Steve Jobs often fell back on the words and music of the Beatles on stage while talking about the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976 (incorporated in 1977) — Apple. From the time he found joy in playing I Should Have Known Better while talking of the iPod (with Jobs humming along and saying “I am dating myself”), Let It Be during a demo of iTunes or quoting a line from Two of Us during an interview, he thrived on the music created by the Fab Four. In fact, many say that when Jobs incorporated Apple Computer, it was a tribute to the Beatles.
The British band and the iconic tech company from Cupertino have a long history, with the Belgian artist René Magritte featuring in the middle. After all, it was Magritte whose 1966 painting ‘Le Jeu de Mourre’ is at the heart of this story.
Rene’s orchard
Paul McCartney was friends with Barry Miles, an English author who helped start the independent newspaper, International Times. He was getting introduced to writers like William Burroughs. This is around the time John Lennon was being an avant-garde man because of his interactions with Yoko Ono.
McCartney also became friends with an art dealer named Robert Fraser. “I was living on my own in London [he moved from the Asher household to St John’s Wood in April 1965], and the other guys were married in the suburbs,” the singer told Paul Du Noyer which ultimately culminated in the book Conversations with McCartney.
Lennon was making experimental tracks like I am the Walrus and Revolution 9, George Harrison made an adventurous solo album titled Wonderwall Music and also Electronic Sound. All that McCartney could do was Carnival of Light in 1967, which was considered too ‘extreme’.
The story comes back to Fraser, the art dealer. “It was one of these long hot summers in St John’s Wood. We were all in the back garden, sitting amongst the daisies with guitars or something, and he didn’t want to break in on our scene. When we got back in he’d gone. But he’d left a painting as we came through the back door, just on the table. A Magritte painting, with an apple. That’s where we got the Apple insignia,” McCartney told Du Noyer.
Across the painting were the words “Au revoir”. This was also the time the Beatles were thinking about going beyond music — music label, fashion and so on.
In a 1993 interview, the singer said: “And this big green apple, which I still have now, became the inspiration for the logo. And then we decided to cut it in half for the B-side”.
Magritte “turned the world upside down and inside out in terms of meaning and significance”. McCartney said: “Science and philosophy and religion are starting to converge on this idea that, whatever hat you put on, you are still you … Magritte’s specs are a reminder: The world is a jungle of crazy interpretations.”
Somewhere in the background the Beatles were changing tracks and they were no longer the lads who once sang Love Me Do or She Loves You. They also agreed to McCartney’s idea to rename Beatles Ltd to Apple Music Ltd in homage of Magritte. Soon, the band’s manager Brian Epstein died. It made the group explore more than ever before.
The band opened a hip boutique clothing store in Marylebone in December 1967 and in January 1968, the band decided to expand their business horizons and Apple Music Ltd. became Apple Corps Ltd. It was a multimedia company that controlled a series of other businesses, like publishing, merchandise and other creative pursuits. It also included the record label, Apple Records, on which the Beatles released new albums. They also signed artistes like James Taylor and Jackie Lomax.
Magritte’s apple found a creative treatment in the bands of graphic designer Gene Mahon. He wanted to use a photograph of an apple on the A-side of the label’s records, and an image of an apple cut in half on the B-side, which would also feature the track’s name and running time, besides other information. Mahon commissioned photographer Paul Castell to photograph a series of apples set against different coloured backgrounds. Months later, the band decided on a shiny green Granny Smith apple. On August 26, 1968, Hey Jude was released, the first on their new record label. It was a smash hit.
But the band continued to fall apart. Finally, the group’s contractual partnership was dissolved but Apple Corps remained intact.
George Harrison was flying
A well-researched paper — Global History of Capitalism Project — from February 2023 sheds light on what happened next.
George Harrison was going through an in-flight magazine in 1978. It had an advertisement for a new computer company, founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The logo? A large, rainbow-coloured Apple with a bite taken out of it. The name was Apple Computer (originally Apple Computer Company). Harrison was unaware that a designer named Rob Janoff had created Apple’s new logo to highlight the innovative colour display on the new Apple II computer.
Clearly, the Beatles didn’t have any interest in computers back then. Meanwhile, Apple Corps was re-releasing old Beatles songs and business was good.
The first of the legal battles was settled for $80,000. Apple Computer paid the money for the rights to keep the name and both companies agreed to keep their respective logos. Apple Corps agreed to never enter the world of computers and Apple Computers agreed to never enter the world of music.
But times were changing and audio was becoming an important part of the tech world. Apple obviously added newer hardware and software to allow Macintosh computers synthesize sound. The Beatles were unhappy or at least Apple Corps went nah-nah-nah. In 1989, the company sued the Cupertino tech giant. A $26.5 million settlement was reached in 1991. The judge ruled that Apple Computer could use the Apple name and logo on products with the capacity to “reproduce, run, play, or otherwise deliver” music. But, not on “physical media delivering pre-recorded music,” like CDs and cassettes.
Apple also agreed to rename sound effects that referred to musical instruments on their Macintosh computers. Apple sound designer Jim Reekes had a cheeky solution — he renamed the beep sound “chimes” to “Sosumi”. Read it again and it will sound like “so sue me”!
With a little help from…
Steve Jobs, who was forced to leave Apple in 1985 after a boardroom coup, returned in 1997. He had great ideas and wouldn’t allow any Apple Corps to come in his way. In October 2001, Apple Computer released the iPod, the iconic portable digital music player and then came the iTunes digital Music Store that allowed customers to purchase songs to download onto their iPods. Here we go again.
Lennon was shot dead in 1980 and Harrison died in 2001. Apple Corps was under the management of their widows, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, as well as Ringo Starr and McCartney.
They decided to not licence the music of the Beatles for digital sales. Apple Computer did not use the name “Apple” in connection with the sale of music on the iTunes Store but the logo was there. In 2003, Apple Corps sued for the third and final time.
In May 2006, Apple Computer won the right to keep its logo on the iTunes digital music store when a British judge rejected a claim by Apple Corps, guardian of the Beatles’ musical interests, over the use of the bitten-apple symbol. Justice Edward Mann of the High Court said Apple Corps had failed to prove that the use of Apple Computer’s rainbow-colored logo on iTunes infringed on a 1991 agreement with Apple Corps.
Then came “that” moment. In January 2007, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Moscone Convention Centre in San Francisco. He announced a product that combined the iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. He had reinvented the phone. The iPhone was born.
Jobs scrolled through a list of artistes (to show the phone’s ‘iPod capabilities’) and tapped on the Beatles. What he played was With A Little Help From My Friends, followed by Lovely Rita. He was clearly still in love with the Beatles.
He wasn’t done. Another announcement turned up. “Today, we’ve added to the Mac and the iPod. We’ve added Apple TV and now iPhone. And you know, the Mac is really the only one that you think of as a computer. Right? And so we’ve thought about this and we thought, you know, maybe our name should reflect this a little bit more than it does. So we’re announcing today we’re dropping the ‘computer’ from our name, and from this day forward, we’re going to be known as Apple Inc., to reflect the product mix that we have today.”
It was the day he ended his keynote with an old Wayne Gretzky quote: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
Steve’s philosophy
There was still one more step left. The music of the Beatles remained missing from iTunes for digital downloads. They all worked it out, as the Fab Four would have sung.
In November 2010, the Beatles’ original albums, along with three compilations and a box set, went on sale: Individual tracks was priced $1.29, single albums $12.99, doubles (like the White Album) $19.99, and the box set $149.99. Each package included video documentaries, and the box adds Live at the Washington Coliseum, 1964, a film of the band’s first concert in the US.
“We’re really excited to bring the Beatles’ music to iTunes,” Paul McCartney said in a news release. “It’s fantastic to see the songs we originally released on vinyl receive as much love in the digital world as they did the first time around.”
Ringo was his cheeky self: “I am particularly glad to no longer be asked when the Beatles are coming to iTunes. At last, if you want it — you can get it now — The Beatles from Liverpool to now!”
Jobs, of course, had the final word: “We love the Beatles and are honoured and thrilled to welcome them to iTunes…. It has been a long and winding road to get here.”
Jobs always had great things to say about the Beatles. He once described his model for business: “My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”
A song that particularly appealed to Jobs was Strawberry Fields Forever. In the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, the Apple co-founder discussed how a bootleg recording of the Strawberry Fields Forever sessions helped him shape his business philosophy.
He said: “It’s a complex song, and it’s fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months…. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect. [As he listens to the third take, he points out how the instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we’d make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It’s a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it’s like, ‘Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?’”
Bringing the Beatles to iTunes was his passion. “Steve had a lifelong love affair with the Beatles’ music, and it was an incredibly important part of his whole being,” EMI’s former CEO Roger Faxon said in an interview with the Rolling Stone. “He wanted to present them in as fine and as exquisite a way as possible — the elegance, the polarity, the compelling nature of the presentation of the Beatles in the digital world was orchestrated and designed by Steve. You felt his passion.”
Jobs remained a Beatles fan till he died in 2011. Former Apple executive Tony Fadell, who worked with Jobs as senior vice-president of the iPod division, remembered a lunch when the tech guru received a phone call from Paul McCartney and excitedly declared, “Oh my God! I gotta take this!”
Jobs loved music and he enjoyed listening to new artistes. He was in awe of John Mayer and U2. But when it came to his personal life, the Beatles and Bob Dylan had all the answers for him.