Barry Miles, Ornette Coleman, Indica Books, and Paul McCartney: The Story of 'Free,' an Imaginary Album with Beethoven and the Beatles
In 1966, Beatle Paul McCartney was very active in London's avant-garde scene. Among the people in his small and exclusive circle was Barry Miles, a young writer and intellectual, founder of Indica Books, a shop specializing in art publications and rare books. In the basement, the Indica Gallery—co-owned by artist John Dunbar and musician Peter Asher—was a space for contemporary art, famous for being where John Lennon met Yoko Ono.
Born in Cirencester in 1943, Miles grew up in an intellectual environment and, in his youth, worked with Tony Godwin, a prestigious bookseller who introduced him to the works of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. In the summer of 1965, he organized the International Poetry Incarnation, a major poetry event at the Royal Albert Hall in London, featuring figures such as William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Ernst Jandl, Michael Jorovitz, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg, among many other writers, poets, and artists.
In the spring of 1967, he organized, along with John Hopkins and Dave Howson, another seminal event: 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, a psychedelic concert featuring music, lights, and LSD experimentation, with performances by Syd Barrett’s original Pink Floyd, Arthur Brown, Soft Machine, Tomorrow, The Pretty Things, Denny Laine, and Yoko Ono. John Lennon was in the audience, and Peter Whitehead documented the happening in the film Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. The concert served to raise funds for the publication of the magazine International Times, also founded by Miles.
In addition to introducing Paul McCartney to his first hashish cakes, Barry Miles recounts in his book The Zapple Diaries: The Rise and Fall of the Last Beatles Label (Abrams Books) a story about McCartney and an idea that came to the Beatle after listening to Free Jazz, the album by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet:
"It was this album that inspired Paul to suggest that if you were in complete control of your consciousness you would be able to differentiate between audio sounds so completely that you could release a record with Beethoven on the left stereo and the Beatles on the right, playing simultaneously".
Miles quotes McCartney:
"I remember one of our ideas was to master two records on to a thing and all you would do in the future was, you'd just switch out one of them with your brain. You'd say, 'I'm not listening to the Beethoven, I'm listening to the Beatles', but they would be both going on. So this was... cheap, cheerful, good value for money. You had to be able to switch one of them out".
It was an extravagant idea. However, had it come to fruition, it would have been released by Zapple Records. Zapple was a subsidiary label of Apple, founded in 1969 to accommodate experimental and spoken-word albums. Only two records were pressed and released: Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Electronic Sound by George Harrison. A series of recordings featuring recitations and readings by Richard Brautigan, Charles Olson, Charles Bukowski, and Allen Ginsberg were planned and developed but never saw the light of day under the label; some—like Brautigan’s Listening to Richard Brautigan—were released on other labels.
In an alternate world, Zapple could have been a vital project at the forefront of sound and literary innovation. However, with Allen Klein's arrival as the Beatles' manager, Apple became more corporate and less adventurous. While this was an understandable organizational and economic decision, it deprived us, as enthusiasts and spectators, of historical eccentricities and fringe sonic and vocal experiments. Who knows.
McCartney's idea of a sonic fusion between the Beatles and Beethoven—doesn't it sound just as megalomaniacal and blasphemous as Lennon’s statement about Jesus?—never came to fruition. However, a couple of years ago, the experimental music entity Elektroshokk’d proposed a showcase of how it might have been.
Using a version of Herbert von Karajan's second movement from Beethoven's 9th Symphony in the left channel and four songs from the Beatles' self-titled album—commonly known as "the White Album"—in the right one, Free (a reference to Coleman's album that inspired the concept) is a recording from an alternate universe for enthusiasts and scholars of the Beatles, the counterculture, the 1960s, and the avant-garde.
It is recommended to listen with headphones.
The 1960s feel increasingly distant, yet the vitality of that era, expressed through a fierce creativity that took pop 'seriously' for the first time, still resonates today. The advantages of having archival recordings, audiovisual repositories, and text collections, along with the constant reissues and reevaluations of catalog material—especially in music and film—allow us to continue enjoying and studying a time that still has much to reveal.
C/S.