In October 1969 a rumour went around the world that Paul McCartney was dead. The story, which started in America on student campuses and was fanned by reports on radio stations, gained so much traction that The Times prepared an obituary in case it proved to be true and Jack Oliver, as head of the Beatles’ record label Apple, felt compelled to phone McCartney to ask if he was OK. “F*** off,” McCartney told him, irritated to have been woken up but proving he was still very much alive.
It was just one of many extraordinary moments in the turbulent three years Oliver spent working for the Beatles.
His tenure began in typically chaotic circumstances in January 1968. The group was in the process of changing the trading name from Beatles Ltd to Apple Corps and was looking to expand into a range of activities from starting their own record label to film and electronics divisions.
Oliver, a failed musician whose band had just folded, was looking for a job and asked Terry Oakes, a friend who worked for Chappell Music Publishing, if he knew of anything. “Well, there’s this new company opening up, maybe they want someone,” Oakes told him and gave him the number of Terry Doran, who had been put in charge of the newly established Apple Publishing.
Doran, an old friend of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein who had once run a car dealership, invited Oliver to come and see him at the Beatles’ Baker Street headquarters. “There were two white leather Chesterfield sofas and everything in the office was white except for this maniac Terry Doran, who had this big Afro and all these psychedelic clothes,” Oliver recalled.
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“I don’t really need anyone,” Doran told him. “Well it looks to me like you need an assistant,” the 21-year-old Oliver replied. Impressed by his chutzpah, Doran told him he could start the next day and to bring his passport because they were flying to Cannes for Midem, the annual music industry conference.
So it was that on his first day as a Beatles employee, Oliver found himself staying at the five-star Carlton on the Croisette in Cannes. “I was in this suite and still didn’t really know what was going on and then out of one of the rooms walks Paul McCartney. I thought to myself, ‘This is going to be a good gig’,” he recalled.
After a week “posing around Cannes with Paul McCartney”, he flew back to London to find that Doran didn’t really need an assistant at all — or at least a second assistant as he already had one in Mike Berry.
Oliver was shunted off to assist Derek Taylor in the press office in Savile Row, but his stay there was similarly brief because the Beatles soon brought in Ron Kass, a 33-year-old American record executive, and appointed him president of Apple’s records division. Kass put Oliver in charge of overseas licensing. Before long the advertising and production departments were added to Oliver’s brief and he also helped to manage Mary Hopkin, one of Apple’s first signings.
Promoting Apple’s signings “wasn’t a difficult job”, Oliver conceded. “We were with the Fab Four so everyone would listen to us.”
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Up to a point, anyway. While Apple enjoyed success with records by Hopkin and Badfinger among others, Yoko Ono’s recordings were a much harder sell. “John Lennon would make me listen to Yoko’s records,” Oliver told Stefan Granados, author of Those Were the Days — An Unofficial History of the Beatles’ Apple Organisation. “I’d sit there for an hour listening to it and John would ask, ‘What do you think?’” When Oliver diplomatically told him it was “nice” but didn’t think it would sell, Lennon told him, “Well it’s your job to make sure it does, isn’t it?”
After work, most of Apple’s employees would congregate in the basement which was meant to be a state-of-the-art studio but, due to the hopelessness of “Magic Alex” Mardas whom the Beatles had hired as the head of Apple Electronics, was little more than a rehearsal space. Musicians would drop by and play and everyone partied until the small hours.
The carousing was brought to an abrupt stop in 1969 when, against McCartney’s wishes, the other three Beatles brought in Allen Klein as the group’s business manager. Apple was haemorrhaging money and Klein, a tough, no-nonsense American go-getter, started firing staff.
Kass was one of the first to be let go and when McCartney told Klein that he thought Oliver should take over as president of Apple Records, he got the job. “I was 23,” Oliver recalled. “Looking back on it, I thought I was equipped to run the label but I wasn’t.”
In fact, it’s questionable if anyone was, for the Beatles were falling apart and a gulf had developed between Lennon and McCartney that was rendering Apple dysfunctional. Oliver did the best he could, working 18-hour days. “I worked all the time. It was my life,” he said. “I kept out of Klein’s way and did my job.”
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However, in February 1971 Oliver resigned and moved to Los Angeles to work for Peter Asher’s management company. “Klein was on my case but I wasn’t worried because when he came in he was given a list of people he wasn’t allowed to fire and I was on it,” he said. “But the Beatles had broken up and I saw what was going on.”
Asher, the brother of McCartney’s former girlfriend Jane Asher and himself a former Apple employee, was managing the careers of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt among others, and had been asking Oliver to join him in LA for the past two years. Oliver became a familiar sight driving down Sunset Strip in his vintage Mini Cooper and an equally venerable MG. He went on to produce tours for Taylor, the Eagles, Carole King, Cat Stevens and others and managed the actor Nicolas Cage’s production company.
He is survived by his daughter, Sara, and sons, Jesse and Michael, who often crewed for him on his sailboat.
Jack Oliver was born in 1945 in Guildford, Surrey, the son of Jack and Betty Oliver. He grew up in Muswell Hill, north London and studied industrial design at Hornsey College of Art. On graduating, he landed a job at Chappell’s Music Publishing and formed a band called the Chocolate Watchband with the songwriter Gary Osborne, who recalls that at the time Oliver was known to everyone as “Jack the Raver”.
Looking back on his time at Apple, he felt that the stories of chaos and self- indulgent excess were not untrue but had been overstated. “It was pretty crazy but it wasn’t overly crazy,” he insisted. “Everybody was having a good time and you weren’t supposed to have a good time working. We invented having a good time and having a job at the same time.”
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Jack Oliver, music industry executive, was born on February 19, 1945. He died from complications arising from Lewy body dementia on October 14, 2023, aged 78