Shout! (68 page)

Paul at once sought the help of Apple’s most powerful ally, Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI. “As soon as Paul contacted me, I rang Marylebone police station,” Sir Joseph said. “John picked up the phone. ‘’Ello,’ he said, ‘Sergeant Lennon here.’ ‘Now stop all that,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to plead guilty. We’ll get Lord Goodman on it. Oh no, we can’t: He hates drugs. Anyway, you must plead guilty.’”

After a preliminary court appearance John and Yoko were released on bail. They emerged from Marylebone Magistrates Court into a forest of press cameras and a three-hundred-strong crowd. John’s slight figure, hemmed in by scowling police helmets, hugged Yoko tightly to him. Though his martyrdom was self-inflicted and self-aggravated, there
began to be something almost chivalrous in the way his slight body shielded Yoko’s.

The case was due to be heard in full on November 27. That date had special irony for a press office bracing itself to deal with another John Lennon event whose vibes had already shown themselves practically combustible.

John had been determined from the start that Apple Records should be a medium for his and Yoko’s experiments in avant-garde electronic music. The first album they had produced together was now ready for release. Entitled
Unfinished Music No. 1—Two Virgins
, it consisted mostly of the tapes they had made during the first night they had ceased to be virgins, at least with one another. Early in October, John had handed to Jeremy Banks, Apple’s photographic coordinator, the picture he wanted used as the album cover. Banks immediately shut it in his desk drawer: for some days afterward, he could be seen surreptitiously peeping at it. The picture had been taken by John himself in the Montagu Square basement, on a delayed action shutter. It showed him with Yoko, their arms entwined, both—as word swiftly circulated—“stark bollock naked.”

The vibes were precisely as expected. EMI flatly refused to distribute
Two Virgins
unless the sleeve were changed. John appealed direct to Sir Joseph Lockwood, but this time “Sir Joe” stood firm. “‘What on earth do you want to do it for?’ I asked them. Yoko said, ‘It’s art.’ ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘why not show Paul in the nude? He’s so much better looking. Or why not use a statue from one of the parks?’”

The eventual compromise was that EMI would manufacture the album but that it would be distributed by The Who’s record label, Track, and the offending cover would be hidden inside a brown paper outer envelope. The same deal was done in America through a label called Tetragrammation. While thirty thousand copies sat in a New Jersey warehouse awaiting distribution they were confiscated as obscene material by the local police.

From here on, good and bad vibes bombarded Apple Corps with even greater capriciousness than the London weather.

On November 22, the double album was released whose enmities and unevenness faded in the breathtaking novelty and simplicity of its appearance. Originally, its cover was to have been created by Alan Aldridge, Swinging London’s leading graphic entertainer and a popular
figure in the circle that included the Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and Cream. Aldridge had proposed a design like an advent calendar, each window of which opened to show a scene from a song on the album—but the cost had been beyond even what EMI was prepared to spend. Instead, it was decided to go for stupendous understatement. The album would be packaged in pure, plain, shiny white, its only title a small, crooked die stamp,
The Beatles
. Each cover also bore a serial number, making a select limited edition of the first two million copies pressed. On opening the double sleeve one found only more tasteful austerity: a list of the thirty tracks on one side, four small, separate portraits of the musicians on the other.

The reviews were of snow-blinded ecstasy. In the
Observer
, Tony Palmer wrote that Lennon and McCartney stood revealed as “the greatest songwriters since Schubert.” Palmer’s review, more than any other, perpetrated the belief that the
White Album
(so its public soon renamed it) represented conscious artistic enterprise; that, by going to the opposite extreme of
Sgt. Pepper
, the Beatles had touched a new, stark, self-surpassing virtuosity. That
Sgt. Pepper’s
abiding quality was cohesion and that the
White Album
’s was disorganization quite escaped most critics’ ravished ears. The quality most evident throughout, Palmer wrote, was “simple happiness.” Even
Revolution 9
could not qualify his belief that the Beatles dwelt on “shores of the imagination others have not yet sighted.”

The day the
White Album
was released, Yoko lost the baby she had been expecting. Her room at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital had a second bed in which John himself lay, propped up with pillows. Throughout the emergency that ended in Yoko’s miscarriage he refused to leave her. When the second bed was needed for another patient he spent each night in a sleeping bag beside her on the floor.

Their drugs case was heard a week later at Marylebone Magistrates Court. John pleaded guilty, assuring the bench that Yoko had nothing to do with acquiring or using the cannabis. He was fined £150, with £21 costs. On the charge of willful obstruction, no evidence was offered. His counsel, Martin Polden, asked for leniency for someone who had given pleasure to millions with his music. “An ounce-and-a-half of compassion,” Polden said, was not too much to ask.

It was on that very same day that Apple, having no other choice, released the album that could not be advertised in any music paper and
could be bought only like pornographic literature, in a plain brown paper bag. On its front cover the two virgins proclaimed their commitment to each other and their new agenda with full-frontal nudity; on the back, they stood hand in hand, looking over their shoulders and showing their bare bottoms.

The success of Apple Records was unquestionable. But what of the other divisions? Six months had passed since Paul had announced that wideranging creative prospectus. Apple Films had yet to make a film. The Apple Press had yet to publish a book. Apple Retail, after the boutique disaster, was virtually moribund. The Apple Foundation for the Arts was something people preferred not to recollect. Occasionally, when a press office employee went into the Black Room and pulled out another case of wine, the huge, unread pile of manuscripts would totter and slide a little, then once more settle to rest.

Numerous subsidiary projects had been floated on the seas of Beatles cash. As a rule, these represented the whim of an individual Beatle: They lasted as long, and no longer, than that Beatle’s flickering enthusiasm. Paul had at one stage been keen on an offshoot called Zapple, a label that would release spoken word records by modish underground writers like Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan. Kesey—the original Merry Prankster, progenitor of the
Magical Mystery Tour
—was brought to London, given an IBM golfball typewriter and invited to write a street diary of his impressions. By the time it was completed Paul’s enthusiasm had moved elsewhere. There was no one else to read Ken Kesey’s street diary; he returned to California, leaving his IBM typewriter at the front desk.

Apple’s design consultant was Alan Aldridge, who would be called in to Derek Taylor’s office several times a week and handed an outsize joint called a B-52 before being asked to come up with plans for an apple-shaped record player, an apple-shaped transistor radio, or a jokey letterhead for Taylor’s own press office headed “Lies from Apple” and illustrated by a picture of a pear. “I also designed some wallpaper based on ‘Lucy in the Sky,’ Aldridge remembers. “The idea was to come up with colors that would make people get high just by looking at them.”

Expenditure ran on at a dizzy rate that was, by Beatles standards, entirely normal. Only now, more than four people were spending and consuming. The tea, the coffee, the Scotch and Coke, the VSOP brandy, the
Southern Comfort, the Benson & Hedges Gold dispensed so liberally in Derek Taylor’s office were but the visible, obvious part of the largesse poured out by Apple to its visitors and its staff. From a kitchen stocked by Fortnum & Mason endless relays of food came forth—hot meals, cold meals, cold wine, sandwiches, champagne. Junior staff shared liberally in the company picnic. A certain brand of vodka favored by the Apple high command could be bought only at a restaurant in Knightsbridge. Since the restaurant did no take-out sales, two Apple office boys would be sent there to eat an expensive lunch and bring back the vodka. One of the kitchen girls remembers a certain Friday afternoon when a sixty-pound pot of caviar had been ordered from Fortnum’s for Yoko, who did not arrive after all. Two girls spread the sixty pounds’ worth of caviar on a single round of toast, and ate a slice each.

Only after three Apple secretaries had had their pay packets stolen on the same day was it realized that Apple’s openhandedness now extended to casual passersby. Security barely existed. That beautiful people, clad in kaftans and emitting good vibes, could stoop to theft simply did not seem possible. Meanwhile, LPs, hi-fi speakers, television sets, IBM typewriters, any movable part of the green-and-white decor continued to vanish, not through the back door—there wasn’t one—but through the front door in broad daylight, before hundreds of staring eyes. Post office messengers who brought in the sacks of fan mail were methodically stripping off the roof lead and carrying it away in the empty mailbags.

The Beatles’ accountants were still, as in Brian Epstein’s day, Bryce, Hanmer Ltd. of Albemarle Street. Harry Pinsker, the head of the firm, supervised Apple’s financial affairs and also sat on the Apple Corps board. When John and Yoko appeared nude on the
Two Virgins
album cover, Pinsker and four other directors resigned. Apple’s day-to-day accounting was then delegated to a junior partner, Stephen Maltz. For a few weeks Maltz worked at 3 Savile Row, attempting to control its vast outgoings. He resigned in late October in a five-page letter to each of the Beatles, warning of dire consequences if they could not find a way to curb Apple’s expenditures.

By that time, the company had gobbled up the £1,000,000 set aside to launch it. It had devoured a further £400,000, the second installment of the £800,000 that the Beatles had realized by selling themselves to their own company. All four had heavily overdrawn their corporate partnership
account: John by £64,858, Paul by £66,988, George by £35,850 and Ringo by £32,080. All four, in addition, were facing personal income tax liabilities of around £600,000 each.

“As far as you were aware,” Maltz wrote, “you only had to sign a bill and pick up a phone and payment was made. You were never concerned where the money came from or how it was being spent, and were living under the idea that you had millions at your disposal.

“Each of you has houses and cars…you also have tax cases pending. Your personal finances are in a mess. Apple is in a mess.”

The Beatles by then could see that Apple was in a mess. They could even, however reluctantly, see why. They had all shared Paul’s vision of Western Communism—of young people freed from turgid conventional business methods, managing their own affairs on the pure, simple dynamo of their own young energy. The lesson of the past six months was that young people were no less greedy, dishonest, avaricious, and incompetent than middle-aged ones. Maltz’s letter and grim warning only confirmed a suspicion, growing even in John’s mind, that turgid, conventional business might have something to recommend it after all. In particular, their thoughts turned toward the very concept that Apple had meant to disown: Someone, they agreed, had better become the boss.

At 3 Savile Row, despite all the high-paid executives in their elegantly appointed offices, no one was quite the boss. Ron Kass, the head of Apple Records, probably came the closest. But Kass did not have, as Peter Brown did, the direct hotline to all four Beatle hides. Peter Brown held expansive managerial lunches. But Neil Aspinall, who never ate lunch, held the post of managing director. Neil, their former road manager, was the Beatles’ oldest, closest friend; it was his very closeness and trustworthiness that prevented him from seizing full executive power. He simply took on a workload that on several occasions caused him to be physically sick.

If Apple was to have a boss, the Beatles decided, it must be a big boss. It must be the biggest, bossiest boss that the land of business and bosses could provide.

As so often in such matters they sought guidance from the biggest boss on their horizon: Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI. Sir Joe’s advice was to bring in the head of a merchant bank. He himself offered to approach Lazard, one of the city’s most powerful merchant banks, on
their behalf. A meeting was arranged between Paul and the bank’s chairman, Lord Poole, who at that time also happened to be giving financial advice to the Queen.

Sir Joseph accompanied Paul to the Lazard meeting. “He’d come along without a tie of course. So Lord Poole took off his tie and jacket and we sat down to lunch. At the end, Lord Poole said, ‘I’ll do it. And what’s more, I won’t charge you anything.’ The Queen’s financial adviser was offering to sort out the Beatles—for nothing! But the Beatles didn’t bother to follow it up.”

Another highly symbolic approach—by John this time—was to Lord Beeching, the man who reorganized British Railways by shutting down huge lengths of them. The legendary “Beeching axe” was not available to be wielded at Apple. Beeching, however, listened sympathetically to the tales of chaos and then offered one wise—and prophetic—recommendation: “Get back to making records.”

Meanwhile, Christmas was coming. So were the Hell’s Angels. The former was to be celebrated with a party for Apple employees’ children organized by Derek Taylor in Peter Brown’s sumptuous first-floor office. The latter were motorcycling heavies from San Francisco whom George Harrison had asked to drop in whenever they happened to be passing through London.

At first, it was rumored that the entire San Francisco chapter of the Hell’s Angels had decided to take up this invitation. The deputation, however, proved to be limited to only two, though sufficiently terrifying, Angels, one named ’Frisco Pete, the other, Billy Tumbleweed. With them they brought two Harley-Davidson bikes—shipped from California at Apple’s expense—and a harem a dozen strong. They and their retinue were reportedly en route for Czechoslovakia “to straighten out the political situation.”