A Storm in a Teacup A Storm in a TeacupChristianity will go. It will vanish and shrink….” The words sounded vaguely familiar to Brian as Wendy Hanson read him a telex that had come over the wire from America. “We’re more popular than Jesus now.”
Once he had heard the whole thing, straining through the crackles of provincial static, the source grew clearer, the March interview John had given to the Beatles’ longtime press groupie, Maureen Cleave. But it was more than an old story, Wendy explained. The night before, on July 31, Nat Weiss had gotten a call about six o’clock in the evening, informing him that Beatles records were being burned in Birmingham, Alabama. A few calls later he had determined that the makings of a firestorm had been ignited. Some of John’s comments to Cleave had been syndicated in Datebook, a cheesy American teen magazine, and sensationalized by some slippery editing. A headline slashed across the cover shouted, JOHN LENNON SAYS: “BEATLES MORE POPULAR THAN JESUS,” and inside, CHRISTIANITY WILL GO! The reaction was swift and predictable. Southern fundamentalists went apeshit over the remarks, labeling them blasphemous. A pair of Bible-thumping disc jockeys at WAQY immediately banned the playing of all Beatles records and sponsored a community bonfire fueled by the offending LPs for August 19 “to show them they cannot get away with this sort of thing.” Once the wire services picked up the story, similar “Beatle Burnings” and boycotts spread to other, mostly hardscrabble communities.
It would come to be a personal joke among the Beatles that in order to burn their albums, one first had to buy them, “so it’s no sweat off us, mate, burn ’em if you like.” And at the outset, the religious backlash seemed absurd. KZEE, in Weatherford, Texas, “damned their songs ‘eternally’ ”; in Reno, KCBN broadcast an anti-Beatles editorial every hour; WAYX, in Waycross, Georgia, burned its entire stock of Beatles records; a Baptist minister in Cleveland threatened to revoke the membership of anyone in the congregation who played Beatles records; South Carolina’s Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan nailed several Beatles albums to a cross and set it aflame. Boycotts were announced by radio stations in Ashland and Hopkinsville, Kentucky; Dayton, Bryan, and Akron, Ohio; Dublin, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; Barnwell, South Carolina; and Corning, New York, “joining stations,” the New York Times reported, “in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, and other states” that bought into the controversy. “We were being told” through operatives in New York, says Tony Barrow, “that there were now religious zealots who were actually threatening to assassinate John Lennon if the Beatles came to Memphis,” one of the scheduled stops on the upcoming American tour.
The Beatles, according to Paul, “didn’t really take it too seriously at all,” and he, particularly, wrote off the excitement to “hysterical low-grade American thinking.” Brian dissembled to the press, calling it “a storm in a teacup,” but beneath the icy elegance he was “deeply disturbed” by the implications and decided that a trip to the States was in order.
Nat Weiss met Brian at the airport in New York. “The moment he got in the car, he asked: ‘How much will it cost to cancel the tour?’ ” Weiss’s estimation of a million dollars didn’t faze Brian. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll pay it.” Then, in the next voice and despite the tension, he got down to vital concerns. “Are there any boys around?” he asked.
For the next two days Brian ran damage control from an office in the Paramount Building, on Broadway. Nat prepared the underlying strategy: John’s statements, as reported in Datebook, “were taken completely out of context.” Most people, he argued, ignored that John was saying “We are more popular than Jesus,” not “We are more important…” “He did not mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame,” Maureen Cleave insisted in a carefully scripted response. “John was certainly not comparing the Beatles to Christ. He was simply observing that, so weak was the state of Christianity, the Beatles was, to many people, better known.” It was highly unusual for any reporter to issue such a ringing defense of the subject of his or her story, especially going so far as to interpret his remarks. Cleave also appeared on a number of radio shows to discuss her viewpoint, at which point Brian “request[ed] emphatically no [further] comment from her.” But whatever the official reason, whatever the excuse, the situation remained volatile. Radio stations, especially in the South and the West, “were having a field day,” as George later recalled. Not that John cared. “I’d forgotten [all about it],” he said upon later reflection. “It was that unimportant—it had been and gone.” But once he had a chance to “reread the whole article,” his tune changed. “Tell them to get stuffed. I’ve got nothing to apologize for,” John snarled. As far as canceling the tour, that was fine with him. “I’d rather that than have to get up and lie. What I said stands.”
Nevertheless, Brian succeeded in persuading John of the need to shape a public statement. “It went back and forth for two days,” Nat Weiss recalls. The two men wrangled over every word until both John and Brian were satisfied that all sides were well served. John would apologize, but he refused to eat shit. Brian would do that for him.
The next day Brian booked a suite at New York’s Americana Hotel and summoned the world press to a hastily convened news conference. It was a typically staged Epstein affair: drinks and hors d’oeuvres were served, after which he read the following statement:
The quote which John Lennon made to a London columnist nearly three months ago has been quoted and represented entirely out of context. Lennon is deeply interested in religion…. What he said and meant was that he was astonished that in the last fifty years the Church of England, and therefore Christ, had suffered a decline in interest. He did not mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame. He meant to point out that the Beatles’ effect appeared to be, to him, a more immediate one upon certain of the younger generation.
To many beat reporters who listened, this sounded like a fairly liberal rewrite of John’s remarks. (Brian had called it “a clarification.”) Yet at the same time, it served to mollify them. Most of the papers that covered the event treated it like a news item, without comment. But it was clear to everyone, including Brian, that it wasn’t the last word on this subject—not by a long shot.
The press conference coincided with the release of two new Beatles records, and the music, as always, managed to work its essential magic. On roughly five thousand radio stations on August 5—that is, the stations that were playing, as opposed to burning, Beatles records—the single “Yellow Submarine” and “Eleanor Rigby” received its first airplay. What an earful of music on two sides of a single disc—from the ridiculous to the sublime! When the reviews hit the trades, it was clear the record was every bit as audacious—and intricate—as its makers had intended. More and more often, the critics just threw up their hands. “One thing seems certain to me—you’ll soon be singing about a ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ” hedged Alan Evans in an issue of NME. “It should be a household favorite soon.” Otherwise, Evans couldn’t get a handle on “Eleanor Rigby,” writing it off as “a folksy ballad sung with very clear diction by Paul McCartney.”
About Revolver, which was released the same day, they were less ecstatic, even somewhat baffled by the music’s ample complexities. “The new Beatles’ album, Revolver, certainly has new sounds and new ideas, and should cause plenty of argument among fans as to whether it is as good as or better than previous efforts,” wrote NME. Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” perplexed critics. They appreciated its message to turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. “But how can you relax with the electronic outer-space noises, often sounding like seagulls?” they wondered. “Even John’s voice is weirdly fractured and given a faraway sound.” And no one predicted the album’s powerful resonance, that it would be considered an artistic breakthrough, or that thirty years later, when Mojo magazine compiled “The 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made,” its readers would rank Revolver number one, hands down. “From the day it came out, it changed the way everyone else made records,” Geoff Emerick reminisced in that celebrated issue. “No one had ever heard anything like that before.”
And though they may have been ahead of the curve, the Beatles were not alone. Every week articles filled the pages of Billboard, NME, and Melody Maker with the incredible stuff that was pouring out of new groups. Two weeks before the Beatles’ American tour opened, the Lovin’ Spoonful soared to the top of the pop charts with the harder-edged “Summer in the City,” displacing “Wild Thing,” by the Troggs. The Beach Boys put out the legendary Pet Sounds about the same time Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde. “Mother’s Little Helper” and “Paint It Black” certified the Stones’ outlaw status. The daring “Eight Miles High” launched the Byrds into outer space. The Holland-Dozier-Holland assembly line continued cranking out sweet soul classics. Tim Hardin made his enviable debut, along with albums by Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Laura Nyro, the Mothers of Invention, and the Velvet Underground, each one as original and eclectic as the next. Ultimately, however, it was the Beatles that provided the most uncompromising, even disruptive, listening experience. Q would eventually refer to Revolver as a “scaling of new musical peaks… a quantum leap forward” for a band of beloved pop heroes. But corresponding as it did with John’s controversial comments, it also represented entry into a dark, ruthless crosscurrent destined to reroute the Beatles as cultural reactionaries. Image, which had always defined the Beatles, now daunted those fans who were unprepared for a transition. ”We’re not trying to pass off as kids,” John insisted. “We have been Beatles as best we ever will be—those four jolly lads. But we’re not those people anymore.” There was no point in keeping up the pose as those wacky teenage idols, not when they’d evolved into the kind of men and musicians who produced a document as riveting as Revolver. As individuals, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were growing up; as the Beatles, they were beginning to grow apart.
By the time John was ready to leave for the States, he was fuming. He had glanced at the first reports of the backlash with mild amusement. Then his anger grew steadily as demands for an apology mounted until, by departure, he was incensed. He told Brian that not only did he refuse to apologize for his statement but he had no intention of saying anything to the press—about Christianity, or music, or anything. Brian wouldn’t hear of it. There was too much at stake, the tour being the least of his worries. His offer to let any promoter out of his contract was unanimously declined. But he admonished John about mucking up several pending deals that could have far-reaching economic consequences. The Beatles’ record deal, for instance; they were in the throes of renegotiating a contract with EMI and Capitol, one that would finally bring them deserved riches. And songwriters’ royalties from dozens of potential new covers. (NME reported there were already nine shipped as of the week of Revolver’s release.) It wasn’t just his own hide on the line, either. There were three other Beatles, Brian reminded John, and dozens of people whose personal well-being rested on their fortunes. “And so Brian… kept asking him to say something,” recalled Ringo, “and in the end, John realized that he’d have to go out and do it.”
The plan was to face the press before the first performance in Chicago, on the evening of August 11. Everyone was staying in the Astor Towers, on the twenty-seventh floor, and the three major American television networks had already set up cameras in the corridor and were delivering pithy commentaries. Meanwhile, John was summoned for a last-minute briefing. “We were nervous that he was going to wiseguy it up,” says Tony Barrow. They were sitting in the dimly lit solitude of Brian’s spacious lounge, John and Brian on the settee, Barrow cross-legged across the glass-and-steel coffee table. After drinks were served, Brian said, “Look, you do realize the implications of this, don’t you? You can’t go out there with a few one-liners. It’s not a joke, and it’s not just you getting yourself off the hook. Either we have to get positive press out of this or the tour is going to be called off. We’re not talking, John, about you rescuing your own reputation; we’re talking about you saving the group’s tour.” Pausing for dramatic impact, Brian admitted that he “feared the Beatles might be assassinated during the tour.”
After gently putting his glass down on the coffee table, John burst into tears. His head bowed, body racked with sobs, John pleaded for some guidance. “I’ll do anything,” he said. “Anything. Whatever you say I should do, I’ll have to say… I didn’t mean to cause all of this.”
He sat there for a while, until he was composed. Then, with Brian and Tony at his side, the three other Beatles trailing, John marched across the hall into Barrow’s suite, where about thirty members of the media were waiting to hear his side of things.
The press conference, long a frisky Beatles performance, was an unusually somber affair. The rest of the band “stood solemnly” behind a table where John sat, clutching his hands to keep them from trembling. His torso twitched nervously, awkwardly, in his seat. Paul, at his side through many scrapes, had “never seen John so nervous.” It was as if it were the first time he’d faced the press.
Leaning into a microphone, John looked a wreck. “If I’d have said, ‘Television is more popular than Jesus,’ I might have got away with it,” he said haltingly. “I’m sorry I opened my mouth. I just happened to be talking to a friend and I used the word ‘Beatles’ as a remote thing—‘Beatles,’ like other people see us. I said they are having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus. I said it in that way, which was the wrong way. I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ, or antireligion. I was not knocking it. I was not saying we are greater or better. I think it’s a bit silly. If they don’t like us, why don’t they just not buy the records?”
Wait a minute! Despite the fact that John spoke willingly and unaffectedly, there seemed to be some skirting of the central issue. It sounded to most of the journalists like an explanation, as opposed to an apology. “Some teenagers have repeated your statements—‘I like the Beatles more than Jesus Christ,’ ” a reporter interrupted. “What do you think about this?”
John paused thoughtfully before answering. “Well, originally I pointed out that fact in reference to England. That we meant more to kids than Jesus did, or religion at that time. I wasn’t knocking it or putting it down…. I just said what I said and it was wrong.” That sounds more like it. “Or it was taken wrong.” Uh-oh. “And now it’s all this.” Hmmm…
“But are you prepared to apologize?” a broadcaster asked.
John tried to explain himself again. And again. The dance went around and around without end, each partner circling, stumbling, stepping on toes. Exasperated, exhausted—the Beatles had just come off a twelve-hour flight—he finally let it boil over. “I wasn’t saying what they’re saying I was saying,” he said, glowering. “I’m sorry I said it—really. I never meant it to be a lousy antireligious thing. I apologize if that will make you happy. I still don’t know quite what I’ve done. I’ve tried to tell you what I did do, but if you want me to apologize, if that will make you happy, then—okay, I’m sorry.”
There was a long, indulgent pause, broken when a mincing voice from the back broke through the silence: “Okay, can you just actually say to the camera how sorry you are?” At which point the Beatles glanced at one another and cut wry little smiles. It was just as they figured: the press hadn’t been listening for the past twenty minutes. Everything was for show. The press was “quite prepared to let the Lennon affair die a natural death” to preserve the spirit of Beatlemania.
Over the Beatles’ objections, the tour had been set back in April, with the rundown of opening acts changing again and again in the intervening months. Only the Ronettes had always been part of the package; even though they hadn’t had a hit in two years, the Beatles loved the girls’ sassy stage personae and wanted them aboard for window dressing as much as anything else. They also added Bobby Hebb, a songwriter from Nashville, whose smash hit, “Sunny,” was a fixture at the top of the summer charts; the Remains, a group of students on leave from Boston University, to provide backup; and the Cyrkle. Nat Weiss had discovered the latter playing covers in a bar while walking along the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. On June 6 he and Brian had formed a company called Nemperor Artists, designed specifically to look after the Beatles’ affairs but also as a subsidiary to manage American acts, and the Cyrkle, at Nat’s urging, became their first signing.
Inside the International Amphitheater, whose location next door to the Chicago stockyards provided a malodorous bouquet, the crowd of mostly screaming teenage girls staged a replay of all the mayhem that had marked the Beatles’ previous tours. It was the same everywhere: Detroit, Cleveland, Washington, Philadelphia—the fans played the familiar roles required of them. But in almost every case, the threat of violence was felt. In Cleveland, especially, where an outbreak on the 1964 tour had interrupted the show, there was a repeat performance when three thousand fans rained out of the stands at Municipal Stadium and made a beeline for the stage. The police and Mal Evans valiantly defended the stage, swatting away marauding fans while the Beatles soldiered on, bashing through “Day Tripper.” But at a certain point, as Barrow’s assistant Bess Coleman observed in Teen Life, they were “given the order: Run for your lives! And, did they run!” The boys dropped their instruments mid-song and took off for a trailer stationed behind the home-plate stands, dragging along the frazzled Coleman.
“By the time we got to Memphis, there was a very serious feeling,” recalls Tony Barrow. “It was the first Deep South date we played,” and there was a strong rumor that something truly violent could happen. According to Nat Weiss, “Brian was very nervous” about Memphis. “He was convinced some nut was going to take a shot at John.” Indeed, there had been discussions with his GAC agents about pulling out of the date rather than invite disaster, but ultimately—and without much discussion—the Beatles insisted on appearing. “If we cancel one, you might as well cancel all of them,” Paul told him.
But the constant buildup of tension eventually dented their bravado. One of the backup musicians remembered that “the flight from Boston to Memphis was quieter than usual.” The Beatles sat together on the crowded charter, staring out the windows, not talking much. John wore a troubled look as the plane made its slow descent into Memphis. “So this is where all the Christians come from,” he said to Paul, slouched grim-faced in the aisle seat next to him. Paul had nothing left to counterbalance John’s ominous mood. “You’re a very controversial person,” he muttered, devoid of the usual cheery note. Only George managed to crack the despair as they taxied to a stop. “Send John out first,” he quipped. “He’s the one they want.”
The situation took a sinister turn the minute they hit the ground. Security was heavier than usual, a condition meant to be reassuring, but everyone was filled with unavoidable foreboding nevertheless. Instead of the usual transfer by limo, the Beatles were loaded into the back of a specially armored minivan while everyone else wordlessly boarded a bus for the trip to the arena. “Driving into Memphis from the airport, we had to lie down, because they thought snipers might shoot us,” remembers the Remains’ drummer, N. D. Smart. The brave few who dared peep out the windows saw protesters along the route, waving signs—and fists. “I will never forget… we pulled in there in the coach,” Paul later said, “and there was this little blond-haired kid, he could have been no older than eleven or twelve, who barely came up to the window, screaming at me through the plate glass, banging the window with such vehemence.” Intuitively, Paul knew the kid was harmless, although he had his doubts about the hooded Ku Klux Klansmen that roamed the grounds of the Mid-South Coliseum.
But the first show went off like any other. Despite pockets of empty seats, there was the typical pandemonium, plenty of crying and screaming; girls littered the stage with stuffed animals and gifts, among cruder types of debris. “The Beatles smiled through it all,” said a review in the Commercial Appeal. “It appeared to be just the type of unrestrained welcome they are used to.”
Understandably, their mood improved between shows. “Everyone started to relax,” recalled an observer. Backstage, the band ate a roast beef dinner and talked amiably with reporters crammed into the cluttered room. They took some good-natured ribbing over an ad for the show that Mal found in a local newspaper. “Go to church on Sunday,” it said, “but see THE BEATLES Friday!”
By the second show, at eight, the Beatles had good reason to be elated. The arena was packed this time, with more than twelve thousand delirious “crew-cut kids” determined to rip the stuffing out of the Old South. It was a right rebel rave-up until midway through the third song, “If I Needed Someone,” when a shot rang out. Epstein and Barrow, standing at the side of the stage, jumped, banging into each other—then crouched. “I was convinced… it was a shot,” Barrow recalls. Paul and George jerked sideways toward John, who was straddling the mike. Later, Paul explained to Teen-Set’s editor how “when he heard [the blast] his heart stopped, but he realized he was still standing and didn’t feel anything. He looked at John and saw that he was still standing, so they all kept right on playing.”
Kids. Two teenagers had lobbed a cherry bomb from the upper balcony.
The Beatles fought back with abandon. Their playing was unusually sharp, full of snap and bite, and for a moment they gave it all they had. But the fix was in. When a string of firecrackers popped and spit a few minutes later, it brought them crashing back to earth. It wasn’t the music fans wanted, they realized, but the show—and not just what was going on onstage, but the whole crazy atmosphere. That’s what they had come for: the mayhem, the hair shaking, the yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of all the Beatles, only Paul was inclined to play along. Paul loved the showbiz aspect of Beatlemania, to say nothing of the acclaim. The times he spent on the road—engaging the fans, jawing with reporters, mugging for photographers, and winding up the crowds—were among the highlights of his life. Lionel Bart, who saw him often during this time, called him a born crowd-pleaser and presumed that he’d eventually find his place on mainstream stages like those at the Palladium. “It was clear from the start that show business ran deep in Paul’s veins and he was committed to a lifetime on the stage.” But the other three were disgusted. George especially had had his fill. Ren Grevatt, Melody Maker’s American stringer, had been watching throughout the tour how the whole grind weighed on the Beatles’ personalities. “I’ve noticed that George Harrison is getting deeper and deeper every day and will probably end up being a bald recluse monk,” he observed in an unusually frank column. “He’s trying to figure out life, but don’t let this sound mocking—he is very serious.”
What Grevatt mistook for seriousness, however, was a malaise that deepened with every passing day. George was fed up with the grim, chaotic life of the Beatles. In discussions with friends, he talked of feeling “wasted” and virtually “imprisoned” by the constraints of Beatlemania. The touring and its effluvia had beat him up, physically and emotionally. “It had been four years of legging around in a screaming mania,” he grumbled. Endless performances—“about 1,400 live shows,” by George’s count—had left him bored and dispirited. It was all he could do to get up for the thirty-minute appearance.
“Nobody was listening at the shows,” complained Ringo, who said he “was fed up playing” in such a haphazard manner. Bashing along to “She’s a Woman” and “I Feel Fine” day in and day out wasn’t his idea of drumming. It was impossible for him to hear what the others were doing onstage, forcing him to play to their body language. There was no percentage in it. Conditions were so pitiful that during many songs Ringo’s drums would slide around the platform, requiring him to get up and move them back into place. Ringo had always been a sport; he’d always done whatever was asked of him, whatever was best for the band. He’d played the role that was required of him—the role of a lifetime. But his heart wasn’t in it anymore.
And to John, the whole scene was a dreadful experience. “I didn’t want to tour again,” he said, “especially after having been accused of crucifying Jesus… and having to stand with the Klan outside and firecrackers going on inside.” Creatively, physically, emotionally, he had had it with playing those kinds of gigs. Beatlemania represented everything he detested—the phoniness of the band’s image, their lack of progress as musicians, the degree to which he’d sold out. He felt “the music was dead” long before the Beatles ever hit the States, which meant that he felt dead for more time than was tolerable for anyone with his instincts. “I couldn’t take any more,” he said.
A series of accidents, incompetences, and circumstances, including a pair of back-to-back dates in Cincinnati and St. Louis, underscored the Beatles’ distaste for the road. Cincinnati was a disaster. It rained before showtime as the Beatles arrived at Crosley Field, but with a ballpark full of sodden fans determined to see their idols, the boys seemed inclined to appear. A canvas canopy hung over the stage. “They’d brought in the electricity,” George recalled, “but the stage was soaking and we would have been electrocuted.” “It was really scary,” recalls Nat Weiss. “The crowd kept screaming, ‘We want the Beatles!’ and Paul grew so upset at the prospect of going out there that he got sick. The strain was too great. And he threw up in the dressing room.” Eventually, Brian called off the show—“the only gig we ever missed,” George pointed out—but managed to reorganize the schedule so that they could play at noon the next day before flying out to do an evening show in Missouri.
Meanwhile, the weather followed them to St. Louis, where a gleaming new Busch Stadium wilted under a stinging drizzle. Only “a couple bits of corrugated iron” were propped above the bandstand positioned over second base, and the slipshod setup reminded Paul of “a mud hut in the middle of somewhere.” “There were sparks flying all over the place,” according to Ed Freeman, who handled sound for the tour. “I remember that every time Paul bumped into the mike, which was almost every beat, there were sparks.” Mal had rigged an outlet with a waterproof power cord and instructed Freeman “to pull it whenever the first person on stage collapsed from any electric shock.”
After the show, during a frantic and extremely narrow escape in the airless container of a chrome-paneled truck, all the damage and indignities finally caught up with the Beatles. “We were sliding around trying to hold onto something,” Paul recalled, “and at that moment everyone” decided they’d had enough of touring. There was no point in pretending anymore—performing had become too much of a liability. Even Paul admitted he’d had enough; the touring, to him, “had become spiritually rather empty.” The Beatles would make more than enough money from continued record sales, as well as other projects that came through the pipeline. Besides, attendance at the shows had been falling off steadily. Only two or three concerts on the American tour had been sellouts, and though no one ever mentioned as much, several promoters failed to make back their investment. It seemed useless to wait until the Beatles—live and in person—became a disposable commodity. It was easier to walk away before anyone took notice.
“We didn’t make a formal announcement that we were going to stop touring,” Ringo recalled. Nevertheless, the matter was settled between them. The August 29 concert in San Francisco would be their last. There would be no more Beatles shows, no more participation in the tumult of Beatlemania. From now on, they would exist solely in the studio as a band that made records.
It’s uncertain if any of them brought Brian in on the decision. Convinced that he’d try to talk them out of it, increasingly distrustful of his ripening psychosis, they most likely kept its finality among themselves, at least for the time being.
By Los Angeles, still reeling from the Philippines fiasco and subsequent Jesus uproar, Brian was a bundle of raw nerves. On August 27 Nat Weiss arrived in their pink-tinged bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and immediately sensed another personality shift, this time into rapture. “Good news,” Brian said, beaming with an unnatural intensity, “Diz is here, in L.A.” Protesting, Nat warned Brian away from the hustler, but any concern was waved off. “No, no,” Brian insisted. “He’s different—he’s so sweet. You’ll see.”
It didn’t take long for Weiss’s worst fears to materialize. Diz and Brian spent the day sunning themselves by the pool. At some point late that afternoon, Brian unloaded a bombshell. “I have an important announcement,” he said, fluttering his hands like a magician. “Tomorrow night is the Beatles’ last concert ever, and I want the two of you to be my guest.” All kinds of arrangements were discussed about flying everyone to San Francisco for the farewell show, then Diz excused himself for another engagement. “[Brian and I] went out to dinner,” Nat recalls, “and when we came back, our briefcases were gone.” Along with Diz.
There have been various accounts concerning the contents of those briefcases. Nat says: “I didn’t have anything in mine. Brian had about ten thousand dollars in cash along with papers and a bottle of Seconal.” By Peter Brown’s calculation, however, the missing cash amounted to $20,000 in addition to “half a dozen or so billets-doux containing explicit references to [Brian’s] conquests, along with Polaroid photographs of his young friends.”
Brian forbade Nat from reporting Diz to the police, arguing that it would lead to a scandal. For a modicum of cash—no more, really, than he might drop on a hand of baccarat—and whatever else was in those briefcases, he’d spare the Beatles any more unwarranted publicity. But while the Beatles flew north, Brian remained in L.A. and sank into “a suicidal depression” that scoured new depths of self-loathing.
The Beatles gave their farewell performance at Candlestick Park the next night, with Brian Epstein nowhere to be seen.
Candlestick Park was a notoriously windswept arena, with its outfield facing out onto San Francisco Bay, but that Monday night, on August 29, gusts whipped through the stands with an almost biblical vengeance. Banners strung around the stadium flapped ferociously against the squall and drafts picked up great clouds of dust and blew them volcanically across the infield. “It was not the sort of night you’d like to turn out for an outdoor concert,” notes Tony Barrow, and, indeed, the stands were only half filled, with 25,000 die-hard Beatles fans huddled against the squall.
Their anticipation, however, rivaled baseball crowds twice the size. Fans recalled “being jolted from head to toe” by the prospect that the Beatles would appear. Mimi Fariña, who sat behind the third-base dugout with her sister, Joan Baez, described the fan response as “sounding like clouds bursting.” There was an air of exhilarating suspense, she recalled. “Things were popping.”
The performance itself was nothing extraordinary. The Beatles sang eleven songs—the same eleven “totally familiar studio recorded versions” they’d been singing for four years, with one or two exceptions—using precisely the same patter, the same tired jokes. (Thirty years later Tony Barrow listened to a tape of the NME concert at Wembley Stadium, one of the Beatles’ earliest concerts, followed by a recording of Candlestick Park, and was surprised to discover that “John and Paul say exactly the same thing between songs four years apart.”) It was one of their shortest shows, seconds shy of thirty minutes, and “perhaps the least inspired,” recalls Barrow. “The boys were very tired indeed and couldn’t wait to get that last show over.” John, who referred to it afterward as “a puppet show,” had nothing left in his tank. He didn’t hesitate for a moment when it came to leading the charge off the field and disappearing with the others into a waiting armored truck. A great release washed over him as the van kicked up dust speeding toward the right-field bullpen, toward the end of Beatlemania—toward liberation, at last.
George also sighed and settled into the momentous finale. “I was thinking, ‘This is going to be such a relief—not to have to go through this madness anymore,’ ” he recalled. There was an air of subtle, rarefied elation to it that he expressed as their plane took off for Los Angeles. Sinking into the seat next to Tony Barrow, George closed his eyes, smiled, and said: “Right—that’s it. I’m not a Beatle anymore.”
Not being a Beatle anymore brought the Beatles no instant peace. Instead of the kind of quiet interlude they had hoped for, the whole world took up their case, talking obsessively about the Beatles and pondering their future. Were they finished? “Is Beatlemania Dead?” Time wondered. Derek Taylor, writing in Melody Maker, could only speculate about their uncertain future. He’d visited with the Beatles during their recent stay in Los Angeles, where he’d found a similar position press-managing the Byrds, but even after a playful night spent passing joints back and forth, he’d come no closer to resolving their murky agenda. Still, their “impact… and mythology,” the Sunday Times said, was too potent to diminish the boys’ overall importance. “In a business where today’s smash-hit is tomorrow’s stinker, the Beatle sound will almost certainly survive as the echo of an era.” Certainly Revolver had defied all predictions and won vast popular acclaim. It sold millions of units while giving fans and musicians alike something extraordinary to shoot for.
In July, Dick Lester approached John about taking a minor role in his new movie, a satirical antiwar comedy called How I Won the War. John not only agreed but promised to cut his famous hair to a length befitting a proper English soldier. It was by no means the first time John had acted. From the moment he slung on a guitar, greased his hair back like Elvis, or decked himself out in black leather and high-heeled boots, John had been playing various parts that appealed to his sense of character. Even as one of the Beatles, he’d assumed an exaggerated role, playing to the crowd and mugging for the cameras. “It makes perfect sense,” Paul said of his collaborator’s sideline. “He’s really only ever wanted to be James Dean or Marlon Brando.”
But working as a supporting actor proved excruciatingly boring. In Germany and then southern Spain, where most of the action was filmed, John spent much of the time “hanging around,” waiting for his scenes to be called. “He loathed the endless waiting in the desert,” according to Ray Coleman, “… and learning lines, however short, drained his patience.” Several weeks lapsed as John bumped from location to location, struggling to occupy himself against stretches of insufferable downtime. At first, long strolls with Cynthia along the sun-drenched Gulf of Almería proved distracting, but the charm wore off soon enough. “It was pretty damn boring to me,” John recalled. “I didn’t find it at all very fulfilling.”
Between the rigors of acting and confronting the unknown, John withdrew deeper into himself, smoking fistfuls of Spanish dope and languishing on the beach, shielded from the stargazers by his war-torn acoustic guitar. Music would provide for him. It always had. Nothing offered the kind of comfort as the sanctuary of a song. “He used to sit cross-legged on the beach or on the bed, working out a melody,” recalled Michael Crawford, who costarred in the film and shared a beach house with John in Spain. It was there, Crawford said, “I heard him playing the same bar over and over again until he got the right sequence.” Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see…The tune had a dreamy, languid feel to it, “conjuring up a hazy impressionistic dream-world,” as George Martin later described it. Crawford, hearing the song at irregular intervals, was struck by its enigmatic beauty—the interplay of pot and nostalgic detail that John labored over in the lyric—and suggested leaving it alone. “Really, it’s good,” he told John. “I wouldn’t mess with it.”
“Strawberry Fields Forever” allowed John to wrestle with a confessional song as confused and dramatic as his emotions. “[It] was psychoanalysis set to music,” he reasoned later, after having spent years on the therapist’s couch. For years he had been sugarcoating his imagery, reluctant, except in a few notable cases, to reveal himself personally in a song. It was easy, with Paul as his sidekick, to keep the lyrics unspecific and upbeat. But with Rubber Soul and Revolver, John had turned a corner on his craft. He finally sensed the true scope of his potential—a gift he’d suspected all along—and realized that to make the leap to great songwriting, he would have to open up his heart.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” lifted everything onto the next level. For inspiration, John took himself back to Woolton, the scene of his favorite childhood escapades, where he spent blissful summer mornings in the company of Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan, and Pete Shotton playing in Calderstones Park. Strawberry Field wasn’t a patch of land but, as John pointed out, the name of “an old Victorian house converted for Salvation Army orphans,” near the entrance to the park. “It [provided] an escape for John,” Paul remembered, musing on his own memories of the place. “There was a wall you could bunk over and it had a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in.” Aunt Mimi told Albert Goldman: “There was something about the place that always fascinated John. He could see it from his window, and he loved going to the garden party they had each year. He used to hear the Salvation Army band, and he would pull me along, saying, ‘Hurry up, Mimi—we’re going to be late.’ ”
All these memories came flooding back as John amused himself in Spain, sifting through the scrapbook of his less-than-idyllic childhood. “I took the name”—Strawberry Fields*—“as an image,” John explained, and he used it as inspiration to express his seriously conflicted feelings about growing up and self-awareness. Instead of rhymes and wordplay, John poured strings of surreal images into the verses to bring his emotional world alive.
During September 1966 Paul was also abroad, in France. For a change of scenery, Paul, who loved to drive, decided to take the sightseer’s route from Paris through the Loire Valley, stopping off at the grand châteaux of Chambord and Chenonceaux that bordered the country roads, before heading west to Bordeaux. His intention had been to “travel incognito, disguised so that he would not be recognized,” or at least appearing as inconspicuous as any young man could while crisscrossing rural France in a sleek dark green Aston Martin DB5. It would be an ideal opportunity, he thought, “to ease the pressure… [a]nd retaste anonymity.” Slicking his hair back with Vaseline and gluing a stage-prop Vandyke to his chin, Paul managed to walk freely around the quaint ancient villages, browsing in the little shops and dining al fresco at neighborhood cafés, at home in a world from which the Beatles had been excluded. Freed from the glare of megacelebrity, he settled into a blissful routine. A few hours each day were spent essentially cloistered in a hotel room, writing furiously in a journal and “thinking all sorts of artistic thoughts.” In the late afternoons, with sun bathing the streets in soft, even light, Paul shot reel after reel of 8 mm film, experimenting with quirky, whimsical images: a cross leaning in a cemetery, horizons tilting at crazy angles, a Ferris wheel in full spin, a gendarme directing traffic. Movies had such seductive energy; Paul found them a particularly exhilarating way of expressing himself. The whole experience brought him back down to earth: “I was a lonely little poet on the road with my car.”
But once up in the air again, Paul McCartney, lonely little poet, changed back into Superbeatle. He met Mal Evans in Bordeaux, then flew off to Kenya for a two-week safari. On the plane ride home from Nairobi, on November 19, Paul began formulating an idea for a new Beatles album. Less about music, it was more a premise: if he could disguise himself on vacation and travel about unnoticed, then why not all the Beatles? They hated being the Fab Four, a nickname that had become synonymous with the trappings of Beatlemania. “I thought, ‘Let’s not be ourselves. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know.’ ” They could “put some distance between the Beatles and the public,” take on the personae of another, fictional band.
Paul and Mal kicked around the idea during the in-flight meal. At first they played with names for a band, mimicking the variety of groups that were just coming into vogue: the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Lothar and the Hand People. Mal, distracted, picked up the little corrugated packets of paper marked “S” and “P,” asking Paul what the initials stood for. “Salt and Pepper,” he responded. “Sergeant Pepper.”
By the time the plane touched down at Heathrow, the entire concept was in place.
As always, Paul’s enthusiasm was complicated by the ambivalence of the other Beatles. It was hard for them to grasp the uniqueness of what he envisioned. An album made by the Beatles—but not the Beatles. Would it be Beatles music? they wondered. Then again, what was Beatles music these days? “We would be Sgt. Pepper’s band, and for the whole of the album we’d pretend to be someone else,” Paul explained. Pretend! Pretend was one of those words that always raised a red flag; the whole thing sounded like a gimmick. Besides, everyone’s head was in a different place.
George was especially skeptical. “I had gone through so many trips of my own,” he recalled, “and I was growing out of that kind of thing.” In fact, of all the Beatles, no one was undergoing as much change, with as much boundless and exciting speed. The skinny, pale boy with big ears and no ambition, the dropout burdened with intellectual insecurity, who used to follow half a block behind John Lennon, had developed into a grimly optimistic, pensive young man clamoring for “the meaning of it all.” LSD had jolted George awake. Tripping had given him enlightenment; it altered his consciousness and put him on the path to self-realization. “Spirituality,” George was starting to believe, was what he needed. “You’ve got to be connected spiritually if you hope to achieve anything in this world,” he wrote to Arthur Kelly soon after the Beatles had stopped touring.
In fact, George had been dancing around the fringes of spirituality for some time. As early as Speke, when he experienced frightening flashes of “divine awareness,” during which a “feeling would begin to vibrate right through [him]… so fast it was mind-boggling,” he had begun struggling with the concept of a greater power. Before his twenty-first birthday on the set of Help!, in the Bahamas, when he heard the trancelike call of Indian music—the same day, coincidentally, that Swami Vishnu-devananda gave him a copy of The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga—George had already been exposed to Eastern and mystical philosophies. Now when George spoke, the ideas flowed effortlessly—about the doctrines of rebirth and reincarnation, serenity and self-fulfillment, as well as pacifism, which had padded to the forefront of the Beatles’ interests.
With John in Spain—along with Ringo, who claimed he “hung out with him [on the movie set] because he was lonely”—and Paul off in France, George and Pattie made an unprecedented trip to Bombay, where they were guests of the legendary sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. “The first time I heard Indian music,” George recalled in 1967, “I felt as though I knew it. It was everything, everything I could think of. It was like every music I had ever heard, but twenty times better than everything all put together. It was just so strong, so overwhelmingly positive, it buzzed me right out of my brain.” George had first met Shankar in June, at Peter Sellers’s house, at which time “he offered to give me some instruction on the basics of sitar.” There was challenge enough, he soon discovered, in “how to sit and hold the sitar,” which was murder on the hips. As he watched Shankar—actually playing the complicated instrument—deep in concentration but in perfect form and control, George must have felt overwhelmed by the extreme discipline involved. Even after a few cursory passes at it, he had difficulty achieving a proper tone. In India, however, George presented himself as a student, Shankar’s “disciple,” for intensive training, most of which was conducted by the master’s protégé, Shambu Das.
The instruction drew George more deeply into his teacher’s professional and personal life. Often after a long day of lessons—“Sometimes [George] would play up to eight hours a day,” Das recalled—Shankar would conduct him on enlightening visits to local temples or they’d meander through the maze of dusty streets, teeming with humanity and exotic musky scents, discussing the mystical enthusiasms necessary for “harmonizing with a greater power.” Although a fastidious performer who aggressively pursued a demanding concert schedule, Ravi implored George to “expand his consciousness.” They read books “by various holy men and swamis and mystics,” practiced meditation and yoga, and listened to music in the evenings. Gradually, but not often, they approached the study of Hinduism in a manner that was more philosophical than religious. The trip to India, ostensibly a musical pilgrimage, had served as a turning point for George. “Ravi and the sitar were excuses,” he came to realize. “Although they were a very important part of it, it was a search for a spiritual connection.”
It was in this keen, highly tuned state, clearly pulsing with enlightenment, that George returned to London on October 22. He quickly transformed his Esher bungalow, filling it with brightly colored Indian artifacts and repositioning the furniture for maximum sunlight and serenity. Long, flowing robes replaced his customary T-shirts and jeans. When Donovan, another lotus-eater, arrived at Esher for a weeklong visit, they smoked hash, critiqued each other’s lyrics, and engaged in many dreamy, abstract discussions about life that lasted late into the night. The Scottish folksinger was mesmerized listening to George, who was as much a rascal as he, “speak with such confidence about truth and self-fulfillment.” He was no longer the cheeky little whacker, as Aunt Mimi had dubbed him, who would take the mickey out of others in order to amuse John and Paul. In a long, thoughtful evaluation, he acknowledged “the trip to India had really opened me up…. I’d been let out of the confines of the group.” The Beatles would always define him as a musician, but out of the limelight, George was ready to be his own man. Consumed with the burden of a developing identity, he even grew a mustache to assert his individuality.
Identity. Identity. Identity.
When he heard Paul’s proposal—that the Beatles take on alter egos—it sounded “mad,” as though they were somehow drifting into old, uncomfortable territory. George assumed they had been moving away from such silliness. Now, from what he could tell, “it felt like going backwards.”
For Brian Epstein, backward or forward didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Down was the direction he seemed directly headed. Since returning from America, his life had tilted on its side like a listing ship and now it felt as if he were sinking, drowning, and no one was there to rescue him.
To make matters worse: Diz was blackmailing him. A letter arrived at the Nemperor office in New York demanding money—$10,000 in cash—in exchange for Brian’s papers and those compromising photographs. Right off the bat, Brian decided to pay up. Grievously holed up in his bone-white Chapel Street flat, he considered it “blood money,” necessary to ending the hideous affair. There was no point in stirring up more trouble. “Don’t do anything else about it,” he instructed Nat Weiss by telephone. But Weiss’s briefcase was part of the hustler’s ransom, “and on that basis,” Nat says, “I called a lawyer named Bob Fitzpatrick, and we had [Diz] arrested.” Some of the money was recovered, along with the letters, but the photographs, the most damning material, had vanished. “And that’s what ultimately sent Brian into a suicidal depression.”
Those photographs haunted him, not so much for what they contained but for how they’d be used. Brian knew they’d turn up again—it was only a matter of time—and dreaded that somehow it would embarrass the Beatles. For days—weeks—he moped around the house, often not getting up until the late afternoon and then not even changing out of his pajamas. Even as the Beatles’ EMI contract was being renegotiated, Brian was lurching about the rooms “just indulging himself,” drinking cognac, popping pills, and sliding deeper into his depression. To Peter Brown, who had moved into the flat at the suggestion of Brian’s doctor, he poured out his agony in bursts of “morbid,” often incoherent tirades. Brown tried to comfort his friend but sensed the futility of it all. “Nothing I said or did seemed to help,” Peter recalls. “He was miserable. A lot. But he was such a drama queen. I assumed this was more of the same exaggerated behavior that would spend itself, like a passing storm.”
The collapse, when it eventually came, caught Brown off guard.
One evening in late September, after an informal dinner in his pajamas, Brian disappeared into his room. “I stayed in the library watching television,” recalls Brown, “and when he didn’t come back, I thought, ‘That’s strange—he’d been home asleep all day, until almost after I’d got back from the office. He can’t have gone back to bed.’ ” Peter stopped to have a look in on Brian on his way upstairs, “and I couldn’t rouse him—he was out cold.” Finding him in this condition was nothing extraordinary. But the way Brian’s body was positioned looked unnatural—sprawled and twisted in a way that couldn’t be explained by dissipation.
Brown slapped him and threw some water in his face: nothing happened. The slack limbs had no elasticity. From what he could tell, Brian was breathing, but barely. Peter ran to call the servants, Antonio and Maria Garcia, who lived in the basement, but thought better of it. “They would have freaked out and left,” he says. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Norman Cowan, the eccentric, shamefully indulgent doctor they shared. Cowan, who was on call in a London suburb, insisted that Brian be taken to the nearest hospital. St. George’s was just around the corner, but Brown balked. “The hospitals always had someone on staff who reported to the press immediately,” he recalls, “and we would have been in the tabloids the next morning.” Recklessly, Peter decided to wait—half an hour, at least—for Cowan to arrive. Then, with the help of Bryan Barrett, the house chauffeur, they bundled Brian’s body in a blanket and rushed him back to Cowan’s private hospital, in Richmond, where his stomach was pumped.
When Brian regained consciousness, he was, Brown says, apologetic and referred to the episode as “a foolish accident.” But when Brown got back to Chapel Street the next day, he found a note on Brian’s night table, next to an empty vial of Nembutal. Written in Brian’s familiar script, it said: “I can’t deal with this anymore. It’s beyond me, and I just can’t go on.” There was a codicil attached, in which he left his estate to Queenie and his brother, Clive, with other belongings to be distributed among Brown, Geoffrey Ellis, and Nat Weiss.
Brian’s desperate act shocked his closest friends. Throughout the tour, his erratic behavior and manic depression had stirred up sympathy and concern. But in the many years they’d known him, even grown accustomed to the emotional jags of his “torturous life,” there was never any indication that he intended to kill himself. Certainly there had been irrational talk, even some low-grade drama. “But none of us, however shortsighted, suspected he was suicidal,” says Nat Weiss.
At Peter Brown’s insistence, Brian spent two weeks “drying out” in the Priory, a spalike sanitorium in Roehampton that catered to well-to-do patients with embarrassing personal problems. But once back in London, Brian slipped back into a disturbing groove paced by indulgence and self-destructive behavior.
While he’d all but neglected the affairs of his other artists, it seemed that for the Beatles there was always enough juice. The deal Brian had recently struck with Capitol had been renegotiated for a hefty 10 percent royalty, with built-in escalators that could rocket the Beatles’ share to an unheard-of 17 percent. According to Weiss, “Brian was never a great push-them-to-the-wall businessman.” But he’d toughened up for Alan Livingston, and when Capitol announced plans, prematurely, to put out a Best of the Beatles package, Brian gave the label president a terrible tongue-lashing, threatening to bolt for a competitor unless the album was shelved. But otherwise, the stairs were steep, and Brian stumbling.
In late 1965 Brian had called Ken Partridge and asked him to rush around to the NEMS office to see something “fabulous” he’d just acquired. Brian was waiting in his car when Partridge arrived, and after a brief enigmatic exchange, they drove to the West End, pulling to the curb in front of a once-stately but now rather dowdy building on Shaftesbury Avenue. “I’ve just bought this from Bernard Delfont,” Brian announced grandly, gesturing outside. Partridge gazed up at the Saville Theatre, then back at Brian, and exclaimed, “You must be mad!” In Partridge’s opinion, “it was the worst theater in London—a real pup—dirty, filthy, dilapidated, with row after row of broken seats.” Delfont and his brother Lew Grade had tried in vain to fill the 1,200-seat theater. How did Brian expect to succeed with it?
For Brian, the Saville was a second chance at a theater career, an opportunity to replay his botched season at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, albeit on a grander, more legendary stage, and at his own whim. “He wanted to be Ziegfeld,” says Don Black, who admired Brian’s spunk. “The theater was a perfect foray.” And he had the acts to fill it.
But the first season was an unqualified disaster. A “terrible” musical about Houdini that Brian produced set the tone for much of the woolly, lightweight fare that would thin out the more discerning audiences. “He also put on several revues that didn’t work,” recalls Ken Partridge. Tony Bramwell, who took over running the Saville Theatre, says they were forced to reshuffle the repertory, mixing in rock ’n roll with a variety of legitimate productions. “During the week, we had Gilbert and Sullivan or Shakespeare, switching to rock concerts every Sunday night: Brian Epstein Presents.” The name, however, was the only association Brian maintained with the shows. The fact was he had already lost interest in the theater, other than the weekly parties at his flat in honor of the Saville’s current attraction. In early November, Brian sent out invitations for a reception with the Who. George and Ringo planned to attend; Paul, still in Africa on safari with Mal and Jane Asher, wired his regrets. John and Cynthia had only just returned to London, suffering from travel fatigue and an ominous melancholy. Friends described John’s mood as “tense” and “bitter.” “There was so much going on in his head that he couldn’t get on top of,” recalls John Dunbar. The future of the Beatles had arrived at a strange point; his marriage, long plagued by lethargy, waded into decline. Still, after weeks trapped on a film set, with his hair swept back and wearing distinctive granny glasses, John stood eager to accept. But two days before Brian’s shindig at the Chapel Street flat, he was steered to an exhibit at Dunbar’s Indica Gallery.
In the ten months since the Indica had been open, both the bookshop and gallery had developed a tidy following, catering to the alternative literary and artistic movement—the emerging counterculture—that craved anything avant-garde. Upstairs, its bowed shelves were crammed with American independent-press imports, interspersed with magazines, beat poetry, and a hodgepodge of philosophy, while the gallery space in the basement hosted conceptual installations. There was nothing quite like it in London. The long-haired young crowd that milled through Mason’s Yard lavished upon it immediate cachet, as did William Burroughs, a widely recognized habitué who lived nearby, on Duke Street. “There were all those Chelsea people,” says another regular, “and they suddenly appeared.” Inevitably, the Indica, along with its next-door neighbor, the Scotch of St. James, became the epicenter of all that was hip and cool.
If there was one theme that ran through the gallery, that extended the Indica’s reputation as a countercultural force, it was radical—anything that smashed the formal categories of art. Whether it meant exhibiting Gustav Metzger’s autodestructive monuments that disappeared before your eyes, Christo’s wrapped objets d’art, or the environmental art of Stuart Brisley, in which the artist performed within the piece, resisting traditional form and structure became the Indica’s overriding mandate. “We never had a painting as such in the place,” recalled John Dunbar, who commissioned each show. Exhibits were chosen without regard for commercial return—to “liberate art as a commodity,” says Dunbar.
It was in that liberated, happily stoned spirit that Dunbar underwrote an exhibit with an elfin Japanese event-art practitioner named Yoko Ono. He had heard about her breakthrough show in Trafalgar Square, during which she lunged about inside a black bag, and thought it was “a hoot, exactly the kind of thing that would bring us notoriety.” Besides, she and her husband, Tony Cox, had become part of the Indica’s “clubby atmosphere.” Dunbar liked to support familiar artists and provide a space where they could be shown.
The opening of Unfinished Paintings and Objects on November 10, 1966, created a strong buzz among the city’s curious trendsetters. Dunbar expected a hearty opening-night crowd, and subsequently he enticed John to a private preview—“a real happening,” he called it—on November 9, “to ensure that he wasn’t harassed.” Attracting a celebrity of John’s magnitude, he knew, would boost the Indica’s crowd—word of a Beatle’s interest would spread like wildfire—and so he “laid it on pretty thick,” implying that part of the exhibit, “fun and games inside a bag,” could lead to, well… anything, anything at all. “I thought, ‘Hmm,’ you know, ‘sex,’ ” John recalled, misunderstanding, just as Dunbar had intended. But John had other reasons for going. Even though he’d been home for only two days, he was already bored out of his skull, ready for anything that might spark a little excitement.
Certainly, John and Cyn had little more than familiarity left to give each other. There was Julian, of course, but John was hardly an attentive father. He left the parenting to his wife, along with most other household responsibilities. Days went by in which they barely exchanged five words between them, even when living—or rather, coexisting—under the same roof. John was aloof, uncooperative, disappearing into the music room for hours on end or staring hypnotically at the television until he passed out from fatigue. Paul, who seldom saw John during this time, remembered encountering him once in London and asking what he’d been up to. “Well, watching telly, smoking pot,” John replied.
In the chauffeured Mini Cooper on the way to the Indica, the weeks of boredom and frustration—the dormant Beatles, the unfulfilling movie role, the resentment of Paul, the stultifying marriage, the creeping inertia—caught up with him. “I was in a highly unshaved and tatty state,” John recalled in an interview. “I was up three nights… tripping. I was stoned.” When they pulled up to the curb outside Mason’s Yard, he’d practically lost his nerve. Les Anthony, who’d been John’s driver for two years, said they sat in the car for “some time”—perhaps as much as half an hour—while John debated whether to go inside. “I’m not ready yet,” he agonized every few minutes. “Let’s just sit here. Let’s see what happens.” Anthony thought the wavering was a by-product of the drugs, but more probably, like most of John’s indecision, it was the result of insecurity. All this time, he’d had the Beatles to cover his anxieties. Yes, he wanted to be the leader, but there was safety in numbers. He wasn’t good on his own. Besides, he dismissed a lot of gallery art as “bullshit and phony.” The longer he sat there, the more he resented coming. But there he was, and, well, fuck it. In he went.
Recalls Dunbar, “When he came in, it was like the parting of the Red Sea. Everyone who was there, some of the staff and a few friends, just stepped aside and gave him space.” Apparently convinced that John was a potential collector with deep pockets, Dunbar was “flittering around like crazy,” and John went stiff from the star treatment. Protectively, he buried himself in the exhibition’s attractive catalogue. “… mirror to see your behind… sky T.V…. eternal time clock… bag wear… Painting to hammer a nail… Painting to let the light go through… Crying machine…” “Is this stuff for real?” he wanted to know. The descriptions sounded like a put-on. “Danger box: machine that you will never come back the same from (we cannot guarantee your safety in its use)… Underwear to make you high, for women, description upon request…” “I wasn’t quite sure what it was about. I knew there was some sort of con game going on somewhere.” Then one of the exhibits caught his eye and he moved in for a closer look. On a shelf, he stared at several nails atop a Plexiglas stand and, next to that, an apple—it looked real, as far as he could tell, and quite ordinary—with a little table card that said: APPLE. “This is a joke, this is pretty funny,” he thought. “I was beginning to see the humor of it.” When he asked Dunbar for the price of the apple, he was told: £200. Oh-ho! Definitely a joke. The dry, almost inadvertent sense of humor appealed to John, who was encouraged to see the rest of the show in the downstairs gallery.
There, John’s mood brightened. All sorts of contraptions, connected by gangplanks, beams, and ladders, were spread across the brightly lit basement, where a few “scruffy people” were putting the finishing touches on the installation. As he stood there, taking it all in, Dunbar excused himself to confer with the staff. When he returned, a slip of a young Asian woman was by his side, prim, in a black leotard and pale as porridge. In her tension of small bones, she resembled a serious small-faced animal. “Hey, man,” Dunbar said, “allow me to introduce Yoko Ono.”
Yoko Ono: was that a put-on, too? She had amazing presence, John thought; he could feel it surge through the room. There was something about her, something strange and exceptional, that was overpowering. John glanced around shyly, buying time to recover his composure. “Well, what’s the event?” he wondered, obviously flustered.
Instead of answering, this little sphinxlike woman merely handed him a card, which John turned over in his hands a few times. There was nothing on it except a single word: BREATHE. “You mean, like this?” John asked, panting like a winded terrier. That was it, yes, that’s what she’d intended. Yes… breathe. John liked that; it was part of the joke.
Increasingly, Yoko relaxed as John responded—perfectly—to her approach. Too many people dismissed her work as outrageous, beyond weird; they got angry instead of locating the humor in it. But this guy—Yoko claimed, hard as it seems to believe, that she neither knew John’s name nor recognized him—seemed to get what she was about, or at least he was willing to play along, which was just as favorable.
Leading him to a ladder, she suggested that he climb to the top to view a ceiling painting. “It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it,” he recalled. What did she expect him to make of that? “You take a magnifying glass and you look at it,” Yoko explained, motioning him toward the rungs. John wasn’t so sure he wanted to play anymore. He dreaded climbing the ladder and confronting some cynical witticism, some goof. Still, Yoko coaxed him upward, and with mounting trepidation, he held the magnifying glass up to the canvas and squinted. A smile spread instantly across John’s face. Painted on the canvas was a single word: YES.
As soon as he’d climbed down, John asked to see more. There was a piece of plasterboard, a wall, that was painted eggshell white. A small sign invited visitors to hammer a nail into its surface. Trouble was, the show’s opening was still a night off and Yoko understandably wanted it to remain unspoiled. “I argued strongly in favor of Lennon’s hammering in the first nail,” Dunbar remembers. “He had a lot of loot—chances are, he would buy the damn thing.” Yoko’s eyes flashed anger. Why let this guy ruin her pristine exhibit? She pulled Dunbar aside and they huddled for several minutes, going at it like cats and dogs. In all likelihood, Dunbar identified John and enticed her with a potential sale, because she eventually relented and said, “Okay, you can hammer a nail in for five shillings.” That was all John needed to hear. Grinning, he responded, “I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings if you let me hammer in an imaginary nail.” Beautiful: pure Lennon. And Yoko loved it. “My God,” she thought, “he’s playing the same game I’m playing.”
During the weeks after meeting Yoko, John spent more time than ever locked behind the door of his music room on the top floor of Kenwood. His drug-taking and depression dragged on ceaselessly, without regard for days or nights. Time passed in a vague blur, during which he leafed through magazines or one of the handsome volumes of impressionist art that were stacked next to the couch, rarely picking up a guitar other than to move it out of the way. Occasionally Terry Doran turned up and managed to coax John to the Scotch or the Bag o’ Nails, but their outings routinely ended back at the house, to refuel. “John was a fun drug-taker—serious fun,” Doran recalls. “We’d come home late from a nightclub… and go up to his attic and dose ourselves silly.”
With no new songs in the hopper and nothing to inspire him, John rarely involved himself with music. Surprisingly, the Beatles seemed content to forfeit the robust Christmas sales platform that had, for several years running, been their exclusive province. The spotlight that season fell instead on Cream, the “first high-voltage superblues group,” who had emerged from a crowded pack of newcomers to dazzle audiences with their formidable accompaniment. Along with Jimi Hendrix, who was competing for that share of the rock, their virtuoso lineup—Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker—expanded and transformed the dynamics of rock, with inventive, heavily syncopated riffs and ferocious jams. (NEMS was booking Cream and Hendrix with what seemed like a vengeance across the U.K.) Everywhere around them were other alluring acts pushing boldly into the Beatles’ firmament: the Easybeats, the Spencer Davis Group, Brian Auger and the Trinity, the Move, Donovan, the Four Tops—the Monkees. If the proliferation of bands didn’t ruffle the Beatles, then surely popular response did. “Show business will vibrate with the sensational news that the Beatles have been outvoted by the Beach Boys as the World’s Outstanding Vocal Group,” NME announced in its annual poll results. (“We’re all four fans of the Beach Boys,” Ringo confessed, “… maybe we voted for them.”) More irritating, perhaps, was the report that John had ceded his Best British Vocal Personality crown to Cliff Richard.
Normally, the Beatles would have ignored such nonsense, but with the fitful shape of their career and contract renewal in play, they grew sensitive to the pessimism imparted by the mercurial media. They still felt compelled to deny rumors that jealousy had driven a wedge between them (“This idea of jealousy is in other people’s brain,” Ringo insisted. “We all work for each other’s success.”), that they were splitting up (pure “rubbish,” according to Paul), or that, despite earlier reports, they were planning to tour again in the spring. They also expressed “outrage” about a front-page “exclusive” in the Sunday Telegraph that they were dismissing Brian Epstein and that “two of the Beatles had approached an American”—Allen Klein, who represented the Rolling Stones—“concerning their future management.” From every perspective, it seemed as though the Beatles were in free fall.
“I think we were itching to get going,” Paul recalled of the days leading up to the session. The Beatles always thrived in the studio. But unlike their previous sessions, Paul hadn’t written anything with John to prepare for it. There had been no time, little if any communication between them. As far as anyone knew, they were coming in cold.
Of course, John had “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the drawing board. On the evening of November 24—a blustery Thursday—the Beatles, all of whom now sported identical handlebar mustaches, regrouped in Studio Two, the enormous, slightly down-at-the-heels room that had functioned so often as their creative laboratory. John, who appeared spidery and gaunt, wasted no time previewing his song for Martin on an acoustic guitar. This version of it, sung so haltingly and in a voice barely above a hush, was dramatic indeed in the stillness of the studio, and so was John’s determination to convey what he felt, to honor the starry images of his Woolton childhood. Martin listened—sitting erect, arms folded across his chest, legs crossed—as impassively as possible, but his ears burned with excitement. “It was absolutely lovely,” he raved, convinced that the song was a masterpiece. “I was spellbound. I was in love.” There was a poignancy, an intimacy that he hadn’t expected to hear. “He had broken through into different territory, to a place I did not recognize from his past songs…. It was dreamlike without being fey, weird without being pretentious.” The gently eloquent delivery, accented in acid-tinged shades of surreal, fragmented imagery, produced a stunning accomplishment. Martin cursed himself for not running a tape.
It was exactly the springboard the Beatles needed. “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which took over forty-five hours to record, spanning nearly a month, sparked an explosively productive period during which Paul and John collaborated on nine of the twelve songs that eventually made the cut. Not every song, of course, warranted their equal contribution. As had been the case since before Help!, writing had become more of an individual process—Ringo estimated the apportionment at “about 80% separately written songs”—with the respective partner brought in at the last minute to provide a middle eight or a polish. But they continued, as always, to influence each other.
Coincidentally or not, Paul also seized on Woolton as inspiration for his next song. John’s fond reference to Strawberry Field must have touched off a flashback that mixed nostalgia and personal mythology in a dreamlike style. George Martin credited the “coincidence” more to the wages of “creative rivalry,” but whatever the moving spirit—Paul would only say that John and he “were often answering each other’s songs”—it didn’t take him long to single out Penny Lane, the terminal where Paul changed buses on his route from Allerton to visit any of his more centrally located Liverpool friends. “John and I would often meet at Penny Lane” on their way to center city or a gig, he recalled. And while the bus shelter “in the middle of the roundabout” at Smithdown Place wasn’t the most scenic spot, its euphonious name struck the perfect note. Penny Lane: Paul incorporated all the associations he had with it—Bioletti’s barber shop, with its photo spread of haircuts in the window; the British Legionnaire who sold poppies for a shilling; the fire station; St. Barnabus Church, where, for a short time, he was a choirboy. The song took form in a brief two-hour burst. Most of it came in his new upstairs music room, at a small upright piano “painted in an exploding psychedelic rainbow” pattern and positioned just beneath the picture window so that it overlooked the front yard onto Cavendish Avenue. The first two verses, which “practically wrote themselves,” set a true-to-life scene, with the whole drama of the neighborhood unfolding, as it might at the beginning of a 1940s movie or “more like a play,” as Paul has said. An entire cast of characters leap into action “beneath the blue suburban skies,” much as they do in “Eleanor Rigby.” From the beginning, however, Paul’s intent was to look at Penny Lane in a special way. “The lyrics were all based on real things,” he recalled, but distorted, “a little more surreal… twisting it to a slightly more artsy angle” to incorporate “all the trippy little ideas that we were trying to get into.”
Paul’s experiments with the recording of it, however, showcase little of the hallucinatory effects that range throughout “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The style of “Penny Lane” is beautifully structured, saturated in rhythmic cadences, rambling like a no. 16 bus to the tram sheds. Paul narrates the action with bluff familiarity, becoming someone who has committed a childhood scene to memory and yearns to share it with a visitor as a way, perhaps, of making it come alive again.
The result was all the Beatles could have wished. To Brian’s insistence that they release a single early in 1967 came back assurances that they had a killer in the can—three songs that George Martin considered “a small collection of gems”: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” and the durable “When I’m Sixty-four,” a “rooty-tooty variety style” song, according to Paul, that he had written when he was sixteen and that the Beatles performed at the Cavern during punch-ups and power failures. “I decided to give [Brian] a super-strong combination,” Martin said, “a double-punch that could not fail, an unbeatable linking of two all-time great songs: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane.’ ”
But fail it did. Not, as a matter of fact, in a commercial sense; the single, which was released on February 17, 1967, sold upward of 2.5 million copies. But it broke what Martin called “the roll”—the Beatles’ unprecedented achievement of twelve straight number one singles—failing to hit the top spot on the British charts. The outcome was so unexpected, so astounding, that the immediate cause was eclipsed by the end result. In fact, the Beatles’ single outsold its competitor—“Release Me,” by Englebert Humperdinck—by almost two to one. But in the curious mathematics of the pop charts, sales figures of the double-sided hit were being counted separately, as two singles, so that one side canceled out the other, giving Humperdinck firm grasp of the top spot.
The Beatles, to their credit, seemed amused by the curious turn of events, and only George went on to say that it was “a bit of a shock being Number Two.” Neither Paul nor John gave it much thought. The concept of A- and B-sides, and even singles, was, in Ringo’s words, “an old trap” they’d do best to avoid. This time around, the Beatles’ sensitive ears had heard rock ’n roll in a different way. “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” reveled in the possibilities of complexity and sophistication. The band’s progress on this single, their experimentation with overdubs and exotic instruments, was unlike anything ever produced, and it affected different listeners in as many different ways. It was clear from initial reviews that there was no middle ground. The sinuous melodies and rhythmic devices puzzled NME’s Derek Johnson. “Quite honestly,” he admitted, “I don’t know what to make of it.” On the other side of the world, however, there was nothing but enthusiasm for the record. The critics at Time cast their usual reservations to the wind, lavishing extravagant praise on the single, which they considered nothing short of an artistic breakthrough. From the earliest singles right through to the present, they wrote, “the Beatles have developed into the single most creative force in pop music. Wherever they go, the pack follows. And where they have gone in recent months, not even their most ardent supporters would ever have dreamed of. They have bridged the heretofore impassable gap between rock and classical, mixing elements of Bach, Oriental and electronic music with vintage twang to achieve the most compellingly original sounds ever heard in pop music.”
No matter how “artistic” or “complex” the songs, when played they became instantly hummable melodies. Every so often—unavoidably—a recognizable riff or backbeat would cut through the atmospheric production to remind people that beneath this new psychedelic guise and ultrahip pretension, the Beatles remained rock ’n rollers at heart. But being a rock ’n roller no longer meant what it had. “The people who have bought our records in the past must realize that we couldn’t go on making the same type forever,” John explained. “We must change, and I believe those people know this.”
If they didn’t, they were about to find out.