Chapter 14

Another Kind of Mind

With the Beatles, Lennon banged out a career of unprecedented creative consistency and success. But at home, his marriage to Cynthia flatlined, and his three-year-old son, Julian, took a number as Daddy hid in the attic doing tape experiments, hit the nightly club scene, and descended into an increasingly distant drug haze. In only three dizzying years, the Beatles had changed the world, but like all mythic figures they came due for a whopping backlash. Theirs could only be measured against the previous pitch of adoration.

Working at the height of his creative powers while finishing Revolver during the spring of 1966, Lennon sank down into an emotional void that would last two years. He completed this mid-period masterpiece only to walk through a nightmarish world tour and then collapse. For the first time in his career, at age twenty-six, Lennon fled to the Continent, alone, to ponder what life after the Beatles might be like and what could possibly sustain him outside his band, the tightest of musical circles. In the classic addict’s slope, Lennon used softer drugs casually at first as a social lubricant and gradually found himself beholden to all manner of intoxicants. The Beatles’ status as supreme rock gods, surpassing all others, brought them the highest-quality grass and acid then circulating, and it was a point of pride with him that he could hold the most liquor and ingest the most chemicals. An unspoken studio ethic involved sneaking bathroom joints; but after sessions, hard drugs and clubbing into the wee hours became nightly rituals. Entire weekends got set aside for tripping at country estates.

From the time he awoke in the afternoon until he collapsed early the next morning, Lennon’s system processed a jumble of uppers, downers, pot, and booze. The wonder is not just that the band did such solid work in this chemically naïve era, but that they survived some of the compounds passed along to them at all. Many, many other casualties in these circles fared far worse.

The more Lennon attended to his professional life, the more his unfinished emotional business taxed his peace of mind. The loss he had carried around since Blackpool, his uncle’s death when he was fourteen, his mother’s death three years later, and his best friend’s death when he was twenty-one, mocked his outward success, creating a disconnect between his inner and outer worlds. Lennon’s subconscious was gripped between his celebrity songwriter status and the loss he armored with so much bluster. His misery often presented itself as cruelty, a bitterness that made no sense given his privileged circumstances.

Ringo Starr provides a clue to some of this in Postcards from the Boys, a joyride with curlicue drawings and breezy puns that couch a few secrets: “I can say this now (if he was here John could tell you) but suddenly we’d be in the middle of a track and John would just start crying or screaming—which freaked us out at the beginning. But we were always open to whatever anyone was going through so we just got on with it.”¹

The studio, among his mates, was the only place Lennon felt comfortable enough to cough up his ghosts.

At home, he slept throughout the day, then spent hours secluded in his Weybridge attic, making experimental tapes of his new obsession, Indian ragas George had played for him on his reel-to-reel machines. By the time the band toured to support Revolver in the summer of 1966, everything that once had seemed heady and euphoric about Beatlemania had suddenly given way to something more ominous: crowds careened closer to violence, and security intensified. The ravages of Beatlemania began to echo Lennon’s anxiety. A simple misunderstanding led to an international diplomatic incident in the Philippines; and in America’s Bible Belt the Ku Klux Klan began picketing their shows.

McCartney’s old-school work ethic kept a professional check on Lennon’s excesses as they continued to write together. But this partnership began to shift: increasingly, they finished off each other’s lines or suggested endings or transitions instead of writing head-to-head, as they had in the glass-tiled foyer at Mendips. Epstein and Martin kept Lennon’s schedule humming, but he also grew apart from Epstein during this final tour and retreat. Epstein felt slowly edged out of some major band decisions and began a downward spiral of his own.

In the midst of it all, the Beatles could barely hear themselves onstage, and this put a hex on the whole enterprise, made their first love of music-making ring hollow. Once the source of their power and ambition, live performances became a sequence of empty gestures for riotous fans who counted music secondary to the spectacle. Their faith in their ensemble, which had sustained them through so many bleak treks in Aspinall’s van, began to falter.

Richard Lester had invited Lennon to Spain to work as a character actor on How I Won the War, and Lennon beached himself on this movie set to recover. This represented escape as much as diversion from the Beatle grind. Unlike his week with Epstein in Spain three years earlier, in late 1966 Lennon found himself alone on the island of Majorca.

Lennon’s emotional state was no mystery to the other Beatles, and some of his private disorientation leaked into a public profile in the Sunday papers just as the band began work on Revolver. Cynthia Lennon’s memoirs report how Lennon napped away a lot of downtime early in the year, became increasingly aloof, and went off on eccentric shopping sprees to fill his mansion up with trinkets. This drift came into full view for Maureen Cleave, a journalist with whom Lennon spoke freely. If some earlier comments had made Lennon seem cantankerous and flippant, now he began to sound more and more as though even Beatle projects left him restless. “Christianity will go,” he told her. “It will vanish and shrink. . . . I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”²

Cleave put this infamous quote into an article which ran in London’s Evening Standard on March 2, 1966, as “How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This.” She described a tour of Lennon’s Weybridge estate and a shopping trip into London at the tail end of John’s longest vacation—more than two months—since Beatlemania first swallowed up normalcy three years earlier, when “Please Please Me” reached number one. A lot of Cleave’s knowing detail, in the now-transparent guardedly intimate tone of a lover, hinted at Lennon’s crumbling inner life. Walking through rooms of model racing cars and electronic gadgets gave Cleave the impression of a bored eccentric. “One feels that his possessions—to which he adds daily—have got the upper hand,” she remarked, noting the many tape recorders, television sets, telephones, and cars: a Rolls, a Mini Cooper, a Ferrari, which were in various stages of newly applied décor.

Cleave noted how Lennon’s junk had the upper hand on his relationships, too. Julian followed them around the house carrying “a large porcelain Siamese cat.” The child would attend the Lycée Française in Kensington, Lennon assumed, since that’s simply where “privileged kids” go. To Cleave, Lennon’s detachment from his son seemed pronounced. “ ‘I feel sorry for him,’ ” John told her. And then out came this whopper: “ ‘I couldn’t stand ugly people even when I was five. Lots of the ugly ones are foreign, aren’t they?’ ” His wife, Cynthia, barely got a mention. John slept “indefinitely” and was “probably the laziest man in Britain.”

Somewhere, Lennon’s head swam with the gleaming arrogance of “And Your Bird Can Sing,” the alternate reality of “Rain,” the shimmering cynicism of “Dr. Robert,” and the jagged psychic fault lines of “She Said She Said”—songs that extended the veiled personal metaphors of “Norwegian Wood,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “Nowhere Man.” The new numbers paraded a dazzling detachment between singer and song, with a subliminal intimacy that only grew over repeated listenings—they sounded like subtexts to Lennon’s epic, heaving subconscious, triumphant statues perched atop personal defeat. He led with the more experimental strain: the obsessively droning “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Rain,” which grew out of his homemade tape collages, became the first two songs he took into the studio for the Revolver sessions in the coming weeks. These required more time and more production ingenuity.

By now, Lennon had perfected the role of precocious counterculture mouthpiece. Just another dotty pop star posing as an aristocrat, most Britons thought as they read Cleave’s profile, yawned, and turned the page. The “Jesus” comment became a yardstick of how differently the British and the Americans perceived both celebrity and religion—and still do. Lennon’s countrymen accepted his offhand spiritual remarks more as an attempt to describe how fame’s bubble felt from the inside than a critique of religion. Lennon was simply repeating remarks all four Beatles had made in Playboy thirteen months earlier with the same philosophical aplomb. His attitude gave off a luxurious anomie, the rock star padding around his mansion, slinging quotes to ridicule the stale Sunday-celebrity-profile cliché. In England, Cleave’s puff piece gave off not the slightest whiff of controversy.

The material Lennon and McCartney polished off for Revolver confronted a radically shifting pop context. The more perplexing aspects of the Beatles’ influence had a counterintuitive effect, pivoting the pop scene toward new conundrums. The Beatles’ popularity unleashed inspired amateurs as much in love with idea as sound; pop became a high-stakes parlor game where ideology often trumped skill. So much ingenious trash began hitting the charts that being as good as the Beatles hardly mattered; the ambition to make the reach was often enough to put a band over. The attitudes driving hits from deities like the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan spread to frat boys like the Swingin’ Medallions and lowlifes like the Seeds, to obscurities like the 13th Floor Elevators and ? and the Mysterians. Retrospect still blurs how much chance and accident steered rock’s new adventurism. We now think of this as a golden period; at the time, the idea that a song like “Dirty Water,” a screed about Boston’s Charles River sludge by some punk Los Angelenos called the Standells, could become a Fenway Park Red Sox anthem seemed inconceivable.

Coming from the most popular act in show business, the Beatles’ records suggested worlds within worlds, and everybody defined themselves against this new standard. Andrew Loog Oldham positioned his scruffy Stones to the left of the Beatles’ axis, dramatizing just how expansive rock’s center of gravity had grown. Beginning with the early Jagger-Richards songwriting breakthrough, 1965’s “The Last Time,” the Stones turned a careening guitar hook into one long sneer, a hooting inversion of Beatle charm. “Paint It Black” and “19th Nervous Breakdown” extended this sneer while broaching the “generation gap,” diagramming establishment hypocrisy (how could anyone over thirty denounce “drugs” while popping prescription pills?). Brian Jones’s sitar work on the former nodded toward “Norwegian Wood” as it pumped up the cynicism. In concert, Mick Jagger wagged his finger and taunted his audience to make Elvis look a prude, and Stones shows became symbolic of all the untidy heat and furor kept in check by the Beatles’ suits and bows. As the Beatles progressed, the Stones pushed hard against Lennon and McCartney’s formal ingenuity, and a new subgenre, garage rock, disavowed all “respectability” and “sophistication.”

Garage rock spun out of surf instrumentals and doo-wop covers as an abbreviated swish of guitars, bass, and drums, and often an organ line leering from on high. A resounding movie image of the ethic gets enacted by John Belushi in Animal House, which takes place in 1962, when he smashes Stephen Bishop’s acoustic guitar against the wall after some unbearable folkie piffle (“I Gave My Love a Cherry”). If anything, it sounded as if rock ’n’ roll had devolved from slavish stylistic imitation down into a food fight; instead of whites “borrowing” black sounds, suburbanites attempted King-sized vocal heroics through Motown’s soul pop. That’s why Otis Day and the Knights’ Animal House set at the black club several scenes later, doing “Shama Lama Ding Dong,” crashes through like gangbusters: here was the forbidden hooch white ears craved.

Just as technique seemed secondary to young actors like Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda, so, too, the skill behind the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan counted among the least interesting aspect of their records. Spurning polish, garage-rock players instead paraded accident as inspiration, inanity as triumph, and disorder severed from craft as a peculiar sophistication all its own. How could anybody possibly improve on “Louie Louie”? Who needed “pretension” when untrained teenagers proved so adept at creating noise so disdainful, contemptuous, and convulsive? The new style elevated guitar sounds, indecipherable lyrics, and hazy, uneven beats into a disarming amateurishness; at first whiff, the stuff smelled like rotgut.

Layered on top of these racial crosscurrents came a dialogue between British and American tastes like never before, which took root in the pre-Beatle era through surf rock. A larger stylistic arc connects the Tornados’ “Telstar” in 1962 (UK), a tough, grainy instrumental, up to the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” (U.S.), a December 1963 patchwork of the Rivingtons’ “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” (August 1962) and “The Bird’s the Word” (March 1963). In between came the Beach Boys, with “Surfin’ USA,” “Surfer Girl,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” and “Be True to Your School” (throughout 1963) and “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen (peaking at Billboard’s number two in December 1963). As Beatlemania swept the world, the cross-the-pond dialogue continued, with songs like “Wooly Bully” by America’s Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and “Wild Thing” by Britain’s Troggs (June 1966). Souped-up jalopies like “Farmer John” and “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love” brought to mind the title of J. D. Salinger’s barbed short story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Two years into its heyday, nobody could imagine garage rock lasting beyond next month. Its doomed immediacy still gives the music a mischievous swagger.

If not already inebriated, innocent listeners found themselves dumbfounded by the noise; and given the right combination of chance and opportunity, this raw energy gained momentum to deliver mysterious new realms of thought. Repetition acquired trance-like sophistication: at around the sixteenth repeat of the fuzziest guitar riff, new overtones emerged, sending new layers of sound and idea afloat above everything else. Sometimes, the song itself hung suspended atop the sound that had been set in motion (think of Them’s “Gloria” or Captain Beefheart’s “Diddy Wah Diddy”). As with jazz, key parts of this style were accidental; musicians came up with “alien” sounds they “made sense of” as they played. The glorious, unending laps players take around refrains in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” release even more energy than they gather up; the more they hug the song’s corners to make sense of Dylan’s casual threats, the more his disdain hovers over them, tantalizingly out of reach. In such defining moments, a stylistic genie got released from its bottle, and many found new places for themselves just by chasing some of the same riffs atop their own beats. And all these trance-like motifs set up exotic, psychedelic contexts that sounded scripted for hallucinogens. It was a very short leap between Beefheart’s bluesy “Diddy Wah Diddy” and his avant-garde mural Trout Mask Replica three years later. An even shorter eighteen-month gap links Lennon’s minimalistic “Tomorrow Never Knows” with the sprawling “I Am the Walrus,” in the same vein. In this paradoxical way, garage rock seeded many an avant-garde impulse. Simply tracing where the music ended and the drugs took over was half the fun.

The garage rock ethic pitted primitive defiance against radical experimentalism, a tension that found an unlikely plainspoken voice. It’s the sound of Andy Warhol’s blank-faced arrogance, or the bored audacity with which he silkscreened soup-can labels onto canvas. The same snarl fueled “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?” by the Barbarians or “Too Many People” by the Leaves. Repeated listenings unveiled layer upon layer of sound, accidental crossbeats of unspeakable fervor, music that couldn’t be bothered with self-consciousness; it only turned pretentious long after the fact.

Garage rock followed a traditional rock ’n’ roll arc, derided at first and later exalted into a realm that supported entire careers, from Creedence Clearwater Revival and Cheap Trick to the Pretenders, the Replacements, Nirvana, the White Stripes, My Bloody Valentine, the Black Keys, and the genre’s Übermensch, Bruce Springsteen. The style dominated rock throughout 1965 and 1966 at least as much as pop ballads, and led directly to a new variant, “psychedelic rock,” which shot off in a different, more elaborate direction—the distance between Lennon’s “Rain,” which cast nature as a rich, abiding metaphor, and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “A Day in the Life,” which roamed the new spaces the style had opened up.

Punctuated by surprise and innuendo, a rash of hits thrived on vivid transatlantic contradictions. America embraced a mythical British Invasion while British ears caved in to American acts once again. In February 1966, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles had “Going to a Go-Go,” which one-upped the Stones; folk held steady with Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound.” UK acts counterbalanced professionalism with R&B smarts: Peter and Gordon scored with a McCartney number, “Woman” (a song idea Lennon would rewrite much later); the Small Faces got stone serious with an R&B ditty called “Sha-La-La-La-Lee.” In March, the Kinks sent up scenesters in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”; and come April, Lennon visited New York’s Lovin’ Spoonful—who were touring Britain to support “Daydream”—backstage at the Bag O’Nails Club. By the time Otis Redding covered the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” he revealed a peculiar and cunning soulful template beneath all the hype. It took Americans at least another year to embrace Redding into their rock mainstream; to the Brits, soul coverage like this had no higher authority.

This revelatory conversation between UK and U.S. acts, and UK and U.S. listeners, achieved new force: the Byrds soared “Eight Miles High” on rocket-fueled guitars; the Troggs sliced open “Wild Thing,” with a two-note, kindergarten recorder, signifying way beyond its pay grade. Summer rolled in with the Kinks’ radiant “Sunny Afternoon” and Simon and Garfunkel’s folk-rock fake-out “I Am a Rock,” the Four Tops’ gritty pop “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever,” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s pop-grit “Summer in the City.” You could typify the range and stylistic sweep of charts by the imaginary diagrams linking “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by Motown’s Temptations with “With a Girl Like You” by the Troggs, which was as nothing compared to the gap between “Wild Thing” and “With a Girl Like You,” a distance that gave off supernatural Beatle echoes. By August, Otis Redding pumped “I Can’t Turn You Loose” and Peter and Gordon turned effete and provincial with “Lady Godiva” (there’ll always be an England). Come autumn, the Supremes wagged their fingers while winking all the way through “You Can’t Hurry Love.”

This inimitable gust of top-forty hits between 1965 and 1966 has long since wallpapered our minds. But at the time, garage rock rebutted the idea that any pop need transcend its moment; each single crystallized a new “now” and raised expectations about what came next. With so much to hear and ferret out of three-and-a-half-minute tracks, this dense activity slowed time down. Ideas upstaged formulas, and garage rock stormed radio to become far more listenable than it had any right to be; most of this stuff made three-chord blues sound complicated. Boosting Lennon’s ethic of “fun” became paramount—the “narrator” of “Louie Louie” wandered around lost in his own world, perhaps even a different world than his band’s, but the effect simulated a drag-race game of chicken: the players were all responding to some imaginary ideal, with some giant invisible force drawing them forward, cutting them off, and whirring past again.

Like the R&B, doo-wop, and surf novelties it sprang from, this junior-varsity R&B held up far better than suspected, and kept oldies radio formats aloft in millions of advertising dollars for generations to come. Captain Beefheart’s “Diddy Wah Diddy” held out a prankster’s promise: blues as abstract truth. The raw menace of his voice toyed with all the forbidden buzz in Bo Diddley’s encyclopedia of danger, “Who Do You Love?” Beefheart’s record tipped over into existential delight, the joy of making noise for noise’s sake.

To Lennon’s voracious ear, garage rock reeked of potential—all this activity only confirmed the gambles he had made on the music since Hamburg. He helped tweak garage rock into psychedelic rock, where thickened textures wove colorful, elaborate lines of thought—ugly became the new beautiful, and chiming guitars conveyed new technical sophistication (Nazz’s “Open My Eyes”), encroaching on Eastern mysticism (“Rain” and the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night”), a dandy’s threads spun out as jangly guitars. In much the same way Muhammad Ali’s championship bouts played out as civil-rights sagas, each Beatle hit carried larger meanings for both rock’s style and its audience’s aptitude. The pop scene resembled a giant extension of the Merseybeat scene, with Beatle musical ingenuity lifting the world’s pop boats, confirming everybody’s appetite for sacred thrills, shared secrets, and collective mirth.

Lennon and McCartney had joined this garage rock conversation as early as their Beatle covers of the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” and the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You,” and were keenly self-conscious about its implications. The tensions they mastered straddled Lennon’s experimental-philosophical with McCartney’s more traditional-romantic. But as progressive as their writing and productions were, their ethic of utterly simple yet compelling sounds defined and transcended garage rock to give this larger scene a giant forward thrust.

Lennon and McCartney engaged this tension from different vantages: McCartney’s formalism supplanted Lennon’s experimentalism like a giant frame to rock’s momentum. As kingpins, the Beatles were both standard bearers and innovators, pop stars and creative eccentrics. Beatlemania became a larger metaphor for the idea of rock as it secured its hold on the mainstream imagination: each successive single built upon the last in a larger dialogue about the ideal of cool, how much style mattered, and how far the genre might go. A new way of hearing the Beatles rose up through this wider context: rock’s middle ground could be defined by the space between McCartney’s romance and Lennon’s abrasiveness, between the sweet of “Yesterday” (cynical craftsmanship) and the sour of “Run for Your Life” (craftsmanship exploiting cynicism). In the context of his notorious outbursts of “sick” humor, Lennon’s murderous threats (the homicidal misogyny of “Catch you with another man, another man, that’s the end-UH, little girl”) revealed more in the inward sighs that followed each utterance of “Girl” than did the deadpan schmaltz of “In My Life.” In such numbers, Lennon’s reserved sentimentality checked McCartney’s glib “sincerity.”

By harnessing the larger ideas they heard at play in rock ’n’ roll on Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ tight ensemble ornamented thin writing (George Harrison’s “I Need You”) the same way compression, and varied repetition, brightened up their rhythmic workouts. The taut repetition on the single “She’s a Woman”—vocal calisthenics for McCartney’s larynx—became a lesson in withheld intensity, a salute to the delayed backbeats and roiling, understated tension of Stax’s Booker T. and the M.G.s on 1962’s “Green Onions.” Those clipped silences, looming between the offbeats of those opening guitar chords, amplified the illuminating stop-time breaks from the opening phrases of “Love Me Do,” “There’s a Place,” and “She Loves You” (after “with a love like that”). On the other hand, the relaxed confidence of Rubber Soul emphasized the band’s democratic roots. Many of their ideas went slumming just for kicks: Ringo’s charming singing on “What Goes On” flowed from an utterly democratic impulse (and ironically cemented his “lucky” image).

Most healthy music scenes can be measured by their fringes, and one important garage-rock act of the period fused many of these contradictions to become one of the most important acts of all time: the Velvet Underground, former art students who lured a classical violist, John Cale, into concept rock. Warhol hired the act to perform for his “Light Shows,” which combined downtown flair with uptown chic. Even Dylan paid respects to the unfazed wizard at his Factory; it was as if a new court of aesthetics emerged whole from an overwrought mainstream. The Velvets produced obscure records that became at least as influential as the Beatles’, if nowhere near as popular, without even glancing toward McCartney-style “respectable” melodies. Likewise, there were no “cute” members of the Troggs or the Trashmen—or Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, who simply turned minority status (Sam was Hispanic) into a costume of comic menace and magic-house intrigue. Sam’s “Wooly Bully,” which might otherwise have been a novelty number, became a decisive piece of nonsense from April 1965—its silliness skated across Dylan’s manic assault on reason. Borrowing a page from Dylan’s playbook, garage rock worked a baffle-your-enemies shtick instead of the usual outsmart-or-outplay-the-competition.

Another measure of the scene’s health lay in heady regional outbursts. Portland’s Kingsmen were followed by the Northwest’s more ambitious Paul Revere and the Raiders, a swift-kicking band that scored hits like “Hungry” and “Kicks,” an antidrug song that circled back on itself: if kicks were so hard to find, how come these seemingly tossed-off hits kept colliding in the top ten?

Some of this bravura trickled down onto mainstream television. The Beatles’ 1965 eponymous Saturday-morning cartoon show, spun off from A Hard Day’s Night, in turn helped inspire a weekly NBC 1966 sitcom following Help!, called The Monkees, produced by television’s Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, with Don Kirshner overseeing the music. These twin ripoffs pulled at Beatlemania from both ends: on the one hand, they siphoned off the cuddly and cartoonish aspects of the band’s popularity for an even younger, preteen audience, and the contrast gave the real-life band more heft. They also smoothed over and whitewashed any political relevance Lennon and the others began to display at increasingly bogus press conferences.

Kirshner gave situationist theorists new grist for “discourse” and postmodernism: the Monkees, conceived and produced in Los Angeles as American-sitcom Beatles, became “authentic” pop product. On their weekly prime-time TV show, they amplified the mainstream impulses behind every teenager’s preoccupation with forming guitar chords, perfecting tom-tom swirls, and combing their hair just so to copy their heroes and impress girls. Kirshner backed up his puppets with sharp songwriters (Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Neil Diamond, Harry Nilsson, Gerry Goffin and Carole King) and in the studio, many of Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew: Hal Blaine on drums, Glen Campbell on guitar, Larry Knechtel (the pianist who went on to play “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on keyboards). And yet, where the Beatles could be reduced to cartoons, the Stones and Dylan couldn’t be, and it gave both these figures more leftist credibility—even though Lennon had been the earliest to speak out against the Vietnam War, in essence a prophet in 1964. McCartney professed himself a Monkees fan; Michael Nesmith showed up at the Sgt. Pepper orchestral party. And yet the Beatles had a lofty perch: they held court far above these commercial spinoffs and made them seem all but irrelevant, if mindless, fun. (This made for antic parlor games: the Monkees enjoyed an inverse curve to the Beatles; the more control they gained over their records, the more their music waned.)

The ultimate test of garage rock came in how it felled a former giant like Phil Spector, who attempted two final production numbers, the first a delirious triumph, the second a sphinxlike masterpiece. The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” stormed top-forty radio like a volcano of dismay and regret, while “River Deep—Mountain High,” from Ike and Tina Turner, scored only in Britain. Against all the new inspired amateurism, Spector bombast suddenly rang pompous. Pop’s great white whale of romantic desire reared up one last time, then submerged.

Instead of sponging off their peers, the Beatles acted as if all the new sounds gave their material momentum. Embracing many of the new trends, they invented a few more. Lennon heard both rock’s essential underpinnings and its future in garage rock’s premise: that four unskilled boys with the simplest of setups (guitar, bass, drums) could attack the music with more depth and imagination, and make a bigger impact, than any “pros” involved at the same level of hit-making. This tension, between primitivism and sophistication, accident and calculation, mirrored Lennon’s emotional quandaries as the Beatles streaked through their middle period.

Rubber Soul outlined how folk rock, and the Beatles’ embrace of group dynamics, enhanced their larger sense of pop; Revolver advanced this mode and brought in third-person address, and even subtler, more intricate technological solutions to questions few others were even asking (tape loops, multiple overdubbing, and bigger ideas stringing everything together). Bigger questions, political and philosophical, crept in: Harrison’s opening number cut the “Taxman” down to size, and concluded with death as a précis to McCartney’s ballad about aging and loneliness, “Eleanor Rigby.” The album worked in vivid images of privation and alienation (“She Said She Said”) among bursts of hubris (“And Your Bird Can Sing”) that reached toward some final, defining transcendence (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). Could a unifying force be gathered from all these threads? Could anyone connect the dots between conservative sugar-pop and wild-eyed anarchism to create a larger synthesis? Could Lennon resist such a dare?

As they entered the studio in April 1966, the band’s work turned obsessive, the camaraderie uneven. McCartney was photographed about town with his chic girlfriend, the actress Jane Asher, and when she traveled, he played Swinging Londoner almost as if he knew he was in a play. Lennon’s closest musical friend led a charmed celebrity life, while Lennon’s wife and child wedged envy into their competitive partnership. The band started the year’s studio work with an overdub session for the August 1965 Shea Stadium concert. The final tracks included some composites from the Hollywood Bowl concerts, since Shea’s sound didn’t work.³ Then they scattered for time off and work on independent projects, and their first extended breather from three grueling years of nonstop touring and recording. With their MBEs, they had earned enough leverage with Epstein to demand more downtime, and the status to say and mean no to more and more requests for appearances. Beyond spring studio sessions and summer touring, they committed themselves only to keeping fall options open.

In this curiously productive and compelling middle period, Lennon and McCartney kept collaborating as their voices veered apart. The world’s most famous songwriting partnership split into distinct halves, the cute one contemplating social isolation (“Eleanor Rigby”), the brute idealizing childhood (“She Said She Said”) and chasing relief (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). “We Can Work It Out” framed a lover’s argument as Lennon’s minor bridges tried to undermine McCartney’s major verses. In a larger context, they volleyed song themes back and forth between Rubber Soul and Revolver. McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” and “For No One” were not just extensions of “Yesterday” but elaborations on Lennon’s “Nowhere Man.” And while the vocal ensemble grew and flourished from Rubber Soul’s “Nowhere Man,” “You Won’t See Me,” and “Girl,” there were no Lennon-McCartney duets on Revolver that rivaled “There’s a Place” or “If I Fell” or “Ticket to Ride.” As an index of their friendship, their vocal duets grew more infrequent. This made their chemistry even more magical when it jelled.

“Yesterday” had been the first McCartney solo track the previous year; these spring 1966 sessions yielded two more McCartney did without the group, one more isolated than the next. Lennon helped compose “Eleanor Rigby,” and George Martin scored it for doubled string quartet, or octet, to darken its mood. On “For No One,” the basic track sported keyboard and drums, overdubbed with McCartney on clavichord, Ringo on cymbals and maracas, and symphony player Alan Civil on French horn. McCartney’s sessions grew more elaborate, his partnership with Martin a natural outgrowth of his formal pretensions; Lennon produced more and more home demos in his Kenwood attic using two-track reel-to-reels, piano, and acoustic guitar. Now they touched up each other’s near-finished numbers more than they fed each other lines.

Work on Revolver started with “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the most experimental track, with major progress made over the first two days of recording, on April 6–7. Norman Smith, Martin’s engineer throughout many of the Beatles’ early recordings, had been promoted, so the control desk brought a new face, twenty-year-old Geoff Emerick, to the party. His ears and technical curiosities would transform Beatle recordings for the rest of their career, and his memoirs account for much of the band’s internal dynamics and work habits.

The Rubber Soul sessions had settled into a vaguely regular schedule of afternoons and evenings, while still leaving time for clubbing after signing off between 10 P.M. and the early hours. The Revolver sessions grew more intense, lasting well past midnight from early on, and gave Emerick headaches about rides home after the Underground had shut down. Ten- to twelve-hour studio blocks marked the Beatles’ work schedule between April and June for six, sometimes seven, days running, from early afternoon into the early morning hours. Typically, they knocked off up to twelve takes for a basic track (rhythm section of bass, drums, and guitar) and then overdubbed lead vocals, harmonies, extra percussion, and the like for several days afterward to build the final mix.

Lennon’s musical dabblings with Indian ragas came alongside readings in Eastern mysticism, trends influenced by the latent underground scene. McCartney introduced Lennon to his London friends Barry Miles and John Dunbar, who ran the Indica bookstore, a hub to London’s counterculture. Dunbar’s marriage to Marianne Faithfull (whom Andrew Loog Oldham signed to sing Jagger and Richards’s “As Tears Go By”) faltered on his heroin addiction and Mick Jagger’s designs on his wife. McCartney helped Miles and Dunbar paint their shop, and they passed along to Lennon Timothy Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, then making the rounds as a “trip guide.” Tibetan mystics chanted the original text to achieve an intense meditative state; when acid still had “recreational” cachet, Leary, the ex–Harvard psychology professor, proposed his book as a mental gameplan. In these elite London circles, LSD tabs provided a “shortcut” to this ancient, transcendent experience. Why meditate for days or years to reach enlightenment when you could recite from a handbook as you popped a pill? Leary’s book gave drug culture a “legitimate” spiritual backdrop.

To Lennon, the book cried out for a soundtrack. He set this road map to the mind with the ultimate garage-rock conceit: a single chord driven furiously from beneath by bass and drums, with only two shifting modal harmonies up top (the I chord alternating with b-VIII). Guitars entered only as backward solo. While McCartney branched out further and further into his harmonic progressions (“Here, There and Everywhere” sports a cunning double-key narrative, the template for “Penny Lane”), Lennon distilled his new song down to a single chord, which flickered against its minor dominant (or Mixolydian V), wavering between this reality and the next. As rhythm subsumed harmony, random noise emerged triumphant. It was as if garage rock had been pointing toward something all along, and “Tomorrow Never Knows” became its ultimate vector and leaping-off point.

On the first day, April 6, they put down the drum and bass in three takes and labeled the tape “Mark I.” The next morning, McCartney, enamored of Stockhausen and Varèse compositions he’d heard through Dunbar and Miles, came in with tape loops he’d made on his living room reel-to-reel, which gave the track’s opening moments an unearthly sweep. To get these effects, Martin had several Beatles and friends stand holding fingers, pencils, empty reels, and other objects to string through the long, quarter-inch tape loops so they cycled on top of one another simultaneously. “I held up my jam jar for a huge loop to run through, and I felt I was helping create the latest in cutting edge artistic fusion,” Barry Miles remembers.⁴ Like the defining Mellotron introduction to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” or the finely shaded vocal harmonies on “Don’t Let Me Down,” McCartney’s role on this Lennon track tends to go undernoticed.

Later that day they did five early takes of McCartney’s soul workout “Got to Get You into My Life.” The next day they perfected “Life” with three more takes and began to think about adding horns. The following week brought “Love You To” on Monday, April 11, and their next single popped out over three intense days: “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” songwriting leaps that brought new technical verve to their studio technique. For months, McCartney and the other Beatles had been pestering Martin to deliver sturdier, more punchy bass sounds, the kind they were hearing on labels like Motown (with the indefatigable James Jamerson) and Stax (whose house band, Booker T. and the M.G.s, featured white-knuckler Donald “Duck” Dunn). These complaints arose again during rhythm tracks for “Paperback Writer” and led to an ingenious solution from engineer Ken Townsend.

Before graduating to headphones (or “cans”), the Beatles used unidirectional microphones and sang directly in front of a huge white playback speaker dubbed “the White Elephant.” This enormous, oversize wooden box pumped out lively sounds they reacted to while singing, the next best thing to fronting live instruments without having to play as they sang. The microphone placement prevented the instrumental playback from leaking into their vocal tracks; by pointing them directly at the singers, these particular microphones never picked up the “leak.” This setup gave much of the early Beatles singing animation and punch. The switch to “cans” can be heard on a lot of the more intimate singing and harmonizing that begins with Sgt. Pepper.

The White Elephant had personality. “It’s a big playback speaker,” Ken Townsend remembered, “and for playback in the studios it had incredible bass.” At this “Paperback Writer” session in April, Townsend struck on a weird notion. “You sat in the control room and you heard all the comments from George Martin and the Beatles, and you sort of put two-and-two together. . . . It wasn’t because I felt we needed more bass, it was because the artist thought we needed more bass,” he went on. Townsend wondered if that White Elephant might absorb as well as it projected.

Simply by plugging the speaker into a different jack (to send rather than receive an electronic signal), Townsend reversed the White Elephant’s capacity—the speaker became a microphone. Instead of using it to sing along to, McCartney performed his bass line as usual through his regular amp, placed in front of the White Elephant, which picked up his sound and fed it into the control board. (In place of a microphone picking up the vibrations from his bass amp, a speaker picked up vibrations from another speaker cabinet.) The results were magnificent. On the playback, everybody marveled at the newly rich and booming McCartney bass sound.

But Townsend, a modest gentleman, describes some of the other factors that played tricks on their ears while they were mixing Beatle records. Townsend had been assisting George Martin on Beatle sessions since the early days in 1962; he joined EMI in 1950, and ultimately rose through its ranks to become director: “The Altec loudspeakers that we used in the control room, later on [it was] discovered that these were bass light. So in actual fact . . . the bass response was actually there sometimes, but we couldn’t hear it! When we put better speakers in the control room with more bass, we no longer had to fight for bass and the records got better.”⁵ The settings on Capitol’s American equipment, which didn’t always correspond to the settings the EMI engineers had mastered Beatle recordings to, complicated this playback situation. For a long time, Capitol engineers thought Beatle recordings sounded terrible, and they added reverb to everything they pressed to help wash over what they perceived as imperfections from EMI’s shop. This added still another layer to the tensions between UK and U.S. perceptions of the Beatles’ sound.

Over the next two sessions the band laid down the five complete rhythm tracks and overdubs for “Rain,” widely regarded as McCartney’s bass breakthrough, not just his solo breaks but the soaring melodic lines he traced surfing Ringo’s terse, involuted drumming. As part of the Beatles’ ethic never to repeat themselves, even when they’d stumbled on an ingenious solution, the White Elephant speaker bass feed did not appear after the B side, “Rain”; each new track demanded its own unique solutions.

Shortly after Maureen Cleave’s Lennon profile appeared in Britain, Capitol contacted Brian Epstein about supplying another album cover, this time for the Yesterday and Today compilation, set for June. To maintain its annual three-album schedule, Capitol culled tracks from the British editions of Help! and Rubber Soul and snagged three numbers from their current sessions (“Dr. Robert,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”). Epstein called Robert Whitaker, the Melbourne photographer he’d retained on staff for just such quick-and-dirty assignments. Whitaker made a habit of posing subjects with props to prompt whimsy: during a previous Beatle photo shoot, they had pointed brooms at one another, a session best known as the series Capitol slapped on Beatles ’65. This time, Whitaker took things a step further.

Whitaker suggested a pose to explode the tired cliché of the “cuddly moptops,” and the Beatles dove in. They grabbed Whitaker’s props and sat in white jackets, cackling and jostling, their bodies draped with raw animal flesh and dismembered baby dolls. Those white jackets atop turtlenecks were a nice touch—butchers, doctors, or mental patient stewards? The sick humor of Lennon’s cripple jokes and mental spastics suddenly sprang to life, and he pushed hard to make it the official American album shot.⁶ Curiously, there are no quotes about Epstein’s opinion on this photo, but the gesture reeks of the Beatles’ contempt for Capitol’s artificially sequenced albums. Implicit in this deal, which stripped Revolver’s American edition of three key Lennon tracks, was the controversy-baiting cover photo they forced Capitol to publish. One hundred thousand copies were printed before Capitol panicked and recalled them, leading to a notorious collectible item—for roughly thirty thousand of these, Capitol hastily pasted over the originals with new art, and “steaming off” the outer layer took on overtones of the occult: unveiling the smiling madmen underneath the corporate pose.

The replacement photograph showed the Beatles seated around a giant trunk in casual garb: John, arms folded and sneering in a mod-striped blue jacket with dark slacks and white socks; Paul sitting beneath him, inside the trunk; Ringo in a collarless Nehru shirt and jacket; George standing behind them in an off-tan shirt and billowing white tie. Compared to the body parts it replaced, this looked tame. But their mod clothes and patronizing expressions gave off an unfazed confidence, as if they were still toying with those body parts in their heads. The new cover mocked the very idea of a more “acceptable” pose.

But both the “Butcher cover” and the “more popular than Jesus” quote lay dormant while the band returned to the studio for many late-night sessions from April through June. As they recorded, the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath quickly ascended the charts, and the group’s singles, “19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Paint It Black,” saturated the airwaves, alongside Otis Redding’s cover of “Satisfaction,” the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” the Silkie’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon.”

Studio ingenuity and upside-down engineering tricks became hallmarks of most Beatles recordings from here on in, and the band loved raiding the instrument closet underneath the control room stairs in Studio 2 for weird sound effects (as on “Yellow Submarine”). But they also tweaked their guitar sounds through their writing: for “And Your Bird Can Sing,” McCartney and Harrison coiled around each other on their Epiphone Casinos for a winding duet, a dual lead that made Lennon’s bitterness shimmer; “Dr. Robert” had sunbursts of resentment. No sooner had they finished “Bird” than Harrison’s “Taxman” went from basic tracks to final arrangement in two days.

For all his wild-man, wire-the-limousine eccentricities, in practice Lennon resembled a technophobe; threading tape into a reel deck often gave him fits. This lack of skill turned him on one night when he accidentally threaded a reel to play backward: he had brought home a rough mix of “Rain” and in a stupor began running it the wrong way across the magnetic heads. He loved the result. Martin spliced out his opening vocal passage on “Rain” and ran it backward for the fade-outs of that same number, and “I’m Only Sleeping” used backward guitar doodles to convey the invading dreamscape of his afternoon naps. By the end of April, passing the halfway mark, Lennon had brought in “I’m Only Sleeping” (April 27), which included a cheeky yawn over McCartney’s bass break (at 2:00). Martin scored and conducted the string parts for “Eleanor Rigby” (April 28). Working side-by-side on separate songs on the 29th, Lennon laid down his vocals for his track and McCartney tracked “Rigby.”

Epstein intruded on Revolver sessions for a couple of promotional events: at the May appearance at the New Musical Express Poll Winners’ Concert at Wembley, they reached back to five songs from 1964–65 for what would be their last UK live appearance until 1969: “I Feel Fine,” “Nowhere Man,” “Day Tripper,” “If I Needed Someone,” and “I’m Down”; they tracked BBC interviews on May 2 and lip-synced promotional films for “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” on location in Chiswick Gardens on May 20. Back in the studio, the band regained its momentum quickly with “Yellow Submarine,” cut in five delirious takes on the evening of May 26.

The next night, all four Beatles attended the Bob Dylan show at the Royal Albert Hall, just as they had the previous spring. This year, however, Dylan had morphed from adored folkie bard into rock sage. For his first electric tour, he brought along Johnny Rivers’s drummer, Mickey Jones, to play with a Canadian crew, the Hawks (later known as The Band). Several nights earlier, in Manchester, someone in the crowd had yelled “Judas!” as Dylan lit into “Like a Rolling Stone,” rock mythology steamrolling over folkie holdouts.

By this point, Lennon and Dylan were circling each other warily, as much friends as friendly competitors in rock’s great superstar sweepstakes. Lennon gobbled up everything Dylan put out just as surely as Dylan listened carefully to Beatle albums. Blonde on Blonde, Dylan’s double-disc masterstroke (with “Just Like a Woman,” “I Want You,” and “Visions of Johanna”), came out shortly after this, and Lennon had likely heard advance acetates, enough to be intimidated, not least because Dylan had turned the druggy waltz of “Norwegian Wood” into fodder for his own daunting one-night stand, “4th Time Around.” In this transatlantic duel between narrative wizards, Lennon felt insecurities he couldn’t articulate. Dylan, on the other hand, had way too cool a façade to let on about feeling intimidated, even though the dramatic threat of his rock move had far more Lennon to it than Lennon numbers had Dylan fingerprints (“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”).

They partied on Beatle turf in the clubs after the gig. D. A. Pennebaker caught their car ride to the Mayfair Hotel on Stratton Street for part of his unreleased documentary on Dylan, Eat the Document (much of which appeared in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home, in 2006, and was cited in Keys to the Rain: The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, by Oliver Trager, in 2004). This heavily bootlegged car scene captured the two pop stars jabbing each other verbally about pop’s lesser royalty, the only footage of the two songwriters conversing. Conducting a mock interview, Lennon accused Dylan of backing the Mamas and the Papas “big-ly.” “I knew it would get to that,” Dylan shoots back with mock condescension. “You’re just interested in the big chick [Mama Cass Elliot], right? She’s got hold of you, too. She’s got ahold of everybody I know. Everybody asks me the same thing. You’re terrible, man.” Dylan pushes back by asking Lennon about the band Silkie, the UK group that charted with “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” (on a session co-produced by Lennon and McCartney).

There’s an affection between these two as they fiddle with their superstar masks, but Dylan slurs his words and has to work hard to hold up his head, as though the chemicals compete for control of his body. None of the shtick seems to float, or to amuse them as much as they hope it might. Soon after this, Dylan begs his driver to pull over so he can be sick. Even Lennon, no stranger to hangovers, looks embarrassed to be riffing with Dylan in this condition. On the verge of a huge creative breakthrough, Dylan seemed gutted by drugs, living for his shows but absent for the rest. It’s hard to tell how much Lennon identified with him on this level, but he must have taken small comfort to see a fellow rock star so worn down by touring.

The Beatles scurried to finish Revolver as the summer’s touring season approached, adding elaborate sound effects to “Yellow Submarine” (in a daffy session with Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, George and Pattie Harrison, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, and Abbey Road staffers John Skinner and Terry Condon). The next day, Harrison led them through his third track, marked “Laxton’s Superb” (which became “I Want to Tell You”).

With vocal overdubs remaining for “Eleanor Rigby,” “Good Day Sunshine” ( just three takes on June 8), and “Here There and Everywhere” the following week, they mimed both “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” for the BBC’s Top of the Pops and then stopped off at the Waldorf Hotel on the Strand for a Pet Sounds listening party. To avoid the anticlimactic response that America had given Brian Wilson’s latest album, Bruce Johnston, the Beach Boys’ newest member, brought over a tape with Epstein’s former assistant, Derek Taylor (now promoting the Byrds in Los Angeles). An avowed Beach Boys fanatic, Taylor knew Lennon and McCartney would want to be among the first to have a listen. Kim Fowley, an L.A. scenester, remembered the two Beatles arriving in their collarless jackets, hanging on every note:

Everybody sat listening intently as the music played. When it ended, Lennon and McCartney went over to the piano together, noodled about with some chords, and had a private conversation about something, right in front of the rest of us. Then they came up and shook our hands, told Johnston how much they admired it, and just as quickly they were gone.⁷

McCartney let it leak that he prized “God Only Knows” as the “greatest song ever written.” Andrew Loog Oldham, now the Rolling Stones’ manager, took out a full-page ad in Melody Maker to proclaim Pet Sounds the “greatest album ever made.” In the ongoing debate between the primal and elaborate, and the American vs. British inclinations in rock style, the UK’s response to Pet Sounds proved clairvoyant. The very idea of Wilson seeking out Lennon and McCartney’s blessing would have been unthinkable even three years before, when the favor would most likely have been sought from the other direction. In this way, Wilson’s fate linked up to Spector’s: cherished abroad, Pet Sounds, like “River Deep—Mountain High,” didn’t get the Capitol marketing support it deserved and peaked at number ten before a rapid falling off at home.

From there, Lennon and McCartney went straight back to EMI for nine more takes of “Here, There and Everywhere.” The “She Said She Said” session came on the last day (June 21), after an afternoon of mixing the rest of the tracks into an album sequence. The band recorded four complete takes of Lennon’s song between 7 P.M. and 3:45 A.M., while batting around album titles—Abracadabra, Magic Circles, and The Beatles on Safari—until Revolver got the nod. Racing to hit the stages Epstein had booked them the world over, a new commotion devoured the band, leaving scant time for reflection on how the rock star with the sharpest fangs, elsewhere so preening, ambitious, and arrogant, openly envied the state of childhood (“When I was a boy everything was right”), as his partner scored nursery-school sing-alongs (“Yellow Submarine”). Fewer still suspected this tour would be their last.

Aggravating many of the same frustrations Lennon and the Beatles felt during the previous summer’s performances, Revolver barely changed the rigors of the live game. The sounds they chased in the studio led to all kinds of tricks, edits, tape treatments, and sleight of hand, and along the way, they lost track of how any of it might be reproduced live. The sound checks that have become routine for touring bands ever since were unheard of at this point, and 1966 concert-amplification technology lagged even further behind their material than EMI’s equipment. They could barely hear themselves play or sing, and the crowds seemed to scream that much louder. Yet ambition compelled them to attempt the fragile vocal harmonies of “Nowhere Man” despite these enormous handicaps. One night, in exasperation, Lennon vented his frustration with how the Beatles struggled to hear themselves straight to the audience: “Don’t listen to our music. We’re terrible these days.”⁸

As the screams intensified, a new fear crept into the Beatle camp. “I remember when George was in Germany he got a letter saying, ‘You won’t live beyond the next month,’ ” George Martin recalled. “And when they went to Japan they had such heavy guards they couldn’t move anywhere. The Japanese took those death threats very seriously.”⁹ After appearances in Munich and Hamburg, they flew straight into a storm that forced them to lay over for nine hours in Anchorage, Alaska. By the time they landed in Tokyo at three the next morning, the press had labeled the storm “the Beatle Typhoon,” the most rain Tokyo had seen in ten years. When asked about it at their press conference, Lennon remained blasé: “There’s probably more wind from the press than from us.”

The storm had symbolic gust: the media sensed a mania edging toward violence, and editorial pages warned of possible riots all over the world. Reporters pitched surreal, inane questions that seemed out of touch with the scale of events and the pitch of the crowds. The day-to-day meetings with the press turned confrontational. At another press conference in Tokyo, a reporter asked the group: “What are you going to be when you grow up?” Lennon replied: “If you grow up yourself you’d know better than to ask that question.”¹⁰

Rigid Japanese security prevented the Beatles from leaving their hotel rooms for their entire three-day stay, although Lennon managed to sneak out for some shopping, spending more than $20,000 to impress an astonished antiques vendor with his range and taste.¹¹ When he was caught, the police threatened to withdraw their “protection” for the band, which felt more like detention. For their first and only performances on Japanese soil, they performed three evenings inside the Nippon Budokan Temple in central Tokyo.¹² Outside the hall, protestors attacked pop music’s “desecration” of a sacred Japanese site.

From Japan, the Beatles lurched into their bizarre encounter with Imelda Marcos, the Philippines’ first lady. Marcos, the former beauty queen who became the original Iron Butterfly, had enough vanity to match her husband Ferdinand’s corruption. They had been in power not quite a year when the Beatles came, and their effrontery could not be quantified.

Ever since their MBEs the previous summer, a Beatle appearance had taken on the stature of a royal visit and conferred international prestige on a country looking for attention. The Epstein operation, however, while efficient in rock terms, lacked diplomatic finesse. The Manila Sunday Times greeted the Beatles’ arrival with the following story: “President Marcos, the First Lady, and the three young Beatles fans in the family, have been invited as guests of honor at the concerts. The Beatles plan to personally follow up the invitation during a courtesy call on Mrs. Imelda Marcos at Malacañang Palace tomorrow morning at 11 o’clock.” Epstein called the local promoter, Ramón Ramos, to wave off this distraction: his boys had a day off after the concert; there would be no scene at the court where some dignitary might clip Ringo’s hair. Unwittingly, Epstein slapped the Marcos regime in the face. Ramos had leaked the schedule to the press before confirming with Epstein, who strictly guarded his boys’ days off.

Unaware of any problems, the band played two shows before a total of eighty thousand shrieking fans at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium. There’s a finely tuned fictional account of their show from the novelist Eric Gamalinda:

On the eve of the Beatles’ arrival, a young colegiala threatened to jump off the roof of the Bank of the Philippine Islands building unless she was granted a private audience with the band. . . . And when the Beatles finally opened with “I Wanna Be Your Man,” you could feel the excitement ripping through you, a detonation of such magnitude your entire being seemed to explode. I couldn’t hear anything except a long, extended shrill—the whole stadium screaming its lungs out. I looked at Delphi [his younger sister]. She was holding her head between her hands and her eyes were bulging out and her mouth was stretched to an O, and all I could hear was this long, high-pitched scream coming out of her mouth. I had never seen Delphi like that before, and I would never, for the rest of her life, see her as remorselessly young as she was that afternoon.¹³

Epstein and the Beatles awoke the next morning to a TV nightmare: state television broadcast weeping children at the Marcos palace, newspapers blared “Imelda Stood Up,” and death threats swamped the hotel and the British Embassy. The Beatles had “rebuffed” the autocratic rulers and were abruptly requested to leave. Almost as soon as they realized their mistake, they worried about how to escape. The government withdrew its heavy security detail and Ramos sat on the gate receipts. Fleeing their hotel, they encountered more hostility at Manila’s airport, where a “tax commissioner” insisted on collecting a cash percentage from the show they had yet to be paid for. After tense negotiations, Epstein finally “filed a bond,” essentially a bribe, to assure their safe departure.¹⁴ A crowd of angry Filipinos saw them off, chanting: “Beatles Alis Diyan!” (“Beatles Go Home!”).

They flew to New Delhi, but instead of respite, hundreds of screaming fans greeted their arrival because the media had leaked their whereabouts. Giving up on a couple of days’ peace, they flew back to England a day ahead of schedule, where they could at least enjoy fan assault on familiar turf. The BBC met them for quotes at Heathrow, and they lay low for the rest of the month. “We’re going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” George Harrison quipped.¹⁵

Instead of Americans prepping to give them a victory lap around the States, their most popular turf, Beatle record-burnings erupted throughout the South as “Yellow Submarine” hit the charts, and Capitol Records went into crisis management. In late June, the label had released Yesterday and Today, bearing Whitaker’s “butcher cover,” the grinning Beatles looking out from beneath raw meat and limbless dolls. Retailers recoiled, and Capitol had to pull its product and issue a letter from vice president Ron Topper. It’s a classic “blame-the-Brits” corporate statement, without apology: “The original cover, created in England, was intended as ‘pop art’ satire. However, a sampling of public opinion in the United States indicates that the cover design is subject to misinterpretation. For this reason, and to avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to the Beatles’ image or reputation, Capitol has chosen to withdraw the LP and substitute a more generally acceptable design.”¹⁶

The controversy vaulted the album to the top of the charts, as “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” clobbered radio. Revolver came out in early August 1966. Between Rubber Soul and Revolver, Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” quote got isolated, reframed, and used as a sensationalist headline on the cover of Datebook, a teen magazine, beneath THE TEN ADULTS YOU DIG/HATE THE MOST. Combined with the “butcher cover,” Lennon’s quote gave the Bible Belt conniptions. A deejay in Birmingham, Alabama, read Lennon’s quotes on the air while smashing vinyl. Thirty radio stations in eleven states followed suit. Southern pastors thundered for Beatle boycotts from their pulpits. Even the Vatican weighed in, although Lennon’s remarks were directed at the Anglican Church: “Some subjects must not be dealt with profanely, even in the world of beatniks,” said Pope Paul VI, simultaneously denouncing both Lennon’s comment and millions of Beatle fans. Before the band even set foot in America, most Southern radio stations had purged themselves of the demon Beatles.

Concert sellouts had dropped off in 1965 largely because Epstein booked larger houses. This time, promoters were nervous, not just about selling tickets but preventing riots. With his sense of fatherly protectiveness, Epstein flew on ahead to New York to reassure American promoters about refunds should dates be canceled.¹⁷ After many phone calls to an obstinate Lennon, he convinced him that his remark had placed his fellow Beatles in real danger, and Epstein scheduled a press conference in advance of their opening concert.

Arriving in Chicago from London on August 11, Lennon sat with the other Beatles, took questions, and issued an “apology” that wire stories carried around the world. He entered the hotel conference room crammed with reporters itching for a “gotcha” moment and, for the first time, had to spin something out of defeat instead of batting down the usual inanities. His face ashen, the Beatle who had never appeared anything but effortlessly self-confident, seemed beside himself with fear. His statement mixed grudging contrition with a piercing resentment at the malevolence his comments had uncovered: “If I had said television is more popular than Jesus,” Lennon sputtered, “I might have got away with it. . . . I just said ‘they’ are having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus.”

Now the swoon lashed back, grabbed its humbled moment from rock’s great quote machine, and reveled in the sight of Lennon groping for words: “I’m not saying that we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever it is. I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong.”¹⁸

To American parents who had yet to be charmed, this seemed like the Beatles’ just comeuppance. Finally, these cheeky Brits would get taken down a notch like some other ne’er-do-well freaks like Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. Beatlemania, far more intense and sweeping than the hula hoop or Elvis Presley, had also grown far more threatening to middle-class mores. To be honored by their queen and then remark so casually about how they had assumed the role of Christ in teenage life, well, this simply made Lennon too big for his rock-star britches.

And throughout these political and religious controversies, the press kept inflating the bubble, even while asking about the inevitable burst. Lennon had trouble avoiding sarcasm at such moments. When asked if Lennon and McCartney might someday replace Rodgers and Hammerstein, he quipped, “We don’t want to be Rodgers and Hart, either.”¹⁹

Despite Lennon’s Chicago “apology,” and subsequent press conferences in New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles, the controversy acted like fertilizer to the ignorant. In Alabama, two thousand teenagers tossed their Beatle vinyl into bonfires, drowning out a pro-Beatle protest across the street. The Ku Klux Klan picketed the Washington, D.C., show and threatened the band on television. At the evening show in Memphis later that week, a firecracker went off in the audience, and all the other Beatles instinctively turned their heads toward Lennon, presumed shot.

Then the Beatle “typhoon” that had derailed their Tokyo trip two months before returned, this time to Cincinnati. The downpour forced them to reschedule Saturday’s outdoor show at Crosley Field on August 20, for Sunday, August 21, which might have been easy enough. But Epstein kept on schedule by jetting them 341 miles between afternoon and evening sets to make their appearance in St. Louis, where they performed for twenty-three thousand people beneath a giant rain tarp. For McCartney, this was the last straw: he finally capitulated to Lennon, Harrison, and Starr’s urging that this be their last tour. “We were having to worry about the rain getting in the amps and this took us right back to the Cavern days—it was worse than those early days. I don’t even think the house was full,” McCartney remembered:

After the gig I remember us getting in a big, empty steel-lined wagon, like a removal van. There was no furniture in there—nothing. We were sliding around trying to hold on to something, and at that moment everyone said, “Oh, this bloody touring lark—I’ve had it up to here, man.” I finally agreed. I’d been trying to say, “Ah, touring’s good and it keeps us sharp. We need touring, and musicians need to play. Keep music alive.” I had held onto that attitude when there were doubts, but finally I agreed with them. . . . We agreed to say nothing, but never to tour again.²⁰

They couldn’t hear themselves play, their audiences were too busy screaming or protesting to care, and the havoc they had to march through to get on and off the stage had become far more trouble than any pleasure they might still glean from the music. Downpours only made Epstein push them harder, and the stage made Lennon feel like a walking target. Revolver, a new creative peak, had heightened the hysteria. But for the moment, they followed Epstein’s counsel and kept their decision to themselves.

The Beatles took the stage at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29 with a collective sense of relief and finality. The audience, unaware of this unspoken farewell, embraced them with a deafening pitch, convincing them that Beatlemania had let loose spooks it was best to avoid. There was something in the crowd’s mood of careening, almost desperate, adoration that made the Beatles feel like the tail wagging a rabid dog. Harrison remembers putting timed cameras on the amps: “We stopped between tunes, Ringo got down off the drums, and we stood facing the amplifiers with our back to the audience and took photographs. We knew, ‘this is it—we’re not going to do this again. This is the last concert.’ It was a unanimous decision.”²¹

In his nonfiction phantasm The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe used this concert to describe the warped, compulsive frenzy in the air. Wolfe built his narrative around novelist Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion), who had already led some early acid happenings on the West Coast with the Grateful Dead and Hells Angels. Kesey attended the show with his Merry Pranksters. After watching a thousand California teenagers trip to light shows, Candlestick Park struck Kesey as mania at its final stage of darkness, and echo of the band’s Ed Sullivan Show debut well into spoilage (he called it a “cancer”). Wolfe’s passage doubles as a portent of Altamont, the late 1969 speedway concert where the Hells Angels killed a black man in the front row during the Rolling Stones set.

Just when the noise cannot get any louder, Wolfe writes, “it doubles, his eardrums ring like stamped metal with it and suddenly GHHHHHOOOOOOOWWWWW, it is like the whole thing has snapped, and the whole front section of the arena becomes a writhing, seething mass of little girls waving their arms in the air,” which he likens to “a single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles.” Kesey felt a twinge of fear watching the Beatles that night. As he watched them “play the beast,” delight in their God-like crowd manipulations, Wolfe describes how he also sensed their futility: “One of the Beatles, John, George, Paul, dips his long electric guitar handle in one direction and the whole teeny horde ripples precisely along the line of energy he set off—and then in the other direction, precisely along that line. It causes them to grin, John and Paul and George and Ringo, rippling the poor huge freaked teeny beast this way and that—”

Here was a “vibrating poison madness,” Wolfe writes, that filled the universe with “the teeny agony torn out of them.” All around him, girls start to faint, as if the noise suffocates them, and the security staff starts carrying limp bodies to first-aid tents as the crowd surges. To Kesey, the scene resembles a disease, “a state of sheer poison mad cancer. The Beatles are the creature’s head. The teeny freaks are the body. But the head has lost control of the body and the body rebels and goes amok and that is what cancer is.”²²

Flying back to London, Lennon felt even more release fleeing the United States than he had fleeing the Philippines just a month before. The freakish democratic abandon of America seemed to hold no less peril than Ferdinand Marcos’s fascistic state security and media. The same musical forces that found elegance and structure in the studio had somehow turned violent and chaotic in concert. As the objects of late-stage Beatlemania, the Beatles were the first to duck an obsessive, all-consuming adoration. Rock celebrity had turned a perilous corner and gave their public appearances a fervor that was both tempting and hostile, euphoric and self-devouring.

Their creative investment in Revolver had been total, but the world preferred to harass them for state dinners, rebellious humor, and religious quotes. At every turn, distractions upstaged the music. Their material, with its layered tape effects and intricate vocal harmonies, had already defied and outgrown live performance. Prompted by their studio work, the decision to stop touring turned from aesthetic breakthrough into survival mechanism.

After this long break from Cynthia and Julian, which had followed hard upon three months of manic night-and-day recording, Lennon’s personal life was unspooling. The other Beatles had long suspected this, given his frequent trysts, which only accelerated on tours. Arriving home at Kenwood, Lennon spent just a few nights with his family before setting off for Spain to film How I Won the War. Perhaps he hoped Spain would sober him up, disrupt his routine, and get him back on track. Like any self-respecting Englishman of that era, he packed a good read to help sort it all out: Nikos Kazantzakis’s semiautobiographical best seller, Report to Greco, since he’d been so taken with that author’s popular The Last Temptation of Christ. Perhaps he’d figure out something else to do now that the Beatles had decided to stop touring. Perhaps if he could get away from all the noise, he could think clearly.

Instead, his detour from Beatle work bestirred a roiling subconscious. He traveled first to Hanover, Germany, with Neil Aspinall, and got National Health “granny” glasses and an army haircut, which made the international news wires just as Elvis Presley’s had back in 1958. In Lennon’s mind, perhaps, this marked an improvement on Presley’s career—at least he entered a fictional army instead of the real thing. After a short trip to Hamburg, Lennon and Aspinall met up with McCartney in Paris. Once filming began, Harrison went to India to study sitar with Ravi Shankar; Ringo stayed at home with his son, Zak; and McCartney returned to London to write the score to The Family Way. Then he hitched around France in disguise.

After a month of shooting, Lennon felt rested enough to summon first Ringo and Maureen, and then Cynthia and Julian, for visits to Majorca (note how his drummer got the call before his wife and son). With Lennon ingesting nothing harder than grass and wine, his loneliness crept back anyway. He enjoyed the work, but life on the movie set involved a lot of waiting around, shooting the breeze with fellow actors like Michael Crawford, and fiddling about on his guitar. Perhaps he’d caught his breath and found himself ready to reengage. Or perhaps he felt guilty about leaving his son, and resigned himself once more to family life. Still, when the filming finished, husband and wife traveled back to Weybridge separately.

Leonard Gross, Look magazine’s European editor, visited Lester’s set and drew a very different portrait from Maureen Cleave’s just six months earlier. Getting off the treadmill had given Lennon a much needed respite and led to the gift of a once-in-a-lifetime song: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which he pursued slowly over six weeks, even though the more he worked on it, the more out of reach it seemed. The working tapes show him going over and over his key phrases, repeating them as if constantly questioning their resilience, and they survived many puzzled exams. Yet no matter how often he returned to the work, its uncertainties only deepened. The most complete compilation of the song’s formation comes on a bootleg disc with more than fifteen demos, first embryonic, then gaining in confidence even as its mysteries held firm. In one of the few examples of Lennon’s songwriting habits, it’s almost as if he converses with the song daily to see how it responds, if it suggests new words or melodic patterns as he nudges it forward. With his personal life disintegrating, and his professional life a quandary, his songwriting provided a distinct yet tremulous answer.

Leonard Gross became smitten by Lennon’s poise. “Lennon is not on; he is simply original,” he wrote. Lennon talked to Gross about everything, from his frustration with acting to his role as a Beatle to the youth movement gaining momentum around the world: “Everybody can go around in England with long hair a bit, and boys can wear flowered trousers and flowered shirts and things like that, but there’s still the same old nonsense going on. It’s just that we’re all dressed up a bit different.”²³ Self-conscious about his influence, he was already vastly skeptical about political change.

In fact, Lennon’s remarks in the fall of 1966 foreshadow the combative tone of his famous late-1970 encounter with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, which seemed abrupt and callous during the Beatles’ breakup. Contrast those 1966 quotes (above) with Lennon’s “revelations” to Wenner in 1970: “The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same, except that there’s a lot of fag fuckin’ middle-class kids with long hair walking around London in trendy clothes. . . . The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything. It’s EXACTLY the same!”²⁴

Like a punctured wound, Lennon’s language is more caustic in this later quote, but the sentiment is analogous. Taking a breather from the Beatles, his head was already weighing the cost of the celebrity grind.

When Gross questions Lennon about the “more popular than Jesus” flap, he incites an uncharacteristic defensiveness—about not religion but his public persona: “I’m not a cynic,” Lennon insists. “They’re getting my character out of some of the things I write or say. They can’t do that. . . . I’m slightly cynical, but I’m not a cynic. One can be wry one day and cynical the next and ironic the next.” There’s a difference between making remarks about politics and society on one day and his overall belief in “life, love, goodness, death,” Lennon argues.²⁵ (It’s almost as if he’s saying: “Trust the art, not the artist.”) His cynicism, he insists, shouldn’t be mistaken for a larger worldview.

Lennon came home to one of London’s worst winters, only to slip back into his downward spiral of acid and late-night clubbing. Whatever level of sobriety he’d managed in Spain was quickly erased. At Kenwood, Lennon headed straight up to his attic to make a demo of his new song, which he played for McCartney. McCartney worked out the keyboard introduction on Lennon’s latest gadget, a Mellotron keyboard, which sat on his landing (too big for the attic doorway). Although he prepared a rough mix at Kenwood, when he played it for the others at EMI studios, Lennon sat alone with his guitar. His own early attempts to figure how to get the song down on tape had left him even more puzzled. He wanted to hear how his band reacted to it.

Returning to his regular haunts, he poked by the Indica bookshop and gallery, where John Dunbar was mounting an exhibit by a trendy New York Fluxus artist named Yoko Ono. The Fluxus movement grew out of Marcel Duchamp’s insouciant Dada style from pre–World War I and stressed performance and audience interaction with highly conceptual art pieces and installations. Yoko Ono’s early reputation flowed from her influential free-form concerts in Greenwich Village, attended by the avant-garde’s leading composer and theorist, John Cage, and Duchamp himself. She came to London with her second husband, Tony Cox, and their two-year-old daughter, Kyoko, to attend an international conference on modernism.

Ono had already met Paul McCartney. During an early gambit to secure rock-star patronage, she knocked on his Cavendish Avenue front door and asked him if he’d contribute an original manuscript to celebrate Cage’s birthday. Ono’s strategy combined two purposes: to flatter McCartney with her artistic credentials and introduce herself to a wealthy rocker who might invest in her work. McCartney declined but did refer Ono to his partner, Lennon, as “the artist in the group.”²⁶ (This echoes the way Lennon had once sent Klaus Voormann to Stu Sutcliffe as the band’s “artist” back in Hamburg.)

Barry Miles had stocked Ono’s private publication, Grapefruit, a book of instructions that toyed with perceptions that resembled Zen koans. “She had published it herself,” Miles remembered, “so it was a very small press. And I’m sure she saw that I was one of the few shops who carried it.”²⁷ The Indica bookstore had expanded into the space next door for a makeshift gallery, and they offered Ono an exhibition. Dunbar invited Lennon in as a potential sponsor the day before Ono’s opening—a millionaire investor who might want in on the ground floor of the next big thing. Lennon remembered meeting Ono there amid her art, and being at once intimidated and amused.

Beneath a mass of long and straight jet-black hair, Ono’s tiny frame and passive demeanor suggested a Japanese version of Andy Warhol. She had trouble taking Lennon the rock star seriously, but welcomed his interest in her work and politely led him through her pieces. In one room, he climbed up a ladder to look through a spyglass, where he found the word “Yes.” This surprised and tickled Lennon, who had seen his share of art-school pretension. “If it had said ‘No’ or ‘Up yours,’ I would have been put out.”²⁸

He asked if he could pay her five pounds to hammer a nail into a piece of wood. Not before the show, she responded. (In this single gesture, Yoko Ono followed only Veronica Bennett Spector as among the few women in Lennon’s life as a Beatle to tell him no.) How about an imaginary payment and an imaginary nail? Lennon countered, and Yoko Ono smiled in recognition. But that first meeting, cordial and mostly professional, passed unnoticed. It has since entered Lennon mythology as a pivotal encounter, one in which Lennon’s entire worldview was thrown into question. But it’s not clear that the scene held any particular meaning for either of them at the time it happened. In his current frame of mind, wrestling “Strawberry Fields Forever” to the ground and falling back into the home life he had just escaped, Lennon took in Ono’s work as a happy blip in a fog. The blurry line between his drugs and Ono’s art must have been pronounced. She sent him a copy of Grapefruit as a thank-you, and he kept it by his bed.

When the four Beatles regrouped for the first time since Candlestick Park for an EMI session in Studio 2 on November 24, 1966, the familiar room became lit with uncertainty. Lennon didn’t look like himself. For the first time anyone could remember, he wore spectacles, which he had never done in public. He’d grown accustomed to his character Private Gripweed’s “granny” glasses and enjoyed seeing more clearly without the first-generation hard contact lenses he had struggled with. Cigarettes were lit, tea served, and expectancy hung in the air as John Lennon picked up his guitar and announced his new number: “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

There is no tape of Lennon’s first performance, but it’s grown into legend because of George Martin’s quote (and the working demos that have leaked since): “When John sang ‘Strawberry Fields’ for the first time, just with an acoustic guitar accompaniment, it was magic,” George Martin remembers. “It was absolutely lovely. I love John’s voice anyway, and it was a great privilege listening to it.”²⁹ Sung alone in front of the others, this mélange of surreal fragility must have had a quixotic effect coming from a tough hide like Lennon’s. Suddenly, their most reliable cutup had enchanted them with a reverie of youth, which somehow made him sound older—and made the others feel older as well.

Lennon’s narrative (“Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to . . .”) retreats to a childhood idyll, the grounds of Woolton’s Strawberry Field Salvation Army home. Both musically and lyrically, the song surpasses anything Lennon had written before, trumping even “Tomorrow Never Knows” from earlier that year. The lyrics were experimental, figurative, and nonlinear; the music had new color and fluidity, the slow-motion quality of listening to something underwater, and yet simultaneously a clear, visionary presence, as if the most hallucinatory images were tumbling from a subdued narrator waking up inside a dream. For the Beatles, the images evoked the backyard at Mendips, where Lennon had a treehouse, and his infatuation with the child’s frame of mind. It must have felt like eavesdropping on a close friend’s dream therapy:

No one I think is in my tree

I mean it must be high or low

Although hesitant and uncertain, the music finds a curious inner calm: in real life, the Strawberry Field grounds were one step from an orphanage, and as an abandoned child, Lennon must have felt a strange identification with the children there. At age four, he watched his mother, Julia, give away a daughter he would never know; it would have been completely natural to fear himself just a step away from the same fate.

“I’ve seen Strawberry Fields described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place, but in the summer it wasn’t dull and grimy at all: it was a secret garden,” McCartney writes in his memoirs. Raised in a “proper” home by his aunt Mimi, he looked forward every summer to the marching bands that played the fêtes in its yard.

“John’s memory of it wasn’t to do with the fact that it was a Salvation Army home; that was up at the house,” McCartney says. “There was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in. The bit he went into was a secret garden like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he thought of it like that, it was a little hide-away for him where he could maybe have a smoke, live in his dreams a little, so it was a get-away. It was an escape for John.”³⁰

McCartney’s sympathetic support followed on this understanding of his partner’s personal associations. That first evening they recorded a spare version with electric guitar, two Mellotron tracks (one of which often gets mistaken for a slide guitar), and backing vocals behind Lennon’s lead. Four days later they abandoned this version for a second, more band-oriented arrangement, featuring McCartney’s now-distinctive Mellotron introduction.

“Strawberry Fields Forever” sounds like a dream reassembled in a bottle, but it required elaborate postproduction work to capture its emotional fragility. The recording process itself resembled the jumbled lyric, with intense sessions followed by days of Lennon’s second thoughts. The song was delicate, but it also had grit, and Ringo’s lopsided tom-toms loosened it up (another track where Ringo’s left-handedness made his fills sound oddly spry). On the other hand, the band aimed for an ineffable tone it couldn’t quite hit, and the tempo kept accelerating with each take. Perhaps some outside instruments could shake up the sound and bring the words more color.

At this point in their studio work (late in 1966), remakes were not unusual. They had scrapped early takes of “And I Love Her” and “What You’re Doing,” and the feel of “Norwegian Wood” changed dramatically from first take to final mix. Only “That Means a Lot,” with its complex arrangement, had been abandoned after reconfiguring. But after a couple of weeks working on McCartney’s “When I’m Sixty-four,” Lennon asked Martin to draw up a new arrangement for “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with cellos and trumpets. That way he might get at the mysterious feel as he’d first imagined it—anyway, McCartney always got the high-class treatment from Martin. “He’d wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous,” Martin remembers. “He said, could I write him a new lineup with the strings. So I wrote a new score and we recorded that. But he didn’t like it.”

Working on these new tracks, Lennon got carried away again, adding backward tape loops, a wild percussion section, maracas, odd piano bits, and spoken lines like “Cranberry sauce” and “Calm down, Ringo.” Still, the track stumped him. Finally, in late December, Lennon asked Martin to join the two separate tracks, as he liked features from each, and felt that splicing them together might somehow split the difference. Martin sympathized with Lennon’s indecision.

“It still wasn’t right,” he remembers. “What he would now like was the first half from the early recording plus the second half of the new recording. Would I put them together for him? I said it was impossible.” Martin pushed back as a musician: the two tracks were in different keys, at different speeds, he said. “You can fix it, then,” Lennon chirped on his way out the door.³¹

Martin’s solution spliced the two pieces together using the Mellotron’s swooping guitar sounds to camouflage two edits (between the words “Let me take you down ’cause I’m” at 1:00 and “going to”). For the remainder of the song, Lennon’s voice has the oddly disfigured aura of somebody singing through a mental fog, the result of the slight tape warp to match the two different pitches. The result married an expressive fumbling with ingenious tape manipulation. Refrains limped alongside Starr’s wobbly drums; verses suspended percussion to peer myopically through horns and strings. There are two narrative angles in the song which blur together at different points: the first is the child, the aimless, thought-spinning boy whose mind wanders, and the second the adult who’s peering through this child’s frame, trying to see what the child’s eye sees. (This echoes and compresses the tension inside “She Said She Said,” where Lennon sings, “When I was a boy/Everything was right,” and steers the band right off its regular meter.) This doubling gets played out in the two opposing arrangements, band versus orchestral instruments, and the genius is how Martin engineers the track to travel these parallel planes at the same time. These narrative contortions also marked a profound break from the material Lennon had worked on with McCartney. “Strawberry Fields” may be an early attempt to compensate for this loss by forging a split voice—different angles (verses and refrains) seen through the same lens.

By February 1967, Epstein had caved to pressure from EMI and Capitol for more product, a single to fill the gap between albums: Revolver had been released more than six months earlier, and at the rate they were going, this new album could take at least that long again. The band kept trying to slam the brakes on their career: for four years in a row they had churned out two LPs a year—only in 1966 did they get away with the second of these being A Collection of Beatles Oldies, a compilation of hits. The band’s holing up in the studio didn’t give the label much leverage, but they did insist on releasing two of their finished tracks as a single: “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” This, in turn, shifted the evolving concept of the tracks that followed—from a self-conscious evocation of their childhood into something more universal on the state of their fame.

Because “Penny Lane” made the obvious choice for a single but “Strawberry Fields Forever” had masterstroke woven right through it, they issued the two songs to follow “Day Tripper”/“We Can Work It Out” as a double A-sided single, encouraging radio stations to play both sides. So it became another physical symbol of the increasingly disparate worlds Lennon and McCartney inhabited, with their differing views of childhood filtered through their differing views of songwriting. It was as if the self-contained argument of “We Can Work It Out” now split across two separate sides of the same single. “Penny Lane” sought out a majestic optimism that repeated listenings betrayed—McCartney’s buoyancy quickened with ironic verve; “Strawberry Fields” turned even the act of radio listening into an intensely private experience, everybody eavesdropping on somebody else’s waking bad dream. (McCartney’s song also mirrored Lennon’s double narrative: his boyhood view of an “ordinary” bus roundabout gets overlaid by his sly adult’s commentary; where the boy thinks, “Very strange,” the grown man thinks, “And though she feels as if she’s in a play/She is anyway.”) That McCartney line forecasts the slippery tension between narrative voices in “A Day in the Life” and how reality haunts illusion throughout Sgt. Pepper. In a subtle way, it recalls that ingenious line Buck Ram wrote for the Platters in “The Great Pretender”: “Too real is this feeling of make-believe.”

Lennon’s song has more poetic intrigue: he sings “Strawberry Fields Forever” in the quietly time-frozen voice of John the boy, examining adult anxiety from the mind’s eye of his childhood. This new psychological vantage point goes deeper into the fear, grief, and alienation Lennon surveyed in “She Said She Said” and, before that, “If I Fell,” “I’m a Loser,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and “Nowhere Man.” One of the world’s most famous men kept a public musical journal of estrangement.

Writing and recording “Strawberry Fields Forever” transformed Lennon’s creative arc: it hinted at the depths of his late-Beatles themes, staked out territory for his early solo career, and transformed the Beatles from performing moptops into studio hermits, from coming-of-age youths into nostalgic adults. Although psychedelic numbers like “Rain,” “Dr. Robert,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” were influenced by the keening harmonies and ringing guitars of the Byrds, Lennon never sounded as if he were trading one style for another; as before with Chuck Berry, imitation only delivered him to a new level of originality. “Strawberry Fields Forever” expanded the hallucinogenic drone of “Rain” into layered colors that shifted when lit by his vocal inflections. The lyrical freedom of his free-form verse produced a supernatural calm. Tracks like “A Day in the Life” (his next song), “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “I Am the Walrus” would soon spring from this same aesthetic impulse as his wordplay blossomed alongside his chord changes.

“Strawberry Fields Forever” became Lennon’s first glimpse of life beyond his group, and part of the recording’s ironic pull lies in how the Beatles drape a group sensibility around Lennon’s abstract psyche, something only the most intimate of musical friends could do. Cued to the music’s new reach, they all grew mustaches for the avant-garde video shoot, a prelude to the coming beards and shoulder-length manes. But the song’s difficult birth took place in the wake of a global media assault, Ku Klux Klan death threats, and a disintegrating marriage and songwriting partnership. As most of Lennon’s primary relationships began to crumble, his muse brought him a song that would redefine his life both aesthetically and personally in a single stroke.