New documentary chronicles Tucson woman's wild ride through rock history

Chris O’Dell’s wild ride through the glory days of rock ’n’ roll always seemed like something out of a movie.

Now it is.

The new feature-length documentary called “Miss O’Dell” chronicles the Tucson woman’s career in the music industry, from her early days working for the Beatles to her later role as a tour manager for the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Linda Ronstadt, to name a few.

The film will make its world premiere in Tucson on April 11, when The Loft Cinema hosts an already sold-out screening in its 370-seat main theater.

“It’s kind of amazing, because Tucson has been such a big part of my life,” O’Dell said. “I grew up here. I left. I came back a long time ago, and now I’m watching a documentary come out in Tucson. It’s so hard to explain the feeling, but it’s almost unbelievable.”

The Palo Verde High School graduate left the Old Pueblo for Los Angeles in 1966 at the age of 19. After menial work at the periphery of the recording industry, she lucked into a job as a personal assistant at the Beatles’ Apple Records in London in 1968.

She would spend the next two decades working with some of the biggest names in rock music, blazing a trail as one of the only female tour managers in a male-dominated business.

Her voice is part of the chorus at the end of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Her face shows up in the cover-art collage for the Rolling Stones album “Exile on Main St.” Her family snapshots have Ringo Starr in them.

The documentary borrows its name from a song George Harrison wrote about O’Dell and later released as the B-side to his 1973 solo hit “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth).”

“Miss O’Dell” is also the title of her 2009 memoir about her charmed, exhausting and sometimes painful rock music odyssey.

Liverpool West Productions, which made the film, describes it as a “backstage VIP pass to the life of a woman who saw it all.”

Lofty debut

The movie premiere in Tucson will feature a live concert by an all-star band of local musicians performing songs by some of the legendary acts O’Dell worked with.

After the screening, O’Dell will take part in a question-and-answer session and sign copies of her memoir.

A number of celebrities recorded video messages that will be played to introduce the documentary, including Ronstadt, Bobby Whitlock from Derek and the Dominos, and May Pang, a long-time friend of O’Dell’s whose affair with John Lennon was chronicled in the documentary “The Lost Weekend: A Love Story.”

O’Dell appears briefly in that film, and she helped introduce it when it debuted at The Loft in 2023.

Jeff Yanc, program director for The Loft, said world premieres are rare at the historic, nonprofit arthouse theater on East Speedway, but this one “makes total sense.”

“It was kind of a no-brainer to me,” he said. “Tucsonans love movies about Tucsonans.”

The Loft has scheduled daily screenings of “Miss O’Dell” through April 17. The movie is slated to debut on streaming platforms on May 13.

Since there are no more tickets available for opening night, O’Dell plans to return to The Loft for the evening show on April 12 and the matinee on April 13 to sign some more books and answer questions from audience members.

London calling

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She said she was first approached about making a documentary in 2022, when movie producer Doug Schwab tracked her down while she was signing copies of her memoir at the annual Fest For Beatles Fans in New Jersey.

“He bought a book and left his card and said, ‘I’d like to maybe talk to you about a project,’” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, right, sure.’”

Then, on the last day of the convention, she was met in her hotel lobby by British director Simon Weitzman, who doubled down on Schwab’s pitch. “And when someone tells you something in an English accent, you believe it,” O’Dell said with a laugh.

The documentary was shot in London and Los Angeles in 2023. Among those interviewed were influential BBC music show host “Whispering Bob” Harris and English musician, manager and record producer Peter Asher, who was O’Dell’s boss at Apple Records.

“The majority of it is really Beatle-focused,” she said of the documentary.

As part of the filming in London, she strolled across Abbey Road and returned to the site of the Fab Four’s iconic 1969 concert on the rooftop at Apple, which turned out to be their final live performance before they broke up. In photos from that famous, frigid day, O’Dell is the young woman with the blond bob, sitting against the chimney three seats down from Yoko Ono.

O’Dell also appeared on camera in “Miss O’Dell” with her friend Pattie Boyd, the British model who famously divorced George Harrison and later married Eric Clapton — in Tucson, coincidentally enough — after he declared his love for her in the song “Layla.”

The women laughed and swapped stories about the old days, including the time O’Dell spent a few months living with Boyd and Harrison at Friar Park, the famous Victorian estate outside of London that served as the musician’s primary home and recording studio.

Boyd later recorded an introductory message for the movie premiere.

Taste of fame

Now O’Dell said she and her friend are in the early stages of completing a project that the two of them started working on together in the 1980s: Interviews and portraits of some of rock music’s most famous wives and exes.

O’Dell said they profiled about a dozen women, including Linda McCartney (Paul’s wife and a former Arizona Wildcat); Shirley Watts (wife of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts); Maureen Starkey (Ringo’s first wife); Jill Collins (Phil Collins’ second wife); and Nicole Winwood (then married to Steve Winwood).

Boyd took the photographs while O’Dell conducted the interviews. “They are literally conversations on a really old tape recorder,” she said.

They hope to use modern technology to clean up the recordings for eventual use in a documentary and a companion book about what it was like for these women to live inside the whirlwind of rock ’n’ roll fame.

And O’Dell is about to get her own small taste of that, as her story makes its way to the big screen.

Though the run-up to the premiere has been hectic, she said the experience of making the film was “actually kind of fun,” thanks in no small part to her director.

“We worked on a pretty small budget, and Simon did an amazing job with what he had to work with,” she said.

O’Dell is glad she said yes to the guys who approached her at that Beatles convention three years ago, and she’s flattered that they wanted to make a movie about her life in the first place.

“It’s really nice that someone wanted to do that,” the 78-year-old said. “You know, for many years, I was referred to as a groupie, or I was not referred to at all. I was back in the background. To be brought out of the background is validating.”