There was, however, one serious doubter from the earliest beginnings in Wigmore Street: George. I met him in the reception area on his return from Rishikesh; we couldn’t talk in my office because it was already full of artefacts and people. Watched by the first of a number of beautiful receptionists, George and I talked quietly about the increasing number of poets, preachers, pirates, mendicants, sculptors, teen-agers, oldagers, middle-management schweinhunde, fixers, entrepreneurs, money-men, carpet-baggers, disc jockeys, transsexuals, travel agents, idlers, sidlers, time-and-motion men, models, molesters, inventors of gadgets and stories, singers, song-writers, serpents, Wasps, Jews, Catholics and Hare Krishnas slithering through the keyholes, along the window-sills, into our desks, our pockets and the canyons of our silk-lined minds. George said, in the simplest of statements: ‘I hate it.’ Enormously discouraged, indeed crushed, I rejoined with a feeble: ‘Oh, dear. I hoped you wouldn't notice.’
‘Notice?’ he said. ‘It’s everywhere. Is all this ours?’ and he pointed at the hurrying, scurrying feet, retreating backs, watching eyes, out-stretched hands. ‘Yours and theirs and ours,’ I said, spreading the load of responsibility. What made it worse, for George, was that many of the people who were at the gates appeared to be ‘George People’: individuals with a religious or Indian hook to their needs or offerings (for many who came to Apple came to give rather than to receive). He said in I Me Mine: ‘I knew at the beginning in Wigmore Street, before Savile Row and all that madness, I knew after coming back from the Maharishi’s... that though we had all been plugging into the peace, things were splitting and racing off down a blind back alley. Again, other people’s trips. If everyone had “got it” in Rishikesh, they would have been meditating more and not getting into so many of the distractions. Or, if we had to get involved more with outside matters, meditation would have helped handle it. Then Apple might have turned into all the things it could and should have been. Instead, we all went crazy.’
Although Paul was the first to become disillusioned, John left in the mood of ‘OK, well, we tried, we surrendered to God but it wasn’t God, it was Maharishi and this God thing is proving itself to be a total fallacy’ - and then went back to being The Beatles.
I left Rishikesh with John. Alex had been the naughty boy who’d stirred everything up. John was in a rage because God had forsaken him (although it was nothing to do with God, really). Then he went and completely reversed himself. He turned from being positive to being totally negative.
I went to South India and got dysentery and everything that happened to me went wrong to the point that I felt, like John and Alex, that the Maharishi had put the heeby-jeebies on me. Then in South India they brought a priest from the mountains to me; he set fire to all the coconuts, did this big puja thing on me, gave me mantras to say, things to drink and ointments to rub on, so that by the time I got back to England I was no longer in the same frame of mind as John. But everyone else had been back far ahead of me and had already set up Apple and had it rolling.
It was the depression which John experienced that helped cause the snowballing invitations of all come round, jugglers, muddlers, acrobats, Tarot cards, etc., which turned into the horror show of all time.
So although I got over my depression in South India, the feeling that I had originally (which got me there in the first place) soon returned and I became very depressed after seeing that everything was all screwed up at Apple.
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