welcome to the machine

Here's an odd thing I noticed yesterday which I surely can't have been the first person to question, and which I'm mildly surprised isn't readily searchable on the internet, what with obsessive Beatles completism being a thing, and people like Mark Lewisohn making an entire career out of cataloguing every aspect of their existence and recorded output. 

As you can imagine there's plenty of Beatle material on YouTube as well, from amusing Beatles-themed quizzes and challenges to all sorts of fascinating micro-analysis, from the rubbishness of the bass-playing on The Long And Winding Road to the identity of the mystery singer on some of the ad lib bits towards the end of All You Need Is Love to the identity of the mystery bass-player(s) on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. It's that last video that caught my eye - not so much for the central topic which is interesting but a bit obscure, but for the flash of a song list (presumably an early one for The White Album) which occurs at about 11:13. There are some handwritten notes in bluish-green felt pen alongside the typed song titles, which appear to give some visual cues for each song, maybe as notes for a planned promotional film or something similar. Anyway, the video pans down the song list and eventually (at around 11:18) we get to a song called What's New Mary Jane. This song is of interest to Beatles obsessives as it didn't make the cut for The White Album and was a "lost" Beatles track for many years until a version (this one entitled What's The New Mary Jane) surfaced on one of the Anthology collections in the mid-1990s. 

Stay with me here, because that's not the interesting bit. Have a look at the note next to the song and you'll see it says "Alexis machine".

A bit odd, right? Most of the other descriptions (the ones immediately above and below, for example) are fairly self-explanatory, so what's this about? And who is this Alexis Machine guy?

First thing to do is establish what this document actually is. This turns out to be surprisingly difficult to do, by which I mean that I'd have assumed that anything even slightly connected with the Beatles would have been obsessively analysed on the internet. This image proves surprisingly tricky to track down, but feeding this Japanese-language web page containing the image through Google Translate reveals that the image was contained in some of the extensive batch of souvenir material issued with the Super Deluxe Edition of the album in 2018. I'm unclear whether this is the same as the 50th anniversary edition, but I assume it probably is. A series of shots of the promotional booklet can be found here and include the image below. No indication as far as I can see whose writing it is - one of the Beatles? George Martin? Someone else?

So what's going on here? Well, I have two things for you. The first thing is that one of the assorted freaks and weirdos who came into the Beatles' orbit in the late 1960s was a guy who they (John Lennon in particular) referred to as Magic Alex. His real name was Yannis Alexis Mardas, and one of the things he did for the Beatles was make electronic machines. He later became head of Apple Electronics, despite having no technical expertise whatsoever; nice work if you can get it. He was also apparently credited as co-writer on early versions of What's The New Mary Jane, before later being removed for some reason. 

So it seems there's a good chance that the phrase is meant to refer to him in some way. But there's another thing: I know the phrase as the name of a character in the book The Dark Half by Stephen King. Well, actually it's not quite as simple as that: the book's principal protagonist, Thad Beaumont, writes violent thrillers under the pen name George Stark, thrillers whose protagonist is called Alexis Machine. 

There's another layer to the (glass) onion here though: King himself, appropriately for a book mainly about writing, borrowed from two other writers for the names of his characters: George Stark is a nod to Donald E. Westlake, who wrote novels under the name Richard Stark, and Alexis Machine is a nod to a character of the same name in a novel called Dark City by Shane Stevens, which seems to be out of print but of which second-hand copies can be had for as little as, erm, 78 quid. 

So, to recap: it seems plausible that the handwritten note next to a song Magic Alex was (originally) credited as co-writer of is at least partly a reference to him, though the syntax is a bit odd, as it definitely appears to say "Alexis machine" rather than "Alex's machine". If the phrase was specifically meant to be someone's name, though, you'd think they might have capitalised "machine". So is it just a coincidence that the phrase also cropped up as someone's name in a novel? The timeline seems important here: the document would have dated from around 1968, and Dark City was published in 1973. So it's theoretically possible that Stevens saw the document at some point in the intervening five years and thought: oy oy, that'd be a good name for a violent criminal in a hardboiled thriller, I'm nicking that. But how plausible is it that he'd seen something that at the time was just a piece of paper in a studio file? It wasn't part of any White Album packaging until the lavish 2018 reissue as far as I can tell. I'm going to go with: not very plausible at all. But how plausible is it that it was just a coincidence? Well, I haven't done the maths, but that seems a bit implausible as well. Perhaps I'm just resistant to that explanation as it would make the whole thing less interesting.

So it's a mystery. The only person who could have definitively answered the question would be Shane Stevens, whose books I have never read, and if they stay at 78 quid a pop I daresay I never will. Unfortunately we can't ask him, because he died in 2007.