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Today Paul — accompanied by Apple executive Ron Kass, Beatle aide-de-camp Tony Bramwell, and Ivan Vaughn, the friend who’d first introduced Paul to John Lennon — arrived in Los Angeles, ostensibly for a business trip. The business part, which involved an appearance at the Capitol Convention, might have taken a few hours; the rest of the time was spent in leisure activities such as:
- Floating in the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel:
- Shopping on the Sunset Strip. Says Tony Bramwell:
Paul and I bought Nehru jackets. Paul’s was red velvet and mine was white silk. We also bought several pairs of exotic sunglasses with pink lenses at a psychedelic optique, which we clowned around in. One pair would have done, but we couldn’t make up our minds which we liked and in the end Paul said, “To hell with it. Let’s have ’em all.” Once again, as we signed the outrageous bill, we found it wildly funny and ran into the street, laughing like people who had done a runner from the Chinese restaurant without paying.
- Hitting the nightclubs, where they ran into Sammy Davis Jr. (coincidentally the subject of a fantastic episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History that I listened to earlier today).
- In Paul’s case, “ping-ponging between rooms while servicing two young women.”1
While Paul was cavorting, John and George were slaving away in the hot recording studio, putting the finishing touches on “Revolution”s 1 and 9. Brass overdubs and a distorted guitar part played by George were added to the former; the latter was topped off with a chant of “Block that kick!” Both songs were then mixed, and according to engineer Ken Scott, an editing mistake led to a small but noticeable change in “Revolution 1”:
There’s a classic passage in one of the Revolutions, an extra beat in there that was an editing accident. The engineer cut one beat too early, but John heard it and loved it and it was kept.
Yoko was there too, of course. Yoko was always there. At this point, it seems like she and George could coexist; I’m not sure what went wrong in their relationship. Let’s keep an eye out.