So little time, so much to know

Paul McCartney & Mal Evans at the Baltimore Civic Center in Baltimore, MD | 13 September 1964 © Curt Gunther

With Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas sharing the bill with the Beatles in Bournemouth, Derek Hughes was on hand to see Mal save the day after John's cleverness nearly got the better of him. As it happened, the band's quarters in the seaside down were in the Palace Court Hotel, which, fortunately for the Beatles, was part of the same city block as the Gaumont Cinema. To reach the venue while avoiding fans, they need only climb the hotel's fire escape, walk across the roof, and then take another fire escape down into the Gaumont. "John got a bit fed up with doing this," Hughes recalled, "so he decides he's gonna get a disguise and go out through the front of the hotel and walk to the theater. He managed to get as far as the door to the Gaumont when somebody spotted him." To Hughes's amazement, "Mal just picked John up, threw him over his shoulder, and made a quick dash for the back of the stage. It was quite comical."

Mal Evans & Paul McCartney at Logan International Airport in Boston, MA | 19 August 1966 © Kevin Cole

Harry Nilsson with May Pang & John Lennon, Linda & Paul McCartney at 625 Palisades Beach Road in Santa Monica, CA | 29 March 1974 © Mal Evans

For Mal, the sunny afternoon of March 29 would bring pure magic in contrast with the previous evening’s lackluster proceedings. The McCartney clan showed up [at the Santa Monica beach house] out of the blue, this time with daughters Heather, Mary, and Stella in tow, and Mal was thrilled at the prospect of seeing John and Paul together again—twice in the span of two days, no less. And he was by no means disappointed, observing the two old friends reclining on the patio together and, later, walking along the beach, with May, Linda, and the McCartney brood trailing along behind them. “Nice to see him and John together,” Mal scribbled in his diary later that month.

The very reason Alf had been offered the job in the first place had been because of an appalling breach of loyalty by his predecessor. The previous driver had dropped the band off at Heathrow Airport, where they flew off for a tour of the States. He then drove into London's Fleet Street, parked the limousine and headed up to a Sunday newspaper, where he sold his story for a hefty sum. Not surprisingly he was given his marching orders and the Beatles' suspicion of newcomers was intensified.

The chauffeur noticed in the rear-view mirror that Lennon was watching him intently. Without warning, he leapt into action. He jumped forward, grabbed Alf's uniform cap, and tossed it through the window. The startled driver watched helplessly as the hat flew, frisbee-style, across the road. Speechless, Alf wondered if he had done something wrong and this de-capping signified the end of the road with the group. But he needn't have worried. John beamed. “Don't worry, Alf. You don't need that any more. You're one of us now!” “For him to say that meant a lot to me," recalled Alf. “I was very emotional - but I daren't have showed it. They'd immediately have taken the Mickey.”

The backing track to [“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”] was quite simple: Paul on bass, Ringo on drums, and John doing a guide vocal, with George Martin enlisted to play harmonium. It did take quite a few tries to nail it down, though, which caused problems for George, because the harmonium required pedaling to get air through its bellows, kind of like riding a bicycle. After playing it nonstop for hours on end, he finally collapsed in exhaustion, sprawled out on the floor like a snow angel—a sight that gave us all great amusement.

“John had a vision of this thing...it was very technicolor and we’ve got to capture that, George Martin, this is your job! You know, what do we do? And George had a bit of a think about it and we did the basic backing track, we had Ringo, George Martin played harmonium—it went on sort of forever. And the harmonium, for those people who don’t know what it is, it’s actually a pipe organ, and you have two pedals that you have to keep going, so you’re pedaling this thing like a bicycle with your feet to get any sound—otherwise nothing comes out, so that pushes the bellows. “So George Martin was playing that, and he got so—this was like two in the morning or something, and he was—I can just see him lying on the floor with his—flat—he was just so knackered! And then we ended up with Mal, the roadie, [who] was sort of lying on the floor facedown, pushing these pedals with his hands. George was sitting at the piano, at the keyboard, and Mal was sort of underneath his legs just pushing these pedals.”

John Lennon & Paul McCartney backstage at the ABC Theatre in Blackpool, England | 1 August 1965 © Leslie Bryce