2 days until the start of the Get Back sessions
The New Year’s Eve party itself was fun. Pattie Boyd described the regular parties at Cilla Black’s Portland Place flat in Marylebone as “fantastic,” and that would imply her 1968 New Year’s Eve party was, too.
After midnight, as 1968 became 1969, and back at her home with George Harrison in Esher – that’s when things cracked.
Pattie and George at home, earlier in 1968.
From Pattie’s 2007 autobiography Wonderful Tonight:
We arrived home in good spirits but then everything went swiftly downhill. The French girl didn’t seem remotely upset about Eric and was uncomfortably close to George. Something was going on between them, and I questioned George. He told me my imagination was running away with me, I was paranoid.
The French girl was 20-year-old model Charlotte Martin – she and Pattie were actually friends, but over time, she was demoted to being described as simply “the French girl.” Eric, meanwhile, was Eric Clapton, who dated Charlotte for several years. If you’re looking for another wrinkle to the George-Pattie-Eric bizarre love triangle, you’re in luck.
Charlotte Martin sits over John’s right shoulder during the filming of the “All You Need Is Love” live broadcast in July 1967.
Eric left Charlotte at some point in late 1968, and she ended up briefly moving in with the Harrisons.
“She was always flirtatious with George, but so were a lot of girls and he, of course, loved it,” Pattie wrote.
“I pulled [Eric’s] chick once,” George said in a 1977 interview with Crawdaddy.
We’ll get back to the Charlotte-George-Pattie story again after the Get Back sessions are underway.
Peter Brown wrote in his 1983 memoir The Love You Make that Pattie spent midnight locked in the bathroom crying, but I’ll figure Pattie remembers her night better than the Apple exec. The story sounds feasible, though, with everything having gone “swiftly downhill.”
Cynthia Lennon had already moved from her troubled marriage, divorcing John in November 1968. In a story published in several British newspapers on December 31, 1968, Cynthia opened up on her time with her ex.
It is a period of the past. At first it was very beautiful, then terrible. But enough. I am 26 years old: I feel young. I want a life all my own, like every normal person in this world.
Cynthia was speaking from Sestriera, Italy, where she was vacationing with boyfriend Roberto Bassanini, who said he planned to open a discotheque in London in the new year.
John is reported to have spent New Year’s Eve in a couple places, and that’s certainly reasonable.
Lennonology places John and Yoko at the Arts Lab for a gathering, while Albert Goldman’s Lives of John Lennon – yes, I know – says the same and pushes the party to a second location.
After starting off at the Lab, the party had wound up at [promoter Michael] Boyer’s home in Islington, where Lennon turned to the promoter, whom he barely knew, and told him with tears in his eyes that he was the only person he had met in years who wanted nothing from his friendship.
Or, maybe we don’t completely believe multiple second-hand accounts describing people weeping this New Year’s Eve, and instead consider that John took in a rock show.
According to the January 11, 1969, DISC and Music Echo, John was an “interested spectator at London’s Alexandra Palace New Year’s Eve party.” That would place him at a concert that featured Joe Cocker, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and the Small Faces among several others on the bill. (The Iveys — Badfinger before the name change — were also slated to perform, but multiple accounts say they didn’t play because the show ran too late.)
The Small Faces’ set was particularly notable for what happened on stage and then off it. Following a period of breakup rumors and “infuriated at the inability to reproduce a stage sound equivalent to their studio work,” Steve Marriott dropped his guitar mid-performance and yelled “I quit” as he stormed off stage.
Marriott’s next move is why this story comes up at all here. Enter Peter Frampton … and a notable producer.
Here’s Frampton, from the 2002 Gallagher, Marriott, Derringer & Trower: Their Lives and Music:
“I was at Glyn Johns’. He’d said … ‘I want to play you this record that I just finished recording and mixing. It’s a new band that we started and finished recording in ten days.’ He put it on and I said, ‘Who is this?’ And he said, ‘Led Zeppelin.’ This was a momentous occasion all ‘round.”
Marriot called that night/early morning, after Frampton listened to Side 1 of the Zeppelin debut, telling him he was leaving the Small Faces. The outcome of the phone call was Marriott and Frampton forming Humble Pie, who would later be produced by Glyn.
But first, little more than 24 hours later in the opening days of 1969, Glyn would get to work with a much more established band at Twickenham Film Studios.
***
Judy Sims, “Our Girl in Hollywood” who reports the U.S. scene in the DISC and Music Echo, wrapped up the old year in the January 4, 1969, issue of the paper and certainly spoke for many:
And that was 1968, folks. A good year and a bad one, but I remember the good parts because I can never relate to bad parts for more than a day or so.
The Beatles made 1968 brighter, just as they did with 1967, 1966, 1965 and 1964. Thank God for them and the double album and Yellow Submarine and Magical Mystery Tour and for everything they do — because everything they do makes me happy, “and you know that can’t be bad.”
They May Be Parted 
