The snake charmer pushes aside a dusty curtain and leads you into another meditation chamber. Your eyes adjust to the darkness, and you begin to notice odd little instruments lined up along the circular periphery of the room, each seated on a table that resembles a glossy, smooth tree trunk. What’s this?
He asks, “have you ever heard of Alexis Mardas?”
~~ …who?
“Magic Alex, the crazy Greek inventor. He used to hang around with the Beatles during their time in the ashram, and you could say he was instrumental in the Beatles eventually leaving the ashram.”
~~ Why’d they leave?
“Alex told them he’d seen the Maharishi making sexual advances towards one of the American women who was staying at the ashram. John and George were disgusted by this, but it was a long time coming – John’d been feeling for a while that the Maharishi was only in it for the celebrities and the fame and the money, and he didn’t think that that was the right path for a spiritual man to follow. Cynthia, his wife at the time, was still a believer – she thought Alex was the one with bad intentions, just trying to spoil a good man’s name.”
~~ What was the truth?
Alexis Mardas, 'Magic Alex', resting his hands on John and Paul's heads
His blue eyes sparkled, as though he’d been waiting for you to ask something along those lines. “Truth? Tell me, what is truth? What is absolute in the face of one person with four faces, four personalities? Who is an unbiased observer who can say with confidence that they know what really happened in those days? Past a point, who can even rely on their memory, and who was keeping track of what was reality and what wasn’t?”
Of course, you should’ve expected that. He’s a snake charmer living in the ruins of the transcendental 60s, and you think he’d give you a straight answer to a question like “what is truth”? Not as if he hasn’t been waiting sixty years to impart his wisdom.
~~ Alright, alright. What I meant was, did the Maharishi really make those advances? What’d they find out about it?
“Nothing was proved. I don’t want to make any comments about the sexual misconduct, but I always sensed the Maharishi had perhaps more sinister intentions than he let on. Sinister in the sense that he was drawn in by money, by the material world – I don’t think that makes him a bad man, but I’d say it does make him a questionable guru. Anyway, the fury of the band waned with time, and they began to doubt these allegations as well. Which brings us back to the man that made them, Alex Mardas.”
You walk around the room, looking at these queer objects and reading the little plaques underneath each one.
MAGIC PAINT (MAKES OBJECTS IT IS PAINTED ON INVISIBLE)
ELECTRICAL PAINT (CAN BE PLUGGED IN TO LIGHT UP THE ROOM)
ARTIFICIAL SUN (HOVER OVER BAKER ST AND LIGHT UP THE SKY FOR OPENING OF BEATLES CLOTHING SHOP “APPLE BOUTIQUE”)
FORCE FIELD FOR RINGO’S DRUMS
LOUDSPEAKER WALLPAPER (CAN PLUG INTO STEREO SYSTEM)
LEVITATING HOUSE
Most of the objects are just models, with each invention somehow managing to one-up the next in its fantastical nature. The last model was a figurine of a human head with a hole drilled through the space between the eyebrows. At just the right angle, you could see an eye painted on the wall behind through the opening in the skull. The plaque read “TREPANNING – GET COSMIC INSTANTLY”.
What do all of these have to do with the Beatles?
“I thought you might ask that. Mardas, the crazy Greek, was an inventor. When the Beatles started Apple Corps, he was appointed as head of Apple Electronics, and made a lot of far-reaching statements about the things he could design as well as things he claimed he had designed in the past. The Beatles were naïve at the time, George says so himself, and couldn’t see through his act. This room is full of all the inventions he promised them, and later stated that he had never actually claimed or intended to make. I actually have something quite funny in here about him actually, something that John had said when they were leaving the ashram but I can’t really remember and I’d hate to misquote…”
As he rifles through his satchel, you wonder how he could ever have heard you ask that last question because you’re pretty sure you didn’t say it out loud.
“Here it is: about the time he was writing the song Sexy Sadie, which was based on the Maharishi himself: "that was written just as we were leaving, waiting for our bags to be packed in the taxi that never seemed to come. We thought: 'They're deliberately keeping the taxi back so as we can't escape from this madman's camp.' And we had the mad Greek with us who was paranoid as hell. He kept saying, 'It's black magic, black magic. They're gonna keep you here forever.' I must have got away because I'm here." The mad Greek -- something about that has such a ring to it. Let’s move on.”