In June 1967 Paul McCartney turned twenty-five. It is possible that no young man had enjoyed such fame, wealth, and influence as he basked in that summer since the days of Alexander the Great.
A side view into McCartney’s life at this time is given in the diaries of the playwright Joe Orton. In January 1967 Orton was on the point of being commissioned to write the script of the third Beatles movie. The movie was a contractual obligation that the Beatles were reluctant to fulfill and were eventually to wriggle out of through the feature-length cartoon, Yellow Submarine. While it was still a live project, Orton was a natural but also a bold a choice as writer. A youthful thirty-four, from a working-class family in the Midlands town of Leicester, he wrote camp and knowing black comedies and was just the writer to scrape off the sugar coating A Hard Day’s Night and Help! had spun around the Beatles. For his part, Orton was a fiercely independent man, enjoying a West End hit after years of penury. Intrigued as he was by the Beatles movie, he had no need for Beatle money, and embarked on the project with detached amusement.
He took a bus to (25) Chapel Street, Belgravia, to meet McCartney in a house owned by the Beatles’ manager.
Arrived in Belgravia at ten minutes to eight having caught a 19 bus which dropped me at Hyde Park Corner. I found Chapel Street easily. I rang the bell and an old man opened the door. He seemed surprised to see me. “Is this Brian Epstein’s house?” I said. “Yes, sir,” he said, and led the way into the hall. I suddenly realized that the man was the butler. I’ve never seen one before. He took my coat and I went to the lavatory. When I came out he’d gone. There was nobody about. I wandered around a large dining-room which was laid for dinner. And then I got to feel strange. The house appeared to be empty. So I went upstairs to the first floor. I heard music only I couldn’t decide where it came from. So I went up a further flight of stars. I found myself in a bedroom. I came down again and found the butler. He took me into a room and said in a loud voice “Mr Orton”. Everybody looked up and stood to their feet. I was introduced to one or two people. And Paul McCartney. He was just as the photographs. Only he’d grown a moustache. His hair was shorter too. He was playing the latest Beatles recording, “Penny Lane”. I liked it very much. Then he played the other side—Strawberry something. I didn’t like this as much. We talked intermittently. Before we went down to dinner we’d thrown out the idea of setting the film in the thirties. We went down to dinner. The crusted old retainer—looking too much like a butler to be good casting—busied himself in the corner. “The only thing I get from the theatre,” Paul M. said, “is a sore arse.” He said Loot was the only play he hadn’t wanted to leave before the end. “I’d have liked a bit more,” he said. We talked of drugs, of mushrooms which give hallucinations—like LSD. “The drug not the money,” I said. We talked of tattoos. And, after one or two veiled references, marijuana. I said I’d smoked it in Morocco. The atmosphere relaxed a little. Dinner ended and we went upstairs again. We watched a programme on TV. It had phrases in it like “in-crowd”, and “swinging London.” There was a little scratching at the door. I thought it was the old retainer, but someone got up to open the door and about five very young and pretty boys trooped in. I rather hope this was the evening’s entertainments. It wasn’t though. It was a pop group called The Easybeats. I’d seen them on TV. I liked them very much then. In a way they were better (or prettier) off stage than on. After awhile Paul McCartney said “Let’s go upstairs.” So he and I and Peter Brown went upstairs to a room also fitted with a TV. A French photographer arrived with two beautiful youths and a girl. He’d taken a set of new photographs of The Beatles. They wanted one to use on their new Record sleeve. Excellent photograph. And the four Beatles look different with their moustaches. Like anarchists in the early years of the century. After awhile we went downstairs. The Easybeats still there. The girl went away. I talked to the leading Easy-beat. Feeling slightly like an Edwardian masher with a Gaiety Girl. And then came over all tired and decided to go home. I had a last word with Paul M. “Well,” I said, “I’d like to do the film. There’s only one thing we’ve got to fix up.” “You mean the bread?” “Yes.” We smiled and parted. I got a cab home. It was pissing down.
Although the dinner was hosted in Brian Epstein’s house, Orton makes no mention of Epstein himself. Both Orton and McCartney assumed that any creative decisions were McCartney’s alone. McCartney was lucky in his manager, or rather they were lucky in each other. Epstein had stumbled into the music business through the Beatles. He did not have the calculation of Mike Jefferies or even the business acumen of Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, who had taken time to study how breakfast cereals were marketed before they set up Track Records. Epstein had risen from managing the record department in his father’s department store to managing the world’s first supergroup in less than five years.
Yet, despite his lack of his experience, he was a fundamentally good businessman and had built a network of enterprises around the success of the Beatles. He was fundamentally a kind-hearted man, too, and respected his artists. He was happy to let McCartney pull the levers on the Beatles machine.
It is a grim coincidence that before the Summer of Love was out, both Joe Orton and Brian Epstein would be dead, Orton murdered by his lover, Epstein killed by his own hand.
One of Epstein’s many enterprises were Sunday evening concerts at the (26) Saville Theatre, 135-149 Shaftesbury Avenue. The Saville Theatre had been built in 1930 at the eastern end of Shaftesbury Avenue, London’s theatre strip, but on the fringe of theatreland on the other side of Charing Cross Road, and the opposite end from Piccadilly Circus, the heart of nighttime London, where Joe Orton’s Loot was playing at the Criterion Theatre. In the summer of 1967 Spike Milligan’s The Bed Sitting Room was playing at the Saville. Noel went to see it on a night off, and managed to talk his way back stage, where he found Milligan, seated cross-legged on his dressing room floor like a guru. “Got anything to smoke?” he asked Noel.
It was during a Sunday evening concert at the Saville Theatre that Jimi pulled off one of his great coups de theatre. On the first Sunday of June, the Experience were top of the bill, and the 1,200-seat theatre was full, with people still arriving to be turned away at the door. Jimi’s opening number was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which had been released only three days previously. Paul McCartney, who was in the audience, was deeply impressed.
“It’s still obviously a shining memory for me, because I admired him so much anyway, he was so accomplished,” he told his official biographer, Barry Miles, in 1997.
To think that that album meant so much to him as to actually do it by the Sunday night, three days after the release. He must have been so into it, because normally it might take a day for rehearsal and then you might wonder whether you’d put it in, but he just opened with it. It’s a pretty major compliment in anyone’s book. I put that down as one of the great honors of my career. I’m sure he wouldn’t have thought of it as an honor, I’m sure he thought it was the other way round, but to me that was like a great boost.
Jimi, Noel, and Mitch did not need a day to rehearse a new song; all three were used to learning entire sets in an hour or two. Jimi had walked into the dressing room at the Saville that night with a copy of Sgt. Pepper, played the first track, and told Mitch and Noel it would be their opening number. There was no hesitation; it was a calculated attempt to upstage the Beatles.
“It was never a question of can we do it? Or how much is this going to cost?” recalls Roger Mayer. “With Jimi it was ‘Let’s do it.’ Whatever it takes we’re going to do it. Let’s be on the edge. Let’s be on the cutting edge. That was the whole premise behind it. Let’s blow some fucking minds here. So Jimi would get up at the Saville Theatre and the Beatles are there: ‘Let’s play Sgt. Pepper for them.’ What do you think of that?”
Paul had been one of the first to see Jimi play in London when all four Beatles had attended the press launch at the Bag O’Nails. His enthusiasm was close to evangelistic, and he was to be directly responsible for the next leap in Jimi’s career.
In early months of 1967, Paul’s girlfriend, the actress Jane Asher, had been away in the United States touring in a play. Paul, who found theatre a literal pain in the arse, could not see why she should wish to continue to pursue her vocation. Kathy, who at the age of twenty-one could not see why anyone should work when they did not have to, would sympathize with his point of view when Paul complained about Jane’s absence.
In April Paul flew from London to Boulder, Colorado, to surprise Jane on the last night of her tour. He went via Los Angeles, to pick up the private jet in which he would complete the last stage of the journey. During his LA stopover he met up with the members of Jefferson Airplane. He played them one of the first pressings of Sgt. Pepper, jammed a little, and sang Jimi’s praises. It was due to Paul’s enthusiasm that Jimi and the Experience were invited to play at an open air festival to be held in the fairgrounds at Monterey, just over a hundred miles south of San Francisco, that summer.
Before leaving for California, Jimi repaid the favor by agreeing to play on an album being recorded by Paul’s brother, Mike McGear, and Roger McGough. McGear and McGough were poets—and two-thirds of the comedy trio called the Scaffold—and the idea for the album was to have them read their witty, self-effacing poems about ordinary life in Liverpool against a sophisticated musical backdrop provided by the Experience and the Spencer Davis Group, among others. In the event, the two poets found themselves as provincial bystanders in the middle of an extraordinary three-day jamming session. The resulting record was not a commercial success.