The Sgt. Pepper launch party was held at Brian’s house in a street just behind the gardens of Buckingham Palace. How far they all had come! And, behind his little round glasses, thin, tired and stoned, John was, for the few journalists present, scarcely recognisable from the wisecracking ‘fat Elvis’ Beatle of eighteen months earlier. This was the new John, the acid-soaked John. He didn’t enjoy these enforced soirées, but his presence had been required by his anxious manager and record company. So there he begrudgingly was.
With hindsight, Sgt. Pepper’s success seems a certainty, but at the time no one was quite sure how the fans would react to such a change of direction. It had been a risk, and, having spent an unprecedented £25,000 (nearly £320,000 in today’s money) over the four and a half months of recording, EMI were taking no chances on it not making the necessary impact. They’d even splashed out on the cover, employing pop artist Peter Blake and his then wife, Jann Howarth, to design a collage of famous faces, against which the Beatles had been photographed wearing flamboyant pantomime-military uniforms in a flower-power setting. For four boys who had once bridled about having to wear suits while on stage, this was quite a change.
John was often grumpy, but he was particularly cross on the occasion of the launch because Paul had told Look magazine a few days earlier that he had taken LSD. To John, this was a case of Paul ‘grabbing the headline’, making it look as if he was the most ‘tuned in and dropped out’ Beatle, when actually, always more cautious, Paul had been the last to try acid. That this should bother John may seem petty, and it was. But in John’s mind, his role was that of the far-out bohemian, not straight Paul. The needles of jealousy were always there.
Not that Paul cared, or probably even noticed. With Jane still on tour he’d spotted a very friendly, sophisticated-looking young American photographer in a blazer and skirt and was enjoying talking to her. Her name was Linda Eastman, and he asked for her New York phone number. She gave it to him.
EMI had worried that sales of Sgt. Pepper might be hurt by Paul’s drugs controversy, and the banning of three of its tracks by the BBC, but in the event the reverse was the case. Fans just became more curious to know what was on this ‘ground-breaking record’.
For the most part, what they found astonished them. Timing is always a factor in entertainment, but somehow, as if through a process of cultural osmosis, the Beatles had once again distilled the moment in music – this time by capturing the vibes of that extraordinary Indian summer of 1967, a half-daft, half-dopey, wholly optimistic time of hippy bells and beads.
With the record released, and the Beatles trying to get on with their lives – John by ordering the painting of his Rolls-Royce in psychedelic yellow with displays of red roses on the sides (‘Sacrilege!’ cried Rolls enthusiasts), as well as a caravan he’d bought for Julian to play in (‘an eyesore’, wailed a neighbour) – the legions of the counterculture now emerged on to the London streets with flowers in their hair, sandals on their feet and cure-all philosophies of love and life on their tongues. It felt as if they had been waiting for a signal only the Beatles as magicians could give.
Everywhere anyone went, all summer long, Sgt. Pepper was playing. Every hairdressing salon seemed to have it on, its songs leaked from the open doors of boutiques, while at parties little else made it on to the turntables.
There were other anthems too, of course. Scott McKenzie was directing everyone towards the hippy picnic that was now, apparently, San Francisco, while ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’, which was reigniting interest in Bach, was the year’s biggest pop hit. John would play it over and over on the record player he’d had installed in his Rolls-Royce. The sequence of images – ‘the sixteen vestal virgins’ who were ‘leaving for the Coast’, the singer wandering through his playing cards, and the girl ‘her face at first just ghostly’ – obsessed him. Did it make any sense? He didn’t know. But he loved the romantic mystery of it.
But it was still only a single. Three minutes or so and it was gone. Sgt. Pepper was an album, more than thirty-nine minutes of mood-changing music that was being greeted with almost universal bouquets by rock critics. The Beatles had, it was generally agreed, made the most adventurous, technically brilliant rock album of all time. What the critics would have said had ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ been included defies the imagination. Praise doesn’t go that high.
Some, myself included, think that other Beatles albums had a better collection of songs, and that George Martin’s arrangements and technical feats bewitched the world into hearing musical and lyrical brilliance where it might not necessarily have been. But, everyone to his or her opinion.
What is undeniable is that with Sgt. Pepper the Beatles began a second career, which would be just as big, though less noisy than their first. As the worlds of music, film, art, theatre and fashion bowed and curtsied around them, once again the Beatles were at the very centre of the public’s consciousness.
But what was John’s opinion of the record? Mixed. ‘When you get down to it, it was nothing more than an album called Sgt. Pepper’s with the tracks stuck together,’ he would later tell Rolling Stone. ‘Actually, I dislike bits of the songs which didn’t come out right . . . I like “A Day In The Life”. It’s still not half as nice as I thought it was when we were doing it . . .’
This was, of course, John being a contrary old misanthrope for the sake of it, as he often was when interviewed by those he perceived to be unquestioning Beatle fans. While Paul was happy to feel that the album reflected the mood of the time, ‘because we ourselves were fitting into the mood of the time’, John would become increasingly dismissive of it.
What he and Paul did agree on was that, when necessary, they could write a hit song to order. Which is exactly what they did when the BBC approached Brian and asked him if the Beatles would like to be the British representatives for a global first, a satellite TV link-up of eighteen countries called Our World. With the show scheduled to be seen by 350 million viewers across Europe, North America and Australasia, as well as in parts of Asia and Latin America, it was an opportunity without parallel to promote a new single. But what kind of song should they write?
They left it late. Then three weeks before the show, the two sat down and swapped ideas. John’s song won for sheer topicality. It was called ‘All You Need Is Love’ – a slogan for the times. He was always good at the pithy little aphorism. If he hadn’t been musical, or become a stand-up comic, and if the Beatles hadn’t made it, he might well have had a good living writing catchphrases for advertising.
By Lennon and McCartney standards, ‘All You Need Is Love’ isn’t a great song, the general message being neither profound nor new or true. But it did have simple words which could be easily understood by non-English speaking viewers, and a catchy chorus – ‘All you need is love, love, love . . .’ little more than a variation on ‘She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!’. According to a droll George Harrison, all the other countries on the show were showing things like ‘knitting in Canada, or Irish clog dancing in Venezuela. So, we thought we’d sing “All You Need Is Love” because it’s a subtle bit of PR for God.’ Soon that PR would sell several million copies at 45 rpm, and begin a fifty-year career as a newspaper headline.
Once again George Martin dressed the song up to make it sound more than it was, giving it a ‘Marseillaise’ opening to illustrate its internationality; he then tagged on a slice of England by way of ‘Greensleeves’, and some of America in the shape of a few bars of Glenn Miller’s ‘In The Mood’ as a fade out – unfortunately forgetting to get permission for the use of the latter. The publishers involved were quick to point out the omission. A fee was arranged.
The programme was supposed to be live, as country after country presented its entry, but, with some of the accompaniment pre-recorded, the Beatles were only semi-live. John, in a shiny floral jacket, sang while chewing gum, one hand clasping a headphone to his ear, with Paul alongside and the others sitting on high stools around him. At their feet, between the balloons and flowers, and in celebratory party mood, were Cynthia and Jane, and Pattie and Maureen, as well as Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Eric Clapton with newly permed hair, Keith Moon, kaftan-clad Keith Richards, Paul’s brother Mike McCartney, Graham Nash, Hunter Davies, Brian and some of the Beatles’ staff.
‘All You Need Is Love’ wasn’t vintage Beatles, in fact it may even have been one of their weakest singles, but as a slogan it was smack on the pulse of the moment.
So, the silly summer moved on, with stories about hippies and pot and LSD, and pictures of rock stars wearing their psychedelic coats of many colours in the newspapers day after day. Editors usually struggle to fill their pages in the dead days of mid-summer, but in that flower-power year, the favourite musicians of the time were doing all they could to help.
Months earlier, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been arrested and charged with the possession of drugs at Richards’ country home in West Sussex. When they went for trial at the end of June there was understandably great newspaper interest. By then, however, it wasn’t so much the two Rolling Stones who were centre stage in the public mind, it was the lady who had been sitting with them when the bust had taken place. She was Marianne Faithfull – at the time still married to John’s friend John Dunbar, he of the Indica Gallery (and, yes, it was a very small world that they all inhabited) – who, the police would say, had been wearing nothing but a white fur rug when her friends had been apprehended.
Marianne hadn’t been charged with anything, so she wasn’t present at the trial. Not physically, anyway. In spirit, though, she was certainly there, in the shape of an astonishingly febrile rumour that when the police had entered the house they had discovered Mick Jagger eating a Mars Bar that had been lodged in her vagina.
The rumour didn’t for a moment sound credible. Nor should it. It wasn’t true. Nor, although much was made of Ms Faithfull’s nudity under her fur rug, was it mentioned in court. It had no bearing on the case. But John, like the other Beatles, enjoyed a warm glow of schadenfreude to see his chief rival, friendly though he was with Mick Jagger, so embarrassed – laughing as he would when passing on mischievous tit-bits about the Rolling Stone. ‘Did you know, Mick Jagger wears a cod-piece in his underpants when he’s on stage?’ he told me one day. That may not have been true either. But he still passed it on. He always loved gossip.
That so many people wanted to believe (and some probably still do) the unlikely Mars Bar story is because it fitted the carefully manufactured image of the Rolling Stones as long-haired, dissolute rock stars with shameless, free-loving, naked girlfriends, every last one of them high on drugs.
The Beatles, on the other hand, the band who had been honoured by the Queen, were still, somehow, reflected in the cheerful, goody-goody halo that Brian Epstein had insisted shine upon them. They were, it was believed, too big and too much loved by the nation to be the subject of any police drugs investigation – although their pills, pot and LSD were hardly now a secret. All of which meant that the Stones copped it instead.
Where no one was in danger of coming up against an inquisitive policeman was on the high seas, so at the end of July, John, George and Ringo, together with wives and some employees, flew off to the Mediterranean in the company of a relative newcomer to their circle – a young man to whom John had quickly given the nickname Magic Alex. The fellow’s real name was Yanni Alexis Mardas, a plausible Greek television repairman by trade, but an electronic inventor of genius in his dreams. John had met him through John Dunbar, with whom Alex lived, and had been immediately excited to hear of the astonishing inventions the repairman was working on – a paint that would make everything invisible, a wallpaper that would work as speakers, and a car paint that would change the colour of your car at the click of a switch.
If it all sounds too good to be true, that’s because it was. But, putting his credulity to one side, John immediately bought a Nothing Box from the inventor – that is, a plastic box with randomly blinking lights that went on and off until the battery ran out. Down-to-earth Cynthia never understood the appeal of this toy and nor did she trust Magic Alex Mardas.
But then she wasn’t enjoying the same diet as her husband who was completely taken by the zany guy’s ideas, so when Alex had suggested that the Beatles should go to Greece to find an island to buy, this was exactly what they did.
John put it this way: ‘We’re going to live there, perhaps for ever, just coming home for visits. Or it might just be for six months a year. It’ll be fantastic . . . all on our own on this island. There are some little houses which we’ll do up and knock together and live in communally.’
Years later George took up the story for The Beatles Anthology. ‘We rented a boat and sailed up and down the coast from Athens, looking at islands . . . It was great. John and I were on acid all the time, sitting on the front of the ship playing ukuleles . . . The sun was shining and we played “Hare Krishna” for hours and hours . . . Eventually we landed on a little beach . . . but it was covered in pebbles. Alex said: “It doesn’t matter. We’ll have the military come and carry them away.” Then we got back on the boat and sailed away and never thought of the island again.’
This was the state that John was in during the summer of 1967. Boundlessly rich, feted around the world, he was an intelligent man whose eyes were blinkered to the wiles of a charlatan and much else. With his mind frequently addled by LSD, he was bored and spiritually empty, ever ready to pal up with any new friend who might amuse him, or to pursue any new diversion whenever it appeared on the fringes of his life.