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

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.”

On the rooftop

O’Dell pops up several times in director Peter Jackson’s restored footage from 1969.

In Part 2 of the series, she briefly appears on screen with Mal Evans. Then in Part 3, she can be seen lying on the floor of the recording studio with Linda McCartney and later in numerous shots taken during the Beatles’ famous rooftop concert, Jan. 30, 1969, at the Apple offices on London’s Savile Row.

She’s the one sitting under the chimney with the blond bob, three seats down from Yoko, watching maybe the most famous rock concert in history — the world’s biggest band playing its last live show ever.

“The songs weren't new to me because I'd heard them in the studio, but it was really exciting to be there and to be watching,” O’Dell said.

Also, she added, “it was freezing cold.”

O’Dell only worked at Apple from 1968 until 1970, but she made a career’s worth of contacts and a lifetime’s worth of memories in just over two years. Once, for example, she flew on a helicopter to hand-deliver harmonicas to Bob Dylan for his 1969 comeback show on England’s Isle of Wight.

In retrospect, O’Dell said, drugs may have influenced her initial reaction to “Get Back.”

“I was high. I used to get so paranoid,” she said with a laugh.

O’Dell did indeed leave her home in Tucson, Arizona, but it was music — not grass — that drew her to California in 1966.

Bored with life in the sleepy Old Pueblo, she decided to drop out of beauty school and use the rest of her tuition money to move to Los Angeles, where the members of a band called the Plymouth Rockers had offered her a place to stay.

She arrived in L.A. at 19 years old with a fake ID she had received in downtown Tucson.

Meet the Beatles

A series of menial jobs with record labels and music promoters quickly followed, which eventually landed her a meeting with Derek Taylor, the famed press officer for the Beatles.

The two became fast friends, and he soon asked her to come to London with him to work at Apple Corps Ltd., the band’s new multimedia company.

She said she was reluctant at first, but she was convinced to go by her roommate at the time, an aspiring actress by the name of Teri Garr.

O’Dell sold her record collection, gave up her car and bought a plane ticket to England with money her parents gave her after cashing in her life insurance policy.

She started work at Apple in May 1968, and within a week she had been introduced to John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

Just a few years earlier, she had been a high school girl in Tucson, dancing to Beatles records with her friends. Suddenly she was doing odd jobs for members of the band, chit-chatting with them in the office and, whenever she could, sitting in on their recording sessions.

She said it was a little like meeting Robin Hood or some other “fantasy figure.”

“They didn’t seem to really exist, so to suddenly see these human people walk into a room and to talk to them, I was awestruck,” O’Dell said.

After a while, though, she got used to being around famous musicians, and they got used to her being around.

O’Dell would sit in the control room and watch them make music, and not just the Beatles. She was there when James Taylor recorded his first record. She sat in on some of Joe Cocker’s sessions.

Gradually, she got to know some of the rock stars’ wives, too.

She said she and Linda McCartney found common ground right off the bat: “She loved Tucson, I love Tucson. We bonded over Tucson, basically."

O'Dell grew especially close to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison’s wife at the time, and Ringo’s first wife, Maureen Starkey — friendships that would outlive band breakups, divorces and other drama.

'Miss O'Dell'

Near the end of her time at Apple, O’Dell lived with George and Pattie for a few months while they restored Friar Park, the famous Victorian estate outside of London that later became Harrison’s primary home and studio.

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She said she and Pattie would go shopping for antique furniture to fill the empty mansion or stay at home polishing the tarnished light switches, which were shaped like little friars’ heads with switches for noses.

O’Dell was there the day in 1970 that Paul McCartney announced his departure from the Beatles with a press release and John Lennon came by the mansion to discuss the news with George.

“It was the first time I ever saw John without Yoko,” she said.

O’Dell would stay on at Friar Park to help out as Harrison wrote and recorded his post-Beatles triple album “All Things Must Pass” and recruited artists for his benefit “Concert for Bangladesh.”

Harrison returned the favor by immortalizing her in a song he wrote, chiding her for not calling him during a lonely stint he had while working in California in the spring of 1971.

He played “Miss O’Dell” for her when she finally visited him at the beachside mansion where he was holed up in Malibu. He recorded the song a year or so later.

O’Dell said there was a push at the record company to release it as a single in 1973 — something a bit breezier and more personal to balance out Harrison’s recent run of political and spiritual songs. Instead, “Miss O’Dell” wound up on the flip side of one of Harrison’s biggest hits as a solo artist.

“In the end, ‘Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)’ won out,” she said with a smile. “I’m always going to be the B-side.”

Hitting the road

After her time at Apple, O’Dell did some work for Derek and the Dominos and stayed at Eric Clapton’s place for a few months while he toured with the band.

Then she was lured back to Los Angeles in 1971 for a job as an assistant, promoter and eventually a full-fledged tour manager for some of the biggest acts in rock music.

The Rolling Stones hired her to help with the L.A. sessions for their 1972 double album “Exile on Main St.” and their subsequent "STP" U.S. tour, which included numerous clashes between rowdy fans and police.

During the band’s June 14, 1972, stop at the then-Tucson Community Center, authorities used tear gas to disperse several hundred people who tried to force their way inside.

Though female tour managers were rare back then, O’Dell also oversaw Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 1974 reunion tour, Bob Dylan's “Rolling Thunder Revue” in 1975 and tours by the Grateful Dead, George Harrison, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Linda Ronstadt and Santana, among others.

O’Dell scored a few uncredited cameos along the way.

Her picture appears in the cover-art collage for the Stones’ “Exile on Main St” (that’s her at the bottom left of the rear gatefold).

Her voice is part of the sprawling chorus of “Na, na-na, na-na-na-nas” at the end of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”

And her mother, during a trip to London to visit O’Dell in 1969, wound up singing with the Krishnas, when Harrison invited them into the studio at Apple to record “Hare Krishna Mantra.”

Her experiences have drawn comparisons to Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film “Almost Famous,” about a 1970s rock band and the hangers-on who follow them on tour, but she bristles when people describe her as some sort of “super groupie.”

“No, I worked. I actually had a job. I got paid,” she said. “I’ve got the tax records to prove it. And the scars.”

It wasn’t always just business for her, though.

Future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Leon Russell wrote two songs about O’Dell — “Hummingbird” and “Pisces Apple Lady,” both from his self-titled debut record — while the two dated for about five months starting in October 1969.

Later, in the 1970s, she fell into brief affairs with Sam Shepard and Ringo Starr.

According to her memoir, she is the “woman down the hall” and Shepard is the “Coyote” in the song Joni Mitchell wrote after the still-married actor and playwright ditched O’Dell for Mitchell.

As for her tryst with Starr, O'Dell writes that she was too ashamed to lie when Maureen confronted her about it. Somehow, though, she managed to stay friends with both Maureen and Ringo, who would later become godfather to O’Dell’s only child, Will.

Getting better

Even O’Dell’s version of settling down was wild and glamorous.

In 1985, after a hazy decade of working and partying on the road, she married Anthony Russell, the son of a British aristocrat, in a star-studded ceremony at Leeds Castle, where her new husband had spent part of his childhood.

A year later, at age 39, O’Dell gave birth to a son, William Odo Alexander Russell, grandson to the fourth Baron of Ampthill.

But those “scars” she mentioned still hadn’t healed. She had developed a taste for cocaine and booze through her career in rock 'n’ roll, and her addictions carried over into her marriage.

Over the next three years, O’Dell got herself sober, moved back to Tucson and got divorced.

She would go on to earn college degrees in counseling and psychology and find work at local rehab facilities for others struggling with addiction — all while she built a quiet life for her son and herself, surrounded by family, back where she belonged.

Today, she is an unassuming Arizona retiree, with a third husband and a dog named Max, though she remains close with her first husband and others from that other life she led the first time she left Tucson.

It all seems a little unbelievable looking back, she said, but she has boxes of old pictures, keepsakes and now a new documentary on Disney+ to prove it.

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

Photos of famous musicians who have jammed out in Tucson