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known for their warm rich tone. Paul may have been familiar with them from the many recordings made at Abbey Road by Yehudi Menuhin. When Paul played piano, either John or George would play a Fender VI bass, through the Bassman amp.
    Some of the other instruments and gear at the Twickenham sessions included George’s Fender Telecaster guitars and Gibson J-200 guitar, John’s Martin D-28 guitars, Paul’s D-28 guitar, a Lowrey DSO Heritage Deluxe organ, a Vox Wah-Wah pedal, and an Arbiter Fuzz Face distortion pedal.
    Les Parrott recalled the filming at Twickenham Studios:
    We moved into Twickenham studios where the Beatles’ road manager, Mal (Evans) had set up the gear. Whatever discussion had taken place about the style of filming, I was not party to (it). My brief on the first day was to ‘shoot the Beatles.’ The sound crew instructions were to roll/record from the moment the first Beatle appeared and to record sound all day until the last one left. We had two cameras and just about did the same thing.
    The soundstage was totally bare. As the week progressed, Tony (Richmond) added more theatrical lighting. To start with, the cameras stayed out of the circle formed by the four Beatles. As the numbers rehearsed forward, we did start to move inside the group. They were never seated that close anyway.
    There was one additional person seated on the floor at John’s feet every day, all day, reading newspapers: Yoko Ono. Only they weren’t newspapers as such; they were from a clipping agency which daily scoured the world’s press for any Beatles-related items, which were forwarded to Apple. This is what she was reading every day. We were never able to get a shot of her face, because her hair totally obscured it.
    Although Yoko had attended the sessions for
The White Album
and other friends and family had dropped in on sessions in the past, Yoko’s more pronouncedpresence at Twickenham, as well as the attendance of all those connected with the filming, likely added to the level of tension right from the start.
    Peter Brown, who played a significant role in the management of the Beatles’ career, provided further insight into the Twickenham sessions. Brown had started working for Brian Epstein when he took over as manager of the Epstein family’s NEMS store on Great Charlotte Street in Liverpool, at the time that Epstein moved on to manage another family store in Whitechapel. When Epstein moved his operation as manager of the Beatles to London, Brown became his personal assistant. He eventually became the general manager of the group, as well as an executive with Apple, after Brian’s death. He was the best man at John and Yoko’s wedding in Gibraltar and was immortalized in John’s song “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”
    After Allen Klein took over the management of the Beatles in 1969, Brown remained with Apple even after Klein’s many purges of the staff. He subsequently resigned and went to work for the Robert Stigwood Organization. He moved to America in 1970 and settled in New York in 1971; for years he has been one of the partners of the highly successful public relations firm Brown, Lloyd, and James. In 1983, together with Steven Gaines, he published
The Love You Make,
an inside account of his years with the Beatles.
    Speaking in the living room of his spacious apartment off Central Park, Brown offered some enlightening comments about how the Beatles dealt with the presence of so many people at Twickenham: “Prior to Twickenham nobody [outside of the musicians and crew] ever went to a recording studio. Twickenham was a very unusual situation for them to be in, and everyone was a little uncomfortable about it. But also they were very professional about it by getting some music done.”
    The bulk of the filming of all four Beatles took place over seven days: Thursday and Friday, January 2 and 3, and Monday the 6th through Friday the 10th. The filming of the rehearsals was quite different from anything else the