The first months of 1966 were spent lolling around his house, reading, writing and seeing his Beatle neighbours. There was no one else John wanted to see down there in Surrey. So, when Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard rang asking for an interview, he immediately invited her to Kenwood. Maureen, an attractive, intelligent interviewer in her early thirties, was a good friend – good enough for him to have lent her his copy of Elvis’s first album, when he’d realised how little she knew about rock and roll. Considering how much he treasured it, that was friendship – and when she forgot to give it back he hadn’t even pursued her for it. She would, she now told him, soon be giving up her job, and it would turn out to be not only the last time they would meet, but an interview that would have extraordinary consequences.
Mainly, John spent the day amusing Maureen as, carrying a Siamese cat, and followed everywhere by three-year-old Julian, he led her around his mansion with its fitted carpets and panelled walls. The Beatles thought she was very grand, with her smart accent and piercing questions, and her subsequent article would clearly suggest that a mock-Tudor house among wealthy stockbrokers wasn’t right for the individualist John Lennon. But John had already reached the same conclusion, as he pointed out the expensive bits and pieces that sudden wealth had allowed him to buy and then to carelessly forget: the five televisions – most people only had one at that time; the three cars; phones everywhere – the numbers of which he didn’t know; the purple sitting room; the fruit machine and the now abandoned Scalextric room.
For a lifelong keen reader there was also a whole room lined with books, from the Just William series beloved from his childhood to hurriedly bought leather-bound editions of Tolstoy, which, as there are only so many hours in the day, would have been still unread, as would the volumes of Swift and Tennyson. The Orwell and Aldous Huxley books might, though, have been looked at.
Like Paul, he too had his own music room at the top of the house, with six interconnected tape recorders, to go with all his other electrical toys, few of which he could make work. All of that might have been expected in any rock star, and it was only when they reached his eccentricities that his merry sense of the absurd appeared, with the purposeless eight little green boxes with winking red lights, the suit of armour, the pair of crutches that George had given him as a present – which was, it might be assumed, a sick joke about John’s spazzie act, which he had now thankfully given up – and a gorilla suit.
A gorilla suit?
‘I thought I might need one. But I’ve only worn it twice . . . I thought I might pop it on in the summer and drive around in the Ferrari . . .’ He’d also thought that the other Beatles might buy gorilla suits too, so that they could go about together in them, four Beatles dressed as gorillas. For some reason none of the others had, so he’d come up with another idea. ‘If I didn’t wear the head it would make an amazing fur coat – with legs . . .’ Then he added: ‘It’s the only suit that fits me.’
There was also a very large bible and a crucifix that looked as though it might have belonged on the altar in a Catholic church. From his few weeks as a choirboy in Woolton, right through school, religion was in those days a constant in a Liverpool boy’s background. At Quarry Bank he’d amused his friends by drawing a cartoon of Jesus on the cross with a pair of carpet slippers waiting underneath, while at college he’d taken his mockery several steps further by depicting the figure of Christ on the cross sporting an erection.
So, religion was always lurking for him and an ever-easy target, and, as he and Maureen chatted, he gave her his views on the subject. ‘Christianity will go,’ he proclaimed. ‘It will vanish and sink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right. And will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first, rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.’
At the time, and in the circumstances, his views on Christianity didn’t seem particularly outrageous, and as they moved on around the house the two soon began discussing other subjects. One was that Maureen thought he was ‘probably the laziest person in England’, something Mimi had chided him about when she’d been trying to get him to mow the lawn at Mendips. ‘Physically lazy,’ he corrected her. ‘I don’t mind writing, or reading, or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more.’
When the two had met three years earlier, his ambition, he’d said, had been to get rich. Now he was, in his words, ‘famous and loaded . . . They keep telling me I’m all right for money. But then I think I may have spent it all by the time I’m forty, so I keep going.’
But going where? the journalist wanted to know. He became more serious. Living at Kenwood in this ‘Hansel and Gretel house’ wouldn’t do at all, he said. ‘I’ll get my real house when I know what I want. There’s something else I’m going to do, something I must do – only I don’t know what it is. That’s why I go around painting and taping and drawing and writing . . . because it may be one of them. All I know is, this isn’t it for me.’
This isn’t it for me . . . The restlessness was growing.
But, if being a Beatle wasn’t enough for him, what would be?
What John probably didn’t tell Maureen Cleave was that he was currently reading a loose translation of the ancient Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead. He’d learned about it the previous summer when, during the Beatles’ second US tour, he’d had his second LSD trip at their Beverly Hills retreat, along with David Crosby and Jim McGuinn from the Byrds, and film actor Peter Fonda.
The original book, which John never read, was a collection of traditional prayers to be recited at funerals, with the belief that they would ease the consciousness of a person through death and on to rebirth. In California in 1966 that had been taken up and rewritten by followers of Timothy Leary as he proselytised LSD and the psychedelic experience – and which included what the author described as a ‘psychological stripping away and a rebirth of the personality’. As such, Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead had become a guide for those keen to embrace an alternative lifestyle, which also promoted the taking of the consciousness-swerving drug LSD. John Dunbar, the husband of singer Marianne Faithfull, who had set up the small Indica Gallery for avant-garde artists in London’s West End, had given John a copy.
To John, ever dissatisfied with the way things were, the idea of a spiritual rebirth, a starting again, was always attractive. He liked to joke that ‘reality leaves a lot to the imagination’, and, mesmerised by the colours, images and thoughts that bled into his brain when he took LSD, it was exciting that surrealism now came on demand in a sugar lump, which was how LSD was often taken. His taking acid ‘went on for years’, he would tell Rolling Stone. ‘I must have had a thousand trips . . . I used to eat it all the time.’
Even assuming that to be a wild exaggeration, and though he never took acid while recording – not intentionally, anyway – its influence on his songs was immediately evident at the very first session for the Revolver album in April 1966. ‘Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,’ he sang, the first line of a new song called ‘The Void’ – later to be retitled ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. With lyrics suggested by the Leary interpretation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it was a radical divergence from anything the Beatles, or any other band, had done before. And, although melodically little more than a dirge, it set the style for experimentation in Indian and other kinds of music. No idea was now off-limits at Abbey Road, as George Martin puzzled about how to fulfil John’s direction that the song’s accompaniment should sound like ‘thousands of monks chanting’.
Once again, the Beatles were ahead of the moment. Doctors writing in newspapers might be warning that LSD could fry the brain, but as well as John and George, Brian, too, now, regularly took acid trips. It was fashionable in their circle. The effects would wear off after a few hours, and they would say that when it was good, it was fun.
But it wasn’t always good, or fun, as John would later regret to Rolling Stone. ‘I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s . . . and I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego, and I did . . . I let people do what they wanted . . . I was just nothing.’ By ‘people’ it would be fair to assume that he was mainly referring to Paul.
But, a convert to LSD, that was the state he was in when he recorded most of the tracks of Revolver. Rubber Soul had contained some of his best songs, but Revolver was a step back, his main contributions being ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, an activity that was becoming increasingly an escape for him, and ‘She Said She Said’, an account of the Los Angeles acid trip when Peter Fonda had kept saying, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead,’ until told to shut up.
Paul, on the other hand, was on a hot streak, going into Abbey Road with ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, ‘Good Day Sunshine’, ‘For No One’, ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ and the sublime ‘Eleanor Rigby’. On top of that he was the main skipper behind ‘Yellow Submarine’, and also came up with the next Beatles hit single ‘Paperback Writer’ – not that it was one of their best.
‘Eleanor Rigby’ had grown from an idea about a spinster called Daisy Hawkins, during an evening at Kenwood. Fed up with watching television, John had left the women and led Paul, George, Ringo and Pete Shotton up to his studio, where everyone pitched in with a line or a thought. Quite why Daisy Hawkins became Eleanor Rigby would become one of those puzzles that Beatles fans love, when it became known that there is an old gravestone bearing the name Eleanor Rigby in St Peter’s churchyard at Woolton. Did John or Paul subconsciously remember it from childhood?
Maybe. But the line ‘wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door’ certainly wasn’t written on a gravestone. It has the stamp of John Lennon all over it. As for the theme and melody, they are pure McCartney, with an octet arranged by George Martin giving it a touch of Vivaldi – a combined operation. A few years later, John’s hazy memory would impel him to tell me that he had contributed 70 per cent of the lyrics to that song, but it was likely to have been somewhat fewer, with Ringo, George and Pete adding some, too.
At the time, John was supportive of Paul’s songs, and he praised ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, and loved ‘For No One’ – ‘that was one of Paul’s good ones . . . all his semi-classical ones are his best, actually.’ But later he would sometimes struggle to control the little green-eyed monster that would nibble away spitefully when he saw excessive praise for his old friend.
The recording of Revolver was completed by mid-June 1966. It had taken nearly three months, and had needed two guitars, one bass, one set of drums, trumpets, trombones, an organ, a sitar, a tabla, a tambura, a cowbell, two cellos, two violas, four violins, a clavichord, a tambourine, a French horn, a piano and some maracas. And then, of course, there were legions of tape-loops, some double tracking equipment and various different microphones. As John saw it, the guy singing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ shouldn’t sound like the fellow who used to sing ‘She Loves You’.
With a cover especially drawn by Klaus Voorman, it was by far the most ambitious project the Beatles had attempted, and, in general, they were pleased with the results. It presented a problem, however. There was no way that the music they were now creating in the studio could be recreated on stage. But a summer tour, taking in Germany and then the Far East, to be followed by yet another across the US, was due to start in a few days.
What, they were increasingly beginning to ask themselves, was the point of touring?