Zapple was a bit like that old story about the blind men and
the elephant. Miles felt the label should be used to document the works of
underground poets and intellectuals. McCartney pictured it as an outlet for his
own watered down avant-garde pretentions. John Lennon imagined it as a means to
document his existence with Yoko Ono. George Harrison thought it was a
nuisance.
Because it offered little in the way of traditional
entertainment, Zapple is less famous for the contents of its discs, more so for
its controversial Beatles associations: Lennon’s penis on the cover of Two Virgins, Harrison’s plagiarism of
Bernie Krause’s synthesizer squawks on Electronic
Sound, etc.
Even Barry Miles seems somewhat unsure of how to find a way into
Zapple in his new book. Beginning and ending abruptly, The Zapple Diaries: The Rise and Fall of the Last Beatles Label is only intermittently the story of the label he
ran. Each chapter in this brief book (which includes lots of photos and entire-pages devoted to pull quotes) is focused on a particular topic that took place during his
days in The Beatles’ inner circle. Some of this is not related to Zapple directly,
such as the arrival of some Hell’s Angels scumbags at Apple (on Harrison’s
misguided invitation), Lennon’s drugs problems, and quite a bit about Apple’s
shambling business. More on-topic chapters occasionally veer from The
Beatles, as Miles discusses working with poets such as Allen Ginsburg, Charles
Olsen, and Charles Bukowski for the label.
As much as the narrative ping-pongs, it’s consistently
interesting and pulses with Miles’s insider knowledge. McCartney, Lennon, and
Harrison sometimes come off as rather unsavory. McCartney’s treatment of the
Apple staff could be cruel and Harrison passing off Krause’s work as his own is
downright criminal, no matter how unlistenable that work may be. More often, they seem naïve, but not distastefully so (Miles
only seems to dislike Allen Klein, which is pretty par for the course). No
matter their own ambitions for Apple and Zapple, McCartney and Lennon did seem
to genuinely want to use their money and resources to help powerless, unknown
artists who could never get their work placed with a more conventional company.
That is the heart at the core of The
Apple Diaries.
