For nearly a decade, The Beatles were the biggest band on the planet. They had fans across the globe and brought in immense amounts of money. According to one employee, though, the band never paid overly extravagant salaries. He shared what life was like for him after the band broke up.
A Beatles employee said the band never paid very well
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Peter Brown worked as a personal assistant to Beatles manager Brian Epstein and, after Epstein’s death, took on many of his former responsibilities. This was a major position, but Brown claimed he wasn’t entirely satisfied with his salary during his Beatles years.
“No, I wasn’t [well-off financially when the band broke up],” he told Rolling Stone. “I was on a very good salary and had a lot of perks, but I didn’t make a fortune. The Beatles never paid anyone that well. I made much more money after leaving them. They thought in an old-fashioned, Liverpool way, like, ‘Let’s be sensible, no sense getting carried away’ [laughs].”
Still, he said there were many benefits to working for the band, even after he left their employ.
“I really rather enjoyed it. It’s funny, because only since I’ve been in the U.S. has it been suggested that this or that happened because I was manager of the Beatles’ company,” he said. “And always my reaction is, ‘Well, how dare you think that!’ I suppose I certainly was lucky, but I just never thought of it that way. My ego has always been sufficient enough to think that I did it. I don’t have any affiliation with anyone now, but I still manage to get a decent seat in a good restaurant.”
The Beatles had a number of concerns about the financial situation at Apple Records
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Part of the reason The Beatles may not have paid as well as Brown may have hoped was because they claimed to not have as much money as people thought. This became especially clear to them after founding Apple Records.
“I think [Apple is] a bit messy and it wants tightening up. We haven’t got half the money people think we have,” John Lennon said in the book Lennon: The Definitive Biography by Ray Coleman, adding, “We have enough to live on but we can’t let Apple go on like it is. We started off with loads of ideas of what we wanted to do — an umbrella for different activities. But like one or two Beatle things, it didn’t work because we aren’t practical and we weren’t quick enough to realize that we need a businessman’s brain to run the whole thing.”
While Paul McCartney bristled at Lennon making these public remarks, George Harrison agreed with his bandmate. He said they had to worry about running out of money.
The band occasionally overlooked their employees in pursuit of their music
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While the band had legitimate concerns about money, they did sometimes overlook the needs of their employees to benefit their music. As they recorded Let It Be, they switched recording locations only to discover that their new studio had a noisy heating system. They dealt with this by turning it off.
“There was a central heating boiler in the office and it was not soundproofed. So somebody pointed this out: ‘There’s the central heating making a din,’ and The Beatles said: ‘We’ll turn it off when we’re in here. We’ll just have quiet fires,’” press officer Derek Taylor said in The Beatles Anthology. “The rest of the building could go to hell — they were just ordinary people, little people. So it wasn’t only in the press office that people were making wrong decisions.”
The band lit fires as they recorded, but this eventually became a problem too.
