Paul McCartney (47 page)

His first proposal, that they should simply play some surprise club dates under an alias, was far too extreme for the others. But in principle, the idea was no longer totally unthinkable. They’d enjoyed their appearance on David Frost’s television show, before a studio audience who, while greeting them rapturously, had listened to their music with an attention and appreciation they hadn’t experienced since the Cavern. John’s appetite for performing had been further revived by the shock therapy of partnering Yoko. Ringo was becoming increasingly involved in film acting, but would conform with the group mind, as always. Only George, who had hated Beatlemania worst of all, remained to be won over.

Paul therefore came up with an alternative plan for the Beatles to get back to the milieu they had once dominated–and in the process revive the film company that had lain dormant since Magical Mystery Tour. They would give a one-off stage show, to be filmed and marketed worldwide by Apple. Released in tandem with this would be a documentary of the band in rehearsal, much like Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One, which had starred the Rolling Stones after the Beatles turned it down.

Initially, Paul suggested the director might be Yoko: a typically subtle stratagem for giving her the respect John demanded while also ungluing her from his side. But Yoko had no interest in conventional film-making–indeed, felt insulted by the very idea–so the job went to 28-year-old Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who’d directed several Beatles promo-films, most recently those for ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Revolution’, as well as the documentary-length Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.

The original idea was to film the concert at the Roundhouse in north London, a venue well-known to Paul through his underground connections, which would have given the Beatles huge credibility with the hippy acid-rock crowd. The Roundhouse was booked for 18 January 1969, but then deemed too ordinary for an event so momentous. Various other locations were put forward, each more grandiose and implausible than the last, from the Egyptian Pyramids to the deck of a passenger-liner in mid-ocean.

On 2 January, only 11 weeks after finishing the White Album, the Beatles reconvened for the in-rehearsal documentary that was to be a companion piece or trailer to their concert film. This was scheduled to last two weeks and take place in a single location, a vacant sound stage at Twickenham Film Studios in west London. The studios promised security from intrusive fans and media, and had good associations for the band: they’d made their revivifying David Frost Show appearance there and, in earlier, happier times, had trodden the sound-stages in both A Hard Day’s Night and Help!

It proved a disastrous choice. The sound stage in midwinter was icy-cold as well as bleak and comfortless; in addition, they were expected to keep film studio rather than recording studio hours, which meant clocking in at nine sharp each morning rather than drifting comfortably into Abbey Road in the early evening. There was no shooting-script nor structure of any kind: Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s brief was simply to film everything that happened as the Beatles assembled a tracklist for their grand comeback concert, in whatever location it should eventually take place.

Although no more enamoured of the conditions than anyone else, Paul characteristically made the best of them, turning up bang on time every day in his baggy tweed greatcoat, setting the agenda of numbers to be rehearsed and conferring with Lindsay-Hogg about set-ups and camera angles. He was both producer and musical director by default: neither George nor Ringo showed any interest in the project, while John had just been introduced to heroin by Yoko and as a result was often barely coherent.

The documentary is celebrated as an amazing exercise in honesty–some might say masochism–which destroyed any remaining illusions that being in the Beatles was the greatest fun on earth. But it also contains a great deal of harmony and humour against the odds, along with some moments of musical magic comparable with any hitherto.

They still don’t seem to mind Yoko’s being in their midst, once again acting as a backing group as she exercises a vocal style modelled on the shrieks and moans of servant women she used to overhear giving birth during her childhood in Tokyo. Paul gets into the avant-garde spirit by jabbing his live bass against his amplifier fabric to create a wail of Jimi Hendrix-style feedback.

Most interesting is the evolution of Paul’s ‘Get Back’, whose title sums up the spirit of the whole enterprise. From a few basic riffs, it turns first into heavy metal, then an upbeat country ballad about ‘Jojo [leaving] his home in Tucson, Arizona’. Tucson was the home of Linda’s ex-husband, Joseph Melville See, who’d recently been so accommodating over the custody of Heather, but Paul would always insist that was pure coincidence.

The original lyric also has a political agenda, mockingly echoing the recent fulminations of Tory MP Enoch Powell against Britain’s immigrant Pakistani community. That verse is jettisoned–wisely since it sounds rather racist in itself. With bitter hindsight, John would say that each time Paul sang ‘Get back to where you once belonged’, he seemed to be looking directly at Yoko.

But on the film, the two often seem to be working together with much of their old relish. There’s real warmth in their performance of Paul’s ‘Two of Us’, actually about Linda and himself, but now a seeming tribute to a staggering joint career: ‘You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.’ They even revive ‘One After 909’, which they wrote together for the Quarrymen in the skiffle era when no subject matter was more glamorous than a train. To the composer of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, that chorus of ‘Move over once/ Move over twice/ Come on baby don’t be cold as ice’ has always been profoundly embarrassing; now he kind of admires it.

But there was also a lot of apathy and ragged playing, and in the end even Paul’s resolution began to waver. ‘I don’t see why none of you is interested, get yourselves into this,’ he told the others. ‘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 really don’t feel an awful lot of support… There’s only two choices. We’re gonna do it or we’re not gonna do it. And I want a decision. Because I’m not interested in spending my fucking days farting around here while everyone makes up their mind whether they want to do it or not.’

Finally, on the eighth day of filming, Lindsay-Hogg’s camera homed in on an exchange between George and Paul. George had just played a riff which Paul thought could be played better, and was demonstrating how with a downward sweep of one arm.

PAUL You see, it’s got to come down like this. There shouldn’t be any recognisable jumps. It helps if you sing it. Like this: ‘waw-waw-waw…’

Nobody said ‘cut’ and, in an instant, Beatles were clashing on camera, one like a bearded young teacher trying to enthuse a sluggish student, the other exuding resentment over the top of his red polo neck.

PAUL I always hear myself annoying you. Look, I’m not trying to get you. I’m just saying, ‘Look, lads… the band. Shall we do it like this?’

GEORGE Look, I’ll play whatever it is you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.

In truth, there was a history of this kind of thing: during the recording of George’s song ‘Taxman’ for Revolver, Paul had also repeatedly criticised his guitar solo and finally wrested it away from him. He had accepted it then but now walked off the sound stage and, seemingly, out of the Beatles, his only farewell a curt ‘See you around the clubs.’

John and Paul agreed that what John called ‘the festering wound’ within the band might be past healing and that if George didn’t return by the following Friday the Beatles would effectively have broken up. In the event, Press Officer Derek Taylor, to whom he’d always been especially close, persuaded him to attend a business meeting at Apple two days before the expiry of the deadline. But, he made clear, he would return to the ranks only on condition that Paul stopped bossing him around and the McCartney master-plan was jettisoned forthwith. They must forget all those grandiose ideas of comeback concerts in exotic places and concentrate on making the next album.

Paul offered no objection, being as weary as the others of conditions at Twickenham. It was agreed to take a short break, then transfer operations to the recording studio in the basement at 3 Savile Row, which Magic Alex Mardas had supposedly been installing for most of the past year. The fracas actually helped determine the character of the new album, which, they only got as far as agreeing, must be totally unlike their recent, overwrought double-disc blockbuster.

It was the continuing anomaly of George’s life that while being a second division Beatle, permanently overshadowed by Lennon and McCartney, he was held in the highest esteem by first-rank musicians like Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Dylan’s virtuoso sidemen, the Band. He had recently returned from America, enthusing about the Band’s album Music from Big Pink, in which the quintet had explored their country and hillbilly roots with largely acoustic instruments, creating an intricate, quiet masterpiece. Rather than White, the Beatles decided, they should now be thinking Pink.

The title of the song Paul had developed at Twickenham Studios defined this new objective as well as it had the previous one. Rather than getting back to live concerts, they would emulate the Band and get back to their roots. Since in their case their only roots were themselves, this meant recapturing the simplicity of their music when there had been just the four of them, blasting out raw soul and R&B in Liverpool and Hamburg; before the arrival of French horns, harps, piccolo trumpets, cacophony orchestras in false noses, backwards-fairground-carousels, sitars and tape-loops.

In that spirit, Paul decided to use the instrument most redolent of those exuberant, uncomplicated years, his Hofner violin bass. Actually, he owned two, the first bought in Hamburg and played through a thousand and one sweaty Reeperbahn and Cavern nights; the second, improved model given to him by the Hofner company in 1963 after he’d made the brand internationally famous. For maximum rootsiness, he brought both to the recording sessions.

George Martin was called in to produce and briefed by John in terms which as good as dismissed Martin’s incalculable contribution to the Beatles over the previous six years. What they wanted, said John, was an ‘honest’ album, with ‘none of that production crap’.

Martin had been led to believe he would be working in a studio where Magic Alex’s technological marvels would make Abbey Road seem prehistoric. On his first visit to 3 Savile Row’s basement, however, he found no useable recording facilities yet in place, months after the studio had been commissioned. (Mardas later claimed not to have been working there at all, but constructing a mock-up of the layout at another address.) There were not even feed-holes through the walls for electric cables, Martin found, and an adjacent central-heating plant created an intrusive din which would somehow have to be muffled. The only way he could start work at once, as required, was by importing a mountain of equipment from poor old outdated EMI.

The opening session for an album with the working title of Get Back took place on 22 January 1969. Assisting George Martin was Glyn Johns, long-time engineer and producer to the Rolling Stones. Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras continued filming everything that happened–though with what ulterior purpose Lindsay-Hogg was no longer sure.

There was also an addition to the Beatles’ line-up: the first ever for the duration of a whole album and a symptom of the fraught atmosphere between them. This was the black American singer and organist Billy Preston, whom they’d got to know in the early Sixties when he was with Little Richard’s band. George asked him to play on Get Back, not just for his keyboard skills but because rows would be less likely with an outsider present.

Martin’s task was, in effect, to produce an album of live Beatles performances, without overdubs or editing of any kind. Their very first album, Please Please Me in 1963, had been just that–made by four boys whose hunger and passion, not to mention awe of their new record-boss, enabled them to power through it in a single day. To underline their purpose, they had a cover prepared just like that of Please Please Me, with a picture of their present-day, lank-haired selves by the same photographer, Angus McBean, looking down the same stairwell at EMI’s Manchester Square headquarters.

Now they were no longer boys but gods, no longer hungry but sated a thousand times over, no longer passionate but weary beyond imagining–and no longer amenable to being driven by anyone on earth. Sticking doggedly to the no-editing-and-overdubs rule, they would stop at every mistake and start all over again. They’d sometimes do as many as 60 takes, leaving George Martin at a loss as to whether the sixtieth had been any improvement on the fifty-ninth. ‘Then you’re no fookin’ good, are you,’ John snapped at him on one occasion. Martin was still too much a gentleman to reply in kind, but increasingly turned over the production to Glyn Johns.

For much of the time they simply jammed, wandering back through the vast repertoire of rock ‘n’ roll and R&B they’d accumulated before they were famous and still knew by heart. Paul gave up all attempts to maintain discipline and focus and went along with the others. Around 100 tracks ended up in the can, most of them self-indulgent, slipshod rambles; a few–like Paul’s ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and John’s ‘Don’t Let Me Down’–touched a wholly new level of brilliance. But by now no one could tell the difference. To lower Paul’s spirits still further, somewhere between Twickenham and Savile Row the older of his two violin basses, the one he’d bought in Hamburg and played until halfway through Beatlemania, was stolen.

Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg had envisaged filming the Beatles’ comeback concert at sunrise in a 2000-year-old Roman amphitheatre in Tunisia with their music ringing out like a muezzin, summoning the faithful by the ten thousand. In the end, the only live performance Lindsay-Hogg got to film was from an improvised stage on the roof of 3 Savile Row, watched by a sprinkling of Apple employees and a few bemused onlookers from neighbouring buildings. It lasted only 42 minutes before being brought to a halt by the police, following complaints about the noise from businesses in the area. Half-hearted compromise though it was, it would become one of the most famous moments in Beatle history–and create an essential ritual for any rock band seeking credibility as urban guerrillas. In years to come, countless others would clamber onto roofs with film-crews and start blasting, their ears hopefully cocked for the wail of police-sirens.