After run with rock legends, Tucson woman got back to where she once belonged

[mahatmakanejeeves]

ALERT | TOP STORY | TOPICAL

After run with rock legends, Tucson woman got back to where she once belonged

Henry Brean Dec 31, 2021 Updated Jan 14, 2022



Chris O’Dell, who worked at Apple Records from 1968 to 1970, looks at a Rolling Stones album, “Exile on Main Street,” which features a photograph of her on the back cover.

Rebecca Sasnett, Arizona Daily Star

Henry Brean

Outside of the Beatles themselves, Chris O’Dell was one of the first people in the world to learn the lyrics to “Get Back.” ... The Tucson woman couldn’t help but take the song a little personally. ... “When I read, ‘Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona … get back, get back to where you once belonged,’ I thought, ‘They're trying to get rid of me,’” O’Dell said last week from her townhouse on the city’s north side.

The 22-year-old Palo Verde High School graduate was working for the Beatles in London in early 1969, when they were recording “Let It Be,” the last studio album they would release as a band. ... Then a secretary at Apple Records, she had come in on the weekend to help out around the studio, so the band’s long-time road manager and personal assistant, Mal Evans, asked her to type up some lyrics from the sessions.

It was the beginning of a crazy, drug-fueled run through the record industry that would place her alongside some of the world’s biggest rock stars at key moments in music history. ... O’Dell chronicled her charmed, sometimes painful rock 'n’ roll career in the 2009 memoir “Miss O’Dell: Hard Days and Long Nights with the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton.”

Now she is getting a rare chance to rewatch moments from her past, thanks to “The Beatles: Get Back,” the three-part documentary series now streaming on Disney+ about the band’s final recording session together. ... “It just moved me right back there. I was back there,” O’Dell said of the documentary. “There’s your life, 52 years later, and it looks like it only happened yesterday.”

{snip}

As O’Dell is fond of saying: “I wasn’t famous, I wasn’t almost famous, but I was there.”

{snip photos of concerts in Tucson]

Contact reporter Henry Brean at [e-mail] or 573-4283. On Twitter: @RefriedBrean

Clapton correction
Contrary to persistent local media reports (including a recent reference in the Star), former Beatle George Harrison apparently did not travel to Tucson in March to 1979 to attend the last-minute wedding of Eric Clapton and Harrison's ex-wife, Pattie Boyd.

Tucsonan and former rock music insider Chris O'Dell, a close friend of Boyd's, was at the ceremony at Apostolic Bethel Temple near Valencia Road and 12th Avenue and the reception at what was then the Sheraton Pueblo Inn near Cushing Street and Interstate 10.

O'Dell said Harrison, whom she also knew well, was not there for either event.

O'Dell isn't quite sure why Clapton and Boyd chose the particular venues — maybe they were trying to keep a low profile — but she said they were in Tucson at the time because it was the first stop on his U.S. tour.

Boyd divorced Harrison in 1974, after Clapton famously wrote the love song "Layla" for the British model. Her marriage to Clapton ended in 1989.