Just Sort of a Freak Show Just Sort of a Freak ShowRubber Soul broke everything open,” says Steve Winwood. “It crossed music into a whole new dimension and was responsible for kicking off the sixties rock era as we know it.” Almost everyone echoed his belief that the Beatles had “raised the bar” in a way that made musicians reconsider how they wrote and recorded songs. Newsweek, a scant two years after tweaking the Beatles’ haircuts and improbable talent, reversed itself, calling them the “Bards of Pop” and their songs “as brilliantly original as any written today.” And the New York Times, whose grouchy critic, Jack Gould, had famously referred to the Beatles as “a fine mass placebo” and their act as “dated stuff,” delivered a glowing tribute in a five-page Sunday magazine article under the friendlier byline of Maureen Cleave.
Rock ’n roll had always been an easy beat to peg—and disdain—but the Beatles, as one classical convert noted, had succeeded in “push[ing] the music into more conventional modes,” especially with Rubber Soul, in which they were able to blend “gospel, country music, baroque counterpoint and even French popular ballads into a style that is wholly their own.”
On December 17, 1965, a handful of Sinatra protégés, along with Cilla Black, Esther Phillips, Henry Mancini, Marianne Faithfull, Ella Fitzgerald, and a seriously stoned Peter Sellers, paid tribute to the Beatles in a television extravaganza titled The Music of Lennon and McCartney. Even John and Paul put in an appearance to plug their new single, “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out,” which, in an extraordinary occurrence, were both being marketed as A-sides. As expected, the show touched off an explosion of interest by entertainers to cover their songs, with everyone from Ray Charles to Count Basie sifting through the Northern Songs catalogue. By mid-1966, an astounding eighty-eight Lennon-McCartney songs had been recorded in over 2,900 versions. Gershwin finally had competition.
While the cover versions multiplied and the critics traded accolades, the Beatles themselves scattered like errant billiard balls, disappearing into various pockets of London that catered to their precious anonymity. The Lennons, the Starkeys, and George and Pattie conveniently lived in neighboring communities, less than a ten-minute drive apart, and although their individual interests took them on different courses, their bond to the larger family remained very much intact. The Beatles continued to have “a strong hold on each other,” as Ringo recalled. Even though they had worked together nearly every day over the past eight years, there was an attachment, a real devotion, that was indelibly drawn. They still socialized and took vacations together; Christmas was usually an extensive group affair.
But as tributaries of the Thames threatened to freeze early in an unusually cold winter, John, George, and Ringo clung dearly to their neighboring homes in Surrey, with Paul camped out in the Ashers’ Wimpole Street attic. Welcome was the cancellation of a British tour in the spring (in fact, they would never tour Britain again), but Brian refused to rule out a short, last-minute sprint around the aging cinema circuit. Nevertheless, the Beatles finally found themselves with valuable time on their hands.
John, who was becoming politicized by fractious world events, took the opportunity to catch up on the news, which he devoured ravenously, scouring “all the daily newspapers published in Great Britain” as well as watching endless hours of daytime television coverage on the set in a tiny morning room at the back of the house. The intensifying civil rights movement, America’s involvement in Southeast Asia, and the allure of psychedelics were all issues that captivated him. At night, he languished in front of episodes of The Power Game, Danger Man, and The Rat Catchers. Work on a new book was postponed in favor of television—“it’s supposed to be out this month but I’ve only done one page!” he boasted.
Ringo spent ample time doting on his family. “Nothing made him happier than sitting at the kitchen table, eating Corn Flakes, with Maureen and Zak,” says Ken Partridge, who helped design Sunny Heights (which included a private club over the garage, complete with a mirrored bar, pool table, jukebox, and, reverently, a portrait of John and Paul). Otherwise, Ringo had developed a passion for fine photography, thanks to a fancy Nikon and an above-average eye, and wasted no opportunity to record “all the important events in his [son’s] life.” Ringo had no other grand visions. While he loved material wealth and was a rich man despite his fractional share of the Beatles’ profits, his dreams, like those of many hardworking Scouse men, were incongruously modest. A house in the country was more than he’d ever expected from life. Having a good job—a very good job—and an adoring family was enough to seal his contentment, and aside from a few material indulgences, he refrained from the temptation to set his sights higher.
Taking the opposite view, Paul tore around London gorging himself on culture, as if he had only a short time left to live. “People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great,” he breathlessly told a reporter. “I must know what people are doing.” To facilitate his acculturation, Paul took piano lessons from a teacher at the Guildhall School of Music, George Martin’s alma mater, studying composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, and read avant-garde poetry, which he plucked from the cluttered stalls at Better Books. “It was a very free, formless time for me,” he recalled. Most evenings, he capered about town in the company of John Dunbar and his wife, Marianne Faithfull, or turned up at Barry and Sue Miles’s bohemian flat, curling up amid the clutter on their unusually hard chaise longue, to get “wrecked” and discuss “all these crazy ideas” about life and art while listening to jazz. Robert Fraser became his art guru, and through him Paul met Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Jim Dine, as well as arty filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni, who was in the midst of shooting Blow-Up. Surrounded by the right people, Paul delighted in those circumstances where his celebrity mattered naught.
George publicly surfaced from his romantic interlude with Indian music—“Sometimes before I go to sleep,” he fantasized, “I think what it would be like to be inside Ravi’s sitar”—in mid-January to announce that he’d married Pattie Boyd. The wedding itself came as no surprise; Beatles fans had been expecting it for months. But the timing of it, on January 21, while John and Ringo were vacationing in Trinidad, caught most friends unaware. He and Pattie gave their families only a few days’ notice to join them in a quiet ceremony at the Leatherhead and Esher registry, in Epsom, near his home, with Paul and Brian serving as best men. George was now the third of the Beatles to be “taken out of circulation” (if in name only), and he was quick to underscore the onus it placed on the single-minded Paul. “Now he’s the only Beatle left…. He won’t get a moment’s peace.”
But Paul had something else on his mind. He and John finished “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” as well as “Here, There and Everywhere,” which they’d originally blocked out in Austria, during the filming of Help! And during his final days as a lodger at the Ashers’ flat, before moving to St. John’s Wood, Paul began an ambitious new song. On those dismally gray afternoons when Margaret Asher wasn’t giving oboe lessons, Paul used to disappear into the cluttered, low-ceilinged basement music room to, as he so blithely put it, “have a fiddle around.” There, hunched over the rugged upright piano, he produced an achingly haunting line of melody while vamping on an E minor chord. “Ola Na Tungee / Blowing his mind in the dark / With a pipeful of clay” were the lyrics that Donovan recalled hearing when Paul showed up at his flat to jam a few days later. The words were meaningless, just filler or suitable phrases to push him through the composing process. “Often you just block songs out and words just come into your mind,” Paul explained much later. They became “insinuated into your consciousness… and when they do it’s hard to get rid of them.” But not long afterward, the lyric had evolved as “Dazzie-de-da-zu / Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been.” Picks up the rice in the church…Paul remembered how “those words just fell out”; it was one of those accidents, those magical moments that had befallen him over the years, seemingly immaterial at first, “but they started to set the tone of it all.”
Dazzie-de-da-zu officially became Eleanor Rigby in March. Paul says he borrowed the first name from Eleanor Bron, their comely Help! costar, with whom “John had a fling,” and grafted it onto Rigby, the name of an old shop, Rigby & Amp, in the Bristol dock area that he’d stumbled over during a visit to see Jane perform at the Old Vic. It was so deliciously “ordinary”: Eleanor Rigby. He had no trouble envisioning someone by that name picking up rice in a church, waiting by a window, dying alone. And those images helped him “piece all the ideas together”—the melody and the chords, everything—before taking the nearly finished song to John for a polish.
John had also been busy sketching songs, working late afternoons in the small smoke-filled music room at the top of his house. There, despite Julian’s interruptions and his growing estrangement from Cynthia, he eschewed the artsy, Dylan-inspired epics like “Norwegian Wood” and “In My Life” and concentrated instead on producing a number of simpler, more hummable songs. There wasn’t much left to do on “She Said She Said,” which had been inspired by Peter Fonda’s hallucinating poolside rambling and pretty much fleshed out in Los Angeles (except for the title, which materialized during the recording session). But he’d gotten a head start on two well-put songs: the pithy, rhythmic “And Your Bird Can Sing,” with its exuberant guitar riff, and “Doctor Robert,” which was “a joke,” according to John, lambasting the socially prominent clientele who got scrip for casual drug use from a chichi New York internist. Without any consensus—or deadline—a new album was percolating.
The Beatles had always gone all out to make great-sounding songs; now it was time, they decided, to make great-sounding records. If you listened to American records, they argued, there was a natural brilliance to them, an excitement emanating from the technical side that made the performances pop. Even on 45s, the bass sound was thick and rich, the trebles clear as crystal. “The Americans seemed to be ahead of us in those days,” admitted Norman Smith, the Beatles’ crackerjack engineer. And it frustrated the Beatles no end. They had impeccable ears; they could hear the difference.
Listening, however, wasn’t going to help matters. Abbey Road was still in the Dark Ages as far as technical practices were concerned. The four-track machines used to record every artist—from the London Philharmonic to Herman’s Hermits—were regarded as dinosaurs elsewhere in the world. Microphone setups were outmoded. Engineers were advised against getting creative—executives called it tampering—with the equipment. There were still regulations, overseen by a tyrannical studio authority, about how bright the sound could be. “The Beatles… were screaming for more sophisticated equipment, more flexible equipment, that could give better definition,” Smith explained.
No one, however, was holding his breath. If their request for a better atmosphere in the studio was any indication, they were in for a long haul. “What EMI did for them was to put in special lighting,” George Martin recalled, laughing, “… [which amounted to] three fluorescent tubes—one white, one red, and one blue.” What about Memphis? someone suggested. Those relentless, hard-driving rhythm sections, the punchy horns, that uninhibited, gospel-inspired groove recently reborn as soul—the high-voltage energy that came through on Bobby Bland’s and Otis Redding’s records under the auspices of Booker T and the MG’s—all that plus a real studio. Without even discussing it with George Martin, the Beatles dispatched Brian Epstein to Memphis, Tennessee, the last week in March to “look over the recording studios” there and to cut a deal with guitarist Steve Cropper to produce the sessions. George and John were especially excited to relocate overseas. “It’ll shake up everything,” George insisted. “You don’t grow as a band unless you shake things up, you know.”
But getting a fair shake in the States came at too high a price. For all Cropper’s attempts to accommodate them, it remained too much of a gamble. “They wanted a fantastic amount of money to use the facilities there,” Paul recalled, and he suspected that it had nothing to do with overhead and everything to do with the Beatles. “They were obviously trying to take us for a ride.” With that, the Beatles immediately booked time to record at Abbey Road.
The first song they recorded, on April 6, 1966, established the pace for everything that was to come. Just after 8 P.M. the Beatles, along with their trusty acolytes Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, George Martin, and a new, embarrassingly young engineer named Geoff Emerick who had been promoted to replace Norman Smith (otherwise engaged with his new discovery, Pink Floyd), assembled in Studio Three at Abbey Road to begin work on a song with the mysteriously obscure title of “Mark 1.” The time of the session itself was quite extraordinary. Studio discipline dictated that all evening sessions end at ten o’clock, thanks to a long-standing ordinance by the local council that imposed a midnight curfew on recording in what was primarily a residential area. The rule was strictly observed for twenty-five years—that is, until the Beatles shoved it out the door. According to Vera Samwell, who booked the four studios, “the Beatles just recorded whenever they wanted to. They went into the studios and didn’t come out until they’d finished and nobody ever had the nerve to ask them to leave.” So the session that night ran—officially—from seven to ten, but as the clock struck twelve, and then one, the Beatles continued to work.
From the beginning, John’s fertile imagination had conceptualized “Mark 1” in a special way. Paul recalled that the seed for it germinated on an afternoon in early March, when he and John visited the newly opened Indica Bookshop, ostensibly to encourage a few sales. John requested a book by an author whose name he pronounced as “Nitz Ga,” and only after a long, ineffectual search did Barry Miles finally turn up The Portable Nietzsche. In the interim, John browsed the stalls and pounced on a copy of The Psychedelic Experience, by Dr. Timothy Leary. Opening the book, he read: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.” In fact, Leary had pinched most of that directly from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which, in turn, gave John license to help himself to the lines. Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It was an irresistible mantra—for so many different reasons. Rushing home, John dropped acid according to Leary’s instructions. “I did it just like he said in the book,” John recalled. Almost immediately, the words came: inscrutable strings of words started threading around ever more gauzy abstractions. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void… That you may see the meaning of within… It was an acid freak’s bonanza!
He played a verse of it for Paul a few days later during a meeting at Brian Epstein’s flat. Incredibly, it “was all on the chord of C,” according to Paul. Somehow, John had stripped the music to its most basic structure, the level at which melody and rhythm contract to an unmodulated drone, in the fashion of Indian music. He had bored into the pores of the song until it vibrated with clarity. Paul was intrigued but wondered how George Martin would deal with it, especially considering their reputation for churning out melodic three- and four-chord hits. To his credit, Martin “didn’t flinch at all when John played it to him,” Paul recalled. “He just said, ‘Hmmm, I see, yes. Hmm hmm.’ ” Martin, from Paul’s standpoint, thought it was “rather interesting.”
Interesting—but unfinished. The lyric was as stark as the melody: only one verse in length. “We worked very hard to stretch it into two verses,” Paul explained. “We wracked our brains but couldn’t come up with any more words because we felt it already said everything we wanted to say in the two verses.” Nor did the structure allow for a middle eight. At that length, the track would come in at just over a minute. They had to find a way to make it longer while still preserving its originality.
It was Paul who came up with a solution: tape loops. From his growing infatuation with Stockhausen, especially Gesang der Jünglinge, a composition that fused vocal and electronically produced notes, he’d discovered a process of recording whereby if he removed the erase head from a tape recorder and replaced it with a loop of tape, he could play a short phrase or sound that would ultimately saturate itself. As George Martin described it: “It went round and round and overdubbed itself until the point of saturation, and that made a funny sound.” Martin said recording technicians called it musique concrète, or reinforced music. There were infinite combinations of sounds that could be produced by this method, from which Paul made a number of “little symphonies.” He demonstrated it for the others in the studio, encouraging George and Ringo to make loops as well. Then, Martin “listen[ed] to them at various speeds, backwards and forwards,” in order to integrate them into the recording.
Meanwhile, John discussed several ideas for the vocal with his producer, each one a conceit of his overactive imagination. “He wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a hilltop,” Martin recalled. Most producers would have dismissed such a cheeky idea out of hand, but Martin, a wise and patient man, gave the Beatles enormous leeway. Their ideas might sound like gibberish initially, but he recognized that because of their lack of formal musical training, they often only needed someone to “translate” what they meant, to express it in terms that made sense to structured technicians, and in that respect Martin viewed his role as “the official interpreter.” In any case, he struggled to create some kind of a Tibetan influence or effect in the studio, realizing that ordinary echo or reverb wouldn’t do the trick. Recording out of doors was also out of the question; there was no way to contain or control the sound. And John’s suggestion—that “we suspend him from a rope in the middle of the studio ceiling, put a mike in the middle of the floor, give him a push, and he’d sing as he went around and around,” according to Geoff Emerick—was met with a meaningful, albeit barely tolerant smile. (When pressed by John, they were always said to be “looking into it,” Emerick recalled.)
It was the nineteen-year-old Emerick who eventually came up with an inventive solution. He suggested putting John’s voice through a Leslie speaker and re-recording it as it came back out. To a straitlaced, formalistic EMI technician, this sounded about as nutty as suspending John from a rope, but the more Martin thought about it, the more he saw its possibilities. A Leslie was a speaker with variable rotating baffles that was usually paired with a Hammond console organ. “By putting his voice through that and then recording it again, you got a kind of intermittent vibrato effect,” Martin explained. It was a revolutionary idea—but considered taboo at Abbey Road, where engineers were discouraged from “playing about with microphones.”
With Martin’s “support and approval,” Emerick happily rigged the mikes for the Leslie. (“It meant actually breaking into the circuitry,” Emerick recalled.) The rest was a matter of simply forcing John’s vocals through the vibrato, much like vegetables through a ricer. “I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker,” Emerick said. “It was just one of sheer amazement.” The Beatles were beside themselves with glee. Stoned—which they were most of the time in the studio—the experiments became part prank, part innovation. In that kind of dreamy, altered—impractical—state, the possibilities were limitless. Recording became no longer just another way of putting out songs, but a new way of creating them.
Of course, once the Beatles got their hands on the controls, they found it impossible to leave them alone. “The group encouraged us to break the rules,” Geoff Emerick recalled. “It was implanted… that every instrument should sound unlike itself.” As well as each of the Beatles. John flirted with the idea of having “thousands of monks chanting” in the background of “Mark 1,” a prospect about as likely as booking the Dalai Lama as a sideman. A way to simulate it, however, was to double-track John’s voice—that is, to re-record John singing a duplicate vocal and superimpose it over the original as a way of thickening the texture—but the sound was severely limited by the lack of available tracks. Besides, John dreaded redoing a vocal—he absolutely hated it.
In a rather magnanimous gesture, Ken Townsend, the studio’s manager of technical operations, decided to tackle the problem himself. He went home that night, amid much grousing and chin-rubbing, and came up with a solution that would forever change the state of recording. Hunched over a cannibalized tape recorder, he concluded that if you took the signals off both the recording and the playback heads and delayed them, it produced two sound images instead of the usual one. Moreover, he discovered that by varying speed and frequencies, you could make adjustments to deliver a desired effect. Artificial double-tracking—or ADT, as it became known—revolutionized not only the recording process but the way in which vocals were subsequently heard. Eventually every artist and producer put it to good use on sessions. What’s more, it opened the frontiers of experimentation to all sorts of electronic recording devices.
John was especially “knocked out” by the sound. It shaved hours, maybe days, off the recording process, let alone the annoying inconvenience of having to sing vocal take after vocal take. Tell me again what it is? John wondered. How does it work? “Well, John,” Martin replied earnestly, seizing the opportunity to have some fun at his artist’s expense, “it’s a double-bifurcated sploshing flange.” A sploshing flange! According to Martin, John knew he was putting him on, but from that point on, the technique known throughout the recording industry as flanging was practiced.
After sampling the wattage behind the spooky-sounding “Mark 1,” which they eventually retitled “Tomorrow Never Knows,” it was virtually inevitable that the Beatles would want to tinker in some way with every new song. A good case in point was the subsequent session for “Got to Get You into My Life,” which had begun, according to studio notes, as “a very acoustic number.” Paul had not composed it in a romantic gist, as the lyric might indicate, but ironically as an ode to drugs. “It was a song about pot actually,” he admitted—not about acid, as John later suspected (Paul hadn’t taken acid yet)—written to a great extent after Bob Dylan turned on the Beatles in New York. At first, the Beatles recorded it as a standard rhythm track, with George Martin sitting in on the organ. In the initial eight takes done over two days (April 6 and 7), familiar Beatlesque backing vocals—John and George repeating “I need your love” behind the refrain—were still discernible beneath the layers of overdubs. But nearly a month and a half later, they were scrapped for an entire brass section—two trumpets and three saxophones—to give the song “a definite jazz feel.” Everyone felt they were on the right track. The horns managed to open up and brighten the song in tantalizing ways. It was clear upon playback, however, that the jazz feel was way too precious, too sedate; the song didn’t rock enough. Moreover, the horns didn’t scream like those on American records. Once Geoff Emerick reevaluated the setup, he hit on a method designed to sharpen the arrangement. Instead of recording the brass in the standard way, by placing the horns a polite six feet away from the mikes, he sandwiched the works—bringing “the mikes… right down in the bells of the instruments”—which fairly electrified the track, giving it liftoff. Then, to launch it into orbit, they overdubbed an additional three trumpets in the coda to match the intensity of Paul’s vocal ad-libs, sealing in a blazing pop R&B feel.
In the sessions that followed, covering “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Doctor Robert,” the Beatles reverted to fairly straightforward recording techniques. On “Paperback Writer,” which John and Paul composed in an epistolary construction, they relied on a “heavier,” rock ’n roll sound utilizing “a guitar lick on a fuzzy, loud guitar,” as John recalled, but otherwise kept it fairly straight. The only special effect employed was to tweak the bass by using a loudspeaker as a microphone so that the throbbing sound practically jumped off the grooves.
“Rain,” however, was a whole other issue. As far as the writing went, it was “a co-effort,” according to Paul’s account, but they ran into problems the minute it was brought into the studio. No matter how the Beatles ran it down, they “couldn’t get a backing track” to work. They couldn’t find a groove; there was just no punch to it. At some point in the proceedings, they remembered how full and meaty certain instruments sounded when they were slowed down. Drums especially took on serious weight, providing “a big, ponderous, thunderous backing” like “a giant’s footstep.” That gave them another idea. If they played the rhythm track faster than normal and then slowed it down on playback, it thickened the whole texture of the song. They used the same effect for John’s sleepy vocal. But even that didn’t satisfy the Beatles’ thirst for experimentation.
No one is certain exactly whose idea it was to run the tape backward. John claimed it was accidental, following an extremely late night at Abbey Road. The Beatles were halfway through work on “Rain,” according to George, who recalled how each of them took home a rough mix of the song on a reference tape tails out, which meant that the engineer had not rewound it on the tiny four-inch spools before handing it to them. Apparently, John had forgotten that by the time his smoke-filled car pulled into Kenwood. “I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana,” he recalled. Just in case he wasn’t wrecked enough, however, he lit up another fat joint before threading the tape onto his recorder, tails out, and played it—backward. In the confusion, John must have experienced a whopper of a paranoid flash; the sound was unlike anything he’d ever heard before, a piercing scronnnch whuppp-whuppp-whuppp bisected by shreds of keening feedback. By John’s account, it sparked an epiphany. “I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know…. Listen to this!’ ”
Perhaps. George Martin, however, always maintained that the effect at the end of “Rain” was his idea. “The Beatles weren’t quite sure what to do at that point,” he recalled. “While they were out having a break one evening, I lifted off a bit of John’s voice. [I] put it onto a bit of tape and turned it around and shoved it back in—slid it around until it was in the right position…. And I played it to John when they came back.”
There is probably some truth to both accounts because of the intense collaboration that paced the recording of the album. It’s entirely likely that John conjured the effect, and every bit as likely that Martin perfected it. What is indisputable is that the excitement was contagious. Everyone in the studio reveled in the process, running instrument and vocal tapes in myriad directions. They used it on “Taxman” and throughout George’s guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping.” There is even some reverse backing on “She Said She Said.” At some point, however, it had gotten out of hand. “And that was awful,” Martin recalled, “because everything we did after that was backwards. Every guitar solo was backwards, and they tried to think backwards in writing.”
Backward or forward, the work was producing amazing results. There was a sense of real adventure—and real accomplishment—in the studio. Ideas were ricocheting off the walls, the boys were playing way over their heads. “We were really starting to find ourselves in the studio,” Ringo observed. Some of the residual magic he attributed to drugs, which “were kicking in a little more heavily,” but even with the added chemical stimulation, the Beatles’ focus remained razor-sharp. “We were really hard workers… we worked like dogs to get it right.”
While the Beatles thrived in the sanctuary of the studio, other events continued to build on their astounding legacy. A month or so after they began work on their next album, Capitol Records issued a self-styled Beatles album titled Yesterday… and Today that featured a hodgepodge of songs left off the American abridged versions of Help! and Rubber Soul, along with the singles “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” and three tracks raided from the Revolver sessions. It was an odious but common enough practice; Capitol had done it intermittently as a way of customizing the Beatles catalogue—getting an extra album or two out of a popular band by packaging leftovers and material in the vault under an innocuous title. And even though the Beatles complained about it, the royalty windfall from its sales served to mitigate their grievances.
At Capitol’s request, the Beatles were to supply a cover for the LP. Specifically, the label asked for a standard picture of the band, encouraging them to use something from an old Bob Freeman session, but the prospect of another posed portrait, like Beatles for Sale or even Rubber Soul, didn’t appeal to them at all. “We [wanted] to do something different,” John recalled. They had felt constrained by the boring composition of the previous covers and, as early as February, discussed several other options for Revolver, including the use of negative imagery and religious iconography. Now, with a smaller American release, it would give them a chance to test some of the more extreme ideas that had been kicking around.
Brian put them in touch with an Australian photographer named Bob Whitaker, who “was a bit of a surrealist,” according to John, and admired the imagery of Dalí disciple Merit Oppenheimer and German artist Hans Bellmer, author of the controversial book Die Puppe, which contained pictures of bizarrely dismembered toy dolls. Whitaker inveigled the Beatles with a concept that would depict how “he, as an outsider, viewed the world’s perception of the Fab Four.” Even though the album was called Yesterday… and Today, he proposed they subtitle it A Somnambulant Adventure so that they could place past and present within the context of mortality.
If this was all a bit of pseudophilosophical bullshit, it nonetheless appealed to the Beatles’ sense of the avant-garde, as well as to their pot-indulged fantasies. Meanwhile, it would help put an end to the Beatles’ innocent image. “We were supposed to be sort of angels,” bemoaned John, who “wanted to show that we were aware of life.”
Even so, the Beatles didn’t know what to expect when, on March 25, they arrived at Whitaker’s rented studio on the Vale, in a fashionable area of Chelsea. The props they saw that day were mostly remnants collected from a butcher shop and doll factory: pungent sausage links, a grotesque pig’s head, joints of raw meat, white smocks, dismembered dolls with distorted faces, and numerous lifelike glass eyes. Working quickly to oblige the Beatles’ notoriously short attention span, Whitaker whipped through several outlandish setups. He photographed John, Paul, George, and Ringo holding a string of sausages in front of a young girl; John clutching a cardboard box, with the number 2,000,000 written on it, over Ringo’s head; George banging carpenter’s nails into John’s head. He then dressed the Beatles in the butcher’s smocks, positioned them on a bench, and arranged the meat on their laps, draping an extra joint carefully over John’s shoulder. The poses felt “gross… and stupid” at first. No one had any idea what the imagery was supposed to reflect. Eventually, however, the Beatles “got into it,” smirking like schoolboys when Whitaker placed four decapitated dolls in between each of them and handed them the heads.
The infamous “butcher cover” was delivered to Capitol the following week, where it quickly landed on the desk of label president Alan Livingston. Inundated by objections from his staff, he immediately called Brian Epstein and demanded an explanation. “It’s their comment on war,” he was told, an interpretation that was as facetious as it was unsupportable. Paul has admitted that “we thought it was stunning and shocking, but we didn’t see all the connotations.” Livingston doubted he could put out the cover, and Brian promised he would ask the Beatles to reconsider. The next day, however, he indignantly “came back and said: ‘They absolutely insist that’s what they want.’ ”
Over the years, Livingston had put his foot down when artists became unreasonable—there was no upside to placating their outlandish demands—but he couldn’t afford any kind of confrontation with a group like the Beatles. Going against all instincts, he ordered the cover into production and shipped out several hundred advance copies to his national sales force. “Word came back very fast that the dealers would not touch it,” Livingston recalled. “They would not put the album in their stores.”
Unfortunately for Capitol, about half a million copies of the cover had already been printed, which forced the expensive process of unpacking cartons of records and replacing the sleeve. Meanwhile, on June 14, the label’s press manager issued a letter stating that “the album cover is being discarded.” It included a disclaimer from Livingston: “The original cover, created in England, was intended as ‘Pop Art’ satire. However, a sampling of 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.”
The Beatles were predictably up in arms over the recall. It wasn’t the picture so much as the way Capitol had caved in to so-called public opinion that offended their sense of fair play. “I especially pushed for it to be an album cover, just to break the image,” John insisted. He was sick and tired of the Beatles’ constantly being held up as altar boys in contrast to the scruffy Rolling Stones. It wasn’t an accurate comparison—and it needed correcting. The butcher sleeve headed in the right direction. Paul agreed: “We weren’t against a little shock now and then; it was part of our make-up.”
But the Beatles knew the importance of picking their battles. Their recording contract was coming up for renewal, and instead of granting worldwide rights to EMI again, Brian wanted to negotiate directly with Capitol for the United States, where he was sure to get a substantial signing bonus and a larger royalty. In fact, he made no secret of the fact that he was already putting out feelers to other American labels. Nat Weiss had introduced Brian to Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, both of whom “he greatly respected.” They’d also visited Columbia and seen Clive Davis, who “thought the Beatles had peaked and wasn’t prepared to give them a large offer.” RCA salivated at the prospect of pairing them with Elvis, but when Rocco Laginestra tried to impress Brian by presenting a copy of Chet Atkins Picks the Beatles, any deal was as good as dead. (“They are cabbage salesmen, not record people,” he told Weiss.) There were still barrels of money to be made in America, that was for sure. Was it really worth jeopardizing that over the butcher cover? He put this to the Beatles, who clearly understood the implications, which is why they quietly agreed to substitute another Whitaker photograph—what John referred to as an “awful-looking picture of us looking just as deadbeat but supposed to be a happy-go-lucky foursome”—of the band posed alongside a steamer trunk.
There were, of course, other things the Beatles earmarked as worth fighting for. For one thing, they absolutely dreaded being dragged around the British cinema circuit on another scattershot package tour. There was some sense, they agreed, to remaining barricaded behind dingy hotel-room doors when playing before a paying crowd of fifty thousand fans, but not for an audience of six or nine hundred. They agreed to appear at the annual NME poll-winners’ show, on May 1, but it was to be their last-ever British concert performance. That wasn’t the only setback. As late as December 1965, the Beatles were still turning up regularly for every lightweight TV and radio appearance. But since January, they’d refused all media requests aside from a live spot on Top of the Pops on June 16 (Melody Maker reported that they’d “succumbed to pressure from fans”). Recording occupied most all of their time; otherwise, the excuse they gave was lame: “It was too much trouble to go and fight our way through all the screaming hordes of people to mime the latest single.” The truth was, it was becoming harder to reproduce onstage the kind of effects-laden music they were creating in the studio. Foot pedals for guitars were still a few years off, there were no remote sound-mixing boards, no faders, no monitors. Their new songs, like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contained crucial sounds that could be made only in the studio. It’d take a pretty substantial horn section to pull off “Got to Get You into My Life.”
A Melody Maker poll reflected the residual impact this had on the Beatles’ popularity by a tabulation showing that 80 percent of respondents were greatly disappointed by the band’s dearth of personal appearances, with only slightly less declaring that Beatlemania had passed its peak. But the Beatles couldn’t have cared less. “Musically, we’re only just starting,” George told a reporter. “We’ve realized for ourselves that as far as recording is concerned most of the things that recording men have said were impossible for 39 years are in fact very possible.”
Brian had promised them that he’d find an alternative method to publicize the “Paperback Writer”/“Rain”single, but EMI wasn’t helpful. Any shortcuts would be frowned upon, he was warned.
No one recalls who came up with the solution, but sometime in early May they decided to make amusing promotional films of both songs—lipsynced versions set to comical scenarios, not unlike those in A Hard Day’s Night—which would be sent out in place of live performances. The whole thing, shot in half a day (by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg), cost a mere couple of thousand pounds. Their old exi pal Klaus Voormann was hired to organize the whole affair in the lovely manicured gardens behind Chiswick House, in West London, and a new medium was miraculously born. “I don’t think we even thought of calling them ‘videos,’ ” Ringo speculated, but videos indeed they were—the first of their kind, and eighteen years ahead of their explosion on the forefront of pop culture.
On June 16, 1966, Vic Lewis, NEMS’ swashbuckling booking agent, took off from Heathrow Airport for the Far East, intent on making final arrangements for the Beatles’ upcoming visit to Tokyo and Manila in early July. Under normal circumstances, Brian Epstein would have tended to this himself. “But by 1966,” Tony Barrow writes in an unpublished memoir, “his alarming ill health and his time-consuming personal struggle with debilitating drugs, drink and sex problems led him to devote substantially less attention to the essential details of his artists’ management and concert promotion companies.”
As much as he tried to hide it, Brian was a physical and emotional mess. Manic depression had thrust its grip on his already volatile personality, accelerating the severe mood swings he experienced randomly throughout the day. “And the drugs made things much worse,” says Peter Brown. “The more the drugs took hold, the worse his condition became.” Drugs had become one of the central focuses of Brian’s life—uppers and Tuinal—mixed with plenty of alcohol. And now a new vice to grapple with: John “Diz” Gillespie, a slightly built, baby-faced aspiring actor from Ohio, in his mid-twenties, who had a prodigious capacity for meting out both love and violence. To a manic-depressive masochist, the combination hit the trifecta.
Diz, in Nat Weiss’s estimation, amounted to nothing more than “a garden-variety hustler.” Weiss first encountered the boy when the Beatles played Shea Stadium and claims he “knew exactly what he was” the moment he laid eyes on him. “Diz was a predator,” he says, and what he wanted was money. For a while, Brian bankrolled his phantom acting career, signing Diz to an artist’s contract with NEMS and authorizing a modest weekly stipend. But when that didn’t pan out, there were arguments and violence. Fistfights were a common enough occurrence. Valuable antique vases would be heaved against the wall or mirrors shattered during late-night assaults. “I went over [to Brian’s flat] one morning and found the glass-top coffee table smashed to smithereens and five dozen tulips strewn all over,” Ken Partridge recalls. “Diz had beaten Brian up and stolen his records, although Brian rather enjoyed it in a funny sort of way.” In New York, Diz demanded three thousand dollars from Nat Weiss, ostensibly to buy a car, although the lawyer suspected that it was going for drugs. Weiss wrote him a check but warned: “If you show up again after I give it to you, I promise you I have friends who will deal with you.”
Threats meant nothing. Diz showed up—only in London next time, where he was received by the lovesick Brian as the “sweetest, most special plaything, the object of my dreams.” Almost immediately, however, they reverted to their old pattern, taking obscene handfuls of drugs and beating the shit out of each other. Peter Brown outlines an explosive incident in his book, The Love You Make, when Brian ordered Diz out of his house, at which point, he said, “Diz raced to the kitchen, grabbed the largest knife he could find, and held it to Brian’s jugular vein while extracting an additional sum of money from Brian’s wallet.”
By the end of May and the beginning of June, the Beatles were busy putting the finishing touches on their new album, which was perceived among them as defining “a new British sound,” if not a brilliant leap forward.
“Taxman” was finally behind them. The scathing satire, with the slurry, psychedelic edge, is the strongest of a record three George Harrison compositions that made the final cut, and an extraordinary contribution to the album’s aesthetic sensibility. Among the Beatles, true genius radiated from the Lennon and McCartney nexus, but “Taxman” is a huge achievement. It is wry, witty, caustic, and concentrated, with “sharp, incisive jolts of energy” that burst from the song’s offbeat “studio-verité” introduction: wandering notes, a cough, a false count. What a delightful surprise!
Like many topical lyrics, “Taxman” sprang from the anger and disillusionment that followed a meeting with Bryce Hammer, the Beatles’ accountants, weeks before the session began. “I had discovered I was paying a huge amount of money to the taxman,” complained George. Paul recalled George’s “righteous indignation” in those business meetings. “Well, I don’t want to pay tax,” he’d fume. “It’s not fair.”
George’s response would open the album. Everything is taxable according to his account: the street, your seat, the heat, and your feet. No matter what you do or how much you have—pay up and shut up. And it doesn’t stop there. After you are dead, he advises listeners, be sure “to declare the pennies on your eyes.” “Taxman” is as sly and critical as anything Dylan was writing. Of course, John had helped; he said he “threw in a few one-liners to help the song along.” And Paul doubled on guitars, playing looping bass lines and delivering the song’s signature savage guitar solo. But as far as first-rate songwriting went, with “Taxman” George had finally arrived.
Earlier that month “Eleanor Rigby” had been given the full symphonic treatment, courtesy of a lush arrangement by George Martin—and inspired by Bernard Herrmann’s score for Fahrenheit 451—that featured a double string quartet: four violins, two violas, and two cellos. This prompted Paul to lend a similar flourish to “For No One.” The song is an elegant ballad about a crumbling relationship built atop a descending bass line that he’d written in the bathroom of a Swiss chalet in March.
The Beatles let their hair down for one of the album’s final tracks. On “Yellow Submarine” they gave a blunt comic edge to a children’s song Paul had brought in by layering it with gentle wisecracks and sound effects from their boyhood iconography. Studio Two was in complete disarray as the four Beatles, along with Neil, Mal, and a full battalion of Abbey Road irregulars, ransacked the trap room, a small equipment closet just inside the door, where a trove of noisemaking effects was conveniently stashed. The vast wooden floor was suddenly littered with “chains, ship’s bells, hand bells from wartime, tap dancing mats, whistles, hooters, wind machines, thunderstorm machines”—every oddity they could lay their hands on. A cash register (the one eventually used to ring up Pink Floyd’s “Money”) was dragged out, along with several buckets, a set of bar glasses, even an old metal bath that was promptly filled with water.
“They had a whole crowd of people to do the effects,” recalled Geoff Emerick, who crisscrossed the studio like a jittery football player, attempting to properly mike the gadgets. Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, and Pattie Harrison were recruited to rattle and clink various hardware. The Beatles’ chauffeur, Alf Bicknell, swirled chains through the bath, engineers John Skinner and Terry Condon made whooshing noises. Ringo handled the vocals with his typical deadpan panache, and with George Martin at the controls, it was all very reminiscent of the goofy Spike Milligan sessions he’d produced in an earlier age. Everyone laughed and hooted as the tape captured the hijinks. At some point after hours of overdubs, Mal Evans strapped on a bass drum and, bashing away, led a conga line around the cluttered studio while the ensemble chanted the memorable refrain: “We all live in a yellow submarine….” It was party time in Studio Two.
Oddly enough, by the time the Beatles set out for a three-date concert tour of Germany on June 23, the LP still wasn’t titled. There were plenty of plausible candidates, however. Originally, everyone got behind calling it Abracadabra until Neil discovered another album with the same name. Lounging around a fifth-floor suite in the Bayerischer Hof in Munich, following a rather rusty opening concert at the Circus-Krone-Bau, other titles were proposed—and discarded: Pendulums; Fat Man and Bobby; and After Geography, Ringo’s send-up of the Stones’ recent album, Aftermath. George’s tape of the album, which blared in the background, didn’t inspire much. “Let’s just call it Rock ’n Roll Hits of ’66,” Paul suggested, getting prickly. “That’ll solve it.” But, of course, that only drew groans. John came up with Beatles on Safari, and Paul offered Magic Circle, which John tweaked and twisted into Four Sides of the Circle. Later, Revolver seemed to fall out of the sky. Paul put it up for consideration, and it was an immediate hit. Revolver.
It seemed fitting that the Beatles pondered album titles in Germany. Two days later they were due in Hamburg, scene of their emergence—officially—as the Beatles. It had been only four years since their last show at the Star-Club, four years since they went from being the amphetamine-stoked resident band in a Reeperbahn rathole to millionaire Members of the British Empire and a worldwide phenomenon. Four years: in that brief span they’d collected nineteen number one hits and six gold albums; they’d made two box-office smashes, become virtuosos, and played in front of more people than any other act in the history of show business.
The late-night train ride from Essen to Hamburg on June 25 was especially poignant. In the suite of smoky coach cars, Tony Barrow played host to several dozen press and members of the entourage who partied noisily until dawn. But up ahead, in a private compartment, the mood was warm, sentimental. There were only eight people in the luxurious velvet-draped car, the same one that had transported Queen Elizabeth and the royal party through Germany months before, and the significance was lost on no one. Throughout the five-hour journey, the little company cut appreciative glances at one another: the four Beatles, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, Brian Epstein, and Peter Brown. “We all knew each other from way back in Liverpool,” recalls Brown, “and we didn’t have to prove anything to each other. It was relaxing, fun. There was a lot of comfort, all of us sitting there like that, together, in peace.”
Essen had been neither comfortable nor peaceful. “At Essen, the brutality started to show itself,” Melody Maker’s Alan Walsh reported. “At each concert over-enthusiastic fans were dragged outside and on several occasions were beaten-up by bouncers who apparently seemed to enjoy it.” Boys, thugs—not the usual gaggle of teenage girls—behaved like disembodied spirits, screaming, singing along, jerking their bodies back and forth, and fighting among themselves. Hordes of brutal-looking, jackbooted police, with loaded Lugers strapped to their hips, moved in with “huge, muzzled dogs at their heels,” trying to move the crowd back. And it got uglier outside.
Nevertheless, for the first few shows the Beatles played, the country cast its inimitable spell, with the sets a core of old up-tempo rockers powered by the atomic beat. It was almost as if they could hear Bruno Koschmider demanding: “Mach schau, mach schau!” and responded, as they had years earlier, with exaggerated body language.
Every one of them was looking forward to arriving in Hamburg. So much had changed since their stay there as penniless wannabes; they were “still just the boys,” as Paul insisted much later, but “[they’d] got famous in the meantime.” Bettina Derlin, the Star-Club’s buxom bartender, pushed through a cordon of police at Hamburg’s railway station to greet the Beatles’ train. What a blast from the past! John, who’d always fancied the girl, couldn’t get over her moxie. “How about Bettina being on the station [platform] at seven o’clock this morning!” he marveled when the touring party arrived at the Schloss Hotel in nearby Tremsbuttel later that day. But the procession of familiar faces didn’t stop there. “[A] lot of old ghosts materialized out of the woodwork,” George remembered (although there were several—the pimps and pill pushers—he admitted, who remained better off buried). The backstage area at Ernst-Merck-Halle, where the Beatles played two concerts, resembled an old school reunion. Bettina was there, this time with an old girlfriend of Paul’s in tow. Horst Fascher bared his lethal grin. Bert Kaempfert swept in with his family, and as the boys spotted him John broke into a creaky rendition of “Strangers in the Night.” It was old home night for the Beatles. But no “ghost” hit them as powerfully as when Astrid Kirchherr walked through the door.
Astrid—Stu’s girl, his wife. Their German muse. Astrid Kirchherr—soon to be Mrs. Gibson Kemp, having become engaged to Ringo’s young replacement in Rory Storm’s band. And, of course, she looked absolutely ravishing, just as they remembered her.
It was hard for the Beatles to tear themselves away from her. She was someone from their past whom they’d loved and who’d never tried to capitalize on or abuse their friendship—a rarity, it seemed, these days. Moreover, she’d brought John a sheaf of letters that he’d written to Stuart Sutcliffe in 1961 and 1962—“the best present I’ve had in years,” he told Astrid, meaning it—and the effect of holding them again made his hands tremble. Occasions like these were too few and far between on their round-the-world odyssey as the Beatles. They helped remind these four boys every now and then that they were real people, with real needs.
Signs of strain showed at their press conference just before the Hamburg shows. In place of their trademark Scouse wit, the Beatles snapped and snarled at the German media, who fired a barrage of unusually inane questions at them. “What kind of questions are these?” John fumed after a reporter commented on Ringo’s complexion. “Come on, are there any members of the press here?” Later, while Paul attempted to respond to a question about his dreams during sleep, John interrupted: “What do you think we are? What do you dream of? Fuckin’ hell!” All these infantile questions—“Do you wear long pants in the wintertime?” or “Do you polish your MBE medal?”—he could bear no longer. If the press was going to act like idiots, he’d respond as he pleased. No one said he had to behave like a trained seal—and he wouldn’t. Not John Lennon.
No, he’d had it with the media and their “soft questions.” And he’d had it with Brian’s restrictions about saying what was on his mind. They might have been okay for one of Larry Parnes’s teenage attractions, they may have once even served a purpose for the struggling young Beatles, but John was twenty-five years old and had a mind of his own. If Paul wanted to play by the rules, that was his prerogative. John had decided that he wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut.
In fact, he’d already started speaking his mind. In March the London Evening Standard published an interview he’d done with Maureen Cleave, in which John had said:
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
The article was picked up on April 13 by the San Francisco Chronicle but didn’t merit an editorial response. After all, no one put much stock in anything that a rock star said.
In April, during a typically banal interview with Disc, John and the reporter did the usual dance for half an hour, waltzing around a dozen polite questions about the Beatles’ upcoming recording session and touring, when John suddenly turned the conversation toward politics and the elections later that week. “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.” Uh-oh, the reporter thought. Topics like these, he knew, were strictly off-limits. But John persisted. “All they seem to want to do—the people who run the country—is keep themselves in power and stop us [from] knowing what’s going on.” John railed against “the system” and chastised people for not knowing “the difference between political propaganda and the truth.”
Clearly John was feeling his oats. He had cut himself loose from the limiting orbit of Beatlemania. And, for the time being at least, he was flying solo.
Flying was part of the Beatles’ job description, and on June 27 they were back in the air, flying from Heathrow this time, en route to Tokyo. No one was looking forward to what John described as “a forty-seven hour flight.” And though it was an exaggeration, he wasn’t too far off the mark. Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, the pilots sent back word of a fierce storm raging in the China Sea, necessitating their being grounded in Anchorage, Alaska, until the danger passed.
Nearly twenty hours later the Beatles landed at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in the middle of the night to find that the storm may have passed—but not the danger. Inside the well-lit terminal—long after the last passengers had straggled off to their planes—the exhausted touring party was diverted once more, into a VIP lounge this time, by a plainclothes police commissioner who warned them about threats issued by a cult of Japanese students determined to staunch the plague of Western culture. “As far as these hooligans were concerned,” recalls Vic Lewis, “allowing the Beatles inside the Budokan, where no Westerner had ever set foot, was offensive, an insult to the great warriors of Japan. If they played there, it was said, they would not leave Tokyo alive.”
There was beginning to be an air of ritual about these episodes. George Harrison had been forewarned about going to Germany. It was the same thing: “You won’t live beyond the next month.” And a steady stream of letters flowed into NEMS brandishing similar threats. “Don’t ever set foot in B——, or else.” “Ringo’s a dead man.” Clear-eyed observers saw these threats for what they were: the saber rattling of delusional crackpots. “We always had to deal with these nuts,” says Peter Brown. “There was no alternative. I don’t think we took it that seriously.” But the Japanese authorities did.
As a result, the Beatles were herded through Customs and into two decrepit limousines surrounded by an armed motorcycle escort for the solemn drive into Tokyo. Fans lined the highway on either side, waving furiously at the motorcade, but no one was permitted beyond a reasonable point. Security was even tighter at the Tokyo Hilton, which “was turned into an armed camp.” The Beatles’ quarters, a rambling warren of rooms in the Presidential Suite, only pushed them deeper into despair. “All the other bedrooms adjoining them and on the floors below were allocated for the police—just in case,” says Vic Lewis. “Aside from going to the gigs, no one was permitted to leave their rooms.”
“We were locked up in the hotel for a long time,” recalled Paul, “with various merchants coming around and showing us ivory and various gifts.” Shopping binges consumed much of the Beatles’ uneventful stay in Tokyo. During the morning hours, their suite resembled a veritable bazaar, with wares laid out splendidly on downy tufts of black velvet and brocade. Everything they could wish for was available: pearls, beads, jewels, jade, netsuke, snuff boxes, watches, fans, alabaster, lacquered objects, kites, gold jewelry, incense holders. The Beatles, lounging in ceremonial silk kimonos, picked through yards of expensive items, selecting presents for their families and themselves. They were also presented with geishas to amuse them. “They spent ten minutes with the girls,” Vic Lewis recalls, “then told us, ‘Get rid of them.’ ”
The Beatles were irritable and growing increasingly restless. “It was their first time in the Far East,” says Peter Brown, “and they’d been looking forward to going out. They resented being cooped up like zoo animals. It was more difficult than usual.” Especially with Brian and Brown in a suite at the opposite end of the floor, entertaining American and Japanese boys they’d picked up at the pool and in various bars. On several occasions Paul and Mal disguised themselves and tried to leave the hotel, as did John and Neil, but each time they were thwarted by security. Finally, says Brown, a government functionary came to remind Brian that millions of yen were being spent on army and police protection and that it was “dishonorable” for the Beatles not to cooperate, which triggered a promise that “it wouldn’t happen again.”
The concert, by contrast, was almost an intrusion. The Beatles grudgingly put on their new stage outfits—“yellow shirts and natty bottle-green suits,” according to Paul—and proceeded to the Budokan, which was “like a military maneuver.” Everything had been timed to the second: how and when they departed, where they sat in each vehicle. A convoy of bulletproof cars spirited them from the hotel, past the Dau, which was opposite the Hilton, and onto the deserted motorway—deserted at rush hour. “The drive was absolutely eerie,” recalls Vic Lewis. “We had to go under about twenty bridges, which is where all the police stood, with guns.” Fans were kept in penlike structures at specific points along the route and under armed guard. Throughout the trip the Beatles were mostly silent, gazing out at the scenery, trying to get a feeling for where they were. Everything looked so different—and strange. It was unlike anything they’d experienced over the years.
The concerts were just as remarkable, with none of the hysteria or even screaming that was the hallmark of Beatlemania. “The audience was very subdued,” Ringo recalled. The unsuspecting Beatles found they could actually hear themselves play! “There were one or two screamers,” according to an account, “but for the most part the teenaged boys and girls sat politely in their seats and applauded enthusiastically after each number.” The politeness was due in no small part to the cultural ethos of Japan, as well as the three thousand cops stationed conspicuously in the arena—one for every three kids who’d bought a ticket to the show.
Afterward, marijuana was consumed; Revolver once again set the appropriate mood, as a single bulb cast a soft spell across the suite. Numbed by the dope and the music, the Beatles took out brushes and paper and, like a clan of art school kids, painted. Thirty years later Bob Whitaker, who photographed them, would recall the wonder and satisfaction the Beatles shared as they painted together until well after three in the morning. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he said. “I’d never seen them calmer, happier, more contented with themselves than at this time.”
It began to unravel, however, the moment they touched down in Manila.
On the afternoon of Sunday, July 3, 1966, the Beatles deplaned to startling news: “You’re being put onto a boat.” Vic Lewis had arranged for the Cathay Pacific aircraft to unload its passengers at a remote end of the runway and then return empty to the gate while the Beatles made a clean getaway. As the Beatles attempted to reclaim their briefcases, an armed guard waved them rudely away. “Leave those bags there! Get in this car!” he demanded, herding them toward a limo that had edged around the plane. The Beatles glanced meaningfully at Neil, who eyed the isolated luggage with trepidation. “Those little briefcases had the marijuana in them,” he recalled. Normally, they were regarded as “diplomatic bags” and waved through Customs without inspection, but from the get-go there was nothing normal about this arrival. As the Beatles, separated from their crew, reluctantly got in the car and pulled away, George looked out the back window and felt his heart sink. “Our bags were on the runway,” he recalled, “and I was thinking, ‘This is it—we’re going to get busted.’ ”
That would have been too easy.
The boat, a large, luxurious vessel, belonged to a local newspaper magnate. It was hot and humid—pushing a hundred degrees. There were more than a dozen short, squat cops on deck, grinning like gargoyles. And, perhaps worse, for the first time in the Beatles’ career, neither Neil, Mal, nor Brian was at their side to direct and guide them through the process. “We were all sweating and frightened,” recalled George, who collapsed next to his bandmates in one of the woven beach chairs along the starboard rail.
Brian showed up two hours later. Livid, he placed a call to Vic Lewis at the Manila Hotel. “You fucking idiot!” Brian raged. “What is this dirty place? We’re on a boat stuck miles away, nobody can get anything.” Lewis tried to defuse the situation. Everything they could possibly want was on that yacht, even a nice little collection of prostitutes. According to Tony Barrow, the Beatles manager throttled the phone and screamed: “We’re not staying one minute longer on this bloody boat. The boys are fed up. There’s absolutely nothing to do, and we want to come ashore at once.” When Lewis reminded him that their hotel suite was presently occupied by General Douglas MacArthur, Brian snapped: “I don’t care! Pull your weight and get us in.”
Security was tight, as always; a quarter of Manila’s police force “had been detailed for Beatles duty between the Sunday afternoon of [their] arrival and the Tuesday of [their] scheduled departure.” In between, there were two shows at the local stadium with an expected sellout of more than eighty thousand fans. Meanwhile, a note attached to the itinerary indicated that they were to “call in on” First Lady Imelda Marcos at eleven o’clock on Monday morning, “before proceeding on from the Malacanang Palace to the stadium for the first concert.”
Tony Barrow thinks it was “unlikely” that Brian Epstein noticed the appointment, although Peter Brown has a distinct recollection that an invitation to the palace came while they were still in Japan, to which Brian responded, “Regret,” meaning: decline it. Certainly everyone had missed the story in the Manila Sunday Times about the impending palace visit.
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 Malacanang Palace tomorrow [Monday] morning at eleven o’clock.
Even if they had seen it, it wouldn’t have made much difference. “Since the British embassy fiasco, the policy was never to go to those things,” says Peter Brown.
Early the next morning Vic Lewis and Tony Barrow were awakened by sharp raps on the door of their suite. Two grim-looking men, a general and a commander of the Philippine army, both in crisply starched full-dress uniforms, saluted and introduced themselves as the official reception committee from the palace. They’d come to make final arrangements for the Beatles’ visit, they explained, which had been expanded to include a luncheon hosted by the First Lady to which two hundred children had been invited.
Lewis, still in his pajamas, seemed baffled by this information. He apologized and explained that there must have been a misunderstanding. No one had told him anything about a presidential visit. Besides, he said, the Beatles were otherwise engaged, although he promised, out of courtesy to Mrs. Marcos, to inform Brian Epstein of their request. “This is not a request,” they insisted.
Lewis jumped into clothes and located Brian in the hotel coffee shop, where he was having breakfast with Peter Brown. “We’ll do nothing of the sort,” he coolly informed Vic. “We’re not going to go.” Lewis begged him to reconsider and implied that he might run it by the boys himself. A deep crimson pool tided into Brian’s cheeks. “Don’t you dare go over my head to the boys. I’m telling you we’re not going.”
“Well,” Lewis responded portentously, “I can assure you we’re going to have a lot of trouble if you don’t.”
The trouble started, as Vic predicted it would, later that morning. First, Brian took an agitated call from the British ambassador to the Philippines, urging him to keep the palace appointment “in the interest of diplomacy.” Brian remained adamant. Moreover, he refused to wake the Beatles to tell them they had to go to a party. “It’s just not feasible,” he said, washing his hands of the matter.
Unbeknownst to him, Paul and Neil had already gone out earlier that morning to take pictures in and around the city. The rest of the Beatles slept until about one o’clock, had their breakfast, and played a rousing if fairly standard afternoon show to an enthusiastic audience of 35,000 Filipinos under a blistering sun. As always, there was no cultural barrier when it came to Beatlemania. Back at the hotel before the evening show, Tony Barrow and Peter Brown gathered in Brian’s suite to have drinks and watch coverage of the concert on the evening news. Every channel featured scenes depicting delirious local teenagers swooning over the Beatles. But on Channel 5, one of the country’s major networks, an extended report ran footage from the palace in which friends of the First Family and their children filed into the grand reception room earlier that day. “The children began to arrive at ten,” said the accompanying voice-over. “They waited until after two…. At noon, the First Lady decided properly and wisely not to wait any longer. ‘The children have all the time in the world, but we are busy,’ she said. The place cards for the Beatles at the lunch table were removed.” The spin they put on it implied that the Beatles in all their rudeness had insulted President and Mrs. Marcos.
Brian faced Peter Brown, wearing a look of feline infallibility. “Well, we were fucking right not to do that,” he said. But Tony Barrow, who understood the implications, shook his head grimly. This wasn’t Los Angeles or even France, where the government shrugged off such proper nonsense. A misunderstanding like this, he thought, could flare up into a touchy international incident. To run damage control, he persuaded Brian to issue a hastily written apology and arranged for a Channel 5 remote crew to tape an interview in the hotel suite. Brian, for his part, was contrite. In his most gracious, upper-crust voice, he professed complete ignorance about the invitation and praised the Marcoses, but when it was broadcast an hour later, Brian’s appearance was obliterated by static interference. “That’s when we started to get very nervous,” recalls Peter Brown.
The uneasiness turned to panic after the evening show at the stadium. Suddenly the Beatles’ police escort disappeared, and when their car pulled up to the hotel gates, it was clear they had been locked out. As if on cue, several dozen “organized troublemakers” converged on the car, banging on the windows and rocking the vehicles. Menacing epithets were shouted in several languages. Leaning forward, Vic Lewis instructed the driver: “Drive on! Go through the people and smash the gates down!” Which is exactly what they did. As the cars raced to the entrance, doors flew open and everyone ran into the hotel—two steps ahead of the angry throng.
A short while later an official visited the hotel, demanding payment of local taxes. Lewis brought out the contract to verify that the promoter, Ramon Ramos, was responsible for the tax, but it was brushed aside. “Your fee is taxed as earnings regardless of any other contracts,” he was told. Until all taxes were paid, no one from the Beatles party would be permitted to leave the country.
When he left, Lewis found Tony Barrow and said, “We’ve got to get out of here—now.” He went straight to the phone and called the front desk for help with collecting the luggage but was told none would be forthcoming. “The whole hotel is going on strike,” the manager told him. “They think you’ve insulted President Marcos.”
The Beatles had already gotten a taste of the situation. The hotel staff refused to provide them with room service and their phones had been shut off. Paul had seen the newspaper headlines—BEATLES SNUB PRESIDENT—but didn’t connect the events. The story went on to claim that the Beatles had “spit in the eyes of the first family,” which, of course, wasn’t true—no one had told them anything about the visit. “Oh, dear!” he thought. “We’ll just say we’re sorry.” But then “things started to get really weird,” as Ringo recalled. He and John were sitting around in their bathrobes, watching television, when one of the roadies stalked in. “Come on! Get out of bed! Get packed—we’re getting out of here.”
Vic Lewis, Tony Barrow, and the two roadies grabbed most of the baggage and headed to the airport. They hoped to have everything settled for a quick getaway by the time the Beatles arrived. Everyone else met in Brian’s suite and began to make their way downstairs. The main elevators had been turned off, which meant taking the service lift. But even though the halls were dark, they weren’t empty. “The passageway was lined with hotel staff who shouted at us in Spanish and English,” recalls Peter Brown, trailing a few steps behind the Beatles. “It was very, very frightening.” When they arrived downstairs, it was impossible to check out. The lobby was deserted; there was no security in sight. Even their cars were gone.
“Nobody would give us a ride,” George recalled. “There was nothing available.” Someone—no one is sure who—managed to corral a Town Car and all seven of them squeezed inside. But the airport route was sabotaged. Soldiers, stationed at intersections, kept directing the car onto ramps that led in circles. Finally they took a back road and arrived half an hour later. Rushing inside the airport, they discovered that the terminal was totally deserted. “The atmosphere was scary,” Tony Barrow remembered, “as if a bomb was due to go off.” Even the individual airline desks were empty. The second the Beatles hit the escalators, the electricity was mysteriously shut off. “We were shitting ourselves by this time,” says Peter Brown. “There was no one to help us, no one to tell us where to go.”
Barrow and Vic Lewis, who had gone ahead of the party, were carrying everyone’s flight tickets and documents. “Meanwhile,” recalls Vic Lewis, “I was in with KLM, pleading for them to hold the flight, which was coming in from Seoul and going on to Delhi.” The passengers had already boarded the aircraft; the plane was an hour late for takeoff. “I rang through to the pilot and was pleading with him. ‘Please, hold on. This is going to be an international situation. Please…’ ”
“Mr. Lewis, I want to help,” the captain told him, “but if we don’t leave soon, we won’t get our clearance.”
“Please…”
Outside, Lewis and Barrow could see their worst nightmare unfold. On the tarmac, a crowd of two hundred Filipino men, many in military uniform, had gathered, waving pistols or clutching sawed-off clubs. “I didn’t fancy the chances of the Beatles, without police protection, getting through to the airport unhurt,” Barrow recalled. Lewis confirmed his fears. “I really felt the boys could be killed,” he says.
The Beatles, meanwhile, made their way through the terminal as little bands of the demonstrators appeared. “We were all carrying amplifiers and suitcases,” George remembered, “nobody was helping us to do anything—but the mania was going on, with people trying to grab us, and other people trying to hit us.” Check-in lasted forever, it seemed. Eventually everyone was herded into KLM’s departure lounge, a double-story glass-enclosed room with a mezzanine, where “an abusive crowd and police with guns had also gathered.”
It was impossible to tell the MPs from the thugs. Customs officials indiscriminately shoved bodies from one side of the room to the other. “Get over there!” they ordered the Beatles, following it with a hard hand to their backs. Of course, once they stumbled to the other side of the room, another cop would shove them back again. “No! Get over there!” It was like a game of Ping-Pong, a vicious game, using the Beatles and their mates as equipment. According to Ringo, “they started spitting at us, spitting on us.” It was complete chaos.
“When they started on us at the airport, I was petrified,” John recalled. One of the policemen got in his face and yelled: “You treat like ordinary passenger! Ordinary passenger!” It occurred to John that ordinary passengers didn’t get kicked, but knowing what was good for him, he kept his mouth shut. Instead, he and the rest of the Beatles darted toward a group of nuns and monks huddled by an alcove, hoping that would discourage the thugs. Meanwhile, Mal fell and was kicked repeatedly in the ribs, along with Alf Bicknell, who was severely beaten.
After about fifteen minutes everyone was allowed to run across the tarmac to the plane. “I was the last to go,” recalls Vic Lewis, “and I remember putting a hand on my back, thinking that’s where the bullet was going to hit.” The terrified Beatles climbed the stairs into the cabin. It was hot, well over ninety degrees, and they were dripping with perspiration—but relieved. Then two Philippine military officers stiffly came aboard. Scanning the passengers, they announced: “Mr. Barrow and Mr. Evans, we need you to come back into the departure office.” The cabin went silent. Tony, sitting in the back of the first-class compartment, grimaced. Mal struggled to his feet and walked unsteadily toward the exit. As he passed George Harrison, he stopped and tearfully whispered, “Tell Lil I love her.”
Tony and Mal were detained for another half an hour. In a typical bureaucratic snafu, their papers hadn’t been processed with the others when they arrived from Tokyo; their passports hadn’t been stamped. After they handed over their passports, duly stamped, they were free to leave.
Once the plane was safely in the air, the Beatles were unusually subdued. Sitting across the aisle from one another, sweating in the painfully sticky cabin, they calmed themselves, smoking cigarettes against the tension, while the anger and resentment that had been simmering over the past few days finally boiled over. The boys quickly developed a need to lay blame for the debacle. It “was Brian’s cock-up,” they decided. He’d obviously handled that invitation business badly, either ignoring it or misleading the authorities—or them. Whatever the reasons, it mustn’t ever happen again, they agreed. Even if it meant having someone double-check his arrangements.
Brian, stewing quietly a row in front of the Beatles, couldn’t help but overhear the intensity of their complaints. And they were right, after all; he was their manager and ultimately responsible for their welfare. But to hear them go on like that, expressing their dissatisfaction with him, was brutal. Agonizing, he clutched the armrests with both hands and stared out the window. Peter Brown, who was in the seat next to him, noticed that Brian was “seizing with tension, and it was not just the Philippines.” Then, a little after five o’clock, when the pillow of thick clouds absorbed the last rays of sunlight, Vic Lewis leaned across Brown and gently shook Brian’s shoulder. “I’m sorry this happened,” he said. Brian took no notice of the agent; he was already on the edge. Brown shook his head ominously and said, “Another time, Vic.” But Lewis refused to take the hint. “No, you don’t understand,” he insisted, “it shouldn’t have happened like this. But I hope you got the money.” Several times throughout the ostensible apology, Brian muttered to Brown through clenched teeth: “Get him away from me, get him away!” Lewis was concerned—and rightly so—about a paper bag containing the box-office receipts, roughly $17,000 in cash, that were due the Beatles from the Manilla dates. “Go away, Vic,” Brown said, pushing Lewis’s hand away. Lewis stared murderously at Brown, deciding whether to hit him. All this trouble was their fault, he fumed; the least they could do was account for the money. Finally, Brian blew a gasket. “You turn to me at a time like this and talk about—money?” he screamed. A spray of saliva splattered Lewis’s cheek. That had done it. Vic reached for Brian’s collar; Brian tried to slap his hand away. Before anyone landed a punch, Neil Aspinall was out of his seat and between the two men.
It was finally clear: touring was a nightmare, it wasn’t about performing anymore. “It was just sort of a freak show,” John complained. “The Beatles were the show and the music had nothing to do with it.”
From the moment they landed in India, so George could buy a decent sitar, the Beatles discussed among themselves the feasibility of not touring. Ever. “Who fucking needs this?” was an oft-heard lament. They were tired of simply going through the motions, tired of acting like the “four waxwork dummies” John thought promoters could “send out… [to] satisfy the crowds.” George had already intimated as much to a reporter back in June. “I’ve increasingly become aware that there are other things in life than being a Beatle,” he observed. “I prefer to be out of the public eye anyway.” And after Shea, John had never hid his contempt for stadiums filled with screaming thirteen-year-old girls. Now there was impetus to take a harder stand. “And they decided then and there,” Neil recalled, “that they weren’t going to do America the next year.”
The finality of the Beatles’ decision unnerved Brian. “It wasn’t like the boys to be so uncompromising with him,” says Tony Barrow. “They usually ran things like this past him, to hear his input.” Peter Brown, who thought it was still all in the talking phase, saw Brian afterward “completely distraught and inconsolable.” He remembered thinking, “He’s blowing this all out of proportion.”
By the time they boarded the plane back to London, Brian’s mood had grown “very dark,” according to Brown, “sinking into a hideous funk.” To make matters worse, the flight was awful. Several of the Beatles got food poisoning. Everyone had been so careful about what they ate while in India that they dove into the beef Stroganoff served after takeoff, which did the real damage. John and Ringo took turns throwing up, and Brian got hives. It was a long flight, and everyone was “very disgruntled, very unhappy.”
To Brian, it was clear from what he overheard that the end had come; that after four years of success and prosperity, his position was redundant; that the Beatles had precipitously cut him loose. “He was distraught about what he’d do if they stopped touring,” says Brown, who sat beside Brian throughout the trip. “ ‘There’s no place for me,’ he kept saying. I finally got impatient with him. He was just being a drama queen. There was so much other business for him to tend to, but it didn’t register.”
By the time they neared their destination, Brian was reeling from nerves and alcohol. His effort to contain the anxiety had backfired. A wave of manic depression swept over him that manifested itself like a shock. Slack, almost catatonic, he was consumed by the repressed anger. He was “so sick, so shaky,” that the airline radioed ahead for an ambulance to meet the plane.
Whatever happened, he begged Peter Brown not to send him to a hospital or an asylum; that would have been too much of a humiliation with the Beatles looking on. Instead, they transferred Brian to a limo headed to Portmerion, an eccentric little beach resort in northern Wales run by two “campy, upper-class guys” that served as a “weekend getaway” for the Liverpool gay community. Bertrand Russell lived down the hill, it had wonderful food. An extravagance of gently wooded walkways wound through the Victorian-style countryside. To Brian, it felt “rather chic and sophisticated,” the perfect place for him to contemplate the future and to mend. The hotel manifest said he would be there for a month, but that was really only for show. “Brian never stayed anywhere for a month,” Brown explains. Even ten days of rest, however, would do wonders for his badly rattled equilibrium.
But on the fourth day, just as he had settled in comfortably, the operator put through a call from Wendy Hanson, at NEMS in London. There was a story circulating in an American magazine, she said, about John and some comments he’d made about Christianity. “You’d better get on top of this,” she warned him. The shit had hit the fan.