Lennon and McCartney to the Rescue[I]
When do you think the bubble will burst?
It was astounding how many times the Beatles could be asked that question—and in how many myriad ways. The American press had pounded them with it, tossing it out like a beach ball at every opportunity. “I’ll probably open my own hair salon,” Ringo predicted in dead earnest. Paul supposed he’d fancy teaching. And as for John and George—they hadn’t a clue. The future: what twenty-one-year-old boy even thought further than two days ahead?
How long do you expect Beatlemania to last?
“Till death do us part,” John muttered through tightly clenched teeth. And what about his ambition, that is, after the bubble burst? “Count the money.”
For all the pissing and moaning about the shelf life of pop stardom, the Beatles were, by all accounts, rock-solid. They’d banked a record $1 million-plus from the American tour (including an astonishing $150,000 for a single show in Kansas City), which seemed a mere pittance in light of the $5.8 million in U.S. rentals for A Hard Day’s Night. Record sales were soaring, with no apparent letdown. By October 1964, EMI had shipped an estimated 10 million Beatles discs—a staggering number, just mind-boggling—accounting for the company’s 80 percent surge in pretax profits. (Capitol followed suit, announcing a 17 percent sales rise “largely due to Beatle [sic] records.”) When Elvis was awarded his second gold single (for sales of more than 500,000 units) it was seen as an unsurpassable record, and now the Beatles owned three, with numbers four and five within reach. The Daily Mail put their earnings from abroad at $56 million—this at a time when a Cadillac cost $3,600.
Only the year before, according to his autobiography, Brian had considered accepting £150,000 for a 50 percent share in the Beatles. Variety also reported that he was actively pursuing the sale of a quarter interest in the Beatles for $4 million, as a tax hedge. Now he turned down $10 millionfrom an American syndicate to buy the Beatles, convinced he’d only scratched the surface of the rockpile.
Still, Brian was all too aware of how abruptly the wheel of celebrity turned, and he therefore wasted no time in planning for the future. There were promises of half a dozen TV and radio appearances, the most important being the American variety show Shindig!, which agreed to film a special segment around them originating from London. Another holiday pantomime (still three months off and already sold out for its entire run) began production, along with a new Christmas flexi-disk for their sixty-five thousand fan club members. And by the end of October, they had also concluded plans for their next movie—“this one in color… and with a much stronger plot line,” according to Walter Shenson.
The most anticipated project, of course, was a new album for Parlophone; the recording sessions kicked off less than a week after the Beatles returned from abroad. It seemed ridiculous to try to squeeze it in so quickly, on top of their other obligations, but EMI had made clear that they “need[ed] another album” out by mid-November, in time for the holiday market, and the Beatles, still ever its faithful subjects, were programmed to comply.
John and Paul had been writing steadily—together and apart—throughout their travels, with about eight songs in good enough shape to record right away. But it had not been a breeze, unlike the previous records. They’d struggled through what John described as “a lousy period,” a time when everything they came up with sounded trite, even flat. There were even hints that the album might have to be put off until the material was up to snuff; but before anyone panicked, they’d finally pounded out a few gems that had the earmarks of their very best work. “Basically,” Paul explained, they set out to re-create their “stage show, with some new songs” as a bridge to the creative territory they were exploring.
The Beatles’ drift away from the simplest pop forms, which had begun under Buddy Holly’s influence, had accelerated under Dylan’s. Even relatively recent hits like “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “P.S. I Love You” no longer played the predominant role in their prodigal repertoire. Like John, Paul needed something new. There was no challenge anymore to churning out fare-thee-well lyrics—“the moon and June stuff,” as Paul disdained it—in a neat two-and-a-half-minute frame. If anything, the seven months of constant travel and fame had given them more perspective on the structure of songwriting, confidently testing new chords and progressions, to say nothing of language, every time they buckled down. “We got more and more free to get into ourselves,” Paul explained. “And I think also John and I wanted to do something bluesy, a bit darker, more grown-up. Rather than just straight pop.”
This he said in describing the basis for “Baby’s in Black,” a pretentious, image-laden song that eventually made the cut, but it could serve as well for their entire approach. John’s and Paul’s fascination with Dylanesque touches—and to some extent the Stones’ foray into R&B—cast an edgy enthusiasm over their latest efforts. There is a definite bridge here to their later albums, discernible in songs such as “I’m a Loser,” whose melodic pattern would resonate exactly a year later in the ebb and flow of “Norwegian Wood.” The same with “No Reply,” with its painful scenes of rejection and humiliation. John called it his “version of ‘Silhouettes,’ ” the 1957 doo-wop hit by the Rays, which had been a staple on his turntable in Menlove Avenue. “I had that image of walking down the street and seeing [a girl] silhouetted on the window and not answering the phone,” he recalled. And while it reworked a long-established theme, its plaintiveness ran against the light current of familiar Beatles songs.
In this burst of daring songs that kicked off Beatles for Sale, along with the lush but anxiety-ridden “Every Little Thing,” John and Paul continued to grapple with the prospect of evolving without alienating. Experimentation and growth had become something of a professional obsession, but it would have been counterproductive, they realized, to do a complete about-face. Just as they’d felt initially that “From Me to You” was “too way out,” there was a suspicion that the audience “[wouldn’t] know quite what to make” of the intensely charged imagery, even though its authors considered it “cool.” They were still making a conscious effort not to deviate too much from the fold, to take creative baby steps as opposed to the proverbial flying leap.
The end of October was a particularly harried period when the Beatles most felt the squeeze. A number of the original songs were actually written on the spot—that is, in the studio—which broke every rule in the book. “No one was allowed to record like that,” recalls Tony Crane, of the Merseybeats. “Even when we had a song in the Top Five, we were given three hours at most to record an A-side, and if at the end of that time we still weren’t satisfied, it still went out as a single.” But the Beatles swept that old tradition right out the studio door. Paul and John had always loved improvising, but up until now it had been done at Paul’s house, in hotel rooms, in the back of vans. Now they took it a step further. “The ideas were there for a first verse, or a chorus,” Ringo explained, “but it could be changed by the writers as we were doing it, or if anyone had a good idea.”
Still, material for this album was at a premium. At a loss, they dredged up “I’ll Follow the Sun,” left over from the Forthlin Road period and four or five covers they’d “played live so often,” according to George, “that we only had to get a sound on them and do them.”
Through it all, John and Paul continued to write, with blocks of time devoted to working in their comfort zone: eyeball-to-eyeball. There was always a room available at Abbey Road studios where they could steal a few minutes to bash around ideas. There was also the tiny music salon below the Ashers’ flat, when it wasn’t booked for lessons. Otherwise, Paul ran his new forest green Aston Martin DB out to Kenwood, where John was spending most of his spare time since returning from the States, and they’d spread out in a little mess of an attic room overlooking the garden to “kick things around” for two or three hours.
Occasionally, when Paul was preoccupied, he arranged to be driven out to John’s in order to spend the travel time writing or just reading the newspaper. One day, just as the limo was turning into the driveway, Paul put down his paper and, more out of politeness than real interest, asked the chauffeur how he’d been. The driver gazed in his rearview mirror and shook his head. “Oh, working hard,” he replied with an emphatic huff, “working eight days a week.” A bell went off in Paul’s head. Eight days a week! “It was like a little blessing from the gods,” Paul recalled. No sooner had John answered his door than Paul dropped this little nugget into his hands. “Well, I’ve got the title,” he insisted, and blurted it out. John, normally as competitive as an insurance salesman, knew when to hop on the bus. They practically dashed upstairs and began spitting out lyrics, just “filling it in from the title,” as Paul remembered it. Bam, bam, bam.
Much later John dismissed “Eight Days a Week,” saying it “was never a good song,” but at the time they wrote it there was no hesitation as to whether it would fit into their recording plans. An obvious crowd-pleaser, “Eight Days a Week” contains all the drive and spunk of their previous hits, its exuberant spirit punctuated by explosive guitar fanfare, joyous handclaps, and an unforgettable hook—“a typical happy John-and-Paul song,” as Derek Johnson, writing in NME, described it. And each pop hit they offered carved out space for more radical exploration.
John and Paul had written “I Feel Fine” in the studio as one of the last songs for the new album. John had pinched the nifty guitar lick from the 1961 Bobby Parker single, “Watch Your Step,” which he admitted was one of his favorite records. “I told [the other Beatles] I’d write a song specially for the riff,” he explained to NME’s Chris Hutchins, and not more than a few hours later he and Paul had knocked it out.
Convinced it was “lousy,” they cut “I Feel Fine” almost as an afterthought and were delighted by the result: it “sounded like an ‘A’ side” from the very first playback. NME called “I Feel Fine” “a real gas… a happy-go-lucky mid-tempo swinger [with] a tremendous rhythm and a really catchy melody.” Hardly insightful (there was no one in Britain writing sophisticated pop criticism at the time), but at least it was headed in the right direction, hitting all the essential elements. One aspect the reviewer seized on—but couldn’t easily articulate—was the “startling, reverberating opening” for which there was no real precedent.
It was the result of a happy accident. The Beatles had finished recording a decent take of the song and were eager to hear the playback. “We were just about to walk away,” Paul remembered, “when John leaned his guitar against the amp.” It was an acoustic Gibson sunburst fitted with a pickup to give it a brighter sound. There wasn’t very much juice in the line, but the proximity of guitar and amp produced an electrical spike that sent distortion echoing through the studio.
For the Beatles, discovering feedback was like hitting a gusher. No one had ever considered using a sound effect before. Certainly they’d used handclaps and cowbells to enhance rhythm tracks, but nothing strictly technical, aside from double-tracking. “Can we have that on the record?” Paul remembered asking George Martin. No problem. They re-created the accident. Each time, they seemed to get more control over the sound: if they regulated the volume, the report would roar in key; cranking it up produced pure noise; by moving the guitar to and fro they could stretch the tone to their liking. They learned about electronics: how pickups function like microphones, the way distorting a frequency feeds it back into itself so that the same sound loops and spirals out of control. Lowering the volume requires pinpoint accuracy but produces a sharper, more resonant sound. Each new finding gave them incentive to tinker.
In a year, the Beatles would almost single-handedly reinvent the way music was recorded, but for now they were content to revel in their discovery. So much so that later that same session, while demo’ing a take of “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” they drowned George’s vocal under a torrent of tape delay, creating an eerie echo effect that makes it sound as if he were singing inside of a steel drum.
While John later boasted that “I Feel Fine” contained “the first feedback on any record,” there was nothing about its use that sent producers running to their consoles. The sound was already as familiar as tape hiss. What it lacked was the synthesis of imagination and experience—a way of weaving it into the densening web of a song, using each new color and shade to conceptualize the arrangement and engulf the listener in an unpredictable experience. In the fall of 1965 the Beatles eventually put it all together. Like everything else they’d done, it was the result of exploring the past and using those early pop influences to go their own way. As John described it, “We finally took over the studio.”
With the album all but spoken for, the “autumn tour” of Britain seemed like a vacation. Booked back in December, before all hell broke loose, the luxuries were few and the chaos next to nothing. There were no fifteen-thousand-seat arenas, no hotel stampedes, no planes to catch. It was a good old-fashioned string of one-nighters through the endless British countryside, stopping at cities whose names and landmarks were as familiar as the nightly set of songs. Bradford, Leicester, Birmingham, Ardwick… the Beatles had covered these lonely roads repeatedly on their way up the rock ’n roll food chain, when it was exciting just to blow into the next town. They knew every turnoff and railroad crossing, every road stop, which stores had fresh cheese sandwiches on the counter or hot tea ready, the distance between filling stations and B and Bs. In the rural corners of the country, where endless stretches of miles were as bleak and isolated as the Gulag, they recognized the shortcuts and detours, the points where the roads were too narrow to get around the flatbed carts filled with hay or produce that inched their way along.
Brighton, Exeter, Plymouth, Bournemouth… How many times over the years the Beatles had been to Bournemouth! Playing the Winter Gardens and the Gaumont Cinema again and again until, unconsciously, they sensed the pulse of the audience. That was their kind of crowd, a bunch of impetuous shit-kickers, harkening back to the wild scenes at Garston and Litherland. Small and rough, no doubt about it, but welcome.
[II]
The Beatles never questioned the way Brian conducted business. The boys were stars and millionaires: all their wildest dreams had come true. Even later, when they suspected the worst—that “all the deals were bad,” as George overstated it—there was no attempt to second-guess Brian’s authority. No one wanted to derail the runaway train.
As a result, the Beatles had no indication at this time of how badly they’d been fleeced. Not about the shameful royalty rate with EMI, nor about the bargain-basement fees they received on the British package tours. At some point John and Paul would grow heartsick over their publishing arrangement, discovering that they simply gave away 50 percent of their rights—millions of pounds—to Dick James Music, but that was still several years off. There was the early closed-circuit concert fiasco, the ridiculous payout from United Artists. They got ripped off right and left.
There was other carelessness. NEMS’ finances in America were particularly a mess. The proceeds from the last tour had been frozen by the Internal Revenue Service until it was satisfied that proper taxes were paid. That left the Beatles completely out-of-pocket for their five weeks of work. Moreover, during most of the tour Brian had effectively isolated himself from the outside world—there were strings of days when he simply disappeared—to the point that scores of producers and entrepreneurs bearing lucrative proposals, proposals the Beatles should have accepted, were unable to contact him. The number of important deals he let slip through his fingers is scandalous.
There was also the lingering suspicion that money was being squandered. The stories about the lifestyle Seltaeb’s Nicky Byrne led must have made it seem that way. He lived regally and traveled in fast, flashy company. When the Wall Street Journal piggybacked a piece on Byrne with the next wave of Beatles merchandising deals, it sounded a thunderclap in the offices on Argyll Street. Those deals, the Journal reported, were worth anywhere from $40 to $70 million. Simple arithmetic clued in Brian as to the enormity of his blunder. His deal with Seltaeb had been for a measly 10 percent of the profits.
In August, Brian managed to renegotiate the deal, bringing the Beatles’ cut up from 10 to 46 percent, but even that seemed insufficient. All Nicky Byrne was doing, it seemed, was issuing licenses—and reaping a fortune.
Offended, Brian decided to take matters into his own hands. Convinced that the operation was “a major ripoff” and that “Seltaeb was not accounting properly,” he summarily canceled Seltaeb’s authority to represent the Beatles abroad. He then instructed David Jacobs’s office in London to begin issuing its own licenses directly to American manufacturers and, thus, collect identical fees. As soon as American companies got wind of the conflicting agreements, all bets were off. J. C. Penney and Woolworth’s didn’t waste a moment canceling $78 million worth of orders, which triggered a lawsuit by Nicky Byrne against Brian and Walter Hofer, seeking $5,168,000 in damages.
It took nearly three years to settle the suit, untangling thirty-nine separate claims against NEMS and a $22 million claim for damages, which eventually broke Nicky Byrne and rent the merchandising deal asunder. “The reality is that the Beatles never saw a penny out of the merchandising,” says Nat Weiss, the avuncular divorce lawyer Brian befriended in New York who subsequently took over their American affairs. “Tens of millions of dollars went down the drain because of the way the whole thing was mishandled. Even after the judgment was vacated, you could smell the smoke from the ashes, that’s how badly they had been burned.”
Despite Brian’s fumbling, the whole of London moved to the beat of the swinging Beatles soundtrack. Almost everyone credited them with the new and buoyant spirit that now seemed to seep into all phases of ordinary city life. The semimythical concept of “Swinging London” had not quite emerged—in fact, the term wasn’t coined until April 1966*—but you could already feel its essence in the air. When Harold Wilson upset the Conservative political establishment and returned Labour to office for the first time since 1951, it signaled “a [new] kind of freedom around which hadn’t been there before.” Total dependence on American culture began losing ground to new, homegrown forms of expression that sparked a revolution in the arts and seemed to undermine traditional attitudes. This energy was already at work on the walls of London’s galleries, where British pop art was in its earliest stages of experimentation. Several recent graduates of the Royal College of Art—including Peter Blake, Richard Smith, and David Hockney—were being exhibited all over the place, with a legion of talented young painters beginning to prowl the trail they had blazed. Fashion had been transformed by the cheeky insolence of clothing designer John Stephen, whose boutique turned a seedy lane in Soho called Carnaby Street into “a Mecca for the Mods.” As one convert recalls: “I can remember going down Carnaby Street in 1964 and feeling like my humdrum life was being reoutfitted. I’d never seen anything quite like it. There were so many different things you could wear—red corduroy trousers, green corduroy trousers, flowery shirts, polka dots everywhere. Before that, all we had were gray and brown.”
The airwaves were still governed by the BBC’s despotic monopoly over what was suitable for transmission, but beginning that Easter, a fleet of “pirate” radio ships moored offshore to the east of Essex or Kent, just outside the twelve-mile international-waters limit, and began broadcasting rock ’n roll on its own terms. Radio Caroline, and later Radio London, showcased the latest records, describing what was fashionable and delivering a new language, sprinkled with words like fab and gear and dig. British kids of every class could agree, in the abstract at least, that music cut through all the bullshit and eloquently expressed all the feelings—frustration, fear, rage, and passion—they’d suppressed for so long.
The Beatles managed to sit comfortably on the fringe of this cultural revolution, having already contributed quite substantially to it. It went without saying that they rejuvenated, if not reinvented, the local beat scene. Their clothes dominated teenage fashion with round-necked jackets and high-heeled boots. And they appeared daring and anarchic thanks to the cut of their long hair. “I can’t overpitch this,” writes journalist Nik Cohn in his treatise on fashion, Today There Are No Gentlemen, “the Beatles changed everything. Before them, all teenage life and, therefore, fashion, existed in spasms; after them, it was an entity, a separate society.”
But the more the Beatles bathed in the limelight, the less they seemed willing to make a defiant splash. Considering that they had already scraped through the turbulent club scene, resigned themselves to the indignities of Hamburg, trudged cross-country in a circuit of endless one-nighters, overcome the age-old prejudice against northerners, conquered America, and captured the hearts of “ordinary blokes,” it was all they could do to enjoy their fresh success. The Beatles weren’t interested in upheaval. They wanted to make records, not statements. There was too much at stake, too much fever and magic, to antagonize their largely mainstream audience, leaving the extreme rule-breaking to newcomers like the Stones and the Who, both of whom were willing to be outrageous and risk everything for maximum impact.
The Beatles were the aristocracy of the new pop establishment, or “popocracy,” as George Melly has called it. As such, there was no need for them to play the clubs. The nucleus of the pop elite required an exclusive place of their own where they could languish in the aura, preen, indulge themselves, and behave as only the famously hip knew how. For the Beatles, that place was the Ad Lib, a discotheque just off Leicester Square in the penthouse of what had been an unsuccessful jet-setter nightclub called Wips. Upstairs it had the perfect ambience: dark as a bank vault and mirrored from floor to ceiling, with alcoves and banquettes situated around a tiny dance floor, where fashionable young couples danced agilely to deafening music—good music, nonstop R&B—and stared at their own reflection. John and Ringo hung out there first, attracting members of the emerging pop establishment: rock groups and their managers, models and their photographers, young actors, boutique owners, groupies, columnists, and dandies of all stripes.
Every night, the band arrived—usually separately—about ten o’clock and held court at a banquette opposite the stage. Over the course of several hours (and more than several scotch and Cokes), they attracted an incongruous mix of awestruck young musicians who would crowd in around the table to compare notes while others stopped by briefly to pay their respects and buy the Beatles another round of drinks. The Stones usually turned up with an entourage, as did the Hollies, the Moody Blues, the Yardbirds, John Mayall, the Searchers, Georgie Fame—just about anybody who was making waves in the Beatles’ wake. “It was a shouty, lively scene,” Paul recalled. “Lots of silly things happened there.” Silly things—away from prying eyes. For all that was unique about the club, for all its cachet, and all the words spent analyzing its contribution to the cultural boom, Paul offered a take on the Ad Lib that was probably closest to capturing its barroom spirit: “It was the pub, that’s what it really was.”
When a more intimate social scene was sought, the Beatles turned up at the frequent parties given by the West End’s self-proclaimed “golden boy,” Lionel Bart. One of Brian Epstein’s buddies, Bart was one of the most prolific songwriters in London, already several years and a good dozen hits ahead of his beat-oriented protégés, having crossed back and forth over stylistic lines as often as a couturier. He’d discovered Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard, and wrote each of their debut hits, before really striking it rich with Oliver!, which was still packing theaters in London and New York.
As the owner of a rococo turn-of-the-century mansion on Seymour Walk, nicknamed the Fun Palace by its faithful, Bart played the Pearl Mesta role that suited his sprightly personality. His parties became instant legends as much for their self-indulgent behavior as for their stellar guest lists: Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse, Noël Coward, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Brendan Behan, and David Bailey, each of whom brought someone equally alluring. “Michael Caine and Terence Stamp came for breakfast every morning,” Bart recalls. “My next-door neighbor, Francis Bacon, showed up regularly. Peter Blake and Lucian Freud were longtime friends. And a typical party would also draw Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Bickford, the Rolling Stones, Cassius Clay—there could be six hundred people there from all walks of life.”
At Bart’s, John amused himself by being devious and petulant. “He liked to be outrageous—he liked to wind people up,” provoking them into a confrontation. Most nights, he got stoned in the spacious Gothic toilet. Since returning from the States, John had become more and more devoted to the giddy pleasures of pot, smoking it intermittently throughout the day, from the time he got up until he collapsed from exhaustion. Then he curled up on a couch, brooding and sending out the kind of barbed-wire vibes that discouraged idle chitchat, let alone anything close to intimacy. Guests avoided him, knowing how lethal the combination of sycophants and drugs (and/or alcohol) could be for John. Of course, the more distant he became, the more the guests ignored him and the harder he had to strike out to draw enough attention. No one was immune. “Everyone who came inwas a potential target,” says a frequent guest. When Brian’s favorite, Judy Garland, arrived on Sid Luft’s arm one night, John berated her indiscriminately, implying that she was a hack and introducing her as “Judy Garbage.” On another occasion, feeling “particularly wicked,” he lashed out at an actor’s German girlfriend, blaming her parents for killing 6 million Jews, until the poor girl fled in terror. Other times he was content to pick on Brian, embarrassing him about his sexuality—“If he pretended to be straight, for instance,” says Bart, “John wouldn’t let him get away with it”—in front of as many people as he could attract.
John’s behavior was nothing new. It was the usual outlet for a lifetime of anger, anger at being given up by his mother and her subsequent death, anger at his father for abandoning him without a fair chance, anger at all the parochial teachers who demanded he conform, anger at Brian for tidying up the Beatles’ jagged image (“I’ve sold myself to the devil,” he complained to Tony Sheridan), and anger at trusted friends like Stu Sutcliffe, who died without warning, and now even Paul, who continuously upstaged him.
Lately, however, it was the inflexibility of his marriage to Cynthia, not his past, that piqued his darkest and most bilious moods. Cynthia had virtually abandoned her artistic aspirations, dedicating all her personal energy to intensifying her husband’s star power. John couldn’t help but bask in that glow. And on those occasions, he found the marriage safe and convenient, especially following a string of long gigs. But there were as many times—during those long intervals between tours—when the marriage felt confining and oppressive.
“Cynthia wanted to settle John down, pipe and slippers” according to Paul—a decision that, to his mind, spelled imminent disaster. “The minute she said that to me I thought, Kiss of Death, I know my mate and that is not what he wants.” For another, they’d been cooped up rather annoyingly in the attic apartment of their new posh home while a team of local contractors gave the living quarters a thorough makeover. It had been hard enough living with Cynthia and Julian in the Emperor’s Gate flat, but in the attic—and miles from nowhere—the situation groaned under the strain. To make matters worse, Cynthia’s mother, Lillian Powell, recently returned from Canada, had moved in while John was on tour and now all of them squeezed into the accommodations like rabbits in a hutch. There wasn’t an ounce of love lost between John and Mrs. Powell, a spiteful, insufferable woman who had never forgiven him for impregnating her daughter and fulminated against her son-in-law every chance she got.
“It was catastrophic for Cynthia,” says Tony Bramwell, who made regular excursions to the house, delivering papers and other packages from NEMS. “She was stranded out there, with John in London or on the road most of the time.” Incredibly, neither Cynthia nor John knew how to drive. They had bought a new Rolls-Royce that sat in the garage until a chauffeur was eventually hired, but even then, with few friends and a young son to take care of, any attempt to steal time away from home was futile. “I would frequently spend weeks of being virtually housebound by duties to child and staff,” Cynthia complained in a memoir. Even when John was around, he usually slept until one or two, then took off for London, rarely coming home until the early hours of the morning, often stoned and drunk. Cynthia had learned to endure his new love of pot, which she viewed as being “relatively harmless” compared with alcohol, but despite the hip and social aspect of getting stoned, it was never something they would share. Alas, marijuana only made Cynthia “sick and sleepy,” further distancing them in their eroding relationship.
Meanwhile, the other Beatles—all bachelors—seemed to be having the time of their lives. Ringo’s relationship with Maureen Cox inched decisively toward the altar, although while she remained stashed conveniently in Liverpool, Ringo tooled around London with fashion model Vicky Hodge on his arm. The same occurred with George and Pattie Boyd. “George was the worst runaround of the bunch,” says Peter Brown, voicing an opinion heard frequently. “He had lots of girlfriends. Lots.”
Paul’s situation was apparently even more enviable. With Jane Asher by his side, Paul claimed one of the most beautiful and classiest girlfriends on the scene. But he was shockingly cavalier about his intentions. “Freedom and independence” was the creed Paul lived by, and as far as Jane was concerned—well, she could like it or lump it. As far as Paul cared, he “wasn’t married to Jane”; nothing else mattered as long as she understood he was “pretty free” to see whom he liked, which constituted, in his words, “a perfectly sensible relationship.” Even while he lived with the Ashers, Paul admitted: “I got around quite a lot of girls. I felt that was okay, I was a young bachelor, I didn’t feel ashamed of it in any way.” To John, this arrangement was most extraordinary, if not the least bit galling. “He was well jealous of [it],” Paul recalled, “because at this time he couldn’t do that, he was married with Cynthia and with a lot of energy bursting to get out. He’d tried to give Cynthia the traditional thing, but you kind of knew he couldn’t. There were cracks appearing but he could only paste them over by staying at home and getting very wrecked.”
Paul, on the other hand, lived between the cracks. Beatlemania was rampant in London, yet for some inexplicable reason he was free to move about with little regard for the usual encroachments. Throughout the end of 1964 and well into the New Year, Paul became a habitué of London nightlife, aggressively cultivating an image as a young man of substance. Each night, after the Beatles’ business ended, he hit the streets like a tornado, picking up energy as he spun from theater to theater, nightspot to nightspot, often ending the whirlwind spree at one of the posh gambling clubs in Mayfair. Paul loved the upscale atmosphere almost as much as the recognition, both intoxicants to an ambitious young man only two years removed from a Liverpool council estate via Hamburg. There was a wide-eyed fascination as once-closed doors were flung open to him. “Right this way, Mr. McCartney.” “Our best table, Mr. McCartney.” “It’s on the house, Mr. McCartney.” Mr. McCartney! He could barely contain his joy over the classy ring to it.
Paul always aspired to tastes he perceived as having “class.” Respect was class, fine art was class, French dining was class. Social status especially provided class, which he solicited in earnest through his ties to the Ashers. Whether it meant courting intellects such as Harold Pinter and, fearlessly, Bertrand Russell—Paul professed to be “very impressed by… the clarity of his thinking”—or having his cigarette lit by the maître d’ at an exclusive joint like Annabel’s, acquiring class became his overriding mandate. Now, with Jane’s stabilizing influence, Paul staged an assault on legitimate theater, exposing himself to the best the West End had to offer, as well as maintaining a steady diet of repertory at the National. Jane herself was deeply immersed in the process of building a distinguished theatrical career. This pleased Paul no end. It was classy in and of itself and provided the perfect contrast to his celebrated splash. Besides, it kept Jane busy while he spread his wings on those nights he wished to fly solo, the upwardly mobile young bachelor haunting such tony nightspots as the Saddle Room, the Talk of the Town, the Astor, and other swish clubs where a “rubbing-up” occurred with famous and recognizable figures. Not that they intimidated Paul, who put his own Beatlesque spin on the situation: “They were on the way out,” he concluded, “[and] we were on the way in.”
[III]
But the social scene, for all its glamour and appeal, took a toll on their work. The critical reaction to the Beatles’ second annual Christmas show had been less than enthusiastic. Even though its staging was more visually elaborate and the Beatles played their usually thrilling set of songs in a cocoon of screaming, nothing could excuse what some viewed as “the feebleness of the show as a whole.” Despite deliriously happy audiences, the Beatles couldn’t disguise their discomfort. “Obviously this show has its weaknesses,” Paul conceded, but most reviewers had taken a harder look. In NME, Chris Hutchins echoed the consensus that the Beatles appeared “bored” and seemed to sleepwalk through the skits. “In the second sketch,” he wrote, “these top world entertainers neither move, nor speak, nor sing. They’re cast as waxwork dummies!”
Much the same could be said of their second film, Help! Unlike the groundbreaking A Hard Day’s Night, which boiled over with reflexive wit and gave insight into the Beatles’ lifestyle, Help! was a patchwork of generic wisecracks that sounded flat and artificial. The script, originally entitled Eight Arms to Hold You, about the possession of a ring with mysterious powers and those vying for control of it, had been tailored especially for Peter Sellers, who rejected it in favor of an equally frivolous picture called What’s New Pussycat? Rewritten in ten days as a Beatles vehicle, the story took on a fractured, fairy-tale silliness from which it never recovered. No one was really happy with the script, least of all the Beatles, who called it “a mad story” as a cover for what they were saying in private.
Not that they could recall much from the shoot. They had packed ample reserves of pot to get them through the process. The Beatles were so stoned, so distracted, they couldn’t remember lines. Brian’s effort to contain the damage went for naught. Even though, as John revealed, they were “smoking marijuana for breakfast,” mornings seemed to be the only time scenes got completed. By noon they were out of their gourds. “Dick Lester knew that very little would get done after lunch,” Ringo recalled. “In the afternoon, we very seldom got past the first line of the script.”
The only one of the Beatles who capitalized on the opportunity was Ringo, the unwitting star of Help! A lifelong movie fan, Ringo projected a vulnerability and unaffected appeal that had come across in A Hard Day’s Night and now blossomed in Help! He’d always been the Beatles’ unofficial mascot of sorts, the runt of the litter, less handsome and sophisticated than Paul, John, and George and, as such, often a lightning rod for their comic relief. There was also no other band that would have given him the visibility or highlighted his versatility, and by the time they blazed through the States, their intuition had paid off. “In a poll taken at Carnegie Hall,” Nora Ephron wrote in her New York Post column, “Ringo received the most applause, screams, and gasps from the audience.” “I Love Ringo” badges outsold all their other merchandise. The same proved true wherever the Beatles went. “In the States, I know I went over well,” Ringo admitted in a moment of pardonable pride. “It knocked me out to see and hear the kids waving for me. I’d made it as a personality.”
While Ringo would never be the Beatles’ central attraction, in Help! he certainly made his presence felt. Perhaps part of the transformation was due to Ringo’s feeling more settled. Two weeks before filming started, during a day off in London, he had married his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Mary “Maureen” Cox, in an early-morning ceremony at Caxton Hall, a registry office near Ringo and George’s Montagu Square flat. Everyone, especially George, expressed how “amazed” he was at the suddenness of it. It was a hasty, intimate affair, designed to provide the utmost privacy; even the other Beatles learned of it only a day in advance. Besides the couple’s parents, very few people were invited. George arrived by bicycle, followed by John, who complained that Ringo had forgotten to buy them appropriate boutonnieres (“We were going to wear radishes actually,” he told a reporter), and Brian, who served as the best man. (Paul, on holiday at a Tunisian villa, learned of the wedding hours afterward, from an international operator who delivered a telegram from Brian that read, RICH WED EARLY THIS MORNING.) Everyone had been sworn to absolute secrecy.
There were plenty of reasons for that. “Maureen hated the spotlight and was worried that fans might disrupt things,” says Roy Trafford, Ringo’s boyhood friend, who was excluded from the event as a security precaution. “We went to the Ad Lib, and in the ladies’ room Maureen confessed how hard everything was for her,” Marie Crawford recalls. “Fans would scratch and spit at her all the time, and call her names. Why, the moment we walked in there, everyone stopped talking.” But there was more to Maureen’s discomfort than the harassment. “I recognized that weekend that Maureen was pregnant,” Crawford says. “She was very sick in the mornings and was beginning to show.”
In spite of everything, Ringo was excited to tie the knot. “He’s the marrying kind,” John explained after the news hit the papers, “a sort of family man,” which was true enough. Only a few months earlier, Ringo had told a reporter: “No matter what the consequences, I don’t want to remain single all my life. I want to get married some day and I don’t plan to wait too long about it. I’m 23 now and that can seem pretty old when you look out every night and see an audience full of 13-and 14-year-old girls.”
Ringo’s celebrity meant something for the success of Help!, but in the end, it was the music that saved their hides. John and Paul had written a splendid collection of songs for the soundtrack. Gone are the standard progressions, rheumy lyrics, and simplistic arrangements. Structurally, the songs still abound with gorgeous, supple melodies complemented by sudden downshifts of chords and wiry guitar licks, interwoven with the sensuous three-part harmonies identified with the Beatles sound. But the creative momentum of the previous year, buttressed by marijuana and a powerful Dylan influence, had broadened the Beatles’ perspective, giving them a new palette of ideas to draw from and explore.
In the weeks during their Christmas show, John and Paul had sketched out most of the material that would provide the soundtrack. John’s music room in the new house—always littered with toys, hundreds of records, and “twelve guitars”—was suddenly ankle-deep in sheets of sloppy, pencil-smudged, nearly illegible lyric fragments, the terminally foul air severely polluted by a dense cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke, aided and abetted by overflowing ashtrays and half a dozen half-filled teacups abandoned in the squalor. A pair of Brunell tape recorders (John claimed he “had about ten… all linked up”) lay within arm’s reach of the red couch, both of them overheated—practically cooking—from being left on for days, one or the other always frozen on PAUSE as though waiting for someone to finish his thought. Mostly John and Paul ignored the machines, preferring to jot ideas on paper that they ripped profligately from spiral-bound tablets like traders in the futures market. Sometimes words or phrases they’d considered perfect were rudely scratched out in favor of an alternative with a more wry twist to it. Almost every line of every verse was reworked several times. They spit words out quickly, not self-consciously, sometimes both of them talking over each other, testing rhymes and expressions and inflections in the outpour. Things sometimes got lost in the exuberant flow, but that had always been the way they worked best. “We made a game of it,” Paul recalls. “John and I wrote songs within two or three hours—our ‘time allotted.’ It hardly ever took much longer than that.” Or else they lost interest and moved on.
Almost immediately they struck on a tone that distinguishes these songs from their previous output. “Ticket to Ride,” released as a single in advance of the movie, sounds like nothing a rock ’n roll band had ever produced. The entire character of the song is a drastic departure, with its reflective lyrics and tense, irregular patterns that make more demands on a listener. “It was a slightly new sound at the time,” John said, upgrading “slightly new” to “pretty fucking heavy” in practically the next breath. Despite the hard language, no one disagreed with his opinion. His chafing vocals swerve around the rambling guitar lick and devious drum fluctuations that play havoc with the tempo, driving it to a playful, if inscrutable, ending. There is no bouncy middle eight, no obvious chorus. In “Ticket to Ride,” John gives voice to self-pitying romantic disappointment, stripped of all adolescent pretensions and reduced to the bitter aftertaste that clings to rejection. “Resentfulness, or love, or hate—it’s apparent in all work,” he explained years later, during a particularly abrasive critique. “It’s just harder to see when it’s written in gobbledygook.”
“Ticket to Ride” is hardly gobbledegook, and not at all the self-penned effort for which John eventually took credit. In a hasty reflection, he reduced Paul’s contribution to “the way Ringo played the drums.” However, Paul later argued: “We sat down and wrote it together…. [W]e sat down and worked on that song for a full three-hour songwriting session, and at the end of it all we had all the words, we had the harmonies, and we had all the little bits.”
That wasn’t always the way John and Paul wrote songs. “John and I don’t work on the Rodgers and Hart pattern, one doing music and one doing lyrics,” Paul explained in an uncharacteristic footnote about their creative process. “He writes a whole song on his own, or I write a whole song on my own, or if we do a song together either he might do the words and I the music, or the other way round.”
Aside from “Help!” and “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” which were near-perfect collaborations, the rest of the material fell somewhere within that boundless range. John brought in most of “It’s Only Love” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” while Paul contributed “Another Girl,” which he wrote in Tunisia, and “The Night Before”—a mixed bag in the absolute sense. The one thing they have in common was that they are all Lennon-McCartney compositions. In the almost eight years of the partnership, it had seemed fruitless to try to reconcile their different styles—John’s jagged emotional urgency, Paul’s giddy romanticism; John’s uncompromising, stripped-down homage to rock ’n roll, Paul’s “lyrical melodies dressed in clever harmonic frameworks”; John “impatient,” Paul “real optimistic”—because, in the larger picture, they merged seamlessly into the universally recognized Beatles sound. It serves no purpose trying to dissect the songs to determine who contributed what.
But energy and tone reveal their own clues. The influences for “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” did not go unnoticed. According to Paul, the song “is just basically John doing Dylan.” And the lyrics could never have come from McCartney.
Success begat insecurity—the greater the Beatles’ popularity, the more threatened and anxious John had become, not only from his part in the band’s snowballing commercialism but over his appearance and his songwriting as well. Weight, too, had become a nagging problem—John had gotten “plump,” according to a friend—and he was demoralized and depressed by worsening vision. “He was paranoid about being short-sighted,” George recalled, “and we’d have to take him into a club and lead him to his seat, so that he could go in without his glasses on and look cool.”
Like Paul.
He was getting tired of hearing Paul described as “the handsome Beatle” or “the cute Beatle,” tired of seeing Paul charm the media, posing as the band’s spokesperson, voicing opinions he didn’t share. Never had John seen anyone turn on the gas like that; throw the spotlight on him and he popped off like a parrot on speed. “He’s a good P.R. man, Paul,” John said, only half seriously. “He’s about the best in the world, probably, he really does a job.” Even as a rock ’n roller, Paul continued to court the kind of establishment approval that offended John. Paul was slick, as slick as they came—“He could charm the Queen’s profile off a shiny shilling,” says Bob Wooler and not at all kindly—and it stuck in John’s craw. Paul still deferred to John, but skillfully. He knew how to play the angles, which is what it took to humor a cranky hothead like John. Paul could dance archly around his partner’s subtle moods, but on tiptoe, always ready to concede center stage rather than risk confrontation.
“We were different. We were older,” John believed. “We knew each other on all kinds of levels that we didn’t when we were teenagers.” Amenities were sacrificed in the transition. Gone was the extraordinary bond that had distinguished the first years of their partnership. In its place was a creative tension, an emotional chess game of sorts, whose pieces were toggled back and forth over squares of mutable interest, that seemed to satisfy each of their impulses to lead—and be led.
John plowed the tremendous emotional upheaval into his songs. He said “Help!” grew out of one of the “deep depressions” he went through, during which he fought the desire “to jump out the window.” Clearly, he wasn’t speaking literally; the people closest to John never recall any suicidal tendencies. But dissatisfied with the direction the Beatles were taking, coupled with his appearance and dispiriting marriage, he was left feeling despondent and “hopeless” during the writing. “I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for ‘Help,’ ” John insisted later on, drawing that conclusion after years of psychotherapy. “He was feeling a bit constricted by the Beatle thing,” Paul observed, although that impression, too, might only have become clarified over the years, with distance and more insight. George insisted that John developed that theory “retrospectively.” At the time he began writing “Help!” it was fashioned as a work for hire upon learning from Dick Lester that it would be the movie’s new title. Paul was summoned to Kenwood especially “to complete it,” he recalled, which they did without delay, nailing it in one productive two-hour session in the upstairs music room.
[IV]
The Beatles spent the first half of 1965 in an exaggerated vacuum, ping-ponging between movie studio and recording studio. Socializing was out of the question. Aside from a brief holiday abroad the last week in May, Brian filled all their spare time with “non-stop” frivolous radio and TV appearances to plug the latest single, “Ticket to Ride,” and to boost anticipation for the forthcoming film. Otherwise, there was precious little contact with the outside world.
In early May, during a break at Twickenham Studios, Brian showed up in a dither and assembled the Beatles in a dressing room. He behaved “rather secretively,” according to Paul, who was more than used to Brian’s affectations, but he sensed that something extraordinary was in the offing. “I’ve got some news for you,” Brian announced with great theatricality, “the Prime Minister and the Queen have awarded you an M.B.E.”
If Brian expected whoops of jubilation, he must have been roundly disappointed. None of the boys had any idea what he was talking about. M.B.E.: it might have been a sports car, for all they knew. Or better: a tax exemption. (George later joked that it stood for “Mr. Brian Epstein.”) As mostly working-class lads from Liverpool, they had little insight into the proprieties surrounding titled Britons. In 1965, with the aristocracy still in high esteem, such honors seemed inaccessible and distant, if not otherworldly, to most commoners. And the Beatles, as famous and widely loved as they were, were still—in their own minds and English culture—as common as crumpets. They were clearly “astonished.”
What they discovered was this: under a charter signed in 1917, King George V and his successors were empowered to recognize distinguished service to Crown and country through a clutch of five honorary awards. The highest rank was Knight or Dame Grand Cross (G.B.E.), then Knight or Dame Commander (K.B.E. or D.B.E.), followed by Commanders (C.B.E.) and Officers (O.B.E), before Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.). “The M.B.E., barely a notch above ‘Guv,’ is the sort of perk given out to senior hospital staff, school headmasters, and local government factotums,” says a cultural historian, “but hardly the creme de la creme of U.K. social hierarchies.” Still, it was coveted by recipients as a toehold to a knighthood—or at least as a license to dream—and for a while it was awarded sparingly, for acts of heroism in the war.
By the time the Beatles were considered, however, M.B.E.s were handed out as routinely as souvenir lapel pins. They were awarded twice annually—on the New Year and the Queen’s birthday, in June—and each list of recipients submitted by the prime minister’s office numbered in the thousands. “I think a grateful government must have given us the M.B.E. for all the taxes we paid,” John joked, which wasn’t that far off the mark. Harold Wilson told the press that he intended to use the honors list to encourage exporters, and while he personally admired the Beatles (he was originally, after all, their M.P. from Liverpool, Huyton), the award was for the “great commercial advantage in dollar earnings to this country” from the sale of 115 million records. Despite some initial concern from staff, Wilson dismissed all worry that the Queen would disapprove. It was “doubtful if Queen Elizabeth [had] time to read through all the 2,000 or so names and citations on the list, nor [was] it likely she would ever object to any of them,” the press concluded.
“I was embarrassed,” John said, recalling his initial reaction. “We all met and agreed it was daft.” Jokes flew about the Queen’s soundness of mind. Since it was policy to assure the palace that the award would be accepted in advance of a formal announcement, the Beatles took a consensus and agreed: “Let’s not.”
Eventually, Brian convinced them otherwise, but that didn’t so much resolve their indecision as take it public. Opinion on the street was clearly divided on whether the Beatles were worthy of such an honor. The press was especially critical, taking an edge that dripped with contempt. “It seems that the road from rebellion to respectability is much shorter than it used to be,” the Sun editorialized. Another caption referred to the musicians as “Sir George, Sir John, Sir Paul, and Sir Ringo,” sounding a note of mockery. But the most vehement dissent came from an unexpected friend, Donald Zec, the Mirror’s entertainment columnist, who was said to be “irate” over the selection. “In the name of all that’s sane if not sacred, isn’t pinning a royal medal onto four Beatles jackets just too much?” he wondered. “What about the Dave Clark Five, the Bachelors, the Animals, and the Rolling Stones?” Only the Daily Telegraph struck a deferential tone, arguing that the honor was not sufficient enough and suggesting a “more generous award,” such as a knighthood.
In the days that followed, controversy turned to vehement protest, as decorated M.B.E.s, furious over the Beatles’ appointment, began firing off angry letters to the palace—and the press. “I am so disgusted with the Beatles being given this award that I am considering sending mine back,” threatened George Read, an elderly Coast Guardsman decorated for bravery. Colonel George Wagg didn’t wait. The aging war veteran returned twelve of his medals, quit the Labour Party, and took it out of his will, while another disgruntled war hero, Paul Pearson, returned his M.B.E. to the Queen, complaining that “its meaning seems to be worthless.” And a former member of Canada’s House of Commons, Hector Dupuis, shipped his medal back with a note denouncing the “superior authority’s wish to honor sorry fellows with whom I have no desire whatever to be associated.”
In the midst of the M.B.E. ruckus, the Beatles continued to record, padding their new Help! soundtrack with enough material for it to pass as an album. On the afternoon of June 15, Paul took center stage in Studio Two at Abbey Road and ran through what he considered to be “a strange uptempo thing” called “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” which he wrote in the Ashers’ music room at Wimpole Street. Originally titled “Auntie Gin’s Theme,” it was intended for the film but ultimately omitted, since it was still unfinished at the start of production. As Paul performed it now, however, it was all right there, right where he wanted it, a juggernaut of simple, streamlined lyrics that didn’t flow so much as barrel along breathlessly, picking up steam—“dragging you forward,” as he described the feeling—with each successive line. He’d sung it slower at one time, and with less of a country-and-western feel, but there wasn’t a note out of place in the playback, leading him to feel “quite pleased with [the result].”
There was plenty of time left before the dinner break to lay down another track, and without much preparation, Paul led the Beatles into the frenzied, all-out rock assault, “I’m Down,” intended as the B-side of the “Help!” single. Paul had mimicked Little Richard often over the years, belting out near-flawless covers of “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Lucille,” and “Long Tall Sally,” but the spitfire intensity of “I’m Down” drove the style way over the top. It was inconceivable that a skinny white boy could make that kind of sound. With little rehearsal other than a brief run-through, Paul threw his head back and let loose with what a critic described as a “larynx-tearing, cord-shredding” vocal that nearly cut his boyhood idol for its ferocity. It was a frightening performance. There are moments during the song when it sounds as though Paul has lost all control of the vocal; he just keeps pressing, pressing, veering close to the point where the vocal exceeds the boiling point and dissolves into noise. Close—but not quite, thanks to the tightly contained boundaries set by Ringo’s backbeat.
A light rain fell during the dinner break. The Beatles had run around the corner to a familiar coffee shop, where they spent slightly more than an hour scarfing down sandwiches, smoking, and exchanging personal news, probably about Paul’s recent purchase of a house near Abbey Road. For most of the time they pointedly avoided talking about the session, which had gone as well as anyone expected. The songs they’d done that afternoon were certainly up to par and suitably polished—an accomplishment that must have given them satisfaction—even though they’d broken no new ground.
There were still a pair of additional tracks to record—“It’s Only Love,” which John and Paul had written as a throwaway for George, and Ringo’s party piece, a send-up of Johnny Russell’s “Act Naturally”*—but Paul was eager to try something first. Tuning a Spanish-style acoustic guitar, he dragged a barstool to the middle of the cavernous studio and sat slope-shouldered over the wide walnut neck, tickling the strings, limbering up, while the engineers, Norman Smith and Phil McDonald, adjusted two mikes to suit George Martin’s instructions. Curiously, the other Beatles stood around, smoking, attentive but uninvolved. There had been some early discussion about their roles in the forthcoming recording, but as plans progressed they’d decided to stay on the sidelines until Paul went through a take or two by himself, “as simply as possible.”
To make Paul more comfortable, Martin had the studio lights dimmed to a shade resembling candlelight and moved the other Beatles out of his sight line before retreating with the engineers into the overhead control booth. There was a short last-minute lull while Smith spun dials to get a proper balance. When he finally flashed the thumbs-up, Paul stabbed out his cigarette in an ashtray, cleared his throat, and delivered a “remarkably controlled” take of a ballad that would become the most recorded song of all time.
“Yesterday” had been rattling around Paul’s head for nearly two years, since he “woke up one morning with the tune,” tumbled out of bed, and before even washing his face ran through it at the upright piano propped against the wall by the window in his room. What was the source of his inspiration? The question gnawed at him for weeks afterward. Had it come in a dream, as he initially suspected? Was it something he’d heard that his subconscious refused to let go of? Paul hadn’t the foggiest. The chords just kept coming, one after another, falling neatly into place. The melody sounded familiar, to say nothing of cozy, like one of the old standards that his father used to pound out after dinner at Forthlin Road, and while the overall impression it left was “very nice” indeed, Paul convinced himself the tune was “a nick,” something he’d lifted.
And what a tragedy, too. The melody is gorgeous, with an effortless, natural flow that brings its evocative sound together. One chord doesn’t so much suggest the next as dictate the progression, leaving no other option lest it collapse like a sand castle in a puff of mediocrity. From the beginning, Paul felt “it was all there… like an egg being laid… not a crack or a flaw in it.” The melody haunted him. “It was fairly mystical,” he explained. He couldn’t let go of it.
Encouragement came from an array of trusted friends and sources. Lionel Bart remembers Paul turning up on his doorstep in late 1963 with the tune still fresh in his mind, wondering for all the world where he’d “pinched” it from. “He hummed it several times,” Bart says, “and I couldn’t place it. It sounded completely legitimate, wonderfully crafted.” Bart was unsurprised by its sweep or maturity. “I recognized that in anything he wrote there was a musical signature, the kind of signature you find with Cole Porter and George Gershwin. In that respect, Paul’s fingerprints were all over the score for ‘Yesterday,’ and I told him that night that he was onto something important.”
Even with Bart’s blessing, Paul was still dubious. “This one, I was convinced, was just something I’d heard before,” he said, and continued seeking opinions in an attempt to prove it. But everywhere he turned, the trail went cold. No one recognized it, nor could they point to so much as a measure that resembled another song. Both John and George Martin pronounced it “original.” And British chanteuse Alma Cogan, Paul’s one-stop music source, expressed interest in recording it herself.
Legend has it that while he was playing the song on Cogan’s piano, Alma’s mother swept through the parlor wondering if “anyone want[ed] some scrambled eggs.” Without missing a beat, Paul improvised a lyric for his new melody: “Scrambled eggs… oh my, baby, how I love your legs…” If his goal was to elicit laughter from the small audience, he was not disappointed—but it came at a cost. The words scanned the meter perfectly. Too perfectly, in fact: for more than a year he was unable to shake those awful lines.
“Scrambled Eggs” became Paul’s nagging burden. Every day, every week, for a year and a half—without fail—he tinkered with it: massaging the chords, putting “the middle in it,” playing with the pulse. Rhyme schemes were tested and discarded in search of a word or two that would give the song its identity. Colloquial expressions were picked over for a hook, even old standbys like “let it be,” which was a favorite of his father’s, enjoyed a brief tenure. No good—the right phrase, the one that would unlock the song and provide the way in, eluded him. This was an anomaly: rhymes, phrases—these were things Paul rattled off in his sleep, as a reflex. He had a rare talent for turning an unforgettable phrase: “P.S. I Love You,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “Can’t Buy Me Love”… It didn’t figure that he’d go cold with a winner like this.
Lennon and McCartney had put songs aside before and come back to them; others they’d abandoned altogether. But this one—this one was different. Paul knew the melody was exquisite; it enchanted him. Frustrated, he finally ran it by John, who had nothing to offer. John thought the song was “lovely,” but not in his jurisdiction. Besides, he’d heard it so often that he wanted nothing to do with it.
Nothing was settled on May 27, 1965, when Paul and Jane left for a two-week vacation at guitarist Bruce Welch’s villa on the southeast coast of Portugal. The minute they touched down in Lisbon the words began to flow. It was a five-hour drive from the airport to the Gulf of Cádiz, along roads hewn from mountainous cliffs nearly the whole way. Brian had hired a chauffeured car for the trip, and the handsome young couple piled in the back, surrendering themselves to the dreadful drive south to Albufeira. “Jane was sleeping but I couldn’t,” Paul told a friend. The scenery was lackluster, monotonous, and before long he was at it again—running down “Scrambled Eggs,” picking it apart, covering old ground. But as the car edged around Grândola onto the barren E1, the stumbling blocks began to give way. “I remember mulling over the tune… and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse.” Da-da-da… yes-ter-day… sud-den-ly… fun-il-ly… mer-il-ly…Somehow, the intimate drive with Jane had summoned up feelings of a different sort, of melancholy and solitude. Indecision had crept into the lyric’s emotional complexion. No sooner was the foundation in place than the rhymes began to connect, blend, and serve one another. “ ‘Yesterday’—that’s good,” he decided. “ ‘All my troubles seemed so far away.’ ”
The minute they arrived in Albufeira, Paul put it to the test. Bruce Welch was waiting in the entrance to greet his guests and he remembered how eager Paul was to play the song for him. “He said straightaway, ‘Have you got a guitar?’ ” Welch recalled. “I could see he had been writing lyrics on the way [from the airport]; he had the paper in his hand as he arrived.” There was an old, abused Martin in the lounge, which Paul flipped upside down, enabling him to chord it with his right hand, then without hesitation, he strummed through the song.
As soon as he was halfway through the verse, Welch realized how far behind the curve he’d just fallen. This wasn’t some three-chord rocker like the ones groups churned out over cigarettes and beer. From Elvis to the Shadows to the Beatles, the pop hits had always followed the same general form. It was easy to jump in almost anywhere and flog the big standard progressions that gave the music its intensity. Now, however, within a few sketchy lines, Paul had advanced the pop form with an inventiveness free of gimmickry, making it lyrical and vivid in ways he’d never imagined. “I didn’t know those passing chords he had put into the progression,” Welch admitted. But its sophisticated structure was the least of his fascination with it. It was the intangible quality of it that overwhelmed him and led Welch to say: “I knew it was magic.”
The song was exactly right by the time he returned to London, on June 11. (Even so, Paul was demoralized by the tone of George Martin’s initial reaction to the lyric. “I objected to it actually,” Martin recalled, convinced that it would confuse anyone familiar with the Jerome Kern–Otto Harbach standard “Yesterdays.”) “We tried ways of doing it with John on organ but it sounded weird,” Paul recalled, “and in the end I was told to do it as a solo.” But listening to the playback, Martin had other ideas. “What about having a string accompaniment, you know, fairly tastefully done?” he asked. Paul cringed at the suggestion, conjuring up strains of “Mantovani” and similar “syrupy stuff.” That wasn’t at all his style, but he agreed to at least try a string quartet.
“We spent an afternoon mapping it out,” Martin recalled, devising cello and violin lines to complement the melody. Actually, arranging it wasn’t that tough of a job. “Yesterday” lent itself majestically to the silken weft of strings, and the two men—Paul humming parts, searching for notes on the piano, with George Martin translating them into notation—created the quintessential “blue”-sounding accompaniment that underscores the record.*
The entire string overdub took less than three hours to complete. Martin booked four musicians from the orchestra of Top of the Pops—session players he’d worked with on a regular basis—and walked them through the parts. After the first take, Paul pulled Martin aside and complained about the heavy shading of vibrato the string quartet had added to fatten the sound. “It sounded a little too gypsy-like for me,” Paul recalled. Normally, he took Martin’s opinions to heart, appreciating the producer’s vast musical training, but this time Paul stuck to his guns—every last shiver of vibrato had to go—convinced, and rightfully so, that the outcome “sounded stronger.”
The only thing left to decide was the awkward question of billing. “Yesterday” may have evolved under the group banner, but it was by no means a Beatles record. Not only had Paul written it entirely himself, there wasn’t another member of the Beatles on it. The implications were clear. It would be difficult for EMI in good conscience to put it out as anything but a Paul McCartney single. That wouldn’t sit well at all with John, Martin knew, whose ego was in fragile enough shape without shifting more attention toward Paul. Still, Martin took that suggestion to Brian Epstein, arguing that the performance on “Yesterday” warranted a solo release. Brian, to his credit, wouldn’t hear of it. He was adamant: “No, whatever we do we are not splitting up the Beatles.”
But in a way, the bubble was already beginning to burst.