Within and Without The Beatles

Peter Doggett had the very good idea of writing an account of the disintegration of The Beatles, starting with the disastrous creation of Apple records (as if their business affairs weren't already in a disastrous state). My two favourite grisly moments from You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of The Beatles (and there are a great many to choose from):

1) When not being a mystic, unconcerned with worldly matters, Harrison was a compulsive seducer. But couldn't he have stayed away from women married to members of The Beatles?

'[Patty] Boyd tried to warn Starkey, who didn't believe her until - as she wrote later - "George, in front of everyone, proceeded to tell Ringo that he was in love with his wife. [He meant Ringo's wife.] Ringo worked himself up into a terrible state and went about saying, 'Nothing is real, nothing is real'" When the affair ended, the Starkeys' marriage soon collapsed. Maureen Starkey was so upset that she deliberately drove her motorcycle into a brick wall, causing such extensive facial injuries that she had to undergo plastic surgery.'

There is something rather impressive in Ringo reacting to his wife's affair with one Beatle by quoting from a song written by another one.

2) Unbelievably, in the middle of the escalating acrimony, three of The Beatles went into the studio. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were kept away by a car crash. Then Lennon appeared. For a moment it seemed like he might be alone, but then...

'...Yoko Ono hobbled into the studio, followed by four porters from Harrods department store, wheeling in a bed. Ono was still suffering severe whiplash after the car crash in Scotland, but Lennon insisted that she should attend the sessions. "Jaws dropping, we all watched as it was brought into the studio and carefully positioned by the stairs," engineer Geoff Emerick recalled. "More [porters] appeared with sheets and pillows and sombrely made the bed up. Then, without saying a word, Yoko climbed in, carefully arranging the covers around her." And there she remained for the next few days, as if she was staging some magnificently comic piece of performance art, a third bed-in, perhaps for the benefit of a very carefully selected audience. As McCartney noted, it was "not the ideal way for making records."'

But he was wrong. It was the perfect way for making records. It produced Abbey Road.