The Summer of Love The Summer of LoveIn early April 1967 Paul had slipped in and out of the States to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of Jane Asher, who was touring there in the Bristol Old Vic’s production of Romeo and Juliet. It had been a whirlwind visit. The few days he spent in San Francisco—showing up at the Fillmore, getting stoned with the Jefferson Airplane, wandering unrecognized into head shops and boutiques—had been among the most carefree in recent months. To Paul, the lure of the Haight’s hedonistic hippie scene, entwined with the North Beach beat movement and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, underscored the connection between acid and creativity. The whimsy, self-expression, and romanticism struck him as “golden… far-out.” Then, in Denver, while shooting some amateur movie footage in a local park, “the idea tumbled together.”
Kesey, in 1964, had sploshed spectral ribbons of paint across a beat-up old school bus, loaded it up with like-minded characters, and set out on a now-legendary trip across America, dispensing LSD to the masses. They had filmed the whole riotous, mind-blowing odyssey—later immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—intending to make a documentary movie. Hearing about it again in San Francisco had triggered a childhood memory of Paul’s. During the late 1950s, northern councils sponsored “mystery tours” on which kids boarded a chaperoned bus whose ultimate destination was kept secret. “Everyone would spend time guessing where they were going, and this was part of the thrill,” he remembered. Couldn’t this be updated with a hip, groovy edge? What would happen if the Beatles cobbled the two ideas together? How cool would it be to comb the English countryside in their own private coach, stopping spontaneously in villages and towns to film inspired, nutty sequences? They could write little scenarios, provide an original soundtrack, control the project themselves. It was loaded with possibilities. Before long, he’d imagined it as a surreal sort of mystery tour—no, a magical mystery tour, to echo the spirit of the times.
Paul crystallized the idea on the flight back to London. Borrowing paper from a flight attendant, he began framing the project—sketching out dramatic segments and scenes, including the rough draft of a title song. By the time he returned to the studio, on April 20, it was all he could talk about.
Clearly his discussions with the Beatles had an edge of déjà vu. Not even a year earlier, he had worked hard to persuade them to undertake the identity of Sgt. Pepper’s band. Now Paul was worked up about another gimmick, and it was all they could do to stay focused. It especially rankled John, who was already exasperated by his partner’s slick enthusiasms. “I still felt every now and then that Brian would come in and say, ‘It’s time to record,’ or ‘Time to do this,’ ” John recalled. “And [now] Paul started doing that: ‘Now we’re going to make a movie. Now we’re going to make a record.’ ”
A feeling crept over John that Paul was somehow trying to dominate the Beatles, which, after all, had been his group. Paul had all but taken over the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions. He contributed so many suggestions for the arrangements, and so fast, so fluently, it was all John could do to keep up with him. It angered him that Paul had come up with the mystery tour concept; he grew peevish, jealous. Why hadn’t he thought of it first? And yet, admittedly, John “enjoyed the fish and chip quality of [it],” the idea that they’d go out “with a load of freaks” and make a low-budget, tongue-in-cheek film. And even if he hated the idea, he may have been distracted—or too fucked-up—to resist.
It would also help solve the dilemma of what to do with their next film project. It was no secret that after Help!, the Beatles had been unable to find a script that captured their fancy. All the ideas submitted were either variations on the Lovable Mop Tops formula, which they despised, or sappy Hollywood retreads. “We didn’t see any way of making a similar film of four jolly lads nipping around singing catchy little tunes,” said George. “It had to be something that had more meaning.”
A magical mystery tour, Paul argued, seemed like the perfect alternative. Because it would be mostly improvised and spontaneous, the Beatles wouldn’t have to learn lines. Nor would they truck off to out-of-the-way locations at ungodly early hours, or endure endless waiting on the set. “Nobody quite knows where they’re going. We can take ’em anywhere we want, man!” Paul declared. What’s more, they could plan and even direct it themselves.
Paul was convincing enough for the Beatles to finish and record a song or two for the project, right on the heels of their Sgt. Pepper’s session. Only four days after they tacked the gibberish and dog whistle onto the end of their forthcoming album, the Beatles headed back into the studio to lay down the basic rhythm track for “Magical Mystery Tour.”
According to a music journalist, “McCartney arrived at the studio with only three chords and the opening line of the lyric:” “Roll up! Roll up!—for the Magical Mystery Tour.” John and Paul had hit on what was, for them, the perfect bit of wordplay: a phrase that fired up listeners with the keen, romantic cry of circus troupes and carnival barkers rolling their riggings into town—and, a phrase that, to any fan with the slightest streak of hipness, served as a veiled invitation to roll up a joint. It was chock-full of feeble “references to drugs and to trips,” Paul recalled. The song was clearly intended as an overture to the mystery tour motif, just as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” had kicked off an imaginary vaudeville show. But as a gimmick it was stale and sounded forced. Even the fanfare of trumpets felt tired—“the worst kind of musical cliché,” writes Tim Riley.
The Beatles worked on polishing “Magical Mystery Tour” over four days at Abbey Road, looping the track with extraneous traffic noise and sound effects from the studio’s audio library. When even that failed to lift it off the ground, they added background shouts and layered on echo. What had once provided punch, however, now sounded deliberate, if not heavy-handed. It took every ounce of their imagination to finally finish the song. When the Beatles returned to the studio on May 9, essentially to decide what to do next, it was clear they had run out of steam. The session deteriorated into a disorganized, loopy, seven-hour jam—perhaps due to boredom, perhaps to drugs—nevertheless, a condition that served to stall work on the project for several months.
Obviously, this frustrated Paul, who thrived on the energy crackling in the atmosphere. Even when the Beatles had no commitments, he seldom rested. At the slightest spark, he would flame into action. “We can do this. Then we can do that. And maybe if this falls into place, we can take it there and do…” If the rest of them wanted to get stoned and sleep in front of the telly, that was their problem. Fuck the dopeheads! Paul was bursting at the seams with creative energy, and nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stand in his path.
Somehow he kept things moving long enough to launch yet another session in advance of his mystery tour and several other rapid-fire projects, including a full-length feature cartoon based on the song “Yellow Submarine” and a new single set for summer release. Part of the other Beatles’ cooperation may have rested on their curiosity about the studio. For only the second time in their record career, they decided to work outside of Abbey Road, detouring for a night to Olympic Sound, in nearby Barnes. The Stones worked there, as did dozens of the edgy, emerging British bands, where it was said that the studio manager, Keith Grant, ran things at a slam-bang pace. Fast was attractive to the Beatles, who were easily bored to begin with; add to that their exacting, exhaustive work on Sgt. Pepper’s, and a quickie sounded like a splendid proposition.
The Olympic song, itself, was a paste-up job. Based on a news item he’d seen about hippies—the Bay Area’s self-proclaimed “beautiful people”—John had been playing around with a lyric called “One of the Beautiful People” that scanned as too convoluted and long-winded on its own. It wasn’t going where he wanted it to—that is, until Paul tacked on the lick “baby, you’re a rich man” that had floated to the fore in his notebook. Suddenly, as with so many of their collaborations, the Lennon-McCartney team pulled a song out of the scrap heap—or, as John later dismissed it, “a combination of two separate pieces… put together and forced into one song”—the whole being spectacularly more than the sum of its parts. With “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” they had come up with a number whose imagery, if nothing else, captured the blatant hypocrisy of the burgeoning hippie scene.
Working at Olympic was a welcome liberation from the frustrations the Beatles faced during the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions. There was none of the ponderous, scientific, deliberate approach to sound recording that had paced their recent sessions. No eggheads padded through the control room in identical, starched lab coats, paging through engineering manuals and dog-eared rule books. No one had to be consulted before a piece of equipment or technique could be employed. Geoff Emerick, their trusty board man, had the touch—but he was an EMI drone, part of the system, whereas Keith Grant ran his own show from the board. At Olympic, his session felt like rock ’n roll.
After laying down the first few takes, several of the Stones showed up to root on the Beatles and lend a hand. Brian Jones tinkered with a spacy oboe effect, Mick Jagger sang a few lines of backup. The whole thing had the feel of an after-hours party. By the time the shindig reached its peak in the postmidnight hours, even John fed off the buzz and grew giddy, expressing his delight by tweaking bits of the lyric. There were numerous aborted takes owing to his frisky, even scandalous, improvisations. He took some wicked shots at Paul, Ringo, and Mick, according to one observer; otherwise, “everyone else was spared.”
Not quite everyone. An oblivious victim wasn’t mentioned by name, but no interpretation was necessary when John, grinning like a jackal, was unable “to resist singing, on some of the later choruses, ‘Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew.’ ”
Rueful of his decision to sell a controlling interest in NEMS, Brian still hadn’t told the boys that Robert Stigwood had taken over the day-to-day operations. “He knew he had to confront it,” says Peter Brown, “but he couldn’t find the right time—or right way.” No matter how he presented it, it would seem weak, perhaps even underhanded. Still, by not telling them, Brian was playing a dangerous game; sooner or later the Beatles would find out, at which point there was sure to be a dramatic confrontation. Moreover, they might feel betrayed by the apparent deception. Of course, Brian hoped to invalidate the Stigwood deal before the option came due, making the Beatles’ knowledge of it irrelevant. Still, should the strategy backfire, it could damage his relationship with the boys. And he knew it. Paul was already on Brian’s back about their intricate financial arrangements, wanting to know, well, everything. “He was a real pain in the ass,” Brown says. “He always thought he knew best. He was always second-guessing Brian’s decisions.”
Had he done more than second-guess, Paul might have stumbled into the darkest tunnel, which was the Beatles’ personal management contract with NEMS. It was up in October 1967, just a few short months off. After five years at the reins of the greatest show on earth, Brian watched as the date loomed near, and he was terrified—“positively sick”—of being sacked as the Beatles’ manager. Brian had certainly taken them to the toppermost of the poppermost, but now that they were there, how much more could he do for them? No dates needed to be booked. No record deals needed negotiating. What, if anything, did they expect from a manager?
As with everything, it came down to money. The Beatles were satisfied, for the most part, by the increases in their new EMI contract, although resentment festered over the remaining careless deals, especially the lopsided music publishing arrangement with Dick James, which was siphoning off hundreds of thousands of pounds, maybe millions, from their coffers. Paul felt strongly that he and John deserved more than a 20 percent share of their copyrights. Why had Brian allowed them to sign away the lion’s share of their rights? With so much leverage, why wasn’t he able to muscle James into a more equitable arrangement? Paul wasn’t the only one asking such questions—George wanted answers, too—but he was the most persistent.
Paul had heard vague rumors about an American accountant named Allen Klein, who had restructured the Rolling Stones’ Decca Records contract and won them a $1.25 million signing bonus. “What about us?” he demanded of Brian during a confrontation in a crowded elevator. What about us? It was the kind of question Brian dreaded most.
While the paranoia may have been irrational, his fear of Klein wasn’t. Brian had taken an immediate disliking to the American the moment he laid eyes on him. They had met in 1964, when Klein was managing Sam Cooke, and it was clear that this was a beast of a different nature. Brian may have liked hustlers, but he didn’t like hustlers, which Klein clearly was, a “fast-talking, dirty-mouthed man in his early-thirties, sloppily dressed and grossly overweight,” as Peter Brown described him in a 1983 memoir. He’d approached Brian on the premise of an opening spot for Cooke on the Beatles’ American tour, but once Klein got his foot in the door he cleverly turned the talk to the business of renegotiating the Beatles’ EMI contract. Brian, of course, was neither interested nor amused. This cheek—together with Klein’s “poaching” of Donovan and the Rolling Stones—earned Brian’s bitter enmity. It became Brian’s strategy to keep a good distance from such a potentially dangerous adversary, so much so that when Klein bumped into Brian and Nat Weiss at a Cyrkle gig in Palisades Park, Brian refused to shake hands.
No one in the inner circle felt even remotely that the Beatles would cut Brian loose. “At worst, they might have renegotiated his commission, reducing it from twenty-five percent to perhaps fifteen,” says Nat Weiss, a believer with particular insight, “and I told Brian this whenever he wrestled with the subject.” Nat says that deep down, even Brian believed they would ultimately keep him on—“It’s a matter of chemistry,” he’d admit—but that, too, would eventually give way to his destructive impulses.
Most days, he couldn’t drag himself out of bed before five o’clock in the evening, and often then it was only to stumble downstairs, “fucked-up and all hazy,” in pajamas for tea and toast. His personal secretary, Joanne Newfield, “felt that more and more he was having trouble coping.” Once, when a phone number he demanded wouldn’t go through as a result of Joanne’s mistake, “he just went wild,” she recalled, hurling a china teapot across the room and striking her. Another time, Joanne misdialed the Grosvenor House and barely dodged the airborne phone. Peter Brown also suffered countless humiliations at Brian’s hands. Following a vacation to Acapulco and Mexico City in late February, the two men settled in Brian’s usual thirty-fifth floor river-view suite at the Waldorf Towers in New York, where they planned to catch the last performance of Jane Asher’s American tour. “One night Peter had been sent out on an errand,” recalls Nat Weiss, “and when he came back it was clear he had overspent for something.” Brian was presented with a receipt and some change, but it seemed only to aggravate the situation. Suddenly he flung the change in Peter’s face and screamed, “You’re sacked! Go back to London—and go economy class!” Then it got extremely physical. Weiss recalls: “It was really very violent.” (Brown did go back to London, but he remained on the NEMS payroll, ever determined to foster Brian’s welfare.)
In an effort to reverse, or at least slow, his boss’s decline, Brown conspired with their friend John Pritchard, the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, to get Brian out of London on weekends, where the go-go lifestyle seemed to be consuming him. Paging through the listings in Country Life, they spotted one place in particular, “a rather grand farmhouse” in the next village from Pritchard’s, a few miles from Rushlake Green. Brown knew instantly that Brian would love it. Known as Kingsley Hill, it was a handsome, ivy-and-wisteria-covered structure, a few hundred years old, with a small garden and a pond on the property. At £30,000, it was quite reasonable, and Brown had predicted correctly—after one viewing, Brian bought it on the spot. But it did little good.
His drug abuse worse, he became “more irrational, more incoherent.” Concluded Robert Stigwood: “You can’t count on Brian anymore. He’s not in his right mind. The best thing we can do is just ignore him completely.”
“Stigwood had Brian written off as though he was dead,” says Nat Weiss. Even by Robert’s standards, however, it was a little premature.
May 19, 1967, was launch day: Brian from his quarters at the Priory, where he once again had retreated in yet another failed attempt to reach some equilibrium, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the London press.* No one had come within a mile of the Beatles since the beginning of the year—the Daily Mail complained they had “isolated themselves not only personally, but also musically”—so it was time to put some of the speculation to rest. To commemorate the occasion, a small but “grandiose” party was held at the Chapel Street town house, whose living room had been hastily rearranged to accommodate the handpicked guests. The invitation list was highly selective—a dozen top-tier journalists, a dozen photographers, half as many influential deejays, scattered among a few NEMS insiders and, of course, the Beatles.
Champagne flowed freely as the press awaited the Beatles’ grand entrance. They were still upstairs in a photo session brokered by Tony Barrow, held captive while a dozen power-driven cameras clicked away without pause. Normally, photo sessions were excruciating ordeals, stiff and phony, but the Beatles felt comfortable with this outfit. All were familiar faces on the clubby British rock circuit, most of them young, long-haired guys about their age who mixed and socialized after the job was done. All except one, that is.
Linda Eastman was an interloper—an American and a woman—but very much a photographer in her own right. She had been twenty-three years old when, two years earlier, she talked her way into a Rolling Stones press party to strike up a conversation with Mick Jagger. Determined to take advantage of the opportunity, “she pulled out an expensive camera,” a guest recalls, “and flirted gamely with Mick while reeling off several rolls of film.”
The photos became the foundation of her portfolio, featuring rock stars in candid poses. Not many women had broken into this restricted rock photography circle, but Linda had several things going for her. Tall and silvery slim, with a natural milk-and-honey complexion, she was, despite her height, the kind of strikingly pretty girl who nevertheless put guys at ease with a quick grin and easy, outgoing manner. Her bearing impressed: “You knew immediately upon meeting her that she came from privilege,” says Nat Weiss, a longtime family friend. “There was something about the way she carried herself and dressed that set her apart from the rabble.”
Privilege descended through Linda’s father, Lee Eastman, a self-styled New York show-business lawyer and cultural aesthete who mixed just as easily with his bluestocking neighbors as he did with the artists and musicians he represented. Handsome and flamboyant, with an imperious manner, Eastman had re-created his persona to suit an upward status, changing the family name from Epstein, thus enabling him to maneuver among the Hamptons and country-club set. Songwriter Jerry Leiber, a client and friend, refers to him as “very Waspish, a real anti-Semitic Jew—yachting in Cape Cod, all the mannerisms picked up on the other side of the tracks.” To her credit, Linda had none of her dad’s pretensions. But she had his ambition and determination.
Linda had launched a career as a rock photographer on her obvious appeal to male musicians. She caught their eye as much as her eye caught their image. Gamboling around the London club scene or backstage at the Fillmore East, the rock gods gravitated to her with appreciable lust. To call Linda a groupie, as the label connotes, demeaned her attractiveness in the equation—the term groupie presumes a one-sided exchange that turns on debasement and humiliation—but word of her conquests, professional and otherwise, was legendary. She photographed every major rock star, counting many among them as lovers. Still, throughout her precipitate rise, she continued to tease Nat Weiss that her tastes were of a more specific nature. “She always insisted that she was going to marry Paul McCartney,” he recalls, “even before she met him.”
Nat maintains that he introduced Paul to Linda at his apartment in New York City, but it is more likely that they met four days before the Sgt. Pepper’s launch, at a disco in the West End called the Bag o’ Nails. Paul had stopped there late one night with Peter Brown, downing a few scotch and Cokes in one of the discreetly hidden alcove tables, while Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames banged through an ear-splitting set. Linda was seated across the room near the stage, squashed in a booth with the Animals, with whom she had worked. During an intermission, Paul cornered her with a corny pickup line, winning him a few hours with her and the singer Lulu back at Cavendish Avenue, discussing art.
Linda, however, had already spent considerable time conspiring to meet her pop crush. A few days earlier she had appealed to Brown, with whom she was somewhat acquainted, for an invitation to the Sgt. Pepper’s launch. This request was not logical at all. Linda’s experience and standing were definite drawbacks (everyone on the guest list was on staff at a major publication), particularly at an event considered “the hottest ticket in town.” Almost all of her work had been published in the United States, where photographers were not yet established as cultural names. Technically she did have an assignment, shooting pictures for a paperback book titled Rock and Other Four Letter Words, but primarily she was in London in an attempt to get her portfolio into the right hands.
One set of hands, in particular, had sticky fingers. Linda had dropped her book off at NEMS, and Peter Brown confessed that he had “stolen a sexy, teasing picture” of Brian Jones out of her portfolio. Fortunately, he felt inclined to barter an invitation to the party in exchange. “Besides,” he says, “I thought she was cute and fun, and I thought she’d bring a different perspective to the pictures than all these other guys.”
During the afternoon photo shoot, Paul deposited himself majestically in an armchair by the fireplace, sipping champagne and dispensing opinions on everything from art to artificial intelligence, a subject he’d just read about in one of the underground journals he devoured. It was no accident that Linda Eastman veered into his aura. She’d taken a few polite shots of Ringo and George before “zero[ing] in on Paul,” who couldn’t help but admire her beauty and spunk. Linda had come dressed to kill. Most days she played the typical rock chick, decked out in rumpled jeans and a T-shirt, with little or no makeup and unwashed hair. But today her hair had been carefully blow-dried so that it fell perfectly forward in wing points at her chin. And she was dressed in an expensive double-breasted striped barbershop jacket arranged just so over a sheer black sweater, with a miniskirt that flattered her gorgeous legs. When she squatted down—not so subtly, in what must have been a rehearsed gesture—in front of Paul for an intimate chat, he had trouble keeping his eyes from wandering below-decks. A photograph taken of Paul and Linda during this encounter reveals their powerful attraction. Their heads are less than a foot apart—Linda’s tilted slightly, irresistibly, enticing; Paul’s chin balanced softly on a clenched hand, a cigarette burning between his fingers; four eyes locked in like radar, in a near-mesmeric stare. Anyone standing nearby “couldn’t help but notice that something was happening,” according to Tony Barrow, himself a captivated bystander. “This wasn’t any stage-door infatuation.”
And yet, like any ordinary breathless fan, Linda was soon herded out of the room with the rest of the photographers, leaving Paul reeling in her wake. The Beatles were needed downstairs, on the double, where Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was already blaring at an unreasonable volume.
The press was astonished when the four men finally appeared on the stairs. They all knew the Beatles rather intimately, having interviewed and mingled with them regularly over the years. But none of them was prepared for the sight he beheld.
John Lennon entered first, dressed in a frilly green flowered shirt and maroon cord trousers, with a sporran cinched at his waist and canary yellow socks. But was it John? They weren’t sure, at first. Instead of the familiar smirking lad who traded on mischievous delight stood a ghostly figure, gaunt and guarded—one journalist thought he “resembled an animated Victorian watchmaker”—moving clumsily into the room. He “looked haggard, old, ill, and hopelessly addicted to drugs,” Ray Coleman reflected. “His eyes were glazed, his speech was slow and slurred.” George followed close behind him, grim-faced, fingering one end of a handlebar mustache as though he were worried it might shake loose at any moment. His getup, the centerpiece of which was a maroon velvet jacket, also drew a few openmouthed stares. Paul, in a striped double-breasted suit with a scarf knotted loosely at his neck, looked to one observer “like someone out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel,” and about as affected, while Ringo, bringing up the rear, grinned sheepishly, no doubt because he was embarrassed by the conservative dark suit, white shirt, and perfectly knotted tie that drew an undue amount of attention to him.
“Gentlemen—the Beatles!” Tony Barrow announced to a sea of stunned faces. Local disc jockey Jimmy Saville, who was heard to gasp audibly, did a comical double-take.
The Beatles?
Why, yes, everyone soon realized, it was the Beatles, but… What the hell had happened to them? They looked as though a costume designer had gotten ahold of them for some kind of mystical production. Perhaps, one guest speculated, it was a promo for their next film. Why else would they show up looking like, well, like wizards? Stoned wizards, if their eyes were any indication.
“The Beatles live!” Paul shouted, hoisting a glass of champagne in the air.
The guests were mystified by the music as well, which was as strange and exotic as the clothing the Beatles wore. The album played continuously over the several hours that the listen-in stretched on, but, politely or not, no one, aside from a Melody Maker columnist, broached a meaningful discussion of the songs. Instead, they seized on a more tangible aspect; twenty-four hours earlier, the BBC had announced that it was banning “A Day in the Life” on the grounds that it “could be considered to have drug-taking implications.” “Rubbish!” John snapped in terse response. (He’d obviously missed Paul’s point.) There had been so many songs they’d crafted with “drug-taking implications.” Leave it to the Beeb to condemn this one.
As Brian sat in a deserted corner of the living room with an ankle balanced on a knee, he couldn’t have been happier. But happiness was an anomaly for Brian. He had become disconnected from his own image. Like everything else that year, the party was a painful reminder of his utter insignificance to the Beatles and further proof that he was the disposable part of their success. Nobody would miss him should something fateful come to pass. As if to test this assumption, he slipped out of the flat while the party was still in full swing.
That last week in May, with the album just hours from release, Brian found himself suffering still another emotional setback—once again at the hands of his beloved Beatles. On April 19, the day before their first recording session for Magical Mystery Tour, the boys concluded the formation of another business partnership that effectively consolidated their interests as a unit, minus Brian. It hadn’t been their idea to incorporate (oddly enough, it was Brian’s), nor were they exploring ways to dissolve their management agreement. This was a tax dodge, short and sweet, to shelter them against Britain’s staggering 94 percent bite out of their income. Brian recommended a financial strategy whereby the Beatles would sell 80 percent of themselves to a holding company, giving them a tax-free capital gain, with generous salaries, and the opportunity to charge their personal expenses to the company. Later, perhaps, they could consider taking the new company public. It made perfect sense. Nevertheless, on May 25, when Apple Music Ltd. was formally registered, the actuality of it sent Brian into an emotional tailspin. “He’d decided this was the Beatles’ first real step toward ending their relationship with him,” recalls Peter Brown, who joined Brian later that evening at Kingsley Hill in Sussex. Nothing Peter said could lift Brian from his despair. Only one group could do that, and they were functioning without him, in London, conducting business that had slipped from his control. There was only one way to reverse that; if he couldn’t be in London with the Beatles, then it was time to bring the Beatles to Sussex. They needed to be there, together, with him. Instantly, Brian knew what to do. “He wanted to have a housewarming and invited all the Beatles, along with their wives and girlfriends.”
To reconcile his own need to foster a “gang’s all here spirit,” Brian beat the jungle drums, assembling a coterie of friends from the very core of the inner circle—the Beatles’ family—guaranteed to amuse him and his favored long-haired guests: Terry Doran, Lionel Bart, Nat Weiss, the Fool, John Pritchard, deejay Kenny Everett, Klaus Voormann, Lulu, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Robert Stigwood, Neil and Mal, and even—straight from Los Angeles—Derek Taylor and his very pregnant wife, Joan.
On Sunday, May 28, John, George, Ringo, and their women, along with Terry Doran and the seriously jet-lagged Taylors, traveled together to Sussex in John’s brand-new £40,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom V—his so-named gypsy caravan—every inch of whose gleaming black finish had been painted in Day-Glo psychedelic regalia. “A Whiter Shade of Pale” provided the frothy soundtrack, blaring over and over from a turntable installed in the partition separating the passengers from the driver. An atmosphere of dreamlike abandon lingered inside the limo. John and George, who had been up all day and night—“perhaps all week,” according to George—in the wake of another LSD trip, wore their new identities unself-consciously. Draped from head to toe in flowing silks and satins, with braided scarves and strands of beads and amulets strung around their necks, they seemed disengaged from the obligations that pressed upon their public personalities.
Derek Taylor, who’d arrived in a customary white shirt, gray flannel slacks, and a navy blue blazer, was mystified by the Beatles’ transformation. The boys embraced—hugged!—him, kissed both his cheeks, danced around him like tree nymphs. When Taylor shot back quizzical looks, they would laugh good-naturedly and chime: “Too much! Too much!”
Every facet of the visit seemed touched by mirth. It was a gorgeous, sun-drenched day, warm and redolent of summer. “Everyone was getting along beautifully,” says Peter Brown. “There was lovely food, lots of good wine, and lots—lots—of drugs.” A test pressing of Sgt. Pepper’s played at thunderous volume throughout the day. It was a giddy, gluttonous event, with LSD as the spark plug. “The minute you walked through the door you got dosed,” recalls Lionel Bart. “The boys were making the rounds, serving tea out of a china pot that had been generously spiked with acid. The whole party appeared to be tripping like mad; everyone was dancing around to the flame of a candle.” The whole atmosphere reminded Cynthia Lennon of “the mad hatter’s tea party; everyone was crackers,” as far as she could tell. And yet, the temptation to function on John’s precious wavelength was too powerful to resist. Perhaps it was time to begin tearing down the wall. According to Cynthia, she decided to go against her better judgment and drop acid along with everyone else. In her memoir, she de-scribes it as a “paralyzing” experience, during which she sank into a hollow-eyed depression, withdrew to a bedroom on the second floor of the house, and contemplated jumping out the window onto the stone driveway below. Instead of being drawn into her husband’s grateful embrace, John was furious with her for ruining his drug reverie.*
By midday a conspicuous absence had left Brian disconsolate. Paul was either late or missing in action. Few guests dared mention his absence, but it stood out in galling contrast. A grand piano had been rolled into the freshly painted living room, earmarked for his attention: a place of honor. It was a Liverpool tradition to have a group sing-along at such an event. Paul, at the old gang’s request, always played the dutiful accompanist, but about 3:00 he phoned to say that Jane needed a lift home from Heathrow. Sorry, hated to do this, he claimed too matter-of-factly, but they wouldn’t be able to attend.
That was all Brian needed. Leave it to Paul to get under his skin. “Wasn’t that always the case,” he groused. Paul, forever nosy and second-guessing business decisions, always set Brian’s teeth on edge, but this went straight to his heart. Everything about his absence seemed personal, like a slap in the face. Brian’s mood grew darker and more irrational; his drinking got heavier. It wasn’t long before the hand-wringing began. “Paul… didn’t… come,” Brian muttered, trying to express his disappointment. His face unbearably wounded, ashen, his eyes filled with tears, he kept repeating it to anyone who would listen. “This day of all days… he should have come.” Derek Taylor tried to console him, but Brian spun away, bending forlornly over the piano like a spurned lover. “This was to have been for Paul,” he sighed in a quivering voice. “Especially for tonight, but he can’t come. The only one.”
It sucked the life right out of the party, until John and George stepped in to assure him of their love. Their affectionate hugs and the psychedelic fireworks that followed combined to rescue the evening from certain meltdown.
Sgt. Pepper played on in the background. It was the Summer of Love.
For all their bluff confidence, the Beatles anguished over public and critical reaction as the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band drew near. “I was downright scared,” George Martin admitted, “but not half as worried as the Beatles.” The so-called failure of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” was still too fresh in everyone’s mind. Even though the single had sold well—over 2 million copies worldwide—its chart shortfall was regarded as an omen.
But their worries were groundless. The album’s release on June 1 caused an extraordinary sensation, with critics lobbing paragraphs of unprecedented praise. In the Sunday Times review, Derek Jewel called Sgt. Pepper’s “remarkable” and “a tremendous advance even in the increasingly adventurous progress of the Beatles.” William Mann went even further in The Times daily column: “Any of these songs is more genuinely creative than anything currently to be heard on pop radio stations,” he wrote, “but in relation to what other groups have been doing lately Sgt. Pepper [sic] is chiefly significant as constructive criticism, a sort of pop music master class examining trends and correcting or tidying up inconsistencies and undisciplined work.” Wilfrid Mellers, writing in the New Statesman, crawled out on a limb to label their music as “art—and art of an increasingly subtle kind.” Where once the critics had described the Beatles and their music in terms befitting cartoon characters, now they scrambled to place them in the pantheon of beloved composers and poets. Since Revolver, it seemed, critics had approached the music more seriously, actually analyzing its content instead of treating it like a fad. The fans, too—“They think for themselves, and I don’t think we can be accused of underestimating the intelligence of our fans,” observed George—were quick to recognize breakthroughs in the Beatles’ musical evolution. “Over the last four years Lennon and McCartney have developed into the greatest songwriting team of this century,” wrote a follower from Isleworth. “Some of the tracks on the LP are pure poetry and unbelievably advanced in conception.” Another, from Llandudno in Wales, complimented “She’s Leaving Home” as “one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard.” No ordinary fan but just as effusive in his praise, composer Ned Rorem called it “equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote.”
Richard Goldstein, known for his scorched-earth criticism, refused to be swayed by the overwhelming groundswell that followed the album right around the globe. Writing in the New York Times, he considered Sgt. Pepper’s a soft and messy piece of work, a self-conscious record, contrived, and was willing to say what no other critic dared: “Unfortunately, there is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtaposition of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related.” (A few months later John concurred, saying: “When you get down to it, it was nothing more than an album called Sgt. Pepper’s with the tracks stuck together.”) The Beatles’ usual innovative clarity had shifted sharply out of focus, he argued, owing to their “obsession with production…. There is nothing beautiful on Sgt. Pepper,” he concluded. “Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about.”
For all the ink spilled over the album, branding it a cultural and artistic watershed—Time gushed that it represented “a historic departure in the progress of music—any music”—one thing was certain: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a runaway bestseller, topping the pace of all previous Beatles albums with a staggering 2,500,000 copies sold in the first three months of its release. For most fans the music had finally become accessible; less yeah-yeah-yeah, more sophistication and cross-rhythms. You could hear it played on practically any station in the world, at practically any time of the day. Deejays considered it the “second renaissance of rock ’n roll,” and the Beatles its chief architects. Their old friend Murray the K, who played Sgt. Pepper’s ad nauseam, until management ordered him to back off, marveled at the way some songs made him realize “they had the pulse of the country,” while others demonstrated that “the Beatles were completely in tune with life.”
That tune had a somewhat familiar ring to it: a whole new type of Beatlemania had broken out, not powered by screams and swoons as before, but rather a kind of reverence in which every note they played or breath they took was analyzed and dissected for greater meaning. Coincidentally or not, overzealous fans—“the nutters,” as Paul referred to them—unscrambled the letters in the title of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to spell LSD; they concluded that “Fixing a Hole” was a veiled reference to heroin and that Harry the Horse (a character in “Mr. Kite”) was a pusher. Pundits extrapolated arcane significance in practically every word—every effect—of “A Day in the Life.” Essayists and critics devoted columns—lectures—to the band’s cultural significance. Hard-core journalists referred to the Beatles as “missionaries.” Others called them “messengers from beyond rock ’n roll,” “progenitors of a Pop avant-garde,” avatars. Timothy Leary called them “evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new human species.”
Paul politely disagreed. “The Beatles weren’t the leaders of the generation,” he said later, with some distance, “but the spokesmen.”
Certainly Paul fancied himself in this role. “Even when the others weren’t speaking to the press, you could always depend on Paul,” says Tony Barrow. “He couldn’t resist the opportunity to represent the band in the spotlight. He loved the role; it fed his considerable ego.”
He’d pontificate at the drop of a hat, firing off slickly polished sound bites with the cadence of a talk-show personality. “Paul needs an audience,” George Martin once observed to great understatement. While Paul considered John “the cock who crowed the loudest,” referring, one presumes, to his partner’s combative snipes and outbursts, he was more a natural raconteur, a great embellisher; charm oozed from Paul McCartney when in the presence of an attentive ear. On June 19 Paul opened his door to a pair of ITN News reporters, who detoured from what seemed like a standard interview about music into an inquisition about his drug-taking. They were sitting, chatting casually in his garden, when the primary newscaster popped the question. “Paul, how often have you taken LSD?”
There was a hesitation that seemed to last an eternity but ate up no more than a few seconds of airtime, during which Paul thought, “Well, I’m either going to bluff this, or I’m going to tell him the truth.” So he answered honestly: “About four times.” He added that LSD had changed his life—“After I took it, it opened my eyes,” he boasted—and made him “a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.”
The minute it was out of his mouth, Paul must have realized his mistake, because he immediately began to backpedal. “I would like to make it perfectly clear that I do not advocate LSD,” he hedged. “I don’t want kids running to take it when they hear that I have.” An admission of this nature from a personality of his stature might have an adverse effect on young fans, to say nothing of their parents. In Paul’s cockeyed logic, that meant the reporters had a responsibility not to show the footage. “It’s you who’ve got the responsibility!” Paul insisted. “You’ve got the responsibility not to spread this now. You know, I’m quite prepared to keep it as a very private thing if you will, too. If you shut up about it, I will.”
But it was too late. The comments, which were broadcast the next day, unleashed a shitstorm of protest, from government bigwigs to the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham, who seemed less peeved about the dangers of drug-taking than Paul’s claim that LSD could give rise to “a religious experience.” The tabloids feasted, condemning the Beatles in a united, if shrill and self-righteous, voice. For days, weeks, stories appeared in which politicos expressed their outrage that one of the Beatles had dabbled in drugs. They were shocked—shocked!—to learn about the scandalous behavior of no less than an M.B.E. “The press had a field day,” George recalled.
Paul’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Only a few weeks earlier Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been busted in Sussex for possession of hash, pot, and amphetamines; Paul’s art dealer, Robert Fraser, who was arrested along with them, was caught palming twenty-four jacks of heroin. On the same day that Sgt. Pepper’s was released, John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the founder of International Times and a social mate of Paul’s, was sentenced to nine months in jail for possession of pot. And Brian Jones was nabbed in a drug sweep while his bandmates faced arraignment.
“No one knew why Paul didn’t keep his mouth shut,” says Alistair Taylor, voicing an opinion shared by the other three Beatles. They were especially annoyed that he’d focused attention on something they’d been so scrupulously careful to keep private. Acid, which might have been commonplace around Britain’s wealthy pop underground, hadn’t yet attracted widespread attention among the masses, not even among die-hard rock enthusiasts. “We weren’t actually telling anybody about LSD, bar the people who knew us,” Ringo recalled, “and [then] Paul decided to come out and tell people.” George also considered it a breach of group etiquette, explaining: “I thought Paul should have been quiet about it—I wish he hadn’t said anything, because it made everything messy.”
Messy—and annoying, considering that for a year and a half John, George, and Ringo had been unable to persuade Paul to join them in dropping acid, “and then,” as George fumed, “one day he’s on the television talking all about it.” It was all over the media: Paul McCartney, the Beatles’ acid authority! For John, it was another instance of Paul’s stealing his thunder.
In his haste to head off another imbroglio, Brian stood up to the press, choosing to defend Paul’s rash comments by adding his own voice to the fanfare, admitting that he, too, had taken LSD and saw nothing wrong with it. A few days later he even repeated the remarks in an interview with Melody Maker, foolishly minimizing the risks of taking acid, adding: “I think LSD helped me to know myself better, and I think it helped me to become less bad tempered.” This was clearly not what the press and Beatles fans had bargained for.
Then, just as quickly as the uproar started, it stopped dead in its tracks, thanks to an event that spun the drug business into the shadows and restored the Beatles’ reputations as beloved minstrel spirits. Several months earlier the BBC1 television channel had approached Brian about helping out with a project the network had planned for June 25 to test its new Early Bird communication satellites. Via a live broadcast, they intended, for the first time, to link thirty-one television networks around the globe. An estimated 300 million people could conceivably watch the same show. Called Our World, it was designed to allow each of the participating countries a five-minute segment in which to feature material or an act that represented its culture. And, of course, what could be more British than the Beatles?
It’s not as hard to figure out why Brian volunteered the Beatles as it is why they agreed to cooperate. They’d just finished five months of intensive work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and were earnestly preoccupied with its promotion. What’s more, they were expected to contribute a song for the broadcast. It stood to reason that, because of complicated special effects, they could not perform anything from the new album. And an ancient yeah-yeah-yeah song was out of the question; they’d moved well beyond that image as a band. That meant writing something new for the program, which seemed like a crushing task.
Surprisingly, they didn’t balk. Paul had been working on a song anyway—“Hello Goodbye”—that he put up for consideration. At the same time, John brought in “All You Need Is Love,” which, according to George Martin, “seemed to fit with the overall concept of the program.” The show’s producers had issued only one instruction: “keep it simple so that viewers across the globe will understand.” Tony Barrow recalled how John sat at the piano and previewed the song slowly, playing it in an almost dirgelike fashion for his mates, after which George leaned toward Paul and muttered: “Well, it’s certainly repetitive.” The Beatles demo’ed John’s song at Olympic Sound and thus made a unanimous decision.
As the broadcast drew near, however, they realized that performing it live, without a safety net, was far too risky. Since the Beatles’ first few hurried recording sessions at the beginning of their career, they’d become used to taking their sweet time in the studio, overdubbing and correcting mistakes, stretching vocals, massaging guitar licks, tweaking everything with electronics. Nothing was left to chance anymore. The Beatles hadn’t performed as a band in almost a year. There was no telling how they’d sound au naturel. “We must do some preparation for this,” George Martin told them. “We can’t just go in front of 350 million people without some work.”
A backing track would provide an insurance policy. But, unexpectedly, it was rejected by the show’s organizers. The idea of the live satellite broadcast, they reminded Martin, was to demonstrate how spontaneous performances were transmitted around the globe. A backing track violated the spirit of the event. But Martin knew what he couldn’t dare say: that the Beatles worked casually, by trial and error, often bumping about until he provided firm direction. They weren’t prima donnas, but they were in the neighborhood, and thanks to drugs, there was unpredictability to consider. Martin strongly defended using a prerecorded track and urged NEMS to “make it a strict condition upon which the group’s appearance would depend,” which a designated liaison eventually did. Ordinarily this kind of tactic might have produced a standoff at the BBC, but as time had grown short and the Beatles were already featured prominently in ads for the show, the producers had no choice but to accept.
The recording, as one might expect, grew progressively more complex, with layers of atmospheric and experimental sounds ladled over an otherwise languid rhythm track, the mongrel construction made impossibly more convoluted by stitching a few bars of “La Marseillaise” onto the opening. A harpsichord drifted in and out between plinks on a banjo, pulls on a string bass, bows across a violin (played by George Harrison, of all people), and other oddball effects. Just to make sure no stone was left unturned, a thirteen-piece orchestra filed in one night to weave samples of one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, “Greensleeves,” and “In the Mood” into the fade. So much for spontaneity. Five days and fifty-eight takes later, a “basic” track was approved.
What had once promised viewers a glimpse of the Beatles during a standard recording session had evolved into a production of epic proportions. Once they’d committed themselves to appearing, once they’d gotten involved, it became necessary to stage a spectacular event befitting their spectacular mystique. Heaven forbid the public perceive the Beatles’ recording session as merely routine! That wouldn’t do. So, on the eve of the broadcast, Tony Bramwell was dispatched to the London club circuit with instructions to hunt down famous friends willing to “drop in” on the session. At the Scotch of St. James, Bramwell drafted Eric Clapton; Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull at the Bag o’ Nails; Keith Moon and Graham Nash at the Speakeasy; Gary Leeds, one of the Walker Brothers, at the Cromwellian. “Everyone I asked jumped at the chance,” he recalls. “In fact, most called it a night early, in order to put together a wardrobe.”
“By 7pm [on June 25], the studio appeared to be in chaos,” Tony Barrow reported. Studio One, the big hangarlike facility at Abbey Road, was crammed with “flower-waving crowds of Beautiful People,” who were oblivious to the battalion of sound technicians and camera operators struggling to put the final touches on the historic transmission. One can only imagine the difficulty they had in adjusting the contrast for the cameras: to complement the carnival atmosphere, the guests were dressed to the nines in flamboyant, brightly colored costumes that clashed with the inflated latex globes and vivid balloons floating above the fixtures. Giant displays of exotic flowers radiated against the garish backdrop. The Beatles themselves gave off a fuzzy flush in their Technicolor garb: Paul, looking debonair in a double-breasted white sport coat draped over a shirt he had hand-colored the night before; George, decked out in an orange paisley jacket whose design and texture resembled an Aubusson carpet; Ringo, swathed cosmically in a silk, suede, and fake-fur outfit designed by the Fool that looked left over from the Crusades. “It was so bloody heavy,” he recalled. “I had all this beading on, and it weighed a ton.” Only John, doleful and glassy-eyed, turned up in a smart-looking banker’s dark pin-striped suit that seemed as outrageous for its elegance as for its posting on John Lennon.
In all the turmoil, between miscues and mischief, the Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” to the world without a hint of disorganization. They sat perched on barstools placed directly in front of the guests, appearing as cool as only the Beatles could look under such hothouse circumstances. John, Paul, and George seemed impervious to the do-or-die situation, synching their voices beautifully, perfectly, to the backing track. The prerecorded music no longer mattered—if it ever did. Remembered chiefly for its stripped-down, monotonous chorus, the song’s verses were nevertheless quite a mouthful for John, who spit them out on camera as though they were child’s play. “There’snothin-youcandothatcan’tbedone…” It sounded effortless, done in one Hail Mary take, much the way he’d fired off “Twist and Shout” four and a half years earlier: rock-steady and right on. For all the technical effects John had come to rely on for vocal support, none were needed to show off his extraordinary range that night. It was all right there, in the pocket, just where it had always been.
John relaxed visibly as the song cruised into its extended fade. “La Marseillaise” drew a ceremonial reprise, giving way to “In the Mood” and “Greensleeves,” as planned. But John, who had tinkered in rehearsal with a fragment of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” suddenly chimed in with a few bars of an old standby that no one—probably not even John—had anticipated. At a juncture in the action, he sang out: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah…,” in an inspired bit of self-parody: perfect!
It touched off a festive reaction in the studio. Balloons and confetti rained down from the ceiling, as five men draped in sandwich boards proclaiming “All You Need Is Love” in four languages paraded across the floor in front of the grinning Beatles. Mike McCartney launched a series of cue cards, instructing viewers to “Smile” and “Laf Now.” Another, scrawled hastily by his cousin Anne Danher, brandished the mysterious communiqué: “Come back, Milly! All is forgiven!”—a message to Paul’s aunt, on vacation in Australia, who, it was feared, might not return to Liverpool.
With the kind of exposure the song had received, the Beatles were left with little choice other than to release “All You Need Is Love” as a single. Most of the work had already been done. A few overdubs were added to polish the track; Ringo contributed an introductory drum roll, and John, never satisfied with the way he sounded, insisted on patching his splendid vocal. Otherwise, it was ready to be remixed and mastered the next day, and it was shipped a week later as the Beatles’ fifteenth single.
Curiously, no single was ever released from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles had already given that album everything they had and decided that, once again, it was time for them to move on.
Brian Epstein had been “too out of sorts” to attend the “All You Need” broadcast. Left to his own devices, Brian languished in seclusion, “zonked,” as one employee put it, “either drunk or on drugs.” There was no key role in it for him and therefore no emotional upside, nothing for him to grab hold of with which to lift himself out of the funk. Even though he busied himself with ongoing productions at the Saville Theatre (where, on one amazing bill in early June, he presented the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Denny Laine, the Chiffons, and Procol Harum), the sinister warp of moodiness was too strong for him to escape.
Once again Brian tried to blow out the cobwebs by throwing a party at his Kingsley Hill estate. While the affair was meant to lift his spirits, sources indicate that Brian intended to meet with the Beatles before the other guests arrived so that he could tell them about his relationship with Robert Stigwood. With only a few weeks remaining before Stigwood’s option came due, he worried that it would appear as though he had deceived them.
It was not to be. After a number of wildly productive months and a reinvented image, the Beatles decided to reinvent Brian’s party as a full-fledged acid blowout. Their tripping, which had always been dependent on the drug’s available supply, suddenly knew no bounds, thanks largely to John. He had figured out how to tap the mother lode—the source of the purest LSD ever made, courtesy of the legendary chemist Stanley Owsley, whose lab operated out of San Francisco. Buying it was no problem; John had the money and agreed to pay top dollar for a lifetime supply. The problem was smuggling it into Great Britain. With the help of a few film freelancers, he commissioned a cameraman named Steve Sanders to film the Monterey Pop Festival, over the June 17 weekend. It didn’t matter that the festival’s film rights had long been sold to ABC-TV. When Derek Taylor reminded John of that fact, John didn’t demur. The film wasn’t intended for distribution, he explained, but for his own private viewing. He might have enjoyed watching it, too, had there ever been film in the cannister, but that wasn’t John’s motive. Instead, the crew’s equipment was used to conceal the acid.
Over the next three weeks, under the influence of the especially potent blotter acid, the Beatles seemed locked on a course of reckless hedonism. First they traveled to Greece, under the clutches at the time of a despotic military junta, for the purpose of buying a cluster of islands in the Aegean, where they could live and record communally, in splendid isolation. “The idea was that you’d have four houses with tunnels connecting them to a central dome,” Neil Aspinall recalled. The scenic space in between would be filled with meditation posts, recording and painting studios, a go-kart track, and a private landing strip. Neil would also be provided for on the island, along with the usual suspects: Brian Epstein, Mal Evans, Terry Doran, Derek Taylor, and their families. According to several well-placed insiders, this was the brainstorm of Alexis Mardas, the son of a major in the Greek secret police, who had recently ingratiated himself into the Beatles’ circle by beguiling them with stories of his mind-boggling inventions. Magic Alex, as John dubbed him, was working as a television repairman when he met the Beatles. Nevertheless, he possessed a powerful imagination and masterly gift for sweet talk.
“Alex wasn’t magic at all,” George admitted, “but John thought he had something and he became friendly with us.” Alex immediately produced his signature artifact, a box decorated with lights that flashed in an irregular fashion. What was it? What did it do? Whatever you wanted, he replied in the spirit of cosmic coolness. John, spaced out on acid, found the box fascinating; he could stare at it for hours. He introduced Alex to Paul and others as his “new guru,” shrugging in response to their questions about his powers.
Taking advantage of John’s susceptible condition and deepest anxieties, Alex concocted other mystical enthusiasms designed to tantalize his new disciple. He was working on a telephone, he said, that responded to voice recognition and identified incoming callers. There was a substance he was secretly developing that would enable him to build a force field around their homes, another that prevented anyone from rear-ending a car, an X-ray camera, invisible beams, wallpaper speakers. “Magic Alex invented invisible paint,” according to Ringo, who marveled at each fantastic brainstorm. He also encouraged a practice he called “trepanning,” which involved having a hole drilled in one’s head. “Magic Alex said that if we had it done our inner third eye would be able to see, and we’d get cosmic instantly.”
Drugs or no drugs, the Beatles had to suspect that they were being taken for a ride, especially when Alex requisitioned the V-12 engines from George’s Ferrari and John’s Rolls so that he could build a flying saucer. Paul claimed that they were onto Alex early but still enjoyed hearing his interesting ideas. “We didn’t really call anyone’s bluff,” he said, “it would have been a bit too aggressive. So we just let him get on with it.”
For the Beatles, the trip was sun-filled and joyous, but the Greek Islands were not, in fact, deemed residence-worthy. Between the rocky slip of a coastline, intermittent severe thunderstorms, and the boredom that set in as soon as the acid wore off, the thought of homesteading never came up. Even so, they instructed their accountants to purchase the islands anyway, paying £95,000, plus a 25 percent premium, which was taken off their hands a few months later for a modest profit. They would not always be so lucky.
For the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Summer of Love was a perfect platform for his ministry of mind expansion, receptiveness, spiritual and sensual fulfillment, self-awareness, intercommunication, tranquillity, knowledge, and brotherhood. The celestial glitter of his spidery face was plastered on walls throughout the London Underground, promoting a treatise on meditation, The Science of Being and the Art of Living, and his extraordinary image, a whispery, slight, but impressionable presence, figured prominently in television news stories. The media couldn’t resist the guru’s eccentric appearance or the oft-perceived flakiness of his spiritual message, extolling love, peace, and eternal happiness. To a skeptical audience of Brits, he came off like a sideshow freak, but as the new sensibilities and surface hedonism of 1967 gained acceptance, his message offered an inspirational refuge from the libertine excess.
Aside from the magnetic personality who captivated young audiences, precious little is known about his background. Born in 1911—“my earthly age is of no importance,” he answered in response to questions about his birth—he was the son of an Indian revenue officer who studied Sanskrit and Hindu scriptures with Guru Dev. Later he fell under the spell of another guru, the founder of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, whose purpose, like many of these mystical followings, was an attempt to combine ancient Eastern religious beliefs with the search for inner truth and wisdom. Spiritual Regeneration instructed people in the discipline of Transcendental Meditation, “a method of quickly and easily reaching a spiritual state.”
In 1945 Mahesh (Maharishi means “great saint” and was an honorific adopted much later) began a solitary meditation in the Himalaya that lasted for thirteen years, after which he set off on a faith-healing crusade designed to take him seven times around the globe. In the process, he attracted widespread attention from the elderly, as well as the curious, the infirm, and other lost souls to whom Spiritual Regeneration was an attractive pursuit. Mahesh brilliantly and shrewdly cultivated these followers. Lectures, conferences, and retreats became a staple of his transglobal tours. A man of immense charisma, he was a natural performer, energetic and riveting, who could transform crowds of the unfulfilled, the suffering, the troubled, or the alienated with simple aphorisms that struck home. Borrowing liberally from the Bhagavad Gita, he popularized traditional Indian teachings, interlacing them with plainly applied self-help therapies that were elementary in their appeal.
Despite the embarrassing criticism from more traditional Hindu teachers and a predilection for publicity and fund-raising—followers were required to donate the equivalent of a week’s salary to the ministry, which ran contrary to the basic Hindu principles of free instruction—the Spiritual Regeneration Movement grew into a worldwide organization, with a luxurious, air-conditioned ashram situated on a fifteen-acre estate in Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalaya. There were already meditation centers in more than fifty countries, with the London office attracting more new followers than it was able to process.
The three Beatles (Ringo was visiting Maureen in the hospital, where she had just given birth to their second son) were among nearly a thousand earnest freethinkers who listened to the Maharishi’s message on August 24 in a ballroom at the Hilton, overlooking Hyde Park. Years later George explained that they “were looking to reestablish that which was within.” George was feeling especially restless following a dispiriting trip to San Francisco, during which he decried the drug-besotted hippies he encountered there as “hypocrites” and “bums,” leading him to a startling renunciation of LSD. “After having such an intense period of growing up and so much success in the Beatles and realizing that this wasn’t the answer to everything, the question came: ‘What is it all about?’ ” Similarly, Paul would recall how he was “looking for something to fill some kind of hole.” He acknowledged feeling “a little bit of emptiness” in his soul, “a lack of spiritual fulfillment.” Much of it he blamed on “seeing all this stuff on acid,” as well as rampant stardom. “And the next step was to try to find a meaning for it all.”
Despite the institutional setting, complete with a cordon of bodyguards in three-piece suits and a gallery of doting blue-haired dowagers, the Beatles were clearly entranced by the Maharishi. He was an extraordinary sight to behold: an elfin, bronze-skinned holy man draped in an immaculate white dhoti, positioned in front of acres of soothing lemony yellow curtains. A picture of contentment, he sat cross-legged on a deerskin mat strewn with flowers and, between arpeggios of an irrepressible giggle, offered to clarify anyone’s experiences.
To young men who constantly struggled with their individuality—toward the public, toward their roles as Beatles, toward one another, and toward themselves—Maharishi advised them “to look within in order to find peace.” Happiness, he said, serves the purpose of creation. Using the flower as an analogy, with the sap the source of its energy, he explained how it was possible to transcend the relative states of their consciousness—in effect bypassing the intellect—to draw the sap upward. “He said that by meditating, you can go down your stem and… reach the field of nutrients, which he called the pool of cosmic consciousness, which was all blissful and all beautiful,” Paul recalled.
For George, who had already devoted himself to the practice of yoga and the study of Eastern philosophies, the Maharishi provided him with a practical approach “to further the experience of meditation.” Even Paul, a natural skeptic, “thought he made a lot of sense.” But it was John, more than anyone, who emerged from the lecture a changed man. Having laid off acid that night, he still bore the look of someone so far gone that it seemed an impossible state without chemicals. “It takes time to come down to earth after an experience like this,” he told a reporter on his way out of the Hilton.
In fact, John, along with the others, was gearing up for an unimaginable trip.