Even before the touring began, John was unhappy. In those days Capitol Records in the US issued shorter albums than did Parlophone in the UK, and, in June, an eleven-track LP, The Beatles: Yesterday and Today, went on sale in America with a few songs from Rubber Soul and others from Revolver. The tracks were fine, but the sleeve photograph, which showed the Beatles dressed in white butchers’ coats with lumps of raw meat draped across their knees and bodies, and Paul holding a headless baby doll to his shoulder, caused outrage, with American retailers refusing to stock it.
It was an extraordinary error of judgement by Brian in choosing that photograph for an album cover. But it also revealed discord within the Beatles. George hated the photograph. He thought it was ‘gross and stupid’ and was disgusted ‘by the baby dolls with their heads cut off’. John didn’t see it that way at all. Feeling humiliated by the phoney mop-top Beatles’ public face, he saw the photograph as surrealism and had pushed for it.
‘I would say I was a lot of the force behind it going out . . . just to break the image of the Beatles,’ he said. It was one of his first acts as a Beatles iconoclast. For Brian it was the Beatles’ first public relations disaster, and, what’s more, the Beatles were falling out among themselves over it. Within a few days Capitol had withdrawn the album.
Until recently, playing to live audiences had been fun and the Beatles had rarely complained about it. But that had been when they could hear what they were playing. Now it bored them. ‘It’s like we’re four freaks being wheeled out to be seen, shake our hair about and get back in our cage afterwards,’ John said. ‘Only someone who was very silly would have enjoyed it,’ George would remember of this period.
For Brian, however, touring was the only part of the Beatles’ career where he still felt like a hands-on manager. As the group now spent so much time working in the studio, it was inevitable that they had become closer to George Martin than to him, and Brian was beginning to worry that he was losing influence with them. In addition, while his reputation for brilliance as a manager was still widely believed, it worried him that the Beatles were getting to know about some very naïve business deals he’d made on their behalf, which had already cost them tens of millions of pounds. George and Paul were more bothered about this than John, but it was, inevitably, outspoken John who would hint at it.
On the surface, Brian appeared calm and confident in his multifarious activities – managing Cilla Black, taking a lease on the Saville Theatre in London’s West End, setting up his own car company to provide expensive vehicles for the super-rich, and finding the time to keep his other Merseyside groups happy. But everything was built on the Beatles, and the tours were the moments he could relish, weeks when he could get away from London and see how much his all-conquering Beatles still needed him.
So, albeit with bad grace, off the Beatles went in June 1966 on the first leg of their summer tour. The first stop was Germany, with concerts in Munich, Essen and Hamburg. It was the first time that they’d been back to Hamburg as stars, and it wasn’t the same. Yes, they met up with Astrid again and their old bouncer pals from the clubs, but the Star-Club had closed down, and they could hardly sneak off to their old haunts in the red-light area accompanied by a German press pack and a thousand fans. Until recently they’d put on a comedy act for reporters, but now they were suspicious and easily irritated.
‘How many girls have you had here in Hamburg?’ asked one reporter.
‘One or two . . . How many have you had?’ came back Paul uncertainly.
‘What do you mean “had”?’ snapped John.
‘What do you dream about when you sleep?’
‘Purple dragons,’ replied George.
‘What do you think we are?’ John bristled. ‘“What do you dream!” Fuckin’ hell . . . We’re only the same as you, man, only we’re rich.’
‘Would you be a Beatles fan, if you weren’t a Beatle?’
‘No,’ said John.
So they sang their allotted twelve songs, and moved on to Japan. This was new territory to conquer. But so worried was the Japanese government by a group of nationalists carrying banners saying ‘Beatles Go Home’ and issuing death threats to the group, whom they saw as representatives of Western decadence, the Beatles were confined by the police to their hotel. As usual they played cards to pass the time.
The stern Japanese discipline did, however, have one welcome side effect. Playing five concerts at the Nikkon Budokan Hall, the Beatles were pleasantly surprised to find that Japanese audiences listened politely before applauding enthusiastically after every song. With a policeman keeping control at the end of every row of the hall, screaming had not yet become a cultural sign of mass approval in Japan. For the first time in a while the Beatles could hear themselves.
The next stop was Manila, the capital of the Philippines, where an estimated 50,000 fans greeted them at the airport, to be followed by a police motorcycle escort as two limousines carried them to their hotel. The itinerary was for them to rest overnight, and then to play two concerts the following day. So Vic Lewis, who was managing the bookings for the tour on behalf of Brian, was surprised to be woken early on the day of the shows and asked by two military policemen to tell them what time the Beatles would be arriving at ‘the party’.
‘What party?’ he asked.
The party was, it transpired, a lunch that Imelda Marcos, wife of despot President Ferdinand Marcos, was giving for three hundred children, and to which the Beatles had been invited.
Lewis knew nothing of any invitation, and nor, Brian insisted, did he, although publicist Tony Barrow remembered an approach from the Philippine government when the Beatles had been in Tokyo, which he had passed to Brian. Whether Brian had replied with regrets or simply forgotten is unknown, but nothing had been done, and the Beatles were unaware of the invitation. However, they would not, Brian told the military police, be attending the party.
A few minutes later, Brian received a telephone call from the British ambassador to the Philippines, telling him that it would be very unwise for the Beatles to insult Mrs Marcos in this way. Brian still refused. Since the incident of Ringo’s hair being cut at the British Embassy in Washington he had made a rule of refusing official functions. Whether he was more afraid of the wrath of the Beatles at being dragged from their beds to go to a lunch party, or was simply standing on principle, only he would know. But it was a bigger deal than he realised. Turning on the television, he watched live coverage of Imelda Marcos and her Blue Ladies waiting with three hundred children for the non-arrival of the famous Beatles.
The two concerts at a football stadium went without incident, and it wasn’t until the following morning when the group were to leave Manila that the trouble really began. Firstly, sour milk was served for an inedible breakfast. Then the police protection assigned to the Beatles disappeared, while the front page of the morning newspaper ran the headline, in Spanish, ‘BEATLES SNUB PRESIDENT’. Television was carrying the same message and showing film of chanting mobs, said to be angry at the insult.
Immediately it was decided to leave the Philippines as quickly as possible. With no hotel porters to help, the entire party hauled their suitcases, instruments and amplifiers out of the hotel and into the limousines they’d hired. With drivers who spoke no English, the journey to the airport was difficult, but it was when they arrived there that the group really became frightened. Hundreds of soldiers with rifles and bayonets were milling about waiting for them, as well as a staged mob of angry chanting Filipinos. Behind the mob, as if to compound the chaos, were hundreds of excited teenage Beatles fans, chanting different messages.
Peter Brown, a friend of Brian’s from Liverpool who was travelling with the manager as his new assistant, would describe the scene at the airport as ‘truly frightening’. In his memoirs he wrote: ‘When our cars stopped outside the terminal, the crowd formed a gauntlet . . . They punched and kicked at us as we rushed by, trying not to panic and break into a run.’
Inside the terminal the escalators, elevators and flight departure boards had all been switched off. People were spitting at them. John said: ‘When they started on us at the airport I was petrified. I thought I was going to get hit, so we headed for three nuns and two monks thinking that might stop them.’
‘They didn’t actually protect us,’ said Paul. ‘They just stood there looking a bit bemused. But wherever they moved, we moved to the other side of them.’
‘At one point,’ wrote Peter Brown, ‘Mal tried bravely to intervene by putting himself between the soldiers and the Beatles, and the punches started to fly . . . Mal was overwhelmed by six soldiers who punched him and knocked him to the ground . . . and Brian was punched in the back and shoulders several times.’
Eventually they made it on to the waiting KLM airliner that was to take them to New Delhi, only to be told that publicist Tony Barrow had to disembark to have his passport rechecked, the excuse being that there was some dubious question of unpaid tax.
For thirty tense minutes, Brian delayed the pilot from taking off without Barrow, as negotiations went back and forth, with, in the confusion, the local promoter coming on to the plane to talk to Brian. Only when the publicist was back on board did the plane take off. By that time Brian was being physically ill and Vic Lewis was wondering about the whereabouts of the cash they’d been due to earn from the concerts. It would remain John’s impression that Brian handed the money over to the local promoter in order to get out of Manila.
It was the bleakest moment in Brian’s management of the Beatles. During a couple of days’ rest in New Delhi, during which the Beatles agreed that Brian had ‘fucked up’, John suddenly said: ‘No more for me. I say we stop touring.’ The others agreed. They gave Brian the news on the flight home to London. After they had finished the forthcoming tour of America, it was decided, there would be no more.
Devastated, hysterical, irrationally unable to see a future for himself, and feeling that he was being rejected, Brian became feverish. An ambulance was waiting for him when the plane landed at Heathrow. Physically, glandular fever was diagnosed. Mentally, a breakdown had been close.
For the first time, the reverse side, the black side, of the outrageous fame that the Beatles had enjoyed had shown its face. It had frightened everyone. And the summer of 1966 wasn’t half over yet.