Shout! (74 page)

The evening, however, did not turn Ringo against Klein so much as against Linda. “It seemed that as soon as I started saying, well, maybe Klein wasn’t so bad and we should give him a chance, Linda would start crying. In a few minutes, I’d be saying the same—well, maybe he
isn’t
so bad—and Linda would start crying again. ‘Oh, they’ve got you,
too
,’ she kept saying.”

Apple, Paul’s brainchild, his living Magritte, his Western Communism, was now repugnant to him. London was becoming almost as bad. The girls outside his gates showed increasing hatred of Linda: They broke into the house not just to look now but to steal the new Mrs. McCartney’s clothes and photographic prints. When money began to vanish, even Paul’s tolerance became exhausted. One day, he and Linda pretended to go out, then kept watch on the house from a garden across the street. Unfortunately, it was the moment chosen by Margo Stevens, his longest-standing admirer, to leave a bunch of flowers on the front step. “Suddenly, Paul ran up and started shaking me. ‘It’s
you
all the
time, isn’t it?’ he kept shouting. I was terrified. I said, ‘No—I only wanted to leave some flowers.’ I think he could see how much he’d frightened me. He stopped shaking me and started stroking my hair.”

Late in July, Paul got in touch with George Martin. It was now five months since Martin had worked on the
Let It Be
album. According to Paul, no one had yet been able to face editing the hours of ramshackle playing. The book that was to have accompanied the record had been written, but then heavily censored in proof by EMI. The film, originally intended for television, was now to be a full-length cinema feature, and so impossible to release before early 1970. The album, when edited, must therefore be held over to accompany the film.

Then Paul made a surprising request. The Beatles, he said, wanted Martin to produce an album for them “the way we used to do it.” Martin, remembering his latter experience, responded cautiously. “I said: ‘If the album’s going to be the way it used to be, then all of you have got to be the way you used to be.’ Paul said: ‘Yeah, we will. We promise. Only please let’s do the album.’”

So it happened, in July and August 1969, as the decade began to wear out, that its chief creators agreed to turn back the clock a little way. John suspended his Peace Campaign. George broke off from recording the chants of the London Radha Krishna Temple. Ringo interrupted his burgeoning film career. Paul steeled himself to remain in London a little longer. The four Beatles met, for the last time, at Abbey Road.

NINETEEN

“EVERYBODY SAW THE SUNSHINE”

O
n July 22, 1969, a human being first set foot on the moon. It was an oddly anticlimactic moment. Fictive representations of the great event for half a century past had imagined a planet inhabited by bellicose little green men, not the dead white wilderness that later close study had revealed. Storytellers in print and film alike had failed to realize, too, that as rocket science advanced, other technologies would keep step with it. Consequently, no one expected that when a first moon landing finally came, it could be televised to the whole world exactly as it happened; that, shown on black-and-white screens for hour after hour, it would gradually lose its initial stupendous fascination, becoming commonplace and ultimately even boring; so that by the time the astronaut Neil Armstrong took his carefully scripted “One small step for [a] man—one giant leap for Mankind,” he would seem less like history’s greatest explorer since Columbus than a kind of intergalactic disk jockey.

So, in their expiring months, the sixties turned from the dusty feathers of the past and shuffled reluctantly toward a new world shaped by the myriad tools and byproducts of space exploration: computers, microchips, digital clock faces, digital typefaces, nonstick saucepans, moon boots, clingfilm, the expression “We have lift-off.”

For millions of the young, paradoxically, that moon-shot summer was devoted to getting as close as humanly possible to earth. In August came the free Woodstock festival when, on a small farm in upstate New York, a four-day pageant of top American and British rock acts was watched by a nonpaying crowd of 450,000, their spirits undampened by periodic rain and the sketchiest of life-support facilities; good-humored even in their message to a government that still wished to export their young men as cannon-fodder to Vietnam. “There ain’t no time to wonder why,” sang the giant open-air chorus led by Country Joe and the Fish. “Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.”

After Woodstock, the exotic notion of playing music for nothing
spread like wildfire through the small, mutually imitative top echelon of rock bands. Doing a free concert was an easy way of becoming patron saints to the hippie subculture, who would afterward buy their records by the million at full price; it also symbolized a widespread breakaway from the control of old-fashioned, money-motivated managers. London had seen its own pioneering free festival earlier in the month when Eric Clapton and his new “supergroup” Blind Faith performed in Hyde Park before a crowd estimated at 150,000. That event also passed off happily and peacefully, and was followed by news of one still larger and more impressive. The Rolling Stones would give a free concert, also in Hyde Park, on July 5.

It would have been hard to imagine a one-shot live performance more unlike the one the Beatles had given for thirty-odd people among the Apple chimney pots in biting January cold. Half a million Stones fans massed around Hyde Park Corner to watch the band give the most riveting show of its career to date, fronted by Mick Jagger in what seemed to be an Edwardian little girl’s white party frock. The concert was also a rite of mourning for Brian Jones, their recently dumped instrumental genius, who had been found dead in his swimming pool three days earlier. Jagger read a funerary passage from Shelley’s “Adonais”—the signal for hundreds of symbolic white butterflies to be released—before settling down to simulate fellatio with a hand microphone.

On August 31 came the most remarkable of all Britain’s free rock festivals, convened on the sleepy, 1950s-ish Isle of Wight and headlined by Bob Dylan, whom the organizers had tempted out of Beatle-like seclusion by stressing the island’s associations with his favorite poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. After what proved a short, disappointing performance, Dylan was helicoptered away to what the press knew only as “a destination near London.” It was in fact Tittenhurst Park, the rambling stately home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, now occupied by John Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon. As Dylan and John greeted each other in the gusts from the rotor blades, it was hard to say which of them had changed more out of all recognition.

Thunderous with alfresco guitars, perfumed with joss and pot, sparkling with sunshine and acid, it was as if this last summer of the sixties truly could, and would, go on forever. Young people lying half-naked in the grassy heat, romping in water, foam, or mud to the free
sounds, for hectare after hectare, had found
anno Domini
’s nearest equivalent to the Garden of Eden. Though their power was soon to dissipate, if it ever really existed at all, they could point to this one irrefutable achievement. Never again in their lifetime would youthful crowds of half a million and more congregate together without wanting to harm each other or smash up the environment.

But the season was already changing. And the great guiding beacon for harmless joy in the past six-year golden age was being appropriated for darker purposes. From Los Angeles came news of random multiple murder on a scale previously associated only with gangland violence. A young movie actress named Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of the Polish director Roman Polanski, and six friends had been hacked to death at Tate’s luxury home by a hippie named Charles Manson and his “family” of largely female disciples. With his vaguely artistic as well as criminal tendencies, Manson was exactly the type who, a few months earlier, might have come begging at Apple’s still-open door. He was also the first fan-turned-fiend; the prototype of Mark David Chapman and George Harrison’s future stalker, Michael Abrams. Under questioning, Manson claimed to have received “guidance” to commit his atrocities from two songs on the Beatles’
White Album
, “Piggies” and “Helter-Skelter,” the latter title having been found scrawled on walls throughout Sharon Tate’s home in her and her fellow victims’ blood.

Not all Apple creatures had perished under Allen Klein. In the press office there were still plastic birds, dipping and dipping their beaks around a shallow watertray. The press office, likewise, continued to function, though at what inscrutable whim of Klein’s Derek Taylor could not claim to understand. Sometimes in mid-afternoon, when his department became too crowded and the Scotch and Coke fumes too uproariously thick, Taylor would raise himself in his scallop-backed throne, push the hair off his eyes, and shout, “Clear the room now! I mean it!” After one such dismissal, wandering in the sudden space behind Carol Paddon’s desk, he paused by the water tray and studied the nodding birds. “Those beaks are going moldy,” he remarked gloomily. “No one told us they’d do that when we bought them. They cost us one pound each.”

Derek Taylor was a frustrated writer. But, unlike most frustrated writers, he had talent. Often he would have dismissed his court simply
for the purpose of fighting his way back the few inches across his desk to the typewriter that stood there. He wrote a great deal during Apple’s last year: essays and soliloquies and memoranda to himself, all on a theme as constant as the pressure on him from above, below, and sideways. Why do I work for the Beatles? And why, of all the complex emotions produced by working for the Beatles, is the commonest one simple fear?

“Whatever the motivation,” Taylor typed, “the effect is slavery. Whatever the Beatles ask is done. I mean, whatever the Beatles ask is tried. A poached egg on the Underground on the Bakerloo Line between Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross? Yes, Paul. A sock full of elephant shit on Otterspool Promenade? Give me 10 minutes, Ringo. Two Turkish dwarfs dancing the Charleston on a sideboard? Male or female, John? Pubic hair from Sonny Liston? It’s early closing, George (gulp), but give me until noon tomorrow. The only gig I would do after this is the Queen. Their staff are terrified of them, and not without reason. They have fired more people than any comparable employer unit in the world. They make Lord Beaverbrook look like Jesus.”

Then the music would begin again, and Taylor, and Mavis Smith, and Carol Paddon—who was afraid to go on vacation lest her job should vanish—each remembered why they were sitting here. The stagnant sea of journalists and TV men remembered, or almost did. Taylor said the same thing into the telephone a dozen times each day. “It’s called
Abbey Road
. Yes—the studios are in Abbey Road. It’s an album just like they used to make. They sound the way they sounded in the old days.”

Something had stopped the elements diverging and restored them to their old unsurpassable balance.
Abbey Road
was John Lennon at his best, and Paul McCartney at his best, and George Harrison suddenly reaching a best that no one had ever imagined. It was John’s anarchy, straight and honed. It was Paul’s sentimentality with the brake applied. It was George’s new, wholly surprising presence, drawing the best from both sources. It was a suite of glorious new songs, not warring internally as on the
White Album
but merging their irreconcilably different viewpoints into a cohesive and balanced whole, and performed with the tautness and unartificiality they had sought for so long. It was the moment, caught again and crystallized, even in the flux of an expiring decade. It was hot streets, soft porn, and hippiedom fading into a hard reality. It was London here and now, and Liverpool then, and the
Beatles, dateless and timeless in a sudden, capricious illusion of perfect harmony.

It echoed throughout 3 Savile Row on September 11, then a date just like any other, as the Apple house girded itself to face whatever ructions this day might bring, its green carpets vacuumed smooth, its still-empty upper suites savory with the aroma of furniture polish. Here was the opening track, “Come Together,” with its hissing percussion and all-too-obvious echoes of the Lennons’ bedroom. Here was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” another cutie-pie Paul song, but this time with an undertow of viciousness: “Bang bang Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon her head / Bang-bang Maxwell’s silver hammer made sure that she was dead.” Here was the ritual Ringo track, a children’s song called “Octopus’s Garden,” as happy and optimistic as Ringo somehow remained, yet still with a wistful subtext of longing for the Beatles to be “under the sea… knowing they’re happy and they’re safe.” Here was “Because,” featuring the sweetest and closest group harmony since “Here, There and Everywhere,” from a lyric jotted down by John on the reverse of one of John Eastman’s most reproachful interoffice memos.

In the ground-floor office of Bag Productions, the first visitors were led in to meet John and Yoko. They were not journalists; they were two blind, middle-aged Texan women in pink and orange taffeta ballgowns. Each was led across to touch John, then Yoko led them to the group of four Plexiglas cabinets blocking the fireplace. It was the hi-fi system that John had ironically christened The Plastic Ono Band, and even credited with the playing of “Give Peace a Chance.” Each blind girl’s hand in Yoko’s touched the featureless robots hopefully, like a shrine.

Next came the day-long line of reporters, primed with questions about peace; about John’s interest in the Tate murder case, but mainly about the two films he and Yoko had shown that week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The first was
Rape
; the second, entitled
Self-Portrait
, was a forty-two-minute study of John’s penis both in partial and full erection. “Anything that gets a reaction is good,” he told the
New Musical Express
. “People are just frozen jellies. It just needs someone to do something to turn off the fridge.” Yoko sat beside him, eating brown rice from a bowl with a long wooden spoon. She interjected only to regret that no serious critical comment had been directed at their film of John’s penis. Or, as Yoko innocently said, “The critics wouldn’t touch it.”