The Longest Cocktail Party | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Exactly @DrBeatle, it shows what happens when well-intentioned people allow the world’s freeloaders in the door. Ripping off roof lining isn’t something you can do on the quiet, which gives you some idea of the extraordinary day-to-day confusion of the place, that someone could get away with that under the noses of a lot of people. And there was a lot of energy put into Apple at first, but that slowly drained away as reality sunk in and that’s an interesting story too, perhaps not told with Beatles face to face but their decisions are the invisible backdrop to the stories here.

My copy arrived in the mail yesterday and joy of joys, it’s the original edition. A lot of the photographs are under-exposed which is a shame because there’s a bunch of good ones of various Beatles (mostly George and Ringo with a couple of John, and Paul only from a long distance). The book is far more detailed than I remember. Plenty of mentions of Kevin Harrington with Mal, in fact it’s pretty detailed about the immediate staff of not just the Press Office itself (where DiLello worked) but also of the various Beatle assistants. The mechanics of how the Apple logo came about, and various projects are gone into in some detail that required more than an anecdotal memory. Overall the tone isn’t as flippant as the surface tone suggests: it was really a giant confusing hassle to work for Apple surrounded by maniacs and the most demanding maniacs were their bosses.

Oh yeah forgot, the irony is that the first edition is published by Charisma Books. That’s right, Charisma Records had a book subsidiary, so even his publisher had a Beatles connection.