Latest / Booked On Rock with Eric Senich / The Untold Story Of Beatles' Roadie Mal Evans with Author Ken Womack [Episode 170]

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The Untold Story Of Beatles' Roadie Mal Evans with Author Ken Womack [Episode 170] · Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

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What's interesting about that moment is I don't even know that mal could see a
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glint of what the future looked like, because all of it was there,
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but the one area that he neglected for so long, that was the biggest
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chasm of grief for him, his family back in London. That was the
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part that was his undoing. We're totally booming rock and roll. I mean,
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I'll leave you. You're reading Little Hans says it's time to rock and
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roll up. Are totally booked. Welcome to book don Rock the podcast for
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those about to read and rock online. It booked on rock dot com,
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where you can find every episode along with links to listening platforms, exclusive videos,
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blogs, and the latest rockbook releases. Ken Woolmack's returning guests on the
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podcast. He and author Jason Kruper appeared a few years back to talk about
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their book All Things Must Pass Away, Harrison Clapton and other assorted love songs.
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Today, Ken is here to talk about his latest book titled Living the
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Beatles Legend, The Untold Story of Mal Evans. This is the first full
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length biography of Mal Evans, the Beatles' beloved friend, confidante and roady a
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towering figure in horn rimmed glasses, Evans loomed large in the Beatles' story,
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contributing at times as a performer and sometimes lyricist, while struggling mightily to protect
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his beloved boys. He was there for the whole of the group's remarkable,
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unparalleled story, leaving a stable job as a telecommunications engineer to serve as road
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manager for this fledgling band. Mal was the odd man out from the start,
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older, married with children, and without any music business experience, and
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yet he threw himself headlong into their world, traveling across the globe and making
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himself indispensable. Wollmack is here to talk about Male's time with the Beatles,
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what he did after the breakup of the band, and his mysterious death in
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January of nineteen seventy six. Ken Willmack, Welcome to the podcast. How
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are you. Oh, very thrilled to be back with you. Thanks so
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much. Yeah, I should say welcome back because I did have you on
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for your book on George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Excellent, excellent book.
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And here we go with another one. The story of Mal Evans. His
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life is fascinating enough, but to read from mal'son Gary. How this book
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came to be is a fascinating story all on its own. He explains in
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the forward how this project eventually found its way to you. It all starts
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with Mal. He's writing his memoir in seventy five, but then his untimely
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death and his material ends up in the basement of a building in New York
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not too far from here. Actually visited it recently. Yeah, so it
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was never one of my ambitions to write about Mal. I thought he was
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interesting. I had noticed, like I think everybody who is into this band,
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you can't help but noticing this this fellow in the background photo bombing them
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all the time, right, So I had that kind of natural interest in
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him. And again, anyone who thinks about the Beatles can't help thinking about
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the fact that Entourage was two guys essentially, which is crazy considering today's standards.
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But Gary contacted me through a mutual friend, Simon Weitzman in twenty twenty,
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actually around the beginning of COVID, and said, would you like to
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tell my dad's story? And I mean, I knew I would help Gary
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out. He's just a sweet guy. I think he's probably a lot like
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Mal. In fact, half the time I accidentally call him Mal. I
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knew I would write the book, you know, just to really to work
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with Gary. Just a wonderful man. And it was at that point that
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I said, you know, is there really all this stuff? And Gary
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said, yeah, do you want to see it? And of course the
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answer was yes, and he began sending it out here to New Jersey and
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that really elevated the entire project. As for how mel Evans becomes part of
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the Beatles organization, it's a simple twist of fate. Lands himself behind the
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wheel of the band's van January of sixty three. Little did he know he's
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about to step into a very fast moving train. The Beatles are about to
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blow up. Can you talk about so what Mal was doing for work at
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that time and how does he end up the road manager for the Beatles.
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Really, he came to them as a fan. He loved their music.
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He wandered down those cavern steps sometime in late sixty one and was just enamored
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with them with their music. Was excited by the fact that they liked Elvis.
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He loved Elvis. That was a natural connection and he became friends with
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them long before he would work with them, and by the time he gets
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to January sixty three and things begin really moving for them, Mal really proves
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himself in that famous windscreen incident. But before that, he'd been a telecommunications
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engineer with the British Post Office with the GPO, and he'd been in training
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for some time with a kind of it's called the Youth and Training Program.
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It actually still exists, this program. Anyway, Mal had this kind of
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technical background. He was the first person in his family to own a car,
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to have a house pension, and they were all pretty blown away when
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Mal decided in August sixty three to throw it all over to be to go
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on the road with a pop band, you know, essentially, which you
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know, most folks figured would have had a shelf life of about eighteen months.
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He was a bouncer right at the Cavin Club. He was a bouncer,
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but he always admitted that if anybody ever had to, you know,
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mix it up and get into a fight, he would have been the first
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person to run away. He was the cowardly bouncer. But being a big
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guy, he kind of naturally fell into that role. But yeah, that
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was just his way of being around the bands. It was George Harrison's idea
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that Mal would be a bouncer and it would be just be a way to
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hang out more often and hang out with their friends. The guy that was
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supposed to drive the van that night he got sick. That was Neil aspinall
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of course, who had been with the Beatles at that point for a good
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almost two years as their driver and their roadie. Neil got the flu.
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It was during what they called the Big Freeze. It was such a calamitous
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storm that ice was crawling out into the English Channel for miles, you know.
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So it was a crazy, crazy weather event and they needed somebody to
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drive them down to London because Please Please Me was shooting up the charts.
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This was the big moment, you know, and they could all tell that
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something special was happening and they needed to consolidate it while it was right there
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in front of them. So Mal drove them down to London. It was
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on the way back when the windscreen shattered and the boys made a beetle sandwich
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in the back of the van while Mal was wearing a I think it was
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a paper bag that John Lennon had fashioned for him with eye holes as the
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snow and the wind or pummeling him in the cab. You know, it
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was just a really bonding moment for them. All along the way as they
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made their long trip back to London, they'd say how much further and he'd
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say two hundred miles to go? This kind of mantra that he would use
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his autobiography was going to call it two hundred miles to go anyway. You
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know, it was a big bonding moment for them, particularly for Ringo,
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right, who was pretty new to the band at that point. Was this
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mattered to him. For Neil and Brian Epstein, it was a big deal
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because when Mal brought the van back to the Cosbok Coffee Club where Neil was
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living at the time with Mona Best, he had gotten the windscreen fixed,
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and this really blew them away. They couldn't believe that he had gone to
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that kind of trouble, but he had that level of initiative and they really
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stored that piece of information away. As Neil said, ten out of ten
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for Mal for getting that done. That takes us to that Ed Sullivan performance
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February of sixty four. Countless times you hear the story from all these great
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classic rock artists. When did you become a musician or what inspired you?
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Beatles on Ed Sullivan, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. It's amazing tell the
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story about this performance, because there's some stories behind it that are so fascinating.
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Mel was in a panic over Ringo's drum kit the first time drumhead,
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yes, and well the second appearance too, the Beatles were nowhere to be
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found only moments before they were to hit the stage. Talk about the the
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Ed Sullivan appearances. Yeah, you know, when you look at those in
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retrospect, part of the problem was that they were a pretty well oiled machine.
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You know, they'd do these twenty five thirty minute shows, and being
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on TV in those situations were it was kind of an aberration, right.
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So yeah, the first one, Mel, he loses the drumhead and I
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think he's probably imagining Brian, who's going to kill him if that drumhead is
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not, you know not, there splayed out screaming the Beatles logo and image.
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And then the second time he just loses them. That was when they
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were at the Douville Hotel doing god knows what, lounging around with starlits probably,
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But yeah, those were crazy moments for Mal, and there were a
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number of them like that, where he was, you know, essentially the
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one conduit keeping things together so that all of these cultural epocal moments could take
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place. I think what's interesting too, is he seemed like a practical person
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and then he makes this decision, like you say, I think his family
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were surprised that he did this. Was he was he all along? Was
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he living a life that he wasn't necessarily happy with and the Beatles kind of
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took him into the dream life that he always had or was it just a
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split second decision that he made and he said, okay, well here we
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go. Oh no, he wanted it. He had dreams of stardom.
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He absolutely wanted to maybe even live on the wild Side as they did there
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for so many years. It's ironic, but the person who the only person
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in the family who really championed what Mal wanted to do was his wife,
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Lily. Everybody else, especially his parents, thought it was ridiculous. His
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sisters were aghasted. They were aghassed for much of their lives, actually,
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long after Mao was dead. In fact, it was his dad who said,
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you know, everything changed when he got involved with those four lads so
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well. As we read in the book too, Lily she was challenged.
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She had to be quite patient and that was difficult for her. Oh absolutely,
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And that's what I mean. It's ironic in the sense that she was
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kind of the only person who supported him in this kind of outlandish I mean,
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it's a ridiculous decision, right. I was talking with Mark Lewison when
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I was working on that part of the book, and he reminded me very
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shrewdly, right, that this was something that happened quite often. You know.
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Brian Epstein's family also thought, you're nuts. What are you doing messing
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around with the pop group? You know we are we're merchants, damaged,
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you know, we don't do this. Stu Sutcliffe's sister thought he was insane,
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you know, to borgo his art for a while while to think about
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these guys. And it makes perfect sense, right, because pop groups then
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and now, you know, it's like being an actor, right, how
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many actors actually make it a living? Yeah? Well, yeah, hindsight
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is twenty twenty. Yeah, we know the Beatles what they became. But
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if it didn't work out, you just left a solid job. You got
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a nice stable thing going here. Not only did not leave a solid job,
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it wasn't going to reopen for him. You know, he had signed
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the Secrets Act. He'd kind of learned that, maybe from his bosses when
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he was making this transition, that it was a good thing he was because
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maybe he wasn't working out that well in his role is telecommunications in the year,
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probably because he was spending so much damn time at the cavern on his
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lunch breaks. So it was fortuitous that something was coming up. But man,
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what a risk to take. He was about seven eight years older than
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the rest of the guys in the band, if I recall correctly, closer
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to five, you know, older than John and Ringo, but probably at
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some level not as mature. The more I study Mal, people would describe
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him as a big kid, and I think that's true. Chapter fourteen titled
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the Elvis Situation and you'll lead with quote, so began one of the strangest
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series of events in Mal's and the Beatles story. Can you talk about what
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happened here? This is nineteen sixty five and impromptu jam with Elvis and the
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Beatles. Wow? Right, this was kind of cooked up by Colonel Tom
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Parker and Brian Epstein and Mal. You know, Mal wanted to spend time
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with Elvis as much, maybe more so than they did, because by nineteen
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sixty five, they're just not as impressed with him, right, I mean,
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all of that had kind of that sheen had tarnished, certainly during Elvis's
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Hollywood period. Right. It was cooked up though by Colonel Tom Parker.
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They went out to bel Air. I mean it almost had the feel of
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a photo op or a party situation, which ironically there were no photos taken
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at the party at elvis place. And again, while the Beatles were kind
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of over it to a certain extent, it was kind of Mal who was
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living the dream and keeping notes that night. Elvis was kind of you know,
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they were both intimidated by each other. Elvis, you know, could
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tell that they were tearing it up and that he wasn't in the level of
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ascension that he used to be. So it was Mal who was kind of
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there breaking the ice, helping them when they had their famous jam et cetera.
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But for Mal, it was the massive evening. You know, we've
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all been wondering all these years. This is one of the first surprises I
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found, right, We've all wondered all these years what's going on with Mal
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and the story of what happened with Elvis and the Beatles, And I open
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up this box right there, and there's like one hundred pages that Mal had
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written about it back in nineteen sixty five. You know. So that's part
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of the magic and the strangeness of this project, how so much material exists
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inside his archives that just answer to the word some many of the questions we've
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been wondering about. And then Mal contributes to Beatles' music, which is really
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interesting because he goes from roady to now they entrust him with his creative input
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on songs. There's an entry in the book on a song that Paul started
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working on in late January of nineteen sixty seven. Mal referred to it as
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where the Rain Gets In and the another he called doors, which became fixing
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a Hole. He co wrote Sergeant Pepper co wrote it. That's amazing,
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But Mal was never credited talk about why that happened, what Paul told Mal
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as the reason, and how Mal felt about it. Well, you know,
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Mal may have groused at times in his diaries or in his notebooks about
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various goings on, but he was always committed to them being the enormous success
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that we know them to be. I mean, that was that was the
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mission. That was the brief as far as Mal was concerned. Obviously he
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would have enjoyed it, but we have to when we think about authorship,
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you know, particularly of a pop song. It just was completely different back
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then. These guys were essentially inventing their jobs and their careers. Mal was
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entrusted with moments like that, for one reason because he was handy, but
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for another because he was so motivated. You know. So if Paul said,
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you know, play this organ note on, you won't see me,
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Malo's gonna play it right. Or take up a trumpet on helter skelter in
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that bizarre trumpet sacks duet that he plays with John Lennon. You know,
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Mal was up for anything, walking around the studio with the bass drum,
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and in retrospect, of course, we know that lots of folks helped out
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with Beatles songs. Pete Shott and John's arguably John's closest friend right was very
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much involved. It did touch off something though in Mal. He enjoyed writing
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songs and he enjoyed working on them, and so when they're in Rishikesh a
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year later, he begins working on the song that will become You and Me
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Babe on Ringo's self titled nineteen seventy three album. What kind of input does
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he chord structures, lyrics or is it just like you say, they say,
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hey, pick up the instrument and play. How deep did it go
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in terms of his inputsh It really depends, you know, so, I
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mean there are times when he's playing downbeat harmonica's very specific. What would that
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have been being for the benefit of mister Kite? You know, that was
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a very clear part that Mal was participating in. If it's percussion right,
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it's a very clear brief on what he needs to provide. Mister McCartney would
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be known to say I need a line and people would contribute, you know,
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during eleanor Rigby or at one point with Mal with here, there and
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everywhere. You know, he needed a way to finish it off. Part
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of it is simply because when you take any kind of extended look at the
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Beatles, you discovered that they were inordinately busy. These are very driven people
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who weren't taking time off and any of the ways we think about that today.
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They were just constantly working, so they would come into the studio with
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the song mostly finished but maybe not completely, and they would rely on creative
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process in that space in which to bring those kind of compositions to fruition.
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The thing that's interesting to me about Mal during that period is after they finish
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the concert years and they move into the studio years. You know, you
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might have naturally thought, and I would have too, that folks like Mal
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and Neil would be less in demand. In fact, maybe they'll move back
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to Liverpool. It was the exact opposite. You know. The Beatles were
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so driven as artists that they were about to spend more time in the studio,
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right, more than seven hundred hours for Sergeant Pepper, more than a
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thousand for the White Album. They're now going to put more time in that
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space, which meant more need for people like Mal and Neil Aspinall to be
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there for them so that they could carry out those long studio sessions and make
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all these master works that we benefit from. Interesting so different from nowadays,
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where artists reach out to other artists from all areas to contribute. But it's
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like the Beatles world was so insulated, so they would just reach out to
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those who were there within those confined walls that they had to put up because
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and they were constantly working, so it was like this bubble, Yeah,
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whoever's in there, let's see what we can get from them. The Sergeant
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Pepper's album cover. Mal contributes to that too. He said he never felt
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so connected to the band as then what was Malo's relationship like with Brian Einstein?
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With Brian, Mal was hired by Brian. Brian kind of paid Mal
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a premium when he was hired. It was a raise over his job with
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the Post Office, which meant that Neil got a raise too, so it
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was good for both of them in August sixty three. But they did bumpheads
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a lot. They were at loggerheads often over image issues. Brian is so
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well known for getting the Beatles to wear suits, to changing their approach to
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the media, to their stage act, to the whole business. And it
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wasn't that Mal was against any of that. It's just Mal was the roadie,
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you know, and to move all this equipment round, which quickly became
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not just the Beatles equipment, but other bands too. Because the Beatles had
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a roady or two. Most bands had none, right, so Mal would
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step up and help them out too. He'd want to wear shirt sleeves instead
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of ties and a jacket, and this rubbed Brian the wrong way. And
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there were several moments like this when they would really get in each other's faces.
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At one point Mauth thought Brian was going to hit him, in fact,
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and it sounds like Brian wanted to. You know, they would just
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become and get really in each other's faces over these issues. But fortunately,
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by the time of Brian's death, Mal and Brian had really buried those sorts
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of issues. And he chalked it up and George Martin would speak in similar
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terms. He chalked it up to almost a kind of jealousy over people getting
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to spend time with the boys. I think that's interesting. You know,
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at times I've wondered how true it is, because I've spoken to a lot
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of personnel at Abbey Road Studios over the years, and they'll let us know
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things like, you know, we didn't want to be on Beatles sessions because
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they went for fourteen hours. You didn't want to run that session. Let
20:07
somebody else do that. They were seen as kind of a chore, right,
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I get the sense that folks in that, as you said, in
20:14
that very insular, smaller group, George Martin, Brian Epstein, the Beatles,
20:19
that maybe those were those were spaces where maybe people were jealous of each
20:25
other. I mean, George Martin admitted that he was kind of jealous of
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Mal at one point. He's got to spend all this time with the Beatles.
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Well, George Martin would certainly get his fill right in sixty seven and
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sixty eight, et cetera. But it's interesting. I guess in any small
20:38
group like that, right, politics emerge, some people like each other more
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than others. Relationships ebb and flow over the years, and these are guys
20:47
who spent a ridiculous amount of time together. I mean, Mal arguably spent
20:51
more time with them than wives and girlfriends. I don't think that's even an
20:55
exaggeration. So when you're in situations like that, obviously grudges develop, people
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butt heads, et cetera. But he doesn't think that Brian committed suicide.
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He felt it was an accidental overdose. Why do you think that. Yeah,
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so a lot of folks were sort of concerned at the time that maybe
21:15
Brian. Brian's death had been intentional, because of course it was a especially
21:19
back in the day when things were happening. It was known inside the Beatles
21:23
circle that Brian had thought about suicide before, so they all seemed relieved that
21:29
it was an accident. Just as the Beatles relationship was unraveling, Mal's life
21:33
was also not going well. So when we go back to his marriage,
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you write in the book quote his marriage was increasingly beset by an internal Cold
21:41
war, there was an out of wedlock baby on the way back in London,
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and his role at Apple appeared to have been built on a foundation of
21:48
quicksand shifting by the day and threatening to suffocate him. Can you talk about
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why Mal was in such a bad place, both personally and professionally around this
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time, which would be what sixty seven? Yeah, definitely in sixty eight.
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And part of the challenge is they've built the Apple enterprise. Naturally Mal
22:07
and Neil will have roles in this company. They would like them both to
22:14
Mal especially function in a kind of a and R capacity because Mal loved going
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to clubs, meeting bands, et cetera, and of course would meet Bad
22:22
Finger, the band that eventually becomes bad Finger. But what they quickly discover
22:26
when they start making the White album is they want Mal in the studio.
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They don't want Mal to be a guy who goes to work every day and
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goes to Apple wherever Apple happens to be, ultimately at Savile Row, but
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they want Mal to be the guy who waits on them. In the words
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of his sister Barbara, who mothers them, right, they want the guy
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who will make a meal at two am, or you know, is there
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just because they like having him there. He's good natured, he's fun to
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be around, you know, by everybody's admissions. So this kind of tore
22:56
it Mal because, you know, like a lot of folks, he has
23:00
his own ambitions. He's imagining other kinds of opportunities, and it's becoming clear
23:04
that in a way he's being type cast. He understands the practicality of why
23:08
he's being type cast, but he is being typecast as the road manager.
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He's also by this point put his wife through several levels of hell, right,
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being gone for so long, raising the kids. At times by herself.
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She's had evidence here and there that Mal is seeing other women, if
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not having full on relationships you know, to call her long suffering is kind
23:34
of minimizing. In fact, I told Gary we were kicking around, whom
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do we dedicate this book to? I said, it's your mother, and
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yeah, and this was, you know, two or three years ago.
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I said, your mom is the only person this book gets to be dedicated
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to. He is the person who made it possible and then suffered, you
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know, nearly every day for the rest of her life over it. So,
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yeah, well, if it's a part of the book two when he
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gets injured, he comes home for a little bit and you can't wait to
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get back out of the house, and she's like you just hear her for
24:02
a few weeks, right, what was that part? I think? Just
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so we washed your clothes? What's this about? And so I did so.
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She recently passed just within the field, just a few months ago.
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Actually, fortunately it had been a while since she's been coherent. She had
24:15
kind of an advanced dementia, so unfortunately I wasn't able to interview her.
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Gary tried to send her my questions a few times, but to no avail.
24:26
You know, you mentioned the out of wedlock child, A son I'm
24:30
so proud of, you know, one of the earliest things I learned about
24:34
in this project was that this this fellow existed and I've spoken to him and
24:40
he's terrific. There was some back and forth as we worked on it.
24:44
What did we do? You know what he and do you include this story?
24:48
You know how germane is it at times? And I got to give
24:52
Gary and Julie so much credit. They said, you know, we spent
24:56
so many of our years feeling disconnected from our five imagine what this guy has
25:00
felt like. And they said he has to be included and acknowledged. And
25:06
I was just so impressed with them for understanding that and making sure that there
25:11
was space for him in this story. Interesting comments from now regarding those January
25:15
sixteen nine let it be recording sessions when George quit the band. He certainly
25:18
didn't blame George for getting frustrated with Paul. He also wasn't happy with John's
25:23
behavior after George left Twicken in Studios. He couldn't believe John actually considered replacing
25:29
him with Eric Clapton. Yeah, there was a lot of stress there.
25:33
And if I had a critique of the docu series from Peter Jackson, it
25:37
would just be that we really did not get a full window into what was
25:42
going on with George. You know, George had his own problems at home
25:45
with Patty during this time. She rightly left him for a while, if
25:51
only a few weeks or even a few days. And during that period,
25:56
John had some unresolved George issues. George had said some kind of catty things
26:02
about Yoko in the previous months, and John had regretted not saying anything at
26:07
the time, So there was this kind of cold war between those two guys.
26:11
But yeah, Mal was very, very frustrated. You know, he
26:15
was so busy. Though. I kind of get a laugh when I read
26:18
the moments when George and Ringo sort of briefly leave the band. Ringo got
26:23
up from his drums and walked away, you know, George left the left
26:29
twickened him and drove away. You know, he just mad. He just
26:30
kind of minimizes it with this single sentence when these things happened. The book
26:37
down Rock Podcasts will be back after this. Ken Wollmack is the author of
26:41
Living the Beatles Legend, The Untold Story of Mal Evins It's out now.
26:45
Later in the book, we read about Mal's financial frustrations he thought that being
26:51
loved by the four Beatles would eventually result in them paying him more money.
26:55
But he was only making around fifty dollars a week after taxes. I think
26:59
that's maybe equivalent to maybe sixty five seventy thousand a year. I was doing
27:03
the inflation on that one. What were his feelings towards the band regarding that?
27:07
Did he just think they were going to give him a raise? Should
27:11
he have gone to them? I think he was hesitant about that. He
27:14
probably was afraid that maybe they'd say, hey, take it or leave it.
27:18
I doubt they would have said that. But I think the problem for
27:21
mal is he had to have known at some level intellectually that the reason his
27:26
money was not going very far was the fact that he was living a double
27:30
life. You know that he was out carousing and he would go off.
27:36
I mean, imagine, you know you've read the book. There'll be these
27:37
long stretches when he goes to the United States with George right months, you
27:42
know, keep saying, well, I'm coming home soon, and then one
27:45
time, I think it's in sixty eight, right, he doesn't come home
27:48
until well after Thanksgiving. It's ridiculous how long he's gone, you know.
27:52
I mean, I think he's not sending money home. Lily's having to rely
27:56
on Mal's relatives to help out, you know, to help pay for things.
28:02
So I think at a certain level he must realize that he's living beyond
28:06
his means. I mean, they do okay when they sell the house in
28:08
Liverpool and they moved to London, and his salary is pretty good until it
28:14
isn't, which is in the early nineteen seventies when there are some inflationary inflection
28:18
points that really begin to take their toll on what Mal and Neil were making
28:23
at that point. But until then they were doing all right, you know
28:26
with Mal. And again this is all retrospect and would have been no use
28:30
to him at the time. But with Mal, it's always bad timing when
28:36
it comes to things like compensation because the time when he needed those raises were
28:42
the early seventies, and by then the Beatles are in receivership. Nobody's getting
28:47
any rays, right, I mean, they are essentially their money's frozen and
28:53
they're just still being paid because Mal and Neil are the only two employees of
28:56
Beatles in company. So that just was bad timing. And then of course,
29:00
the bad timing of the way Mal exits the story. With all of
29:04
these wonderful tidings happening the last few months, I'm reminded, as I always
29:10
am around this time in the Beatles commercial cycle, that Mal would have been
29:14
a part of all of this. Right, had Mal lived, he would
29:15
have been there in the eighties for those great moments of renaissance, in the
29:21
nineties with the anthology right the remasters Beatles Love You Name It, it goes
29:26
on, and Mal would have been playing Beatles rock band and profiting as Neil
29:30
Wood from these ventures. So his timing, which you know is a reality
29:36
in all of our lives, matters here. It affects Mal deeply. There's
29:40
a picture in the book he sketches an image of Paul and this is referring
29:44
to an incident at Olympics studios. He just couldn't put it into words,
29:48
and he witnessed the tensions firsthand. What happened there, well, that had
29:52
to have been a primal moment that I'm sure Mal thought of in retrospect.
29:57
He drew a picture based on a character named Mazie from the Parisher's, an
30:02
old British cartoon. It was a picture of Paul losing his mind, which
30:07
by mister McCartney's own account, he did that night when the other Beatles were
30:11
there to cajole him into signing with Alan Klein, and Paul lost it,
30:15
of course and was angry. It was the first thing I looked up when
30:18
I got this cash of material. I want to see what happened, how
30:22
did Mal deal with May ninth, nineteen sixty nine. And there it was
30:26
just a picture of Paul losing his mind, and I'm sure Mao was feeling
30:30
it. And the tremors of that evening would never abate, right, I
30:33
mean, as Paul said, we were never able to put it back together
30:37
again after that night. And of course Alan Klein would exert a horrible effect
30:44
on Mao's career, certainly with the Beatles he tries to fire famously Mal and
30:48
Neil eventually and not too long after that, but also because Alan, in
30:56
a terrible act of cruelty, will not let Mao continue with bad thing.
31:00
It is just a ghastly moment in this story, and it really breaks Mal
31:06
when Alan begins playing games with him, because malsoncerely wanted to help that band,
31:11
and of course, as you know, it's hard to find a bigger
31:15
tragedy in the history of rock than Bad Fingers. There is such a dark
31:18
cloud over that band. He did work with the guys in the Beatles even
31:22
after the Beatles broke up officially, not officially during that period, but then
31:26
his relationship with Paul ends rather abruptly. And when I first read this,
31:30
I thought, boy, that's pretty cold on Paul's part. But Matt later
31:34
said he understood why it was so abrupt, talk about what Paul said to
31:38
him. This is when he's recording. Maybe I'm amazed. Yeah, it's
31:42
right around that, when they're in the studio. That was, you know,
31:45
one of the songs Paul knew needed to get the studio to treatment.
31:49
So they'd gone into the studio and Mal had been secretly helping Paul for weeks,
31:53
not telling not telling Neil about it, which kind of chagrined Neil because
32:00
you know, they usually were the two guys who were really upfront with each
32:02
other. But you know, in retrospect again, it makes perfect sense.
32:07
You can almost see one of the Eastmen saying, look, Paul, if
32:08
you're trying to sue to dissolve this band, if you're going to do that.
32:14
You can't keep using Mal. He is a benefit of Beatles in company,
32:20
So you kind of have to cut everything off and you know, go
32:22
your own way. And so he tells Mal, I don't need you anymore,
32:27
and it comes off really cruelly, and I imagine Paul in retrospect recognized
32:32
that maybe those weren't the best words, but you know, he really had
32:36
to cut himself off if he's going to try to sue to in the partnership,
32:40
if you're using a benefit of the partnership, it doesn't make any sense.
32:44
But Mal understood. And in every divorce, we have to worry about
32:49
the children, and in this case the children went to John George and Ringo
32:52
and Mal was kept very busy in those years, with arguably the best solo
32:58
efforts. You know, when you look retrospectively at the Beatles, those first
33:01
four or five years are when the great music's getting made. The first you
33:06
get away from the big bang of the Beatles, it becomes less so for
33:09
everybody. Yeah, he's involved with Beatles solo projects. Harry Nilsen and you
33:15
mentioned Bad Finger. What exactly happens with Bad Finger? How does he get
33:19
involved and then how does it end. Well, he is involved because he
33:22
discovers them as the Ivy's in the Marquee Club. He champions them at Apple,
33:27
gets them a contract. So a lot of trouble was brewing already because
33:30
they had a manager, a guy named Billy Collins, who was very paranoid
33:34
and was always worried about his own status, and so he was a problem.
33:38
But then also Alan was demonstrating pretty early on in his tenure at Apple
33:45
that if an artist wasn't the Beatles, they weren't going to get the same
33:50
attention, which kind of makes a natural level of sense at Apple. But
33:53
almost immediately they're in the act of breaking up and in the long range story
33:59
of breaking up their partnership, so very quickly, Bad Finger begins to be
34:04
Mothball. Right now, they've written a song Without You, which becomes this
34:08
international hit for Harry Nilsen and is making pots of money, but the money's
34:15
going into receivership and probably being absconded by a business manager, Stan Polly.
34:22
So there's some really troubling threads to what's happening with Badfinger. Male's trying to
34:30
keep them along and keep them moving forward and records no matter what with them,
34:35
this really wonderful song which he begins trying to champion around the hallways of
34:38
Apple. Well, the problem is the Beatles aren't going to the hallways of
34:43
Apple like they used to, right. I mean, when you start breaking
34:46
up, everybody moves away and they're staying at their own mansions, et cetera,
34:51
more than they're coming into the city to savile rows. So Male's having
34:54
a lot of trouble getting traction for this song. It only gets released because
35:00
of a guy named Guy who lives just north of me here in New Jersey,
35:02
Alan Steckler. Alan was hired as a consultant by Alan Klein. He
35:07
listens to the music and he says, you've got to hit here. This
35:10
needs to be released, And of course it is and it becomes this almost
35:15
signature hit for Bad Finger. But by then Alan Klein has forbidden Mal from
35:21
working with Bad Finger, just really out of cruelty, probably because he could
35:24
not fire Mal and he made Neil suffer too in his own way. So
35:30
it's just another nail in the coffin of Bad Finger. They're really on a
35:36
kind of life support at this point. They're big enough and they have some
35:39
hits later with George Harrison day after day that sort of keep them moving along,
35:45
but it's they're on life support eventually in seventy five Pete dies first and
35:52
then Tom Evans later. It's just awful. I wonder in twenty twenty three
35:55
when I hear these songs No matter What, and then Breaking Bad was as
35:59
a baby Blue who gets the publishing on these songs? And there's one surviving
36:06
member of the band, right, Sure, Joey is still with us,
36:07
and Joey is very helpful for this book. Gave me great point by point
36:13
analysis of what happened in the studio when they were working with mal. The
36:16
publishing has been going to their relations a guy named Dan Mattavina who died a
36:23
few months ago, way too young. Great guy Dan had been working to
36:29
help out the families and he'd been sort of their executor. Yeah, so
36:32
it helped close the Breaking Bad deal. And actually wrote a marvelous book called
36:37
Without You, which details what happened. Oh, I'd like to read that.
36:43
Yeah, it's a it's a great book. In fact, he re
36:45
released it, I believe earlier this year on e books. There's a story
36:51
it has to do with George's guitar being stolen. So this is a guitar
36:53
given to George by Air Clapton and then now gets involved with a woman named
36:59
Pandora and somehow he's in the center of this. Pandora visits Georgie's house Friday
37:05
the thirteenth, by the way, Friday, April thirteenth, this time with
37:08
some friends, and those friends happened to burglarize George's house. One of the
37:14
things they take is George's cherry red Gibson guitar that had been a present from
37:20
Eric Clapton. And this is just insane, this whole story. They eventually
37:23
get it back. But Mauswen who gets the call in the middle of the
37:27
night from Pandora and he's somehow in the middle of all this. Yeah,
37:30
and I somebody out there knows Pandora's name, and you they need to contact
37:35
me. I spent so much time trying to find her. It is one
37:38
nutty It's like a nutty story that could only happen in southern California in the
37:44
early nineteen seventies, right, it's this weird, this strange woman, you
37:51
know. And at a certain point, and there was too much to tell
37:54
in this story, but people like Share get involved. They go to the
38:00
Playboy Mansion at one point and Mal's like, we can't get in the Playboy
38:04
mansion and she's like, sure we can, and they drive through and she
38:07
pushes the intercom and they say who is it? She says, it's Share,
38:10
Let me in, damn it, you know, And of course they
38:13
do its Share damn it. So you can't make this stuff up. No,
38:16
it's a crazy, crazy story where Mal eventually goes to Mexico to track
38:23
down this guitar and he hasd to horse trade to get it back. He
38:27
has to find another guitar that's like it. It's just ridiculous, just absolutely
38:32
nuts, that story. I mean it almost you can almost see it being
38:37
some weird screenplay. Yeah. Mouse separated from his wife in nineteen seventy three,
38:42
which he never seemed to get past, but he did move on.
38:45
He moved to Los Angeles. He begins a relationship with fran Hughes. She
38:49
encouraged Mal to start writing his memoir. This would lift his spirits since he's
38:53
been battling depression and anxiety for a while. Can you talk about where Mal
38:58
Evans was mentally leading up to that final tragic day in January of seventy six
39:04
and the cryptic writings in his notebook in May of seventy five. To call
39:07
it a separation is probably slightly inaccurate in the sense that Mal was just going
39:15
to la on another trip right to work with the guys. John was out
39:19
there full time at that point on the Lost weekend, And to call it
39:23
a separation, it was a separation, but it was one that was not
39:28
supposed to be official. It's just Mal gets busted for moving into this with
39:31
this woman, you know, and he gets busted by John Lennon's ex wife
39:36
Cynthia and John's son Julian, who say, hey, Fran, Lil,
39:39
we met your cousin, Fran, and she's like, what cousin? You
39:43
know. It was kind of a classic Mal wasn't a very good philanderer.
39:45
I don't house to put it, you know, And he got busted for
39:49
it. And at that point, really there's a ticking clock on Mal Evans
39:53
because he's now been once and truly outed to his wife about who who he
40:00
is. When he's not there at the house, he's living with another woman,
40:02
and it's a matter of time until Lily finally gets up the courage to
40:07
say, you know what, I might divorce you, and just the idea
40:09
that she might creates this incredible stress for Mount. Life should have been good
40:15
for him. He'd produced a hit song for Bad Finger, he had a
40:19
song on a blockbuster album for Ringos, So he's getting residuals, he's getting
40:23
opportunities. But the fact that he has his worlds have collided in this way
40:30
really creates pretty severe depression for him, and probably much worse than people knew.
40:36
I would imagine at least he was with I look at it this way.
40:38
I mean, it's a strange, kind of ironic way to look at
40:42
it, but at least he was with Fran. Fran was tough, you
40:45
know, Fran, who was much younger than Mal, probably was looking out
40:47
for him and helping him through this period. It was her idea to do
40:52
the memoirs, to give him something meaningful to do, you know, when
40:55
he would miss his family. Fran had the Wherewithal and though again she was
41:00
a young woman, to say, well go back to your family. You
41:02
know they exist there in London, you know where it is, head on
41:07
over and Mal was just torn. It probably didn't help that there was so
41:10
much free flowing alcohol and cocaine in southern California. But it was Fran's idea
41:15
to write the memoirs, and she even helped him to engineer how to do
41:21
the deal with Harold Lipton as their attorney. You know, they were doing
41:23
Fran was doing a lot of smart things. She had to incorporate her company,
41:29
Frantic Enterprises. Mal didn't finish the paperwork on his It was going to
41:32
be called mal Contented. But you know, all of this is taking place,
41:37
and Mal really throws himself deeply into this project. It's stressful at times
41:43
because he's worried that he'll betray the boys and their trust, which I don't
41:47
think he really does, but he throws himself into this project. He hires
41:52
a team, gets a woman named Joanne Lenard to be the stenographer, Mal
41:57
will dictate the manuscript to her. Hires another guy, her boyfriend, actually
42:01
John Hornley, who was a former art director at Capitol, and John would
42:07
be the photo editor because Mal knew the photos would be important and he had
42:10
this whole collection of thousands of photos. So John's job was to have transparencies
42:16
made so that they could eventually ship them off to New York to the publisher,
42:21
and Mal finished the thing in late nineteen seventy five. It was essentially
42:24
done. It just needed to be sent in so that they could publish it.
42:30
I think they were aiming for June for a publication date, or at
42:34
least that was the first date that they were considering, so, you know,
42:37
it was ready to go. It's just that moment, that late moment
42:42
in seventy five early seventy six, when Lily finally said I'm going to get
42:46
an attorney that Mal just you know what, property used the language of the
42:52
day. He freaked. What were the cryptic writings in the notebook? May
42:55
have seventy five that seemed to I don't exactly know, you know, was
43:00
it was around the time that Fran and Mal visited Robert Markel, who was
43:05
the executive the editor in chief at Grosset, and something was going on in
43:10
Mao's head about how his life had begun in sixty three when he joined the
43:16
Beatles full time, and now it was he felt like it was ending.
43:21
I don't truly I kind of left it there for the reader to think about,
43:24
you know, which I did on more than one occasion in this book.
43:28
To my mind, Mal is frankly not thinking straight. He is ideating
43:37
various kinds of realities in his life that aren't real. There was nothing over
43:42
about the Beatles, right, even when he tried to quit the year before,
43:45
nobody really believed it, right, you know, it wasn't really going
43:49
to happen. They never stopped paying him, you know, George said famously,
43:53
so what he thought it was ridiculous, you know. So it's really
43:59
interesting. I think Mal was formulating that in his own mind, because of
44:04
course the Beatles are calling him all the time. Not too long after that,
44:07
the partnership finally over. Paul's in touch again more regularly. You know,
44:13
everything's hunky dory. It was Ken Mansfield who said on the day that
44:16
Mal died. He said, Mal, you're telling me all these wonderful things
44:19
that are happening, but you sound awful. You know what's going on.
44:22
And of course Mal was in the throes and probably had been for a while
44:28
of a full on mental crisis, so heartbreaking if he had just reached out
44:32
for help. But I don't know those days people didn't readily admit they needed
44:37
help too. I think he just tried to ballot on his own and yeah,
44:40
you got that right. I mean that was a completely different era in
44:44
terms of health care and mental health care and a gender right. I mean
44:49
Mal would have been a stoic Liverpool man who's forty cut from a very different
44:53
cloth than even his counterparts, necessarily in la So you know, I don't
45:00
even know if he knew how to begin to do that. And Fran and
45:02
she's wonderful in this way, is kind of no nonsense. She would have
45:06
been like, well, then go back, you know. But of course
45:08
imagine how Mal would have taken that. Well, you don't love me,
45:12
then I can just you know, so I think no matter where he turned,
45:16
he must have felt confused. He told Laura Gross, a good friend
45:22
of his at the time, he said, you know, if only I
45:24
could go somewhere and clear my mind for a while. And he knew instinctively,
45:30
he knew that that was important, but of course he doesn't do it.
45:32
And there was a place he could have cleared his mind, right his
45:37
house that he owned with Lily outside of London. Just a little bit of
45:42
time away from everything can do that for you, and it never happens.
45:45
And as the promo for the book states, Mal's untimely death has always been
45:49
shrouded in a mystery, and it's an emotional read what transpires Without giving away
45:53
too much from the book, can you talk about what happens on January fourth,
45:58
nineteen seventy six and what leads to the mystery. The signs were there.
46:01
Fran was probably hoping against hope that Mao was had righted himself. The
46:07
night before in a kind of drunken fit, he had written his last will
46:14
and testament, which was his suicide note essentially, and then the next day,
46:19
which is a Sunday night, they were taking down the Christmas tree.
46:22
She thought everything was okay, that maybe it was an aberration the evening before,
46:28
but man, it wasn't. And Mal began to act to radically,
46:32
and I'm of the mind that he'd been planning this for some time. Got
46:37
out his gun, you know, his Winchester rifle that Fran had given him
46:40
for his birthday in May seventy four, and that scared John Hornley, who
46:45
had come over because Fran was concerned. She would often call folks to come
46:51
over if she thought Mao was getting erratic. Well, Hornley saw the gun
46:53
and he got the hell out of that bedroom, and she said, you
46:58
know, do you want me to call the police. I'm going to call
46:59
the police. Males like you call him. And at that point he was
47:04
waiting for them to come upstairs to tell him to drop the gun, and
47:07
as we know, Mal pointed it at them, and cops do what cops
47:09
do. But yeah, this is all, you know, It's interesting the
47:14
way history has looked at this event as though it's mistaken identity or an accident
47:20
or a domestic dispute. Really it's what we now call suicide by cop,
47:25
right. I guess the saving grace is Mal didn't take anybody else with him.
47:30
With Mal's story, with bad fingers story, there's always plenty of misery
47:35
to go around, I've noticed. I think his story would have ended so
47:38
much better than maybe I was just thinking of, you know, Jimmy Nicol,
47:43
the Beatles drummer for you know, right, But you know, for
47:47
him, mel Evans would have been a celebrated, beloved figure. He would
47:52
have really, I think, enjoyed all of the admiration and adoration from the
47:58
fans. As we get into the eighties and nineties and two thousands, it's
48:01
just that. That's what I was left thinking about after finishing the book.
48:06
It's like, boy, only if, like you say, he just got
48:07
away for maybe a month, two months, even a year if he needed,
48:12
you know, get cleaned up, and he would have been Okay,
48:15
that's the thing you just you wonder about. Yeah, I mean, obviously
48:22
he still has the baggage that others did at the time that you know,
48:28
well, surely the Beatles are just a pop group. They're not going to
48:30
really be talking about them in ten years, but of course we do.
48:36
We will continue to do so for I would think centuries. But what's interesting
48:40
about that moment is I don't even know that Mal could see a glint of
48:45
what the future looked like, you know. And of course when one is
48:47
in a mental health crisis or in a state of depression, you can't see
48:53
anything that looks like a saving grace because all of it was there, you
48:59
know, I mean, just toneel about what they were going to do with
49:01
putting Apple back together, which would have mental role for Mal. He was
49:06
talking to Paul, talked to John the week of his death. You know,
49:09
it was all there, but the one area that he neglected for so
49:15
long that was the biggest chasm of grief for him, his family back in
49:20
London. That was the part that that was his undoing living the Beatles legend,
49:24
the untold story of mal Evans and it's out now through day Street books
49:28
and you can find it wherever books are sold. And Ken weell Mack,
49:30
where can people find you online? You have your podcast still too, right,
49:35
I do. I'm still doing Everything Fab for Yeah, we have a
49:37
new episode coming soon on the founder of the Violent Films. Well wonderful.
49:45
But I got to say I really enjoyed your last episode with Tom Werman.
49:49
Oh Tom, yes, huh. How about He's got some stories he does
49:53
and such an important bricker in the story of Cheap Trick and was very interesting.
50:00
But yeah, still doing the podcast Everything Fab four with Salon dot com.
50:04
And then I have a website Kenneth Womack dot com. Bring your friends.
50:08
You're always well, Ken, Thank you so much. I think there's
50:13
a chance you'll be back on again in the future. I would think you
50:15
got some more projects in the works. I have some things cooking up.
50:20
Maybe you'll even have myself and Jason Krupa back. Yeah, guy's down with
50:23
you. We're working on a new book right now called Beatles seventy four.
50:28
Oh about into the partnership. Yeah, so we're gonna probably be done in
50:30
a couple months. We're excited about that. Well, I'm sure Beatles fans
50:35
are thankful that Mal's story has finally been told in proper form a book on
50:39
Mal. I couldn't believe that there wasn't one on him up until now.
50:44
Well, you know, it was impossible to adequately tell his story without those
50:49
materials. You know, it's sort of walking through the looking glass, right.
50:52
The story we knew of Mal existed in sort of one dimension, and
50:57
then when you added his own voice, in his own words, that he's
51:01
writing and composing contemporaneously with events happening, it really changes everything. Ken Well,
51:07
Mac, this is great to have you on. Thank you, thank
51:09
you. That's it. It's in the books.