11

THE WHITE ALBUM

November 1968

The Beatles with Maharishi on the train in 1967: (left to right) Hunter Davies, Paul, Ringo, John, Maharishi, George.

The Beatles had first met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the Hilton Hotel in London on 24 August 1967. The next day they went off to Bangor in North Wales to meet him again. I went up with them on the train–sitting with the four Beatles in their colourful finery, along with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. They been given their mantra by the Maharishi and joined in his Transcendental Meditation meetings. It was this same weekend, while we were still in Bangor, that news came through of the death in London of Brian Epstein. Not suicide–although he had made an earlier attempt–but an accidental overdose of drugs.

While Brian had ceased to play a vital role in their lives, they had lost someone who had in some senses been a spiritual leader, who had always believed in them and loved them, guided them at a vital stage in their development. In the Maharishi they found, for a while, another spiritual leader. Of a different sort.

In February 1968 all four of the Beatles, plus wives and, in the case of Paul, his fiancée Jane Asher, went out to India. At this stage, although John had met Yoko, he was still officially with Cynthia, and she accompanied him. They all went to stay and study at Rishikesh, away from the media circus that had surrounded them for the last five years.

It brought them together, whereas in London various petty squabbles had been tearing them apart, and it removed them from boring business meetings and worries. It also reduced their individual egos, as they were supposed to be thinking of higher things. It confirmed George as the most influential figure, as he was the most knowledgeable and devoted and spiritual. But probably the greatest effect of the Indian trip was in their music.

They had a lot of free time to play and think and be with each other, and the result was that they returned to their former methods of songwriting–instead of being holed up in their individual mansions or stuck in a studio with a deadline and the latest electronic wizardry, they were able to sit around with their acoustic guitars, making music.

Ringo and his wife Maureen returned first–he missed some of the essentials of his life back at home, such as baked beans. John wrote him a postcard: ‘Just a little vibration from India. We’ve got about two LPs worth of songs now so get your drums out.’

Two LPs! That suggested something in the region of thirty songs, since the standard LP at that time had about fourteen songs. All that, in just the few weeks they had been in India? It turned out not to be an exaggeration. John and Paul, while out in India,^* had indeed worked on at least thirty new songs. Not all of these appeared on their next record–probably about half made it–and not all were completed, but they came home very excited, keen to start work again and knock their new creations into shape. They decided to keep it fairly simple, not as elaborate or as way-out as some of their songs on Sgt. Pepper. A return, in many ways, to simple songwriting.

The album–their ninth, and the first to appear on their own Apple Records label-turned out to be a whopper. They had so many ideas, so many songs, that it became a double album–two whole records, with twenty-eight new songs in all. It took them almost six months to record–from May to October 1968–and during this time various difficulties began to emerge between the four of them. Sources of conflict included Yoko’s influence over John, and problems with Apple, their new company, and all its various bits (some of them fairly mad and eccentric). Even the normally placid George Martin began to get fed up with them and their demands.

The album was at first going to be called ‘A Doll’s House’, until they discovered another rock group, Family, were calling their latest album Music in a Doll’s House (it came out while the Beatles were still recording).

After all that jazzy, snazzy, busy, fizzy, colourful packaging of Sgt. Pepper, the album cover this time was minimalistic–all white, front and back, with no photos, no printed lettering. A blank cover, in fact. Each record was numbered, like a collector’s edition. (The numbers stopped in 1969–the highest known number being 3,116,706.)

The album was actually called The Beatles, but this was so discreet, embossed so subtlety, that it was easy to miss. Most people, then and now, called it The White Album or perhaps The Double White Album. Referring to it as The Beatles, its official title, was too confusing.

Tucked inside the sleeve was a large sheet with photos on one side, including one of John in bed with Yoko. By the time the album came out–on 22 November 1968–John had left Cynthia and was living with Yoko. They were also making records together, Two Virgins being the first, as well as becoming involved in various other excitements of an artistic nature.

The other side of the sheet contained all the words of all the lyrics, a practice they’d started on Sgt. Pepper. Hurrah for that. Such a help, then and now, for all fans and for all lyricalists. Is there such a word? Definitely a species.

Back In The USSR

It still makes me smile, after all these years, one of the wittiest songs they ever did. The fun–well, I think it’s funny–is that it sounds just like an American rock song, sung in an American accent, but it’s about the USSR. Which of course does not exist now, so young people today might not get it. It’s a pastiche, in both words and in music: not an easy trick to pull off.

It was one of fifteen songs that Paul wrote in Rishikesh, and was inspired by a suggestion from Mike Love of the Beach Boys, so he has claimed (Mike was also in India, along with the singer Donovan). The idea was to do a version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Back in the USA’ but set it all in the USSR. There were also hints of the Beach Boys own song ‘Surfin’ USA’.

Some right-wingers in the USA did not get the joke. Russia was their deadly enemy, backing the baddies in the Vietnam War, and thousands were being killed, so the Beatles were accused of being Communists. These right-wingers did not seem to realize that in the USSR, the Fab Four were considered by the Communist Party as being capitalist lackeys.

When I visited the USSR in 1988, still under Communism, every young person I met knew the words of every song–and of course one of their faves was ‘Back in the USSR’, getting the jokes many Americans had missed. (I discovered that they had all read my biography of the band as well–not officially but in dissident samizdat versions, duplicated and passed around.) Today, the Russians remain passionate Beatles fans. There have recently been academics, in the USA and the USSR, who have written learned articles arguing that it was the influence of the Beatles that helped bring down the USSR.