The stupendous success of the album he had conceived, and done most to bring to fruition, ought to have brought Paul some sense of security at last. Instead, it was to usher in an era of upheaval and uncertainty that would destabilise even his carefully measured career path and have a catastrophic effect on his relationship with John.
In Britain, Sgt. Pepper sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week and stayed at number one in the album charts for more than six months, including over the Christmas holiday; in America, it spent 15 weeks at the top of Billboard’s Hot Hundred. Over the following decades, it would sell 32 million, make repeated returns to the charts and be cited time and again in newspaper and magazine polls as the most influential album of all time.
The heyday of mass album sales, between the late 1960s and early 1980s, would see other artistes shift more units, more quickly. But none would ever catch the zeitgeist more perfectly than the Beatles’ blend of nostalgia, mysticism and faux naivety, nor cast so instant a spell over all races, ages, classes and intellects. At one end of the spectrum, the great drama critic Kenneth Tynan called it ‘a decisive moment in the history of Western Civilization’; at the other, small children jigged up and down to it, wearing the paper moustaches and sergeants’ stripes given away with every record. Untold numbers of the Sixties’ young would always remember exactly where and in what circumstances they first heard it and how, more than anything else in that lucky decade, it seemed to transfigure and transform their lives.
As every rave reviewer agreed, it put the Beatles far ahead of even their strongest competitors. And the very strongest of those had to agree. During Paul’s pre-release trip to America, he’d paid a social call on Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ harmonic genius, who was currently at work on a new album called Smile, promising an even greater challenge to Lennon and McCartney than Pet Sounds. When Paul played an advance pressing of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ to Wilson and his wife, the couple both burst into tears. So dented was the fragile Beach Boy’s self-belief that he abandoned work on Smile soon afterwards; its disconnected fragments stayed on the shelf until finally being edited together and released in 2004.
Similar admiration came from the Beatles’ musical peers across the board. In June 1967, London’s most talked-about live performer was Jimi Hendrix, a beautiful young black man dressed like a gipsy Mad Hatter, whose blend of guitar virtuosity and blatantly sexual showmanship left Britain’s native rock talents gaping. Three days after the album’s release, Hendrix appeared at the Saville theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, a venue lately acquired by Brian Epstein and partly used for Sunday-night rock concerts. The three-man Jimi Hendrix Experience’s set opened with an acid-rock version of the formerly cosy Sgt. Pepper theme-song. Paul watched the performance, afterwards calling it ‘one of the great honours of my career’.
With the Beatles’ usual uncanny timing, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared just as the hippy culture that had been growing in Britain and America turned into a visible and vociferous mass movement. The so-called ‘flower children’ with their creed of universal love and peace might have been expected to loathe any evocation of trumpety Victorian NCOs. Yet by some strange alchemy, Lennon and McCartney’s cheery vaudeville show became absorbed into the hippies’ manifesto for social, spiritual and sexual revolution–would indeed become the very touchstone for what they were proprietorially (but over-optimistically) billing as ‘the Summer of Love’.
Ironically, musicians who’d given up live performance because they couldn’t stand the hysteria now found themselves unleashing hysteria which made old-fashioned Beatlemania seem rational by comparison. For in the eyes of their hippy devotees, the Beatles were no longer just a band but a four-headed deity whose every song was invested with the power of Holy Writ.
John and Paul had always liked burying private jokes in their lyrics: initially bits of schoolboy smut, then underhand references to drugs. But on Sgt. Pepper, these were underhand no longer. John’s ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, a song drenched in acid-trip visions, formed the acronym ‘LSD’–though he protested it was the innocent title of a painting his son, Julian, had done at school. ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, a roughly equal John–Paul collaboration, spoke of getting ‘high’ and seemed a direct allusion to pushing and to acid’s community spirit. In ‘A Day in the Life’, the long, wheedling chorus of ‘I’d love to turn you o-o-on’ was barefaced mischief, also with Paul’s connivance, resulting in the first-ever banning of a Beatles track by the BBC.
But there was more; much more. The unprecedented printing of the lyrics on the album cover allowed them to be endlessly pored over and, in their readers’ over-stimulated or beclouded minds, to yield up more hidden meanings than the Dead Sea Scrolls.
‘A Day in the Life’ on its own became a verbal archaeological site, what with the man who ‘blew his mind out in a car’ (Paul’s friend and first acid-partner, Tara Browne), the ‘4,000 [needle?] holes in Blackburn, Lancashire’, the ‘smoke’ Paul had on the top deck of his bus and the ‘dream’ that resulted. The chaotic orchestral passages, conducted by Paul, which John wanted to be ‘a sound like the end of the world’, were said to represent an addict’s first ‘rush’, when the drug hits the system.
The Paul-originated Pepper songs were generally free of suspect subtexts, but that didn’t stop people finding them. In ‘She’s Leaving Home’, the ‘man from the motor trade’ with whom the runaway elopes was–and still is–thought to be fellow Liverpudlian Terry Doran, who co-owned a car-dealership with Brian Epstein, though Paul has always insisted he’s pure fiction ‘like the sea captain in “Yellow Submarine”’. ‘Fixing a Hole’ was taken as a metaphor for injecting heroin rather than DIY on a farm in the Scottish Highlands.
The hunt for hidden signs and meanings even extended to the brief jabber of speeded-up talk that had been put on the album’s playout groove as a nod to Paul’s interest in experimental music. One day in Cavendish Avenue, he was accosted by two boys who informed him that if the electronic gabble was played in reverse, it seemed to be saying ‘Fuck me like a superman’. He invited the pair into his house, checked out their story on his own copy of Sgt. Pepper and was forced to admit they were right, although neither he nor any of his bandmates had been aware of it.
In Britain and America, hippies were most visible en masse at open-air rock concerts, now known as festivals or happenings and larger than had ever been known before. Their sanctification of Sgt. Pepper led to the first of many attempts to get the Beatles to play live again. Between 16 and 18 June, a giant festival was held in Monterey, California, co-organised by their former press officer, Derek Taylor, whose Anglo-American, multiracial roster–including Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Ravi Shankar–almost all performed for free.
John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas flew to London to ask Paul if the Beatles would headline the festival. Paul himself was not averse but knew John and George would never agree, so suggested that Phillips should ask Jimi Hendrix instead. The result was Hendrix’s breakthrough from cult club act to international superstar.
Hippies might be preparing to celebrate the Summer of Love, but Britain’s law-enforcement agencies had other ideas. For months, there had been growing national unease about the spread of drug-use among young people, seemingly with the open encouragement of their favourite music stars. The police had been yearning to take reprisals on such figures but had been held back by their inexperience in spotting the various drugs–and also the fact that LSD was too new to fall within the scope of the UK’s antiquated anti-drug laws. But at the end of 1966, it had finally been made illegal, untying the law’s hands at last.
The first strike was against the nation’s most infamous musical miscreants, the Rolling Stones. In February 1967, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been busted together for minuscule drug offences–neither involving acid–at Richards’ Sussex cottage, where they’d gone after watching the Beatles complete ‘A Day in the Life’ at Abbey Road. Also netted in the raid was Paul’s art dealer friend Robert Fraser, who at the time had 24 heroin tablets in his officer-style blazer-pocket. Photographer Michael Cooper, who’d shot the Sgt. Pepper cover, was present, too, but escaped any charges.
Next in line was International Times, the underground newspaper Paul had helped to fund and launch. IT was permanently under official fire for its open advocacy of marijuana–to say nothing of homosexuality and nudity–and had already been raided once, after publishing an interview with the black American comedian Dick Gregory which included the quote ‘I say “fuck white folks”.’ On 1 June, the day of Sgt. Pepper’s release, a member of IT’s editorial board, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for possessing a tiny amount of pot. Fearing this might presage a further, fatal police onslaught, the editorial team turned to Paul, who promised that if such a thing should happen, he’d hire the very best lawyers to defend them.
Yet for all the Beatles’ open espousal of the drug culture, it seemed inconceivable that any of them personally might be targeted. George Harrison, in fact, had been among Keith Richards’ house-party with his wife, Pattie, but they had left just minutes prior to the raid. Legend has it that the police waited for George to get clear before they went in, though in reality his escape was pure luck.
In this open season on British pop’s top echelon, Paul was as vulnerable as anyone else. He was a habitual pot-smoker, had started on cocaine (thanks to Robert Fraser) and, during Jane’s long absence in America, had taken to dropping acid. Jane would later recall her dismay when she returned to Cavendish, some time after Sgt. Pepper’s release. ‘Paul had changed so much. He was on LSD, which I knew nothing about. The house had changed and was full of stuff I didn’t know about…’
Yet he seemed utterly confident that being a Beatle gave him immunity from what lesser figures in the musical and counter-cultural world were now suffering. For instance, neither he nor John ever thought of backing away from the two busted Rolling Stones despite the risk of attracting police attention. While awaiting trial, Jagger and Richards composed a sneering riposte to the authorities entitled ‘We Love You’, for which Lennon and McCartney provided (uncredited) backing vocals. Also present at the session was America’s greatest beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Barry Miles and regular contributor to International Times. Ginsberg later recalled John and Paul singing together, ‘looking like Botticelli Graces’, while he conducted them through the control room glass ‘with Shiva beads and a Tibetan oracle ring’.
Paul was a steadfast friend to Jagger throughout these pretrial months when he could have expected further surprise visits from the forces of law and order at any moment. The Chief Stone was often to be found at Cavendish, together with Marianne Faithfull, whom he had wooed away from Indica gallery’s co-owner John Dunbar–and who’d greeted the police raiders at Keith’s cottage wearing nothing but a fur rug. During these hazardous demonstrations of solidarity, Paul little suspected that the Stones’ new album-in-progress, Their Satanic Majesties Request, would turn out to be a shameless imitation of Sgt. Pepper, both in content and packaging.
He was similarly supportive of Brian Jones, also awaiting trial after a separate bust, and a far less well-protected and more psychologically vulnerable character than Mick. To distract Brian from his problems, Paul invited him to join a Beatles session at Abbey Road for a track that eventually became ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’. And Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, who had been busted along with Brian–in his case, on non-existent evidence–was given sanctuary at Cavendish for as long as he needed. ‘If they want to bust you again,’ Paul said, ‘they’ll have to bust me as well.’ Which told ‘Stash’ there was no safer house.
The eve of his twenty-fifth birthday brought proof of just how invulnerable he felt. This usual master of polite evasion and soufflé-speak became the first Beatle–in fact, the first major pop star–to publicly admit taking LSD. It came about in an odd reprise of John’s ‘more popular than Jesus’ episode. Comments originally made to a minor British publication and causing little reaction were repeated by a major American one, unleashing a firestorm.
Some time previously, Paul had given an interview to Queen, a tiny-circulation glossy magazine mainly covering London high society. To his prospective audience of duchesses and debutantes, he not only owned up to having tried acid–before it became illegal of course–but rhapsodised about the ‘mind-expanding’ effect. ‘After I took it, it opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brains. Just think what we’d accomplish if we could tap that hidden part. It would be a whole new world.’
Then on 17 June, America’s mighty Life magazine ran a post-Sgt. Pepper article, headlined ‘The Way-Out Beatles’, which recycled the quotes. In Britain, the resultant outcry was almost as great as ‘more popular than Jesus’ had caused in America. The Beatles’ best ambassador and PR man now found himself branded ‘an irresponsible idiot’ by the Daily Mail. A Labour Home Office minister, Alice Bacon, declared herself ‘horrified’ by Paul’s views and compared him unfavourably with Lulu, one of various goody-goody popsters to have spoken against the drug culture. ‘What sort of society are we going to create,’ the minister mused clairvoyantly, ‘if everyone wants to escape from reality into a dream world?’
Two days later, Paul gave an interview to Independent Television News in his garden at Cavendish in which he admitting taking acid ‘about four times’. The reporter asked whether he didn’t feel some responsibility for making drugs alluring to the Beatles’ millions of young followers. Deciding attack to be the best form of defence, he replied that he’d never wanted to ‘spread the word’ about acid: that was being done by ITN itself, and all the other news organisations currently at his heels. ‘You’re spreading it now at this moment… This is going into every home in Britain and I’d rather it didn’t… If you’ll shut up about it, I will.’
None of the other Beatles was caught up in the furore–though Brian Epstein loyally stood beside Paul, admitting to five acid-trips and insisting they’d caused him no harm whatsoever. John, above all, might have been expected to be sympathetic, but instead felt aggrieved that the band’s last and most reluctant convert to acid had made himself the spokesman for it. Living at close quarters on the road, the two had never annoyed each other half as much as they now would as demigods.
Nobody in or out of the media imagined Paul’s tripping had ended when LSD was outlawed. Yet he still was not considered to be in the slightest danger of being busted. Nor was the controversy allowed to interfere with the ultimate use of the Beatles as an advertisement for Britain. On 25 June, they starred in the BBC’s first-ever live television transmission via satellite, performing ‘All You Need Is Love’, the hippies’ mantra salted with Lennon sarcasm, to an audience of some 400 million people across five continents.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards joined the Beatles and other pop VIPs in the television studio for this literally universal dissemination of the Summer of Love. Two days later, they stood in the dock at Chichester Quarter Sessions to answer for their microscopic drug offences the previous February. After the most grotesque of show trials (which also managed to smear the unaccused Marianne Faithfull) both Stones were found guilty and briefly incarcerated, but released on appeal. Robert Fraser, who was tried for heroin possession by the same court, received six months’ imprisonment with hard labour, serving his time in full.
The Jagger–Richards case gave new impetus to the lobby calling for the legalisation of marijuana as a harmless recreational drug which did not lead to more serious use. On 16 July, a huge ‘legalise pot’ rally in Hyde Park gave London its first sight of flower children en masse and passed off peacefully, despite the heavy-handed intervention of police still clad in helmets and short-sleeved shirts rather than riot gear. The principal speaker was Allen Ginsberg, wearing a red sateen shirt covered with psychedelic patterns. The shirt was a gift from Paul, who’d hand-drawn the patterns himself.
Leading figures in the arts and science also rallied to the cause in an open letter to The Times (whose unexpected support had been mainly responsible for getting Mick Jagger off the hook). Since the letter was also to be a manifesto which couldn’t risk being censored or cut, it would have to take the form of a paid display advertisement. Paul agreed to pay the necessary £5000 and to get the other Beatles and Brian to sign it.
The letter duly appeared in The Times of 24 July, headed ‘The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice’. In addition to John Lennon MBE, Paul McCartney MBE, George Harrison MBE, Richard Starkey MBE and Brian Epstein, its 64 signatories included Britain’s greatest living novelist Graham Greene, the foremost drama critic of his generation Kenneth Tynan, the photographer David Bailey, the broadcaster David Dimbleby, a psychologist, a pharmacologist, a Labour MP and one of the two men who had discovered DNA.
However questionable its case that the risk of cannabis-smokers becoming heroin-addicts ‘was less than of drinkers becoming alcoholics’, the letter and background campaign had one positive long-term effect. Although pot was never to be legalised, the savage penalties for possession–up to ten years’ imprisonment or a £1000 fine–would, over time, be drastically reduced.
But in other countries, no such liberalisation took place–as Paul would one day discover to his cost.
On 24 August, the hippies’ four-headed deity found their own spiritual guide in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and became converts to Transcendental Meditation. Soon afterwards, EMI’s chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood attended a reception hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. He found Her Majesty disinclined to the usual polite small talk. ‘The Beatles are turning awfully funny, aren’t they?’ she said.
Not so funny, perhaps. Young men who had achieved every possible and impossible success and tasted every conceivable material luxury by their mid-twenties might well become jaded by their so-envied lives and feel a yearning for some higher fulfilment.
Actually, only two of the four were in this susceptible state. George was already deeply immersed in Indian religion and music–hence the latter’s influence on Sgt. Pepper–while John was open to any relief from his chronic insecurity and self-hatred. Paul was not conscious of any particular spiritual void, nor was the uncomplicated Ringo, but the group mind held its usual sway.
Indeed, this decision concerning their souls was taken even more quickly than the one to grow moustaches. Hearing (from George’s wife, Pattie) that the Maharishi was to give a talk at London’s Hilton hotel, John, George and Paul, accompanied by Pattie, Cynthia Lennon and Jane, turned up in their millionaire-hippy finery and sat at the front, experiencing the extreme novelty of a spotlight being turned on someone else.
Here it was monopolised by a diminutive Indian gentleman with straggly hair and black and white forked beard whose high-pitched voice seemed to quiver with perpetual mirth. But if his appearance was rather comical, his message was riveting. His Beatle listeners had heard of meditation as a way of calming the mind, but had always thought it involved self-discipline and patience aeons beyond their attention span. This transcendental variety, however, offered an inviting fast track, needing only 20 minutes per day to produce a state of perfect ‘inner peace’.
After the lecture, John, Paul and George talked with the Maharishi and there and then signed up to his Spiritual Regeneration Movement, pledging to contribute a week’s earnings apiece to its funds and to study meditation at the guru’s ashram, or religious sanctuary, in India. Meantime, they agreed to join a ten-day induction course he was running at a college in Bangor, North Wales, starting the following August Bank Holiday weekend. With them went Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, until then the Summer of Love’s most notable casualties. But that distinction was about to be usurped.
At the end of the first day’s indoctrination in Bangor, John, Paul and George held a joint press conference with the Maharishi to announce an early major benefit: they were giving up LSD. ‘You cannot keep on taking drugs for ever,’ Paul said. ‘You get to the stage where you’re taking 15 aspirins a day without a headache. We were looking for something more natural. This is it. It was an experience we went through. Now it’s over and we don’t need it any more.’
The next day, Sunday, as the cycle of spiritual chats with the Maharishi and press conferences continued, a telephone began ringing persistently inside the college’s administration block. Paul said ‘Someone had better answer that’, and went off to do it. A few moments later, he was heard to shout ‘Oh, Christ … no!’