Into the Cosmic Consciousness[I]
The Beatles had undergone quite a change since their first trip to New York in early 1964, when they sprang up like clothespin cutouts on the stage of The Ed Sullivan Show. Outwardly, they remained the same lovable mop tops, their smiles as familiar and flashy as the grille on a late-model Jaguar, their extreme hairdos every bit as symbolic as the Queen’s crown. Privately, however, they were in transition. If, with Beatles for Sale, the band had reached the limits of the conventional three-minute song, then certainly Help! had spun them down paths into uncharted territory. Though they still cursed, drank, and fucked their way around the globe, there was something about the way they comported themselves that was sensible and precise. But the generation gap was widening, and with it came rising expectations and a feeling that they could no longer afford to play the charming but cheeky lads.
To keep ahead of the curve, the Beatles had relied on pot, a magic key to unlocking inhibitions and abandon. That was fine for an appetizer, but everything—especially the music—was changing so fast, and with it, their impulse to experiment. Together, the Beatles had crept into a darkened box at the Albert Hall in May to catch Dylan’s riveting performance and left speechless, in awe. He seemed so intense, so emotionally out there, expressing himself at enormous risk. How did he manage to work from inside like that, to set himself free and arrive at that remarkable place? What enabled such a release?
John and George found part of the answer quite by accident one night while they were at a dinner party at the Victorian flat of a prominent dentist on the Edgware Road. The evening had peculiar, almost sinister overtones that made them uneasy from the get-go. Both Beatles had heard stories about the dentist’s notorious dark side, about the kinky scenes that he staged and his appetite for orgies. Though that hadn’t stopped the boys from bringing along Cynthia and Pattie, their radar was tuned rather high from the moment they walked through the door.
Nothing out of the ordinary cropped up until after dinner, when the Beatles prepared to leave. According to George, their gregarious host insisted they remain for coffee, during which he watched them soberly, silently, smiling, smoking, taking an inordinate interest in the girls. Afterward, he huddled in a corner, talking animatedly with John.
“We’ve had LSD,” John finally revealed to George in a bone-dry voice. The acid had been slipped into their coffee on sugar cubes and might have been an after-dinner cordial, for all George knew.
It meant nothing to George, who was determined to leave. “I seem to recall that I’d heard vaguely about it,” he remembered, “but I didn’t really know what it was, and we didn’t know we were taking it.” Virtually nothing had been written about the cryptically named drug; there was no buzz about it on the street. So little was known about LSD, in fact, that it wasn’t even illegal. This acid, however, had a distinguished provenance, having been supplied to the dentist by the manager of the Playboy Club, who, in turn, had gotten it from Michael Hollingshead, the man responsible for turning on Timothy Leary. Which meant that it was pure—and potent.
John was livid. He had not come to dinner to be dosed by a virtual stranger. Mumbling good-byes, they grabbed the girls and bolted, speeding toward the Pickwick, a London nightclub, with the dentist in hot pursuit. For a few minutes everything was fine. They got seated and ordered drinks, squinting in the low light to identify the faces of other musicians who waved to get their attention. “Suddenly I felt the most incredible feeling come over me,” George remembered. “It was something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had in my whole life.” He was overcome with love—hot, feathery, dizzying love. The others must have felt it, too. John, especially, had a grotesque grin plastered across his face that looked as if it belonged on a marionette. Streaks of blazing light burrowed behind the rainbow rims of their eyelids, trembling; something had altered the tone of their bodies. The sensations held them captive. It is uncertain how long they sat there like that. No one recalls seeing the performance, but at some point they got up to leave and realized, in a panic, that the club was empty, the waiters busily placing chairs atop the barren tables.
Someone—it is not certain who—mentioned the Ad Lib, which was within walking distance, just a few blocks north. That seemed to make sense—that is, until they got outside, where the gnarled skew of lights and jangly sounds bombarded them. If their eyes could be believed, the sky was velvet, opaque, the buildings rimmed with jewels. The act of walking became overlaid with intervals of clumsiness and the need to vent anxiety. Everyone was “cackling” like hyenas. Pattie Boyd, normally a picture of cool poise, came undone in the garish neon nightscape. She cowered, trapped in the glare of blinking lights and the sound of car horns swelling and roaring around Leicester Square. Even with the others’ reassuring companionship, the acid flung her into fitful emotional states that alternated between dread and agitation. Later, “half crazy,” she threatened to break a store window until George dragged her away. “We didn’t know what was going on and [thought] we were going crackers,” John explained. “It was insane going around London on it.”
Beyond insane. A tiny red light in the elevator to the Ad Lib touched off a folie à quatre in which they imagined flames shooting up into the air-conditioned car. Said John, “We were all screaming, ‘aaaaaaagh,’ all hot and hysterical.” Ringo, who was waiting for them upstairs in the crowded discotheque, recalled how they tumbled out of the elevator, shouting: “The lift’s on fire!”
The bizarre hallucinations continued until dawn, nightmare flashes interspersed with periods of sublime intimacy, laughter, and intense creativity; objects took on a fun-house distortion that exaggerated their appeal. John, enraptured by the experience, summed up the extremes by saying: “It was just terrifying—but it was fantastic.” It wasn’t anything like the fluttery highs they got from speed or pot. The LSD possessed an undeniable power—a spiritual power—that forced them to look inside themselves. Indeed, it seemed to offer everything John had been searching for in his music, writing, and art. And none of the Beatles was more receptive to LSD’s spiritual potential than George Harrison. From that very first trip, he felt “a light bulb” go on in his head that blazed the way to enlightenment. Years of misfit indifference to school and the alienation it generated had left him immature and callow. Even the cheeky facade that served as George’s personality in the Beatles collapsed behind the scenes in the auras of Lennon and McCartney, exposing the gawky, awestricken boy who used to trail behind his mentors in Liverpool. Having always competed for their favored attention, he had learned to fit in, not stand out. Feelings of inferiority persisted, reinforced in part by his age, John’s and Paul’s intimidating talent, and the lingering ambivalence of their companionship.
It was this sense of alienation as much as his interest in music that made George so susceptible to guiding spirits. In the Bahamas during the filming of Help!, he heard the siren song of the sitar and came under the influence of Swami Vishnu-devananda, who introduced him to hatha yoga and Eastern religions. Later in life he would become vegetarian, consult an astrologer, and devote himself to Transcendental Meditation before embracing traditional Christianity. Like many others who flirted with mysticism, it gave him a sense of authority and confidence. But with LSD, George stepped out—and into the cosmic consciousness.
“Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream”: it would eventually become the mantra of every seeker of enlightenment for whom experimentation and self-discovery were the portals to the new age. But in July 1965, after their first unwitting trip, the two Beatles were too shook up by the experience to storm those precarious gates. There was “too much to sort out,” George said, too much of an emotional upheaval. It would take another six weeks before they got up the nerve to take a second trip. In the meantime, they spread the gospel, cornering anyone who would listen to the fantastic tale. There was a fish-story extravagance to the retelling of the Great Acid Experience. “Each time they recounted it,” says a Beatles intimate, “the hallucinations got wilder and more incredible. They introduced marvelous visions and rainbow-colored submarines and all kinds of crazy stuff.” Friends and musicians were held in thrall by the shifting pool of details, and some, no doubt, felt inclined, or even pressure, to dive into the deep end, including the one companion for whom it would have disastrous effects.
[II]
From the moment George and John sang the praises of LSD, Brian Epstein had made up his mind to take it. Friends remember that he had been trying for some time to find a buffer for his snowballing unhappiness. For all his outward poise, Brian seldom spent a waking moment without being medicated to some extent. Amphetamines had served him ably through the tension-filled days—a blast of speed to keep him up—followed by a capful of Seconals washed down by brandy before bedtime to ensure a soft landing. Even so, he took great pains to maintain a respectable front. Few people—not even the Beatles, at this point—were privy to his indulgence. At a party with “some kids” arranged by Nat Weiss, Brian chattered, clowned, danced, and played disc jockey—long after everyone had passed out. “The next morning, when we woke up, he’d be refreshed, making notes,” Weiss recalls. It wasn’t until sometime later that he discovered Brian’s secret. “He had suits made with little pockets on the inside, with pills tucked into each of them, which he popped like candy. And he told me that this was what kept him going.” Amphetamines and pot: he had a person come by the house each week to roll thin little joints that he’d stash in a cigarette case, behind the Dunhills.
As the summer heated up and the demons became intolerable, Brian moved from the designer flat in William Mews to considerably more glamorous quarters in a Belgravia town house on Chapel Street that he decorated from top to bottom with the sleek white furniture that was all the rage that season. Together with his longtime Liverpool friend Peter Brown, who had moved to London in May to lend a hand around the office, Brian got everything situated and resumed a frantic social pace: drinking, carousing, dinner parties, anonymous sex, and nightly drug-taking until he passed out in the early hours of morning.
The drugs fortified him for the social scene, but there was still a key element missing. Nothing satisfied Brian unless some kind of risk was involved. “He loved the danger, no matter what the cost,” says Ken Partridge, “whether it was bringing home a guardsman who would rough him up for twenty quid or dropping a bundle at a joint on Curzon Street.” The Curzon House, behind the Hilton Hotel, was only one of the posh clubs that played host to Brian’s rampant gambling habit. “He was a heavy gambler,” says Terry Doran, a boyhood friend who had come to London in the recent wave of migration that brought northerners to the Smoke. Doran, who spent a great deal of time bouncing around the clubs, would encounter Brian late at night during his own furtive escapades. “In Liverpool, he gambled at the Rembrandt and a couple of other places, losing more often than not. The dough wasn’t very much—maybe fifty or a hundred quid. But in London it started to get serious.” Doran, who came from a dirt-poor family, watched in horror one night as Brian placed an £8,500 bet at the White Elephant. Toting Francis Bacon along as a guest, he went to the Clermont and promptly lost a cool £10,000. Another time Nat Weiss “watched him drop $17,000 in one quick moment.” In fact, if he happened to hit a jackpot, he wouldn’t even bother to pick it up. Paul recalled running into Brian at the Curzon House, his jaw “grinding away” on pills, when his money had run out—but not his determination. “I remember Brian putting his Dunhill lighter on a bet—‘That’s a hundred pounds’—and he’d lose it all.”
Throughout the summer of 1965, Brian continued to pick up rugged hustlers or other undesirable characters and take them back to Chapel Street for a night of forbidden excess. Lionel Bart remembers the time he hired a muscle-bound guardsman to abuse him—“the guy asked Brian what he had in mind and was told, ‘Whatever you like, as long you don’t break anything.’ ” Brian would show up at the office sporting “great purple bruises” or a black eye. One morning Ken Partridge was met at the door by Joanne Newfield, Brian’s young personal secretary, who wore a look of shocked distress. Between clenched teeth, she warned him, “You’re not going to believe this,” and ushered him into the living room. A few weeks earlier, Partridge had overseen the installation of a magnificent Crowders oak staircase that led from the entrance hall up to Brian’s study. “And when I walked in there, the whole staircase was piled up on the floor like matchwood,” Partridge recalls. “He told me he’d picked up two guardsmen at the [Golden] Lion but, after a drink, decided that he only wanted one of them. So, on the staircase, they beat the shit out of each other—and then out of Brian.”
Another night, remembers Terry Doran, “he came back with some hunk that he was totally infatuated with, who then proceeded to rob him. But he enjoyed it—he really enjoyed getting robbed.” Doran recalls how the same person “took him off” again and again, as if it were a sport, a perverse sport. “George Harrison bought Brian a beautiful watch for his birthday—a really extravagant piece of jewelry, more expensive than a Dunhill. A month or so later he took this guy back to Chapel Street, and the guy robbed it. So Brian had to buy another one, because he didn’t want George to know what had happened to it.”
Between all this, business continued. In early 1965 Brian arranged to meet with Vic Lewis, the celebrated big-band leader whose agency now booked American acts throughout the U.K. Lewis was “a fantastic character,” according to people who knew him, “a cricket-loving, jazz-loving hypochondriac.” A short man—under five foot eight—he “looked very much like a Persian carpet salesman,” with the manner to match. “There wasn’t a day he wasn’t ill,” says a colleague. “But it was never anything that normal people had. One day he’d say, ‘I don’t know what it is, but my hair hurts.’ Another day, his tongue wouldn’t feel right.”
Lewis controlled GAC’s substantial roster of stars for the U.K. territory, but even more important was his marked foothold in the London entertainment establishment. “Norman Weiss [GAC’s president] rang Brian and advised him to buy me out—which he did—at which point he suggested that I run his agency,” Lewis recalls. NEMS absorbed all Vic Lewis’s acts, among them Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Mel Tormé, Sarah Vaughan, David Rose, Percy Faith, Anita O’Day, Tony Bennett, Henry Mancini, Herb Alpert, and Nelson Riddle. The ink wasn’t even dry on the deal when comedian Allen Sherman turned up for a concert tour, and after that, an appearance by the great Groucho Marx. A few months later they “took on” the Moody Blues, who “were crumbling at the time,” according to Tony Bramwell, but remained a fairly important name on the scene. There was also a new kid, an American expat who was still pretty raw, by the name of Jimi Hendrix.
“With Vic, NEMS really picked up steam,” says Bramwell, “and within a year we were the biggest entertainment agency in the world.” That was, of course, an exaggeration, but NEMS had certainly leapfrogged into the major leagues. “Instantly, it gave them size and an international reputation,” says Don Black, who came aboard as part of the Vic Lewis deal. The gifted Black, who had already written a string of hit songs and would later win an Oscar for “Born Free,” had a special place on the staff inasmuch as he personally managed the career of Matt Monro, “the English Frank Sinatra.” The connection paid off handsomely, too: George Martin, Monro’s producer, gave the vocalist first dibs on covering “Yesterday,” which shot to the top of the charts.
“The office was growing, the joint was jumping,” recalls Black, who moved into a cubicle down the hall from Brian. A skeleton staff had been cached during the launch of Beatlemania, but now NEMS scrambled to recruit talented folks who could handle the serious flow of work. Wendy Hanson had been hired in New York as a favor to Capitol Records, and she had steered Brian through one crisis after another. Geoffrey Ellis, the starchy ex-Oxford lawyer who had known Brian from Liverpool, was prevailed upon to “run the office.” Along with Alistair Taylor and Tony Barrow, Brian formed the nucleus of a staff necessary to oversee the expanded organizational effort: capable, serious-minded managers whose experience would ensure growth and efficiency. Even Peter Brown, whose as-yet-undefined position rendered him more of “a glorified office boy,” proved skillful at handling many aspects of the business—to say nothing of those surrounding Brian’s personal life, which, frankly, not many other people would have wished to handle.
Of course, it was still the Beatles that everyone desired. On a particularly busy evening when phones were ringing off the hook, Black remembers picking up a call from the producer of The Lucy Show in New York, who’d been trying desperately to reach Brian. She explained how they were preparing to film a segment in London. If the logistics could be worked out, Lucille Ball wanted to walk down Piccadilly, do a double-take, and see the Beatles standing on the corner. It would be only a ten-second shot, for which the network was willing to pay $100,000. But Brian wanted nothing to do with it. Furthermore, he warned Black never to interrupt him with such a ridiculous request.
It seemed like madness at the time, but Brian was right. Everyone wanted some time with the Beatles—ten seconds, thirty, a minute and a half, just an hour or two. The office was inundated with calls like that every day, and not just three or four good offers but sometimes twenty or fifty. The Lord Mayor of Birmingham needed their support for a favorite charity, David Frost requested an interview, Sunday Night at the London Palladium would settle for a walk-on—“they won’t have to say a word”—two minutes with the P.M. to discuss communications, a scene in some Hollywood movie, backup vocals for the Animals, their own TV special… it never ended. As heartless as it sounds, it seemed there were more dying children with a last request for one of the Beatles to bid them farewell than there were healthy ones. And each request drew the same cold response: no! Not on any condition. Nada. Non. Nein.
They’d already been through this with the cripples. At the outset of Beatlemania, handicapped or deformed children were wheeled into the theaters and placed along the front, at the foot of the stage, before each performance as a goodwill measure. “We were only trying to play rock ’n roll and they’d be wheeling them in, not just in wheelchairs but sometimes in oxygen tents,” recalled George. “We’d come out of the bandroom to go to the stage and we’d be fighting our way through all these poor unfortunate people.” To make matters worse, they were the only part of the audience the Beatles could see from the stage, and the distraction was unimaginable. John would gaze down at a child whose drool hung in a solid string from mouth to lap, and he’d pfumpf a line. Spastics trying to clap would accidentally smack themselves in the face. Epileptics would have seizures in the middle of songs. “You felt like you were at the shrine at Lourdes,” says Nat Weiss. Even after the shows, it never let up. “Crippled people were constantly being brought backstage to be touched by a Beatle,” remembered Ringo. Parents would traipse into the dressing room with terribly deformed children who had no idea where they were or who they were looking at, and then the parents would leave. “They’d go off for tea or whatever, and they would leave [the kids] behind.”
Fed up with the continued imposition, John took to doing “spastic impersonations” while onstage. According to Paul, “he had a habit of putting a clear plastic bag on his foot with a couple of rubber bands” and stumbling around in a circle, until Brian had seen enough. “Finally, he took it upon himself to say ‘no’ to every request by the parents of these kids and even to the hospital wards,” says Nat Weiss. “It was depressing the Beatles, and he couldn’t expose them to it any longer.”
Nada. Non. Nein.
Early in July, after looking over their schedule, Brian announced to the press that contrary to the group’s usual practice, the Beatles would not be doing any radio or TV appearances to promote their new record. He was imposing a media blackout, although he didn’t call it that, and to underscore his point, he canceled their appearances on Ready, Steady, Go!, on Top of the Pops, and on Thank Your Lucky Stars, substituting, in lieu of the boys, a rather feeble clip of the Beatles lip-syncing to “Help!”
The very next day, predictably, the tabloids made headlines out of the announcement, overshadowing an Australian initiative in Vietnam, and fans across Great Britain reached for their pens and fired off angry letters to local editors, damning the Beatles as insensitive prima donnas. “These lads have become far too big for their boots,” wrote Anne Laury of Harrogate, “and it’s time the fans paid them back and quit forking out their hard-earned pocket money to buy their records.” Another disappointed teenager complained, “I used to be one of the Beatles’ biggest fans… BUT I’m beginning to wonder….” An NME poll of its readers revealed that a majority of fans felt cheated, accusing the Beatles of “taking a leaf from Mr. Presley’s book.” Still, Brian stood firm, and just in case that wasn’t crystal-clear, NEMS dashed off a press release emphasizing that the Beatles would “definitely not tour Britain” for the remainder of the year.
The strategy behind this maneuver was entirely pragmatic. Brian had no intention of alienating anyone; he had argued with the Beatles for years about staying accessible to the fans. But John’s second book of nonsense, A Spaniard in the Works, was published in early July, earning mostly puzzled, if not outright negative, reviews, and soon after that Help! took a beating from the once-adoring critics, with NME calling it “100 minutes of nonsense” and, worse, “unfunny.” Part of the backlash, Brian was convinced, arose from the Beatles’ being everywhere at once—in print, on record, in the news, on the telly, in the movies. “It was saturation point,” John agreed. “You couldn’t walk down a street without having us staring at you.” It stood to reason that when the press finally got good and bored with singing the band’s praise, they’d amuse themselves by taking potshots. Making the Beatles scarce took them out of the critical crosshairs. It would offset the constant glare of exposure, giving them distance and creating demand. “We need less exposure, not more,” George said. “It’s been Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.”
Whether George realized it or not, the audience wasn’t tired of the Beatles as much as grown weary of the Beatles’ glossy personae. While “the Beatles had inspired an upheaval in pop music, mores, fashion, hairstyles, and manners,” as Robert Shelton wrote, a new attitude was developing among rock ’n roll partisans that had no musical antecedent and distanced itself from the tame protopop that, up to now, had sustained the form. Its enthusiasts, who defined themselves culturally instead of by age, offered a tough, toothier alternative—rock, as opposed to rock ’n roll—steeped in gritty urban blues, art school romanticism, and folk music’s outsider intellectualism. A trend emerged, inspiring songs with more meaningful lyrics intent on saying something about reality, conformity, and injustice.
The spectacle of four irrepressible woolly-jumpered lads shaking their hair and trilling, “Oooooooooo,” was inadequate for the emerging rock culture, and the Beatles knew it. “Things were changing,” Paul realized. “The direction was moving away from the poppy stuff, like ‘Thank You Girl,’ ‘From Me to You,’ and ‘She Loves You.’ ” Shrewdly, the Beatles anticipated the need to move with it.
All of that, however, took a backseat to the upcoming American tour.
By the end of the first week in August, the preparations were all but complete. The bags were packed, the wives and girlfriends provided for. John and Paul spent one of their last days in London producing a cover of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” for the Silkie, a quartet of long-faced Hull University students that Brian had signed to NEMS; otherwise, most of the last-minute arrangements focused not on music but on real estate. Ringo and Maureen closed a deal on a small but graceful estate, Sunny Heights, literally around the corner from John and Cynthia’s place in Weybridge. With a baby on the way and the ongoing harassment from fans, they felt it was easier to live in the suburbs. Paul didn’t share their concerns and was about to be ensconced in his handsome, newly renovated three-story Regency house on Cavendish Avenue, near Abbey Road. George had already moved into a modest California-style bungalow in Esher, about twenty miles south of the city. And in one final and overdue act of generosity, John bought Aunt Mimi an ivy-covered cottage in Poole, set in a loose cluster of houses just off the dunes, with a long front porch and a bay window that gave a huge, breathtaking view of the English Channel.
Finally, on the morning of August 13, as a heat wave swept in and scorched the streets with ribbons of heat, the Beatles and their entourage piled into the first-class cabin of a Pan Am Clipper and took off into the desolate white sky, leaving the last traces of innocence behind.
[III]
No sooner had the Beatles touched down in New York than the shift in the scene was evident. Music was everywhere; it seemed to have taken over the streets. They not only heard the new groove on the radio but could see it in the styles as well as the manner in which the kids carried themselves. Everywhere they turned there was a residue of the cultural fallout. The airwaves were awash in popular records by the Byrds, Sonny and Cher, Jody Miller, the Turtles, the Dixie Cups, and Bob Dylan. “The Eve of Destruction” belabored the stinging social message by whining, “This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’.” Even the Righteous Brothers, their throwaway opening act from the last U.S. tour, had hijacked the Top Ten with the symphonic tearjearker “Unchained Melody,” and as the Beatles’ caravan of limos plodded like circus elephants into the city, everyone inside remarked how cool and sexy the Brothers’ last hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” had turned out. Little did they know that, at that very moment, Mick Jagger was aboard the luxury yacht Princess moored in the Hudson River, dancing on deck to a test pressing he’d been given of the new Bob Dylan single, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
The scene had shifted slightly downtown and farther west, to the Warwick Hotel at Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, but gone was the “happy hysteria” evident during the Beatles’ previous visits. This crowd was determined—ferocious. About fifteen hundred strong, they confounded the more than one hundred “tense and red-faced” cops who were brought in to provide security at the hotel, breaking through barricades and storming police lines. Everywhere one looked there were scuffles, aggression, and discord, not only between female fans and the police but also with malevolent construction workers who egged on the violence from atop nearby scaffolding.
Gone was the innocence that had accompanied the previous tour. There was no official greeting at the airport, no prearranged waving to the fans; despite a heavy turnout at Kennedy Airport, the boys remained completely out of sight throughout the arrival process. Later, at the requisite press conference, they showed none of the staccato wit that paced earlier performances. Their answers came fast, to be sure, but were strained and with a contemptuous edge, indicating how bored they had become with the “farcical affairs.” Even the hotel situation grew strange. Outside of a few scheduled appearances, the Beatles remained locked in the Governor’s Suite on the thirty-third floor. There was no sneaking off to a restaurant or club, none of the easy socializing with deejays and the press. Part of this turnabout might be ascribed to drugs; the Beatles didn’t mind drinking scotch and Cokes or cursing in front of journalists, but smoking dope was too dicey. Or they’d simply had it with the barrage of inane questions.
The only visitors to the suite were other performers, some old friends reasserting old claims, with new acquaintances scrambling for a place in the entourage. Frank Sinatra, who once derided the Beatles as “unfit to sing in public,” sent a valet bearing an invitation to a private party. (The Beatles politely declined.) Bob Dylan and Del Shannon arrived early, to much hurrahs, followed by the Supremes, who were treated to “the coolest reception [they’d] ever received.” The girls showed up alone, without their handlers, looking like porcelain figurines, outfitted in precious day dresses accented with hats, gloves, costume jewelry, and little fur wraps. One can only imagine the impression this made on the Beatles, considering they were stoned and behaving in an excessively silly manner. “We felt we had interrupted something,” recalled Mary Wilson, who couldn’t fathom what the boys kept laughing about and left in a flash with Florence and Diana.
Ronnie Spector wasn’t “so square,” like the Supremes, but even she “sensed that something strange was in the air” since the Ronettes’ last visit in 1964. Sometime after she arrived, Spector recalled, John steered her into one of the bedrooms, where a handpicked audience was packed along the walls watching a young girl have “sex every which way” with “one of the guys in the Beatles entourage.” Then, in another bedroom, with liquor and a magnificent view to embolden him, John tried to talk her into a more intimate scene.
The atmosphere surrounding the Beatles was turning cruel and pitiless. Instead of reshaping their image, they were sharpening it in ways that offered no identifiable quality. Most everyone who came into contact with them could feel it. Larry Kane, the young Miami newscaster who had accompanied the previous tour, rejoined them in New York and was startled by the edge of detachment that had crept over the entourage. “It was alarming how hard-shelled everyone had become,” Kane says. “There was a kind of Us and Them mentality to protect against the outside world.” The Beatles had always been circumspect, even distrustful, toward outsiders. “Now, there was an ambiguousness about everything, a way in which they kept you off balance. One moment they could be playful or attentive; if they were in a bad mood, however, they might try to intimidate you—or simply freeze you out. You never knew what to expect. And I got the sense that they liked it that way.”
Not liked—but needed. The demands on the Beatles were extraordinary, the characters and situations growing less distinguishable. More so than ever, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
On Saturday, August 14, they taped their third—and final—appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.Chris Hutchins remembers sitting in the studio audience next to Cilla Black, who was also on the bill, and marveling at how hard the boys worked to put their set across. “Four hours of constant rehearsals,” according to Hutchins. “Six songs, no break, just total dedication.” Getting an adequate sound balance was further complicated by a solo spot featuring Paul playing an acoustic version of “Yesterday.” But though the configuration was highly irregular, the performance otherwise came off without a hitch.
As the sun went down, the Beatles boarded a helicopter on the East River, bound for Shea Stadium, in Flushing, New York. It was a clear, sumptuous night, and as the aircraft lifted up, the jagged silhouette of the city, tinted by speckled neon light, resembled a vaulted jewel box. The Beatles, looking gaunt-faced and anxious, barely glanced at the scenery. They actually loved New York—George called it “one of the most amazing cities in the world”—but between the helicopter, which they dreaded, and the destination, which seemed unreal, it was all they could do to keep their food down.
A 56,000-seat horseshoe where the perennially crummy Mets played baseball, Shea Stadium was bathed in a halo of opalescent light and looked more like a stage prop from eight thousand feet up. “For the boys,” recalls Barrow, “seeing the stadium was an absolute high. They were awestruck, gobsmacked, as the Liverpool expression goes.” No band had ever played to an audience so large. The show was already in progress, featuring an interminable number of opening acts, with King Curtis’s glorious backup band pounding away against the tsunami of screams. The pilot switched on a two-way radio so his passengers could monitor the sound onstage. As he swung over the parking lot, a deejay preempted the stadium P.A. system, shouting: “You hear that up there? Listen… it’s the Beatles! They’re here!” The sky lit up as thousands of flashbulbs exploded. “It was terrifying at first when we saw the crowds,” said George, “but I don’t think I ever felt so exhilarated in all my life.” Geoffrey Ellis, who sat bewildered in the cockpit, sweating in a crisp blue suit and tie, didn’t know what to make of the whole crazy scene. “I was caught up in the extraordinary fantasy,” he recalled, “that all those kids… kept looking up to the heavens as though God was descending to the earth.”
It was too dangerous to land the helicopter on the baseball field, so it was diverted to a macadam strip near the old World’s Fair site, where the Beatles were transferred into armored cars. “It [was] organized like a military operation,” according to photographer Bob Whitaker. Every aspect of the arrival was timed to split-second precision in order to elude canny fans.
Ed Sullivan, who was filming the concert for a TV special, paced anxiously in the Mets’ dugout as the boys and Brian arrived. A little of the terror showed when the actual size of the place hit them. It was huge—ridiculous, John said. As the Beatles looked at the stands from the dugout they fell back in laughter. Everywhere they looked were kids—wall-to-wall kids. “It seemed like millions of people,” Paul recalled, “but we were ready for it.”
As the Beatles charged from the dugout to the stage situated over second base, “mass hysteria” broke out. More than fifty thousand kids jumped to their feet and screamed, wept, thrashed, and contorted themselves in a tableau that, to some, must have personified pure bedlam. “Their immature lungs produced a sound so staggering, so massive, so shrill and sustained that it quickly crossed the line from enthusiasm into hysteria and was soon in the area of the classic Greek meaning of the word pandemonium—the region of all demons,” wrote the stunned reporter for the New York Times. Another compared the roar to “a dozen jets taking off.” Mick Jagger, who, along with Keith Richards, was watching from a seat behind the first-base dugout, was visibly shaken by the crowd’s behavior. “It’s frightening,” he told a companion.
All of this without a note of any music.
More than fifty 100-watt amplifiers had been set up along the base paths of the diamond, but they were no match for the wall of piercing sound that blared from the stands. The fans drowned out all the singing and most of the music. All that could be heard above the roar was “the pulsation of the electric guitars and thump of drums,” and even then only sporadically. The Beatles played their standard half-hour set—“not a minute more, not a minute less,” as Brian mandated it—but conditions on the stage never improved. “It was ridiculous!” John remarked of the experience. “We couldn’t hear ourselves sing.” During two numbers, he wasn’t even sure what key they were in. And later, after watching the replay on TV, he noted: “You can see it in the film, George and I aren’t even bothering playing half the chords, and we were just messing about.”
Measured by dollars and cents, however, the show was a runaway success. Variety reported that the Beatles “shattered all existing… box office records, with a one-night gross of $304,000”—the Beatles cleared $180,000, or as the New York Journal-American calculated it, “$100 a second”—and took a giant step toward reshaping the concert business. For promoters everywhere, the Shea Stadium concert was a major breakthrough. It freed them from the constraints imposed by a gym or cinema, thus turning a pop performance into an event.
The Beatles bonanza continued its late-summer push across North America, rekindling the excitement in cities such as Toronto, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In each location, the usual concert halls had been usurped by open-air stadiums and arenas, with scenes of screaming and hysteria replayed like half-hour sitcoms. Aside from a minor skirmish in Houston, when unruly fans swarmed the plane, climbed on the wings, and banged on the windows—“It happens every time we come to Texas, we nearly get killed,” John quipped—the spirit in the chartered tour plane was constantly convivial, marred only by mechanical problems as the plane descended into Portland.
Some of the Beach Boys were planning to visit backstage between shows in Portland, a visit everyone in the entourage looked forward to. Larry Kane, who was sitting over the left wing, remembers eavesdropping on a conversation between John and George that touched on their curiosity about Brian Wilson, when he happened to glance out the window. “Flames were shooting out of one of the engines in the rear,” Kane recalls. Trying not to attract undue attention, he headed into the cockpit and notified the pilot, who voiced the exact sentiment that Kane was feeling: “Oh, shit!” This was more than anyone had bargained for. The inevitable black smoke finally alerted other passengers, who rushed to the windows. “John totally freaked. He went to the emergency door and attempted to open it. We were about eight thousand feet up and it took several of us to pull him away. Then George totally freaked.” No doubt he and the others flashed Buddy Holly. It turned grim in the cabin as the pilot struggled to maintain control of the plane. John took a seat next to Paul, both of whom “sat silently, with fixed, serious expressions,” as the airport loomed into view. They could make out the outline of workers foaming the runway and fire engines speeding alongside. Ringo, “pale-faced,” asked a reporter what to do in case they crashed, but an answer seemed entirely too ridiculous for words.
Thankfully, the plane, billowing smoke, bellied through the sea of white lather, stopping safely half a mile from the terminal. When the thrum of turboprops ground to a halt, there was a long, anxious silence. It was broken by the sound of a seat back groaning as John sprang to his feet. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he announced: “Beatles, women, and children first!”
When the Beatles arrived in Los Angeles two days later, still reeling from the emergency landing, they finally got what they coveted most: peace and quiet. There were two sold-out shows at the Hollywood Bowl flanked by a tantalizing four-day layover, and rather than confining them to a hotel suite, Brian had rented a luxurious horseshoe-shaped house on stilts on a secluded road in Benedict Canyon, off Mulholland Drive. It had everything they wanted—gourmet cooks, a staff of maids, an imposing gatehouse, an Olympic-size swimming pool, an intimate movie theater, lush bougainvillea-scented gardens. Better yet, there was no entourage, no meddlesome press, no annoying deejays, no Brian, no record-company flacks. And best of all, no fans. Thanks to the rugged terrain, there was a sheer drop from the pool right down the hillside, studded with bracken, cacti, and boulder-size rubble.
During those lazy days, under picture-postcard skies, the Beatles lounged by the pool, pulling on “the fattest joints” anyone had ever rolled and gorging themselves on a round-the-clock buffet to stem the “munchies.” John and Mal swam with cigarettes in their mouths, seeing who could keep them lit the longest. Paul strummed idly on an acoustic guitar, while Ringo, and later John, sorted through a selection of casual sports clothes that had been sent over by a Hollywood boutique. At night they crowded into the screening room for a preview of What’s New Pussycat?
Throughout the next day, celebrities arrived to pay their respects—Eleanor Bron, the actress who costarred in Help!, Joan Baez, Peter Fonda, and half the Byrds, along with a few delectable birds on loan from the Playboy Mansion, invited to cheer up the boys. At Tony Barrow’s urging, the press also attended (as a gesture of goodwill) but were heavily chaperoned lest they come upon one of the Beatles unawares.
As it happened, there was something they wanted to hide. John and George had been waiting for the perfect opportunity to take another acid trip and decided that this setting was ideally suited. Their objective was to initiate Paul and Ringo because, as George explained, after the tripping, “we couldn’t relate to them anymore.” The experience had changed their outlook, if not their lives, and inasmuch as the Beatles were a cliquish family with a unique vision, it was essential to get everyone, especially their mates, on the same page. “We got some [acid] in New York; it was on sugar cubes wrapped in tinfoil and we’d been carrying these all through the tour until we got to L.A.”
Paul, cautious as ever, wanted nothing to do with it. But Ringo was game, as was Neil, who had Paul’s share, with enough left over for Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. “We were all ripped on LSD,” recalls Fonda, who joined the guests around the pool, while Paul worked in his usual capacity “to keep everything calm and level.”
By midday, the hills opposite the house were ringed with teenagers who screamed and shouted any time so much as a maid walked across the deck. Several kids actually attempted to climb the steep slope to the house but were intercepted by security guards who helped them to safety rather than letting them risk a fall going back down the hill. To make matters worse, three girls had rented a helicopter and buzzed the house, flying so low that the water in the swimming pool rippled. “The Beatles actually enjoyed the ingenuity of it,” says Tony Barrow, “and they grinned and posed for the girls, who leaned dangerously out of the helicopter, taking pictures and waving.” Only George’s feathers were ruffled. He had been splashing around in the pool, zoned out of his skull and grooving on the “great feeling,” but when the girls flew overhead, he retreated to a chaise longue between McGuinn and Fonda, where he sank into a deep funk. “He said, ‘You know, man, I feel like I’m gonna die,’ ” remembers Fonda, who tried to assure George that LSD occasionally triggered strange reactions that needed to be ignored. The two men “bounced that around for a while,” until Fonda sensed a real panic building and decided to tackle the feeling head-on. “Well, look,” he confided to George, “I know what it’s like to be dead, man.” And he explained how in 1950, at the age of ten, he accidentally shot himself while playing with an old pistol and lost so much blood that his heart stopped three times. “The thing is, I almost died. And I’m not dead. I’m here, I’m alive. It’s okay, George—everything’s gonna be all right.”
John, who had been passing by and overheard only a fragment of the conversation, leaned reproachfully over the recliner. “What do you mean, you know what it’s like to be dead?”
Fonda, more than “a bit wasted,” stared blankly at him. “I know what it’s like to be dead.”
“Who put all that shit in your head?” John snarled.
The two Beatles watched half fascinated, half horrified, as Fonda lifted his shirt to display the blotchy wound. “I know what it’s like to be dead,” he repeated, which, by this time, began to gnaw on George as well.
Weirdness abounded in Los Angeles. First, the police refused to cooperate with the Beatles, saying that “they could not be responsible for their security.” Then Phil Spector invited them to his mansion and did a number with drugs and guns. Both circumstances produced some awkward moments for the boys, but nothing that would compete with their visit with Elvis.
For over a year Brian and Colonel Parker had been attempting to arrange a summit between their two megastars, with only egos—massive egos—standing in the way. “Keen to preserve their artists’ prestige,” neither manager wanted to blink first when it came to deciding who would accept the other’s invitation. But in the end, the Beatles conceded, agreeing to pay their respects to the King.
Elvis had just returned from Honolulu, where he’d been filming Blue Hawaii, and was holed up with the Memphis Mafia at a rented house in Bel-Air. When the Beatles arrived, sometime after ten o’clock on August 27, they were “laughing… all in hysterics,” partly from nerves, which they all suffered, and partly from the joints they’d shared in the car. The house was unusually big and ornate—“like a nightclub,” John thought. Inside, Elvis was posed regally on a huge horseshoe-shaped couch, the King, larger than life in a flame red blouse beneath a tight-fitting black jacket and black slacks. A big arm was thrown around his queen-in-waiting, Priscilla Beaulieu, and on either side, his loyal squires: Joe Esposito, Marty Lacker, Billy Smith, Jerry Schilling, Alan Fortas, and Sonny West.
Perhaps more than anyone else, John was shaken by the sight of his boyhood idol. Before he’d gotten a guitar, before skiffle, before Paul, George, and Stu jump-started his own pop odyssey, John had heard “Heartbreak Hotel” and knew “it was the end for me.” Now, John resorted to buffoonery, acting and jabbering as if he were Inspector Clouseau. “Oh, zere you are!” he clowned, peering absentmindedly at his host over his glasses.
The other Beatles were speechless, gazing around at the Vegas-like setup of pool tables, craps tables, and roulette wheels crowding the den. A well-stocked jukebox stood purring in the corner. The room was bathed in red and blue light, which gave it the appearance of a cheesy after-hours club. No one knew what to do, or say. After a brief, embarrassing silence, Elvis summoned them to sit down beside him but grew weary of the Beatles’ vacant stares—“It was hero worship of a high degree,” Paul admitted—and started clicking nervously through the channels of a wall-size TV set.
“If you guys are just gonna sit there and stare at me, I’m goin’ to bed,” Elvis huffed, tossing the remote control on the coffee table. Turning to his girlfriend, he said, “Let’s call it a night, right, ’Cilla? I didn’t mean for this to be like the subjects calling on the King. I just thought we’d sit and talk about music and jam a little.”
“That’d be great,” Paul said, suggesting they try a song by “the other Cilla”—Cilla Black—at which point guitars and a white piano were produced, along with ample drink. “We all plugged in whatever was around, and we played and sang… ‘You’re My World,’ ” John recalled. Unwinding gradually, they segued into a few Presley barn burners—“That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” with Elvis carrying the melody and Paul vamping on the piano—before finishing with “I Feel Fine.”
By now John had slipped from feather to thistle. “Zis is ze way it zhould be,” he mimicked, “ze szmall homely gazering wiz a few friends and a leetle music.” Chris Hutchins, who recollected the visit in his 1994 chronicle, Elvis Meets the Beatles, writes that beyond the faux French accent, John chided Elvis rudely—and in front of his pals, no less—about his lack of chops, the post-army soft-core singles, and string of cornball movies. “I might just get around to cuttin’ a few sides and knockin’ you off the top,” Presley said with a shrug, feeling hard-pressed to respond. Nobody could dispel the “uncomfortable undertones… and superficial cheerfulness” that punctuated the evening until sometime after two, when the Beatles finally departed.
“Sanks for ze music,” John said in parting, then bellowed: “Long live the King!”
The next day the hungry pool of reporters covering the tour pounced on the story of the historic meeting, which had been press-managed—and largely fabricated to suit both managers—by Tony Barrow. Every journalist was supplied with a generous sampling of quotes from each of the Beatles, who fairly tripped over one another in the rush to praise their idol. Only in private would John admit what he really felt. “It was a load of rubbish,” he concluded. “It was just like meeting Englebert Humperdinck.”
After the Beatles’ final performance—at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, on August 31, 1965—everyone was ready to head home.
The pitch of the crowd in San Francisco was a bit too “wild,” even for the Beatles, who thought they had seen it all. Before the show, Wendy Hanson had been bitten by a fan who trampled on the hood of her car. Hearing about the incident made John “nervous.” Superstitious by nature, he took every chance event as an omen, and when he walked onstage to discover the guitars out of tune, it set off all kinds of alarms. Paul had much the same reaction when he saw “the dreadful crush of fans up against the stage.” A massive stampede of teenagers had broken through the barricades and surged forward, wave after wave attempting to vault the stage, only to be turned back by a detachment of stagehands. “Calm down!” Paul screamed at them. “Things are getting dangerous.” But to no avail. One kid leaped over the amplifiers and snatched the cap off John’s head before swan-diving into the audience. A security guard was knocked cold by a Coke bottle and more than two hundred fans fainted. Paul even stopped the show midway through so that police could rescue a pregnant woman who was being trampled. “At one point I glanced down and saw Joan Baez trying to pull kids to their feet and bring them around with smelling salts,” recalls Tony Barrow, who says he feared for his life. Eventually the Beatles had seen enough and bolted, leaving Ringo to deliver a fitting postmortem. “We survived,” he told an interviewer. “That’s the important thing, wouldn’t you say?”
[IV]
By the fall of 1965, the Beatles had drawn a deep collective breath. The luxury of six weeks off allowed each of the boys to catch up with his personal life and to step out of the all-consuming glare that had highlighted one of the most productive seasons of their career. In a reversal of the pattern that had governed their lives, the break gave them time to settle into new homes, see friends, and sleep. Beatlemania raged on without them. Help! kept them on the radio and in front of packed, delirious audiences, while Paul’s single of “Yesterday,” released only in America, captured the top spot on Bilboard’s Hot 100 for four weeks running, spawning a cascade of competent if uninspired covers by Marianne Faithfull, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, and Andy Williams. The only commotion during the rare hiatus was caused by Ringo Starr when, on September 13, Maureen gave birth to a boy—“a little smasher,” as Ringo dubbed him—at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital, whom they whimsically named Zak. “I won’t let Zak be a drummer!” Ringo vowed to reporters outside the delivery room, but whether he realized it or not, the matter was out of his hands, and if he didn’t realize it, most of the grinning press corps did.
In the meantime, October 12 loomed as the kickoff for recording a new album at the Abbey Road studios. EMI insisted on the date so that there would be new Beatles product available for the coming holiday season. The only song ready was “Wait,” which they had completed while in the Bahamas and recorded for the Help! soundtrack. Otherwise, John and Paul “had to force themselves to come up with a dozen new songs” in a little more than two weeks, which seemed like an impossible feat, even for such naturals.
One thing was certain: this record wasn’t going to sound like anything they’d ever done before. There was too much going on in the rock music scene, too much creativity in the air. Paul spoke for the others when he complained of “being bored by doing the same thing.” Lyrics like “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret” no longer seemed relevant. The Beatles had moved on emotionally, preoccupied with inner thoughts and feelings that gradually shaped their adult lives. “You can’t be singing 15-year-old songs at 20 because you don’t think 15-year-old thoughts at 20,” Paul explained. “We were expanding in all areas of our lives,” Ringo recalled, “opening up to a lot of different attitudes.” And they’d moved on artistically. “We were suddenly hearing sounds that we weren’t able to hear before,” George observed. They were all still influencedtremendously by American R&B—although gravitating toward Stax and Motown artists as opposed to Little Richard and Chuck Berry—but other forms and diverse sources that had constantly swirled around them finally began to coalesce. Certainly jazz patterns and country licks had always figured in Beatles songs, to say nothing of the music hall influence still prevalent in every aspect of their careers. It had taken time, however, for them to learn how to put it all together.
As Paul well knew, in his capacity as a keen listener of pop radio, the summer of 1965 had already produced a rich vein of exceptional hit singles analogous for their offbeat originality and authentic voice. Dylan had started the ball rolling, not only with “Like a Rolling Stone” but also the Byrds’ cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which bounced the process into another lyrical dimension. The Animals were offering their bluesy melodrama, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” followed by the Who’s anthemic “My Generation,” Unit 4 + 2’s “Concrete and Clay,” and the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love.” One can only imagine the bruising body heat created by the Stones’ one-two punch of “The Last Time” and “Satisfaction.” By contrast, the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” seemed like the perfect pop confection to counterbalance the scorching imagery.
The competition, such as it was, turned out to be all the incentive John and Paul needed. Throughout the beginning of October, the songs ripped off their guitars, one right after another, and each as different and revolutionary as the last. If anything, the short two-week schedule seemed to sharpen their focus on the task of transforming and shading the Beatles’ tone.
In “Norwegian Wood,” which John had begun in February while skiing in St. Moritz, they gave a moody, vaguely Oriental voice to a furtive adult relationship. There was nothing predictable about “Norwegian Wood,” neither in its lyric—“a very bitter little story,” as George Martin referred to it—nor in its delivery. John claimed he based the narrative on an extramarital affair he was having—insiders say with the journalist Maureen Cleave—and that it was “my song completely,” meaning the entire composition. Decades later Paul would take issue with that account, raking it from top to bottom, beginning with the fanciful title, which he said was nothing more than an inside joke about the cheap pine walls in Peter Asher’s bedroom. “[John] had this first stanza,” Paul recalled, but really only the first line and nothing else, as far as he could remember, except perhaps the underlying tune. There was in fact no indication that John had anything more than a general idea of where they were headed. But no matter: once a song was begun, no conceit could stop their momentum. Everything just poured out, the character of the girl or “bird,” her rejection of the lover along with his due penance—“to sleep in the bath”—and the extreme revenge he exacts the next morning, after “this bird has flown.” The way Paul recollected it, they wrote most of the song together in a single afternoon, finishing it during a productive session at Weybridge.
John’s house was also the scene for “Drive My Car,” which Paul called “one of the stickiest” they struggled through in the writing process. Paul had sketched out a rough outline for the song on his way there from London. When he arrived, the tune was already set in his head but “the lyrics were disastrous,” he admitted, “and I knew it.” Baby, you can buy me golden rings. John called it “crap” and dismissed it as “too soft.” Besides, it wouldn’t scan. And the longer they played with and reworked it, the more entrenched the phrase became, much like the “scrambled eggs” impasse with “Yesterday.” Pass after pass turned up the same problem. When the lyric threatened to block the entire session, John and Paul discussed throwing in the towel. Instead, they went to have tea, still unresolved: a great sassy melody with nothing to hang on it. When they returned to the attic half an hour later, they took another swing at it and replaced the central theme with an idea John suggested: drive my car—perhaps, as Paul implied, to ply the old blues euphemism for sex, perhaps because it just sounded good. “Baby, you can drive my car.” An entire narrative flowed from it, rich with imagery and innuendo. It came alive in the studio, it just took off, with a flirtatious piano riff and a skintight backbeat, underscored by a soulful bass and guitar motif, “like the line from ‘Respect,’ by Otis Redding,” George recalled, which further emphasizes the song’s raunchy feel.
In the days that followed, a set of songs evolved that grappled with a new form: the act of self-exploration and confessional lyrics. John felt especially compelled to explore through his music the emotional upheaval that was churning in his life. His dilemma basically focused on propriety: could he get away with writing emotionally charged lyrics streaked with imagery that revealed dark truths? How much did the Beatles’ fans want to know about intensely personal issues? And how much was he willing to share with them?
To sidestep these questions, John initially resorted to third-person narratives, a tactic most prevalent in the seminal “Nowhere Man.” He’d begun it after a late drug-ridden night of clubhopping, arriving back at Kenwood higher than a kite. Collapsing on a couch in the attic, he said he “spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good,” until he finally gave up and dozed off. At some point John apparently blinked awake with a concept: “I thought of myself as a Nowhere Man sitting in this Nowhere Land,” after which the words and music came—“the whole damn thing”—in a rush. Paul showed up sometime later and helped polish off the rough edges, admittedly a bit uneasy over the blatant personal slant of the lyric. “I think… it was about the state of his marriage,” Paul surmised, aware that John had grown bored with Cynthia, frustrated by her timidity and aversion to drugs. A reflective, “dirge-like” song, “Nowhere Man” is steeped in dense harmonic pathos, the two voices intertwining, almost wearily so, around a tent pole of melancholy. The same can be said of “Girl,” John’s fantasy of “that girl—the one that a lot of us were looking for,” he opined—although it is more wistful than melancholy. One of the last songs recorded for the album, “Run for Your Life” was stripped to its essential acoustic core, with some help from George’s lovely guitar counterpoint as well as the control booth.
No production tricks were necessary for “In My Life,” in which John even abandoned the coy third-person smoke screen for a straight biographical approach. It was the first time he consciously put the “literary part of [himself] into the lyric.” And unlike “Norwegian Wood,” nothing is jumbled by abstraction. As it was originally conceived, “In My Life” was a magnificent piece of songwriting, influenced by all the beloved sites from John’s Liverpool childhood: Menlove Avenue, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, the tram sheds (or bus depot). “I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic version of a trip from home to downtown on a bus naming every sight,” he recalled. But by the time he was finished, the structure bored him. It was too much of a travelogue, too nostalgic and sentimental. Practically none of it survived the makeover that followed. Once Paul took a crack at it, the places John identified were gone, replaced by two stanzas in which he only alluded to them and meditated on his past.
The song that resulted is a standout among innumerable gems, not only on the album but among all Lennon-McCartney compositions. It would be hard to point to a more gorgeous melody, distinct and unforgettable; in the hours John and Paul spent shaping it, each chord, each stroke, added new layers of color. None of their lyrics are as restrained—or more poignant. Proudly, John claimed authorship of the song throughout his life, and “In My Life” certainly has his stamp on it; few songs reveal his romantic sensibility more clearly. But Paul has maintained that while the “original inspiration,” the “template,” was John’s, by the time they got done reworking it, “filling out the rest of the verses,” only “very few lines” remained. According to Paul, they rewrote all but the opening lines, with Paul alone “writing the whole melody” based on a Smokey Robinson motif, “with the minors and little harmonies” lifted from Miracles records.
In fact, you can see their discrete fingerprints at various places in the material. Together, John and Paul polished off “The Word,” “You Won’t See Me,” and “What Goes On” in quick succession. “I’m Looking Through You” took its inspiration from Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher, which had scrabbled onto an uneasy plateau. “They were like two speeding trains,” observes John Dunbar, a scenemaker and fantastic character in the British underground, “running on opposite tracks. Paul liked having Jane on his arm—when it suited him. But you could see he was gradually losing patience.” And interest. Jane wasn’t marriage-minded—not yet, at least—and Paul didn’t “feel comfortable” settling down with her. Besides, there was definitely some friction as a result of their respective careers. “Jane’s star was rising,” says Tony Barrow, “and Paul didn’t like being upstaged.” She refused to take a supporting role to the Beatles. “There was a time when he might have preferred that she play the housewife role, and that was never going to happen. Jane loved acting and Jane loved Paul, but she wasn’t about to give one up for the other.” Paul admitted “being disillusioned over her commitment” to the theater and reacting petulantly: “I can see through your facade—I’m looking through you.”
The tune brought John and Paul a step closer to finishing, but they were still a song or two short. The Beatles were determined to load up the album with an unheard-of fourteen cuts.* “It’s a question of value for money more than anything else,” Paul explained in a year-end wrap-up with the Herald Tribune. “We want to do what we would have liked when we were record-buyers ourselves.” It was a gracious gesture, but not without disadvantages. They were pretty much tapped out from the rigorous grind. Neither of the boys felt much like going back to the drawing board.
But they had to. “D’you remember that French thing you used to do at Mitchell’s parties?” John asked Paul, referring to the all-night “bohemian” bashes they attended at the flat of Austin Mitchell, one of the tutors at the art college in Liverpool. Paul knew exactly what he was talking about: a precious, “rather French” instrumental he’d spun using a Chet Atkins–type fingerpicking technique. “Well, that’s a good tune. You should do something with that.”
Indeed. Paul had been noodling with a lyric built around the name Michelle and thought it might match up with the melody. To give it the musical lilt that the name seemed to suggest, he decided to weave in a few French phrases as an accent. Michelle… ma belle. It so happened he was spending the weekend with his old Liverpool mate, Ivan Vaughan, whose wife, Janet, taught French at a primary school and, at his urging, she helped fill in the rest of the expressions. By the time he played it for John, the song was pretty much fleshed out but still lacked a middle eight. “I had been listening to Nina Simone [doing] ‘I Put a Spell on You,’ ” John recalled. “There was a line in it that went: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.” Changing the emphasis to love, he “add[ed] a little bluesy edge” to the mix and they’d bagged another one.
They were almost ready—except for one not-so-minor detail. George Martin had been with EMI for fourteen years, ten of them as head of Parlophone, and after a feeble contract negotiation in 1963, he was still earning less than £70 a week. All his requests for a commission against sales were rejected out of hand—an outcome made all the more incredible considering his monumental effort in breaking seven or eight NEMS acts, to say nothing of the Beatles. “I was in the studio twenty-four hours a day,” Martin argued. “You know, you don’t [spend] thirty-seven weeks out of fifty-two at number one without working quite hard.”
Even so, a commission was unheard-of. Producers and A&R men were company drones, ciphers, lacking any residual perks—not even a car or a negligible Christmas bonus. Martin, who not only brought in tens of millions of pounds, reversing EMI’s flat earnings, but was largely responsible for thrusting the label into the rock ’n roll era, surely deserved at least the same kind of compensation as company sales reps, a reward for his extraordinary success—or so he thought.
EMI balked until the summer of 1964, when Martin notified the label that he would not be renewing his contract at the end of its current term. Len Wood attempted to broker a new deal, but each proposal he made was more preposterous, more arrogant—and ultimately more insulting—than the last. When, at their final meeting, Wood, sitting ramrod-stiff and imperious behind a polished yacht-size desk, proposed a deal by which Martin would be forced to reimburse EMI for departmental costs out of his profit, the producer yanked the plug. “Thank you, very much,” George informed him. “I’m leaving.”
Martin decided to start an independent production company—a revolutionary concept, “a shock to the recording industry,” NME conceded—that would lease its staff’s services to the labels for a respectable fee against royalties. Not only that, but he was taking a couple of EMI’s young frontline producers, Ron Richards and John Burgess, as well as Decca’s Peter Sullivan, along with him. That gave them—or A.I.R. (Associated Independent Recording), as it was to be called—an artist base that included Adam Faith, Manfred Mann, Cilla Black, Tom Jones, Peter and Gordon, the Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Matt Monro, Freddy and the Dreamers, Billy J. Kramer, P. J. Proby, Lulu, the Fourmost, and, of course, the Beatles.
Without waiting for the details of Martin’s future role to be sorted out, the Beatles began working on the new album, entering a period during which their efforts together once again produced a groundbreaking style that would change the course of popular music. “For the first time we began to think of albums as art on their own, as complete entities,” Martin explained. That sounded suspiciously highfalutin, as unnecessary floss for rock ’n roll, but in no way did it seem to hamstring the recording process. In the sessions that followed, the Beatles, along with their faithful producer, struck a groove that had never been mined before, in which the sound, the way a song was approached and recorded, played as important a part as the music itself. The composition turned more experimental. “The studio itself was full of instruments: pedal harmoniums, tack pianos, a celeste, and a Hammond organ,” George remembered. “That’s why we used all those different sounds on our records—because they were there.”
Harrison had already become fascinated, if not yet proficient, with the sitar, an Indian lute popularized by Wendy Hanson’s friend Ravi Shankar, and he worked out a subtle arrangement that helped dramatize “Norwegian Wood.” In retrospect, it seems like a minor piece of musical construction, adding a string accompaniment, but that sitar managed to turn more than one head inside out. As far as Ringo was concerned, it was “a mind-blower,” a change of direction, if not a reshaping of the band’s attitude. “We were all open to anything when George introduced the sitar,” he said. From then on, “you could walk in with anything as long as it was going to make a musical note.”
Such experiments were hastened by Martin. “He’d come up with amazing technical things, slowing down the piano and things like that,” John recalled. “They were incredibly inquisitive about the recording process,” Martin recalled. “They wanted to know what they could do that people hadn’t [already] done.” A guideline was immediately established: no idea, however vague or outlandish, was too risky or off-limits. Martin knew better than to dismiss their penchant for experimentation. For every trial concept that crashed and burned, there were four that not only took off but soared.
When it came to musical terminology, however, they couldn’t speak the language. Not only didn’t any of the Beatles have formal training, none could read a note. To stem the lack of communication, they developed a rapport with the eloquent Martin that facilitated discussions about music free of theory-loaded jargon. “Give it some color here,” they might suggest. “Make it punchier.” On one number, “In My Life,” which required an instrumental bridge between the verses, John’s instruction got whittled down to “play it like Bach.” Exchanges like that galvanized Martin, who took up each of their abstract ideas as a challenge.
Play it like Bach. That one especially intrigued him. They needed to fill about twelve bars with a piano solo that would lend the song a classical feel. Martin felt he could swing it. Not a pianist by training, he could still manage a fairly decent passage that would approximate “something baroque-sounding,” as John expressed it. “I quickly wrote out a Bach two-part invention [for piano],” he recalled, “ but it was too fast for me to play. So I lowered the speed of the tape to half speed… and then speeded it up [on playback],” an engineering trick that allowed him to simulate an Elizabethan-style harpsichord. Another time, he wove a few sheets of newspaper through the strings of the piano “to make it sound different.” He wrote the middle figure of “Michelle” as well, taking the song’s basic chord structure and inverting it as an instrumental that he played in a duet with John against George’s guitar solo. Martin called these departures “just manipulations of the resources we had at the time,” but that would be akin to playing Hamlet just by putting on the clothes. Resources take resourceful people to manipulate them, and the Beatles, with George Martin’s able assistance, injected originality and daring into the mix that hinted at the great artistic recordings to come.
“This was the departure record,” Ringo said. By any name, it was a masterpiece. The Beatles had already settled on a concept for the cover: it would be a fashionable photograph of the band from among those taken by Bob Freeman in the garden of John’s house in Weybridge. They’d worn new suede outfits for the occasion along with a new look: mannered, self-assured, candid. Freeman had shot more than a dozen rolls of film at the session, necessitating a consultation with the Beatles in order to choose the right photo. Everyone assembled in the parlor of a London flat one night to view the proof sheets that Freeman had converted to slides. “Whilst projecting [them] onto an album-sized piece of white cardboard, Bob inadvertently tilted the card backwards,” Paul remembered. “The effect was to stretch the perspective and elongate the faces.” What a groovy effect! It reminded them of hallucinations during an acid trip, where everything was out of whack. Was it possible to print the photo that way? they wondered. Freeman’s response—a resounding “yes!”—triggered some discussion about an American blues artist’s reaction to the Rolling Stones. “Well, you know they’re good,” he’d commented, “but it’s plastic soul.” Plastic soul! What a hoot, they thought. It had a clever ring to it, and it was irreverent. A potential album title? Very close. But Freeman’s elasticized photo stretched the phrase in another direction, which everyone felt hit the mark. The name of the album, they agreed, would be Rubber Soul.