A Very Freaky Experience A Very Freaky ExperienceThough die-hard Beatles fans anticipated something exceptional from their heroes, no one, not even other musicians, was prepared for the sound of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The music sounded unlike anything the Beatles had ever done before. Even the structure of the album was unconventional: it was conceptual, a kaleidoscope of interconnecting songs without the standard three-second break between tracks.
What to make of it? Especially considering the tumultuous state of popular music at the time. As EMI and Capitol prepared to release the latest Beatles opus, competing forces vied for the ears of the disenchanted—and divided—young audience. Top 40 pop, like its consumer base, had been rocked by tremors of social and cultural upheaval. A good portion of its listeners—specifically, those teenagers affected by the outburst of creative energy that embraced poetry, drugs, anti-establishment politics, and a general alternative lifestyle—no longer related to the bloodless, derivative pop music that was passed off as rock ’n roll. It didn’t speak to their groovy new way of life; it no longer resonated. Radio stations continued to play the slickly polished toe-tappers and ballads that dominated the charts, but a darker, more sensual strain of music—turned-on music, for want of a better term (“cheerful music for dope smokers,” as one critic called it), and very early acid rock—began to creep onto playlists. It was music for “serious” rock fans, and it raised the level of artistry that fans expected from the records they bought.
Groups like the Doors and those psychedelic boogie bands that were emerging out of San Francisco put listeners on notice that rock music was growing up. Within the next few years, they would be joined by virtually the entire sixties rock pantheon: Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Traffic, Jethro Tull, Sly and the Family Stone, the Band, the Chambers Brothers, Ten Years After, the Jefferson Airplane, Elton John, Credence Clearwater Revival, the Allman Brothers, Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, as well as the entire Motown and Stax/Volt rosters—all of them swept in in the aftermath of the British invasion and subsequent demise of the Brill Building factory sound. “To those of us making music for a living,” said Pete Townshend, “it seemed like, finally, rock ’n roll had found a perfect groove.” Pop playlists began mixing more progressive “album cuts” with singles, so that songs such as “Windy,” “Happy Together,” and “Somethin’ Stupid” were programmed with “For What It’s Worth” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
As all participants scrambled for a piece of the rock, the Beatles watched impassively from the sidelines. Throughout the first four months of 1967, they remained secluded in Abbey Road, working steadily, fussily, on the new album. Never had they enjoyed such a luxury of time to record. In the past there had always been a deadline looming, always a last-minute crunch to write enough material and get it down before the next tour began. For four years EMI had cracked the whip to ensure that the Beatles released four singles and two albums a year—an output unthinkable by today’s standards. But now, at last, they had time, precious time. No deadlines, no tours, no commitments—no nothing.
The studio, always off-limits to outsiders, erupted under a crossfire of loud, jangly, exotic—indescribable—sounds competing like car horns at rush hour. George Martin considered it the Beatles’ “playground,” but a laboratory was more like it. No song was safe. Ideas that once might have been polished off in a day or two were turned inside out, upside down, to see what might happen. They pounced on “every trick brought out of the bag,” according to George Martin. At any time, a “final take” consigned to the can might attract someone’s attention and be reworked entirely the next day. At home following a long night’s work, when a well-deserved joint unleashed some profound, spacey insight, John, Paul, or George might listen to an acetate of the day’s work, pick up a guitar, and bang out a riff that sent everyone back to the drawing board. Instead of learning a new song and recording it, as was customary, there was more a tendency to let it develop organically, idea by idea, overdub by overdub.
The effects of this technique began to pay off immediately. By the middle of January, when they began work on the epic “A Day in the Life,” in essence the first entirely new piece for the album,* the Beatles were able to build the song’s magnificent production, take by take and layer by layer, at their leisure, from the ground up.
They began on January 19 with a simple, two-track rendition, laying down the basic rhythm—Paul on piano, Ringo on bongos, and George on maracas—accompanied by John’s despairing, spectral vocal saturated in echo “because he wanted to sound like Elvis Presley on ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ ” The middle section had yet to be written, so an arbitrary twenty-four bars were left blank, each counted down aloud by Mal Evans, who indicated the end by setting off a noisy alarm clock that was eventually put to good use.
Even in the early run-through, the song showed unmistakable brilliance. The gorgeous melody, as stark as it is soulful, stands as one of the Beatles’ finest accomplishments. John’s “dry, deadpan voice” aches with disbelief as he comments on both tragic and inane news items that defy common logic. The lyric came, he maintained, during a stretch at the piano, with the January 17 edition of the Daily Mail propped open on the music stand in front of him. “I noticed two stories,” he explained. “One was about the Guinness heir”—Tara Browne, a friend of Paul’s—“who killed himself in a car.* That was the main headline story…. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled.”* Paul’s contribution, he said, was “the beautiful little lick ‘I’d love to turn you on’ ” that had been “floating around” unused.
Or so John claimed. Like all Beatles’ recollections, parts of that account were, indeed, accurate, while other parts improved with age. In fact, John was inspired by the newspaper inasmuch as he set out to write a lyric based on actual events. But when he arrived at Paul’s house to work on the song, only the first four lines existed, along with a bit of the second verse and the melody. “The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together,” Paul recalled. As far as he could remember, there was no discussion about Tara Browne. “The ‘blew his mind’ was purely a drug reference, nothing to do with a car crash.”
They spent the next few hours constructing the rest of the song, filling in “funny… little references” and adapting the Blackburn potholes story from John’s newspaper. It was a delicious bit of absurdity, blithely surreal and apropos of, well… nothing: perfect! In the meantime, they stitched in the “woke up, fell out of bed…” sequence that Paul borrowed from another song he’d been fiddling with—“a little party piece of mine”—leaving the rest for improvisation in the studio.
Back at Abbey Road, the Beatles were encouraged by a happy coincidence. The “woke up, fell out of bed…” sequence fit into the song exactly at the point where Mal’s alarm clock rang! It was almost too good to be true. But they still had twenty-four bars to account for. The best they could hope for was an outrageously long middle eight to materialize.
But the gap whetted Paul’s appetite for a grander, more ambitious effort. Sometime during the second day’s work, it dawned on him: a big orchestral buildup. “It was a crazy song, anyway,” he rationalized. “We could go anywhere with [it].” As he kneaded it for a while, the idea leavened. He envisioned a magnificent instrumental interval, avant-garde in its approach, that produced a spiraling ascent of sound. Explaining it to John, Paul said: “We’ll tell the orchestra to start on whatever the lowest note on their instrument is, and to arrive at the highest note on their instrument. But to do it in their own time.” The effect would be “something really tumultuous… something extremely startling.” When he requested that George Martin book a symphony orchestra, however, the producer told him to forget it. The idea appealed to Martin. “But ninety musicians”—the standard symphony configuration—“would be… too expensive.” Martin already feared that the project was getting away from them. In the past, an evening session was called for seven o’clock sharp, with everyone ready to record. Now sessions operated on Beatles Time, which meant that while the staff assembled at seven, Ringo might arrive about 10:45, with the others trickling in before 11:30, in time to grab a cup of coffee or a smoke, maybe catch up with friends, before getting down to work. But—oh, the payoff! All anyone had to do was listen to Rubber Soul or Revolver as a reminder. Who could argue with that? So, after mulling it over, Martin suggested that half an orchestra might serve the same purpose. No one in his right mind would book forty-one musicians—from the prestigious London Philharmonic, no less—to play twenty-four bars of music, but book them he did. Nor did he bat an eye when the Beatles requested that everyone wear evening dress for the occasion.
In the meantime, they set to work on the title song, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which Paul wrote, he claimed, “with little or no input from John.” With concentration and technical innovation, the track was hustled into shape in a lively two-day marathon, along with a basic reading of “Good Morning, Good Morning,” the theme of which John pinched from a Kellogg’s Cornflakes commercial.
Each new triumph by the Beatles created an urgent need for fresh material. John and Paul continued to write, both together and apart, delivering “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “Lovely Rita” in the intervening days. Another song was inspired by a “blurry and watery” painting John’s four-year-old son, Julian, brought home from nursery school. “The top was all dark blue sky with some very rough-looking stars, [and] green grass along the bottom,” Julian recalled years later. Near the corner, he’d drawn a stick-figure girl—presumably his classmate Lucy O’Donnell, identified by her long blond hair. “I showed it to Dad and he said, ‘What’s that then?’ ” Julian blurted out the first thing that came into his mind: “That’s Lucy in the sky, you know, with diamonds.”
The moment Paul learned of it, over cups of steaming tea with John in the breakfast room at Kenwood, he flashed: “Wow, fantastic title!” Perfect for their next song, it was “very trippy” sounding, which meant they could ladle on the psychedelic imagery. John had already begun playing with a few lines inspired by the “Wool and Water” chapter of Through the Looking Glass, one of his and Paul’s favorite books. “Picture yourself on a boat, on the river…” You could go anywhere on the wings of a line like that! They immediately went upstairs and began writing, “swapping psychedelic suggestions,” Paul recalled, and “trading words off each other, as we always did.” He came up with “cellophane flowers” and “newspaper taxis”; John pitched in with “kaleidoscope eyes.” It came together very quickly. The result was sure to please George Martin. First, however, they had to finish “A Day in the Life,” which awaited a hot middle passage.
On February 10 the all-male orchestra, in full evening dress, assembled in Abbey Road’s Studio One, the cavernous, hangarlike hall near the entrance to the building, dotted with a hundred “ambiophonic” loudspeakers and accommodating up to a thousand musicians, where so many of EMI’s legendary symphonies had been recorded. The ghosts of Elgar, Caruso, Menuhin, Heifetz, Casals, Toscanini, Robeson, and Callas were banished to the rafters as the Beatles invaded sacred territory—not in tuxedos, as promised, but tricked out in a wildly flamboyant, neon-rainbow wardrobe and loaded with gag accessories that they distributed to the mortified musicians. The violinists were given red clown noses; their leader, the eminent Erich Gruenberg, fitted with a gorilla’s paw on his bow hand. Balloons were attached to the bows of stringed instruments. The brass and woodwind section wore plastic spectacles, with fake noses and funny hats. Badges, bells, and beads were affixed where applicable. John giddily handed out plastic stick-on nipples and fake cigars. “People were running around with sparklers and blowing bubbles through little clay pipes,” George Martin recalled. Most of the classical musicians remained bewildered. Many were contemptuous, offended, brimming with hostility. To them, it was an undignified way to behave in the studio. Still, it was a payday, and a good one at that, stretching on and on to accommodate the Beatles’ flights of fantasy.
The Beatles also invited a few musical friends of their own stripe, among them Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Donovan, Brian Jones, Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, Pattie Harrison, two Dutch designers—Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger, who operated a firm called the Fool that would eventually play a role in another aspect of the Beatles’ career—and the Hollies’ Graham Nash, all dressed outrageously in flowing robes or waistcoats with long silk scarves and flared pants, all pleasantly stoned, all spectators for the happening that was about to take place.
Once the orchestra was given instructions, the two conductors—George Martin and Paul McCartney, the latter in a red butcher’s smock draped over a purple-and-black paisley shirt—led the ensemble through five separate performances, each one a cyclone swirl of rolling, vibrating babel. Martin more aptly termed it an “orchestral orgasm.” “It was a remarkable, breathtaking experience,” says Ron Richards, who took cover in a corner of the control room and, with head sandwiched between hands, was reported to have cried: “I just can’t believe it…. I give up!”
But the Beatles were just getting started. All five takes were mixed down onto one track, creating a monster symphonic effect that exceeded everyone’s expectations. But the high note that was reached at the end of the sequence just dangled there, unfinished. It needed a coda. But how could anything complement the sound of 205 turbulent instruments? What could, in effect, land the plane with as much panache as the flight? Initially, Martin dusted off one of John’s acid fantasies from Revolver, when he proposed the sound of four thousand monks chanting accompaniment to “Tomorrow Never Knows.” As nutty as that sounded, Martin thought it might actually work in this case—not four thousand monks, of course, but a chorus of eight or nine people chanting a mantra that could be overdubbed four or five times to create the illusion of thousands. The concept, which everyone responded to eagerly, was ditched after several rehearsals revealed that no one—most of them smokers—could hold the note for more than fifteen or twenty seconds.
Instead, they settled for producing “a gigantic piano chord” that would sustain for just over a minute. The staff rolled three grand pianos into Studio One, including the one reserved exclusively for Daniel Barenboim that was normally kept locked. On the count of four, ten hands—Paul, John, Ringo, Mal Evans, and George Martin—clamped down on an E chord as hard as humanly possible, letting it reverberate, enhanced by some complex technical magic (boldly employing heavy compression and increasing the gain by degrees), right up to the last ounce of fade. It took nine attempts to perfect but was well worth the effort. It was a magnificent—stirring—effect, as conclusive as it was dramatic, capping a dazzling thirty-four-hour arrangement that serves as perhaps the Beatles’ outstanding studio performance.
Much has been written over the years analyzing “A Day in the Life,” how it expresses John’s disillusionment and comments upon the hopelessness of society or redefines the “mythical” Sgt. Pepper’s band by interjecting a measure of sobering reality. Newsweek’s critic hailed it as the pop version of “The Waste Land.” Others singled it out as a case of acid reflux. But, one by one, these grand visions amount to nothing more than personal bias. The song was, after all, recorded before the album concept even took shape, and was written almost as an exercise, lifting random images from the pages of the Daily Mail that “got mixed together in a little poetic jumble,” according to Paul, so “that [it] sounded nice.” No one can argue with the song’s beauty or its astonishing power. Moreover, it reveals the Beatles’ skill and growing confidence as craftsmen—virtuosos—in the studio. John’s vocal, Paul’s musical daring, Ringo’s exquisite, inimitable drum fills are unparalleled. But whether it is profound remains purely subjective. Instead, “A Day in the Life” shines as one of the most innovative sessions in history, one in which the Beatles experimented with sounds and styles that refined the slapdash recording process into a feat of technical artistry. “I’d love to turn you on…,” they had teased, and in the end, it was a promise fulfilled.
Even in the midst of this “very productive period,” there were muted notes of discontent. Professionally, the Beatles felt the strain of wear and tear on a tightly yoked bond now entering its tenth year. They had been inseparable for the most part, shaping one another’s early attitudes toward life, as well as dreams about the future. As boys, they had clung tenaciously to one another—to the Beatles—for stability and even survival, but as men, they were already looking beyond the band in response to individual needs.
George, who suffered through a stretch of extreme growing pains and a preoccupation with all things Indian, found the “assembly[-line] process” of recording overdubs “a bit tiring and a bit boring.” To him, the whole Sgt. Pepper business was a turnoff, not so much for its concept, which wasn’t all that fascinating, as for the diminishing role he filled in the recording studio. “A lot of the time it ended up with just Paul playing the piano and Ringo keeping the tempo, and we weren’t allowed to play as a band so much,” he complained, and not unjustly. Certainly there was less for George to do on this album. Guitar parts seemed to have taken a backseat to technical fireworks. Most of the songs he proposed—a miscellany of mantras and ragas—had been rejected by John and Paul. The facade of Beatlemania that had been his pass into John’s and Paul’s world lost its luster, and now the old sense of alienation that he’d felt in Liverpool and Hamburg was pecking at a nerve.
Whatever restlessness George felt in the studio was compounded by John’s personal burden of self-loathing and envy. The destabilizing effects of LSD, coupled with a stagnant marriage and twenty years of snowballing rage, sunk Lennon further and further into an emotional shell. “I was in a real big depression in Pepper and I know that Paul wasn’t at that time,” he recalled. Paul’s glaring “confidence,” as John saw it, only inflamed his outlook, and as a result, John said, “I was going through murder.”
The extent of his anguish is apparent in the volume of photographs that survive as a graphic account of the Sgt. Pepper sessions. In picture after picture taken throughout the months at Abbey Road, the sleepless nights begin to show. John looks miserable, achingly sad, his face dissipated from abuse, his eyes as flat and lifeless as a poached carp. Food no longer interested him, probably a condition caused by the drugs that were sustaining him. For hours, sometimes days, he remained transfixed in a cosmic consciousness, either staring at the ceiling like a zombie or giggling into his hands. Cynthia equated John’s LSD fixation with “religion” and wrote that, because of the incessant tripping, “it was becoming almost impossible to communicate with [him].” In one respect, she said, his “tensions, bigotry, and bad temper were replaced by understanding and love,” but the downside was tragic. During the winter and early spring of 1967, he reached an apogee of drug-taking and self-abuse unparalleled since art college. The nightly scenes when he returned home had lost their intimacy. John was often too spaced out, talking gibberish and behaving much like a child. And he brought home swarms of street freaks “as high as kites,” who tripped and drank and passed out in the house, causing havoc chez Lennon.
John’s problem, according to Paul, was that he was “stuck out in suburbia, living a middle-class life.” It wasn’t the John Lennon he knew at all. It was someone else pretending to be John, pretending to be a husband and father in a fake, alien world. The real John Lennon was the sharp-tongued bohemian from Liverpool, the guy he knew from art college who enjoyed dancing on the edge, going for broke, not the house husband in the ritzy-titsy Stockbroker Belt, as Weybridge was called, with boring neighbors and a seriously boring wife. Paul knew that wasn’t where John was at. And where it left John was plain to him: John was in hell.
He had company. Even before the latest round of headaches, Brian had felt threatened by the Beatles’ metamorphosis. He had vowed to maintain control over all aspects of their career. But this new direction saw them slipping further from his reach. At the beginning of the year—right after they’d settled into the studio—he had negotiated an extension of the Beatles’ contract with EMI. He thought his position would be strengthened by the generally favorable terms and increased royalty rates.* Even with a new deal in place, however, his insecurity mounted. Touring had sustained Brian. He loved the detailed work and traveling with the boys. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t bring up the subject of tours, as if to somehow keep the idea of it alive. “I know Brian was convinced they’d go out again,” recalls Tony Barrow. “He actually had dates penciled in—they’d start in Glasgow and do Brighton.” But Barrow knew better. John and George had been adamant; even the other two had no interest in playing to audiences. Ever.
Other circumstances indicated to Barrow that Brian had lost control over the Beatles’ press functions as well. It was becoming impossible to get any interview or photo session approved, even when it was impressed upon Brian that a prestigious publication had put in a request and was sending Lord So-and-so as its rep. There would be days, maybe weeks, of excuses, hedging, until Brian eventually lost patience and snapped: “Of course I’ve been to them. Don’t you realize? They’ve said no.”
When it came to the Beatles, the sad truth was that Brian’s role had been reduced to that of a figurehead. Distancing himself even further from the process, Brian moved out of NEMS and took a private, tucked-away office on Albemarle Street, out of which only he and Wendy Hanson operated. He also decided to sell a controlling interest in NEMS to a flashy operator named Robert Stigwood. Like Brian Epstein, Stigwood was among the small, pioneering band of gentleman British impresarios who, beginning in the mid-1960s, built empires by spreading the gospel of rock ’n roll. By 1965, he had already gained prominence as one of the first independent producers and gone broke in the process—twice, in fact, the second time, as Peter Brown points out, with “borrowed money from EMI, knowing he would never be able to pay it back.” Nat Weiss sized him up as “a real carnival promoter… a man who had two cents [to his name] but could run up a bill.” But Brian detected what other music insiders knew and respected, which is that Stigwood had qualities that, in the rock world, superseded fiscal responsibility: fabulous style and taste, not to mention an eagle eye for talent. “Robert seemed like the solution to our worries,” Peter Brown remembers. “Even though no one came out and said it, Brian was no longer paying attention and couldn’t adequately run the company as it was. Suddenly, here was this person who could not only run it effectively but improve on it in the process.”
To encourage a deal, Stigwood and his partner, financier David Shaw, whisked Brian off for what has been described as “a dirty weekend” in Paris, an expression that can only be taken to mean attractive young men and wanton sex. Stigwood had already prepared a proposal. “It was quite simple,” he recalled. “We’d be joint managing directors together, and he gave me an option… for six months. If I paid him half a million pounds [in that time], then the controlling shares… would be transferred to me and my company.” Half a million pounds seems a ridiculously small amount for a company that, just two years before, was valued at twenty times that. But that was then—when the novelty of Beatlemania was still thrilling, and before the drugs and depression tightened their grip. It wasn’t fun anymore. Without much ado, Brian made the deal that was presented to him in Paris, dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s that enabled Stigwood and Shaw to move into NEMS right away.
Only one small detail was overlooked: he neglected to tell the Beatles anything about the new arrangement.
Then again, Brian might have outlined the Stigwood deal on a billboard placed outside Abbey Road and the Beatles probably wouldn’t have noticed. They were up to their forelocks in recording, cranking out the remaining songs for what would become Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and oblivious to the outside world.
In a little over three weeks, they laid down the basic tracks for “Fixing a Hole,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” “Good Morning, Good Morning,” “Lovely Rita,” “Getting Better,” and “She’s Leaving Home,” all songs of which bits and pieces were written during various sessions. The recording staff had never experienced anything like it. Geoff Emerick, the chairman of the board, and Richard Lush, the tape operator, were kept dancing, trying to create the extraordinary effects that caromed around the Beatles’ heads. Hardly a note was left intact without dissecting and manipulating its abstract properties. Could a sound be distorted, looped, or played backward? How about speeding up the tape to play havoc with the vocals? (They accomplished just that on “When I’m Sixty-four,” satisfying Paul’s request to “sound younger… and be a teenager again.”) Or slowing it down? (On “Lucy in the Sky” the tape was delayed five cycles, which elevated the vocals, then cushioned with tape echo.) And what about orchestration? “She’s Leaving Home” gave itself over entirely to a string octet, a harp, and those gentle voices; there wasn’t a conventional rock instrument on deck. Nothing was sacred.
One of the most enterprising tracks was “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” The idea for it came the last week in January 1967 during a break in recording, while the Beatles were filming the promotional films for the “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” single. It was a clear, bitter cold day, and they were on their way to a restaurant, passing in front of an antiques shop in Sevenoaks, when a poster for an old-fashioned circus—Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal—caught John’s eye. Enchanted by circuses as a boy, dazzled by the animals and the costumes—even once flirting with quitting school and “joining up”—he disappeared inside the shop and scarfed up this trophy. It was advertised as “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite (late of Wells’s Circus)” and promised to be the “Grandest Night of the Season!” “It said the Hendersons would also be there,” John recalled. “There would be hoops and horses and someone going through a hogshead of real fire. Then there was Henry the Horse. The band would start at ten to six. All at Bishopsgate.” The next week Paul arrived at Weybridge for an afternoon’s work and saw the poster on John’s living-room wall. “Almost the whole song was written right off this poster,” he remembered. “We pretty much took it down word for word and then just made up some little bits and pieces to glue it together.”
Writing it, however, was a snap compared with bringing the song to life. John was explicit about the atmospherics: he wanted a “fairground sound,” something that toggled his memory of wandering through village fetes, where one could “smell the sawdust” and hear the crowd amid the background racket of the arcade. To George Martin, that conjured up the calliope, and he put out the call for a steam organ. It seemed like a reasonable order, but the cost of renting and programming one was enormous, he discovered, even when it came to his golden boys, the Beatles. Those within financial reason were automatic, not hand-cranked, which sounded fake. Existing recordings seemed like a good alternative, but those he could get his hands on proved useless. Hamstrung, they created their own backing track—“a pumping kind of sound,” Martin called it—with a harmonium, various organ overdubs, and a bass harmonica played by the ever-versatile Mal Evans. Over roughly a six-hour marathon, Paul played various keyboards, with Martin pumping the harmonium nonstop until he literally gave out, collapsing on the floor out of exhaustion.
Early session tapes reveal the fairground ambience beginning to take shape, with John contributing “oom-pahpahs” on yet another organ. Nevertheless, on playback it still lacked authenticity. Martin went back to the existing steam organ recordings—variations of John Philip Sousa marches—and transferred the lot of them to tape. “I selected two-minute segments of the taped music,” he recalled. Then he enlisted Emerick—“my co-conspirator,” as he referred to him—and issued bizarre instructions. “I want you to cut that tape there up into sections that are roughly fifteen inches long…. Now, pick them all up and fling them into the air.” Geoff did what was asked of him, excited to hear what the randomness provided—“but, amazingly, they came back together in the same order.” So they cheated a bit, shuffling the samples, splicing pieces, even turning several upside-down to create a patchwork of one-second segments, and—voilà!—a fairgrounds sound materialized, almost uncannily so. More organ was added to lend a more circusy effect, and the backing track was complete. “John was thrilled to bits with it,” Martin recalled.
The album grew up and around them. A lot of the joyous mayhem is evident on “Lovely Rita,” which Paul had written during a nighttime walk while visiting his brother, Michael, on the Wirral. Its whimsical lyric invited an equally whimsical approach when it came to getting it on tape over a day or two in late February. In four takes, it was more or less intact. But John had one last trick up his sleeve: combs were distributed throughout Studio Two in lieu of instruments, after which Mal was dispatched to the loo for ample lengths of regulation-issue EMI toilet paper (each sheet was stamped PROPERTY OF EMI) to complete the kazoo orchestra. The honky-tonk piano solo, added as an afterthought by George Martin, lifted the exuberant spirit of the song from what John considered its otherwise “boring” subject.
During the recording, Martin’s fussy direction provided tremendous downtime during which the Beatles would either rehearse or muck about. Ordinarily John might have doodled in a sketchbook or huddled with Paul, but throughout the prolonged months of working on Sgt. Pepper, these languorous stretches were often serviced by drugs. All the Beatles smoked pot in vast quantities; they really enjoyed it. But John’s intake wasn’t so much recreational as it was therapeutic. In the studio, the Beatles’ regimen of drugs was fairly limited, although Paul has reported—quite surprisingly—that “the one hard drug used during the making of Sgt. Pepper was cocaine.” This amounted to a few lines before the sessions: “For Sgt. Pepper I used to have a bit of coke and then smoke some grass to balance it out.”
Had harder drugs further encroached, they might have seriously impeded the work, but even the buttoned-down Martin maintained that “looking back on it, Pepper would never have been formed in exactly that way if the boys hadn’t gotten into the drug scene.” The album wouldn’t have been “quite so flowery,” he believed, nor would it have been so intense without LSD. In fact, John told Jann Wenner, the Beatles never dropped acid in the studio. But John quickly corrected his memory, remembering an “accidental trip” toward the tail end of Sgt. Pepper’s. It happened on March 21, while they were overdubbing the lead and backing vocals on “Getting Better.” There was a lull between takes, during which John staunched the boredom with what he thought was a blast of amphetamine. “By mistake this night he had acid,” Paul recalled, “and he was on a trip.”
It hit John unexpectedly, which played on his paranoia. He felt disoriented, nauseous. Recording continued, but it failed to settle his nerves. “I suddenly got so scared on the mike,” he recalled. “I thought I was going cracked.” Unsteadily, he climbed the steep staircase to the control room and confronted his producer. “George, I’m not feeling too good,” he mumbled. “I’m not focusing on me.” One look told Martin that John was distressingly ill. His gaunt face was tightly cinched around the mouth. A hollow-eyed stare obliterated any concentration.
Martin may have exuded common sense, but he knew less than nothing about drugs. In his naïveté, he suggested John get some air—on the roof. Fifty feet above the concrete driveway, shivering in the biting air, the two men stood perched on the edge of the studio’s flat roof, staring at the stars. John hallucinated wildly. Breathlessly, he filled the night with talk of heavenly brilliance. The aimless gush of his comments surprised George Martin, who by now sensed that John was “wired”; he felt him “swaying gently against my arm… [and] resonating away like a human tuning fork.” Martin tried to comfort him but sensed the futility of it. Gradually, the paranoia passed. At some point George and Paul “came bursting on to the roof” when they found out where John was, but by that time he was safely out of danger—or at least nowhere near the ledge.
Everyone decided that it would be fruitless to go on. Nothing would be accomplished without John, and he was in no shape to continue. Reluctantly, Martin closed down their session for the night. John had no place to go. His driver wasn’t expected for several hours. Cynthia was fast asleep in Weybridge. Since Paul’s house was the closest—just around the corner, in fact—it seemed most sensible for the two men to go there to chill out.
Paul’s house held its own pitfalls. It demanded a degree of intimacy, which, for all their interaction, had disappeared from their relationship. No one said as much, but acid had driven a larger wedge between them. Paul felt it had intruded upon their careers as well as their extraordinary, productive friendship, whereas John no doubt relied on it to sharpen his self-expression. In some respect, LSD permeated every aspect of their lives, and it affected each of the partners in completely different ways. As they set off and bisected that now-famous zebra crossing outside the studio, John and Paul once again avoided saying anything that either of them might regret. Still, each no doubt felt the implication attached to Paul’s good deed. They may have been headed to the same destination, but it was clear to both men that they were on vastly different wavelengths.
Somewhere between Abbey Road and Cavendish Avenue, Paul reached a pivotal decision. “I thought, Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with [John],” he recalled. Paul had avoided tripping with the other Beatles. He described himself as “a guy who wasn’t keen on getting that weird” because of “a disturbing element to it.” As a matter of fact, the prospect terrified him. He later attributed his abstinence to common sense; Paul had great reserves of self-control and an eye on posterity. Even with pot, which was consumed with relish, he felt the reins of responsibility. “I always knew I’d have to keep my shit very well together,” he explained. And acid put you squarely in the shit. But unlike the Preludin and pot quagmires the Beatles slogged through as a group, acid had alienated Paul from his mates. They couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t try it, or why, as they put it, he was “holding out.” What was the point? And why did he have to act so high-and-mighty about it? Wasn’t he comfortable letting go of it all in their presence? Didn’t he trust them? The peer pressure was unrelenting. John needled him endlessly about what a choirboy he’d become, while George, on another spiritual plane altogether, expressed his contempt wordlessly by distancing himself from Paul. From the outset, Paul felt the hostility.
It had become such an issue that late in 1966, against his better judgment, Paul succumbed to the pressure and dropped some acid in the company of Tara Browne. If he was unwilling to take the drug before, his reaction to it leaned more to ambivalence. Overall, he found it quite “spacy,” a “very, very deeply emotional experience,” ranging in sensations from godliness to depression. Most likely, Paul was too uptight to give it a fair ride.
Whatever the outcome, he’d been in no rush to continue the journey. But now, with John’s companionship—just the two of them, alone—it made the prospect more appealing. Deep down, Paul loved John in the way someone loved an elder brother. He knew all of John’s faults—many of which frustrated Paul’s ambition—but he still looked up to his partner, even courted his attention. John was a loose cannon, but he was the genuine article. His rough edges and fuck-all personality only underscored Paul’s pretensions, sparking a contrast that would haunt Paul for the rest of his life. Maybe sharing the experience would help bring them closer.
Into the night, stretching almost until dawn, the two most important songwriters of their generation hallucinated like madmen, staring inscrutably into each other’s eyes—“the eye contact thing we used to do,” Paul called it—and communing with the unknown. He imagined they “dissolve[d] into each other” and envisioned John as “a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity.” No doubt they’d both drilled deeply into their subconsciouses; a good deal of transference took place. Otherwise, there was a lot of laughter and reminiscing about the past. Nothing was mentioned about their dense tangle of differences. Except for a brief walk in the garden, they hardly budged for about five hours. Still, it was a powerful, emotionally tumultuous five hours, especially for Paul. “It was a very freaky experience,” he said, “and I was totally blown away.”
By the third week in April, the Beatles had reached the end of their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band odyssey. They had logged slightly more than five months in the studio, a staggering, unheard-of amount of time, completely without precedent in the annals of pop recording.* The interminable sessions especially worried their fans, who feared the Beatles’ long silence augured some untoward fate.
On the evening of April 21, the band showed up at Abbey Road for what was ostensibly a final salute to the sessions. They gathered in the control room above Studio Two, where George Martin and his engineers were busily remixing the final two songs. Aside from sequencing, there was nothing more for them to do, but the Beatles had insisted on one last laugh.
It had been predetermined that “A Day in the Life” would close the album. There was a finality to the song, effectively bringing the curtain down, that made perfect sense in its placement. But what to do about that climactic piano chord? It just hung there like a last pregnant gasp and, then… scratch, scratch, scratch… the tone arm slid rudely into the record’s run-out groove. How annoying! the Beatles grumbled. Wasn’t there something they could do to reduce the offensive noise? It remains a mystery who actually proposed filling the groove with gibberish, but the decision to do it was fervent and unanimous. Their reasoning behind it was basically this: if people were too stoned to get up and turn off the record, even if the needle swayed in the groove for a few stagnant hours, the nonsense talk would take on the form of a mantra. Perfect! As Geoff Emerick recalled: “They ran down to the studio floor and we recorded them twice—on each track of a two-track tape. They made funny noises, said random things; just nonsense.” Only a snippet was chosen—someone saying, “Couldn’t really be any other”—which was looped, repeated ad infinitum, and overlapped until it was meaningless. There was nothing artistic about it, it wasn’t even earthshaking—except that when listeners who looked for hidden messages in Beatles recordings played it backward, a voice clearly intoned: “We’ll fuck you like Superman, we’ll fuck you like Superman….”
The gist of the message took the Beatles completely by surprise. “We had certainly not intended to do that,” Paul recalled, “but probably when you turn anything backwards it sounds like something… if you look hard enough.” John Lennon, no shrinking violet, claimed to be “shocked—and delighted.” It was even more delicious than his parting contribution: inserting a high-pitched whistle only dogs could hear immediately after the piano chord but before the gibberish began. To John, it seemed only fitting that every dog had its “Day.”
Throughout early March, as sessions for Sgt. Pepper’s accelerated and the album’s novel concept edged into focus, the Beatles batted around ideas for a cover that would complement the music. The situation, they agreed, called for something fresh, daring, and grand. Not merely a cardboard slipcase, but something radical: unusual art, psychedelic design, an entertaining sleeve, extra goodies. Perhaps it was necessary to reinvent the entire article, to offer a genuinely new vision of what an album could be.
Before the cover ever materialized, the Beatles hired a fledgling London ad agency, Geer, DuBois, to field and generate ideas. Instantly they set about experimenting with forms. New designs demanded new approaches, new ways of regarding an album. Instead of a one-dimensional surface, they proposed, maybe it should open like a book. That way, it was possible for the Beatles to include sleeve notes to their hearts’ content. One of the project coordinators, Gene Mahon, suggested printing the songs’ lyrics inside, superimposed over pictures of the Beatles. Lyrics! It had never been done. As routine as this practice seems now, the idea was trendsetting and attracted a serious challenge from music publishers, fearing it would cut into their sheet-music sales. Even so, the Beatles persisted. “We wanted the sleeve to be really interesting,” Paul insisted. “Everyone agreed.”
One thing was for certain: there wouldn’t be a standard studio shot of the four mop tops on the cover. Compared with their images on any of the early albums or even Revolver’s stark collage, Sgt. Pepper demanded a bold departure. Initially, Paul had made pen-and-ink sketches of the Beatles, dressed in Salvation Army–type Lonely Hearts Club Band uniforms, standing in front of framed photographs of their heroes. Another series depicted them being presented to dignitaries on a platform, in front of a garish floral clock. Although generally disdainful of Paul’s increasing thirst for control over such details, the other Beatles apparently approved of his design. They also commissioned the Fool, the Dutch design group, to paint an acid-inspired dream landscape for the inside gatefold. The spectacular mural was a mishmash of composition and flamboyance. Several panels of overlapping scenes served up a kaleidoscopic vision of the universe filled with silvery unicorn-like beasts, mystical birds, shamanistic images, peacocks, flowers, rainbows, and, of course, the Beatles, striding out from lush vegetation into a spectral clash of color, all crammed in beneath a comet-streaked sky. It was crude, embarrassingly puerile—and the Beatles loved it.
The arbiter of this material was Robert Fraser, Paul’s art dealer and confidant, who had been enlisted as a consultant for the Beatles’ album design. Like Victor Waddington and Mateusz Grabowski, Fraser was among the small, daring band of London gallery owners who brought the new wave of modern art to hip, young British collectors. In 1962 Fraser reportedly gave the first show in London of American pop art, and he represented an impressive array of clients, including Claes Oldenberg, Jim Dine, Eduardo Paolozzi (Stuart Sutcliffe’s mentor), Richard Hamilton, Colin Self, Harold Cohen, and Bridget Riley. Rock and movie stars alike were drawn not only to his exquisite taste in art but also by his charismatic personal style. A dapper, raffish, irrepressibly arrogant man with a drop-dead smile, he had a showman’s panache coupled with a quick, caustic wit and an alluring coterie of friends. He was also a doyen of the fashionable gay drug culture, with a gourmet taste that ran from young boys to heroin. It was a combination that attracted eclectic crowds to his gala openings and his posh flat on Mount Street.
Fraser’s involvement with rock stars was nothing new. His best customers, according to gossip, were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He sold them dozens of paintings, including most of Paul’s René Magritte collection (including au revoir, which would become the Beatles’ green Apple logo). He provided a relaxed arena where they could learn about modern art and develop an instinct for quality. It was the perfect stimulus for ambitious, newly rich young musicians. With a revealing mix of fondness and admiration, Paul later admitted that, aside from John Lennon, Fraser was “the most formative influence for me.”
Fraser took one look at the Fool’s slapdash work and, with a flick of the hand, dismissed it as “not good art.” It lacked tension. “In years to come, this will be just another psychedelic cover,” he told them. “You’ve had good covers up [un]til now, you’ve had a high standard. Why don’t you ask a fine artist to do it?” At Fraser’s insistence, they consulted two of his other clients, photographer Michael Cooper and pop artist Peter Blake.
It stood to reason that they’d find a sidekick in Blake. A devotee of fantasy and abstraction, his fascination with toys and badges played right into the Beatles’ wiggy sensibility. He painted to rock music, and what’s more, he boasted loose ties to the Liverpool arts scene: in 1963 Blake had won the junior prize at the John Moores competition—the same prize Stuart Sutcliffe won to finance the band’s first bass guitar. John had actually seen Blake’s winning entry, and when the artist wondered if he’d liked it, John replied as only John would: “No, not very much.” Hardly the ring of praise, but Blake appreciated the honesty. Besides, John had gone to several of his exhibitions at the Fraser gallery, in an entourage that included Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, and the Stones, which delighted him. And Paul appreciated his early work, the famous pinups and the wrestlers.
The Beatles laid out their ideas for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. John described their identity as “part German marching band, part military band,” and the idea was that they had done a concert. “Perhaps we could do something in a park,” he suggested. In Blake’s recollection, the crowd concept was his, but most likely he’d been told about Paul’s sketches and incorporated them in his design. Sitting in his cozy studio with John, Paul, Brian, and Robert Fraser, he proposed framing the design around a bandstand. A collage seemed like the most expedient way to construct it. “Look, I can make a crowd with photography, cutouts, and waxworks, and so we could have anyone [in it] you really want.”
Anyone. It tantalized the Beatles, who loved the prankish quality of it. “Anyone” meant friends or heroes or family or, well, any obscure face that tickled their fancy. And it required no explanation. Let the fans go crazy trying to figure out who was in the crowd—and why. What a hoot it would be!
Blake instructed each of the Beatles, as well as Robert Fraser, to make a list of the people they’d like to include in the crowd. “It was just a broad spectrum of people,” George remembered. But his list, of those finally submitted, proved the narrowest: eight Indian holy men, including Babaji, Paramahansa Yogananda, and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Paul went mostly for artsy choices: William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, Alfred Jarry, Fred Astaire, Aleister Crowley, Groucho Marx, Magritte, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as an obscure Everton footballer named Dixie Dean, among others. John had little interest in impressing anyone; he wanted to goose them, to stir up the ooze. If he felt at all chastened by irate Christians over his now-infamous comments, then starting with Jesus seemed like a “naughty” little choice. Then he requested Hitler—which managed to piss off Paul, who wanted him to take the cover more seriously—Gandhi, Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, and, of course, that rascal of rascals, the Marquis de Sade. John threw in his own obscure Liverpool footballer, Albert Stubbins, despite only the vaguest interest in sports. Later, for good measure, he added Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll.
When Blake collected the names, only Ringo hesitated. “Whatever the others have is fine by me,” Ringo replied. “I won’t put anyone in.”
Robert Fraser contributed Terry Southern, the author of Candy, as well as two American artists—Richard Lindner and Wally Berman. “Mine,” recalled Blake, “included Dion, one of the very few musicians on the cover… the Bowery Boys—Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall—Lex Barker, the Tarzan [figure], and the waxworks of Sonny Liston, who I was a great fan of. Richard Merkin, the painter, was a friend of mine in New York, so I put him in there, too.”
At the last minute, John, to his credit, insisted they include Stuart Sutcliffe.
The legwork was left to Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, who canvassed the local libraries for photos of the famous crowd. Blake, along with his wife, artist Jann Haworth, made the final selections, blew them up to life-size proportions, and retouched the images before pasting them on a hardboard surface. A set was constructed in Michael Cooper’s studio in Chelsea. “We made a rough kind of wooden frame, tacked up all the figures, and stood in the waxworks,” Blake recalled. “Built a little platform where the Beatles would then come and stand. I had a drum [skin] painted by a fairground painter [Joe Ephgrave], with the Sgt. Pepper’s symbol on it. I also asked [the Beatles] to bring in favorite objects that we might use.” The whole thing came together in less than two weeks’ time. Aside from Paul’s early sketches, there were almost no working drawings. Most of the detail was improvised on the fly. The mock-ups were placed haphazardly, the mementos patched in at will. Even the flowers for the intended floral clock were ordered as if one were sending a dozen roses. As a result, there weren’t enough stems to pull it off properly, “so the delivery boy [from Clifton Nurseries] made a guitar with them instead.”
In the shadow of Blake’s spectacle, the Beatles went to work on their outfits for the cover. It had been decided that a takeoff on soldiers’ uniforms would be appropriate. John, whose recent outing in How I Won the War gave him some experience in this field, directed his mates to Berman’s, the theatrical costumers who had supplied wardrobe and plumage for the movie. “We just chose oddball things from everywhere and put them together,” recalled Paul. Color triumphed over substance; anything bright, garish, or remotely psychedelic was given serious consideration. No one worried that anything might clash or offend—and if so, all the better, all the cooler!
Cool—they had always seemed able to define that very term. There was nothing they didn’t do naturally that had failed to catch the popular drift: their style of hair, the choice of clothes—from pointy-toed boots to collarless sport coats to loud, flower-print shirts to army jackets—the granny glasses, the handlebar mustaches, everything they touched became vogue. Meanwhile, as individuals, they had become even more handsome than their teenage years indicated, growing into faces that once only suggested the sensuality but now burst into full bloom. The Beatles had always been easy to look at. But in the early days, the spectacle of hair had drawn too much away from their appearance; it made their features less intimate, more like caricature. Now, with everybody wearing long hair, they revealed themselves.
None of this was lost on Robert Fraser, whose appreciation of young men rivaled his eye for fine art. On March 30, as the cover photo session transpired, he instructed Michael Cooper to shoot a series of portraits of the Beatles that might be used inside the gatefold. The Beatles were still committed to the Fool’s psychedelic design, but they didn’t resist the opportunity to sit for Cooper, whose lens captured them in a pose as strong and penetrating as any in their career.
The album, as a package, was almost complete. There were attempts to include a transparent envelope filled “with goodies”—stick-on tattoos, badges, sergeant stripes, and little gifts that would vary from pressing to pressing. But production costs were insurmountable and it would have made the album too bulky and impossible for EMI to ship. In a more practical approach, the Beatles created a less-expensive souvenir cutout kit, with a Sgt. Pepper’s Band bass drum, mustaches, and badges that could be slipped into the fold.
As it was, the cover costs alone soared into the stratosphere. A label like EMI usually budgeted anywhere from £25 to £75 for the standard cover photograph, but the bill for Sgt. Pepper’s topped £2,800. “Joe Lockwood was furious,” recalled Fraser, who was called into the EMI chairman’s austere chambers to account for the “folly.” Glowering like Zeus, he thundered, “I can hire the London Symphony Orchestra for that!”
Lockwood’s chief concern, however—and justifiably so—was the label’s liability in regard to the cover images. EMI had an international reputation to protect, to say nothing about standards of taste, and as far as he was concerned, that photo of Hitler was out of the question. He also insisted they “take Gandhi out” to avoid any backlash from the enormous overseas market. “If we show Gandhi standing around with Sonny Liston and Diana Dors, they’ll never forgive us in India,” he said.
Lockwood preferred that the whole cover be scrapped. In an altogether uncharacteristic gesture, Sir Joe had the label’s in-house art department tinker with the cover and showed up with it himself, unannounced, on Paul McCartney’s doorstep. “We have some problems on this,” he reportedly told Paul, handing over the retouched version. “It had the flowers, the drum, the four Beatles—and a big blue sky,” recalled Neil Aspinall, who happened to be visiting when Lockwood arrived. “They wiped out all the people [in the crowd] behind [the Beatles] because he was frightened that they might all sue or not want to be on the cover.”
Paul refused to buckle, and détente was reached when Lockwood grudgingly approved the original cover, sans Gandhi and Hitler, as long as NEMS got proper permissions, while Paul—with no authority whatsoever—cavalierly agreed to indemnify EMI against any lawsuits arising from the design.
Right off the bat, there was friction between Brian and Robert Stigwood over the direction of NEMS. In an effort to get ahold of his life and to concentrate on developing the Saville Theatre, Brian intended to downsize the company’s roster. “He certainly couldn’t handle them, in his condition,” recalls Alistair Taylor. “Brian and I discussed drawing the line at a maximum of six groups, preferably four—the Beatles, Gerry Marsden, Billy [J. Kramer], and Cilla [Black] with Sounds Inc. to back her—but, with Stigwood on board, we went in the opposite direction, signing new acts.”
Stigwood turned up the promotion of Cream, who were on the verge of breaking wide open, and pursued three or four other acts creating buzz in the London clubs. Then, in March, Brian handed him a letter that changed the course of their relationship. It was from a group in Australia, hoping to interest the Beatles’ manager. “I don’t deal with this kind of thing,” he told Stigwood, expecting him to issue a standard refusal. Instead, Robert took a look at their head shot and “fell in love.” They were three siblings who called themselves the Bee Gees—for the Brothers Gibb—and the demo tucked in their press kit sounded incredible.
Stigwood was convinced NEMS could do something with them, but he got no support at all from Brian. “Brian became annoyed when Robert said they would be the next Beatles,” recalls Nat Weiss. “As far as he cared, that sealed their fate.” But fate had its own way of striking a responsive chord. Stigwood signed the Bee Gees posthaste and decided to originate their record deal in the United States, with Atlantic.
This only magnified Brian’s indignation. Perhaps Nat Weiss had been right, fingering Stigwood as a “carnival promoter.” But the man seemed to possess a full bag of tricks, which, thus far, had been profitable.
In a style that he copied directly from Brian, Robert decided to launch the Bee Gees in America with a splash—literally—by chartering a yacht, packing it with guests and elegant food, and sailing around Manhattan. It was an elaborate, expensive affair, and Nat Weiss remembers cornering Stigwood during the cruise and asking how he intended to pay for it. “Put it on my personal account,” Stigwood replied. The next day Weiss got a call from Brian, who had flown into a rage. “They haven’t sold one record yet and he’s chartered a yacht!” he fumed. Weiss told him not to worry. “Robert says he’ll put it on his personal account.” This only prompted a more ferocious scream: “He has no personal account!”
By the time the American visit was over, Brian got his revenge. He described to Weiss Stigwood’s preference for good-looking young men but, contrary to Brian’s fancy, definitely not hustlers. “Robert likes to be able to win them over,” he told the lawyer. Half the pleasure lay in the challenge. “He likes the art of seduction.” Brian and Weiss found “the most used-up hustler in New York,” hired him, and arranged for an encounter with Stigwood. For months they fed on the story of how “Robert thought he’d seduced someone who could have been available [to anyone] for ten dollars.” So spent Brian Epstein his time and efforts.
By May of 1967, says Nat Weiss, “Brian wanted to get rid of Stigwood. He’d already begun proceedings; he had Lord Goodman”—Arnold Goodman, his personal solicitor—“working… to undo all of that.” None of this, of course, had the slightest impact on the Beatles. They still had no idea that Brian was even involved with partners, and had they known, they would have certainly disapproved. As it was, they were concentrating on their own album launch, keeping a close check on the progress of the troublesome Sgt. Pepper’s cover.
For the most part, permissions came smoothly and with expressions of great honor. There were, however, a few snags. Shirley Temple, now an ambassador to the United Nations, wanted to approve the cover first and, barring any objections, receive an autographed copy for her children. In a now-famous response, Mae West expressed her disturbance over an obvious contradiction. “What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?” she wondered. But the Beatles put together a flattering letter to her themselves, which charmed West into granting a release. Leo Gorcey, of the Bowery Boys, wrote back and said he’d be happy to appear on the cover—for a $500 fee. Unwilling to set a precedent, the Beatles refused, “so we had to airbrush him out,” Blake recalled. Otherwise, everyone agreed, and the Fates, it seemed, sided with the Beatles: not a single lawsuit would arise from the cover.
For Brian, a crueler fate was yet to come.