#jonathon green

DEREK TAYLOR: I think Apple must have given out a considerable amount of money, if you add it up. But it wouldn’t get to six figures in all. What John was initiating with Yoko would certainly add up. John should have recognised that when he was getting panicky and saying, ‘We’ve been bled dry,’ and all that. A lot of the bleeding was done by Bag Productions.

(Days in the Life by Jonathon Green, 1998)

DEREK TAYLOR: Apple had been going since December 1967 when they had opened the Apple shop. I joined in April 1968. At Apple I had access to funds to shovel out to all the people that John, particularly John, approved of. There was this general disposition to be nice to anyone who seemed to be on the trip. Anyone who wanted a small amount or who could give us a service for a reasonable sum. So if someone came in off the street with an idea and they looked right and felt right and had a nice manner they would get money given to them.<…> We want to help save the world. And that was the message and to make sure that people knew about it John and Paul appeared on the Johnny Carson Show and said, ‘Come to us, we’ll give you a cup of tea or a drink …” And they did come. And to the best of my ability I did give everyone a cup of tea or a joint or a drink. If they came in and they actually wanted cash and it wasn’t a lot, I’d probably give them a fiver out of my pocket and get it back from expenses. And of course if IT wanted anything, they could have it. John was into all this — though he didn’t get to know about all of it — and while my instincts were usually pretty good, if I did get into a quandary, I always had it in the back of my mind: John would cover this. George too, though he didn’t like Apple as much as John. He didn’t like what he saw as the chaos of Apple. He was very spiritual and very hooked into Krishna. He was very much into the American version of the counterculture. GENE MAHON: I worked for Apple from the very beginning, but I was never on the staff, never actually employec. Though I probably spent more there, in Derek Taylor’s office, than anyone who was employed. <…> Derek Taylor’s office was extraordinary. He did stuff that people didn’t really realise. He worked long and hard to get Lennon into the States, for instance, things like that. He answered the telephone. Mad telephone calls from everywhere. He organised the launch of the singles — ‘Give Peace a Chance’ at Chelsea Town Hall, a very funny occasion — things like that. <…>

DEREK TAYLOR: After a while Allen Klein had appeared, but John and Yoko had taken over Ron Kass’s office to do Bag Productions and it was still possible to do a lot of alternative things if one could get John’s monogram on a piece of paper. I was never shoving four figures to anyone, but I could raise about £150, which was quite a lot of money then. Anyone who asked for too much or asked in the wrong way or who just came to test our sincerity — they were definitely shown the door. GENE MAHON: Apple wasn’t profitable — even for me — but I had a lot of fun. Smoked a lot of dope, drank a bit of champagne. By the time they moved from Wigmore Street to Savile Row, I began to spend more and more time in the press room, in Derek’s office. I’d stroll round to see Derek, get ripped, then stroll back into the office. I might not get back to work till five in the afternoon. <…> DEREK TAYLOR: None of the Beatles is strictly conventional, but Paul became more conventional when he came down to looking on Apple as his house. If you look at MPL in Soho Square, that’s his idea of how an office should be. He and Linda have total control. I see very much now how Paul must have recoiled from an Apple he couldn’t control. Rich, talented people tend to be what is known in the world of Alcoholics Anonymous as ‘manipulators and controllers’. Because that’s what they get used to being able to do. Paul couldn’t believe that this outfit that he’d been so keen on had turned out to be so out of control. It wasn’t just a case now of him and Miles and Steve Abrams and all that kind of stuff. It was Taylor’s friends from Fleet Street getting pissed as arseholes. ‘This is not what I had in mind at all. And who is he? I know he’s our friend, but he’s not one of the fucking Beatles and it’s our Apple, or at least it was.’ All too much for him, I can see now. He was a young man and I was ten years older than him and not as easily manipulated and controlled as perhaps I should have been since they were paying my salary. I was becoming autonomous; I was manipulating and enjoying myself. I was doing those things that I ought to have done and doing some of those things which I ought not to have done. And by 1969 it was real madness. We didn’t know where we were.

PAUL MCCARTNEY: We weren’t disenchanted after setting up Apple but there was more required than we could bring to it. The theory was what we could bring to it the music, the vibes, if you want to call it that, or ‘goodwill’ as it would be known in business — it’s worth an awful lot of money; if you look at Beatle contracts ‘goodwill’ is worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. We could bring all that to it and on that side the company was quite successful. What happened was that it couldn’t exist on that alone. It needed business expertise. Our idea was to create an alternative: by our goodwill we would be saying to people like Donovan, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, ‘Look, we’ve got this really great little company, you won’t be hassled by any of these business heads who are always hassling you … all you need to do is just flourish in this garden that we’re going to provide for you, and we, as artists ourselves, will sympathise with what you’re going through. We will provide these things and then the businessmen will merely structure it all for us and will make sure that we don’t overspend or we don’t do this when things are looking dodgy.’ But they actually didn’t do that. We wanted to work very hard but we wanted it enjoyable: this was how we worked and we felt sorry for all the plebs who didn’t have that luxury and we wanted to bring that to everyone and I still think it’s a major, great idea. Why Apple failed was that it wasn’t set up well enough on a business level. So we just had pleasure with pleasure. We had Number One hits, we had everything a company needs to be a successful company, but also we had this sort of riot in the press room, which Derek was in charge of. And there were other things in there, some of John and Yoko’s stuff, quite a good artistic thing. But unfortunately the business people weren’t us, or even of our generation — they were suits. It was the first time I’d seen ‘SA’ on companies — I used to think it was ‘South Africa’. It implied Switzerland, it implied dodgy deals to me. Suddenly it was Apple SA. What happened was that we gave over the business side, to be relieved, we hoped, by great business people, but in actual fact — probably our fault — we didn’t staff it with really great business people. Hell, if they’d been really great they might have run off with the whole shebang — who knows? I don’t.

DEREK TAYLOR: I was very unhappy at Apple some nights. It was all too much and you could get so tired by. the end of the day. Sometimes on the train home to Sunningdale I’d think, ‘Jesus, has it been a terrible day.’ Someone kicking up a rumpus, a terrible phone call from Paul: ‘You know that none of you people are any good — if you amounted to a hill of beans you’d be somewhere else doing a proper job .. .’ That sort of stuff. It came very hard. <...> I think it was Paul came and asked, ‘What are you doing with all this money?’ But we weren’t spending anything like the amounts that were going out on the Ron Kass/Allen Klein end of things which involved enormous amounts of international travel and hotels. What we were spending in the press office was pennies compared to that sort of thing. But Paul objected to the sloppiness of the way we ran the operation. As a press office it certainly left a lot to be desired. The pity of it was that it would have run better if I’d been more sober. Less marijuana, less alcohol. It would have been much less fun but more coherent. That’s never mentioned in the dismissive reports you read about Apple: that the Apple press officer, in addition to everything else, was a practising alcoholic. VIRGINIA CLIVE-SMITH: One day in the summer of ’69 I walked into Apple in my patchwork dress and Derek Taylor said he would pay me £25 a day just to sit at his feet. Which I found delicious, though I didn’t do it. I did spend a lot of time round Apple doing things like write on large pieces of white paper ‘Who Killed Hanratty?’ which were then pinned to Lennon’s Rolls-Royce. DEREK TAYLOR: Apple was like Toytown and Paul was Ernest the Policeman. We couldn’t have gone on and on like that. We had to have a demon king. Whe was Klein. And we had to have a mad inventor, and that was Alex Mardas. But there were so many people. There was Neil [Aspinall] who was the keeper of the conscience, the keeper of the files, the man who had some sort of hand on the Beatles. You had Peter Brown running his own adventure. He was their personal assistant. Peter would lunch, it was a feature of Apple. There’d be some MP and you’d have Hardy Amies coming in, perhaps, and Andy Williams — ‘Perhaps George may come in today, Andy, who knows. Keep a place for George …’ So we’d all sit down and have lunch and champagne and then in the afternoon Lauren Bacall would appear by the request of Lord Bernstein on the off-chance that she might meet all four, but with a promise of Ringo. So there was this other level of society, and sometimes one of my friends who had drunk too much would find his way down to that floor downstairs, or Dominic Behan or a Hell’s Angel, and there’d be this culture collision. . .

(Days in the Life by Jonathon Green, 1998)

ANDREW BAILEY: The Speakeasy, a dreadful place! It was this cellar off Margaret Street, a roadies’ heaven. <…>

JO CRUIKSHANK: I was going to the Speakeasy.<…>When you’re young and vivacious and you don’t get pissed, clubs absoiutely adore to have you. You’re just a sparkly young thing, you’re not a tart — so they give you free memberships. The Speakeasy gave me a free membership. I used to go three or four times a week. I’d sit and drink and not drink very much but I’d want another, which I couldn’t afford, and they’d say, ‘It’s all right, darling, we'll put it on Brian’s bill.’

So Brian [Jones] would come in, holding hands with Anita Pallenberg, and didn’t know that in fact he was standing drinks for half the Speakeasy. There was always someone footing the bill without knowing it. Keith Richard was another. Jimi Hendrix used to come. I was sitting at a table one night, I’d been off to have a little dance and I came back and Jimi Hendrix was sitting there and I walked up and said, ‘Sorry, this is my a table,’ and he was so polite and apologetic — ‘Have I taken your seat, here have it back’ — and I thought ‘My goodness!’ and I became a complete Hendrix fan after that.

The Speak certainly wasn’t a hippie club, it was medallion man club — record producers and things. All the people you’d see parading on the King’s Road on a Saturday you’d quite likely see at the Speak on a weekday night. No one ever went on a Saturday, of course — that was strictly for the plebs. Tuesday or Wednesday was when you went, showing how you didn’t have to get up next morning.