Georgian town house, directing their luscious new empire with a zest that infected each member of their ever multiplying staff. Though largely invisible within Apple, their presence was unmistakable. There would be the commotion on the first-floor landing, the tightly shut door to Neil Aspinall’s office, or Peter Brown’s. There would be the wakefulness surging suddenly through the press office as Derek Taylor answered his intercom. There were the familiar kitchen orders—a one-egg omelette for Ringo; cheese and cucumber sandwiches for George; for John and Yoko, brown rice, steamed vegetables, chocolate cake, and caviar.

Bad vibes from the outside made their first major strike on the afternoon of October 18. Laurie McCaffery, the deep-voiced telephonist who had followed NEMS down from Liverpool, put through a call to Neil Aspinall from someone who declined to give his name. In a moment, John Lennon’s voice came on. “Imagine your worst paranoia,” John said. “Well—it’s here.” He and Yoko were in police custody, charged with possessing cannabis.

They had been camping out at Ringo Starr’s Montagu Square flat when the bust happened, shortly before midday. Six policemen and one policewoman had arrived with a search warrant and a sniffer dog, which had nosed out approximately one and a half ounces of cannabis. There was an additional charge of obstructing the officers during their search. John and Yoko were now being held at Marylebone police station.