December 13, 1968: Countdown to the Get Back sessions

20 days until the start of the Get Back sessions

Don’t say George Harrison didn’t warn everyone.

I won’t give away the ending to the story of the Hell’s Angels’ 1968 trip to Apple headquarters — you’ll see it at the end of the month — but if you’re reading this, you probably know it already.

The public never would have known at the time, but on December 4, 1968, George fired off a memo to “Everybody at Apple”:

Hells Angels will be in London within the next week, on the way to straighten out Czechoslovakia. There will be twelve in number complete with black leather jackets and motor cycles. They will undoubtedly arrive at Apple and I have heard they may try to make full use of Apple’s facilities. They may look as though they are going to do you in but are very straight and do good things, so don’t fear them or up-tight them. Try to assist them without neglecting your Apple business and without letting them take control of Savile Row.

A little more than a week later, it was the public’s turn to find out what exactly was going on. Ray Connolly, who so often covered the Beatles beat, shared the news in the December 13, 1968, Evening Standard under the simple headline, “Hell’s angels.”

Hells Angels, the Californian drop-out society of motor-cyclists, are hoping to extend their activities to Britain.

Two members of the Hells Angels are in London at the moment and have been given an office by the Beatles’ company, Apple. With them are several aspirant Angels and an underground pop group called the Grateful Dead.

To clarify, the Dead were actually in California at the time, but band manager Rock Scully was part of the “California Pleasure Crew” joining the Hell’s Angels in London.

In his 1995 memoir Living With the Dead – written with David Dalton, who co-authored the original Get Back book packaged with Let It Be in 1970 — Scully recounted George’s original invitation to the Hell’s Angels, which happened during the Beatle’s visit to San Francisco in 1967.

On Divisidero he runs into a couple of Hell’s Angels, Tumbleweed and Pete. Wow! Real sweaty, hairy, savage Hell’s Angels. The terror of the West. He’s impressed, all right. They’re impressed, too.

“Fuckin’ George Harrison, man!” In the heat of the moment George invites them to come and stay with him “whenever you’re in London, man.” You know, at George’s house! Now in England, this sort of invitation is taken for what it is: perfunctory politeness. Besides, he must have thought, when are two Hell’s Angels ever going to show up at Savile Row? But this is California, baby! The West—where a man’s word is a man’s word….

“Well, Jesus, George, that’s real decent of you. Real decent. We’ve been planning a trip to check out swingin’ London, haven’t we, Pete?” Pete is equally enthusiastic.

“Fuck, yeah! Hell, we’ll just bring the Harleys, it’ll be a hell of a time.” Whereupon George proceeds to hand them… his card. A bit formal, methinks, but the boys fall on it as if it were a fresh kilo of dope. They hand it around—to sniff, I presume—but on closer examination it turns out to be an Apple Records card. Oh well, he’s not actually going to give them his telephone number at Strawberry fucking Fields, now is he? I mean what if these guys actually do show up?

In time, the guys showed up, bankrolled by the Grateful Dead via Bill Graham.

After arriving and sticking Apple with the air cargo cost of their motorcycles, the Hell’s Angels arrived at 3 Savile Row the next day.

“House hippie” Richard DiLello’s account in 1972’s The Longest Cocktail Party probably stands as the definitive account of this era. The book is a breezy, must-read, so do so if you haven’t already. Here’s how he described the Hell’s Angels’ arrival:

In actual fact, the anticipated, 12-strong army of leather and chains that was on its way to Czechoslovakia to straighten out the explosive and highly degenerate political situation had somehow been watered down to two genuine, dyed-in-the-Levis Hell’s Angels and 16 California freaks: zonked, wired, and suffering from massive time displacement and cultural shock. The two Hell’s Angels were Billy Tumbleweed and Frisco Pete of the San Francisco chapter of the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, California, USA.

Apple office secretary Chris O’Dell dedicated a short chapter of her 2009 autobiography Miss O’Dell to the Hell’s Angels visit. Like any good host, the first thing Apple supplied was beer, and figurative keys to the building. From Miss O’Dell:

Sufficiently juiced, the Angels started casing the joint, peeking behind doors, opening closets, running up and down the stairs, playing with the elevator, and before long they found their way up to my office on the fifth floor.

So why did the Hell’s Angels really come to London? It depends on when you asked. Per Ray Connolly’s December 13 report, Frisco Pete (Pete Knell) said the plan was to “arrange a party or a dance here for about 50 to 100 of our members.”

In the January 4, 1969, issue of DISC and Music Echo, however – and by this point they had been thrown out of Apple — an unnamed Angel sounded a more ominous tone.

“They were, they said, worried about the power the Beatles had and exactly how they are going to use their influence over the world,” according to the story.

But here on our timeline, it’s only December 13. We’ll hear more from the Hell’s Angels again before the end of the month.

(It’s worth marking that at the exact same time all of this was happening at Apple, three chapters of the Redditch Hell’s Angels lived in the basement at Rutle Corps.)

The Hell’s Angels weren’t quite to Czechoslovakia yet, but Paul McCartney’s Continental adventure continued. At this point, we know some of what he did on his Portuguese holiday, but we don’t necessarily know when.

Paul’s brother Mike (aka Mike McGear of the Scaffold) and wife, Angela, were expecting their first child imminently back in England. Paul picked up some practice on how to be Fun Uncle with Hunter Davies’ kids, doing things like letting 4 ½-year-old Caitlin sit on the Beatle’s knee and steer the car, according to the writer’s memoir “The Beatles, Football and Me.”

“He would also let Jake play with a kitchen knife,” Davies wrote, “refusing to take it off him, saying he would learn it was sharp when he cut himself.”

That’s just the sort of Beatle behavior the headmaster of Clark’s Grammar School in Guildford was afraid of, as published in the December 13 issue of the Surrey Advertiser. Col. A. C. M. Rowlands was up to here with the Fab Four, and let the parents at the school know about it at the annual speech day.

Here’s what the headmaster had to say, under the headline “Homework more important than the Beatles”:

“One understands the attraction to the young of the Beatles and other so-called pop groups when their performance comes just at the time your sons and daughters should be doing their biology or mathematics homework.

“But in these two particular contexts you can, instead, guide your child’s mind along the channels that firstly, a beatle, in biological language, is really a Coleoptera — it’s only similarity to the aforementioned individuals perhaps being that it also is regarded by some as a pest.

“And that, secondly, as far as mathematics is concerned, the Beatles’ theories on ‘All our loving’ are of far less importance than Pythagoras’s theory of “The Square on the Hypotenuse” — even if, in giving this parental guidance, you risk being regarded temporarily as the very personification of that square.”

In other schools, though, the Beatles could still be role models.