All four Beatles climbed the stairs to the roof of the Apple building in Savile Row for their last public performance – played in the teeth of a bitter wind – that served as the climax to Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s film documentary Let It Be.
JANUARY 1969
All the rainbow colours of the outside world seemed to have been extinguished, replaced by a grim, cheerless darkness. The only sounds came from the heavy footsteps of two men – Mal Evans, the faithful roadie, and Kevin Harrington, the faithful gofer – lugging in guitar cases, amplifiers and drums, the sound of their heels echoing in the stillness. The guitars were positioned in a circle beside three chairs. Already in place stood a Blüthner piano. The drums were then mounted on a high-riser, the black lettering with the familiar dropped ‘T’ a clue to their owner.
Close by, people worked stealthily, checking camera angles and light meters. Men with headphones tested their audio equipment, checking noise levels. Snaking all over the floor and around the chairs were seemingly endless lengths of cables and wires. On the morning of 2 January, the sound stage at London’s Twickenham Film Studios was a hive of muffled activity. The only people missing, though soon to arrive, were the main players from Central Casting: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
It was in these desolate surroundings that The Beatles hoped to get back to where they once belonged - back to the days when their music set in motion a chain reaction that altered western youth culture. A new year. A new hope. For the next couple of weeks at least, the studios would serve as their creative hub.
The premise was simple. The four most famous musicians in the world would be filmed writing and rehearsing new songs for a fly-on-the-wall TV documentary. The pay-off would be their first proper live show since 29 August 1966, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
The prime mover, as he had been for the last two years, was McCartney, the Beatle-cheerleader-in-chief. ‘The idea was that you’d see The Beatles rehearsing, jamming, getting their act together and then finally performing somewhere in a big end-of-show concert,’ he recalled. Driven by a relentless work ethic, his enthusiasm for the group remained as full-on as ever. And so, it appeared, was the love held for them by fans who had been with them every inch of the way. Through early Beatlemania. Through the druggy mystery tour of the Summer of Love. Through the reinvented rock of The Beatles (aka the White Album).
Proof of their longevity lay in the fact that, as the decade entered its final year, The Beatles still sat imperiously at the top of the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The White Album, a four-sided record, had, despite its difficult birth, been hailed as an amalgam of pop, rock, country and soulful blues. But six years of unparalleled and dazzling success, combined with the relentless vagaries of fame, had taken an inevitable toll on relationships within the band.
Memories of the marathon sessions for the album, which was released in November 1968, were still fresh. The price for creating the music had been frayed nerves, angry bust-ups and, in the case of Starr, a week-long walkout.
By the turn of the year, McCartney, more than any of them, worried that the band was on life support, but he was not prepared to be the one to administer the last rites. He remained in denial over the serious disconnect that now existed between each of them. The cure, he was convinced, lay in a back-to-basics approach, the four of them creating great music in the studio and then going back on the road. Or at least playing a one-off gig to prove they could still cut it as a live band. He was even considering a surprise rock’n’roll-style drop-in, drop-out tour of northern dance halls. That was the fantasy he sold, and it was persuasive enough for them all to hook up at Twickenham on the second day of the year to begin sessions for a project tentatively and wistfully dubbed ‘Get Back’.
They were, of course, no longer the four callow kids who first stepped onto the world’s stage in 1963. Lennon had found Yoko Ono, the Japanese avant-garde artist seven years his senior for whom he broke up his marriage and with whom he dabbled in heroin. Harrison, having discovered a new inner confidence through Indian mysticism, was on a quest for Krishna consciousness. McCartney was enjoying the fame and acclaim that was his heart’s desire. And Starr, whose childhood had been wrecked by illness, simply couldn’t believe his luck at such a reversal of fortune.
But the symbiosis that once touched on telepathy had been replaced by lethargy. And now here they were, two days in to a new year, in a freezing studio they didn’t know, hemmed in and tapped out and working once again under an autocratic conductor: McCartney.
As she had been during the White Album sessions, Yoko remained umbilically attached to Lennon, an awkward situation which acted like dry tinder. Harrison simply wanted to be somewhere – anywhere – else; Starr had a ringside seat at the long goodbye. It was far too soon after the fractious atmosphere of the White Album to get back to the future, but no one had the courage to say out loud what needed to be said.
Lennon recalled: ‘Paul had this idea that we were going to rehearse or … see, it all was more like Simon and Garfunkel, like looking for perfection all the time. And so he has these ideas that we’ll rehearse and then make the album. And of course we’re lazy fuckers and we’ve been playing for twenty years, for fuck’s sake, we’re grown men, we’re not going to sit around rehearsing. I’m not, anyway. And we couldn’t get into it. And we put down a few tracks and nobody was in to it at all.
‘It was a dreadful, dreadful feeling in Twickenham Studio, and being filmed all the time. I just wanted them to go away, and we’d be there, eight in the morning. You couldn’t make music at eight in the morning or ten or whatever it was, in a strange place with people filming you and coloured lights.’
Lennon’s heart may not have been in it right from the start but he, like all of them, had initially appeared to buy in to the ‘Get Back’ project, the seed for which had been planted after their first appearance before a live audience for two years. That had been at Twickenham, too: they had showcased ‘Hey Jude’ and Lennon’s ‘Revolution’ before the cameras for Frost on Sunday. The clips, broadcast on British TV on 8 September, were directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a talented American filmmaker, whose entry into the band’s orbit had come in 1966 when he oversaw the groundbreaking videos for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’.
The ‘Hey Jude’ video captures McCartney smiling angelically while seated at an upright piano with the band surrounded by roughly a hundred extras who were providing the ‘audience’. Looking back at the footage after fifty years, it’s hard to disagree with Lennon’s post-break-up assessment that he, Harrison and Starr had become McCartney’s sidemen.
But at the time all four were surprisingly pleased with the result. Denis O’Dell, head of Apple Films, said: ‘The “Hey Jude” promo is possibly more important than most fans realise. The Beatles’ unexpected enjoyment at performing for the clip was to be a key factor in the new direction that they were about to take. After shooting, we ran the final edit of the tapes in the recording truck. They were absolutely delighted. Drinking a whisky and Coke with them at four in the morning, we agreed a good night had been had by all. In fact, they had enjoyed it so much they suggested, there and then, that we should make another film. I was elated. That was the start of “Get Back”/Let It Be.’
But that was then – and this was now. And Lennon, always the prime mover in The Beatles’ power network, had almost no interest in going over old musical ground, with McCartney especially. The creative spark that once bound them was largely gone. He was bored with The Beatles and bored with his musical partner, who no longer stimulated him intellectually the way Yoko now did. They were different people, always had been. But they had always recognised in each other a friendly rivalry that drove the music. Now, though, they were rarely singing from the same song sheet.
Lennon’s dread was fuelled by more than just scorn over the music. Apple Corps, the company they had set up in 1967 as a multi-faceted Beatle business, was now haemorrhaging thousands of pounds a week due to a culture of spend, spend, spend that outweighed the money coming in. By the start of 1969, the company’s bean counters were warning that they faced bankruptcy unless serious steps were taken to address the losses. It was the ultimate corporate contradiction. The White Album had sold millions of copies while the success of ‘Hey Jude’ in singles charts across the world had also generated much income. The Yellow Submarine album, an ad hoc collection of oldies, new songs and instrumentals was released on 17 January to accompany the release of the film of the same name. Apple Records also included the likes of Mary Hopkin, whose debut single, ‘Those Were The Days’, had overtaken ‘Hey Jude’ at the top of the UK lists in late September 1968. But the accountants’ inescapable conclusion was that Apple was fast running out of cash.
Even before a note could be sung at Twickenham, there would have to be preconditions. None of the four wanted to repeat the formula of the White Album. Musically, The Beatles had always been about breaking boundaries, but they had been ceding ground to a new wave of groups, such as Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, while contemporaries such as the Rolling Stones and The Who were widening their artistic boundaries; the Stones had just released Beggars Banquet, an acclaimed return to their R&B roots, while The Who had started recording Tommy, the first rock opera, in September 1968 (the landmark double album was released in May 1969).
Lennon’s solution was to ditch the high-end production values that had been the hallmark of their long-time producer, George Martin. The music would be stripped down, recorded warts-and-all. Martin was relegated to an ad hoc role: Glyn Johns, who had worked with the Stones and Zeppelin on their groundbreaking debut album, jumped at the chance to man the desk.
‘It was funny actually,’ recalled Johns. ‘I got a phone call from someone with a Liverpudlian voice and I thought it was Mick Jagger taking the piss. Anyway, it was Paul McCartney. And you don’t turn down Paul McCartney. The idea was something like [Bob Dylan and The Band’s] The Basement Tapes, to show what they were really like. I’d worked with everyone and their mother by then, so I was quite used to being around people who were famous. But when I got the call, to walk in and be privy to those guys sitting around, doing what they did, and to be invited in, was pretty astonishing. I didn’t know them. I was the same as every other punter on the planet, who saw them as these extraordinary icons of marvellousness.
‘And although they could hardly be normal people, because of what their success had done to them,’ Johns added, ‘I was witnessing them being normal to each other. Which no one else had got to see, and which nobody really had a clue about. And so my concept of the record was: how fantastic to have a record of them playing live, sitting around mocking each other, just having a laugh. It was very weird. But George Martin, being the gentleman that he is, he realised that I had been compromised in a way, and he saw fit to put me at ease about the situation. He took me to lunch, and he said, “You’re not to worry about a thing.” I was feeling really awkward about the whole thing, and he was completely at ease about the situation.’
Johns was unaware that he had just signed a Faustian deal that would haunt him for at least the next twelve months. For the moment, however, his job was to coax the world’s greatest band back from the brink. But they were up already against the clock.
Starr had agreed to take a substantial role in a Peter Sellers film, The Magic Christian, Terry Southern’s anarchic comedy satirising America’s obsession with money, TV, guns and sex. Starr was due on set – at, coincidentally, Twickenham – in the first week of February, a timescale that instantly posed a creative challenge for The Beatles. And therein lay the crux of the problem: the Lennon and McCartney songbook currently contained only a couple of jewels and several unpolished stones.
In those first days of January, Lennon unveiled ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, ‘Child Of Nature’ (exhumed from the initial White Album sessions and later retooled as ‘Jealous Guy’, a stand-out track on Imagine), and ‘Sun King’. McCartney, on the other hand, arrived with several promising works in progress that would be given the full band treatment over the next week. These included ‘Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight’, ‘Oh! Darling’, ‘Two Of Us’, ‘Teddy Boy’, ‘Junk’ and ‘Let It Be’ (a song that Lennon had little affection for) and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’(which Lennon simply loathed.)
In the early days, when they worked together, fine-tuning and editing each other’s material was never a problem for Lennon and McCartney. Now, though, they rarely wrote together. Which meant the naturally lazy Lennon was constantly trying to play catch-up to McCartney’s habitually prodigious output. Now expensively divorced from Cynthia, his obsession with Yoko continued to drive a wedge between him and the others.
He was also in thrall to heroin, a fixation that further alienated him from McCartney, who tended to stick to pot. Indeed, that month, during an interview for Canadian television, Lennon pulled a ‘whitey’ – junkie jargon for throwing up as he craved his next fix. His lack of new material betrayed the effect that heroin was having on his creativity, notably his lyrics, which had once been his strongest suit.
The fact was that, at the outset of filming for ‘Get Back’, Lennon and McCartney were ferreting around in their bottom drawers for decent material. That left them having to present snatches of half-finished tunes and half-baked ideas to their colleagues. Ironically, Harrison was armed with some of the best songs he had ever written. Encouraged by the material he delivered for the White Album – ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ had been hailed as an instant classic – he had found his voice and was already channelling his assertive future self with songs such as ‘Something’, ‘All Things Must Pass’, ‘Hear Me Lord’, ‘Let It Down’ and ‘Isn’t It A Pity’. He had also co-written ‘Badge’ with Eric Clapton for Cream’s farewell album and was enjoying a new-found freedom playing with other musicians.
His self-confidence had been boosted by the kind of celebrity endorsement available to only a few. At that time, only Bob Dylan existed on a higher plane of credibility than The Beatles. In November 1968 Harrison had been invited to stay with Dylan and his family in Bearsville, near Woodstock, while Bob worked with The Band, the rootsy Canadian-American group that had garnered worldwide acclaim for the sheer diversity of their musical prowess.
Harrison marvelled at Dylan and The Band’s egalitarianism. It was the complete antithesis of his own situation.
Occasionally, during those dark January days at Twickenham, Harrison tried to tempt his bandmates into trying one of his songs. But they rarely took up the offer. ‘All Things Must Pass’ was given only rudimentary run-throughs and can be heard on bootleg tapes more as ghostly background noise to forced banter. Others, such as ‘Something’, would be given similarly brusque dismissals before the month was out. It wasn’t difficult to see the lyrics to ‘All Things Must Pass’ as an astute commentary on the band’s moribund state.
Over the next few days, Harrison would also roll out ‘I Me Mine’, the title of which also laid bare his antipathy. ‘It was like being back in the winter of discontent … straight away it was back to the old routine,’ he would later recall. ‘We had been together so long that we just pigeon-holed each other.’ Something had to give, and it did. On 6 January, four days after the sessions began, Harrison and McCartney squabbled over how to play a guitar part on ‘Two Of Us’. Their exchanges were caught on camera. McCartney tried to persuade Harrison – the Beatle he had known the longest – that his own feel for the song was the one that should hold sway. Harrison was tactful: ‘I’ll play what you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.’
As he later told Rolling Stone: ‘My problem was that it would always be very difficult to get in on the act, because Paul was very pushy in that respect. When he succumbed to playing on one of your tunes, he’d always do good. But you’d have to do fifty-nine of Paul’s songs before he’d even listen to one of yours.’
The exchange has gone down in Beatles folklore as pointing to Harrison’s eventual make-or-break decision on his future with the band, but it would be another three days before matters really came to a head.
Chaotic as the sessions were musically, the most discordant note surrounded McCartney’s obsession with either a full-blown tour or a one-off show. McCartney, backed by Lindsay-Hogg, was keen to push the envelope. Discussions included talk of an amphitheatre in North Tunisia with thousands of fans holding torches and making their way to the venue across miles of sand dunes. An alternative was to hold it on board an ocean liner. Apathy, though, stonewalled every suggestion until, one day, McCartney’s patience snapped: ‘I don’t see why any of you, if you’re not interested, got yourselves into this,’ he told them. ‘What’s it for? It can’t be for the money. Why are you here? I’m here because I want to do a show, but I don’t see an awful lot of support. There are only two choices. We’re going to do it or we’re not going to do it. And I want a decision because I’m not interested in spending my days farting around here while everyone makes up their mind whether they want to do it or not. If everyone wants to do it, great. But I don’t have to be here.’
Harrison remained opposed to any live show, particularly one that he viewed as ‘expensive and insane’. Starr was adamant that he was not going abroad. Lennon vacillated between being up for anything and opposing everything. ‘I’m warming to the idea of an asylum,’ he remarked.
Harrison was vexed by yet another issue. As she had been during the White Album sessions, Yoko was impervious to all hints that her presence was unwanted, while Lennon revelled in the discomfiture of his friends. She often distracted him by kissing him or whispering in his ear during a take, causing him to miss a note or forget a lyric. It was virtually impossible for the cameras to get a shot of the four Beatles without Yoko being in the frame. It was obvious to everyone that Lennon, like Harrison, wanted to be anywhere but there.
Copyright © 2019 by Ken McNab
