30

‘The idea of being a rock and roll musician sort of suited my talents and my mentality’

For much of the rest of 1964 the Beatles would be on tour. John, like the others, was excited to be visiting so many other countries, and he even took Aunt Mimi along when the Beatles went to New Zealand – she had relatives there she wanted to see. But he didn’t take Cynthia. Being a Beatle was a man’s job, and, at the time, neither he, nor anyone else, saw why a wife or a girlfriend would be invited along when a fella went to work.

And it was work, a hard grind, day after day. Slogging from one country or city to the next. During the year, the Beatles would perform before thousands of screaming fans at 123 shows in 80 towns and cities across Europe, Hong Kong, Australia (where an estimated 300,000 people turned out to greet them in Adelaide), New Zealand, the United States and Canada. Usually they would now only play for thirty minutes at a time, singing a dozen or so songs, but their presence would give fans the chance to say, ‘I was there. I saw them.’ And that alone would sell millions of records when the tour had moved on.

They’d quickly accepted the wall of sound that now greeted them and largely overwhelmed their music, in that the primitive equipment they found in many venues hadn’t been designed to combat mass hysteria. And at first they were amused by the screaming more than annoyed. ‘There’s no point in doing a show if they’re just going to sit there listening,’ John would joke. ‘I like a riot.’ At the same time, to have become the objects of what was now a global fascination took some getting used to.

Back in London in July, John was puzzled that the streets were filled with people as he and Cynthia were being driven to the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night. ‘Is it a Cup Final or something?’ he innocently asked, only to be genuinely surprised when told by Brian that the crowds were there because they were hoping to see the Beatles.

Obviously, it was fun, for John as much as for any of them. It had to be, as each new peak of popularity was overtaken by a bigger and better one. How could it not be? What could be more flattering for a young man than to be met by screams of devotion from teenage girls whenever you flew into an airport or appeared on a stage?

Even the film critics seemed to bow in supplication when A Hard Day’s Night was released, although their constant references to the Beatles as latter-day Marx Brothers slightly irritated – John seeing no similarity between the two, other than a few one-liners and that Harpo Marx had combed his hair forward.

When he realised that none of the Beatles would share financially in their film’s huge box office success, having each been paid a flat fee of £8,000 for their appearances, he, along with the others, would be a little narked. But with the movie in cinemas around the world, it was a terrific piece of promotion for the soundtrack album, which, as he and Paul wrote all the songs, would profit them both enormously as it immediately became another worldwide number one.

Everything that was happening was good. But John was a realist. The popularity of rock stars was usually fairly brief. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and even Elvis weren’t selling records in the quantities they had. That was the nature of the job. Why should the Beatles be any different? So, it was always in his mind that this kind of fame couldn’t go on for ever. Best to keep his sense of humour and earn as much money as possible before the fire went out.

Only when the Beatles went home to Liverpool for a civic reception before the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night did he begin to understand that this particular fire would not be going out any time soon. As the Beatles stood on the balcony of the Town Hall and looked out at the ocean of faces on Castle Street, John knew that nothing could ever be the same again.

Somewhere in the two hundred thousand faces below him were his uncles and aunts, half-sisters and cousins, friends, ex-girlfriends, schoolmates and college pals – all the people with whom he’d grown up. They would always stay the same to him, but in their eyes he would now always be different from them. Massive fame had set up barriers between him and people and places he’d known and loved as a boy. He would think about them often, he liked to talk about them, and sometimes to sing about them. But, though he always planned to go back, he would rarely visit Liverpool again.

The Beatles had played a few hastily arranged New York and Washington concerts during their Ed Sullivan visit in February, but it was during their first North American tour in the summer of 1964 that they began to feel at home in the US. John liked to say: ‘The idea of being a rock and roll musician sort of suited my talents and my mentality.’ But rock and roll was an American music form, and there was much else about the United States, with its energy and speed and restlessness, that suited his talents and mentality.

With Elvis’s former bassist’s band, the Bill Black Combo, together with the Righteous Brothers on the bill, the Beatles’ first American tour opened in San Francisco. After which, off they flew in a hired plane as they went looking for America in a 22,000-mile zig-zag of twenty-six of the largest towns and cities. It was an odyssey, not just for them but for the pack of reporters who were accompanying them, too, a time when the Beatles learned a lot about America; and one during which the accompanying reporters learned about self-censorship when filing their reports to their newspapers.

Six years later, when post-Beatle John was in full iconoclastic mood, he would spill the beans to Rolling Stone about the determined young groupies who would turn up in every city the Beatles visited. He may have been overselling his case when he said Beatles tours were ‘like Fellini’s Satyricon . . . When we hit town, we hit it . . . Wherever we were, there was a whole scene going.’ But it wasn’t all exaggeration.

Yet, at the time, not a hint of inappropriate sexual behaviour appeared in the press. The wholesome image that Brian had wanted the Beatles to adopt was the official line and what happened on tour stayed secret. In John’s eyes, the accompanying journalists were all part of the Beatles’ feelgood party bubble and no one wanted to pop it – perhaps in case they got kicked off the tour. That’s possible: there may have been some self-interest involved.

But in those times, when the tabloids were less intrusive, blind eyes in show business were not unusual – every Hollywood star knew that. Besides, the Beatles were now seen as personifications of a new youthful excitement and a mood of happy optimism among the world’s baby-boomers. No one wanted to spoil that party.

Midway through the tour a meeting took place that would have a profound effect on John’s songwriting. After appearing at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, New York, the Beatles were visited in their hotel by Bob Dylan. By now, not many artists fazed John, but Dylan was one of them, and the Beatle was, he would later say, ‘dumbfounded’ when they met. A New York Post journalist friend of Dylan’s, Al Aronowitz, arranged the meeting, of which John would later have just two main memories. The first was that Dylan was surprised when the Beatles coyly admitted that they had never smoked marijuana. As there was very little pot around in Britain at the time, that was less surprising than it now sounds. But it astonished Dylan because he thought the Beatles had been singing ‘I get high, I get high, I get high’ in ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’.

‘No,’ they said. The lyrics had, in fact, been ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide’.

Everyone was amused by the misunderstanding, but the omission in the Beatles’ rock and roll rites of passage was soon corrected when one of Dylan’s companions quickly rolled a joint and passed it around.

John, Al Aronowitz would remember, was usually the first to experiment with anything new, but he would only try the joint after Ringo, like a medieval royal taster, had taken a few puffs. ‘Soon, Ringo got the giggles,’ Aronowitz wrote years later, ‘and the rest of us started laughing hysterically at the way Ringo was laughing hysterically.’

The other memory was less agreeable, and John would often tell how Dylan kept telling him, ‘Listen to the words, man. Listen to the words,’ as they played one of his records.

Feeling embarrassed about some of the lyrics of his own songs, John muttered lamely, ‘I don’t listen to the words.’

Actually, that wasn’t even true any more. What John would describe as the ‘professional songwriters’ attitude . . . a certain style of song for a single’ that he and Paul had so far pursued was now giving way to more personal pieces. Paul would still often write little stories in his songs, but John would increasingly ‘try to express what I felt about myself’. A typical example would be ‘I’m A Loser’, which had been recorded just before the US tour had begun.

‘I’m a loser, and I’m not what I appear to be . . .’ went the lyrics. Could that possibly be true? John would sometimes think so. ‘Part of me suspects I’m a loser . . . and part of me thinks I’m God Almighty,’ he would sometimes reflect.

Certainly, he had periods of bleak introspection. Was he as clever as he wanted to be? Was Dylan cleverer? Musically, he appreciated that George was a better guitarist, and he would say that he never played lead guitar on any of his songs when he thought George could do a better job. He could live with that. But was Paul a better songwriter than he was? That was more difficult for him. He’d certainly liked one of Paul’s newer songs, ‘Things We Said Today’. It sounded rather like one of his own, slightly foreboding and built around a bass riff. Had he felt a slight prick of envy when he’d first heard it? If he had, it wouldn’t have been the first time that envy and admiration had come together when it came to Paul. Other doubts still lingered, too. Was Paul better-looking than he was? Did girls fancy Paul more than they did him? He’d already realised that they did – the younger ones anyway. But did Paul have a better voice as well?

‘Paul has a high voice,’ he once snapped when I mentioned to him that Paul had a ‘good voice’.

And, knowing the trickery that could be done in the studio, he was soon asking George Martin to disguise his voice, no matter how much the producer would tell him, honestly, how much he liked the way he sang.

Then there was his marriage. Had he trapped himself? By the autumn of 1964 John might have been one of the most famous young men in the world, but behind the mask that he wore when he laughed and acted ‘like a clown’, which he mentions in ‘I’m A Loser’, there were more than a few insecurities. There always would be.

When the Beatles left America in late September, they had nothing but praise for the experience. ‘It’s been fantastic,’ John said. ‘We’ll probably never do another tour like it. It could never be the same.’

In private, however, all four would have their grumbles. Although they would joke that they didn’t mind the screaming, because it covered up their mistakes, with John fibbing that sometimes he didn’t even bother to sing but simply mimed because no one could hear him anyway, they had been virtual prisoners the whole time they’d been in the US. Moving from one hotel room in a city to a stage and then on to another hotel room in another city and so on to another city and stage, playing Monopoly or cards to pass the waiting time, life had soon become stultifying.

On top of that, so determined to meet them had been local mayors, dignitaries and police chiefs, many of whom would be accompanied by their wives and children, as well as disc jockeys, journalists and fans, all four Beatles would regularly retreat behind the locked door of a hotel bathroom to unwind in each other’s company. Only they knew what it was like to be at the centre of the howling hurricane of attention that they themselves were stoking, and only they, in their comradeship, could help each other get through it. ‘It must have been impossible to be Elvis,’ John would say. ‘He was on his own.’