Fire and Rain (12 page)

Upon his return to London in the new year, McCartney had bought a home recording unit and had it delivered to Cavendish Avenue. There, he began putting on tape some of the songs and fragments he'd been
playing at the farm. He started with a trifle, strumming lazy chords and singing about the way Linda looked “with the lovely flowers in her hair.” It wasn't much of a song, but it was a start. Over the next month and a half—at home and then in Morgan, a studio just north of London—more songs began taking shape, with McCartney playing all the instruments himself. Some, like a modest rocker called “That Would Be Something” built around a coiled-up guitar line, were cut in his living room. (In that song and others, he'd hum when he didn't have enough words written down.) He tossed off “Valentine's Day,” an instrumental, and resurrected “Junk,” a wispy, lullaby-style leftover from the White Album sessions. With its bumpy rock and roll feel, “Oo You” recalled “Why Don't We Do It in the Road,” from the White Album. “Momma Miss America,” another instrumental, was fueled by a rumbling piano and drumbeat that were, by his standards, experimental and ambient. Like a few other songs, it devolved into random strums and giggles, as if McCartney wanted to make it explicitly clear that he wasn't taking it all terribly seriously.

In late February, McCartney returned to EMI Studio, the Beatles' home base, bringing the tapes with him. John Kurlander, a young EMI employee who'd worked as an assistant on the
Abbey Road
sessions, couldn't help but notice the difference in McCartney's mood. McCartney was now relaxed and productive, playing one instrument at a time as he constructed or finalized his new songs, only Linda and their children his companions. Inspired by the plight of a South American tribe he'd seen on TV, he recorded “Kreen-Akore,” essentially a drum solo, then played every instrument and sang every note on two truly fully realized songs, “Every Night” and “Maybe I'm Amazed,” both odes to Linda.

To Peter Brown, one of the few told of the work in progress, the unassuming project hardly felt out of the ordinary. After all, Brown thought, the Beatles were always working on one thing or another, albeit increasingly on their own. As McCartney well knew, Lennon had just finished
“Instant Karma,” Harrison had already put out an album of instrumental film music,
Wonderwall Music
, and Starr was at work on his album of oldies. Brown also knew McCartney had a particularly strong work ethic and, far more than the others, a deep-seated need to entertain.

On February 25, one of McCartney's last days at the studio, he began and finished an entire song, “Man We Was Lonely.” The music—a gentle sway led by an acoustic guitar, with mild bass and drum parts that hinted at polka oom-pah—was determinedly casual. Starting with the ungrammatical use of “was” instead of “were,” the song was consciously hammy, and the repetitive lyrics, with their references to his former city life and his new wife, were his most direct comment on his state of mind. “But now we're fine all the while,” he and Linda sang at the end—three times in a row, as if to ensure the point was made. “After all the tension with the Beatles, spending several weeks up at the farm with Linda put him in a state of relaxation he hadn't been in for a while,” Kurlander recalled. “There was no one else to answer to at all.”

In part, that was because few knew he was there. Following an earlier session, on February 22, Kurlander jotted down McCartney's name in his logbook—then scratched it out and wrote “Ssssh.” Starting the following day, McCartney was referred to in Kurlander's journal as “Billy Martin,” his
nom de studio
. For reasons Kurlander couldn't discern, the sessions were suddenly clandestine.

The silver film canisters squirreled away in an office at Apple Corps told their whole story, or at least the early part of it. Footage of them, young and ebullient, at the Cavern Club. Clips from their early days on tour, playing to swaying stadiums of weeping female fans. Film of Brian Epstein, youthful, alive, talking of his plans for the group. The canisters sat in a small room with no windows located next to the second-floor office
of Neil Aspinall, the Beatles' longtime and loyal friend. Despite all the changes in the band and at Apple, Aspinall remained a valuable, rocksteady presence. He'd gone from working as their first road manager—putting up posters of their club gigs, among other tasks—to helping run Apple from its launch. A movie projector sat in the middle of the room, with a projection screen nearby. All that was needed was someone to catalogue the contents of each canister, and for that job, Aspinall turned to Chris O'Dell.

O'Dell, a vivacious brunette born and raised in Oklahoma, was on her second tour of duty at Apple. She'd been living in Los Angeles in 1968 when she'd met Derek Taylor, Brian Epstein's former assistant and a dapper hippie aristocrat in his own right. After a falling-out with Epstein, Taylor moved to southern California to become a rock publicist—for, among others, the Byrds, who then included David Crosby. When Taylor met O'Dell, he told her he was returning to London to work for the Beatles' new business, Apple. A few months later, at Taylor's invitation, O'Dell was at Apple herself, working random jobs like answering the switchboard, until Peter Asher asked her to be his personal assistant. In the fall of 1969, O'Dell left Apple and returned to Los Angeles to be with her new boyfriend, singer and pianist Leon Russell. But when their relationship soured, O'Dell was back in London, this time at the dawn of 1970.

A year and a half after its launch, Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row looked unchanged in many ways. The five-story building tucked away on the modest Piccadilly Square street, alongside a string of upper-crust tailoring shops, retained its reddish-brown brick exterior; the Apple Scruffs, the loyal female fans, still gathered outside, just beyond the black iron front gate. Peter Brown was still reporting to work, handling the band's social engagements, helping organize wedding plans, and juggling innumerable Beatle details. His office at Apple was on the second floor, right across from the one the Beatles shared, and Brown, in the old days, would see McCartney there almost every day.

But that was before Epstein's death, before the fractious making of the White Album, before the Twickenham Studio filming, before Lennon and Ono had held that meeting with Allen Klein. It was before their marriages and house purchases, and it was certainly before the meeting in Brown's office the prior September, when McCartney had argued for future concerts and a TV special and Lennon had called him “daft,” told everyone he wanted a divorce from the band, and stormed out. “Well, that's that, then,” said one Apple employee glumly afterward.

Apple was different now. Inside, the whirlwind of activity O'Dell had witnessed in 1968—the constantly
brrrring
phones, the sight of McCartney, Lennon, Harrison, or Starr whipping in and out, the secretaries brewing tea and making sandwiches—was largely gone, as was her old boss Peter Asher. Everything was so quiet now, the mood so much less freewheeling. O'Dell heard from the outset that McCartney, once the most business-focused, never came into the office anymore.

Apple was hardly in a position to hire, especially now that Klein was pruning its budgets and attempting to rein in its out-of-control finances. But Aspinall needed an assistant, so O'Dell had a new job helping him dig through the film canisters. For several weeks, O'Dell diligently scribbled down the contents of each reel. Aspinall never talked about his assignment in detail, but after a while O'Dell assumed he was putting together a documentary on the history of the Beatles. It felt odd to compile what amounted to a chronicle of a band that still existed, but O'Dell didn't question the project.

Nor did she see it through to completion. To O'Dell's surprise, Harrison called her one late winter day and asked her to work for him at his new home. By 1970, rock and roll was roughly fifteen years old and ready for royalty of its own. The Beatles fit the bill, and as O'Dell saw for herself on a late-night drive to the house, so did Harrison's new home. In early March, he and wife Pattie Boyd had left their bungalow in Esher, Surrey, and moved into Friar Park, a Gothic mansion
in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, over an hour west of London. Once visitors drove past the entrance house and onto the main property, they saw a mansion a far cry from the drab, two-floor Upton Green, Speke, council house in which Harrison had lived with his family as a teenager. Surrounded by thirty acres, Friar Park had two dozen rooms, stainedglass windows, multiple gardens, oak-paneled rooms, a library, and pointed turrets outside. If Harrison wasn't able to place many of his own songs on Beatle albums, he'd at least show them up with the grandest of all Beatle residences.

Although now a devout student of Hinduism, Harrison could also be unpredictably moody, sullen, or sarcastic. Part of him stewed over the way the others, McCartney especially, were dismissive of his songs and still treated him as if he were simply the lead guitarist. He'd gritted his teeth through the
Get Back
and
Abbey Road
sessions. At Friar Park, Harrison was finally in control of at least one aspect of his life. He could work on his songs in solitude, without feeling the scrutinizing eye of McCartney. When he so desired, he even had his own bass player. Shortly after moving in, he heard Voormann's marriage was breaking up. “Come on, stay here,” he told Voormann, who took his friend up on his invitation to move into one of the cottages on the estate. The two would play or talk about music, apart from the others and in Harrison's own enclosed world. At one point, O'Dell overheard Ono remark that O'Dell was now in “George's camp.” “
We're in
camps
now
?” O'Dell thought.

Lennon had his own luxurious camp by then. The previous May, he and Ono had bought Tittenhurst Park, an estate thirty miles outside London. Starting in the fall of 1969 and continuing into the new year, their friend Dan Richter had been overseeing its renovation. A thirty-year-old actor from the American Northeast, Richter had made his name with mime
performances throughout Europe. While doing street theater in Tokyo in the early '60s, he'd met Ono and Tony Cox. After moving to London in 1965, Richter reconnected with the couple and rented an apartment right next to theirs; the two homes shared a common balcony. Before long, Richter noticed all wasn't well with the Ono and Cox marriage. Looking out his window, he'd see Lennon's white limousine pull up and Ono rush in.

In the summer of 1969, Richter achieved a level of fame. He'd been hired by director Stanley Kubrick to choreograph the enigmatic opening sequence of
2001: A Space Odyssey
, in which a group of prehistoric, manlike apes fight with another tribe and come across a mysterious black monolith. Richter wound up playing the head ape in the scene. But he was also addicted to heroin, and at the Lennons' invitation, he and his wife Jill moved into two of the back cottages at Tittenhurst.

Like O'Dell at Friar Park, they were overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place and its surroundings: seventy-two acres surrounding a massive white house with huge bay windows. Since he needed something to do, Richter was hired (albeit for no pay, at his request) to oversee the makeover of the home. A white marble fireplace was installed on the first floor. A round bed—resembling a turntable, at Lennon's request—had been built for the Lennons' bedroom (for which Richter had to search for custom-made circular sheets). The floors were covered with off-white carpets made of unbleached wool specially woven in China; a green Queen Anne desk was installed in the bedroom. Since Lennon wanted to wake up each morning and see water, a lake was dug where once had lain an empty field. Everyone darted around the estate on golf carts. “The money kept coming in,” said Richter, who signed off on all the work charges without ever looking at the bills. “It was like a waterfall.”