The Magic Years: Scenes From a Rock-And-Roll Life by Jonathan Taplin

Author:Jonathan Taplin [Taplin, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, music, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781597145251
Google: gHaKzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Heyday
Published: 2021-11-15T23:43:09.938775+00:00

10. The Concert for Bangladesh

1971

Although the Beatles’ last live performance was in August of 1966, the pressure had never ceased for them to perform live again. George Harrison had described to me the touring scene in 1966 as a nightmare in which you were trapped for hours on end in a hotel only to be brought to some vast stadium in an armored van. Once you got up onstage the screams from the crowd were so loud that you couldn’t hear yourself play and weren’t even sure your voice was on key.

In late 1968, John Lennon had hired an inventor who went by the name of “Magic Alex.” His first job was to build a new sound studio in the basement of the Apple headquarters on Savile Row in London. Fueled with Beatles millions, Alex dreamed big and eventually came to the band with his solution for the live-appearance problem. Alex would build twenty stage sets of drums and amplifiers that would be 15 percent larger than normal. The Beatles would rent twenty stadiums and Alex would project holograms of the band (blown up by 15 percent) onto the stage sets and the Beatles would play twenty simultaneous live shows without ever leaving the comfort of their London studio.

Unfortunately, like the model of Stonehenge in This Is Spinal Tap, the vision failed, as Magic Alex was never able to project a holographic Beatle taller than six inches. Needless to say, this crackpot idea never progressed further than the first demonstration with Peter Brown, the manager of Apple, and so it was decided to do a film on a soundstage instead. The plan was to film the recording of the new album, Let It Be, and release the film simultaneously around the world. But unlike our magic night in the manor on the Isle of Wight, the musicians weren’t gelling, and the presence of the cameras just brought out all of the simmering tensions between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. John, with Yoko in tow, and Paul, with Linda hovering just offstage, were at each other’s throats. As Paul’s music got more sentimental, John’s got harder and more political. For George Harrison, it was an opportunity to step away for a while. He had for the last five albums been given his allocation of one or two cuts, while John and Paul wrote most of the tunes. He felt he could do more on his own and still stay a member of the band, and so he began spending time away from London.

In the late fall of 1970 he called and asked if he could stay at my house in Woodstock for a couple of days. He visited with Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson, but the mood was kind of blue and he soon returned to New York City to keep recording. We were all in a kind of quiet wake for Janis Joplin, who had died in a motel in L.A. a month before. For Albert Grossman, it was an especially bitter blow.

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