CHAPTER 8
GROW A LITTLE TALLER
“WE’D ALL LEARNED to grow together and some days one of us would grow a little taller”—that was how Starr described Beatles symbiosis. During the last few years of the group’s existence, Harrison unexpectedly led the way. The Quiet Beatle took seriously what others merely dabbled in, and his full immersion in India lifted the entire group. His effort infused their music with reflection, depth, and compassion. It distanced them from the art-school rockers—as Keith Richards snickered, “I’m quite proud that I never did go and kiss the Maharishi’s goddamn feet.” It’s true, Richards never came close to writing songs like Across the Universe, Hey Jude, and Here Comes the Sun. Harrison’s embrace of India was central to the crowning phase of the Beatles’ career, which confirmed their status as the musicians who defined the 1960s.
While they were filming Help! in early 1965, Harrison discovered a sitar on the set. The weakest of the five Beatles films, Help! is a postcolonial farce that ridicules the primitive, ignorant, and barbaric (from a British point of view) sides of India. The Beatles hated the film. Harrison remembered his mother listening to music from India on the radio when he was a child. Emboldened by precedents like the Kinks’ See My Friends, he flipped British condescension and felt an attraction. By October he was able to add a touch of exoticism to Norwegian Wood with a simple sitar solo. Also during filming for Help! came a chance introduction, on location in the Bahamas, to Swami Vishnudevananda, who gave each Beatle a copy of his book The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. The Swami signed and dated Harrison’s copy, February 23, 1965, which happened to be Harrison’s birthday. He took that as an auspicious sign.
In the spring of 1965, Lennon and Harrison were also introduced to LSD. Lennon was intrigued by how Leary connected the drug to Eastern mysticism, but Harrison took that linkage more seriously: “For me it was like a flash, the first time I had acid, it just opened up something in my head that was inside of me, and I realized a lot of things . . . [LSD] happened to be the key that opened the door to reveal them. From the moment I had that, I wanted to have it all the time—these thoughts about the yogis and the Himalayas, and Ravi’s music.”
The first musical fruit of his new passion was Love You To (from Revolver), which relies heavily on musicians from London’s Indian Music Association. The song provided Harrison with a new niche. He put his guitar aside and made the sitar his primary instrument all the way until the end of 1968. In the summer of 1966 he met Ravi Shankar in London and took some lessons. This fortuitous connection could not have been bettered. Shankar was a sitar virtuoso who made it his life’s goal to promote the North Indian raga tradition in the West. For him, the primary purpose of music was devotional, to reach God, which made him the perfect person to bring Harrison into not only music but also religion. Lennon and McCartney took Dylan and Brian Wilson as remote models for new phases in their compositional careers, but Harrison found a mentor who was willing to personally bring him along. Shankar was “the only person who ever impressed me,” Harrison once said (having forgotten the impressiveness of the teenage Lennon). Shankar in turn appreciated Harrison’s humility.
It was as if a hidden intelligence in the Beatles’ hierarchy was now emerging, with Harrison’s modest position relative to the two principals allowing him to take bigger risks, a classic “last born” situation: Harrison, the youngest of four children and the youngest in the band of four, had less reason to defend the status quo. He was open to a rebellion more radical than those ahead of him cared to pursue.
Anyone who wishes to scan his turn to India in terms of “orientalism”—a vigorous European tradition of manipulating stereotypes from the exotic “East” for trivializing purposes, a form of control only slightly more subtle than blackfaced minstrelsy—misses two central points. First, his goals were to learn musical and spiritual practices; second, his engagement was driven through direct contact with powerful mentors. His teachers regarded these traditions as universal treasures of humanity that should be available to everyone. They wanted the best of India’s heritage to travel across cultural boundaries. Access to top talent was an important part of many Beatles’ successes, and in this case, especially, fast-track, high-level tutoring gave potency to the group’s connections to India, accounting for the impressive results.
In one of his first lessons, Harrison got up to answer the telephone, and as he stepped across his sitar Shankar whacked him on the heel, scolding not to disrespect his instrument. Around the same time that art-schooler Pete Townshend was introducing nihilistic gestures like smashing his guitar on stage, Harrison was being taught by the only person who ever impressed him about the fundamental concept of respect and how to manifest it in his life. (“I started my own rebellion against these rebellious youths,” Shankar once said.) It is a simple moment that symbolically represents the spiritual orientation that shaped the last phase of the Beatles’ career. The Beatles would not be putting anarchy and nihilism in a primary position. Nor would they reduce their stunning variety of expression to straight-ahead rock, an increasingly popular construction of authenticity. Lennon was tempted by all of those trends. But what gave the Beatles so much heart, what made them the ultimate representatives of the 1960s counterculture, was the firm infusion of a genuine spiritual tradition into their music.
In the autumn of 1966, Harrison traveled with his wife Pattie to India for seven weeks. He was impressed by the role religion played in the lives of ordinary people, not something reserved for Sunday morning but a way of life. Pattie learned to play the dilruba while George studied intensively with Shankar. They met Shankar’s guru, who instructed them on the law of karma. They saw sadhus living in poverty, and they visited the sacred cremation grounds of Benares, along the banks of the Ganges. Shankar gave concerts that lasted until four in the morning. They spent several weeks with the virtuoso and his entourage on a houseboat in Kashmir, practicing and talking endlessly about music and religion. “I got the privileged tour,” Harrison observed. When they returned to London, he embraced his sitar with fanatical devotion, taking breaks to practice yoga and meditation, mixed with LSD.
From Shankar, Harrison received a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, and from Shankar’s brother a copy of Raja Yoga by Swami Vivekananda. Yogananda (1893–1952) took it as his mission to bring Hindu spirituality to the West, while Vivekananda (1863–1902) had pursued the same goal earlier. “Each soul is potentially divine,” wrote Vivekananda. “The goal is to manifest that divinity.” Those words moved Harrison deeply. He closely studied The Bhagavad Gita with Yogananda’s commentary volume. Autobiography of a Yogi includes photos of the author and his guru Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, his guru Lahiri Mahasaya, and his guru Babaji. Harrison put all four of them on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and he put his new composition Within You Without You on the LP itself. The year separating this song from Love You To was a period of full immersion in the music and spirituality of India. He absorbed Ravi Shankar’s point of view and did not perceive any boundary between the two.
With informal ease, Within You Without You conveys the Vedic teachings he had been contemplating, just as if he and his friend Klaus Voorman were hanging out and chatting (as he described the origin of the lyrics). The three books that we know he was reading—Autobiography of a Yogi, Raja Yoga, and The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga—are all first-rate expositions in English of the Vedic tradition. This song bound his interest in India to his emergence as a songwriter, the two growing more sophisticated in tandem. The integrity of the song gained the goodwill of his bandmates. In a striking way, mid-1967 found the four of them (or at least the three creative principals) on the same page with regard to the Eastern foundations of the psychedelic inquiry. “God is in the space between us,” said McCartney. “God is in the table in front of you . . . It just happens I’ve realized all this through acid.”
In August, Pattie persuaded her husband, who persuaded Lennon and McCartney, to attend a lecture in London given by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Maharishi presented meditation as something that anyone could benefit from, without religious trappings. “If we’d met Maharishi before we had taken LSD, we wouldn’t have needed to take it,” insisted Lennon. The Maharishi invited them to join him for a group retreat in Wales, but on the second day Brian Epstein, back in London, suddenly died. They abandoned the retreat, but not the Maharishi, who encouraged them to join him in Rishikesh, India, an area favored by renunciants in the sacred foothills of the Himalayas, where he had a residential center funded by cigarette heiress Doris Duke.
Plans were made to visit in February. Meanwhile, they meditated and kept in touch, McCartney and Harrison visiting the Maharishi in Sweden and Lennon and Harrison in Paris. “You know I feel I can handle anything at the moment and I never felt like that before,” said Lennon. “[This is] the greatest period for us in an inner sense.” His close friend from childhood, Pete Shotton, saw how good it all was for Lennon. One evening Shotton was watching television with the four musicians when Lennon suggested they turn the sound off and meditate. Shotton sneaked a peak during the twenty-minute session and noted Harrison and Lennon in deep concentration while Starr watched a silent soap opera on the TV set; Starr shot Shotton a wink. “We were looking for something more natural,” explained McCartney in August. “This is it. It’s not weirdy or anything, it is dead natural. Meditation will be good for everyone.”
“I hope the fans will take up meditation instead of drugs,” advised Starr.
McCartney composed The Fool on the Hill, which he defined as a song about the Maharishi, and Lennon answered with Across the Universe. The Fool on the Hill is a strong song, but Across the Universe is one of Lennon’s best. It was never developed on record to a finished state worthy of its quality. Across the Universe deals with the imagery of mystics. In his book On the Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation and Commentary with Sanskrit Text (1967), the Maharishi describes a mind no longer imprisoned by a “field of sorrow” or “waves of joy.” The accomplished meditator becomes “an unbounded ocean of love and happiness. His love and his happiness flow and overflow for everyone in like manner.” Lennon’s song is indebted to these lines and it quotes the mantra “Jai guru deva” (Victory to the guru-god), which was chanted in homage to the Maharishi by his followers.
There was an idea to put Across the Universe on the B side of McCartney’s Lady Madonna, but Harrison’s The Inner Light was chosen instead. A McCartney favorite, The Inner Light was recorded with a superb ensemble of five Indian musicians, with Harrison’s vocal added back in London. Harrison was nervous about singing the lead, but McCartney encouraged him and got him through. It is a simple song about the power of meditation, the lyrics based on the classic Taoist text Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu. In The Inner Light, the weight of Within You Without You gives way to enchantment and whimsy, with Pink Floyd’s Chapter 24 as a possible inspiration.
The four musicians arrived in India in mid-February. Starr, nervous about the food and his weak stomach (a condition that began in childhood), brought a suitcase filled with canned beans. Cynthia Lennon felt her husband drifting away. In fact, he was indeed strolling down to the post office every day to both drop off a letter to and pick up one from Yoko Ono. But for the most part, Rishikesh was a happy time. It put them all on the same page, renewed the Beatles as a communal enterprise, launched dozens of new songs, defined The White Album, and put the Maharishi’s teachings on “transcendental meditation” on the map like nothing else could have.
The retreatants woke up every day to the screams of peacocks and monkeys. They dressed in white, ate vegetarian food, practiced meditation, listened to the Maharishi’s lectures, met with him in private audiences, and hung out together in the cool mountain air. The Maharishi presented meditation as a simple but flexible practice that could help with anything in life, lead to cosmic consciousness, and bring harmony to the world. Lennon quizzed him about the “big brass band” that was in his head when he meditated. McCartney remembered how he “got to a really good place” through meditation. “I felt like I was a feather, floating over a hot air pipe.” Mia Farrow was there with her sister Prudence, who was unsettled and stuck to her room. Prudence was determined to fast-track her meditative path. Maharishi asked Lennon to coax her out for a little bit of social time, which led to the four Beatles lining up outside her door and singing the emerging Dear Prudence. Farrow saw the Beatles as belonging to a “land of light, and of youth, strength, and certainty; they seemed beautiful and fearless.”
The Maharishi banned drugs, and they respected that request with the tiny (for them) exception of some joints. There were no easy ways for them to experience communal living, and Rishikesh turned out to be the solution. It was a holiday of healing and socialized creativity. “For creating it was great,” remembered Lennon. “It was just pouring out.” They brought along acoustic guitars and spent a lot of time strumming and fooling around, composing dozens of songs that filled the next three albums and beyond. (Lennon’s 1971 Jealous Guy, for example, began life at Rishikesh with the title Child of Nature, a companion to McCartney’s Mother Nature’s Son.) McCartney estimated that twenty of the thirty songs on The White Album started in Rishikesh. “John and George were in their element,” explained Cynthia. “They threw themselves totally into the Maharishi’s teachings, were happy, relaxed and above all had found a peace of mind that had been denied them for so long . . . To John nothing else mattered. He spent literally days in deep meditation . . .” In a postcard from Rishikesh, McCartney wrote to Starr (who had already left) that “John and George have each done 7 hours, but we’ve [he and Jane Asher] only managed 2½ so far.”
Starr departed after two weeks and McCartney stayed for five. “I’m a new man,” he told a friend. Lennon and Harrison stuck with it for eight weeks, though their departure unfolded badly. Urged on by Lennon’s friend, the jealous and scheming Magic Alex (John Alexis Mardas), they falsely accused the Maharishi of sexual impropriety and deception. The guru had no idea what was going on and asked why they were leaving so suddenly. Lennon snarled, “Well, if you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.” He silently interpreted a flash in the Maharishi’s eyes to say, “I’ll kill you, you bastard.” With that, the novice reduced his teacher to the level of the Liverpool streets. “I felt that what we were doing was wrong, very wrong,” remembered Cynthia. The Maharishi found out the hard way how celebrity sparks could backfire. From parts of the Western world there was an almost audible sigh of relief, an echo of the response to Elvis joining the Army in 1958, a collective satisfaction that this disavowal of meditation, the Maharishi and Indian spirituality would bring a return to normalcy—whatever that could possibly mean in the spring of 1968. McCartney and Harrison later apologized to the Maharishi. Many more people today remember Lennon’s accusations than the apologies.
The bottom line, as each of his bandmates have noted, was that Lennon had better things to do. It is easy to imagine how difficult it must have been for him to break with the Maharishi, who had helped him considerably, but this was just one part of a huge transition in his life. He composed a tacky little song to commemorate the moment. Sexy Sadie is an indictment of the guru he had been so beholden to (the deflecting title came at Harrison’s request, replacing the original title, Maharishi). The triumphant quality in this song should not be missed. It is as if Lennon’s fragile ego has realized that it cannot possibly defend itself against the potency of these teachings and practices. Sexy Sadie confirmed that this was now past. He was free to turn his back on meditation and embrace his new lover, avant-garde conceptual art, and heroin.
The White Album
The retreat was so creatively fertile that it required a double LP. In place of the elaborate fantasy of Pepper’s album cover there is just a white cover, designed by the artist Richard Hamilton, with the name of the group faintly embossed.
The album has been described as a postmodern statement. This is the kind of grandiose analysis that made the Beatles chuckle, a fancy way to grapple with the lack of a unifying concept and the sprawling diversity. For the first time they include fragments, a postmodern specialty. The range of Pepper’s collage is matched and doubled. Lennon’s taste for satire is echoed by Harrison. McCartney offers warm ballads, fun-loving narratives, and hard rock. Lennon embraces full-frontal avant-gardism and raw blues. Vaudeville, lullaby, doo-wop, swing, blues, a nature anthem, old-fashioned rock and roll, cutting-edge heavy metal, and country all mix it up. Humor is everywhere, in the music and in the lyrics, ironic, punning, childlike, coy, raucous, silly, slapstick, sly, playful, and over the top. “Both John and I had a great love for music hall, what the Americans call vaudeville,” explained McCartney. Musical parodies (Beach Boys, Dylan, Donovan, Tiny Tim, The Who, etc.) go in more directions than one can count. All of the past is available for play in the present, and nothing gains dominant traction.
The postmodern array (if one wishes to call it that) is stunning, but for me what stands out are the reflective songs that represent Rishikesh most directly, with its communal synergy of acoustic guitars, meditation, and relaxed sociability—Dear Prudence, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Blackbird, I Will, Julia, Mother Nature’s Son, Long, Long, Long, Revolution 1, Cry Baby Cry, and Good Night. No more soft music for soft people, declared Lennon as Pepper was incubating, but Rishikesh and the Maharishi changed his mind. These songs are tender, contemplative, and full of heart. They have nothing to do with postmodern cynicism and everything to do with the very best of the countercultural 1960s. They define the soulful center of the album.
Blackbird is another example (Eleanor Rigby, And Your Bird Can Sing, Penny Lane) of McCartney discovering inspiration in classical music from the Baroque period. He cited a bourrée by Johann Sebastian Bach as an influence on this song. The connection has to do with the richness of independent lines (though the impact from an étude by Fernando Sor seems more direct). Blackbird ranks among McCartney’s best work. It is heartfelt but impersonal when compared with Julia, Lennon’s startling step into publicly exposed vulnerability. Lennon builds his lyric around a couple of Kahlil Gibran’s aphorisms and presents it with soul-bearing tenderness. Lennon instructed Martin to arrange his lullaby Good Night, composed for his son Julian, with over-the-top camp, but Martin wisely ignored him. Here is a wonderful exception to the Beatles’ allergy to straightforward sentimentality. Starr’s unpretentious persona makes it work. Engineer Geoff Emerick remembered the other three standing behind him as he worked to get the vocal right, urging him on in four-headed-monster fashion. No other Beatles album ends like this.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps helps focus the album’s contemplative side. Modest images gently drift in and out of the lyrics—unlimited love latent in every human being, a little Zen sweeping of the floor to clear away self-centered clutter, the sad heart of the compassionate, knowing observer. These sentiments work well with the minor/major contrast between verses and bridge, and they are enriched by the introduction and descending bass lines, with effective layers of percussion in the background. Without a trace of self-consciousness, the song synthesizes African American blues with an Eastern perspective. As provincial outsiders with no culture to protect, the Beatles had reached a global perspective.
The title promises strong guitar work. Harrison’s initial idea to have an edgy, backward guitar solo may be taken as a confession that he was simply not up to the task. It was a good decision to abandon that plan and ask his friend Eric Clapton to add the weeping guitar. Usually in Beatles songs, instrumental solos do not command too much attention but lend support to the total effect. While My Guitar Gently Weeps is the exception, justified by the title. The guitar is an equal partner from the moment it enters in lovely call and response with the singer. Clapton’s solo, one of the greatest he has ever recorded, magnificently gives life to the aspiration of the lyrics. It is paced skillfully from the first note to the last as a coherent statement, deep blues that powerfully extend Harrison’s compositional script. Clapton took a good song and made it great.
Along with the Indian musicians who played on Within You Without You, this is an example of creative collaboration brought in from outside the circle of four plus one. The absence of credit recalls Ellington’s dissemblance, which is somewhat ironic given how central collaboration was to the Beatles’ image. The lads from Liverpool did it all together, and they did it all by themselves. It was easy to stretch that configuration to include George Martin, with his technical know-how and classical training, graciously bringing “the boys” into the professional realm, but it was a different matter to bring in someone like Clapton. Just as Ellington and his publicists worked hard to sustain the image of a great artist who didn’t need anyone else, so did the self-sufficient collaborative circle of the Beatles become a fixed boundary that required maintenance and secrecy.
The White Album is often read as a marker of the band’s fragmentation and the end of collaboration. The main rebuttal to this is that most of it was generated during the communal retreat in Rishikesh. The three creative principals were moving independently, but Rishikesh and the long buildup to it put them all on the same page. There were still stunning moments of collective effort back in London, above all Dear Prudence. Here is another great example of a strong script from Lennon brilliantly developed by the creative team, including swirling, sitar-like guitars, superb drumming and piano touches from McCartney, and a deliberate ascent on Harrison’s guitar for the finale that, when it reaches its peak, forms an absolutely perfect moment.
There was one collaboration with an outsider that was not hidden but instead occupied the painful center of a whirlwind controversy. Lennon and Ono, the most famous intervenor in Beatles history, worked together on Revolution 9 for The White Album. In 1968 the Beatles recorded three pieces with “Revolution” in the title, two on The White Album and one on a single, one slow and acoustic, one raucous and electric, the third bizarre and avant-garde. How the three fit together—which has often been misunderstood—documents Lennon’s personal turbulence in 1968 in a vivid way.
The up-tempo single, entitled simply Revolution, was released first. It was issued as the B side of Hey Jude in late August, five days before the Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man, and on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The gentlemen’s agreement between Beatles and Stones to stagger releases and avoid head-to-head competition collapsed in this case. Street Fighting Man was immediately banned on radio stations in Chicago, a city overwhelmed with rioting and arrests. The main musical impression one has from this Revolution, with its raucous guitar distortion and screaming lead vocal, is an explosion of rage. Yet the lyrics suggest something else.
This Revolution is a classic case of mixed messaging, a technique the Beatles had mastered in the early days, when Epstein tidied them up while they played tough rock and roll. Their songs were sexually charged and daring on the musical side, while the lyrics were safe and polite. For Revolution, Lennon badgered the studio engineer to distort the guitars harder and harder to match the intensity of his voice. The lyrics, on the other hand, say that the singer is repelled by political radicalism and all calls for violence. Instead he advocates a “revolution in the head,” as the great Beatles commentator Ian MacDonald put it. Violence and hatred simply lead to more of the same. Count me out when it comes to Mao or any other destructive ideology, sings Lennon. This position earned the Beatles a warm endorsement from Time magazine while the radical Left lashed out bitterly.
The first key to understanding the triple Revolution conundrum is that Lennon conceived the foundational song in Rishikesh. For the Maharishi, spirituality trumped politics, which is a common position for religious leaders everywhere. It would not be surprising if the basic ideas of Lennon’s song came straight out of his teacher’s evening lectures. Having returned to London, in May he made a demo tape and put the song forward as the first to be recorded for the new album. This would be the major statement, the new album’s equivalent of Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life. But by then he had reconceived the song. During the month or so after his return he spent a lot of time holing up with Ono, whose ideas about modern art were well informed, well practiced, and well articulated. The revolution of the song became an artistic one, replacing the spiritual one he had turned his back on.
8.3 Ono and Lennon, July 1, 1968
At his suburban London home, he and Ono offered to a tape recorder what one critic has described as “whistling, caterwauling, groaning, wailing, moaning, shrieking, samplings of old records, the sounds of guitars being tuned and strummed, background noise, scraps of conversations.” This material eventually filled the album Two Virgins, and it was a warm-up for the sound collage that ultimately became Revolution 9. The collage of Revolution 9 had little in common with the album-track collage of Pepper, which was based on a variety of tunes, chords, engineering, imagery, and verbal narratives. It was instead a wild ride through fragments of barely identifiable tunes, orchestral warm-ups and doodlings, backward tape loops, electronic distortions, radio shows, and loads of random speech.
McCartney had dabbled in a one-off experiment of freak-out electronica called Carnival of Light, which was never intended for commercial release but made for fun and restricted playback at a happening in London in February 1967. Ono was no dabbler. She was born into immense privilege and wealth in prewar Tokyo. Like her conceptual-art predecessor Marcel Duchamp, she used her position of security to launch a career of full-throttle adventurism. With bohemian leanings in place she auspiciously landed at Sarah Lawrence College in 1953. In 1956 she moved to the Lower West Side, married to a young Japanese composer who was fascinated with the music of John Cage. This put her on a fast track into the downtown world of happenings filled with randomness, absurdity, and high concept. This group of artists took Duchamp’s principle of regarding ordinary objects in special ways and added dynamic performance and audience interaction, though with far less humor.
In 1964, Ono published a book with the title Grapefruit, a collection of small poems that instructed the reader in quirky exercises of the imagination. In 1965 she premiered her legendary Cut Piece at Carnegie Hall, inviting audience members to mount the stage where she sat, pick up the scissors she provided, and cut away parts of her dress. Her 1966 Film No. 4 was dedicated to a series of closely cropped human buttocks in motion.
Ono was smart enough to keep up with Lennon—he declared that this was rare in his experience with women—and in an excellent position to tutor him in a set of bold artistic principles. He had gotten a whiff of avant-garde art at the Liverpool College of Art and then in Hamburg with the Exis, but he kept all of that “bullshit” at a distance while climbing the ladder of Beatle fame. In May 1968 he was feeling differently. His close friends Stuart Sutcliff and Astrid Kirchherr had worn each other’s clothes as an expression of how intellectually, artistically, and romantically close they were. Since Lennon was nine inches taller than Ono, that was not an option, though they could both wear similar white outfits. “She’s me in drag,” Lennon informed the world. He told a close friend that she was to him as Don Juan was to Carlos Castaneda.
The collage Revolution 9 began life as an extension of the original song from Rishikesh. With help from Harrison and Ono, Lennon strategically set to work while McCartney was out of the country, knowing that his songwriting partner was not going to endorse this new direction. “Not bad,” was McCartney’s dismissive response to a first hearing. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” sputtered Lennon. “This should be our next bloody single!”
“I agree with John, I think it’s great,” chimed in Ono, supportively. The collage grew and got cut from the slow tempo, acoustically based song from Rishikesh, which was now given the title Revolution 1. At Lennon’s insistence, his experiment found a place on the double album as a separate track called Revolution 9.
Lennon wanted Revolution 1 to be the flip side of the single with Hey Jude, but the others were wary that the slow tempo would not sell. His solution was to transform the song once more, now into an up-tempo rocker. Certainly he was aware of the soon-to-be-released Street Fighting Man. The opposite receptions of the two songs must have burned. In terms of hip credentials, nothing could top getting banned from the radio, and nothing could be worse than praise from Time magazine combined with scathing criticism from the Left.
What happened next was an effort to ameliorate his position with a single word. When The White Album came out in November, it included Revolution 1, with acoustic guitar and slow tempo, not too different from a demo tape made in May and presumably not too different from the song Lennon composed on the ashram’s rooftop. But the word “in” was added after the singer advises those advocating destruction that they must count him out. It was a little flash of provocative ambivalence. It certainly seemed like a response to the scathing criticism, a slight nod of agreement that yes, there will be situations that demand violent revolution, a meek assertion that Lennon was not hopelessly bourgeois. The added “in” does not appear on the lyric sheet attached to the album, and it does not appear on the early demo. It very much looks like a late, strategic addition, post Time magazine and Street Fighting Man.
Often it is a mistake to lean too heavily on biography for interpreting art. Songs like Dear Prudence or Let It Be, for example, have precise biographical origins, but the narratives of those origins limit understanding of the end product more than they enlighten. In this case, however, biography explains a lot. Lennon’s interior confusion produced three mutually contradictory Revolutions. It’s worth imagining how a single Revolution might have stood as the dominant song on the album. Had Lennon yielded to Martin and his bandmates rather than to Ono as he developed the song, this hypothetical Revolution might have given the entire album more depth and definition, much as A Day in the Life did for Pepper. Instead, the triple Revolutions work against one another.
Emerick described the four Beatles, during work on The White Album, leaving the studio very late one night, headed to a club for some fun, and then returning for an impromptu session of work at four in the morning, which doesn’t sound like a breakdown of camaraderie. Yet there certainly were strains during the five months of production. Starr actually quit the band for two weeks, frustrated with McCartney’s mix of cajoling him to do better and then surreptitiously redubbing his drumming. Were there limits to McCartney’s micromanagement? “It got a bit like, ‘I wrote the song and I want it this way,’” Starr remembered, “whereas before it was ‘I wrote the song—give me what you can.’” Even more damaging was Lennon’s insistence on bringing Ono into the studio, a move that astonished the others; he even brought in Magic Alex, whom he considered an electronic genius but has been portrayed by others as a complete charlatan. Best-friend-as-needed Starr was nominated to make a friendly visit to Weybridge. “Listen, John, does Yoko have to be there all the time?” he gently asked.
McCartney’s Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da became a pressure point. The song came to define for Lennon everything that was wrong about his partner. One of Paul’s “granny songs,” he called it. After long stretches of intense rehearsal, with McCartney having difficulty finding the right tempo, Lennon stormed out of the studio in anger. When he returned a few hours later he walked in and threw his new fondness for heroin in his partner’s face, shouting, “I am more stoned than you have ever been! In fact I am more stoned than you will ever be!” Then he sat down and pounded out the granny song with a new tempo that turned out to be the one ultimately used.
“You” in Lennon’s proclamation was primarily McCartney, secondarily the other two, ultimately anyone who was not in the tree he and Ono now occupied. Emerick reports that the next day, when they set upon recording the backup vocals, “the bad feelings of the past weeks seemed to evaporate. That’s all it took for them to suspend their petty disagreements.” But the die was cast. Heroin had become part of Lennon’s all-encompassing entrancement with Ono. Their deep connection through the drug locked in his sense of separateness from the others and fueled his fascination with her ideas. His songwriting partner had kept up with him through alcohol, amphetamines (cautiously), pot, and LSD (even more cautiously). It was obvious that he was not going to go for heroin. And in the summer of 1968, Lennon was starting to gain confidence that it might be okay if McCartney was not in his tree, anyway.
Out of this grand mess arose two of McCartney’s best-known songs, Hey Jude and Let It Be, both composed in the summer of 1968. Hey Jude was initially conceived as consolation for Lennon’s young son, Julian, and Let It Be was based on a dream where his mother appeared to comfort him in the midst of the band’s squabbling. The sense of gentle reassurance and resignation in each song builds musically on the “amen cadence,” discussed in Chapter 6 with reference to Yesterday.
Hey Jude and Let It Be are both easy to like and hard to analyze. Their surface simplicities are traps for any critic. The long, mantra-like second part of Hey Jude, based on a doubled version of the amen cadence and judged over-the-top by some, gives it communal empathy and universal weight. The gesture of nonverbal comfort is dutifully backed by the interpersonal strength of the world’s most famous group of friends. Lennon told his partner to keep the outlier line about moving the shoulder, put there as a placeholder, thus adding a small dose of mystery. Harrison wanted to add call and response with his guitar, something like Clapton did for While My Guitar Gently Weeps—he wanted to enter this special song more fully—but McCartney vetoed that in favor of simplicity, irritating Harrison. The swell through the lyrical first part and the long, gradual fade through the mantra-like second are masterfully controlled.
The atmosphere of Let It Be includes church references to Mother Mary, the amen effect, simple, hymnlike chords, Starr’s bell-like cymbals (directed by McCartney), and a Hammond organ. Two different guitar solos from Harrison were issued, one on the single and the other on the album, both strong and documenting his renewed dedication to the instrument. Hey Jude and Let It Be are songs of elegance and warmth, and they both sit in the sweet spot of the singer’s range. Spiritual qualities of acceptance and compassion are central to their appeal. This is usually missed, even though it should be obvious: these two songs were the finest fruits of McCartney’s sustained attention to the Maharishi’s teachings, capped by the Rishikesh retreat.
Get Back
The month of January 1969 was set aside for what came to be internally called the “Get Back Project” and ultimately got the title Let It Be. The original conception of the monthlong project included a television show, a live performance, and an LP. The TV show would document how the Beatles worked together to create their songs over the course of the month, how they went, in McCartney’s metaphor, from a blank canvas to a fully finished painting. A live performance would premiere the songs and the LP would crown the whole thing.
The idea of filming the band’s working method was a competitive response to Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One) (released November 30, 1968), which showed the Rolling Stones creating and improving the title song over many sessions. There is enough good footage in the film Let It Be to give it a taste of success. When it is supplemented by the excellent study Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster, by Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt, we have very thorough documentation of the entire month.
The stage performance was the key to the project and also its biggest obstacle. Back in the summer of 1966 the Beatles had given up touring and embraced the creative possibilities of the recording studio. Three years later it was not easy to leap back, pre-Revolver, to a simpler kind of music that did not depend on studio tracking. The rewards of strong musicianship and playing well together had carried them through the Hamburg years, and the hope was that these could pull them together again, as a counterforce to the centripetal momentum of independent interests. A month in the studio would get them in shape to play on stage, a bootstrapping embrace of nine to five discipline, as McCartney explained. A return to rock and roll became a rallying cry for unity.
Each of them bought into the concept. Harrison and Starr must have viewed it as a way to reestablish themselves as integral partners. Yet they were also concerned about venues. Starr flatly refused to travel abroad and Harrison refused to perform on a ship, two ideas that were tossed around. The rooftop performance on January 30 solved the venue problem since it was local, yet kept fans and hysteria at a safe distance.
McCartney’s feelings about live performance must have also been divided, though for different reasons. On the plus side, he was a confident performer and missed playing in public. The creative drawback would be that the songs would have to be crafted in such a way that they did not depend on studio tracking. The final recording could be doctored, but the conception of the songs had to reflect what the quartet could produce on stage, which could not be significantly altered. In the early years, when their music was less ambitious, the quartet carried a song all by itself. But McCartney was now an expert in bringing songs to completion through brilliant studio detail. The quartet was used to recording a “backing track,” but that was rarely conceived to stand alone; rather, it was the foundation for a bigger compositional vision. In January 1969, as they ran through a song like Across the Universe and pondered how to develop it without tracking, Lennon threw up his hands in frustration and asked for an up-tempo number.
Harrison had been hanging out in the fall of 1968 with The Band, in upstate New York, and he mentioned that group as a model for their new direction. In The Band’s 1968 album Music from Big Pink, the five-piece group plays lean and tough, with tightly constructed songs. Harrison envied their egalitarian spirit, which reminded him of the early Beatles. In 1966, Brian Wilson became McCartney’s model for extending creative control into the studio, and now The Band was Harrison’s model for a return to songs that could be performed on stage. The Band’s down-home singing nicely matched their songs about old-timey country life, moonshine, crazy dogs, and pre-pickup-truck southern narratives, all delivered with sincerity. That theme would not be something the Beatles could easily explore, since they reserved their country slots for light satire on the one hand and Starr’s winning simplicity on the other. But no one was better than the Beatles at absorbing a model and transforming it, so it is easy to understand Harrison’s enthusiasm.
Ironically, McCartney’s songs tend to be the ones that can flourish with the least amount of arrangement. He embraced the decision to drop tracking and fancy studio production, to get “more natural, less newspaper taxis” as Lennon put it (alluding to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds), and move toward a fresh sense of authenticity. January 1969 could be a communal retreat something like Rishikesh, without the Maharishi but with electricity and all of the conveniences of home.
Lennon loved the idea of live performance and no tracking, but he was really the most conflicted of all. The documents from January 1969 make clear that the main problem, indeed the main factor in the breakup of the Beatles, was Lennon. He brought to the daily sessions the debilitation of heroin addiction and the distraction of his relationship with Ono. Without heroin it might have been possible to overcome all the other issues and reach the promise of the project. “I was stoned all the time and I just didn’t give a shit,” he later admitted. Day after day, Lennon shows up late, forgets what they had just rehearsed, can’t carry a part, doesn’t finish writing songs, can’t write new songs, and can’t contribute to shaping the songs he has introduced. The others realize that if they push too much he will quit. Harrison’s intelligent stroke was to match The Band and go to a quintet by adding keyboardist Billy Preston, who filled out the sound, covered up inadequacies, and added solo interest.
At the Royal Albert Hall in December 1968, Lennon and Ono appeared at an event called the “Alchemical Wedding.” They sat in a large black bag for forty-five minutes, barely moving. Covered up by the bag, the audience was supposed to tune into a level of communication deeper than visual or aural. The two felt that they could communicate without words. During the January sessions, Lennon sometimes sat in silence, insisting that Ono speak for him.
In addition to bagism and aleatoric music, he was excited by the current turn toward hard rock, with Cream, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix leading the way. He performed Yer Blues with Clapton, Keith Richards, and Mitch Mitchell for the film Rock and Roll Circus, also in December. As soon as the song was finished he quickly ushered in Ono, who then screamed into a microphone while the surprised rock stars jammed. Rock purity was in the air. Jon Landau wrote in Rolling Stone magazine that The Fool on the Hill and other examples of “rock ‘art’” were “pious, subtly self-righteous, humorless and totally unphysical.” He lamented how “the joyfulness and uninhibited straight-forwardness which is such an essential side to all rock and roll was often lost in the shuffle. Rock became cerebral.” Language like that multiplied during the 1970s, after the Beatles dissolved. For example: Pepper was “the moment when the music went off the rails almost for good.”
It all recalls John Hammond’s 1943 complaint that Duke Ellington had “alienated a good part of his dancing public . . . By becoming more complex he has robbed jazz of most of its basic virtues and lost contact with his audience.” Such were the perils of turning the African American musical vernacular in the direction of art. This antiart position was the flip side to mid-1950s and early 1920s chatter about rock/jazz dragging Western civilization into the barbaric Negro jungle. A rigid set of conceptual frames on each end of the spectrum was readily available to pump up like a balloon. The only thing needed was some hot air.
The authentic side of rock and roll was especially meaningful to the art-school rockers who had begun their careers in the Beatles’ wake. By 1968 they were strong enough to advance a set of values that excluded the Beatles’ artistic turn. Lennon would struggle with this problem for the rest of his tragically abbreviated life: how to use his talents as a composer of pop hits while holding on to anticommercial purity?
For all of these reasons, it is not surprising that the first week in January was heavily dedicated to oldies, from Carl Perkins’s Tennessee to Cliff Richard’s Move It to Elvis’s Good Rockin’ Tonight. The band seemed happiest with a number they had covered back in Hamburg or Liverpool. This was an easy way to get them pointed in the direction of no tracking. For Lennon, especially, the oldies were bubbling up to surface consciousness, as we can see from several of his new songs for 1969: Don’t Let Me Down was partly derived from Little Richard’s 1957 Send Me Some Lovin’; I Want You from Mel Tormé’s 1957 Coming Home Baby; and Come Together from a Chuck Berry mix.
Lennon and Harrison both suggested that the band might recast some of their own oldies for the concert, but McCartney brushed that idea aside. The closest they got was One After 909, a Lennon tune from way back in 1960, perhaps the first Lennon-McCartney original performed for the Liverpool public. One gets the feeling that this inclusion was a gesture of sympathy from the others, a recognition that in his present condition Lennon was having trouble coming up with new material.
The infamous rancor of early January can be blamed on a lot of things. There was the cold environment of the Twickenham studio, chosen for its movie-making advantages. Though they were relatively close in point of view about musical direction, there were still substantial differences. Harrison brought out his new song All Things Must Pass, and while McCartney was encouraging, Lennon pushed for something more up-tempo. Again and again they tried it, Harrison talking about how The Band would have performed it and mentioning his inspiration from Timothy Leary’s poetry, trying to hook Lennon in. An acoustic version was considered, also a set of backup singers in the style of the Raylets. Harrison predicted that the Beatles would regain harmony when they could each approach songs composed by the others as if they were their own. In frustration, he decided to withdraw All Things Must Pass, explaining that he would save it for proper treatment in the studio.
Sulpy and Schweighardt observe the different working methods of the three creative principals coming through during the January sessions. McCartney tends to have a vision of the final product in his mind. His approach is to work over all the little parts—riffs, solos, drumming, everything—again and again until everyone gets them the way he wants them. Harrison prefers to play through a new song multiple times, allowing each player to gradually develop his own details. Lennon is so disengaged that he cannot lead his own songs forward.
On January 7 they bluntly confronted their collective problems, with a lot of venting audible through the studio microphones, some of which sat in full sight while others were hidden and unknown to the musicians. They have never fully recovered from Brian Epstein’s death, Harrison says. McCartney admits that they haven’t been having very much fun, and he cites lack of discipline, bad attitude, and lack of commitment to a quality product. Harrison bristles and tells McCartney to go find musicians he’d be happier with. Lennon yawns. McCartney reminds Harrison of how to let go of negative thoughts through transcendental meditation. Harrison again brings up the example of The Band, but it must have been pretty evident by now that the Beatles were not up to the standards of musicianship of The Band, not in January 1969. There is talk of ending the group’s existence. Lennon wants to play some up-tempo rock and roll. According to Martin (who was not regularly present), Harrison and Lennon actually came to blows.
On January 10, Harrison announced that he was quitting and left the studio in a huff, throwing off years of frustration from second-class citizenry. Lennon told the other two that he thought it would be easy to persuade Eric Clapton to take Harrison’s place and finish the project. But Harrison came back, with the stipulation that they expand to a quintet by adding Billy Preston. Harrison intuitively understood where to turn to jump-start communal music-making: to the gospel tradition, the strongest modern manifestation of the ring-shout heritage. No musician knows how to fit in better than a gospel pianist. The Beatles first met Preston in 1962, when he was sixteen years old and touring through Hamburg backing Little Richard. On January 22 they moved back to Apple studios and started fresh with Preston. Like a squabbling family, they all behaved better in front of the guest. George Martin called Preston an “emollient.” Preston filled out the sound and added bright solos. Lennon was so impressed that he wanted to keep him in the band permanently.
Many writers have read the January project as a failure. If Abbey Road is your measure of success, then it is very easy to come up short. But there are reasons to value this undertaking.
First there is the stunning introduction of fifty-two new songs over the course of the month. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director hired to make the film, asked McCartney at one point about the decline of his songwriting partnership with Lennon. McCartney responded that this was mainly due to physical separation and simply not spending as much time together as they had in the early days. Rishikesh in the spring of 1968 and the January 1969 sessions were the successful corrections to that problem.
The rooftop concert on January 30, at 3 Saville Row, was also a success. All four of them were delighted with the performance. After it was over they can be heard bubbling with enthusiasm, eager to take a break and get back to the studio, Harrison ranting about how the police had no right to stop the concert. They performed five songs, four of them created and developed through January sessions with an eye toward no tracking.
I’ve Got a Feeling is the last example (except for the medley of Abbey Road, which did not involve much interaction with Lennon) of a Lennon-McCartney hybrid, with songs from each composer combined to make something stronger than either individual effort. McCartney worked patiently to help Lennon get the descending guitar slide at the transition just right. At one point in January Lennon insisted that he and McCartney had experienced simultaneous dreams the night before. Lennon had lost interest in his partner’s granny songs, and he was passionately searching for an artistic vision that would include his soon-to-be wife, but the songwriting partners were still exceptionally close. It is a complete mistake to project the anger of How Do You Sleep? back to January 1969.
As intended, the January documents reveal a lot about how the Beatles took a blank canvas and turned it into a finished product. “It’s complicated now,” says McCartney at one point. “If we can get it simpler, and then complicate it where it needs to be complicated.” That is a sophisticated approach to composition. Ellington said something similar: “Simplicity is a complex form, and the more involved you get you’re going to find out how complex simplicity is.” This kind of focus on detail, which is difficult to track and isolate in analysis, undoubtedly accounts for much of the high-level appeal of what the Ellington Orchestra and the Beatles achieved. The ability to focus in this way was part of the skill sets for both Ellington and McCartney.
Don’t Let Me Down started as a song by Lennon. Over the course of the month the whole band worked it over, again and again. McCartney took the fragments Lennon had composed and arranged them to produce the finished order. He recommended dropping a line for the chorus and a repeat of the title phrase to open the song. Harrison changed the rhythm, they experimented with the bridge, Harrison tried the wah-wah, McCartney dictated rhythms to Starr, and all four of them bantered critiques back and forth as the song got better and better. When Preston entered the ensemble Lennon cued him for a solo. The commercial single, the B side to Get Back, is as much a product of collaboration as Please Please Me had been in early 1963. McCartney fretted that he was being too dominant, and he suggested that each of them take the lead in developing his own songs. Lennon was not sure that this would work, and it is clear how dependent he was on his partner.
Get Back, which gave a working title to the whole project, is the closest of the rooftop songs to the January jam sessions. In spite of the discord, the month was filled with countless hours of good-time yucking it up, dancing, clowning, joking, riffing, and the pure enjoyment of playing music together. “No matter how bad it was in the studio, and some days it was quite bad,” remembered Starr, “when the counting came in we were all there. If someone counted it in we all gave everything.” Through dozens of sessions, Harrison came up with the three quick chords that help define Get Back, much as his riff for And I Love Her helps define that song. McCartney alternately improvised the melody and lyrics while the group played along, then went home and revised independently on his own, back and forth, a working method that must have been followed many times, just as it was by Ellington. His melodic gift carried the song to the top of the charts. Starr’s drumming is energizing, and Preston adds a crisp, bluesy solo. His contribution to the Beatles in 1969, like Clapton’s to While My Guitar Gently Weeps and like the Indian musicians to Within You Without You, suggests one way the Beatles might have developed had they stayed together: keeping the core intact and extending the creative dynamics to include performers of this quality. That kind of trajectory would have resembled the long-term dynamics of the Ellington band, a collaborative mandala with a fixed center that drew on the strengths of others who came and went.
The four songs performed on the rooftop could have easily been supplemented by Oh! Darling, I Want You, Come Together, I Me Mine, Old Brown Shoe, and Octopus’s Garden (worked on by Harrison and Starr on January 26) to make a terrific album. All it would have taken was willingness to see it through. Instead, the music was shoved into the wrong-sized shoe without end-stage participation from McCartney and Martin. If Billy Preston demonstrated the potential of an extended mandala, Phil Spector showed, in his production of the album Let It Be, how difficult it could be for an outsider to enter the Beatles’ creative world. McCartney was appalled by Spector’s treatment of The Long and Winding Road. He had been developing the song at the piano during January. He had in his ear Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and you can hear the impact of that lovely piece (for example, in the rising lines in the bridge, “Many times I’ve been alone . . .”). Spector pushed the song over the fine line of Beatles restraint, with syrupy strings and a wordless chorus of professional singers. We can only pity him for having been assigned a hopeless task—to bring the song to fruition with quality that the creative quintet reached so often through untraceable alchemy developed over many years, and to do it all by himself, as an outsider.
The End
Lennon’s break was slow and painful, but there was musical success along the way. There was still tension in the making of Abbey Road, with Ono attending regularly and offering suggestions. (Emerick, the engineer, remembered Harrison snorting, “That bitch! She’s just taken one of my biscuits!”) But the atmosphere was more productive and professional, with, in Emerick’s view, Lennon less acerbic, McCartney less officious, and Harrison more confident than ever. Their fresh commitment to good behavior was prompted, no doubt, by bracing awareness of genuine financial difficulties. In any event, positive energy hops off the vinyl. The song scripts range from good to excellent, vocal harmonies sparkle, musicianship is solid, the production is superb, and the medley is a classic summary of the Beatles’ aesthetic of collage. Starr suggested naming the album after the address of the recording studio, another confirmation that, while the Beatles engaged with many different types of meaning during their career, what they were ultimately about was music.
Lennon’s songs are still the most interesting to talk about. Side one of Abbey Road is bookended by two that stake out very different territories. Come Together is a high-verbal, Rimbaudian scramble, while I Want You (She’s So Heavy) could be described as an anti-Dylan and antipop demonstration of the aesthetics of obsession.
Lennon demoed Come Together for the others on acoustic guitar, and McCartney’s first suggestion was to slow down the tempo and aim for a “swampy” kind of sound. As usual, his response to his partner’s bare-bones music was spot on. McCartney came up with the electric piano part, and his bass riff inspired a splendid little mosaic groove of drums, bass, and vocalization that musically defines the song. When the Beatles first heard Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, back in 1965, they were stunned. The impression it made was still resonating in 1969. Like Subterranean Homesick Blues, Come Together leans on Chuck Berry.
I Want You was conceived as another major statement that would dominate the album. The title matches one by Dylan, certainly no coincidence. “Listen to the words,” Dylan once told Lennon, and Dylan’s own I Want You is a terrific example of words worth listening to. Lennon’s titular match has only twelve words for seven minutes and forty-seven seconds of music—which would be, by the way, thirty-six seconds longer than Hey Jude. Hey Jude’s heartfelt communal swell is replaced with manically obsessive love. I Want You is a denial of pop prettiness as well as Dylanesque wordplay, a denial, you could say, of the two primary influences on Lennon as a composer (McCartney and Dylan). What saves the song is another perfect match between words and music.
I Want You and, from side two of Abbey Road, Because are Lennon’s final efforts to create Beatles songs that reflect Ono’s artistic sensibility. For I Want You that meant minimal words and maximum intensity. The band sounds terrific in part one of the song, with Billy Preston fully engaged on organ, McCartney dazzling on bass, and tight ensemble playing from everyone, the result of a lot of practice, including thirty-five takes on the first studio day. Part two is based on an ostinato. This is not a riff related to black music, like Day Tripper or Come Together. Instead it is humorless, sexless, and obsessional, which is what Lennon wanted.
The main problem with I Want You is the lapse in part two, where Lennon takes command of a synthesizer and yields an incoherent spillage of nonsense. “Louder!” he shouted, “I want the white noise to completely take over.” When he said that, Emerick noticed a smile cross Ono’s face while McCartney sat in grim silence, his head between his knees. Lennon did have an inspired idea of how to end the song, though—simply cut the tape with a scissors, a gesture of symbolic violence and an abrupt, unexplained end to the obsession, a cut inspired, perhaps, by his wife’s most famous work of art, Cut Piece. If Preston had been given more room in part two, with the synthesizer taken out of Lennon’s hands, and if McCartney and Martin had been given free rein to imaginatively develop it, I Want You might have turned into something on the order of Tomorrow Never Knows. When Lennon invited his partner to take the lead in executing his strong concepts the results were spectacular, but those days were rapidly coming to a close.
Because is a lovely, haunting number, lit up with vocal harmony arranged by Martin. “John and Paul were a unique blend,” reported a listener in 1960, in Liverpool. “They sounded like the same person and they sounded like a record.” Here is the rainbow ending to that unique blend, an unconscious salute to the resonant vestibule at Mendips with Harrison dutifully finding his place. McCartney conducted the original three with hand gestures for five hours to get the phrasing precise, while Starr sat silently at the side, eyes closed in sympathetic concentration. Lennon liked the addition of Martin on electric spinet since it provided a classical touch, a nod to the initial inspiration of the piece in Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which Ono had played for him at home.
Abbey Road is usually talked about as McCartney’s album, but his stand-alone pieces actually lag behind those of his fellow composers. Oh! Darling is a handsome Fats Domino/Little Richard tribute. One can almost imagine it making the charts in the late 1950s, nestled between Ooh! My Soul and Little Darlin’, but of course it is more than an imitation. Harrison’s guitar accompaniment works splendidly with the emotional buildup, and McCartney’s vocal is superb. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer was, in Harrison’s words, “imposed” on the band. On the plus side, this song exhibits the same levels of great musicianship and great production as every other number on Abbey Road. It might have been more at home as a snippet on side two, Maxwell entering alongside Polythene Pam and Mr. Mustard and exiting just as quickly.
Lennon disliked the side two medley, maybe because it trumped I Want You, but this is where McCartney shines. Lennon legitimately pointed out that there is no coherent theme that ties the songs together, though a few gestures do lend light coherence. Three songs on side two feature the sun. You Never Give Me Your Money is reprised toward the end of the medley. If Lennon could have gotten it together to sit down for an afternoon with McCartney, he easily could have strengthened the whole thing. The medley solved the problem of what to do with so many fragments left over from January and even Rishikesh. Lennon called it “Paul’s opera.” It is opera that blends the semitragic with the comic, the semitragedy being the Beatles’ farewell, the comedy a postmodern play of styles and moods.
McCartney had been sneaking little insider messages into a couple of the January songs, especially Get Back, where Ono is thinly disguised as Loretta (Lennon complained that the singer looked straight at her when he sang the refrain), and Jojo (John/Yoko) is also advised to get back to where he belongs. Plus there was Two of Us, which is partly about having fun with Linda Eastman, partly about his songwriting partner. The medley-opera on side two of Abbey Road sprinkles vague references to the imminent collapse of the band throughout. You Never Give Me Your Money alludes to perhaps the most insurmountable of all Beatles squabbles—the fierce disagreement over management and the last of the disasters following from Brian Epstein’s untimely death (Magical Mystery Tour, Apple, Magic Alex, manager Allen Klein). The song introduces the “sweet dream” that came true and now has nowhere to go, which can be none other than the ascent of four Liverpool scruffs to the top of the world. In January, Lennon had suggested to McCartney that they cover a song called I Had a Dream as their final single. The Beatles were well positioned to talk about dreams. Through their fans, they confronted, in glaring spotlights, the dreamlike quality of individually constructed reality every single day of their famous lives.
Golden Slumbers is based on a poem by Thomas Dekker from 1603. McCartney uses the lullaby to acknowledge how the Get Back wish of return to a golden age of Beatles camaraderie is now impossible. Carry That Weight has Starr closely mic-ed on the sing-along, his humble aura representing the collective identity of the group. No single Beatle will be able to achieve on his own what the four of them had achieved together, and they will each have to carry the weight of their unmatchable collaborative accomplishment. McCartney was the superior musical talent, but he understood the implications of the breakup. Mr. Mustard and his sister Pam add comic relief, with Lennon slathering on a Scouse accent.
What is so thrilling about the medley, and what makes it feel like an opera, are the brilliant changes of mood, all of it carefully calibrated with elegant fade-outs, mysterious fade-ins, effective modulations and changes in tempo, dynamic peaks and swoons, and terrific vocals. You Never Give Me Your Money itself moves through three moods, each in a different tempo, from wistful to hustling to dreamy. The song uses twenty-one different chords. Sun King, building on Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross, extends the relaxed expansion of Because, punctured by the jokey fake Spanish-Italian. Starr’s inventive drumming stirs the variety of tempos throughout. He hung towels on his tom-toms and beat them with tympani sticks for Mean Mr. Mustard. Harrison’s guitar licks count among his finest as a Beatle, especially the crackling explosions of She Came in through the Bathroom Window. McCartney’s full vocal range is on glorious display everywhere. The medley is a bath of sonic luxury. The Beatles had started their recording career by claiming the extreme lo-fi end of the spectrum with Love Me Do, and they ended it with hi-fi production that must have made even Mitch Miller pause in admiration.
The blending principle of rock and roll absorbed during the late 1950s and early 1960s was extended, by the end of 1965, to a musical range no one else could touch. After that they went further with studio imagination and fresh concepts. The album as a kaleidoscopic collage was presented in Revolver, thematicized in Pepper, and doubled in The White Album. Now the principle was condensed into sixteen minutes of continuous music, a rotating crown of jewels that reflects dazzling light in all directions.
For The End McCartney convinced a reluctant Starr to take a drum solo. He patiently coached him through many takes out of which a final conflation was patched together. Then the other three sat around jamming solos on their guitars, McCartney answered by Harrison, who is answered by Lennon, and so on. Acknowledging the special moment, Lennon tactfully suggested to his wife that she retreat to the control room. Emerick saw the three of them looking “like they had gone back in time, like they were kids again, playing together for the sheer enjoyment of it . . . They reminded me of gunslingers, with their guitars strapped on, looks of steely eyed resolve, determined to outdo one another . . . No animosity no tension at all—you could tell that they were simply having fun.” Emerick engineered each guitar slightly differently to emphasize the distinct voices.
The End finishes with McCartney’s closing couplet about the love anyone generates in life being equal to the love that is, in turn, received. (“It proves he can think,” snapped his partner.) McCartney said he was inspired by the epigrams that conclude Shakespeare’s sonnets. It was the end not only of the Beatles but of the 1960s, perfectly phrased. Her Majesty got tacked on like the laughter of Within You Without You and the silly, sped-up voices after A Day in the Life—Scouse insistence that nobody take themselves too seriously.
Starr offered a reflection in Anthology that is one way to frame the epigram of The End: “There were some really loving, caring moments between four people . . . a really amazing closeness. Just four guys who loved each other.” Their offering of music was also an offering of love, a music-love synthesis at the core of the band’s experience and their cultural meaning.
The End is a perfect finale to Abbey Road and the Beatles’ story, but let us give the last word in this collaborative study to Harrison, the youngest Beatle, who reached musical maturity in 1969, at age twenty-six. His contributions to the last Beatles’ years brought heart and vision, an antidote to the occasional slippage of McCartney into pop glibness and Lennon into edgy cynicism. Harrison grew taller, and the others came along. Here Comes the Sun and Something, his two best songs, go a long way toward making Abbey Road the charmer that it is.
Here Comes the Sun is weightless, infused with magnetizing light. Like Let It Be and Julia, it is a song of simple richness. Musically it is relaxed yet assertive, an attractive blend. The extended syncopations of the verses and chorus, delivered with a light touch, burst into raga-inspired licks of threes and twos. The musical freshness does indeed resemble sunshine bursting out on a rainy April day in London. Starr called the sun mantra, which is set to a slightly longer raga pattern, an “Indian trick” that was hard for him to pick up, though once he did he enhanced it splendidly with his imaginative fills. The message of solar rebirth is completely realized through the music and the slender lyrics, which gently point in a spiritual direction with no need for sermons. The arrangement, with understated strings, winds, and Moog synthesizer, is exquisite.
Something is a simple song of elegance and loving awe. Sinatra famously called it the greatest love song in fifty years, a big shift from his paranoid assault on rock and roll from 1957, but it was the Beatles who had changed more than he had. A gentle riff defines the song. When, to introduce the bridge, the riff deftly carries the tune into an unexpected modulation, lifting it into a larger space, it is still possible, after so many hearings, to get goose bumps. This leads to a surprising expansion beyond the comfort of the verses that feels exactly right. The drums pick up and so do bass, strings, organ, and voice. The arrangement for the bridge (“You’re asking me . . .”), collectively generated, is a musical masterpiece. Harrison learned about the power of modulation from McCartney, and he also internalized his partner’s sense of balance between emotional richness and restraint. The combination made Something the second most covered Beatles song ever—after Yesterday.
Emerick was impressed at how well Harrison delivered the central guitar solo on the same take that the orchestra was also playing. The solo may be his finest. There is an enchanting take of McCartney playing his bass while scatting Harrison’s solo and lifting everything through his feeling for counterpoint. Harrison resented McCartney’s active bass line, which he took as a symbol of his domineering attitude. But here, as in so many other Beatles songs from 1966 forward, it enriches the piece immensely. Harrison wanted to have a long section of doodling freak-out music in the middle of Something, but Martin wisely deleted it. In its place Martin composed a warm string arrangement, a soft bed of loving touch. Something is modesty lifted into the territory of the sublime.
A third Harrison composition, All Things Must Pass, was available for Abbey Road as well. Either Harrison held it back for his solo album or the Beatles hierarchy (the chain) could not accommodate three strong songs from the youngest member on a single album. Had it been included, it would have been hard to resist naming this farewell album after the song. All Things Must Pass has a touch of majesty (thanks partly to lyrics copied directly from a poem by Timothy Leary) that would have brought into focus the spiritual tint that shines through Here Comes the Sun, Because, and The End. It might have made this the greatest Beatles album of all.
Yet McCartney’s micromanagement was central to the success of Abbey Road, just as it had been for Pepper and The White Album. The others complained that he was overbearing, during (Starr and Harrison, but not Lennon) and after (Harrison and Lennon) the group’s existence. No doubt he was.
With the Beatles, there were two tacit understandings that facilitated decision making: first, the relationship between Lennon and McCartney, which gave Lennon leadership status while always leaving an opening for McCartney’s improvements; and second, the hierarchy of the “chain.” As both started to weaken, McCartney took over, seeing things through much as Ellington did by vetting, revising, improving, and forging ahead. The complaints against Ellington were along the lines of “You’re not a composer, you’re a compiler,” while those against McCartney were symbolized by Harrison’s sarcastic barb, “Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.” McCartney’s musical superiority was respected by the others at the same time that they resented it. Abbey Road represents the respect, Let It Be (the album) the resentment.
Imagine
A tape from January 1969 caught Lennon singing a phrase of Imagine, the song that is identified with him like no other. The song still held its power almost fifty years later when Madonna sang it for an impromptu postconcert (and postterrorist attack) gathering at Place de la République in Paris (December 2015). Imagine may be heard as Lennon’s most successful resolution of the contradictory influences coming from the two primary collaborators in his life.
He got the structure and concept for the lyrics from Ono’s poetry anthology Grapefruit, where several poems begin with the word “imagine.” He acknowledged that the lyrics owed so much to her that he could have plausibly listed her as co-composer, though of course he didn’t. Imagine is thus a witness to the most commonly unacknowledged creative collaborator of all, regardless of art form, genre, or period—the dutiful wife.
Imagine may also be heard as a response to McCartney’s Let It Be, a song that bothered Lennon. (On the Let It Be album, Phil Spector wickedly introduced the title track with Lennon cutting it down to size, singing in falsetto voice, “now we sing ‘Hark the herald angels come.’”) McCartney’s song is about resignation and resolve. Lennon’s is about resolve but not resignation, and it explicitly argues in favor of ditching religion (since it includes the idea of hell), possessions (since they lead to greed), and countries (since they breed war). These concepts separate people from one another, and their absence, in the author’s view, leads to liberation and peace.
If Imagine had appeared on his first solo album, Plastic Ono Band, I doubt that anyone would be talking about it today or singing it in the Place de la République. On that album Lennon experimented with a kind of musical primitivism, raw and bare and therapeutic. Instead, Imagine relies on bourgeois musical conventions as much as any of McCartney’s granny songs. This works with the lyrics to strike just the right note of invitation, sincerity, optimism, and inclusiveness. Lyrically, the song is a full-frontal attack on bourgeois convention, while bourgeois musical gestures—“chocolate coating,” as the composer begrudgingly acknowledged—pull the listener in. He turned to the musical language he had spent years soaking up with McCartney as his guide. The entire verbal-musical construction is sleek and tight, without a wasted word or note, yielding a classic statement.
Imagine was started before the breakup and it solves in a unique way the riddle of how to blend the two greatest artistic influences in his life. Like each of his former bandmates, he then struggled to meet expectations established during his career as a Beatle. The question will always arise: why weren’t any of them as good after the breakup as they were when they were Beatles? There are at least three answers.
First is that the 1960s were over, literally and figuratively. To be more precise, the idealism of the 1960s was no longer pushing ahead. Idealism did not disappear but it did not remain the cultural force it had been. Different cultures arrange their artistic values differently, with varying points of emphasis between the arts, and youth engagement in the 1960s put a remarkably high emphasis on music. Like many great artists, the Beatles were directly plugged into the liveliest currents animating their exciting times.
The second answer is that the three creative principals, once they stopped being Beatles, tried very hard not to be Beatles. They tried to stake out individual identities that did not involve their past. As Beatles they wrote to impress one another, but as post-Beatles they wrote to distance themselves from one another. It is hard to create great art with a negative agenda, to be unlike someone, something. The artist is limited, cramped, before he even starts.
And the third reason, of course, is that they had learned to rely on one another in countless ways. They were used to collaborating, and each of them continued to do that. But they did not do it with musicians who shared their deep history. A solo artist will find it very difficult to give up the method he or she has developed and start collaborating with someone else. Vice versa, any collaborative artist who gets used to exchange and stimulation will feel like something is missing when it is taken away. Personal closeness brings trust, which makes room for constructive conflict, which lifts the achievement higher. As Starr put it, “disagreements contributed to really great products.”
What was extraordinary about Ellington and the Beatles was their skill in synthesizing group dynamics of the African American vernacular with commercial expectations of compositional definition. The combination came with built-in structural conflict that had little to do with any particular set of individuals. Collaboration like this depends on leadership, which directly introduces a paradox, since to be a good leader means to be exceptional in some way. As McCartney confessed, in a candid assessment of January 1969, “it was getting too democratic for its own good, you know?”
Some still hold a grudge against him for being overbearing, but given who he was and what the group turned out to be, the most musically gifted Beatle really had no choice. Part of what made them special was insistence on the finest compositional result, the one that beat not just everybody else but all previous efforts. It’s lonely at the top, even when—or especially when—you are surrounded by your best friends in the world.