On New Year’s Day in 1969, the British writer Barry Miles, whose byline was simply “Miles,” reports on his recent visit to Apple’s Trident Studios in Soho, where over the past few months the Beatles have been finishing the White Album while twenty-one-year-old musician James Taylor—who sang “Something in the Way She Moves” and passed a spring 1968 audition with Paul and George to become Apple’s first American artist—was recording his eponymous debut album.

“I was pleased,” Miles writes in his favorable review in the International Times, “because it’s nice to see and hear people working happily together, in close coordination, producing sounds which are good to hear, trying out ideas, getting it all down on tape for everyone to hear later.”

The harmonious picture Miles paints of Taylor’s recording sessions is perfectly in line with Paul’s vision for Apple, though according to Ken Mansfield, the US manager of Apple Records, in reality “the atmosphere at Apple is utter chaos…‘We can’t be more number one, we can’t be more famous. We’re going to start a business, and we’re gonna do it right,’” Mansfield remembers Paul telling him. “Everything is about creativity.”

John tests the boundary between art and commerce, insisting that a nude photo of him and Yoko taken at 34 Montagu Square appear on the cover of Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.

The idea came to him during a meditation session in India. “I wrote Yoko telling her that I planned to have her in the nude on the cover,” John later says. “She was quite surprised, but nowhere near as much as George and Paul.”

Sir Joseph Lockwood, head of EMI, grouses, “Well, I should find some better bodies to put on the cover than your two. They’re not very attractive.” In November of 1968, the album, which features the avant-garde recordings that John and Yoko made on their first night together, goes out in a plain brown wrapper—selling only five thousand copies in the UK.

On January 2, 1969, officials at Newark airport seize a shipment of thirty thousand copies, denouncing the album cover as “pornographic.” The incident prompts the FBI to open a file on John.

“But it was worth it for the howl that went up,” John says. “It really blew their minds. It cleared the air a bit. People always try to kill anything that’s honest. The album wasn’t ugly, it was just a point of view.”

George and John’s definitions of art are rapidly diverging. Since returning from the maharishi’s ashram, George “was angry because he couldn’t achieve the level of spirituality he wanted,” his wife, Pattie Boyd, recalls.

“Fuck off—can’t you see I’m meditating?” he lashes out at one stewardess who disturbs him during a transatlantic flight.