At the beginning of 1965, a new Beatles stature settled in over the rest of pop, and it’s worth stepping back to view the larger frame to see how broadly their influence stretched. An onslaught of 1965–66 hits, from both sides of the Atlantic, now form the core of “Classic Rock,” that slippery conundrum of a style that was all about the Ongoing Now. While the Beatles set this boom in motion, competing talent created new substreams, many of which quickly expanded into new genres. All of it worked as metaphor for the ideas and attitudes the songs reflected, a social upheaval that seemed to dance.
Ascendants like the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan turned in defining skyscrapers (“Satisfaction,” then “Like a Rolling Stone”); a thriving middle class set up shop in the musical suburbs (the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Hollies); and a staunch underground yowled of unrest still to come (the Animals, the Kinks, the Who, the Sonics). Week after confounding week, early Beatle promise became manifest in single after dazzling rock single, tracks that would dominate radio playlists for decades. And while reigning over the pop world in 1965 with four singles (“Eight Days a Week,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Help!,” and “We Can Work It Out”/“Day Tripper”), each a powerhouse of a different stripe, the Beatles created ripples that were often as tempting as the hits themselves.
The larger irony of Lennon’s creative arc resides in how this emerging middle period—Rubber Soul in late 1965, Revolver in 1966, and Sgt. Pepper in 1967—drew from all this chart activity to harness a new authority: through his ears, and the Beatles’ ensemble, the rock album grew more conceptual than a mere sequence of discrete songs. The historical nuances steering this larger story touch on all the extremes the Beatles toyed with in their sound.
Hindsight deprives contemporary listeners of the Pervasive Now that that season’s hits encircled, one of those thrillingly rare collisions of artistry with popular taste that ranks with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels in the 1920s and 1930s, Charlie Chaplin’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s films, or the rash of subversive TV sitcoms like Roseanne and Seinfeld throughout the 1990s. Top 40 radio streamed intoxicating musical perfumes. Nearing fifty years later, simply scanning these charts can give you tingles: in December 1964, Phil Spector released his last great micro-epic from the Righteous Brothers, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” a huge international hit, which zipped past the Zombies’ “Tell Her No,” a refusal so enticing that Lennon approached the band about producing. March brought Motown’s lithe, ethereal “My Girl” by the Temptations, which seemed to glide on an idealized plane summoned by the civil rights movement. Listeners got lost in such delirium, but there were too many distractions to linger: “My Girl” got bumped aside by “Eight Days a Week,” atop for two weeks, and then by the commanding cry of “Stop! In the Name of Love” by the Supremes. “The Last Time,” the Rolling Stones’ first Jagger-Richards original Stones hit, came careening around the next corner, a guitar’s dagger to the heart of disaffected cool. Come May, Lennon’s cunning “Ticket to Ride” held firm atop Ringo’s white-hot delayed drum patterns, alongside “Help Me, Rhonda” by the Beach Boys, a Rubik’s Cube of vocal harmonies.
This was all foreplay for that summer’s avalanche, each hit more tantalizing than the last, variety chasing experiment. June alone brought a lusty “Back in Your Arms Again” by the Supremes, the confessional “I Can’t Help Myself” by the fiercely proud Four Tops, and a shimmering, magisterial incantation of Dylan as electric prophet in “Mr. Tambourine Man” from the Byrds. You could have freeze-framed rock history right there and called it a golden era. But July served up two giant set pieces: the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (rock as carnal unrest) and Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (rock as bottomless, implacable, leering social unrest).
For Dylan, this electric assault threatened to suck the air out of everything else, only there was too much radio oxygen to suck. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the giant, all-consuming anthem of the new “generation gap” disguised as a dandy’s riddle, a dealer’s come-on. As a two-sided single, it dwarfed all comers, disarmed and rejuvenated listeners at each hearing, and created vast new imaginative spaces for groups to explore both sonically and conceptually. It came out just after Dylan’s final acoustic tour of Britain, where his lyrical profusion made him a bard, whose tabloid accolade took the form of political epithet: “anarchist.” As caught on film by D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, the young folkie had already graduated to rock star in everything but instrumentation. “Satisfaction” held Dylan back at number two during its four-week July hold on Billboard’s summit, giving way to Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” come August, novelty capstones to Dylan’s unending riddle. (In Britain, Dylan stalled at number four.) The ratio of classics to typical pop schlock, like Freddie and the Dreamers’ “I’m Telling You Now” or Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual,” suddenly got inverted. For cosmic perspective, yesterday’s fireball, Elvis Presley, sang “Do the Clam.”
Most critics have noted the Dylan influence on Lennon’s narratives. Less space gets devoted to Lennon’s effect on Dylan, which was overt: think of how Dylan rewires Chuck Berry (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) or revels in inanity (“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”). Even more telling, Lennon’s keening vocal harmonies in “Nowhere Man,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “Dr. Robert” owed as much to the Byrds and the Beach Boys, high-production turf Dylan simply abjured. Lennon also had more stylistic stretch, both in his Beatle context and within his own sensibility, as in the pagan balalaikas in “Girl” or the deliberate amplifier feedback tripping “I Feel Fine.” Where Dylan skewed R&B to suit his psychological bent, Lennon pursued radical feats of integration wearing a hipster’s arty façade, the moptop teaching the quiet con.
Building up toward Rubber Soul throughout 1965, Beatle gravity exerted subtle yet inexorable force in all directions. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds spoke ecstatically about leaving A Hard Day’s Night determined to form a band, and built his sound around Harrison’s jangling Rickenbacker electric twelve-string, used in the title song’s delirious opening chord and closing arpeggio—which seemed to imply all things to all listeners. Within a year McGuinn had steered his folkie taste into folk-rock, turning Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” into a space-age duet threaded between neon guitars. Everywhere there was inexorable melody; everywhere there was booming, luxurious beat.
Remarkably, Lennon and the Beatles surveyed this vast new world of sound and ideas under expert cover as bubblegum pop stars. The previous fall, of 1964, had seen the band turn sideways (with Beatles for Sale), but only in the way comets dip from view. In this new climate, they absorbed their surroundings and pushed back with better material, more ideas, and a newly relaxed confidence even as their schedule hastened forward. No matter how relentlessly Epstein packed their calendar, their minds always seemed to be leaping out ahead.
After finishing the group’s second annual Christmas Show at the Odeon on January 16, 1965 (capping three weeks of nearly twice-daily performances), John and Cynthia Lennon flew off to Switzerland with George Martin and his soon-to-be second wife, Judy Lockhart-Smith, leaving Julian with their new housekeeper, Dot Jarlett. Only the Alps would do for Lennon to practice skiing for ten days in anticipation of the next movie’s Austrian sequences. One night, Lennon broke out for Martin a new song he had been working on to cheer the producer up after an injury. It bore the working title “This Bird Has Flown.” The rest of the time he scribbled to meet a publishing deadline for the literary followup to In His Own Write. He returned to six weeks of filming and a summer of touring the world’s stages. Epstein had mapped out another European tour for July, with a live TV broadcast from Paris, followed by another major American tour in August and at least one concert in Mexico (which was later scrapped).
It’s telling that Lennon sat on this song, “This Bird Has Flown,” for several months. The band began recording material for its second film as director Dick Lester rewrote the script to accommodate some vacation, with sequences set in the Bahamas as well as in Austria. The plot leapt unevenly from life inside the Beatle bubble to broad James Bond parody. As the Beatles recorded and Lester preproduced, Epstein flew to New York to arrange the August tour schedule, under strict instructions about how their second U.S. tour would scale back from the manic pace of the first. Although amenable, he couldn’t resist making trade-offs in the number of dates versus larger venues. One of his earliest bookings came from a Manhattan meeting with Sid Bernstein, who was anxious to follow up 1964’s Carnegie Hall dates at a more profitable space. The year before, Bernstein had walked Epstein down to Madison Square Garden for a look-see. Now he suggested an even bigger venue.
These deals went forward as fans read the Beatles’ Playboy interview (in the February 1965 issue), which hit newsstands over Christmas 1964. This high-profile exchange included a prescient discussion of religion, with distinctions between “atheism” and “agnosticism” from all four. Are any of you churchgoers? Playboy asked. “Not particularly,” Paul offered. “But we’re not antireligious. We probably seem antireligious because of the fact that none of us believe in God.”
Lennon assented: “If you say you don’t believe in God, everybody assumes you’re antireligious, and you probably think that’s what we mean by that. We’re not quite sure ‘what’ we are, but I know that we’re more agnostic than atheistic. . . . The only thing we’ve got against religion is the hypocritical side of it, which I can’t stand. Like the clergy is always moaning about people being poor, while they themselves are all going around with millions of quid worth of robes on. That’s the stuff I can’t stand.” The only sin worse than piety, Lennon argued, was hypocrisy. When the interviewer asked if Lennon was speaking for himself or for the entire group, he shot back: “For the group.” And George added, “John’s our official religious spokesman.”1
Too bad for Hefner’s hot tub, these comments went unnoticed—the world was still too enamored of Beatle magic to take umbrage. And with four individuals, the entertainment wires had plenty to report. Ringo Starr married Maureen Cox in February at the Caxton Hall registry office, with Lennon and Epstein standing beside him, while Paul vacationed in Africa. Starr’s marriage echoed Lennon’s: Maureen gave birth to Zak Starr eight months later. Epstein still fretted about negative female reaction as a second Beatle gave up bachelorhood, to the point where even Harrison got quoted saying, “This means two married and two unmarried Beatles—two down and two to go.”2 The newlyweds honeymooned in a secluded spot near Brighton; but once again, the location leaked and fans swarmed their honeymoon.
Increasingly, EMI’s Abbey Road studios became the Beatles’ island of control. Where the schedule pushed down on their time, sessions began lasting longer, and the number of takes per song swelled as needed. Sessions over the week of February 15–20 yielded eleven tracks toward the untitled sound track, beginning with “Ticket to Ride,” “Another Girl,” and “I Need You.” They still needed a title song, but remained productive enough to set aside two strong efforts. Ringo’s “If You’ve Got Trouble” burst forth in a single take (it would have made a dapper theme song for Ringo’s lead role in the upcoming film, but got held), before “Tell Me What You See,” in four takes. February 19 saw “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” in two basic takes plus overdubs, and they finished on the 20th with “That Means a Lot,” the second number from these sessions to get held, and handed to P.J. Proby for an overproduced, melodramatic single. This last track, however, had more potential—they returned to it after filming Help! in the Bahamas.
The worldwide success of A Hard Day’s Night gave their second film a bigger budget, color stock, and more glamorous locations. Help! was arranged with some vacation in mind. Apart from easing the daily schedule, the Beatles’ accountant, Dr. Walter Strach, advised an offshore tax shelter to protect their earnings. Strach was installed in the Bahamas for a year to make this possible. Lester booked three weeks of shooting there, followed immediately by another three weeks in Austria. They would have to finish the sound track along the way.
Spinetti, their Hard Day’s Night costar, remembers the Bahamas mainly for falling ill and for Lennon’s contretemps with a local British dignitary. He got right back into conversation with the band on the trip over. “You’ve got to be in all our films,” Harrison told him. Otherwise, he said, “me mum won’t come and see them, because she fancies you.” Each Beatle stopped by Spinetti’s room individually: Lennon performed German gibberish; George brought him milk and cookies; Ringo sat down and read him a good-night story; Paul poked his head in the door, asked if he was all right, and fled.3
Lester ran a congenial set as the Beatles sneaked off to smoke joints; the cutting-room floor piled up with takes interrupted by rampant giggling. The maiden-voyage charge of making a movie had worn off, and work progressed with typical show-biz contours. Rumors flew about Lennon and costar Eleanor Bron. Ringo got thrown into the water before announcing he couldn’t swim. Spinetti noted how nonchalant the Beatles remained even as their world had begun to shrink.
At the tail end of three weeks of shooting with no days off, Spinetti remembered there were location shots at a military camp—a makeshift hospital for the infirm and elderly. “We had been filming in this deserted army shack, a wooden frame with a tin roof, and all the doors and windows were closed, and all these kids inside, old people . . . it was just rotten, filthy. Dining on a royal feast that evening, John says to his host, ‘This morning, we were filming in this old deserted house, and we looked through the windows and saw all these sick kids and old people. How do you reconcile that with all this?’ And the man said, ‘Mr. Lennon, I am the minister of finance, and I have to tell you that I do this job voluntarily, I do not get paid for it.’ And John took a slow look round. ‘Well, you’re doing better than I’d have thought.’ ” BEATLES INSULT GOVERNOR, the headlines ran the next day. But Spinetti recalls the governor barely noticing, even though the other Beatles were nodding in assent to Lennon’s remark. “When we eventually left, we were virtually booed off the island.” 4
Lennon later remembered this scene as a drunken rage: “The most humiliating experiences were like sitting with the Mayor [sic] of the Bahamas, when we were making Help! And being insulted by these fuckin’ junked up middle-class bitches and bastards who would be commenting on our work and commenting on our manners. I was always drunk, insulting them. I couldn’t take it. It would hurt me. I would go insane, swearing at them.” Spinetti warned Lennon about popping off in public. To the actor, Lennon seemed daft about how seriously everybody took him. “I’m only a songwriter, Vic,” Lennon told him, “I’m no fucking martyr.”5
Harrison remembers celebrating his twenty-second birthday in Nassau (February 25). As he sat on the side of a road, Swami Vishnu-devananda approached him. “He was the first Swami I had met and he obviously knew we were there,” Harrison remembered. “He told me years later that whilst meditating he had a strong feeling that he should make contact.” He gave Harrison a book that he stowed away to read later on. Subsequently, he found it preached the same philosophy espoused by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.6
According to Cynthia Lennon’s most recent memoir, Alfred Lennon paid John another surprise visit, this one to Kenwood, after Lennon returned from Austria, just as he had done the previous year on the Hard Day’s Night set. He introduced himself as “Freddie.” Rather than displaying the delight for which his father had been hoping, John flared up, asking, “Where have you been for the last twenty years?” “Freddie” stayed in the Lennon house for three days, until John and Cynthia became convinced that he had contacted his son for financial rather than sentimental reasons. After dismissing him, Lennon fell prey to guilt, and resumed his annual allowance after threatening to cut him off.7
Another giant intrusion on Lennon’s consciousness took chemical form. In late March, John and Cynthia went out with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd for a dinner with the dentist they shared, one John Riley. They were already daily marijuana smokers, but in public, they preferred Scotch and Coke, and snuck joints in the bathroom. The Beatles made irresistible marks for Swinging London’s thrill seekers.
Riley fancied himself a swinger, and dosed his guests with LSD. Cynthia remembered the room beginning to swim and Riley erupting in laughter. Harrison and Lennon scolded him and took Pattie and Cynthia out to Harrison’s Mini Cooper S as the drug was beginning to take effect. Cynthia recalled:
The trouble was we were in central London, a good hour from home, and George had no idea which way up the world was. God knows how we made it, but after we had gone around in circles for what seemed like hours we eventually arrived at George and Patti’s home. . . . The four of us sat up for the rest of the night as the walls moved, the plants talked, other people looked like ghouls and time stood still. It was horrific.8
Her account doesn’t entirely square with what Pattie Boyd remembered in her memoir Wonderful Tonight (2008): “We were really keen to get away and John Lennon said, ‘We must go now.’ ” They had planned to catch Epstein’s new act Paddy, Klaus and Gibson (with Klaus Voormann, their Hamburg friend). “These friends of ours are going to be on soon,” Lennon told Riley. “It’s their first night, we’ve got to go and see them.” But Riley tried to keep everybody at the table. When he told them they had just been dosed through the coffee, Lennon erupted. “How dare you fucking do this to us?” he demanded. George and Pattie didn’t even know what LSD was, but Lennon had read about it in Playboy. “It’s a drug,” he told them. As its effects grew stronger, they felt even more strongly that they should leave. Pattie thought the doctor must have hoped for an orgy to break out. Somehow, they arrived at London’s Ad Lib club. They entered the elevator only to start hallucinating its red light setting it aflame. Inside the club, they bumped into Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Ringo, none of whom seemed to quell the increasing inner hysteria and the “elongating” tables. They drove home at a frantic crawl.
Cynthia vowed never to take the drug again, but Lennon and Harrison were intrigued. “It was as if I had never tasted, talked, seen, thought, or heard properly before,” Harrison said. “For the first time in my whole life I wasn’t conscious of ego.”9
Lysergic acid now began to mix with Lennon’s steady intake of alcohol and grass as the Beatles reentered the studio, and a new strain of dislocation slowly seeped into his muse. Back at EMI on the evening of March 30, the Beatles remade McCartney’s “That Means a Lot” with five more takes, but were still unhappy with it. As with Ringo’s “If You’ve Got Trouble,” this bespoke a pride they took in the rest of Help!’s sound track, only they never came back to it. This tells you something of their confidence, or of something more troubling—George Martin’s lack of authority, perhaps? How could a producer not hear “That Means a Lot” as anything but masterly?
Crafting richly layered rock narrative under the guise of pop stars was one trick; consigning juggernauts to the vault while pounding out tracks for a movie, another. “That Means a Lot” finally came out on the Anthology in 1995, but it remains a stumper, a clue to how out of touch McCartney could be with his own strengths. Surely this was a track Lennon should have urged him to release—its melody alone trumps “The Night Before” or “Another Girl” or even “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” The lyric borrows heavily from ideas spun out first in “From Me to You” and “She Loves You,” as a lover measures his inner state against hearsay. Strung on a delicious guitar lick that settles gently down into understated rhythmic offbeats, punctuated by Ringo’s discreet snare, the groove itself is disarming. But it’s all an echoey bedding for McCartney’s rubbery vocal, which grows from purring self-reflection to damn-it-all revelation in one miraculous arc of feeling across two key areas (a ploy he revisits in “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Penny Lane”): “A touch can mean so much/When it’s all you’ve got.”
Unlike on most of the other numbers from these sessions, the production is thick but detailed, with each individual line carefully etched. The recording admires “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” from a respectful distance; it’s an Englishman’s version of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, with heft but no fat. Here’s what Spector might have sounded like if he had but an ounce of British reserve. Its note of defeat (“Love can be . . . suicide”) gives much of McCartney’s preening self-regard, in this and many other songs, some measured respite. The other Beatles’ judiciously delayed vocal harmonies don’t answer the lead; they simply join it at the ends of phrases, a strategy used on this track alone and never again. And the swells in the middle eight expand in the fadeout as McCartney hints at “Hey Jude” vocal glories: his all-consuming yet restrained affection becomes giddy release into the fadeout. P. J. Proby’s rendition discards nuance and uncorks the emotion for a good example of sixties bathos: the melody was enough to make it a hit, but his recording sounds like a Johnnie Ray rerun.
In advance of the band’s spring sessions, Northern Songs Ltd., the publishing company that held the rights to all Lennon and McCartney’s material, in February 1965 began its listing on the London Stock Exchange, opening with two out of five million shares at 9p apiece. Opening day was bumpy; the price dropped to below 6p, but shares were soon selling at 14p.
The world grabbed brief glimpses of the band peeking from long hours in the studio, broken up by hastily arranged radio and TV spots. They did overdubbing and miscellaneous shots for Lester at London’s Twickenham Studios at the end of March, mimed “Ticket to Ride” and “Yes It Is” for Top of the Pops on April 10, and played five songs at the New Musical Express Poll Winners Concert at Wembley the next day. More film work took place on April 12 and 13, when Lester approached Lennon with a new title, to replace the film’s working title, Eight Arms to Hold You.
In Lester’s mind, “Help!” suited the mock–James Bond caricature of the script, but it posed a special conundrum for the songwriter. Lennon tilted the lyric inward, which tweaked the movie’s burlesque tone with an imperceptible edge, as if the Beatles, looking down on their own project, had reservations. They went into EMI’s studios on April 13 to tape the title song, in twelve takes, with multiple overdubs. On the 16th, Lennon and Harrison appeared on the also newly retitled Ready Steady Goes Live! for an interview, promoting their “Ticket to Ride” single. The record came out three days later. At the end of that month, Peter Sellers visited the set of Help! to present the Beatles with their first Grammy Award, for Best Performance by a Vocal Group, for A Hard Day’s Night. Sellers called it a “Grandma” award. In America, the Grammy telecast featured a short film of the presentation on May 18.
In advance of their second feature film release, more Beatle product clogged the cross-Atlantic muddle. Capitol Records finally won the rights to release the Swan and Vee-Jay material from 1962 and 1963 and put out The Early Beatles for the American market in March 1965, using Robert Freeman’s 1964 photo for the UK’s Beatles for Sale. This was quickly subsumed by April’s futuristic “Ticket to Ride” / “Yes It Is” single, a diagram of the gaping aesthetic distance traveled in two impossibly swift years. A backlog of songs quickly crowded the Billboard charts, an almost literal echo of the previous year: “Ticket to Ride” went to number one while The Early Beatles grazed the top twenty. It wasn’t until June that America got to hear the Beatles for Sale tracks that Britain had been listening to since the previous November, with a marketing mosaic called Beatles VI, which included two tracks they had dashed off at Capitol’s request: “Bad Boy,” which got filed on a UK title called The Beatles Oldies later that year, and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” which landed on the Help! sound track.10
The wires noted how all four Beatles attended Bob Dylan’s Royal Festival Hall appearance, captured by D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back documentary. Dylan’s recent Bringing It All Back Home featured a side of electric rock, and this would be his last acoustic-only tour. Convulsed over Dylan’s identity, his British audience parsed every lyric, mistrusting his flirtation with rock ’n’ roll more for its flight from literary pretense than inexplicable lack of explicit social protest. The Beatles’ attendance conferred royal approval of Dylan’s vexing persona, whichever guise it took.
With the publication of Lennon’s second book, A Spaniard in the Works, the Dylan rivalry intensified. Spaniard was both hastier than its predecessor and more ambitious, with more wordplay by the pound. In His Own Write featured several genre parodies (letters to the editor, school lessons, scripts). Spaniard took the genre stuff further, ranging out into mock sagas like the title tale and “The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield,” an account of Harold Wilson’s 1964 ascent to prime minister in “We must not forget . . . the General Erection,” a gossip-column parody in “Cassandle” (spinning off Cassandra’s narcissistic column in the Daily Mirror), a “Last Will and Testicle,” and several long poems, alongside a flurry of new drawings.
Lennon wrote the poem “Our Dad” during at least two confrontations with Alfred Lennon in this period, but the verse lurches from autobiographical to fantastical. Instead of a seafaring ne’er-do-well, Lennon opens his ode with the verse:
It wasn’t long before old dad
Was cumbersome—a drag.
He seemed to get the message and
Began to pack his bag.
“I’m old and crippled,” he says on his way out the door. “You’re bloody right, it’s true,” the family responds. It’s hard not to read Lennon’s own emotional defection from Cynthia and Julian here, seeing as he had long since packed himself off, with nowhere to go. (In another story, “Silly Norman,” mother is a “muddle,” both a revered elder and a common whore—as much a puzzling over Julia and Mimi as a peculiar intimation of Cynthia.) In “Our Dad,” Lennon sustains such brittle enmity through a hectoring, bouncing children’s rhyme for eighteen stanzas, only to crash down into a bitingly satiric reversal for the final lines: “But he’ll remain in all our hearts/—a buddy friend and pal.” This toys with exhausted British notions of the inertia toward “happy endings,” to which all such “odes” necessarily conform. Lennon’s verbal contortions accent the pathology of “normal,” as though anybody could “tidy up” such harsh, consuming hostility. No wonder he preferred venting through rock ’n’ roll: reading Lennon’s prose can feel halting, as if the energy behind the words suffocates their multiple meanings. Detonating conformity was one of the few themes Lennon’s pen mastered, but his drawings convey more emotional mayhem with greater elegance.
During the scramble to finish the movie songs before the Beatles hit the road, Epstein got a June call from Buckingham Palace. The Beatles would be listed as recipients of MBE—Member of the British Empire—awards from the queen, he learned. This was as much a matter of economics as it was of status and celebrity fawning: the award was not for culture but for trade. As much as politicians had promised an upswing in Britain’s economy, everybody knew it was the pop-music exports that had made Britain flush, that the tourist money fueling Swinging London filled its coffers. In weathering the subsequent storm of protest from retired military types, the royals were nothing if not pragmatic.
Recording had been compressed, but Help!’s sound track bested Beatles for Sale from six months earlier; they were learning to keep the aesthetic ideas afloat amid torrents of activity. Lennon’s title song and “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” posed a new threat with sturdy finesse, but in numbers like “The Night Before,” “Another Girl,” and Harrison’s “I Need You,” boy still meets, finds another, or loses girl; the musical wheels spun unattached to substantive gears. Their ensemble, increasingly nimble yet determined, gave this material flair beyond its ambition. Only “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” fit inside the larger arc of Lennon confessionals, the male anxiety shifting beneath “If I Fell,” “I’m a Loser,” and “Norwegian Wood” and not as piercing. This resignation signaled a new Lennon mode, a disquiet that would seep into “I’m Only Sleeping” and “I’m So Tired.”
Paradoxically, much of the band’s work in this dense season was upstaged by McCartney’s lone “Yesterday,” which echoed inside the idea of a Tin Pan Alley classic. The song was so pure, and so credulous, it sounded as if it had sprung from the Hollywood musical forever looping in McCartney’s mind, the imaginary rock ’n’ roll past he kept inventing as he went along. He walked around for months with the melody and the dummy words “Scrambled egg,” certain he had heard it somewhere before, running it by older London show-biz pros, like Oliver!’s Lionel Bart, to make sure he wasn’t unconsciously cribbing it. When he finally sat down and played it for the others, incorporating Lennon’s three-syllable “Yesterday” for the title phrase, they threw up their hands: it was simply not a band number.11 Martin suggested strings, but McCartney blanched. So Martin scored it for the more highfalutin string quartet atop McCartney’s solo acoustic guitar. The finished product was placed on Help!’s sound track, but it sat outside that box on both stage and album. In America, it became a single and dominated the autumn charts with four weeks at number one, for their biggest seller since “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Here was a superbly ironic punch line to the season’s forward momentum. Was “Yesterday” even a rock ’n’ roll number? In Lennon’s ongoing quandaries about such McCartney swill, it created new tension in the partnership. Lennon could not help admiring it, or enjoying the profits he would share in its extraordinary publishing returns. But it was never a song Lennon would have written on his own, and if the Beatles had to put it on a record, there was no place for him to so much as harmonize alongside his songwriting partner. For the album, Lennon made sure to follow it up with “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” to conclude Help!’s side two, as if reiterating all the arguments about the band’s priorities since the Decca audition. This slammed the sound track shut with a reliable Larry Williams number as touring season swallowed them up again.
To top The Ed Sullivan Show from the previous year, Epstein took promoter Sid Bernstein’s bait, leapfrogged Madison Square Garden, and booked Shea Stadium. Fifty-six thousand fans stilled for the Beatle helicopter as it settled on the New York baseball field on August 15. “A hush fell over the crowd, it was this mind-numbing moment, like watching the Gods descend from the sky,” recalls critic Richard Meltzer, who attended both Shea shows, in 1965 and 1966.12 From there, they went through Toronto, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco by the end of that same month.
Reporter Larry Kane, who rejoined them on this tour, reported that fans crowded onto the runway in Houston while the propellers were still running. “Not only did they swarm the tarmac but when the engines of the planes were finally turned off,” Kane says, “some of the older fans managed to climb onto the wings with lit cigarettes in their hands waving to the entourage inside.” There were many such close calls.13
As Help! hit theaters at the end of July, Epstein met with Walt Disney to discuss the possibility of the Beatles performing songs for the upcoming animated film of The Jungle Book. Later, John Lennon nixed the idea; Disney wound up using laconic Scouser accents for the film’s four shaggy-haired vultures. On August 14, they taped another Ed Sullivan Show appearance before a live studio audience at Studio 50 in New York: “I Feel Fine,” “I’m Down,” “Act Naturally,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Yesterday,” and “Help!” The tour whooshed by in a blur of mad dashes and isolated hotel rooms.
After a six-week break beginning September 1, the Beatles hit the EMI studios on October 12, flush with new material, determined to hold their own atop the summer’s pop avalanche. Curiously, stronger songs reduced studio takes. They began with five attempts of Lennon’s “Run For Your Life” on October 12 and then “This Bird Has Flown,” which featured George on sitar. The next day came “Drive My Car,” in four takes. October 16 brought three more takes of “Day Tripper” and some vocal overdubs to finish the track; then they started Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone.” On the 18th, more work followed on “Someone,” with lead and backing vocals and Ringo on tambourine. Then came Lennon’s “In My Life,” in three takes the same session. Few of their songs for Help! had emerged so quickly.
And on October 26, the Beatles reported to Buckingham Palace to receive their MBE awards.
At a press conference after the ceremony, reporters crowded around Lennon to ask what he thought of the uproar the awards had caused. A Canadian politician had said he no longer wanted his MBE because it “put him on the same level with vulgar nincompoops.” A rash of air force squadron leaders had returned their medals, claiming the MBE had been debased. John replied that most of the complainers had earned their medals “for killing people. I’d say we deserved ours more. Wouldn’t you?”14
The veterans who returned their awards in protest seemed to miss the point: the Beatles had revived Britain’s economy, restored its sense of self-confidence, and turned its postwar socialist experiment into an inarguable success. And in a 1982 interview with Lennon biographer Ray Coleman, former British prime minister Harold Wilson justified the award in similarly practical terms: “I saw the Beatles as having a transforming effect on the minds of youth, mostly for the good. It kept a lot of kids off the streets.” Even beyond that, Wilson noted, “They introduced many, many young people to music, which in itself was a good thing.”15
Posing for the world’s cameras, the Beatles put on their best grins, as if oddly touched that the ruling class seemed to care. By this point, they knew the royals were sponging off of their celebrity, but Lennon opted not to rattle anybody’s jewelry with his quotes. Rumors swirled that they had snuck off to have a joint in the royal loo. The rumors became enshrouded in the official myth long after the Beatles admitted only to tobacco nerves.
Where the royal honors stirred controversy, history measures them as a blip in the ongoing story—nothing like the blips to come. The Beatles headed back to work, and again the schedule reveals an increasing studio efficiency: fewer basic tracks (for foundation) and more layers onto the crowded four-track equipment. Recording continued with “We Can Work It Out,” vocals on October 29, and November began with rhythmic tracks for “Michelle.” “What Goes On” got revived for Ringo from March 5, 1963, on November 4, and the evening session tracked a twelve-bar blues with George Martin on harmonium, one of the few takes from these sessions that got held (until 1995’s Anthology). The following days brought remakes of McCartney’s “I’m Looking Through You,” Harrison’s “Think for Yourself” (called “Won’t Be There with You”), the 1965 Christmas message (in which “Yesterday” turned to derision), Lennon’s “The Word,” a second remake of “I’m Looking Through You” with a new rhythm track, and a final thirteen-hour marathon finish with the vocal splendor of “You Won’t See Me,” “Girl,” more work on “Wait,” and vocal overdubs for “I’m Looking Through You.” Martin sequenced the album’s songs on November 16, and sent Rubber Soul off to be mastered and ready in shops by the first week in December.
Recorded almost one year after Beatles for Sale, under almost exactly the same conditions, Rubber Soul has no hint of the previous record’s fatigue. A Hard Day’s Night was the band’s first all-original sequence; Rubber Soul came close to this formula, adding two tracks from George Harrison, a Buck Owens knockoff from Ringo, and a startling leap forward in both theme and tone. “We were just getting better, technically, and musically, that’s all,” Lennon later concluded. “Finally we took over the studio. In the early days, we had to take what we were given, we didn’t know how you can get more bass. We were learning the technique on Rubber Soul. We were more precise about making the album, that’s all, and [we] took over the cover and everything.”16 Having conquered the rock ’n’ roll ideal, they leaned back into the beat and delivered an adult record—dance was secondary on this album in a way it had never been before. This was not music you made sense of by making out or moving along with it; it was all shadows and subtext, an experiment in suggestion and elliptical gestures that was at once nervy and guarded, extroverted yet discreet.
In America, the Help! sound track appeared in September, followed by Rubber Soul barely three months and a creative light-year later. By October, the charts had shifted dramatically toward social protest (“Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire), sleek yet hook-laden piffle (“Hang On Sloopy” by the McCoys, cowritten by Bert Berns, who’d written “Twist and Shout”), and romance (“Yesterday”). November brought the Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud” and the Supremes’ “I Hear a Symphony”; December saw the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and the Dave Clark Five’s “Over and Over.” The year’s commercial blockbusters were Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” two incendiary bombs followed by a lullabye, images that defined these acts for years to come. In reality, the Beatles would have had a fifth U.S. number one that year if “Day Tripper” had been included on Capitol’s resequence of Rubber Soul; the track swarmed the British Christmas season as the perfect holiday single but had to wait for the new year to dominate American radio. For Americans, the geographic delay wound up dispersing the musical energy away from the band’s best work rather than in favor of it.
Dylan’s overt influence on Rubber Soul skirted imitation. Ever since “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” a new psychological acuity had risen up in Lennon’s love songs, making them at once particular and universal. His romantic insecurities were unique, but of the stripe almost every young couple could identify with. “Norwegian Wood” posed the lover’s mind as a maze; it caught the exotic, bohemian mood of an emerging London chic and detailed an off-kilter affair as doubt tipping toward the existential. Boy gets girl in this song, but under the most confounding of emotional circumstances. “What tryst is worth this kind of emotional hangover?” Lennon seemed to ask.
McCartney’s standout track was not “Michelle” (a cousin to “And I Love Her” and “Yesterday” with fancier chords and French lyrics), but “You Won’t See Me,” which was unbearably chipper on the surface and leaked nagging hesitation from every luminous harmony: boy loses girl but wonders if he ever really had her to begin with. The bummer lyric gets joined to incandescent vocals to express the gap between love and great sex, reaching toward a closeness sex alone can’t deliver. The production was a marvel: the vocal work hints at breakthroughs like “Paperback Writer,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” “Nowhere Man,” and Abbey Road’s “Because.” Brian Wilson and the Byrds had goaded the Beatles into proving that no matter what kind of harmonies were happening elsewhere in pop, they were a peerless, muscular choir, leaning into every nuance, relishing every finely honed detail, competing with their meticulous ensemble for attention. As each verse comes around, the backup vocals increase their intensity, both in mood and in upper descants, until the entire track gains a momentum more emotional than rhythmic. The very idea of singing while playing many of these songs now became daunting—such studio musicianship became impractical, not to say irrelevant, onstage (they never attempted this track live). As early as the elaborate vocal harmonies attached to “You Won’t See Me,” the argument to stop touring began as an outgrowth of their musical sophistication.
Rubber Soul’s restrained musical confidence brought new momentum to the London scene. The Beatles had long since graduated into cultural symbol, a beast that wasn’t nearly big enough to absorb and reflect all the desires its audience projected onto it. Pots of money flowed in and around pop, and Britain, almost in spite of itself, began to seem trendy. Even the Union Jack, long a totem of an empire’s oppression, flipped into status symbol. London itself graduated into pop’s new center, an international jet-setter’s hub, not least because it seemed a source of magic and poetry. “London is the most swinging city in the world at the moment,” Diana Vreeland proclaimed in Vogue; and to Americans, the weirdest thing about her self-evident proclamation was its utter lack of irony.
As the media glare descended, this larger pop moment embraced music, fashion, design, film, architecture, and all things mod (a term derived from modern-jazz buffs in the late 1950s). Any town that sprouted a brand this fetching must be hip by association—and once again Liverpool got the shirk. Teen desire erupted through Mary Quant’s outfits; and once clothing shops flourished all down Carnaby Street, they spread to Mayfair, Chelsea, and Kensington. Models and actresses like Pattie Boyd and Jane Asher turned into Beatle girlfriends and then part of “ideal young couples.” Roger Miller followed up “King of the Road” with “England Swings” at the end of 1965 for a giant reversal of cultural salutes: this country crossover act topped UK charts by genuflecting to pop’s new center.
A Geoffrey Dickinson cover collage trumpeted Time magazine’s “Swinging London” issue in April 1966. By this point, Quant’s jersey minidresses, with their sleek zipper lines and casual flair, had been distributed stateside by JC Penney since 1963. Quant added PVC (polyvinyl chloride) to her palette of threads, creating go-go outfits that shone like raincoats, bright colors topped by enormous sunglasses. Twiggy (aka Lesley Hornby) became an international supermodel wearing op-art miniskirts, suggesting art worn around town. With her reverse-Beatle bob, a babe who cropped her hair like a boy, Twiggy practically invented Quant instead of the other way around. Time had spotted a trend, but it was already cresting: within another year the international pop “scene” torch would pass to San Francisco.
The faded suede jackets the Beatles wore in Robert Freeman’s Rubber Soul shot fed Swinging London’s international elan, and they gazed down from its cover like cool avatars, musicians who were too hip not to set fashion trends. The collarless jackets in which Epstein outfitted them back in 1963 now seemed like portents, the idea that even young men could go spiffy at no cost to their machismo. Characters like the “Norwegian Wood” couple, with her fancy furniture and liberated attitude, became the ideal of hipsters everywhere.
Like 1962’s “The Twist,” Swinging London became a social metaphor for everything groovy, sexy, and fun. In cultural terms, to swing meant celebrating the tension between modernity and tradition in every facet of life. As Andrew Loog Oldham, now managing the Rolling Stones, had already discovered, fashion had a head start on pop, so as trendy shops opened with irresistible names like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, the movement fed on itself. In this new frame, Christine Keeler’s 1963 nude portrait looked prophetic. This new cult of British youth paraded through new magazines like Queen and Petticoat, expressing pleasure in the very idea of getting and spending, consumption itself, which helped turn all things British into desirable exports.
Pop’s new relationship between viewer and subject leapt across mediums—Help! had whispers of this, especially in its flimsy Bond pretext. Michael Caine’s portrayal of Alfie Elkins, the cad who befriends the camera / audience throughout Alfie, became a signature piece of self-conscious cinema. Antonioni’s Blow-Up portrayed a fashion photographer based on David Bailey (played by David Hemmings), with models Veruschka and Peggy Moffitt (and the Yardbirds in a club scene) playing themselves. In an early sequence that doesn’t hold up, Hemmings’s character has a wan orgasm during a fashion shoot. It’s all about the vain, empty obsessions of the beautiful people. Cued off the cynical exhaustion in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the entire charade has the feel of empty-headed sleaze, but everybody looked fabulous. The industry scarecrow Alun Owen had George Harrison slice up in A Hard Day’s Night was replaced by figures with style and menace. On television, Honor Blackman and then Diana Rigg conveyed a cool, detached and faintly ironic heat for their Avengers counterpart, Patrick Macnee, wearing black leather catsuits and jackboots alongside his bowler hats and tight jackets. (The series neatly overlapped the Beatles career, 1961–69).
As if making up for lost time, broadcast entrepreneurs seized on a loophole in the BBC’s media monopoly. Three pirate radio stations began broadcasting from offshore, pumping out fare more closely aligned to the charts: Radio Caroline, Swinging Radio England, and Wonderful Radio London. (Americans would get a taste of Radio London as parodied on The Who Sell Out in 1967.) These “underground” stations disrupted everyday British imaginations to stoke the increasingly surreal atmosphere. In July 1966, Britain even won the World Cup. In every aspect—economy, fashion, music, international status—the Beatles headed up a resurgence of British cool that was quite unlike anything its subjects had ever experienced before, or have experienced since.
On that year’s Christmas message sent out to the Beatles’ fan club, the band ridiculed McCartney about “Yesterday,” lifting its sentimental skirt like sailors taunting a streetwalker. To hear these naughty schoolboys turn its melody into a sea shanty was the sound of parody sharpening some manic competitive edge. But by then, “Yesterday” had legitimized the Beatles as a mainstream product, and sent Lennon further into outsider status within the band he supposedly led. His response was aesthetically decisive: if Beatles for Sale showed the wear and tear of a schedule few could keep up with, Rubber Soul leapt over many of the same hurdles with ease and showed just how attuned Lennon and McCartney were to their audience and peers.
By the end of 1965, Rubber Soul had set their previous work in a new context, absorbing the best from Dylan, the Stones, the Byrds, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Animals, and the Hollies. Yet despite its cheeky title (redolent of the R&B slag-off of white soul, or “plastic soul”), it remains succinct, even modest. Many cite it as the Beatles’ best work, and the effect was singular even though Americans got a thinned-out, ten-song version which began with the temperate “I’ve Just Seen a Face” instead of the sterling “Drive My Car.” Nobody else could have produced this work at this point, and it sent shudders through the pop industry—suddenly, the Beatles had outgrown the teen market that once defined them, and reshaped rock as songs with adult characters, situations, and inner lives. Rock ’n’ roll, shedding its teen identification, became rock as early as Rubber Soul’s track two, with the exquisite discomfort of Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood”: girl snubs boy, her stylish furniture a symbol of expensive regret.