GEORGE MARTIN: No one could have conceived that it would happen, and the boys were completely broken up by it. They were like a ship without a rudder. One of the awful things is that, if Brian had lived, he would have lost the Beatles. He wouldn’t have survived as their manager. Because they would have split up anyway. They would probably have sought their own, younger, different people to look after their affairs. Brian, by his own design, had become too fragmented, and the Beatles were too selfish to ever have someone like that. They wanted someone who did nothing else but the Beatles. Even more than that: by that time, Paul wanted someone who did nothing but Paul, John wanted someone exclusively, and so on. So it would have become an impossible situation.
JOANNE PETERSEN, PERSONAL ASSISTANT TO BRIAN EPSTEIN: Things started to unhinge pretty quickly, almost immediately. It seemed to me that things became unstable very quickly. Brian was the glue. He held it all together, and the moment he wasn’t there it was like a rudderless ship. There was no one steering the ship.
DEREK TAYLOR: Had he lived, Brian might have been more decisive and more tenacious and seen the Beatles through a lot of the things that no one else could. John had a famous quote, ‘We’ve fucking had it now,’ and to the extent that they did break up, that’s true.
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: The Beatles were just fucking around, really, with the Maharishi, that’s all. Brian was much more than a brilliant businessman. He was a spiritual centre. So I think what happened with the Maharishi was a betrayal of spiritual values, that’s how it must have appeared to Brian. If he had met the Maharishi, he would have seen immediately that this idiotic little guy wasn’t going to be able to take his place. I think everybody realised that from the minute they met him.
Here’s what would have happened if he hadn’t taken the overdose. They would have come back to London and Brian would have said, ‘How was it?’ and they would have all cracked up laughing as if it was the most ridiculous thing. The trouble with him dying at that moment was that it actually pushed them into the arms of the Maharishi, whereas if he hadn’t died, it would have blown over. The Maharishi was the most ludicrous little man you could imagine. Everybody realised this, and we were all embarrassed.
Brian had an incredible antenna for sensing things. If he had been there in London when they got back from Wales and answered the phone in his silk dressing gown when John or Paul rang, the Beatles would not have gone to India and all these things would not have happened.
PAUL: Brian’s death kind of opened the floodgates. It gave other people the possibility to come in whereas there had been no possibility before.
It would be too glib to suggest that the Beatles looked to the Maharishi to fill the gap left by Brian Epstein. Compared to Epstein, he was a fly-by-night. But by now the pace they had set themselves had become so rapid, their needs and quests and fads so random and restless, that perhaps they were bound to look for another hand to guide them.
John and George left Bangor so full of the benefits of Transcendental Meditation that a month later they appeared on The Frost Report to extol its virtues. The following week, they were invited back on the same show. Unusually, George was by far the more talkative of the two, rattling on about levels of consciousness:
… Transcendental Meditation takes you to that transcendental level of pure consciousness, but by going there often enough, you bring that level of consciousness out onto this level, or you bring this level onto that level. But the relative plus that level becomes cosmic consciousness, and that means that you’re able to hold on to the full bliss consciousness in the relative field, so you can go on about your actions all the time with bliss consciousness …
And so on; and on; and on. It says much for the awe in which the Beatles were held that the usually snappy David Frost let him drone on at such length, and on such an abstruse topic, leaving even his wildest claims unchallenged. At one point George mentioned that he had been reading a book about a yogi who lived to be 136, ‘and there’s another one, living in the Himalayas at this very moment … It seems pretty far out, you know, to the average person, who doesn’t know anything about it. But this fellow has been there since before Jesus Christ, and he’s still here now in the same physical body. They have control over life and death. They have control in everything, having attained that higher state of consciousness …’