In any case, the album was no longer about Liverpool and childhood. The previous November, in another reconnecting-with-the-real-world exercise, Paul had gone on a safari holiday in Kenya, accompanied only by Mal Evans. During the flight home, he’d been thinking as always of the Beatles’ American competition, especially the new West Coast psychedelic bands with ironically fanciful names–Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company–that were being embraced delightedly by the same people who’d once scoffed at ‘Beatles’.
To while away the inflight hours, he thought up an imaginary addition to the genre, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band–a nod to the current fad for Victorian red military tunics–and began to put a song together around it. When ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ were removed from the album-in-progress, the now fully-written (and abbreviated) ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ was among the little raw material remaining.
It was Neil Aspinall, that most intelligent of roadies, who later claimed most convincingly to have had the brainwave. Why not make the Pepper band alter egos of the Beatles in their new uniform whiskers, and devote the whole album to its exploits? Weary as they were of playing John, Paul, George and Ringo, all four concurred with enthusiasm; from then on, Martin recalls, ‘it was as if Pepper had a life of its own’.
The idea that a pop album could be more than a random collection of tracks, but have the same cohesion as a classical symphony, was not new, or not quite. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the Beatles’ own Revolver had possessed such compulsive all-through listenability as to make each appear more than the sum of its parts. The first so-called ‘concept’ album had already come from the world of American experimental rock: in June 1966, Frank Zappa and the (all male) Mothers of Invention had released Freak Out!, a biting satire on American politics and culture, constructed in what were not tracks so much as movements or chapters. ‘This is our Freak Out!’ Paul often said during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, though he also had Pet Sounds repeatedly played at Abbey Road to remind the others, and himself, how high they were aiming.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is regarded as the ultimate concept album, but actually wasn’t one at all. After the recording of Paul’s signature song and a reprise to end side two, neither he nor John made any attempt to take the Sergeant Pepper theme any further; as Ringo later recalled, ‘we just went back to doing tracks’. Almost every one of those tracks would acquire a subtext, real or imaginary, more fascinating to millions than anything a faux-Victorian NCO and three subordinates might conceivably get up to.
In many ways, the album carried on the childhood and Liverpool theme with its circus and fairground sound effects, its pervading atmosphere of the traditional northern music hall that was in both its main creators’ blood. Yet in other places, it was grown-up to an unprecedented, indeed perilous, degree. It was at once sunnily optimistic and harrowingly bleak, fantastical yet down-to-earth, instantly accessible yet teasingly mysterious. Its superabundance reflected a conscious wish on the Beatles’ part to make amends to their fans for their abandonment of touring. Clamped between headphones in a recording studio, they managed to put on a live show more exciting, more intimate, than any since they’d left the Cavern.
Sgt. Pepper certainly was John Lennon’s Freak Out! The songs he brought to it–one his masterpiece, ‘A Day in the Life’, another a close runner-up, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’–were drenched in the LSD he now consumed in industrial quantities; with his chronic shortsightedness added, the result could be imagery to dazzle Dalí. There was also a power-surge by George as a songwriter and performer following his study of Indian music and religion, which added sitars, tablas, a whiff of joss and a very un-Liverpudlian earnestness.
In contrast, Paul’s contributions all had the same ‘clean’ sound as ‘Penny Lane’ (at one point making use of that unlikeliest pop effect, a rippling harp) and were as firmly rooted in the everyday. ‘Fixing a Hole’ was a direct reference to DIY at High Park Farm. ‘Lovely Rita (Meter Maid)’ commemorated a female parking attendant who’d broken with tradition by giving him a ticket and whose first name turned out to be Meta. ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ finally made use of the little music-hall ditty he’d started before ever meeting John: of all its deft little domestic touches, perhaps the best were the names of his imagined grandchildren, ‘Vera, Chuck and Dave’.
The harp introduced ‘She’s Leaving Home’, another McCartney ‘short story’ song, destined always to be unfairly overshadowed by ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Eleanor Rigby’. The problem of young female runaways was currently in the news, thanks to Jeremy Sandford’s milestone TV drama Cathy Come Home, which Paul had watched with Jane at Cavendish. He’d been equally moved by the story of a real-life runaway, 17-year-old Melanie Coe, whose distraught father told the Daily Mail, ‘I can’t imagine why she would do it. She had everything here.’ He was never more sensitive and empathetic than in this portrait of another ‘Cathy’, stealing away at daybreak for a clearly ill-advised elopement with ‘a man from the motor trade’, and her parents’ bewilderment on discovering ‘our baby’s gone’.
That sensitivity could be less evident in his dealings with people in the real world. After his forays into avant-garde music, he now tended to regard the classically-trained George Martin as somewhat old-fashioned in refusing to rank the likes of John Cage and Luciano Berio alongside Mozart or Brahms. One evening when Martin and his wife, Judy, were having dinner at Cavendish, Paul insisted on playing him a whole album by the experimental saxophonist Albert Ayler and–when that failed to convert him–started an argument about what did and did not constitute ‘real music’, citing numerous other names of whom Martin had never heard, and did not want to. The slightly embarrassing situation was lightened by Jane’s deft switching of the subject to Gilbert and Sullivan.
So now, when ‘She’s Leaving Home’ was mapped out to Paul’s satisfaction, he asked George Martin to be at Abbey Road the next day to score the arrangement he’d worked out in his head. Martin was already booked for a session with Cilla Black and offered an alternative slot but Paul couldn’t wait, so hired another musical director, Mike Leander. Breaking a matchless producer/artiste partnership for a single track, and snubbing that most invaluable as well as courteous of producers, meant nothing when he had the bit between his teeth.
Later, John would bitterly criticise the direction Paul’s songs began to take on Sgt. Pepper. But at the time, far from lodging any objection, he provided a supporting vocal that hugely enhanced their atmosphere, swelling the plaintive ‘Bye-bye’ in ‘She’s Leaving Home’, blissfully complicit with every cosy bourgeois image in ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, its ‘cottage in the Isle of Wight’, its gardening, infant-dandling, Sunday driving and fireside sweater-knitting. On ‘Lovely Rita’, his trance-like counterpoint became the nearest the album had to a leitmotif, reinforcing the impression that a concept really was being pursued and a continuous story told.
Nor would its stunning climax, ‘A Day in the Life’, have been fully realised without an infusion of McCartney mundanity. John’s epic, self-disgusted self-portrait was lacking a middle eight, so Paul supplied it with an unused song-fragment from his bottom drawer, about oversleeping and running for a bus. That little interlude of energy and positivity, amid its monumental inertia and melancholy, proved the song’s finishing touch of genius.
Despite the size of John’s LSD habit, he never let it interfere with work at Abbey Road, not even on this ‘acid album’, as he’d taken to calling it. ‘There was only one time when I ever saw him incapacitated,’ George Martin recalled, ‘and at the time, of course, I had no idea why. I just thought he was looking a bit peculiar and sent him up to the roof for a breath of fresh air. After that, I left Paul to look after him.’
To be sure, kindly, caring nurse Mary McCartney seemed reborn in her son that night. Paul took John back to Cavendish, stayed up all night with him and, to keep him company, took acid for the first time since sampling it with Tara Browne. Tara had since died tragically, crashing his Lotus Elan sports car at more than 100mph while apparently on an acid trip and finding a posthumous niche in ‘A Day in the Life’ as ‘the lucky man… who blew his mind out in a car’.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band took five months to make, as against the single day needed for the Beatles’ first album, and cost a jaw-dropping £25,000 as against Please Please Me’s £400. They were having such a good time that they stretched it out still further with costly but pointless sonic flourishes indicative of how Paul’s taste for experimental music had entered the group mind. Not content with the thunderous chord that ended side two, they spent eight hours creating a chorus of gibberish to go on the record’s playout groove, the usually silent bit where the playing-needle lifted off. Their final demand of EMI’s sound-effect archives, after circus crowds, fairground carousels, crowing roosters, alarm clocks and fox-hunts in full cry, was a note at 20,000 hertz frequency that would be audible only to dogs.
The concept was always clear, at least, for what would become the most famous album cover of all time. While recording was still going on, Paul made a series of pen-and-ink sketches of the Beatles in Victorian military uniforms, holding brass band instruments and standing in front of a wall covered with images of their collective cultural heroes. Himself he depicted with an E-flat bass tuba like the one played by his grandfather, Joseph McCartney, in the band at Cope’s tobacco works.
To art direct the cover, he brought in his gallery-owner friend Robert Fraser–just then awaiting trial for heroin possession after being busted along with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Fraser in turn engaged Peter Blake, to develop Paul’s rough sketch. With his then wife, Jann Haworth, Blake in effect built a stage set with the Beatles as psychedelic bandsmen, holding brass band instruments and standing around a bass drum bearing their alter egos’ name. Subtract the psychedelia and they could have been Jim McCartney’s Jim Mac Jazz Band 30 years earlier.
The collage of pop art icons ranged from Bob Dylan and Marlon Brando to Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, Laurel and Hardy, Aleister Crowley and W.C. Fields. They were largely chosen by Blake, who crossed out Paul’s nomination of Brigitte Bardot, the dream of his and John’s teenage wanking sessions, and substituted a waxwork of the British ‘blonde bombshell’ Diana Dors.
The collage terrified EMI’s lawyers, who believed those among its members who were still alive would sue for unauthorised use of their likenesses. The company’s chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, personally went round to Paul’s house to urge that the collage be dropped. Paul protested that ‘They’ll love it’, but to no avail: EMI insisted that permissions were obtained from as many as possible and that the Beatles undertook to pay the costs of any legal trouble. Sir Joseph also insisted Gandhi be removed, so as not to imperil sales in the Indian subcontinent.
Another innovation, one they would have cause to regret, was that Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics would be printed in full on the back cover. EMI were initially reluctant, fearing it would cut across sales of the songs in sheet music form, still then an important market. They also jibbed at the further expense of giving away cardboard moustaches and sergeants’ chevrons with every album, and wanted to increase profit margins by manufacturing the cover from the cheapest possible cardboard. In each case, it was Paul who went to the company bean-counters and persuaded them not to compromise the quality that had gone into Sgt. Pepper at every other level–an argument one cannot imagine anybody winning today.
In the run-up to the album’s release, Jane was in America with the Bristol Old Vic company and Paul, reverting as usual to a bachelor life, had two male friends staying with him at Cavendish and sharing his nightly clubbing. One was a young furniture designer named Dudley Edwards who, having decorated Paul’s piano with psychedelic thunderflashes, was now painting little figures all over the William Morris wallpaper in his dining-room. The other was Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, otherwise known as ‘Stash’, a son of the French painter Balthus, who’d lately been busted along with Rolling Stone Brian Jones and consequently couldn’t find a hotel in London that would take him.
On 17 May, with Jane still away, Paul was at the Bag O’Nails club, that favourite pop-star hangout, with Dudley Edwards and Stash to watch a set by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. There he bumped into the Animals, who were showing London to a friend just in from New York, a 25-year-old freelance photographer named Linda Eastman.
By a strange coincidence, Linda’s true family name was also that of the Beatles’ manager. Her father, Lee Eastman, had been born Leopold Epstein but had reinvented himself during his ascent from poor Russian-Jewish immigrant in the Bronx to high-level Manhattan lawyer. Her mother, Louise, was one of the Lindners, a prominent Jewish family from Cleveland, Ohio, who owned an old-established women’s clothes store in the city.
Linda, born in September 1941–nine months before Paul–was the second of the couple’s four children. Under matrilineal law, she, her older brother John, and sisters Laura and Louise automatically took their mother’s religion. But for Leopold-turned-Lee, it was too redolent of childhood poverty and obscurity and, with Louise senior’s acquiescence, he excluded all Jewish observances and customs from their home. The children thus grew up as typical New York WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), a disguise assisted in Linda’s case by a rangy build and long pale-blonde hair.
Lee had many clients from the entertainment and art worlds, among them bandleader Tommy Dorsey, songwriters Harold Arlen and Jack Lawrence and painters Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. In 1947, Lawrence composed a ballad entitled ‘Linda’, dedicated to his attorney’s six-year-old daughter, which was sung by Buddy Clarke with the Ray Noble orchestra and became a national hit.
Linda enjoyed a privileged upbringing, divided between the large family home in Scarsdale, Westchester, a beach house in East Hampton, Long Island and, later, a spacious apartment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. But her relationship with the self-made, dynamic Lee–an alpha male before the term existed–was often difficult. ‘I was always a dreamer who liked just looking out of windows,’ she would recall. ‘My teachers told my parents I’d be watching the butterflies instead of looking at my books.’ She was passionate about animals, especially horses, and would always say she only ever came properly alive on horseback.
After graduating from Scarsdale High School, she met Joseph Melville See, always known as ‘Mel’, a Princeton graduate whose mixture of scholarliness, athleticism and Hemingway-esque good looks impressed even her hypercritical father. When See received an offer to do postgraduate work in geology and cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, his birthplace, Linda went with him to study art history at the same university.
In 1962, her mother Louise was aboard an American Airlines plane, bound for Los Angeles, that crashed into the sea shortly after take-off from Idlewild, later JFK, airport, killing all its 87 passengers and eight crew. The tragedy precipitated Linda’s marriage to Mel See and in 1963 she gave birth to a daughter, Heather.
Arizona, with its wide-open spaces and opportunities for horse-riding, suited Linda perfectly, and its awesome scenery prompted her to enrol on a photography course at Tucson Art Center. There she had the good luck to meet Hazel Larsen Archer, a famous name in the largely male-dominated photography world of the 1940s and 1950s, now confined to a wheelchair but as vigorous and unorthodox as ever. Leisurely Linda was galvanised by Archer’s advice to forget theory but simply ‘borrow a camera, buy a roll of film and get out and take photographs’. Her earliest subjects were landscapes in the Walker Evans style, the Arizona prairies and mountains she had come to love.
Then some students from Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art happened to pass through Tucson on a Shakespeare tour of the US and were entertained by the university’s English faculty. Linda became friendly with several of the company and offered to do publicity head-shots of them for nothing. As a result, the first pictures she had published appeared some time later in the British actors’ directory, Spotlight.
At that stage, she seemed content with her role as a wife and mother, known only by her husband’s Christian and surname. She became locally celebrated for her prowess as a cook, though with no sign of the vegetarianism she would one day preach so fervently. In 1965, the cookery page of the Arizona Daily Star ran a picture of ‘Mrs Joseph Melville See’ preparing her favourite recipe, meat loaf with cucumber mousse (‘3 pounds of meat loaf mix, veal, beef or pork…’), wearing a vaguely cowgirl-looking outfit and watched by two-year-old Heather.
Unfortunately, Mel See regarded himself as an explorer/adventurer in the Victorian tradition, at liberty to take field trips to faraway places whenever he chose while his cowgirlie wife stayed home, caring for their child and making meat loaf. One such trip involved Mel’s spending almost a year in Africa. Linda refused to accompany him and when he returned, he found she’d taken Heather back to New York and begun divorce proceedings.
With a young child to support, and unwilling to exist on handouts from her family, she had to find a career in short order. Her choice was photojournalism, a profession then at its apotheosis in the pages of mass-circulation glossy magazines like Life and Look. Her father urged her to study photography ‘properly’–just as, thousands of miles away at about the same time, Jim McCartney was giving Paul the same advice concerning the piano–but Linda was no more receptive than he. In truth, becoming a photographer no longer required the training and technical dexterity it once had. With one of the modern single-lens reflex cameras, a Japanese Pentax or Nikon, all you really had to do was line up the image in the viewfinder and press a button.
She found a tiny apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and a job with Town and Country, a staid publication mainly read by WASPs rich enough to own homes in both localities. Linda worked on the reception desk, opening mail and making coffee, and had no visible ambitions to become anything more. Among her colleagues, she was said to be a descendant of George Eastman, inventor of the Eastman-Kodak photographic process, and as such the heiress to millions. Though Linda may not herself have originated the myth, she never went out of her way to deny it.
Another cause of friction with her father was her dislike of the Town and Country social set and preference for rock music clubs in the downtown quarter that was still considered dangerous and disreputable. But in one respect, she was as conventional as Lee Eastman could wish. However rackety her New York life might seem, her daughter Heather was scrupulously well cared for and always had a nanny looking after her while Mama was out on the town.
One night in 1966 at a club called The Scene on West 46th Street, she met a young photographer named David Dalton who was there covering a record company junket. Dalton specialised in rock singers and bands, not merely popping off a few shots in usual paparazzi style but posing his subjects in unusual locations and hanging out with them as friends. He later remembered ‘a tall girl with long blonde hair [who] began asking me a lot of questions. Did I do this for a living? How does one get into this? Is it hard to learn?… She was dressed in a striped long-sleeved T-shirt and an A-line skirt down to the knees… this in the very heart of the Sixties [among] mini-skirts… silver-foil sheaths… Op Art… She dressed with the studied bad taste elite WASPs aspired to. It was a bizarre cult of exclusive dowdiness.’
The next day, Dalton was booked to photograph the Animals–currently America’s favourite Brit band after the Beatles–against the gritty backdrop of New York’s shipping piers. He invited Linda to come along, thinking she’d be merely an awestruck spectator. Instead, the band paid far more attention to her than to him and she ended up doing an intimate one-to-one shoot with lead singer Eric Burdon.
Soon afterwards, the Rolling Stones came to town to publicise their latest album, Aftermath, under the direction of their new American manager, Allen Klein. After 14 Manhattan hotels had turned the Stones away, fearing sex-and-drug orgies, Klein billeted them aboard a yacht, the Sea Panther, moored in the Hudson River, and invited the nation’s media to interview them during a short cruise.
Normally, a publication like Town and Country would never have made the Sea Panther’s guest-list. But the magazine had recently published a flattering cover picture of the Stones by David Bailey, so was persona grata with the Allen Klein organisation. During her daily mail-opening duty, Linda came upon the invitation, pocketed it and went to the reception, camera in hand, posing as T&C’s official photographer.
So many reporters turned up to talk to the Stones that there wasn’t space for the yacht to carry photographers too. But Linda managed to talk her way on board, and so had the band all to herself for the whole cruise. As a rule notoriously disobliging at photocalls, they did whatever she asked, sprawling around in louche attitudes with wide-apart legs and thrusting crotches. Afterwards, the reporters on board besieged her for pictures to accompany their articles, and she got a spread of her own in Datebook–the same magazine whose reprinting of John Lennon’s ‘more popular than Jesus’ remarks had poisoned the Beatles’ final US tour.
Her mentor David Dalton (who hadn’t been asked to the Sea Panther reception) caught up with her at the Stones’ after-cruise party, for which celebrities like Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe and Baby Jane Holzer had likewise clamoured for invitations. ‘Mick’s just asked me for my phone number,’ Linda told him. ‘What should I do?’ It was, Dalton recalls, ‘a purely rhetorical question’.
On the strength of her Rolling Stones exclusive, she quit her job at Town and Country and turned freelance. She herself admitted she was ‘too lazy’ to bother overmuch about composition or even learn to use a light meter. But she possessed a superabundance of the photographer’s most essential skill, the ability to gain access. At photocalls for new-in-town bands or singers, she had only to kneel in front of the media pack with what David Dalton called her ‘leonine gawkiness’ and the most ungracious and unco-operative became hers to command.
She became house photographer for New York’s main rock venue, the Fillmore East, swelling her portfolio with the Doors, the Mamas and Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Cream and Frank Zappa. Her detractors–of whom there were many, and would be many, many more–regarded her as a rarified form of groupie. After Mick Jagger, she had brief affairs or one-night stands with several more of her subjects (something considered quite normal for male photographers), among them the Doors’ legendary singer and satyr Jim Morrison and the Hollywood star Warren Beatty, at that time a sexual icon as potent as any in rock.
She attended Beatty’s press conference with a female colleague named Blair Sabol, who later recalled its outcome with vitriolic disgruntlement: ‘I remember how impressed I was with her come-on talents as she sat in front of him in a mini-skirt and her legs in full wide-angle split for at least six rolls of Ektachrome. Warren ended up ushering me out of his Delmonico suite within 30 minutes and kept Linda for two days.’
In hindsight, she seems more like a genuine free spirit, already emancipated in most of the ways that the nascent feminist movement had only just begun to demand. She was also a busy and successful professional whose work appeared across a range of prestigious magazines from Life to Rolling Stone. No one who knew her then could have dreamed she would one day become a spectacular symbol of monogamy and domesticity–and give up cooking meat loaf for ever.
Despite having covered the Beatles’ 1966 American tour and knowing several friends of theirs, Linda had never met any of them before she arrived in London in May 1967. Nor was she on a specifically Beatle-related assignment. She had been commissioned to take the pictures for a book entitled Rock and Other Four Letter Words, to be written by the music journalist J. Marks, and the first name on her British hit-list was Steve Winwood of Traffic.
Her share of the publishers’ advance was only $1000 and, to her father’s horror, she’d used almost all of it for her return air-fare. But Lee Eastman would later have to admit no money was ever better spent.
She had reunited with her first-ever photographic conquest, the Animals, and was with them at the Bag O’Nails club when Paul walked in, accompanied by Dudley Edwards and Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola. The leonine gawkiness seemed to be doing its usual stuff when he asked her to accompany his party to another club, the Speakeasy. Once there, however, he seemed more interested in a new single the deejay was playing, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, and debating what its enigmatic lyrics might mean. Later, as limos were dropping everyone off, Linda briefly saw the interior of Cavendish and, she would recall, was ‘impressed by all the Magrittes on the walls’.
Although she was not in London in pursuit of Beatles, professionally speaking, it clearly made sense to show her portfolio to her almost-namesake Brian Epstein. Brian being otherwise engaged, she was seen by his assistant, Peter Brown, just then deep in arrangements for the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on 1 June. The Beatles were to do just one photocall for a dozen hand-picked photographers at Brian’s house in Chapel Street, Belgravia. Impressed by Linda’s work and even more by her connections, Brown added her to the list.
She turned up with her usual ‘exclusive dowdy’ look–striped blazer, too-long skirt, blonde hair not over-scrupulously brushed. The other photographers were hardened Fleet Street and agency men, experienced pushers and elbowers, not to mention unregenerate misogynists. Yet Linda, as always, won special access, lining the Beatles up in front of a marble fireplace with a copy of the album, then getting John to shake Paul’s hand with a simultaneous jokey thumbs-up sign. A rival took some shots of her photographing Paul on his own, kneeling in front of him as he lounged in an armchair, and in an intimate huddle by the fireplace, staring deep into his eyes.
Afterwards, she took the initiative, charming his top-secret home phone number out of someone and calling the next evening–a Friday. However, she found he’d gone off to spend the weekend with his father in Cheshire, leaving Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola alone at Cavendish. ‘Stash’ invited her over nonetheless. At that stage, there was no question of her being Paul’s girlfriend, so his temporary lodger did not feel out of order.
A couple of days later, she returned to New York without having seen him again, and there the matter seemed to end.