Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of the Beatles' Utopian Dream

ARTIFICIAL PARADISE

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ARTIFICIAL PARADISE The Dark Side of the Beatles’ Utopian Dream

Kevin Courrier

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Courrier, Kevin, 1954– Artificial paradise : the dark side of the Beatles’ utopian dream / Kevin Courrier. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–313–34586–9 (alk. paper) 1. Beatles. 2. Rock musicians—England—Biography. 3. Rock music—1961–1970—History and criticism. I. Title. ML421.B4C68 2009 782.42166092’2—dc22 2008032632 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2009 by Kevin Courrier All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008032632 ISBN: 978–0–313–34586–9 First published in 2009 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Don and Sheila Courrier for having the foresight to buy me a record player early in my life & Roger Cormier and Walter Knox in gratitude for the years of shared music and camaraderie.

Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with the fire of their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the fire of the projector. Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Step Inside Love

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Prologue: Nowhere Land Chapter 1: Once There Was a Way

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Chapter 2: Like Dreamers Do

30

Chapter 3: Hurricane of Love

66

Chapter 4: You Won’t See Me

101

Chapter 5: Let Me Take You Down

129

Chapter 6: Fixing a Hole

159

Chapter 7: Turn Me On, Dead Man

188

Chapter 8: Come Together

236

Epilogue: Dreams Within a Dream

257

Notes

281

Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The idea for Artificial Paradise came about a few years ago over a dinner conversation among some close friends about the Beatles. The conversation that night had rippled with friendly intensity. As we argued about the group’s merit, it had me wondering how a band over 30 years gone could continue to spark debate as if they’d just broken up yesterday. Three books made it possible for me to expand the ideas in my own work. Devin McKinney’s Magic Circles opened up the territory, while Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head provided astute comments on the Beatles’ music and the zeitgeist of their time. Steve Turner’s A Hard Day’s Write was invaluable for collating the background to the writing of their songs. I took this project to a number of publishers who didn’t see the worth in it. So I was deeply fortunate that Daniel Harmon at Greenwood Publishing Group did. And I’d first like to thank him for his support—and for not collapsing from a heart attack when he saw the book’s length. I’d also like to thank Kelly Fisher Lowe for recommending the publishing house. Special thanks also goes to Erin Fleck who provided the door which I gladly opened to the concept of Nowhere Land. There were a number of readers who made my job easier (and less lonely). First and foremost, I’d like to express my sheer gratitude to my friend and CBC colleague Greig Dymond, who cares as much about the Beatles as I do. His invaluable support and insightful suggestions, which grew out of many years of discussing the group, made him a worthy collaborator on this project. Steve Vineberg provided the kind of forensics appraisal that always keeps you sharp and never lets your work go soft. It’s one of many reasons why he’s such a valued friend. Naomi Boxer kept me on my game and did what deeply cherished comrades always do: She gave unconditional support of both the work and myself—no matter how tired or grumpy I became. David Churchill is one of my oldest and closest friends for a damn good reason. He’s always there with the right questions, the best answers, and the biggest heart. Special thanks go to Susan

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Green for the years of unconditional love and friendship. My deep appreciation is also extended to Jack David and Jen Hale. Thanks to M. F. for the rare Beatles’ album, too. Many other people helped where they could and in their own distinct way. My producer and good friend John Corcelli generously gave me all the breathing room and encouragement that I needed to finish this book. Fellow author Donald Brackett has been part of a long musical chairs style dialog that proves—once again—how the shared love of art can deepen the best of friendships. Judy Graham reminds me of why music lovers make for great friends. Lynne Teperman is the kind of generous and loving friend that I feel more than grateful for having in my life. Janice Newton has always provided the most valued kind of encouragement in both my life and work. Shlomo Schwartzberg was always on the lookout for good Beatle material and provided some invaluable research. Ester Arbeid lent me a valuable book. My friends and colleagues at Public Outreach (you know who you are) always give me hope that there’s a better world to make. Adam Nayman always gives me hope that there is better film criticism to write. I’d be remiss to forget Mi-Kyong Shim for changing my life. Thanks to Bob Douglas and Gayle Burns for always caring. Annie Bryant for mattering beyond words. Sandra Kerr and Vrenia Ivanoffski for convincing me I could teach and write. Avril Orloff may be across the country, but she’s never far from my heart. Sheila, Shawn, and Scott Courrier and Albert Vezeau who never forget. Special thanks goes to the Ontario Arts Council for the financial help to finish this book. And, of course, a tip of my hat to Anton Leo and Dave Downey, without whom, none of this would have been possible. Kevin Courrier July 2008

INTRODUCTION Step Inside Love Art speaks to our dream nature, our secret desires, our wordless understanding of the world. Rennie Sparks, lyricist for the Handsome Family The French film critic Andre´ Bazin once wisely remarked that it was difficult for directors to make great movies based on classic books because they often feel intimidated competing with a literary classic. The writer’s voice becomes such a strong presence, and the book’s reputation is so unassailable, that the moviemaker believes that he or she can’t possibly find his own voice in the process of adapting it. Writing about the Beatles is a little like that. The music is so good, their story so rich, so familiar to us, that you can feel frozen in the face of it. Unlike Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, and Captain Beefheart, the subjects of my previous books, the Beatles have been so thoroughly covered in print that it seemed presumptuous of me to add my own opinions. I even began to get embarrassed, almost sheepish, in responding to anyone who asked me about the latest project. In contrast, when I wrote about Zappa and Newman, it was like sharing some enticing secret with the reader. But the Beatles? Who hasn’t scribbled something about them? What could I possibly add to the huge pile of Beatle lore? Since everyone already has an opinion about the Beatles and their music, I began to feel swallowed up by the idea. I was luckier with my previous subjects. Most people had never heard of albums like Trout Mask Replica, Bad Love, or Weasels Ripped My Flesh. Nevertheless, the Beatles were, in the end, inevitable for me. I had lived through their music, grew up with it, and I saw them in concert each time they came through Toronto. Without the Beatles, in a certain sense, I wouldn’t have found my way to Weasels Ripped

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My Flesh. Their music and its impact on the culture was so significant that just about every other form of popular music stood in comparison to it. But between the lines of this great music was another tale I wanted to tell. That story was about the failed utopian hopes of the sixties. It was about what those hopes were, why they emerged, and how the Beatles embodied them; about what happened when the Beatles, and the counterculture they helped create, couldn’t fulfill them. Since the Beatles had built a world for us to dream in, what were the contours of that dream world? What part did we play in its conception? I sought to examine how the Fab Four concocted, through their distinct personalities and tantalizing music, the promise of an inclusive culture built on the principles of pleasure. Their music offered a utopia of the mind, a Nowhere Land, rather than a political manifesto for social change. On February 11, 1963, when the Beatles recorded ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ a dazzling, mostly unheralded tune included on their electrifying debut album, Please Please Me, the song firmly laid the foundation on which this huge utopian dream would be launched. But within that dream also lay darker elements that materialized out of the very counterculture they helped concoct. As they would initially attract adoring fans, they would soon draw the envious and the resentful to themselves. They would also ultimately draw those with murderous ambitions. Disillusionment with the sixties, along with the dashed hopes endured by the group itself, would years later culminate in tragedy with the assassination of John Lennon and the attempted slaying of George Harrison, perpetrated by deranged and obsessed fans. This was the tale I wanted to tell. What I realized, in sharing this story, is that, by being a fan, I couldn’t avoid telling my own as well. When I was four, I developed a promiscuous interest in music. Without understanding the meaning of the first songs I discovered, such as Frankie Laine’s romantic confession ‘‘Moonlight Gambler’’ or Marty Robbins’ fateful ballad ‘‘The Hanging Tree,’’ I was drawn by the unusual texture of sound in those numbers. Laine, a hyperbolic performer, used a number of strange effects in his composition. A high-pitched whistle, drenched in echo, opened the track; to my young ears, that whistle seemed to be forlornly signaling to some distant train arriving into a lonely, abandoned station. It was soon followed by another voice making click-clop noises, as if a majestic horse were coming over the hill to intercept that oncoming train. And all of this was taking place before Frankie Laine opened his mouth to sing. It was clear that I was responding to more than just a song—it was a whole other world of sound reverberating around me, creating a spot in my imagination, inviting me to share in the music’s distinctive peculiarities. But these were my parents’ and my relatives’ records. I didn’t really discover rock ’n’ roll until my mother’s cousin, Jimmy Mahon, came to live with us in 1959. Jimmy had a huge collection of ’45s, by such performers as Buddy Holly (‘‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’’), Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks

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(‘‘Southern Love’’), rockabilly artist Jack Scott (‘‘Patsy’’), the Mills Brothers (‘‘Till Then’’), some Elvis (‘‘Don’t Be Cruel’’), and Little Anthony and the Imperials (their wonderfully eerie voodoo hit ‘‘Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-KoBop’’). He also owned a portable 45 rpm record player with a built-in cone to stack each record on top of the others. When one finished, the next song would drop down and begin to play. I used to sit in the middle of my room, stack the singles, and leaning against my bed, listen to the songs for hours. And there it was: my first love affair with music. Of course, even though I fell hard for Jimmy’s rock collection, the records and the songs were his, not mine. (All I owned was ‘‘Popeye, the Sailor Man’’ and ‘‘Blow the Man Down.’’) At five, I asked myself when I would find my own music. Word of the Beatles reached Canada before it did in America. In 1963, some of their songs were getting radio airplay and many of my school friends were starting to take notice. When I saw a photo of the group, four guys in matching suits and cereal-bowl haircuts, they looked too precious for words. My parents complained about their long hair and, adorned with my own razor-shorned brush cut, I found no reason to argue. But a sharp guy in my grade three class seemed to know a thing or two about music. Brian Potts was older than his years. When the Beatles were about to make their historic appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, Brian was telling all within earshot to watch. He already owned their new album and he promised us that their TV performance would be worth it. A contrarian even at the age of nine, I scoffed and refused to watch the show. So the next day, Brian invited me over to his house to hear With The Beatles. It was their second UK album (called Beatlemania! With The Beatles in Canada) and it had a black-and-white photo on the front cover with the group in half-profile. The picture was startling—half in light, half in shadow—and their faces revealed no desire to please anyone. The music, on the other hand, was immediately arresting. From the opening track, the boldly appealing ‘‘It Won’t Be Long’’ featured John Lennon declaring his desire to be by his lover’s side, as Paul McCartney and George Harrison backed him up with affirmative ‘‘Yeahs!’’ I was instantly hooked. There was a quality of feeling in this music that told you it was yours to possess. And as joyful as it was, it also had a bottom end, a certain sadness at its core. The Beatles seized me dramatically because the pleasure in their sound tugged at some unarticulated, buried sorrow. The seductive ‘‘All My Loving,’’ for example, was the happiest song on the record, but it was about the singer going away, leaving his girl behind. Most popular artists, like Bobby Vee in ‘‘Take Good Care of My Baby,’’ made it clear that there was nothing about the absence of a lover to feel happy about. Paul McCartney’s song, on the other hand, made a candid promise. He’ll write every day he’s away, so although he’s gone, don’t worry, he’ll be back, just as Lennon would be in ‘‘It Won’t Be Long.’’ When the Beatles covered Motown, as in their version of the Marvelettes’ charming 1961 hit ‘‘Please Mr. Postman,’’

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they act out an emotional tug-of-war. The Marvelettes coyly beg the postman for that letter, perfectly confident that the boy will come through; ‘‘Please Mr. Postman’’ anticipates the joy the singer will feel when that letter arrives. In the Beatles’ version, John Lennon sounds like a man on death row waiting for a reprieve. The elation in his voice at the thought of this letter arriving is also paired with anguish that it may never come. This equivocal characteristic of their music wasn’t a simple divide between pleasure and pain, right and wrong, or an unassuming claim asserting that pain would lead to pleasure (as the woman in ‘‘Girl’’ believes). The Beatles’ records had transcendence in them, a belief that even in the most despairing moment, hope was possible; that even at the most painful time, enjoyment could be around the corner. With The Beatles was the first Beatles’ record I bought with my saved allowance in March 1964—though my parents warned me not to get any ideas about growing my hair long. In September, my mother bought me a ticket to the Beatles’ first concert at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. I was somewhat surprised since she had to put up with Brian Potts and me at the drive-in earlier that summer watching A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles’ first film. Bored out of her mind, clueless to the Liverpudlian humor in the script, she also had to listen to Brian pontificate on the type of acoustic guitar Lennon was playing during ‘‘If I Fell.’’ Nonetheless, she roamed the downtown streets seeking out a scalper so I could attend the concert. She could only get one ticket so I had to go it alone. I walked gingerly past scores of young girls screaming, tearing at their hair, their clothes, some dropping to the ground in a fainting fit in front of me. One female I recall was hitting her head—hard—against the Gardens’ brick wall screaming out for Paul, who, of course, wasn’t there to answer. He didn’t yet know that the hopeful promise he offered in ‘‘All My Loving’’ would generate such desperate responses. Inside the hockey arena, the sports palace that housed the storied Toronto Maple Leafs, my grandfather and I had watched many games together, but I was now entering it by myself for the first time to see the Beatles. It was a rite of passage—my first rock concert. Many performers took the stage before the Beatles, but in my fervent anticipation, I didn’t register any of them. I was in the cheapest seats in the building, up in the gray area near the roof, so I could barely see the stage. When DJ ‘‘Jungle’’ Jay Nelson of the local CHUM radio introduced the Beatles, the din was frighteningly intense. I knew the tunes, but I could barely hear the melodies for the screams from the crowd. An older gentleman beside me lent me his binoculars from time to time through the group’s brief half-hour set. Dressed in their matching suits, like elegant bachelors at a ball, they withstood the barrage from the crowd. Singing ‘‘She Loves You,’’ they dug their black heels into the floor, as if fighting back hurricane winds, yet smiling happily, knowing that the vivacity of that song could match, perhaps even surpass, the devoted shouts the song earned. At times, it was as much a battle of wits as a concert. I

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remember the excitement of the audience during the Beatles’ performance of ‘‘Please Please Me.’’ The plea from the stage was to come on, share this love, an urgent appeal that was greeted with a desire in the crowd to become one with this young and exciting group. Nothing could compare to the emotional force in the stadium that afternoon. As the Beatles left the stage, once they had completed their mandatory mannerly bows, the air was thick with exhilaration. My ears rang for days. When I saw them again at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1965, the music was becoming a little more sophisticated and I was sitting a lot closer—on the floor, mere feet from the stage. With the majority of the screaming behind me, the intensity of the music was now before me. Lennon played a Hammond organ at this show, and as he sang Larry Williams’ exuberant 1958 bar boogie ‘‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy,’’ he’d alternate his fingers and his elbows, madly stroking the keyboards. Yet as exciting as the concert was, it lacked the impact of the 1964 performance because it was clear to me—even at my callow age—that the Beatles’ show was starting to become routine. Certain of what to expect from the crowd, they knew now what to feed us. Yet despite the predictability of concerts like this one, they were never content to repeat their success when it came to their albums. As they scrambled through their second film, the James Bond parody pastiche Help! they also released the introspective Rubber Soul, and later offered us the dazzling eclecticism of Revolver. On these records, the Beatles challenged us to hear music in new and exciting ways. The artistic risks they were taking in the studio were replacing the excitement once heard in their concerts. In 1966, their most dangerous risk, however, took the form of John Lennon’s remark about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus Christ. Despite the outcry over his comment, what Lennon argued was nothing more than a simple truth: popular culture, the paganism of the sixties, was becoming the new religion. The year 1966 was also the year of their final tour, and that’s where the violence that had been lurking under the surface of the happily screaming throngs fully materialized. Facing death threats in Japan for daring to play at the Budokan, being assaulted in the Philippines for snubbing Imelda Marcos’s state dinner, their albums burned in the American Bible Belt as a protest against Lennon’s Jesus remark, the Beatles were now targets of hatred rather than just entertainers of adoring crowds. When I saw the group for the last time at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1966, I sensed a different dynamic in the audience. The spontaneity of earlier shows was no longer present in either the crowd or the group. For that show, I decided to bring a tape recorder my parents had recently bought me. Nobody bothered checking my machine since bootleg albums were still in the future, and copyright infringement was still an issue for publishers and libraries only. My seat wasn’t quite as good as it was in 1965, but I was close enough to get a reasonable recording of the show. The screaming was also nowhere near the

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pitch it had been during the heights of Beatlemania. If there was frenzy in the audience, it seemed rehearsed, as if people were acting out roles in a movie in their minds, no longer responding to the performance on stage. I took my friend Doug Smith to the show and afterward, as we were exiting, the crowd turned toward us, thinking they saw the Beatles and began stampeding. I quickly pulled myself to the wall, clutching my tape recorder for fear it would get broken. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as cautious about my feet and someone stomped over my ankle spraining it slightly. Doug wasn’t as fortunate: he got mowed down so fast I didn’t see where he went. When the paramedics asked me for a description of Doug, I told them what he looked like before the crowd clobbered him, but I was afraid to consider what he might resemble now. I remembered the scary pitch of intensity in the audience in 1964, but the mood this time was more potentially dangerous. The crowd was less responsive to the Beatles, or to their music; they were now becoming conscious of their own power. The harmony between the group and the audience was no longer synergized. As I sat on the stairs waiting for the paramedics to find Doug, with my ankle gently throbbing, I stretched out my legs. As I did, I heard voices and footsteps coming down the steps toward me. Most of the crowd had left the building by now so I found myself wondering who it was. As I looked up, I was stunned to see that it was them—it was the Beatles. Here at their final Toronto show, they were right before me. I was so startled that I couldn’t decide whether to pull my legs in so that they could walk around me, or leave my legs stretched out, so they could just jump over me. Confused, I moved them up and down like a disabled drawbridge. Paul laughed as he jumped over me, while George briskly walked around my feet toward the wall. I brought my knees up and Ringo gingerly stepped around my feet, but John had already decided to leap over me, and his foot caught the edge of my knee. He started tumbling down the stairs, but quickly caught his balance toward the end, with George’s help. Horrified, I tried to say I was sorry but the words wouldn’t come out. I was caught in one of those paralyzing moments that resemble a dream where you try to run but you can’t because your legs won’t move. Lennon quickly shot me his trademark look: an angry pose replaced by a quick smile that caught you off guard and told you it was alright. It was the same disarming smile you could clearly hear in his voice on ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ or ‘‘I Feel Fine.’’ I stumbled down the stairs to watch them enter the press lounge for what would be their final Toronto press conference. When Doug was finally found, he certainly wasn’t smiling. Although he was physically fine, he was emotionally shook up. He was even less pleased when he heard that I got to meet the Beatles. But I was the one who soon had little reason to be smiling. Assuming the Beatles would come back the next year, I decided to erase my tape of the concert because buying reel-toreel audiotape was pretty expensive for an 11-year-old—and, of course, the

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Beatles never returned. The tape that had once contained the Beatles’ final Toronto concert was now filled with the voices of my grandmothers taunting each other as they played cards. The concert in San Francisco at the end of the summer of 1966 was to be their last. From that moment onward, they no longer wished to be the Beatles we knew. They were soon to be disguised by nineteenth-century moustaches and mutton chops, calling themselves Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Along with this new look and the fundamental shift in their new singles, ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ and ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ their candid revelations about drug use began to test the loyalty of some fans (who ran for comfort to the Monkees). But the effects of drugs had always been part of their music, beginning with the uppers they used in Germany at the outset of their career, so they could play maniacal rock ’n’ roll nonstop. They embraced grass to reach the contemplative state of Rubber Soul, turned to psychedelic drugs like LSD to reach the mystical grandeur of Revolver in 1966. The widespread use of harder drugs, especially in the counterculture, would evolve into a type of skid row psychosis, and when John Lennon was taking heroin in 1968, the effects of this psychosis infiltrated the Beatles, too. The harsh individualism heard on their ‘‘White Album’’ that year began to mirror the violent splintering taking place in the counterculture. The curtailing of political and cultural reform with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy contributed to ending the ideals of the era. Soon the hippie movement would evolve into the Manson Family, while the Students for a Democratic Society would become, in a modern equivalent of Dostoevsky’s The Devils, the terrorists of the Weather Underground. The drug culture the Beatles had endorsed had little impact on me, although I did do some experimentation of my own. When I discovered Frank Zappa in 1968, his persuasive view of the harmful impact of narcotics was convincing. (Seeing what people around me were like on various types of chemical refreshment served as a perfect deterrent as well.) But I did become quite politically active on the left, especially after the shocking events of 1968, and I briefly toyed with the extremism found in various collectives and cells. When King and Kennedy were murdered, the thought of revolution seemed not only necessary but inevitable to me. Fortunately, when I discovered the writings of Arthur Koestler, Dostoevsky, Freud, Hannah Arendt, Wilhelm Reich, and Robert Lindner, through a high school teacher’s marvelous humanities class, I realized much to my own dismay that the political discourse I was endorsing was tinged with bitterness and personal disillusionment. When the Beatles ended their celebrated career with Abbey Road in 1969, they had concluded with the line, ‘‘The love you take/Is equal to the love you make.’’ By the time they uttered those words, I had realized all too well that there was little love left to take—or make—from the culture.

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When the Beatles broke up in 1970, the book might have been closed: a great rock band breaks up and life goes on, as John Lennon put it at the time. But the group continued to be a leitmotif through the seventies, when people kept clamoring for a Beatles’ reunion, until 1980, when Lennon was murdered. The Beatles’ utopian spirit, a dream of love and inclusion, had always been an artificial paradise, but the seventies had turned quite perfidious. Since the stakes offered by the Beatles’ dream were so high, the disenchantment with the sixties was all that more painful. If one rock band in the history of rock music captured the hearts and souls of an audience, plus the spirit of a decade, it was certainly the Beatles. Unlike that of any other group, their music found ways to astonish us and change our expectations of what pop culture could be. They helped to bring about a cultural revolution that altered our perceptions of what the world around us might become. The Beatles also offered a promise that we all could share in. Beyond being a significant part of the cultural history of the sixties, they were a force that shaped that history. While their musical innovations set high standards among their peers, as a group, they went far beyond the status of great pop stars. They were pop artists who deliberately gave voice to their time while allowing others, in the process, the means to find their own voices. The relationship the Beatles developed with their fans over eight years, 12 albums, and dozens of singles became an intense explosion filled with desire. The explosion they touched off echoed the New Frontier promised by John Kennedy in his 1960 inaugural speech when he implored, ‘‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’’ Kennedy’s address, which asked America’s citizens to become part of a larger dream, made possible the utopian spirit of the Beatles. When Kennedy’s idealistic plea was answered with the gunshots in Dallas in 1963, the country’s mournful mood was answered by the Beatles’ new hope a few months after his assassination. Although they were British, the Beatles’ idealism took the form of American rock and rhythm and blues music. And why not? ‘‘[They resurrected] music we had ignored, forgotten or discarded, recycling it in a shinier, more feckless and yet more raucous form,’’ wrote music critic Lester Bangs.1 And they chose the most appropriate music in which to lift our spirits: ‘‘In retrospect, it seems obvious that this elevation of our mood had to come from outside the parameters of America’s own musical culture, if only because the folk music which then dominated American pop was so tied to the crushed dreams of the New Frontier.’’ 2 From the moment the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, they seemed to resurrect the possibility for a better world. ‘‘[It was] the last time we can remember believing that life got better every day rather than worse,’’ Beatles’ biographer Philip Norman recalls.3 Author and critic Steve Turner, in The Gospel according to the Beatles, confirms Norman’s view, while defining our own complicity in the Beatles’ hopes. ‘‘During such a time of uncertainty

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the Beatles represented the best of what people longed for,’’ Turner writes. ‘‘They represented laughter rather than tears, hope rather than despair, love rather than hatred, life rather than death.’’4 The joy we heard expressed in the Beatles’ best music offered us an ardent connection to the group. But while that identification brought both the pleasure and the belief those two writers describe, in time it would also bring pain and disappointment. The unending riddle of the Beatles’ stamp on popular culture is basically this: how did a band so devoted to love, also attract, and occasionally inspire, such hate? ‘‘Within [Beatlemania] the symbolisms of desire, fear, and foreboding ran wild,’’ Devin McKinney asserts in his book Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. ‘‘Under its proscenia, acts were committed which could not be consciously acknowledged for what they were. And under its sway, the dreamer had no power over its components, its direction, or its outcome.’’5 Within an open-ended dynamic, the contours of their vision housed a passionate love riddled with paradoxes. Although the strong fervor of this romance promised better days, it also carried within it the roots of disillusionment, rage, and ultimately murder. The innocent invitation of ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ in 1964, which cast a bright reflection of deep love, would, within a few years, be answered by the shadow of death formed by the grim prescience of ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ in 1968. To imply that there is a dark side to the Beatles’ utopian dream is by no means to say that the dream is false or inherently corrupt. It isn’t either/or. Out of this dream grew hope, an honest desire for change, and even a sense of fulfillment that comes with the realization of what that change can mean. From the moment we heard our very first Beatles’ song, so unlike any other pleasurable form of pop, many of us believed that the real world, if not our own lives, would change into something much finer than we knew. The joy expressed in a song like ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ made us believe that love could extend the calendar, even though we knew it couldn’t literally be done. Through the confluence of four disparate men coming together at the time they did, with the songs they imagined, we invested hope that the world they invented in those songs was inherently possible. But we then woke up one day to discover that the world hadn’t changed for the better. We had to recognize that the Beatles’ greatness lay in the way they changed our perspective on the world, rather than their impact on the state of the world. Some experienced a profound sense of loss over the fact that something so grand, so powerful, could change so little of the world’s poverty and the hatred among nations. For others, the end of the Beatles dream was a betrayal and no promise would ever again be great enough to make them feel as hopeful again. The void at the heart of this kind of despair would be seen in the actions of a Mark David Chapman. ‘‘In one way, or another, this longing for community—the dream of self-willed equity and harmony, or at least tolerant pluralism in a world where familiar notions of family and

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accord were breaking down—would haunt rock’s most meaningful moments for the remainder of the decade,’’ eloquently writes Mikal Gilmore in his book Night Beat, about the dashed hopes inspired by the Beatles.6 This specific longing, though, ran deeper and much longer than the decade Gilmore refers to. The endless struggle to define community pops up almost everywhere in American culture. In 1928, in the wake of a horrible depression, folk singer Harry McClintock proposed an alternate world in ‘‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’’ where one’s worst trepidations could happily vanish. On Bruce Springsteen’s Magic (2007), the narrator on ‘‘Radio Nowhere’’ desperately scans the radio dial looking for a song that will pull it all together, make sense of the turbulent tenor of contemporary American life, but he can’t find it. He’s not just clamoring for some current hit to tap his toes to; he’s searching through time to find some meaning that’s lost to him, an ageless song that reminds him that he’s part of something bigger and not at the mercy of transient tastes, the whims of the moment. His goal, as the song states, is to be delivered from nowhere. ‘‘[T]he covenant between Springsteen and his audience remains strong, in part because he gives them permission to go on believing in trust, even when the world seems to offer so few things to deserve it,’’ writes Robert Everett-Green in the Toronto Globe and Mail after a 2007 Springsteen concert in Ottawa, Canada.7 You can see the cost of that pursuit of a covenant to trust in Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, as he walks through the indifferent murderous American landscape in the Coen Brothers’ laconic thriller adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men (2007). ‘‘[His] last speech is a contemplation of hope, a dream, about however dark and cold the world might be, however long the ride through it might be, that at the end you know that you will go to your father’s house and it will be warm, or to a fire that your father has carried and built for you,’’ Jones told a journalist in 2008. ‘‘The last sentence of the movie is, ‘And then I woke up.’ It’s a contemplation of the idea of hope, is it an illusion? Is it just a dream? And if it is, is the dream real?’’8 The question of whether it is real or all an illusion, a question John Lennon posed explicitly in ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ always remained at the heart of the Beatles’ vision. Those of us seeking the covenant they offered were searching for something outside the world we were fated to live in. But the America that the Beatles bonded with in the sixties, despite the Vietnam War and racial iniquity, still had a promise worth believing in. In the wake of the current Iraq War, profoundly hysterical anti-Americanism has replaced a critical distinction between what’s rich and true in the culture and what’s empty and false. You can see that lack of distinction, too, in the fatalistic world of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007). The picture is a preordained polemical statement, an empty pose that offers little insight and no surprises. Anderson’s epic tale of American betrayal implies that there was no American Dream to breach since it was already a

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nightmare to begin with. So his movie provides no tragic dimension to the teeming avarice of the oilman played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Walt Whitman had once distinguished between an art that decided presidential elections and an art that made those elections irrelevant. There Will Be Blood is art that’s too busy counting ballots. There is no grandeur to the deceived dream to even care about its loss. By marrying themselves to the most vital and exciting aspects of American culture, the kind that outstrips partisan polemics, the Beatles give the lie to the kind of narrow assertions Anderson deals in. They built a dream world based on America’s conflicted spirit—its promises and its failings—which offer us a wider definition of community, one that also attracts many diverse citizens. In 1963, the young Brit Ozzy Osborne, yet to become the Wizard of Oz fronting the formidable Black Sabbath, was walking down the street with his transistor radio when ‘‘She Loves You’’ suddenly came on. ‘‘It took me to another place—and I’m still there now,’’ Ozzy told Uncut in 2005. ‘‘I collected everything with the name Beatles on it. My bedroom wall was like a sanctuary to them.’’9 That same year, a Scottish teenager with aspirations to live a bohemian life had a calling to play music. Donovan Leitch sat in his bedroom and just turned on his radio as many kids his age did. ‘‘[It was] one of those old, Bakerlite jobs with the grill of a Fifties American automobile,’’ he recalled to Anthony DeCurtis in 2003. ‘‘The DJ played a pop song, and this song washed over me and I had to sit down. I was dumbfounded, in a kind of altered state. It was two guitars, harmonica, drums, bass and these extraordinary Celtic harmonies. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was, but I said to myself, ‘I’m going to do that. There it is—that’s the fusion.’ And then the DJ said, ‘And that was the Beatles with ‘‘Love Me Do.’’’’’10 Step inside love, the song told Donovan, and he did just that. When the Beatles’ 1, a CD of #1 hits, was about to sell nearly 30 million copies in November 2000, the largest number of buyers were 16- to 24year-olds. To commemorate the album, ABC Television ran a Beatles special called The Beatles’ Revolution, which featured a number of celebrities and recording artists. Comedian Robin Williams described the Beatles’ songs as residing not so much in his memory banks as in his genes. Singer Sinead O’Connor, whose public persona rivaled John Lennon’s for its outspokenness, claimed that the Beatles were the modern version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, able to change the entire face of the planet. Author Salman Rushdie remembered how, for five minutes in the history of the human race, thanks to George Harrison’s interest in Indian music and culture, he felt that it was very sexy to be born in India—especially to the girls he met. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of amazon.com, declared the Beatles futurists for recognizing the emergence of a global village (to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s prophetic phrase). But it was composer Michael Kamen who identified the nature of the strong bond between the Beatles and their audience: ‘‘We didn’t want to be like the Beatles, we wanted to be the Beatles.’’11

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Tom Robbins wrote in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues that you could tell a lot about a person by learning who his or her favorite Beatle was. The svelte sixties’ model Twiggy remembered fights in the schoolyard over who the most attractive Beatle was. (Her choice was Paul McCartney.) Comedian Tim Allen loved Ringo’s everyman quality. Author J.K. Rowling was madly in love with the quiet, contemplative George Harrison, but she wrote about a hero, Harry Potter, who looked more like John Lennon. Blues singer/guitarist Bonnie Raitt covered her wall with Lennon pictures. She even had a pillowcase with Lennon’s face on it so she could kiss him goodnight. My own favorite, like Rowling, was George. His unassuming stature suited my own reserve and I liked the simplicity of his songs. He seemed too shy to have a voice and yet was still determined to express his thoughts. Don’t bother me, one song might say. Think for yourself, another would add. ‘‘If I Needed Someone’’ told you that he definitely had needs, but he wasn’t needy. His egoless detachment naturally led to an interest in spiritualism (and sometimes some pretty dull sermonizing) that was never less than genuine. I admired and identified with that characteristic over the imposing genius of Lennon, the magnetic showman’s gifts of McCartney, the steadyrollin’ self-effacing appeal of Ringo Starr. Most performers responded to what they heard in the music. In songs like ‘‘Town Without Pity’’ and ‘‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart,’’ singer Gene Pitney had the loneliest voice next to Roy Orbison’s, or maybe Del Shannon’s—a voice that didn’t set out to build a community, but rather existed in the shadow of night, on dark streets where it faded into isolation and oblivion, the way Paul Muni did at the end of the Depression-era social problem picture I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932). Despite his forlorn romanticism, though, Pitney understood the utopian foundation that the Beatles built. ‘‘I wasn’t an outsider looking in, but there was a feeling of optimism,’’ Pitney once explained about his response to the Beatles. ‘‘There was something about whether the problems of the world, or personally, you could make them work out. There was an answer to it. To me that all fell apart at the end of the 1960s and diminished into something that nobody ever believed in anymore.’’12 The Beatles’ story is partially about things falling apart. But it’s also about desperately trying to put the pieces back together again. At Beatlefests worldwide, fans offer celebratory events unlike those for other pop groups of the past. In tributes to other pop legends, the music is generally enjoyed for its nostalgic value. But attending Beatles events is like entering a world invented solely to recreate a history. These particular events, of course, leave out one key part of that narrative: the madness and the shadowy undercurrents of Beatlemania. At these gatherings, people step inside the skin of their favorite Beatle. Once I saw a gentleman gleefully, without self-consciousness, take on Ringo’s style and even his name. There

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he was madly signing autographs as if he were the real deal. Mostly at these happenings, though, you are exposed to fannish discourse given by the background players in the Beatles’ story. At one event in New Jersey in 1999, Mojo magazine writers Dawn Eden and Simon Moran encountered former Beatles’ publicist Tony Barrow enrapturing the crowd with old band stories (one included quoting John Lennon who had once asked him, ‘‘If you’re not Jewish and you’re not queer, why are you going to work for Brian Epstein?’’). Sometimes they met some of the recording artists, all but forgotten today, who toured with the Beatles in 1964. These were people I had forgotten I’d seen like singer Doris Troy, whose song, ‘‘Just One Look,’’ I loved as a boy. Eden and Moran also encountered Gordon Waller, late of Peter and Gordon, who recorded a battery of Lennon and McCartney discards like ‘‘World Without Love’’ and ‘‘Nobody I Know,’’ reliving a time that had definitely passed them by, if time was ever on their side to begin with. They’re not forgotten by these hard-core fans, though, who are still looking for a glimpse of that Beatles magic, an aura of what made their period so convulsively joyous. If these special guests can’t supply the magical ambience, then the fans attempt to create it for themselves. Sometimes it took the form of Bob Abdou’s Beatles Puppet Show, or the clone bands that tackled the music, like Liverpool who performed ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ with every little sonic detail in place. ‘‘The audience seems to think it’s really the Beatles up there,’’ Eden and Moran wrote in Mojo. ‘‘Their excitement stems from Liverpool’s frighteningly high-level of authenticity.’’13 By taking the right steps, playing the right notes, who knows? Maybe they feel they can find the vanished Beatles’ spirit. Over the years, there has been an endless supply of Beatles tribute bands, but perhaps no tribute quite like the one that took place in Toronto on December 17, 2006. A 20-member ensemble called Classic Albums Live (who had spent four years performing ‘‘classic’’ albums by the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Radiohead) embarked on a 211-song, 12-hour Beatles marathon, beginning with the group’s 1963’s debut Please Please Me right through to Let It Be in 1970. Rather than duplicate the experience of the Beatles by adopting their look and attitude (as tribute bands like Rain have), Classic Albums Live concentrated solely on the music. ‘‘We treat these albums as if they are sacred,’’ founder Craig Martin told Vit Wagner of The Toronto Star. ‘‘It’s a rock ’n’ roll recital. We’re a cover band as much as the [Toronto Symphony Orchestra] is a cover band.’’14 So if Mozart or Bach has provided a standard repertoire for symphony orchestras to draw upon, Classic Albums Live believe the Beatles have left a pop canon that cover bands can perform to seek legitimacy. Delving into the essence of the Beatles’ pop canon has also put filmmakers on a quest to capture some of that sacred territory. Theater wunderkind Julie Taymor’s phantasmagorical stage production of The Lion King brought her the success required for her to try her hand at movies. Her third picture,

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Across the Universe (2007), is a wildly ambitious jukebox movie built around 35 songs by the Beatles. As we might expect from the woman who made Titus and Frida, Taymor designed a passionately wrought musical fantasia on how the Beatles’ music influenced the youthful idealism of the sixties. In scope, Across the Universe is aspiring, audacious, and spectacular, but it’s a shame that so much of her execution is wrongheaded. Taymor correctly identifies the utopian promise inherent in their songs; especially by illustrating the way people shaped their lives and their ideals around the transcendent spirit of the music. But rather than tell a coherent dramatic story that indicates specifically what the music meant to these characters, she ends up with a broad, operatic canvas that reduces the period of the sixties to a series of cataclysmic events. Ultimately, it dwarfs the individuals on the screen, who come across as simple pawns of history. Across the Universe is at times like Hair directed by Oliver Stone. The story concerns a young Liverpudlian named Jude (Jim Sturgess), who travels to the United States in the mid-sixties to find his American father on the Princeton University campus. There, he befriends Max (Joe Anderson), a middle-class bohemian with a beautiful sister, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), with whom Jude falls madly in love. When the trio eventually ends up in New York, looking ahead to claim their visions of a better future, the decade’s murky underside of the Vietnam War and the draft, racial discrimination and the assassination of Martin Luther King, the drugs and psychedelia diminish their ideals. Throughout the story, the characters sing various Beatles’ songs that reveal their hopes, their longings, and their fears. But Across the Universe would have made for a much stronger picture if Taymor had worked from a dramatic script that fleshed out the characters and made them a distinguishing force out to make history (as the Beatles themselves were). Instead, the historical forces swirling around them leave the cast with nothing more to play than archetypal symbols of an ultimately dashed idealism. Taymor’s failed film does show us how the Beatles have become part of our common heritage, yet that legacy can also be expressed in more unusual ways, as part of the common usage of language. When Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici was working on his documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus in 2006, he claimed that he found nine limestone ossuaries that one time held the bones of Jesus Christ, Mary Magdalene, their son Judah, and others from their family. Of course, he was challenged about his findings by the press during a news conference in New York in February 2007. When archaeologists dismissed the possibility that the tomb held Jesus after its discovery in 1981, Jacobovici (and his producer James Cameron, director of Titanic) claimed they found a constellation of names in the family tomb that proved its inhabitants. When Cameron explained his view of the findings at the press conference, he decided to invoke the Beatles as a means to validating it. ‘‘It’s like finding a John, a Paul and a George, and you don’t leap to

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the obvious conclusion that that’s the Beatles unless you found a Ringo,’’ Cameron concluded. For many, the Beatles forged an appealing lifestyle that fans wished to imitate. In Osaka, Japan, back in 1999, a pub replica of the Cavern Club featured a Beatles-clone house band called the Bricks, who played the dream Beatles concert. They began their show in the style of the group’s rough punk origins in Hamburg in the late fifties, and then they recreated the controversial 1966 show at Tokyo’s Budokan, where fierce nationalists who issued death threats opposed pop music. The Bricks concluded with a replica of the rooftop concert from Let It Be. Yasuhiro Honda of the Bricks calls himself a Beatles expert who thinks about the Beatles most of his waking life. ‘‘I want to put the Beatles into a black box and send them into orbit so they can watch over our children in hundreds of years to come,’’ Honda told Dawn Eden and Simon Moran of Mojo. ‘‘I want to spread the Beatles dream all over the world.’’ He adds, incongruously, ‘‘It’s like a religion, like a big disease, like cancer, like a beautiful, beautiful cancer.’’15 The Beatles as ‘‘beautiful cancer’’ is an intriguing image; it could have even been the title of this book. The contents of that image definitely wouldn’t have escaped short-story writer Ann Hood, author of An Ornithologist’s Guide to Love, when she wrote about her need to flee from the Beatles. In the beginning, their music was a source of constant enjoyment for Hood and bonded her with her family. In recent years, however, it became a source of pain and loss, haunting her like an inescapable specter. ‘‘It is difficult to hide from the Beatles,’’ she wrote in The New York Times in 2006.16 But why hide from the music you love? For Hood, the Beatles had been a valuable part of her life ever since she was a kid. She memorized their birthdays, knew all the lyrics to their songs, and collected Beatles’ cards. With her cousin Debbie, Hood would argue over whether songs like ‘‘Penny Lane’’ and ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ were good enough to be worth the wait. She mourned the day Paul McCartney got married, assuming (as many other girls did) that she alone would get him. When Hood herself married and had children, she would sing Beatles’ songs to them before they went to sleep. It was her way of sharing her love for the music. Her young daughter Grace zealously embraced her mother’s passion for the Beatles. She would quiz Ann on the title of songs. What tune is that where the man is standing holding his head? she’d ask. Ann had to get out her Help! album and unearth ‘‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.’’ By the time Grace was four, she had seen all the Beatles’ movies, had the Beatles’ 1 CD, and owned a photo book of their career. For mother and daughter, the song they took as their own was the euphoric ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ (Grace’s brother Sam would join in when they started singing). Before long, Grace had her favorite Beatle, but it wasn’t Paul, like her mother’s choice. Oddly, it turned out to be Stuart Sutcliffe, the original bass

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player, who died in Hamburg before the Beatles conquered the world. But one day, Grace saw the movie Backbeat (1993), which told the story of the early Beatles in Germany and the bond between Sutcliffe and John Lennon. Only then, when she realized that Stuart was already dead did she switch allegiances to John. Before long, Grace seemed to know more about the songs than her mom did. When George Harrison died in 2001, Grace went into mourning, as if she’d lost a friend, her mother remembered. In April 2002, the day after they had shared a duet of ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ in the car on the way to school, Grace took seriously ill with a virulent bout of strep. While she was strapped to tubes and machines in the ICU, Ann and her husband began playing her a tape of ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ even singing it to her, perhaps hoping the magic of the song would revive her. It didn’t; she died soon after. At her memorial service, her eight-year-old brother Sam sang ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ as loud as he could, so that his sister would hear it wherever she was. After the memorial, Ann took all her Beatles’ records and put them in a box, never wanting to see or hear them again. ‘‘[T]he very things that had made me happy a week earlier were now too painful even to glimpse,’’ Hood wrote in The New York Times. ‘‘Grace had seized my passion and made it her own. But with her death, that passion was turned upsidedown, and rather than bring joy, the Beatles haunted me.’’17 The opening chords of ‘‘Yesterday,’’ for instance, now were devastating. A cover version of the Beatles was enough to drive Hood to seek comfort in talk radio where the Beatles perhaps couldn’t find her. ‘‘How foolish I was to. . .have believed that everything I could ever want was right there in that family room of my childhood: cousins, TV, my favorite music,’’ she wrote. ‘‘But mostly I feel foolish for believing that my time with my daughter would never end.’’18 By the end of her story, though, Ann Hood recognized that the magic spell the Beatles had cast over her made her believe that all that she loved could last forever. But when her daughter died, it broke that spell, made it seem false for not coming true. At which point, the Beatles no longer brought her pleasure, but pain instead. Anyone who loses a child, or a loved one, can feel that certain songs or movies or books that they shared can be too painful to bear, but Ann’s eager enthusiasm over the Beatles wasn’t just a shared passion, it was a common dream between her and her daughter. ‘‘[P]erhaps that is love: a leap of faith, a belief in the impossible,’’ Hood wrote. ‘‘Or for a grieving woman to believe that a mother’s love is so strong that the child she lost can still hear her singing a lullaby.’’19 The intense emotions stirred by the Beatles’ music are based so intrinsically on the listener’s identification with the group that happiness and sorrow can become interchangeable. In a sense, this explains why the Beatles have inspired both love and hate.

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‘‘The durability of the Beatles surpasses pretty much any other music I know,’’ critic Dave Marsh wrote in 2007. ‘‘And as much as it belongs to the waking world, it belongs to dreams.’’20 It’s been close to 40 years since the demise of the Beatles, yet they continue to exist in an ethereal place existing somewhere between the waking world and the world of our dreams. From there, the Beatles continue to operate in the realm of our imagination, no matter what shape the world happens to be in. Yet because of the Beatles, we still try to imagine, as well as desire, better worlds to live in. But these dream worlds, as fleeting as they are appealing, I’ve set out in Artificial Paradise to truly comprehend.

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PROLOGUE Nowhere Land We risk being the first people in history [who] have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so realistic that [we] can live in them. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image When rock ’n’ roll began, its promise was pretty basic: the music told us simply that good times lay ahead. With that primary assurance, a captivating pact was struck with listeners. A defiant claim was wagered in those early records—they said the world was going to be a different place than it was today. As early as 1954, Bill Haley proposed a simple pledge, an unadorned avowal of that claim, when he said we’d find our freedom by putting our glad rags on and rocking around the clock. The song, though, did more than just rock around the clock. Youth riots broke out in movie houses after it was featured in the opening credits of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), an otherwise cautionary story about juvenile delinquency. The same year as Bill Haley, the Penguins, a quietly graceful doo-wop group with ultimately only one hit up their sleeve, promised us a world of feasible pleasures when they asked us in ‘‘Earth Angel’’: Will you be mine? In answer, people danced with their hips pressed just a little bit closer to their partners’. When Elvis Presley first decided to shake his hips on national television, nations of eager teenagers were given permission to shake theirs—and shake them they did. But for the 15-year-old John Lennon, from Liverpool, England, there was something more to the promise rock offered than just putting your glad rags on and wiggling your hips. Lennon was looking for a way out of his frustrated life in his indigent seaport town. Often he found himself dreaming of being in a plane, flying over Liverpool, escaping altogether. Other times,

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he was on a giant horse, galloping unfettered, until his own fears detained him and he ended up home feeling frustrated and defeated. One night, though, in May 1956, Lennon discovered a way out, a possible means of escape, when he caught something extraordinary on Radio Luxembourg, which played all the American rock, blues, and R&B music that the BBC didn’t allow. Lennon was listening to The Jack Johnson Show when he first heard the voice of Elvis Presley singing ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel.’’ Lennon had heard of Presley through his friend Don Beatty, who had shown him Elvis’s photo in a copy of New Musical Express and told him how great a song ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’ was. Lennon had only heard Bill Haley’s music to that point. He would remember his mother Julia dancing to Haley, but the music did nothing for him. As for ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ the title alone came across as phony and corny to the demanding Lennon. But the great benefit of radio then, now lost to generations used to strictly formatted playlists or iPods, was that on occasion it offered you the serendipity of discovery. There was always the chance you’d hear something you didn’t expect to find, or perhaps would ever find again. That’s how Lennon finally encountered ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’ that night, and he knew he had to own that record. ‘‘When I first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ I could hardly make out what was being said,’’ Lennon recalled. ‘‘It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end. We’d never heard American voices singing like that.’’1 And more than Elvis’s voice, which to Lennon sounded like Frankie Laine, Johnny Ray, and Tennessee Ernie Ford rolled into one, he realized all at once that nothing existed for him but rock ’n’ roll. From that day onward, he thought of little else. Besides containing a sound that encompassed him, it spoke of freedom, sex, and youthful rebellion. ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’ also opened up something else to Lennon. But he wasn’t sure what it was exactly. After he launched his meteoric career at Sun Records in Memphis a couple of years earlier, in 1954, with his startling and still unmatched performances of ‘‘That’s All Right’’ and ‘‘Mystery Train,’’ ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’ became Elvis Presley’s debut single for RCA Records. The origins of the composition began with a steel guitarist from Georgia named Tommy Durden, who had been playing country music in Florida since the forties. In 1955, Durden met Glenn Reeves, a Jacksonville DJ and singer, who promptly introduced him to Mae Axton, a schoolteacher, also an eager publicist for local country music performers. Durden told Axton a story about a man who committed suicide and left a note that said, ‘‘I walk a lonely street.’’ In trying to imagine why the man in the story walked to the end of that lonely street, they decided to write a song about where he might have ended up had he not killed himself. That place with no known address became Heartbreak Hotel. Axton went to the annual DJ convention in Nashville in November 1955 and pitched the song to Elvis, who was enticed to record it when he was given a share of the writer’s credit. Jack Strapp, who owned Tree Music (and

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sponsored the convention), purchased the tune and Elvis recorded it in his first RCA session. Despite the popularity of ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ which would get to #1 on April 21, 1956, it is not one of Elvis’s best sides. He puts so much melodramatic affectation into his performance of this torch ballad that it inadvertently comes across as a parody of the blues. But maybe what Lennon heard in the song was what Leonard Marnham, the English post office technician stationed in Berlin, hears in Ian McEwen’s 1990 novel, The Innocent. Bored with his routine life, Marnham switches on the radio one night and, like Lennon, suddenly finds ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel.’’ McEwen describes Marnham’s reaction to the song this way: It spoke only of loneliness and irresolvable despair. Its melody was all stealth, its gloom comically overstated. He loved it all, the forlorn, sidewalk tread of the bass, the harsh guitar, the sparse tinkle of a barroom piano. . .The song’s self-pity should have been hilarious. Instead it made Leonard feel worldly, tragic, bigger somehow.2 No question that the track tells an alluring story that can pull you out of your ordinary life. For one thing, the singer is abandoned by his girl, just as Lennon himself was by his own mother when he was five. He found a new place to abide, right down Lonely Street, there at Heartbreak Hotel. But the hotel gives the singer no comfort; it’s a phantom residence. The singer is all alone, and so destitute he wishes he could die. The idea of this metaphorical hotel of the heart, this ‘‘new place to dwell,’’ spoke deeply to the young Lennon, who would hear his own loneliness and desolation in the song. But also out of that pain, he would hear his own possible, brighter future. By traveling in his mind to Heartbreak Hotel, John Lennon started to imagine a place beyond it. There’s a place in this sound, he thought, to find one’s salvation. Of course there is. There’s a place, don’t you know that it’s so? It was February 11, 1963, almost seven years after John Lennon had his life changed by hearing Elvis Presley sing ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’ on Radio Luxembourg. Now his group, the Beatles, were about to record their debut album Please Please Me at EMI Records, not realizing that they too were about to change the course of popular music. After the moderate chart success of their 1962 single ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ the follow-up ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ recently released, had quickly become a monumental #1 hit. Riding that success, the Beatles were about to record an album of cover songs and original material to try to replicate their dynamic stage performances. After a notable stint in Hamburg, Germany, playing some of the seediest nightclubs, rhythm guitarist John Lennon, bassist Paul McCartney, guitarist George Harrison, and their new drummer, Ringo Starr (who had replaced original

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percussionist Pete Best), had now become legends in Liverpool. This album was designed to capture not only the excitement everyone was hearing in their music but also the excitement that was building around the group. The first song they began recording that day was called ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ an original Lennon and McCartney composition that took 13 takes to nail down. Lennon was trying to get the black R&B sound he loved onto the record. Meanwhile, his writing partner, McCartney, came up with the idea of lifting ‘‘There’s a Place for Us’’ from the Original Broadway Cast LP of Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 hit musical West Side Story. The dream place Bernstein and his lyricist Stephen Sondheim created was an obvious, literal metaphor, invented to accompany the play’s banal civics lesson that meekly tackled racial and generational discord. Lennon and McCartney’s concept turned out to be far more radical. ‘‘There’s a Place’’ laid the groundwork for the Beatles’ musical and philosophical foundation, and it held all the secrets to the potency of their appeal. Oddly enough, however, many would never realize it: the track became their most underrated song. Perhaps because it was sandwiched on the album between the quaintly romantic ballad ‘‘A Taste of Honey’’ and the forceful album closer ‘‘Twist and Shout,’’ ‘‘There’s a Place’’ was unnoticed by listeners. But it seems to have been invisible to the group as well. The Beatles never performed it live during the heyday of Beatlemania. The tune never appeared on any compilation albums, and nobody had ever covered it. In the United States, Capitol Records ignored ‘‘There’s a Place’’ altogether until they released a Rarities LP in 1980. It did find a brief life in America as the B-side of the ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ single on the independent Tollie Records in April 1964, which went to #2 on the pop charts. While some critics drew significant attention to the track over the years, most barely acknowledged its existence. Yet this visionary song, with Lennon and McCartney’s most urgent, beautifully sung harmonic pleas, paved the way for some great material to come, like ‘‘She Loves You,’’ ‘‘All My Loving,’’ ‘‘Any Time at All,’’ ‘‘What You’re Doing,’’ and ‘‘Eight Days a Week.’’ ‘‘There’s a Place’’ essentially fulfilled the promise of ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ while simultaneously surpassing it. Like ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ ‘‘There’s a Place’’ finds the singer in a blue funk, but the place he takes us to isn’t located down some lonely street. Rather than inventing a metaphorical place, Lennon locates it in his mind. Here was a place with no boundaries, no clear definition, and a space within which his endless imagination could take flight. In his mind, Lennon could transcend his sadness. For in his mind, he states, he finds no sorrow. Tomorrow won’t be sad, either, because there’s a place, a place where he can realize his dreams. Coincidentally, the reclusive Brian Wilson also wrote of an alternate place where he could go. But where Wilson goes, in the Beach Boys’ beautifully understated ‘‘In My Room,’’ is clearly at a remove from a threatening world he sees closing in on him. And despite the song’s arresting and seductive

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harmonies, it’s clear that we’re not invited to join Wilson in his room. By contrast, the joy and invention we hear in Lennon and McCartney’s harmonies tell us that not only we are invited to this place where there’s no sorrow but true happiness is contingent only on our presence. The sole pleasure we take from ‘‘In My Room’’ is the relief the singer finds in getting there. The ecstasy underscoring ‘‘There’s a Place’’ is wisely tempered by the singer’s anguish as he declares his euphoria. You have to know what you’re transcending, he seems to be saying, before you can reach transcendence. ‘‘In ‘There’s a Place,’ blue states are expressed with minor triads . . .rather than a pentatonic blues style,’’ explains music critic Walter Everett. ‘‘Perhaps this is because in this song, Lennon does not have the blues; he has retreated to his mind, and we suspect that once there, happy memories of his beloved have let him forget whatever it was that brought him ‘low’ in the first place. Blues aside, both the lyrics and their tonal world express an unusual mix of happiness and melancholia.’’3 What Everett describes here is the underpinning of all the ambiguities of the Beatles’ utopian dream in the sixties. That mix of happiness and melancholia, where heartache adds depth to pure joy, and pure joy adds relief to heartbreak, sent ‘‘There’s a Place’’ past the manufactured posturing of ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel.’’ In less than two minutes, the time it takes to listen to this song, the Beatles take us to Nowhere Land. But this isn’t the Nowhere Land of ‘‘Nowhere Man,’’ a Lennon composition that describes an alienated state of mind. Rather it refers to the Greek meaning of utopia—‘‘no place’’—a precinct that doesn’t exist yet is a perfect locality. In Utopia, an ironic treatise on the Elizabethan social order written in 1518, Sir Thomas More defined utopia as a fictional island. Through the character of Rapheal Hythloday, More travels to this paradise where he finds perfect political, social, and legal systems. Ever since the time of More, when people think of either utopias or even dystopias, they usually locate them in a real world we can all recognize. The Nowhere Land of the Beatles’ music, though, has no literal location. It is sustained by a delicate balance held between the band and its audience, dependent on a common mind created by the diverse group of men who make up the Beatles. The Beatles were part of a different kind of revolution than most of their contemporaries. ‘‘The true revolution of the sixties. . .was an inner one of feeling and assumption,’’ according to author and critic Ian MacDonald. He called that revolt ‘‘a revolution in the head,’’ the title for his own book on the group.4 Perhaps it could be argued that the Beatles’ artistic progress could not have truly evolved without the audience as their muse—and their adversary. ‘‘If the Beatles had ever embodied any principle beyond the transformative power of rock ’n’ roll, it was that every step in their progress would entail the inclusion, through engagement, of yet another community,’’ suggests Devin McKinney in Magic Circles. ‘‘First they would form a community among themselves; this would grow into a community that encompassed

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an imagined mass, an ideal audience, and after all the dues were paid and the foundations laid, the community would include, or at least invite, everyone who wished to play a part.’’5 As a result of this dynamic between the Beatles and their fans, the implicit message of ‘‘There’s a Place’’ can be heard only one way: Nowhere Land exists and the love it offers is only palpable if we play our part in sharing the experience of going there with Lennon. John Lennon had always made himself the pivotal figure in the Beatles’ utopian dream. With them, he proposed the possibility of community, the plucky idea that by joining one, you could free yourself. ‘‘The Beatles and their fans played out an image of utopia, of a good life, and the image was that one could join a group and by doing so not lose one’s identity as an individual but find it: find one’s own voice,’’ critic Greil Marcus wrote in a tribute to Lennon shortly after he was murdered. ‘‘This was an image of utopia that could encompass every desire for love, family, friendship, or comradeship; while the Beatles were the Beatles, this image informed love affairs and it informed politics. It shaped one’s sense of possibility and loss, of the worth of things.’’6 Over time, though, things changed, both for the culture and for the Beatles. Nightmares grew out of dreams. Promises couldn’t be kept. For some devotees of the band, some were deliberately broken, tilling the ground for the murderous impulses some felt justified in acting upon. The screams of fans, at one time demanding the sharing of the unbridled joy of the group’s best music, would now become either screams for blood or the screams of bloodied victims. During this time, Nowhere Land was a ghost town, abandoned even by the ghosts. The Beatles were no longer shaping history, but becoming it, their utopian hope turning into a lamentable loss. In their later music, like ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ they tried to supply answers, rather than pose open questions. We were left wondering what the dream was worth. Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true, Bruce Springsteen once asked in a song, or is it something worse? ‘‘The Beatles had nothing to do with hope,’’ John Lennon suddenly declared at a June 1970 press conference at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, Canada, to announce plans for a peace-and-music festival in the city with his wife, Yoko Ono. ‘‘The Beatles made it, they stopped touring, and they had all the money they wanted, all the fame they wanted, and they found out they had nothing.’’7 Two months earlier, Paul McCartney had announced his split from the Beatles and released his first solo record, McCartney, a dramatic move that made clear that the Beatles were officially over. McCartney retreated to his Scottish farm to record a stripped-down collection of love songs written for his wife Linda, playing all the instruments, i.e., portraying all of the Beatles. But Lennon had abandoned the band privately before McCartney did publicly, having found that rock ’n’ roll itself was no longer living up to its promise. ‘‘The idea of being a rock and roll musician suited my talents and mentality, and the freedom was

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great,’’ Lennon recalled. ‘‘But then I found that I wasn’t free. I’d got boxed in. It wasn’t just because of my contract, but the contract was a physical manifestation of being in prison. And with that I might as well have gone to a nine-to-five job as to carry on the way I was carrying on. Rock ’n’ roll was not fun anymore.’’8 By 1969, the Beatles were not much fun anymore either, nor did they inspire in each other much in the way of hope. Their manager Brian Epstein had died of an accidental drug overdose two years earlier, leaving them stranded. Managing their own affairs, starting their own company, Apple Corps, had only bitterly divided the band. After leaving the road in 1966, they had retreated into the studio to record their Summer of Love totem Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. By 1968, their double-LP The Beatles, the contentious ‘‘White Album,’’ had inadvertently ushered in a Summer of Hate. A psychopathic fan named Charles Manson heard the record as a call to murder. On August 9, 1969, with his cult followers, known as the Family, Manson murdered five people in Los Angeles, including actress Sharon Tate, citing the album as a coded message inspiring him to bring on the apocalypse. On the walls of the murder scene, the title of two songs from The Beatles, ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ and ‘‘Piggies,’’ were written in blood. With the horror of the Manson murders simmering that summer, death hovered in the air. In October 1969, two months after the Beatles finished recording their last album, Abbey Road, a fan phoned a Detroit radio station to inform the DJ that Paul McCartney was dead and, in fact, had been for some time, having been killed in an accident in 1966. An imposter was now playing his role. Since the Beatles were no longer on the road, their clandestine lives in the studio were now clearly inspiring different kinds of dreams from the ones that dramatized Nowhere Land. Citing clues from a variety of Beatles’ songs and their record covers, the caller insisted that the man claiming to be McCartney was being used as a decoy to keep the Beatles myth alive. Within the month, the University of Michigan newspaper, The Michigan Daily, featured a mock article by Fred LaBour that was picked up by a number of international papers and immediately taken to heart by many Beatles’ fans who had abandoned all common sense. It became clear at that moment that the promising courtship of the early days of Beatlemania had deteriorated into violence, bitterness, and crackpot conspiracy theories. Within a year of Lennon’s Toronto press conference, while the counterculture was continuing to regress, the Beatles, citing the irreconcilable differences, broke up. After the collapse, each member embarked on a solo career. George Harrison uncorked the triple-LP All Things Must Pass in 1970, featuring a number of songs he couldn’t get on Beatles’ records. Ringo Starr put together an album of sentimental standards for his mother called simply Sentimental Journey. Lennon, the man who first dreamed up the Beatles, didn’t want to quit the group quietly. After entering psychotherapy with Primal Scream therapist Arthur Janov, Lennon didn’t just abandon the dream like the

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others; he decided it was time to end it. In December 1970, he gave a bluntly dismissive interview to Jann Wenner, editor of Rolling Stone magazine, in which he put down his former mates, asserting that the Beatles changed nothing in the world. South Africa still had apartheid, he ranted, people lived in poverty and corrupt governments had quelled positive change. By protesting—quite rightly—that the Beatles could never enact the social change many fans thought they would, he was now going on to deny that their vision had any worth. That same month, he released his own autobiographical record, named after his new group, Plastic Ono Band, which began as a stark recollection of his traumatic childhood. And one listen to the album’s intensely austere songs made it clear that the world of possibility Lennon once heard in ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ the inclusive spirit he once proclaimed on ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ he was now refuting. He stripped the songs of their quixotic power for the purpose of discovering the naked truth about himself. ‘‘Mother’’ opened the album with the peeling of funeral bells, as Lennon ranted angrily at the father who abandoned him as a boy and at the mother who was killed soon after. ‘‘I Found Out’’ expressed his angry contempt for religion and the pop culture the Beatles helped inspire. ‘‘Working Class Hero,’’ a mournful old-fashioned folk ballad, despaired of an authoritarian society that stripped its citizens of their souls. Culture critic Albert Goldman, in his controversial biography The Lives of John Lennon, aptly compared the theme of Plastic Ono Band to the Who’s rock opera Tommy. ‘‘For what is the famous rock opera about?’’ Goldman asks. ‘‘A boy traumatized by his mother’s cheating loses all his senses but the most primitive, the sense of touch. He employs this mute yet passionate faculty to become a pinball hero—a symbol of rock ’n’ roll. Acclaimed by the world’s youth as a pop star, he continues to evolve, becoming first a guru and ultimately a saint. There is the legend of John Lennon to a T.’’9 On Plastic Ono Band, Lennon set out to reveal himself as a new man. The music was different from the Beatles, as well, their colorful sound turned into monochromatic black and white. Besides Lennon, the record featured only Ringo on drums, Klaus Voorman, an old friend from the Beatles’ Hamburg days, on bass, and an immensely talented young black pianist who had played on the Let It Be sessions named Billy Preston. On Plastic Ono Band, Lennon set out to tear away what he perceived to be the illusory symbols of being a Beatle—but that wasn’t going to be easy. ‘‘The Beatles not only incorporated all the elements of John Lennon’s fragmented personality but they harmonized these elements perfectly, which enabled them to achieve total self-sufficiency,’’ Goldman wrote, explaining the difficulty of Lennon’s task. 10 Since the self-sufficiency of the Beatles was partially inspired by the image of John Lennon, in order to destroy the Beatles, Lennon had to find a means to destroy their image. He did so in a song he called ‘‘God.’’

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For a man who once claimed in 1966 that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus and had himself claimed to his mates to be Christ at a business meeting while tripping on acid, addressing God directly in a song wasn’t far-fetched. But ‘‘God’’ wasn’t simply a Lennon riposte. He used the song to strip away not only the illusions of religion but also the illusions of pop deities who, Lennon felt, paraded like gods. ‘‘God’’ begins with Preston’s stately piano introducing a gospel dirge. Lennon’s voice speaks over the melody, suppressing the appealing melismas that once drew such affection for his Beatles’ songs. He tells us that God is nothing more than a concept we use to measure our pain. As if we were too shocked to take in the idea, he repeats the phrase, seizing bitterly on the final words ‘‘our pain.’’ At this point, the sermon begins. ‘‘God’’ presents the inverse of a gospel song’s affirmations. Reading from a laundry list of injustices, Lennon begins to tell us what he doesn’t believe in anymore: magic, I Ching, Jesus, Hitler, mantras, yogas, and kings all make the cut. After kings, he mentions Elvis, obviously no longer worthy of being considered royalty. When Lennon denounces Bob Dylan, another key figure in the Beatles’ musical and cultural evolution, he calls him by his true name of Zimmerman. (His ploy becomes confusing here since the name Dylan is that artist’s disguise, the illusion that Lennon means to strip away.) Then he comes to the key line in the song: ‘‘I don’t believe in Beatles,’’ he states, his voice rising in the mix over the piano, which stops cold on ‘‘Beatles.’’ After this deathly silence, Lennon returns to tell us what he does believe in now: himself—and Yoko. Throughout the song, Lennon bites hard on the lyrics, careful not to allow the lyrical beauty of his voice to come through. He saves his best singing for a single pensive moment toward the end when, announcing that the Beatles’ dream is over, he insists that he’s no longer the dream weaver, but a man reborn. He proclaims that he isn’t the walrus, alluding to the character he playfully portrayed in one of his best songs, but John. Lennon’s voice rises beautifully here, and then lightly falls like a leaf caught in a quick breeze, as he divulges the simple truth that we have to carry on. In what sounds like an irrepressible sob, a final somber glimpse back at an era of great promise, Lennon softly cries out once again that the dream is over, and his brittle voice breaks into tiny fragments swallowed up by the song’s silent decay. The sound of Elvis Presley’s voice once altered John Lennon’s life. And despite all his intentions in ‘‘God,’’ at the end we can still hear Lennon’s voice accumulate the power that Presley’s had for him. When he recovers the radiance in his voice, when he’s letting it all go, he thinks he’s ending the Beatles’ utopian vision, closing the book on Nowhere Land. But what he fails to see is that the dream is still there, and it’s no longer his alone. When Lennon recorded ‘‘God’’ with the purpose of ending the Beatles’ storied myth, he didn’t consider that he’d eventually become a casualty in the process. In 1980, he was murdered by a deranged fan who felt the former

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Beatle had betrayed him. Tragically, he wasn’t alone. George Harrison succumbed to cancer in 2001, but he had been mortally wounded in his home a year earlier by another obsessed fan hearing voices. Contemplating Lennon being killed by the gun and Harrison nearly by the knife, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones confronted the sick irony of ‘‘such pleasant guys, who made such beautiful music and never did harm to anybody, [having] to go through that kind of violence.’’11 Richards seemed to be implying that the Stones, not the Beatles, had always been identified as the bad boys. In the years following, the world didn’t become any easier, or easier to understand. When you look out into it, you don’t see anybody wanting to hold anybody else’s hand. In 2006, a divisive war was raging in Iraq, where the American government had toppled a vicious dictator with the expressed desire of restoring democracy. What they unleashed instead was more religious and sectarian violence than Iraq had seen under Saddam Hussein. In one day, 130 Shiite pilgrims were killed by a suicide bombing in Karbala. On another, an American private was accused of raping an Iraqi teenager and murdering three members of her family, bringing back horrifying echoes of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam a few decades earlier. Bombs killed hundreds on a commuter train in Mumbai, India, in yet another example of fanatical religious terrorism, while Russia continued to exert its force by cutting off gas to the Ukraine over a pricing dispute. Iran continued its nuclear research while declaring the demise of Israel. Not to be outdone, North Korea decided to start testing nuclear missiles. Bin Laden continued to send death-cult videotapes from his hideout, warning of more terrorist attacks. Inquiries began into the CIA over 1,000 detected secret flights over Europe transporting terrorist suspects to countries that allowed torture. Before the year is end, Saddam Hussein was executed but religious violence continued to tear Iraq apart. Soldiers of the coalition countries were coming back in an endless parade of caskets. One dull November day, in the face of all this turmoil, among the endless bad news, dull commercials, and impersonal patter, an old Beatles’ song, the gorgeous John Lennon number called ‘‘Because’’ appeared on the radio. Filled with that blinding romantic spirit Lennon set out to end on Plastic Ono Band, ‘‘Because,’’ originally heard on Abbey Road, broke through the aural clutter. But this version was different from the one on the record. It was stripped of the lovely baroque harpsichord instrumentation, so the group’s rich a cappella harmonies shone forth—as it also sounded on Anthology 3, the CD box of alternate takes. In the midst of reports of death, recrimination, corruption, the opening lines jumped out: ‘‘Because the world is round/It turns me on.’’ Was this somebody’s idea of a sick joke? Yet somehow, despite all the horrible news dominating the airwaves that day, in a world that wasn’t turning anybody on, you couldn’t resist the sentiments expressed in the song; those voices were just too achingly gorgeous to write off. Listening to the song made it easier to dismiss all the cheap sarcasm on

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talk radio, the monotony of the political pundits, the self-righteous reflexiveness of ideologues. The number seemed to blow away—momentarily—all the horrors of the present, and took the listener to an eternal place where it was once again possible to experience the pleasures of harmony. Even with carnage everywhere, the shimmering beauty of Nowhere Land was again in view. Lennon hadn’t ended the dream back in 1970, only the reality of the group. The renowned pop melodies were still an inseparable part of our own dreams. The real world around us might not be changing as we’d hoped it would, but the artificial paradise of the Beatles’ music remained. As it turned out, ‘‘Because’’ was the opening song on a new Beatles CD simply called Love. The music included was the sound track for the Cirque du Soleil Beatles tribute that had opened at the Mirage in Las Vegas earlier in June. The theatrical acrobatic dance troupe, founded in 1984 and noted for combining surrealism and tent-show theatrics, had been eager to mount a show based on the Beatles’ music and first considered it in 2000 when George Harrison and artistic director Guy Laliberte, both racing car fanatics, became friends on the Formula One circuit. At the Montreal Grand Prix, Harrison told Laliberte that he thought the Cirque should contemplate a show based on Yellow Submarine, the Beatles’ 1968 animated film. Once Apple and the Cirque reached an agreement, however, they moved away from the idea and concentrated on creating a fantasia on the themes in the Beatles’ music. The $27 million production would feature 60 performers in costumes that would combine sixties’ pop art with the dusky industrial look of Liverpool. Characters from their songs—Lady Madonna, Mr. Kite, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Eleanor Rigby, and Father McKenzie—would also flit through the show. For the music, the Cirque du Soleil contacted George Martin, the man who had produced most of those great records, who (due to his age and hearing difficulties) brought his son Giles on board to produce a series of remixes and mash-ups of Beatles’ songs to shape the show. These tracks would provide a panorama of soundscapes whose common thread was the theme of love, the focus of many of their songs. In 2003, father and son prepared about an hour and a half of music for the show, 80 minutes of which would fill the CD. They approached the project as if scoring a film, and indeed the Love album resembles a movie for the ears. On first listen, Love is rather jarring because it toys with our memories of the songs and their original context. But as much as the individual tunes have their place on their individual albums, and in our memories, Love is something different: a scrapbook of song fragments, an elaborate Beatles mosaic created from an impressionist painting of Nowhere Land. While it enhances the Beatles’ mystique, the CD is essentially the sound track of the stage show. But it has its own thematic coherence as an album. Love draws for us a picture of the Beatles’ utopian vision as a convoluted reverie we have now claimed as our own. It is conceived primarily as our memory of the

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Beatles, not the band’s. In spite of Lennon’s efforts on ‘‘God,’’ Love proves that the dream isn’t over. Love opens with the soft cries of nature, sound effects borrowed from a recording of ‘‘Across the Universe,’’ before the harmonies of ‘‘Because’’ open the album. Dominic Champagne, the director of the stage show, had been listening to ‘‘Because’’ on the Anthology CD and adored the a cappella harmonies so much he wanted to include it in the program. On the final relieved sigh of the vocal harmonies comes the final piano chord from ‘‘A Day in the Life,’’ only played backward. ‘‘I guess we thought that as it made such a great ending, turned around it was bound to make a great beginning,’’ Giles Martin wrote in the CD booklet for Love.12 That monumental chord crashes right into the memorable G eleventh suspended 4th on George Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker which opens ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night.’’ As that chord lingers in the air, Ringo’s rare drum solo from Abbey Road (on ‘‘The End’’) plays over it until the opening riff from ‘‘Get Back’’ propels us directly into the song. In just these opening few minutes, Giles and George Martin unravel a tapestry of conflicting fragments, a Beatles hall of mirrors that reflects back to us splinters of distant sounds, of fleeting memories, both happy and sad, that we’ve stored for years. The effect is anti-nostalgic because rather than ask us to harken back to the golden days of the sixties, the album instead tests the worth of these songs today. By daring to break them apart and reconfigure them, Giles and George Martin are letting these sounds loose, as if they were I Ching coins being thrown to see what they might say to us today. As ‘‘Get Back’’ rolls toward its conclusion, Lennon’s cries of ‘‘Oh yeah’’ from The Beatles’ track ‘‘Glass Onion’’ creeps over the top of McCartney’s shouts of ‘‘Hello, hello’’ from ‘‘Hello Goodbye,’’ providing a vivid contrast between Lennon’s despondency and McCartney’s bright optimism. At this point, the Renaissance horns from ‘‘Penny Lane’’ begin to adorn Lennon’s cry, ‘‘Nothing is real,’’ until the creeping strings that end the song turn into the chamber melody of ‘‘Eleanor Rigby.’’ With a spirited theme out of Vivaldi, by way of Bernard Herrmann’s trepidatious score for Psycho (1960), the chamber string arrangement leads us into tragedy—the lonely people whom the solitary Eleanor Rigby laments. At the song’s conclusion, the clamor of children playing in the street is met by the sound of an ambulance going by. Since the melody played over this section is the guitar line from ‘‘Julia,’’ a song Lennon wrote about his late lamented mother, the ambulance might be invoking her death. As it departs, we hear the countin of George Martin in the studio leading us to ‘‘I Am the Walrus,’’ a Lennon song whose roots are found in his childhood love of Lewis Carroll, which brought solace to this bereaved motherless boy. As the chorus chant that concludes ‘‘I Am the Walrus’’ mixes in with the spinning dial of a radio, picking up snatches of Shakespeare, the screams of the early Beatles’ crowds return us to the world of Beatlemania, back to

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those first concerts, when their world was a stage. We catch the eager introduction of the group at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, as the band launches into ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ the song that first seduced American audiences with the Beatles’ music. As the portion of the song concludes with the audience screams fading behind them, the Martins give us a clever mashup collage featuring three songs from the middle of the Beatles’ career. Starting with ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ the opening song from Rubber Soul, the Martins capture the group at the height of swinging London in a number with a clever role reversal. The guy in the song plays chauffeur to his girlfriend who wants to be a star. Martin adds some lovely touches, including McCartney’s Indian-flavored guitar solo from ‘‘Taxman’’ which replaces the original one in ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ plus the blues-drenched horn shuffle from Harrison’s ‘‘Savoy Truffle’’ that underscores the girl’s request to have the guy drive her car. The track then moves quickly into ‘‘What You’re Doing,’’ an underrated McCartney track about his relationship with actress Jane Asher. Almost magically in the same beat as ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ ‘‘What You’re Doing’’ serves as the guy’s answer to the girl’s request in ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ a response that quickly resolves itself in the third section, ‘‘The Word.’’ And the word, of course, is love. As the sly and sexy ‘‘Beep, beep, yeah’’ returns us briefly to the conclusion of ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ the drone of the Indian sitar, associated with Harrison’s incorporeal ‘‘Within You Without You,’’ takes us into a different love: the mystical kind the Beatles soon embraced. While taking Lennon’s vocal ‘‘Sun King’’ and playing it backward as ‘‘Gnik Nus,’’ Love develops a soothing ambience that draws us right into Harrison’s airiest love song, ‘‘Something.’’ As his joyous song of devotion concludes, under the encircling organ of his ‘‘Blue Jay Way,’’ we hear traces of Lennon singing ‘‘Nowhere Man,’’ leading us into the macabre circus atmosphere of ‘‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.’’ Lennon’s carny-barker vocal announces a splendid time guaranteed for all, but we’re thrust into the biting, bluesy organ of ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy),’’ Lennon’s obsessive love song to Yoko Ono, while McCartney shrieks out his desperate lyrics from ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ under it. In track after track, the preeminence of their music is balanced by the urgency of its darker components. After the appropriately imperative cries of ‘‘Help!’’ the soft acoustic guitar of Paul McCartney’s lovely ‘‘Blackbird’’ moves seamlessly into ‘‘Yesterday,’’ his lament of loss which hasn’t lost any of its poignancy through the years. The question of whether to include it in the show apparently caused some concern for Giles and George Martin, because the song is so iconic, so well known; they feared it would be too obvious a choice. But while Giles was in Montreal helping the Cirque sound designer set up another show, Martin began playing around with the PA system and while testing the board, he decided to play ‘‘Yesterday’’ on it. When it was over, he looked up to see that all the other workmen had stopped working to listen. Martin knew then

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that ‘‘Yesterday’’ could still captivate an audience. It had to go into the show. McCartney rarely revealed himself so nakedly in a song, though in ‘‘Yesterday,’’ where he looks back into the past to comprehend what happier, less complicated times meant to him, he was uncovering a coveted theme he’d return to many times throughout his songbook. Perhaps to provide a parallel theme, but from an opposing sensibility, the Martins follow up ‘‘Yesterday’’ with Lennon’s ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’’ Lennon’s tune also delves into the past, but if the past gives solace to the contemplative McCartney in ‘‘Yesterday,’’ for Lennon, the past he draws upon in ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ is a malediction. The song’s origin is a Salvation Army orphanage Lennon, his friends, and his Aunt Mimi used to attend to hear marching band music. Martin begins the song with Lennon’s original acoustic demo of ‘‘Strawberry Fields,’’ which now stripped of its psychedelic adornments, becomes a much more plaintive ballad. As the tune progresses, though, the producers use an aural equivalent of time lapse photography, as ‘‘Strawberry Fields’’ gradually evolves into the orchestral embellishments of the finished version we remember. But rather than repeating the merry-goround effects of the original conclusion, they incorporate an elaborate mix of horns from Sgt. Pepper (the album ‘‘Strawberry Fields’’ was originally destined for), George Martin’s Elizabethan piano solo from Lennon’s autobiographical ‘‘In My Life,’’ the French horn from McCartney’s nostalgic ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ the baroque harpsichord from Harrison’s ‘‘Piggies,’’ and finally the celebratory chorus from ‘‘Hello, Goodbye.’’ Thus what begins as a destitute portrait of childhood out of Dickens becomes a childlike collage of colorful melodies that takes us into an enchanted kingdom. The childhood despair of ‘‘Strawberry Fields’’ is magically cured. The drone of an Indian tamboura is met by the whooping cries of Paul McCartney from the tape loops he provided for John Lennon’s most radical musical experiment, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows’’ on Revolver. But just as Lennon exhorts us to turn off our minds, relax, and float downstream, George Harrison arrives on the rhythm track with his Hindustaniinfluenced ‘‘Within You Without You.’’ The mix of the two songs is probably the best mash-up on the CD. ‘‘At the beginning of the project, I knew that no one would ever hear my mistakes as we’d been secretly shut away,’’ Giles Martin recalled. ‘‘So I thought I’d start by trying to combine a few tracks to see what the result would be.’’13 Besides the kindred spirit between the two songs, the melodies converge as if part of a portable mobile where every disparate piece connects. As the song fades with whooping trills, like that of seagulls flying overhead, the tentative sound of a harpsichord comes out of the mix as if the player were still trying to find the melody. The track begins to establish itself as ‘‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’’ and the harpsichord sets up a blanket of shimmering stars in the sky. Based on a drawing Lennon’s son Julian did in school, ‘‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’’ was tainted in 1967 with the controversy of

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whether it was about LSD (the initials of the title, the surreal imagery in the lyrics), but while drugs had become a habitual part of the Beatles’ music by then, ironically, the song was not enhanced by chemicals. From up in the sky, we move down into the ocean for Ringo’s children song ‘‘Octopus’s Garden.’’ Since it is a close cousin to ‘‘Yellow Submarine,’’ the producers cleverly add a musical reference to that song here. They begin with the maudlin Mantovani-like strings used in ‘‘Good Night,’’ Lennon’s tune to Julian (which Ringo sings), but Ringo’s voice is slowed down to match the melody of his song, while the rival melody is played by the orchestra. Originally Giles Martin wanted to use the morose string movement that ended ‘‘Glass Onion,’’ but he found it too creepy and wisely rested on ‘‘Good Night’’ instead. For the next song, ‘‘Lady Madonna,’’ both Martins have fun with its structure. Opening with the bridge as a lead-in, the track is reminiscent of George Martin’s early experiments with the group, like having them open ‘‘She Loves You’’ with the bridge instead of the verse. Harrison’s majestic ‘‘Here Comes the Sun’’ is a folk mantra that Giles Martin cleverly links to his earlier spiritual tome, ‘‘The Inner Light’’ (which was the B-side of the ‘‘Lady Madonna’’ single). Lennon’s anthem ‘‘Come Together’’ has far more presence here than on Abbey Road and toward the end the producers mix in elements of ‘‘Dear Prudence,’’ ‘‘Cry Baby Cry,’’ and McCartney’s song fragment, ‘‘Can You Take Me Back,’’ all from The Beatles. Out of the competing melodies, which sound like a mixed chorus of nursery rhymes, comes a blast of distorted guitar that opens Lennon’s incendiary ‘‘Revolution.’’ The chastising of violent revolutionaries astutely segues into ‘‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’’ which uses the musical spirit of Chuck Berry to lampoon the pioneer revolutionary state of the Soviet Union. After writing the orchestral arrangement for both ‘‘Yesterday’’ and ‘‘Eleanor Rigby,’’ George Martin was called upon to write a new score for an alternate acoustic version of Harrison’s ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’’ The released version, from The Beatles, was a rock anthem featuring Eric Clapton on lead guitar. But the earlier demo, which featured just Harrison on his acoustic guitar and McCartney on a harmonium, is more satisfying. ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’’ was always a catchy, if overly dramatic expression of self-pity, but in this much simpler version, the tune is less ostentatious and more pensive. Martin was initially resistant to writing another string score. But encouraged by his son and Harrison’s widow, Olivia, he went ahead. ‘‘‘Yesterday’ was the first score I had written for a Beatle song way back in 1965 and this score forty one years later is the last,’’ Martin remarked.14 With the addition of his understated and elegant string arrangement, the song finally achieves a ripe poignancy that permits it to serve as the mirror opposite of ‘‘Here Comes the Sun.’’ If the latter celebrates the rebirth of the spring, the former now sadly contemplates mortality. ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’’ on Love becomes a deeply touching epitaph for Harrison.

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If death underscores ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps,’’ it becomes the subject of ‘‘A Day in the Life.’’ Based on the death of the young socialite Tara Browne, an Irish friend of the Beatles killed in a car crash, ‘‘A Day in the Life’’ explores the fragile, fleeting nature of the moments that make up a life. Out of the rising orchestral din of the concluding note in the song, McCartney follows with ‘‘Hey Jude,’’ the most majestic anthem in their catalog. Although the song today raises as many groans as cheers, ‘‘Hey Jude’’ (which was written for John’s son Julian, after his parents divorced) is a huge affirmation of hope. Unlike Lennon’s explicitly political anthem ‘‘Revolution,’’ which was the B-side of the single, McCartney’s song, with its extended chorus, was taken up as the chant among Czechs protesting the Soviet invasion in August 1968. After the reprise of ‘‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’’ Love concludes with another anthem, the rather naive ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ which brings the album full circle with the opening track of ‘‘Because.’’ In ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ like ‘‘Because,’’ the Beatles seek to surmount the travails of everyday life. When they first recorded this song in 1967, it had that effect on George Martin. One week before he recorded the song for a national television broadcast, Martin’s father took ill and died shortly thereafter. ‘‘I was shattered, devastated,’’ Martin remembered. ‘‘Perhaps the work on ‘All You Need is Love’ was my lifeline.’’15 The Beatles’ music over the years has become a lifeline for many people, as ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’ had been for Lennon when he was a boy. What Love proved upon its release was that their musical wizardry had retained a distinctly hopeful quality. But it was a hope that lives only in the realm of our imagination. The Beatles’ music didn’t, nor could it, make our lives and the world around us better—it could, however, change our outlook on the world for the better. Even so, many still heard a promise in the Beatles’ music, but it was a pledge that the group (which broke up acrimoniously) couldn’t keep. All promises that don’t come true, though, can’t be considered equal. Film critic Pauline Kael once concluded her consideration of Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), a movie about the ultimate betrayal of political ideals, by saying that promises broken are not the same as promises that can’t be kept. In the years ahead, when it came to the Beatles, we came to learn the difference between those two types of promises. So did the Beatles.

CHAPTER 1

Once There Was a Way Ah, Love, could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits—and then Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire! Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat Once there was a way to get back homeward. At least, that’s how the song went. For Paul McCartney, since the Beatles broke up in 1970, getting back homeward had become a fruitless task. All his life, as his career scaled musical heights not imagined, McCartney continually looked to the past for some point of reference, or maybe for some profound meaning to make sense of how far he’d come as an artist. Who could blame him? With the Beatles, he not only was living out a dream but the dream took on a life that made him feel larger than he truly was. His songs once had a power that they couldn’t attain now that he was on his own. Writing in the Beatles was about more than just honing his craft. Being in the Beatles fulfilled McCartney’s ambitions and gave full shape to his creative impulses; it completed him. With the band gone, looking back might seem futile. But without a sense of the past, McCartney couldn’t see a future. Unlike John Lennon, who consistently sought to escape his own history, McCartney always looked for a means to return home. But where was home? And what did home actually mean? In ‘‘Yesterday,’’ a young man reflects on innocent times, when personal troubles were nothing more than a distant blur. By finding refuge in that past, he might eventually become the man he’d hoped to be. But where was this place? Early on Lennon identified a dwelling for himself—in his mind. He sought satisfaction there

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in a song like ‘‘There’s a Place’’ because he could discover none in the real world. McCartney, on the other hand, finds no true refuge anywhere in ‘‘Yesterday,’’ only the need for a place to hide away. Even on an earlier composition, ‘‘Things We Said Today,’’ which seemed anchored in the present, he includes hints of yearning back. ‘‘It was a slightly nostalgic thing already, a future nostalgia,’’ McCartney told friend and journalist Barry Miles. ‘‘[W]e’ll remember the things we said today, some time in the future, so the song projects itself into the future, and then is nostalgic about the moment we’re living in now, which is quite a good trick.’’1 The thought of looking into the future, while living in the present, but always looking back to the past, was actually less a trick than the continued state of Paul McCartney’s mind. An unfinished McCartney song fragment, recorded in 1968 during a studio session for The Beatles, found its way onto the record between Lennon’s pensive ‘‘Cry Baby Cry’’ and the musique concrete of ‘‘Revolution 9.’’ The song, which arrived suddenly like a cry from the beyond, repeated a phrase over an acoustic arrangement borrowed from ‘‘I Will’’ (a song McCartney had just been recording). It was the phrase, ‘‘Can you take me back where I came from, can you take me back?’’ But this lovely yet eerie ballad, heard in a faint echo, seemed weightless, practically haunting itself. Take you back where? it left you asking. After the mournful weight of ‘‘Cry Baby Cry,’’ ‘‘Can You Take Me Back’’ seemed a faint plea from a ghost ship, a desperate appeal for solace that would never find resolution. Before you could even grasp where McCartney needed to go, his voice gently faded into the background, and then suddenly vanished from the record. By 2005, rather than continuing to compose songs that sought a way home, McCartney began literally trying to get back. He had experienced too much grief to endure in recent times. It had been 25 years since Lennon, his former writing partner and creative adversary, had been murdered. His loving wife and collaborator Linda McCartney had died of breast cancer in April 1998. George Harrison, his childhood friend and fellow Beatle, was also dead from cancer. His new marriage to model Heather Mills was quickly coming undone. McCartney may have started to wonder if he actually had become the character in ‘‘Yesterday.’’ The troubles he wished were far away now covered his life with heartbreak and loss. The dream life he had once accomplished for himself didn’t conform to the life he was now living as a popular solo musician. So McCartney had the idea to retrace his professional steps. A new album and a special concert to promote it might provide clues to solving the puzzle of his life. The first step in this direction, though, actually began a few years earlier in 1999, in the same dank basement cellar where manager Brian Epstein had first heard the Beatles in 1961: Liverpool’s Cavern Club. The material McCartney had chosen to take to the Cavern (which had since been renovated) was fitting for the occasion. It was, in fact, some of the same music

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Epstein would have known. McCartney had just recorded a new album called Run Devil Run, a sparkling catalog of hard-driving rock songs from the fifties. He came to excavate the seminal work of his life as a way to reconnect to the very source of what he loved most (as Lennon had also done less successfully on Rock & Roll back in 1975). Run Devil Run revealed to the listener McCartney’s polished showman’s instincts in picking songs that best defined his varied strengths. His tastes may be erratic, with a tendency toward the maudlin, but his sense of his own personal musical roots is sure. It’s what earned him the right to lead his own band. McCartney brought together a talented ensemble, including Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, guitarist Mick Green, pianist Pete Wingfield, and drummer Ian Paice, and put them through the same rigorous recording schedule the Beatles had once adhered to. They would play through all the giants of fifties’ rock: Gene Vincent (‘‘Blue Jean Bop’’), Larry Williams (‘‘She Said Yeah’’), Ricky Nelson (‘‘Lonesome Town’’), Fats Domino (‘‘Coquette’’), and, of course, Elvis (‘‘All Shook Up,’’ ‘‘I Got Stung,’’ ‘‘Party’’). There was also one McCartney original (‘‘What It Is’’). He would later say about revisiting this developmental music that ‘‘it [was] the magic drama they created in the music that was important, not the person.’’2 This was McCartney’s way of saying that Run Devil Run was more than just a nostalgic tribute album to the heroes of his past; the album also connected him to the intimate moments of his own past, where dream and intent had converged, where the Beatles’ magic dream of Nowhere Land had fully surfaced. ‘‘[I]t wasn’t always the song or how good the singer was, it was how good my memory of it was, whether it was a really glowing hot ember of a memory,’’ McCartney told Jim Irvin in Mojo.3 That glowing hot ember was burning pretty bright in 2005, too, when he decided to record an album of new songs titled Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. Rather than produce the record himself, he brought on board Radiohead’s Nigel Godrich. With Godrich, McCartney sought to move away from the melodic lyricism of his more traditional songs and experiment instead with creating innovative tunes with layered patterns. ‘‘I think that’s what Nigel wanted,’’ McCartney told Jon Wilde in Uncut. ‘‘A friend of mine heard it and said, ‘It’s like you’re taking me to a place with this album.’’’4 The place he was taking us to wasn’t home, exactly, but maybe it traced the beginning of how to get there. The front cover of the CD provided a small clue. It was a stark black-and-white photo, taken by his brother Mike in 1962, featuring Paul sitting alone in the backyard of his parents’ house, below a clothesline full of drying sheets, strumming his acoustic guitar and singing a song. The picture was taken through a window shielded by some net curtains, made by his late mother Mary; in the frame, they appear to be silhouetting her talented son. The photo, taken the year the Beatles would release their first single ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ shows Paul looking off beyond the yard (perhaps dreaming for the moment he would no

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longer be alone). What the CD cover tells us is that, for McCartney, chaos underscored his life after the early death of his mother from breast cancer. But music was his salve for healing those wounds. He abandoned the isolation of that backyard when he embraced John Lennon’s the Quarry Men as his new residence. Grief and the hope for salvation became the cornerstone of the Beatles’ music. That same mixture would form the ambience of Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. To launch the CD, McCartney decided to give a small concert for an invited audience and film it at Abbey Road Studios. The event served as a coming home to where the dreams of Nowhere Land truly began, where chaos actually turned into creation. As McCartney walked onto the studio floor, he looked out toward the invited guests, pleased to be there but overwhelmed to find himself in surroundings that held indelible memories. ‘‘That’s where the grown-ups lived,’’ McCartney said, pointing up to the control room and reminding the audience of the time he was a kid about to make his first record. He talked about his nervousness in recording ‘‘Love Me Do’’ because, in order for Lennon to play his harmonica in the chorus, McCartney had to sing the title over it. He then glanced around the studio floor, wistfully taking it in. He imagined Lennon singing ‘‘Girl’’ in one corner, Harrison plucking his guitar in another, and right behind him, he could picture Ringo keeping time. As the past appeared almost ready to swallow him up, McCartney quickly announced, ‘‘I want to try things a little bit different.’’ After introducing Nigel Godrich, who would record certain effects and play prepared tape loops, McCartney grabbed an acoustic guitar and launched into a new song from the album. ‘‘Friends to Go,’’ which he described as ‘‘a George song,’’ was a fascinating McCartney tune. Addressing the singer’s need to reveal himself, because he’s been hiding and waiting for friends to leave, the number seems to have a lot in common emotionally with Lennon’s ‘‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.’’ ‘‘Friends to Go’’ makes you aware of the gaps in McCartney’s creative life because he was now exposing them in this song. He followed it up with ‘‘How Kind of You,’’ a song about being grateful for someone’s love and friendship. There’s an elegiac beauty to this song. It tells us something of his desire for the community of friends, and how the loss of his mates has deprived him of it. Meanwhile Godrich uses loops of an epiphonic acoustic guitar to add textures that sound like pouring water washing away the pain. After finally rendering himself defenseless, McCartney began to launch into his musical past. First, he began rubbing the top of a series of empty wine glasses with his fingers, recording a drone effect, before performing ‘‘Band on the Run’’ as a rousing sea shanty. Later he transformed ‘‘Lady Madonna’’ from its original barrelhouse tribute to Fats Domino into a blues dirge. He danced as lightly as Fred Astaire through Eddie Cochran’s turns of phrase in ‘‘Twenty Flight Rock,’’ the cover song that got him into Lennon’s group. Later he

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unveiled Bill Black’s original stand-up bass, the one featured in ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ when Black was in Elvis’s band. McCartney wrapped his arms lovingly around the neck and performed his own version of the song. He was enjoying the freedom of opening up territory, connecting with the crowd, and taking them into new and interesting facets and interpretations of his work. He was reinventing himself, and his music, in the very place where he had first begun recording it. With a new authority, he used the occasion to invoke his old partners who were no longer there. To accomplish that goal, toward the end he created a song on the spot where, with the magic of overdubbing, he got to play bass, rhythm and lead guitar, plus drums, to become—in spirit, anyway—the Beatles. But as enjoyable as this track was, McCartney knew that he couldn’t outjump the shadow the Beatles had created. After all, what was he singing? ‘‘Gotta go home,’’ he cried happily. Gotta get back. One poignant moment stood out from all the others. Early on, he started to play an old song, ‘‘In Spite of All the Danger,’’ that many in the audience didn’t know, summoning his former mates without being consumed by their loss. Recorded in 1958 with the Quarry Men, ‘‘In Spite of All the Danger’’ was the group’s first record. And in it, the only tune that McCartney and George Harrison ever wrote together, lay the genesis of the utopian promise the Beatles would set forth—then tried in vain to live up to. Encouraging the throng to sing along with him, McCartney sang that in spite of all the danger, he’d do anything for you, anything you’d want him to, as long as you’d be true. The lyric never once indicates what the danger is, but we assume that it’s looming, ready to pounce, if that promise isn’t fulfilled. Even in 1958, perhaps, McCartney recognized that the danger in any dream— especially a romantic one—is the fear that it won’t come true, or more to the point, that it won’t last. ‘‘In Spite of All the Danger’’ is about how the Beatles’ story began, and in a way, it’s about how it ended. Yet that night, McCartney offered that hope once again and the audience affirmatively joined in, forgetting the heartbreak that inevitably follows the promise that song made. And at that moment, the longtime burden of being a Beatle appeared to be lifted: McCartney had happily recalled a point in time when he was one. He was home. For McCartney, as well as for the other Beatles, Liverpool was literally home. Thanks to the band, today the city is a tourist haven, apparently second only to the Tower of London for sightseers in England. Of course, the city’s history is hardly a cause for celebration. One has to remember that while Liverpool spawned the Beatles, the Beatles ultimately wished to break free of Liverpool. Yet the band never dismissed their roots and rightly so. One could always hear the character of Liverpool in their songs, the sense that as things could always get worse, we’ll try our best to make them better. It’s a common characteristic that’s quite germane to the city, a quality

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Alistair Cooke once described as ‘‘cheerful pessimism.’’ The cause of that ‘‘cheerful pessimism’’ came directly from their disparate economic and cultural life. It brought to the city industrial growth, but paradoxically it also brought waste; it brought cultural potential, but often left squandered hopes. The ambiguous roots of the Beatles’ aspirations began right here. One day Liverpool would set the foundation for their greatest artistic triumphs and provide the bedrock for their worst failures. Liverpool’s checkered heritage begins in the eighteenth century, when the slave trade from Africa became mixed with the cotton market from North America. When abolition became law in 1807, slaves were not allowed to land in England, but since cotton was sent to manufacturing cities like Manchester and Birmingham by railroad, other immigrants made their way to the jobs. By 1820, the dockyards and the Cotton Exchange attracted close to 160,000 Irish immigrants from across the channel to make the kind of money they couldn’t make in Ireland. Cotton would be the trade that Jim McCartney, Paul’s father, would begin to ply. But the Irish would also become the despised in Liverpool and were the victims of both unrest and hopelessness. During the Depression years, with the merger of the Cunard and White Stripe shipping lines, the luxury liner traffic was being rerouted to Southampton. This decision changed the industrial base of Liverpool diminishing their economic status. The only way that they could retain their former status was by becoming the anchor of the country’s naval operations. But that change inadvertently created an adverse effect when relentless German air raids lead to massive destruction. By 1941, thousands were killed and the city was reduced to rubble. After the war, it took years to relocate over ten thousand persons. During that period, Liverpool became part of a metropolitan area called Merseyside with a population of about a million and a quarter. When the United States entered the war, Americans were stationed there. They were a source of great fascination for Liverpudlians. Given the hardship they’d endured under German bombs, the brash and stylish manner of Yankee soldiers was something for locals to look up to and admire. ‘‘The people living within these confines saw the seaport as a threshold on the horizon,’’ biographer Bob Spitz wrote in The Beatles. ‘‘Beyond it, an invisible world beckoned. Not a day passed when detachments of tall-masted ships weren’t diligently on the move, bound for one of the globe’s imagined corners.’’5 Those imagined corners of the globe might have set the groundwork for the Beatles’ Nowhere Land, which took place for them not in Liverpool, but ironically enough, in Hamburg, Germany. But during the mid-forties, through all the devastation, the rationing, and the nightly rain of bombs and casualties, England’s dreaming hadn’t really grown beyond surviving on the obliterated streets in which they lived. So when the Americans then came calling, they were the objects of derision as much as envy. They were also a reminder of everything that

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Liverpool didn’t have, even if they represented what Liverpudlians might truly want. No movie caught the ambiguous corners of that conflict, where longings can also breed repression, better than Jim O’Brien’s The Dressmaker (1988). John McGrath’s script, which is based on Beryl Bainbridge’s 1973 novel The Secret Glass, is set in Liverpool in 1944 during the nightly blackouts and food rations. The story centers on two sisters, Nellie (Joan Plowright), the dressmaker of the title, and Margo (Billie Whitelaw), the younger sibling, who works on an assembly line in a munitions plant. While Nellie makes other people’s dreams come true with her assembly of dresses, she has no future dreams of her own. Nellie is basically a seething spinster who’s rigidly devoted to past decorum and respectability, that is, the manners that she feels have been disrupted by the war. But her good taste serves as character armor to mask murderous rage. Margo is her opposite, boisterous, up for a song, and a good time gal looking for the next party. Yet she’s also vulnerable. While in Nellie’s care, her husband had died from mustard gas poisoning suffered in World War I. On account of that tragedy, the sisters have continued to carry a simmering contempt for each other. At least, it simmers until they do battle over their meek 17-year-old niece Rita (Jane Horrocks), who was left in their care by her father (Pete Postlethwaite), after Rita’s mother died. When Rita falls in love with Wesley (Tim Ransom), a young American soldier from Mississippi stationed in Liverpool, it ignites the tension between the two siblings. Like the character of the city itself, Rita is waging an inner war between freeing her desires to express her sexuality like Margo or becoming as prudish and as hard as Nellie. Rita is strongly attracted to Wesley, who represents an exotic American to her. He’s a symbol of the very freedom she dreams for. But she is also terrified of his sexual advances toward her. Since Nellie is a self-righteous custodian of old values, she becomes an emotionally suffocating presence in the house. Film critic Hal Hinson, in The Washington Post, described perfectly the priggish Nellie by defining her as a woman with ‘‘a streak of mania in her bustling. . .bent over her sewing table, her mouth stuffed with pins, she seems deranged, driven mad by her efforts to keep things stitched together.’’ 6 The desperate Rita goes to Margo for help because things for her are becoming emotionally and sexually unstitched. By doing so, she hopes that Margo will understand her fears and help her win Wesley. But Margo, despite her libidinous temperament, is too timid to stand up to the power of Nellie’s disdain for her. Nellie naturally triumphs in the end. It’s easy to see how the Beatles could emerge out of the bone-chilling world depicted in The Dressmaker. While they are products of the repressive culture that Nellie represents, they also embraced the free-spiritedness of Margo, who has a striking resemblance to Julia, John Lennon’s late mother. But there’s something of Rita in the Beatles, too. It isn’t her awkward

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shyness, or her forlorn whimpering that prevents her from sustaining joy; rather, it’s in her strong desire to imagine a way out of misery. Despite Wesley’s continued attempts to break up their relationship by standing her up, never calling, or even flirting with Margo when he comes to family dinner, Rita still maintains the faith that he’ll still one day want to hold her hand. As the Beatles looked beyond their own environment, to dream of a world where they could prevail, they had to carry the ghosts of the past that they escaped from. In the last moment of The Dressmaker, when Rita wakes up from a horrible nightmare with a hideous scream, it’s a scream that releases her momentarily from a bad dream. But the scream is itself a manifestation of the kind of bad dream she won’t escape. That scream would find its own release in the Beatles’ shouts of freedom in ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ and ‘‘Money.’’ But it would also find its echo in Lennon’s twisted, painful screams toward the end of ‘‘Mother,’’ on his solo 1970 Plastic Ono Band album, when his cries aren’t about finding freedom, or even resolution. They were the screams of a man who, as Albert Goldman said, couldn’t get the past out of his system.7 The fear and repression that the Beatles sought to escape was not abstract. ‘‘Their era had been on close terms with [that fear] since the first thump of a Nazi boot at the far end of the European corridor,’’ wrote Devin McKinney in Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History.8 The Beatles came into a world that was being bombed continuously between 1940 and 1944. As McKinney points out, Britain’s major cities were brought to the edge of infrastructural collapse. The threat of death continually lingered in the dead silence of national blackouts. After the invasion of Poland and the capitulation of France, Britain feared that it could be next. Clothing, electricity, and food became luxuries, and starvation was staved off by cans of Spam. In the midst of this horror, the Beatles were born. ‘‘[John Lennon] first took breaths in a world full of fearful screaming females, and found the first name of his country’s revered prime minister [Winston Churchill] affixed patriotically to his person,’’ McKinney remarked.9 After watching their parents sacrifice both life and livelihood to fend off Hitler, the next generation wanted nothing less than their freedom. But it wasn’t the security and comfort their parents craved for that they were after. The generation of the Beatles wanted to test the worth of the values they’d just inherited. They weren’t content to grow up with a legacy handed to them only out of sacrifice. The risks they wished to take, in testing those limits, would come from the pleasurable sensations they heard in rock ’n’ roll music. ‘‘We were the generation who didn’t really suffer from the war and we didn’t want to have to keep being told about Hitler,’’ George Harrison recalled. ‘‘We were more bright-eyed and hopeful for the future, breaking out of the leftover Victorian mold of attitudes and poverty and hardship.’’10 Those bright-eyed hopefuls had found their bearings the very

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moment that the Labour Party started pulling the plug on the British Empire in 1945. Before long, the new government started providing health care and education, as well as reforming the class system. During the fifties, amidst a burgeoning welfare state, a Conservative government promoted a consumer culture that was built on the postwar American model. By the sixties, that bold decision would launch a renaissance in British popular culture. In the postwar fifties, besides boredom, deprivation, and bomb holes for playgrounds, American movies and the music of Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, and Little Richard stepped into the cultural breach. These artists offered something to aim for—a world to conquer. The world the Beatles had come from was bleakly monochromatic. It was the grim purpose following the war of joining the National Service, of being molded into the army’s idea of being a man. ‘‘You have to remember that we’d watched all that happen to Elvis,’’ Paul McCartney explained. ‘‘He’d been this ultimate rebel figure who we’d all worshipped. Then they made him cut his hair and he had to call everyone ‘sir’ and he was never really the same again . . .Before we knew what was happening, we were like errant school kids off the leash.’’11 With the end of compulsory service, here was a prospect of something novel, perhaps something better. ‘‘[I]t was like a paradise had been created for young people,’’ McCartney continued. ‘‘There were all these possibilities opening up that our parents could only have dreamed about. Suddenly, our entire world was bright colors.’’12 The generation of the Beatles in England was the first to dream in technicolor. They could dodge the National Service, as well as avoid getting a dull, respectable job. For the first time, they could even imagine a career in rock ’n’ roll, instead of a predictable life of drudgery. To the individual Beatles, music stoked their imagination. Harrison would discover that Big Bill Broonzy had the key to the highway, Josh White sang like a man satisfied to have just one meat ball, and Hoagy Carmichael revealed the wonders of stardust. McCartney would listen to his father playing ‘‘Stairway to Paradise’’ on the piano and believe that paradise was possible. Ringo, a seriously ill and aspiring drummer—who no one expected to live to see twenty—would hear Gene Autry lamenting ‘‘South of the Border,’’ and he could imagine himself among the backup singers cheering Autry across the county lines. Lennon, of course, would have his rendezvous with Elvis Presley singing ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ and would hear his escape from Liverpool. ‘‘Pop music denoted more than preferred entertainment or even stylistic rebellion,’’ Mikal Gilmore wrote in Night Beat. ‘‘It signified the idea of autonomous society. British teenagers weren’t just rejecting their parents’ values—they were superseding them, though they were also acting out their eminence in American terms—in the music of Presley and rockabilly; in blues and jazz tradition.’’13 The image of Elvis loomed large in Liverpool and manifested itself through the Teddy Boys. Although the teds began a little earlier in 1954, these gangs of young boys dressed in long Edwardian jackets (from where

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they would take their name) would start fights at local dances. ‘‘The teds personified a classic example of adolescent rebellion,’’ wrote biographer Bob Spitz in The Beatles. ‘‘[T]hey drank, brawled, screwed, defied convention, and acted out by dressing like ghoulish undertakers. . .Its mongrel style was adapted from a fusion of postwar London homosexuals, who wore velvet half collars on Edwardian jackets, with the biker gangs as depicted by Marlon Brando in the film The Wild One.’’14 The hypermasculine swagger of Brando in The Wild One, a strut that defied all authority, also had a huge impact on Presley, which Lennon immediately recognized, as did other Teddy Boys. But just as ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’ spoke to Lennon over the radio, the appealing idea of revolt in Britain was seen and heard on stage in John Osborne’s autobiographical Look Back in Anger. Working-class realism was breaking up the protocol of British politesse, the very world that Nellie of The Dressmaker was trying to keep stitched up. Osborne was answered, too, by author Colin Wilson’s novel The Outsider, a book that didn’t so much speak to alienation as it did to disenfranchisement. It offered not a realist’s bible to social change, but a skeleton key to Nowhere Land, where an impressionistic view of the world existed beyond class distinction, to a place where a new reality could be attained. But first, what was needed was a sound to express both that disenfranchisement and the brave new world that this new generation was envisioning. It couldn’t have come from a less likely source. Like most young kids, future-Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was looking for something hopeful out of the depressive atmosphere of postwar Britain. ‘‘It was still those somber post-war days of rationing,’’ Page said while bleakly recalling the period. ‘‘Then this explosion came through your radio speaker when you were 11 or 12.’’15 That explosion was Lonnie Donegan. In July 1954, as Elvis was laying down his first landmark tracks at Sun Records in Memphis, a Scottish banjo player and singer named Anthony Lonnie Donegan was starting his own minor musical revolt by filling up a few minutes of dead studio time with music that, like rock, had its roots in American blues and folk. It was called skiffle, a crude adaptation of basic blues and folk songs, where the folk rhythms were radically sped up on makeshift instruments. Buskers on street corners often embraced skiffle as the music of choice for drawing coins. When Donegan began his career playing traditional New Orleans jazz with the Chris Barber Band, he started introducing skiffle into their stage repertoire. In January 1956, Donegan had recorded the Leadbelly folk song ‘‘Rock Island Line’’ as a single for Decca Records. ‘‘Rock Island Line’’ was given a quick country and western swing arrangement right out of Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys. When the song became a huge hit, skiffle bands suddenly started popping up in a number of British cities. When Donegan recorded ‘‘Cumberland Gap’’ in 1957, another traditional folk

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song done with a skiffle arrangement, Lennon began to believe he could play this music. After all, you didn’t have to have expensive instruments to perform it. ‘‘Skiffle was the beginning of the whole Liverpool scene in the end, because once the bands realized that they could form a group cheaply, just washboards and tea chests, it was next to nothing and you could have a band,’’ explained music promoter Sam Leach, who started promoting skiffle in Liverpool in 1957. ‘‘So, from the 600 or 700 skiffle groups came the nucleus of about 300 rock and roll bands two or three years later.’’16 One of those bands would be the Quarry Men. Lennon formed the Quarry Men in May 1957, and they consisted of friends Eric Griffiths, Colin Hanton, Rod Davis, Pete Shotten, and Len Garry from Quarry Bank High School for Boys. They made their debut at a street carnival on Rosebery Street in Liverpool, copying songs they heard on the radio. Often they would mangle the words—like those to the Del-Vikings’ smoothly seductive ‘‘Come Go With Me’’—because their lead singer, John Lennon, had a bad memory and even worse eyesight. They were playing this composition the day Paul McCartney first met Lennon at the St. Peter’s Church Field Garden fete on July 6, 1957. Could there have been a more apt song (in melody and title) to lure a partnership that would soon change the world? Ivan Vaughn, a mutual friend of both Lennon and McCartney, had invited McCartney down to hear the group figuring he might like to join. The band was playing two sets in the afternoon shortly after the crowning of Miss Sally Wright as the Rose Queen and the Fancy Dress parade. The 14-year-old McCartney was taken by Lennon’s inventiveness as he stumbled his way through ‘‘Come Go With Me.’’ As John mangled the lyrics with typical Lennon sardonic humor, the improvised words quickly tumbled out. ‘‘Come little darlin’, come and go with me, down, down, down, down to the penitentiary,’’ he’d sing while confusing a seductive love song with a prison blues. McCartney had actually come from a musical family. His father, Jim, besides working in the cotton trade had been a brass-band musician. Many years later, Paul would pay tribute to his father by creating Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. His grandfather also used to play an E-flat bass in a brass band, an instrument that would eventually find its way into Paul’s hands. But first, Jim McCartney had bought his son a trumpet. Paul would first learn ‘‘When the Saints Come Marching In,’’ and some other standards, but his lips had never felt comfortable and he realized that there was no way he could sing and play the trumpet at the same time. Next he tried the guitar, but since they only made them right-handed, Paul had a technical problem—he was a leftie. McCartney figured out that if he turned the strings around he could actually feel more comfortable playing. When he happened to see The Blackboard Jungle, with the opening credit music of ‘‘Rock Around the Clock’’ by Bill Haley and the Comets, he heard the call of rock ’n’ roll.

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After the show, McCartney was introduced to Lennon, who was somewhat inebriated. In a brief 20-minute session, with John’s closest friend Pete Shotten present, Paul got out his guitar and played Eddie Cochran’s ‘‘Twenty Flight Rock,’’ impressing Lennon by knowing all the words. He also tore through Gene Vincent’s 1956 hit ‘‘Be-Bop-A-Lula,’’ a track that Lennon adored. But he was equally impressed that McCartney could explain chords, and apparently, play the trumpet and piano. ‘‘Was it better to have a guy who was better than the people I had in?’’ Lennon asked himself. ‘‘To make the group stronger, or to let me be stronger? Instead of going for an individual thing we went for the strongest format—equals.’’17 Equals. This became the first brick in the foundation of the Beatles. With Lennon, McCartney would skip school. And they’d play songs together at Paul’s place. The tunes they especially liked were those of Buddy Holly because there were fewer chords and they could make it all the way through the number. During this period, they would write some of their early songs like ‘‘Love Me Do.’’ In early 1958, McCartney introduced Lennon to George Harrison, his guitar playing younger friend, with the hope of having him join the group. Harrison apparently knew more chords than even they did. But Lennon initially thought Harrison too young to join until he performed perfectly Bill Justis’s beautifully languid ‘‘Raunchy.’’ Harrison’s quest for perfection on the guitar came out of the sheer boredom he endured at school. Early in his teenage years, he had made up his mind that the only job he wanted was to play guitar in a rock band. His first guitar was purchased in 1956, the same year he met Paul McCartney at school. When he learned about McCartney’s musical background, they started playing together. Soon enough, they learned that they both liked Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran. But as Lennon and McCartney were both becoming fast friends and musical partners, they also shared a common tragedy. McCartney’s mother was a midwife nurse, a dutiful woman, who had a lasting impact on her son. While his father might have developed his son’s interest in music, it was his mother who encouraged his drive to succeed at it. Her determination in life had its downside, though, when she continued to work despite the suspicion that she may have developed breast cancer. Ultimately, she would die of the disease on Halloween night in 1955. Deeply wounded by his loss, McCartney built a wall around himself and turned to music to become lifted out of his grief. Sometimes he would lock himself in the bathroom just so he could play his guitar. John’s mother, Julia Stanley, also had an indelible effect on her son. Unlike Paul’s responsible parent, though, Julia was an impulsive woman who married seaman Freddie Lennon in 1938. John was their only child and by the time he was five, his mother gave birth to another child by another lover. When his parents separated, Lennon was left in the custody of his strict Aunt Mimi. His mother was both charismatic and unconventional, and she had a deep love of music that she imparted to her son. Her

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death in 1958, where she was accidentally run over by an off-duty policeman, shattered the young Lennon who was only just becoming close to his mother again. McCartney always saw their mutual tragedies as their special bond. ‘‘We both had this emotional turmoil which we had to deal with, and being teenagers, we had to deal with it very quickly,’’ McCartney explained.18 But being teenagers, with opposing temperaments, their shared bond would also be their axe to grind with each other. In the early years of building what would become the Beatles’ group dynamic, they would channel that rivalry into a mutual plan for constructing and strengthening the group. ‘‘They were the perfect foils for each other’s disaffections,’’ biographer Bob Spitz wrote. ‘‘For Paul, who had lost his mother to an illness, and for John, whose home life was fraught with emotional confusion, their relationship created an alternate reality, free of such tensions.’’19 That tension would find expression however in the songs they wrote—both alone and together. In the winter of 1958, the same year he heard Gene Vincent’s raw and hungry ‘‘Be-Bop-A-Lula,’’ McCartney composed a buoyant love song, with hints of the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly, called ‘‘I Lost My Little Girl.’’ McCartney would perform the song live on MTV for his Unplugged show in 1991 (curiously right after doing ‘‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’’). He pointed out to the audience that, although the song has sweet innocent lyrics, the chords go down as the melody goes up. But you can’t mistake the lightness in McCartney’s touch. Rather than use the song to plumb the depths of his pain, as Lennon might, McCartney sought a refuge. He essentially hid inside his music, letting his artistry help him overcome whatever psychic disturbances might lie beneath. ‘‘There have been times when I’ve been feeling down, and then I’ve heard a particular song and it has lifted me,’’ McCartney once remarked.20 Lennon though used his art to relentlessly plumb his soul with the belief that he would find the purity of truth there. As a partnership, they sought to discover a means to consolidate their differences, to establish a common front, even an identity to house those divergences. This belief in the unity of diversity actually helped Lennon and McCartney sow the seeds for the utopian ideas that would emerge in the Beatles’ music. That summer, the first seed would be sown. On August 7, 1957, the Quarry Men debuted at the Cavern Club located on Matthew Street in the seedy warehouse district that was once the original fruit district. Alan Sytner had opened it in 1957, when he got the idea from the Parisian jazz club, Le Caveau Francais. A few years later, the Cavern was taken over by Ray McFall, who changed the club from jazz to skiffle, then ultimately to rock. When they made their debut at the Cavern Club, the Quarry Men were part of that evolution from skiffle to rock. Beatles’ biographer Bob Spitz described the Cavern as a club right out of some modern horror movie set:

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Most of the way down the steep, dark stairway there was no clue the passage actually led anywhere—no sound rose from the darkness, no flickering light at the end of the tunnel. The only sign of life was a stench that grew fouler and muskier as they progressed downward. Eventually the stairs bottomed out into a vestibule of sorts, which emptied in the club, itself a dank cellar in three sections separated by archways.21 There was enough room for about 40 people in the middle section where the 14 square feet of stage, built into an arch, was bisected by a wall. The outer sections were saved for dancers and observers. There was barely enough head room because of the low ceilings. But the acoustics, and the sight lines, were perfect for loud hothouse rock ’n’ roll. By the summer of 1958, having now played live at the Cavern, the Quarry Men set out to make a record. Back in 1955, 60-year-old Percy Phillips ran an electrical goods store in Liverpool. When he saw that there was an interest in local country and western groups wishing to record songs, he bought a portable tape recorder, a disc-cutting machine, some microphones, and a four-way mixer. He installed this portable studio in the living room of his Victorian home on Kensington Street just outside the center of Liverpool. Phillips would then record the songs on a 78 rpm shellac disc with a single microphone. When the news of this facility got out, groups like the Quarry Men eagerly set out to make a record to promote themselves. At this time, the Quarry Men consisted of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, pianist Duff Lowe, and drummer Colin Hanton. They paid a total of 17 shillings and six pence to cut two songs. The two songs chosen were Buddy Holly’s ‘‘That’ll Be the Day,’’ the first smash hit for the Texan in 1957, and the McCartney/Harrison original, ‘‘In Spite of All the Danger.’’ Holly’s sassy defiance (quoting in the title John Wayne’s key phrase spoken in John Ford’s 1956 western The Searchers) after being dumped by his girlfriend was a perfect fit for Lennon to sing. In fact, Julia had taught the song to him shortly before she died. His mother had learned the banjo, a beautiful mother-of-pearl, four-stringed instrument, from her grandfather. ‘‘She used to play ‘That’ll Be the Day’ by Buddy Holly,’’ Lennon’s half sister Julia Baird recalled. ‘‘I remember us standing over [John], making him play it again and saying, ‘Yes, it will hurt. Press harder. Press harder. Yes, it hurts. Get the tone clear.’’’22 The version the Quarry Men perform is admirably close to Holly’s, but Lennon is too worshipful of Holly to truly make it his own. But ‘‘In Spite of All the Danger’’ is a whole other matter. Written largely by McCartney, with the guitar solo composed by Harrison, the song builds on musical ideas heard in Elvis Presley’s ‘‘Tryin’ to Get to You,’’ which he recorded in 1955 at Sun Records, and released as a single in September 1956. The song was originally rehearsed many hours at McCartney’s home at Forthlin Road before the day of recording.

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‘‘In Spite of All the Danger,’’ which can be heard on the Beatles’ Anthology 1 CD box, is a strange hybrid of a country ballad backed with an R&B doo-wop chorus. Unlike ‘‘That’ll Be the Day,’’ this song has a more distinct texture (plus there is no rock hero to look up to). McCartney uses Elvis only as a starting point where Lennon looks to emulate Buddy Holly. ‘‘In Spite of All the Danger’’ shows us a group that’s feeling their way toward figuring out who they are, what they sound like, and maybe even what they’ll become. Of course, when McCartney performed the song in Abbey Road in 2005, he had already caught up to its meaning. After all, the Beatles were the ultimate response to the promise posed in that tune. But in 1958, we can hear those young innocent voices trying to make a plea that, as yet, had no precedent. ‘‘The sound is of a group more interested by what it has yet to search out than what it has too easily found,’’ Devin McKinney wrote in Magic Circles. ‘‘[It’s] a group excited by the danger of staking every hope on nothing but their talents, themselves, each other; a group willing to brave its fear of failure and horror of obscurity on the long, long chance that their voices will be heard. Listening to it now, we hear John, Paul, and George forging a vow from the meddle of their ambitions—I’ll do anything for you—and addressing it to a single person. If you’ll be true to me. . .A vow, like an ideal, means nothing if it goes untested.’’23 The tests, of course, would soon come. Beyond the airwaves of Radio Luxembourg, rock, blues, and R&B records found their way to Liverpool in the duffel bags of black American sailors arriving in port. Being a seaport, Liverpool had easier access to those records than London. Liverpool also had a savvy DJ named Bob Wooler who would travel from club to club with a vast assortment of American songs. The ‘‘beat scene’’ would emerge out of this cultural brew with bands like the Bluegenes, named after Gene Vincent (until they went mainstream in 1963 as the Swinging Blue Jeans), plus Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, which featured one Richard Starkey (i.e., Ringo Starr) on drums.24 By the early sixties, Liverpool would have close to 300 bands, but the groups didn’t so much create a revival of rock in England, but glory in its tradition, create a link, or a slim continuity between themselves and a heritage they thought would launch them into the future as the next wave of R&B artists. Unfortunately, the popular music of the late fifties and early sixties was the feathery pop of Cliff Richard and the Shadows. The Quarry Men, and others like them, idolized Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and the Everly Brothers. In particular, McCartney added Little Richard and Peggy Lee, while Lennon loved the manic energy of Larry Williams. Harrison brought in the doo-wop and girl group sounds of the Shirelles and the Chiffons. When the Beatles arrived, they didn’t simply copy the sound of these groups, rather, they sought to find their own voices within songs like ‘‘Honey Don’t,’’ ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven,’’ and ‘‘Long Tall Sally.’’ Many British blues bands, such as the Yardbirds, were initially content trying to pay homage to the black artists they admired (until the Yardbirds found their

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true vocation in pop with ‘‘For Your Love’’ in 1965). But their cover versions of the blues music they loved were so ardently bland that they became a modern form of minstrelsy. These groups wanted to sound black and blue, but couldn’t help appearing white and fake. Sonny Boy Williamson was often fond of saying that the British kids wanted to play the blues so bad, the blues ended up sounding bad. The Beatles, on the other hand, always sounded like the Beatles. Whether they got deep inside Smokey Robinson’s ‘‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’’ or matched the chiming vocals on the Cookies’ ‘‘Chains,’’ by swapping both gender and color, the Beatles were never just paying tribute. They saw themselves as inheritors building their own version of the sounds they loved. What specifically did the Beatles inherit? When Elvis Presley arrived in 1954 with his first record, ‘‘That’s All Right,’’ he had successfully integrated the black blues into country swing. Some say the most important factor here was that it enabled a white man to sound black. I think the more significant act here is that, in the same year the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation, a white man defiantly acted on its pledge. In the years to follow, Elvis would rock (‘‘Hound Dog’’), turn gentle (‘‘Love Me Tender’’), or become melodramatic (‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’), creating a style that was gleefully unpredictable and open to possibilities. ‘‘The power of [Elvis’s] music lay in its directness: rhythm and harmony were boiled down to basic essentials and used to convey primal human passions—impatience, pride, sexual yearning, simple pleasures, confusing doubts, and sheer hilarity,’’ critic Tim Riley wrote in Tell Me Why. ‘‘The recording medium rock ’n’ roll was invented in proved to be the perfect outlet for these passions.’’ 25 That medium, of course, was radio. Suddenly young listeners could hear a singer celebrate those passions, without inhibition, magically into the air for all to hear. But Elvis was only one man breaking through, not a group, so the larger sense of community the Beatles would represent didn’t come from Presley. He opened the door for those larger possibilities of freedom—and fell victim, ultimately, to its traps. The cadences of Buddy Holly’s voice provided nuances Lennon and McCartney tried to create in their own harmonies. But they were also impressed that he wrote his own songs that he performed with the Crickets. ‘‘[Holly] had a permanent, identifiable backing group,’’ critic Steve Turner explained. ‘‘John (who was short-sighted) was encouraged that a bespectacled singer could become a rock ’n’ roll star and the initial naming of the group ‘Beetles’ was inspired by Buddy’s Crickets.’’26 Lennon and McCartney were also very taken with the Everly Brothers (‘‘Bye Bye Love,’’ ‘‘Wake Up, Little Susie’’) because of their close-harmony style that was influenced by Appalachian country and Celtic folk. They sang songs of heartbreak, but with such beauty that the music surmounted the pain without ever denying its existence. Perhaps that was only possible because, like Lennon and

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McCartney, the Everly Brothers also had opposing temperaments that they channeled into their songs. Lennon and McCartney consumed the Everly Brothers’ hits, but also the B-sides of their singles like ‘‘So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad).’’ In their fantasy, Paul would play Phil Everly and John would be brother Don. As with the Everly Brothers, Lennon and McCartney locked horns as much as they harmonized in song. ‘‘The thing about me and John is that we were different, but we weren’t that different,’’ McCartney told Jon Wilde in 2004. ‘‘I think Linda [McCartney] put her finger on it when she said me and John were like mirror images of each other. Even down to how we started writing together, facing each other, eyeball to eyeball, exactly like looking in a mirror.’’27 Devin McKinney saw them as neither mirror images nor complete opposites. ‘‘[Lennon and McCartney] were complementary coevals: two halves of a bipolar split, each with the potential to run manic or fall depressed, but each clinging to its fundamental identity when times got tough,’’ McKinney wrote. ‘‘Troubled, John always went back to rock ’n’ roll, the simplest wordings and most basic chords, the most immediate communication. At such times he favored reality—or his artist’s idea of reality—over fantasy. Paul did the opposite, gravitating to the fantastic over the tangible, to impeccable pastiche over personal essay.’’28 But as certain opposites attract, they also complete each other, compensating for the deficiency in the other, in order to take themselves beyond a world each knows only too well. That dynamic was there right from the beginning. Johnny Gentle, one of the first singers who played with them in 1958, took notice of this. ‘‘It was always Lennon and McCartney, even then, Lennon and McCartney,’’ Gentle told Beatles’ biographer Bob Spitz. ‘‘They wouldn’t even look at [the others] to determine where things were going. Everything was designed around the two of them—and the others had to catch up on their own.’’ 29 Their future record producer George Martin would compare them to Gilbert and Sullivan, as opposed to Rodgers and Hart, for reasons of their creative rivalry. ‘‘When they were both Beatles their rivalry was channeled towards the betterment of the Beatles as a totality,’’ critic Ben Gerson would write in Rolling Stone in 1971 about Lennon’s ‘‘How Do You Sleep,’’ a vitriolic invective against Paul McCartney, on his solo album Imagine. ‘‘Apart, it is only destructive.’’30 The way Lennon and McCartney wrote songs didn’t follow the same pattern as Rodgers and Hart, where one did the music and the other did the lyrics. ‘‘If I get stuck on the middle-eight of a new number, I give up, knowing that when I see John he will finish it off for me,’’ McCartney told a journalist in 1964. ‘‘He’ll bring a new approach to it and that particular song will finish up half and half, Lennon and McCartney.’’31 As for their singing styles, Lennon and McCartney developed along the lines of the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly in an attempt to acquire a harmony that surpassed their contrasting nature. ‘‘Lennon’s was particularly

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expressive, with soulful graces, melismas, Preslian roulades, sprezzatura, and timbre shadings,’’ musicologist Walter Everett wrote. ‘‘McCartney broke into falsetto to overdrive his Little Richard-style shouts, but Lennon’s falsetto was more refined and melodious, usually restricted to transitional ‘woos’ in emulation of Roy Orbison.’’32 According to biographer Bob Spitz, when one singer took over the song, the melody would expand demanding the other to join in. But the second voice didn’t seek to harmonize with its partner in the traditional sense where the edges of the song would get smoothed out. The timbre of their contrasting voices built to an unbearable tension within the song that constantly demanded release—something you could hear ultimately in the ecstatic screams and head-shaking of ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ and ‘‘She Loves You.’’ The Beatles synthesized the innovations of their antecedents out of love and necessity. By the end of the fifties, their heroes were missing in action: tamed by the army (Elvis Presley), dead (Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper), disgraced (Jerry Lee Lewis), in jail (Chuck Berry), or they found religion (Little Richard). The charges of payola against pioneer DJ Allan Freed also changed pop radio. Pop music started shifting toward the resurrection of Tin Pan Alley with songwriters scrambling to the Brill Building in New York, where Carole King and Gerry Goffin provided sweeter sounds for various pop performers like Frankie Avalon. By 1962, in Britain, the Beatles would begin to overturn that trend. First, by covering some of those songs themselves and transforming them. Secondly, they would perform their own material. Before the Beatles were through, the rule of the Brill Building ended with many of those same songwriters (Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond) recording their own material. ‘‘Up to that point, you could write songs for everybody—rock & rollers, soul singers, pop singers,’’ recalled Al Kooper, once a writer in the Brill Building, but who would make history playing organ on Bob Dylan’s ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone.’’ ‘‘But the Beatles and the Stones wiped all that out.’’33 Before they led what was commonly referred to as the British Invasion, they were still the Quarry Men looking for gigs. By August 1959, the band narrowed down to John, Paul, and George, when the others abandoned the cause to start new lives. The new, improved Quarry Men played their first engagement at the Casbah Club in Liverpool, which was owned by Mona Best. Her son Pete Best just happened to be a drummer. For the moment, it just happened to be what the group needed. Besides requiring a drummer, the band also needed a bass player. Back in January 1960, Lennon talked his painter friend Stuart Sutcliffe, a classmate at the Liverpool Institute, to join the group. When he sold one of his paintings for 65 pounds sterling at the John Moores Exhibition, it gave him enough money to buy a bass guitar—an instrument he couldn’t play. Coming from a Victorian background, Sutcliffe had a civil servant father

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who was serving in the merchant navy and a schoolteacher for a mother. Although painting was his true passion, his deep friendship with John convinced him to join the Quarry Men. When they met, Stuart stood in sharp contrast to Lennon (just as McCartney did). While John was angry, violent, and often drunk, Sutcliffe was sensitive, an intellectual, and passionate about the art world. In hindsight, he was an early surrogate for Lennon’s partnership with Paul McCartney when the Beatles became renowned. For one thing, Sutcliffe had a keen interest in art that McCartney would later develop after living with Jane Asher’s family. He was the group’s first bassist, an instrument he would soon pass over to the more musically superior McCartney. And he would die tragically in 1962, just as Paul will later be rumored to have done in 1966. John had more of an intuitive grasp of the artistic world, plus contempt for its pretensions. But it was Sutcliffe who already had the means and discipline to get there. More importantly, in terms of the ultimate hopes of the Beatles, Sutcliffe had already grasped—and openly accepted—an equal enthusiasm for the world of high art and the lower road of rock and roll. ‘‘To him, Michelangelo and Eddie Cochran, cathedrals and Italian shoes, although obviously unalike, could be treated with the same seriousness,’’ wrote Steve Turner in The Gospel according to the Beatles. ‘‘He was a studious teenager who nevertheless dressed like James Dean, a fan of European art movies who could rave about Elvis.’’34 While Sutcliffe would have never lasted as a Beatle because of his musical deficiencies, his egalitarian spirit, where all forms of culture could coexist and be accepted as equal, was the vision of what the Beatles would come to mean. Shortly after Sutcliffe joined the band in March, they started rehearsing and recording their efforts at McCartney’s house with a tape recorder that he borrowed. These primitive recordings, available on Anthology 1, as well as various bootlegs, show a group restless to find their own voice. McCartney barrels through Ray Charles’ ‘‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’’ with a brisk brio. His own composition, ‘‘Cayenne,’’ an instrumental he wrote before meeting Lennon, shows the influence of the Shadows while simultaneously surpassing them. ‘‘You’ll Be Mine’’ is a lark, a parody of the Ink Spots, with McCartney using that exaggerated vocal style he would later perfect on ‘‘Oh! Darling.’’ Lennon also does a spoken refrain that spoofs the Velvetones’ ‘‘The Glory of Love.’’ It’s a clever, yet sloppy, attempt at the comedy stuff they’d do better on ‘‘Yellow Submarine’’ and ‘‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).’’ Perhaps the most interesting track is McCartney’s ‘‘I’ll Follow the Sun,’’ which he wrote in 1959, and is only available on Beatles bootleg recordings. Although the rerecorded song would ultimately turn up on Beatles for Sale (1964), as a quaintly pensive ballad, here it has the attack of pure rockabilly. While telling his loved one goodbye, that he’s off to follow the sun, McCartney unwittingly introduces a clever double entendre. The sun he’s following in this early version seems to be Sun

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Records in Memphis, since the song, in style and voice, resembles one of Elvis’s early sides. In April 1960, the Quarry Men decided to change their name to the Beatles for a number of reasons. They had always liked the name of Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets, so it served as the perfect homage. In his own definitive poetic fashion, Lennon said that Beatles with an ‘a’ came to him from a man on a flaming pie. But the real reason was that the ‘a’ defined them as a ‘‘beat’’ group. ‘‘It was John and Stuart who thought of the name,’’ McCartney claimed. ‘‘They were art students and while George’s and my parents would make us all go to bed, Stuart and John could live the little dream we all dream: to stay up all night. And it was then that they thought up the name.’’35 But the name Beatles also has its origins in The Wild One where the female followers of Lee Marvin’s motorcycle gang are called ‘‘beetles.’’ That same year, the group also met Royston Ellis, England’s own version of Allen Ginsberg, a writer and poet who met the group in the summer when he performed his poetry at Liverpool University. Notably, Ellis introduced the Beatles to drugs such as the Benzedrine inhaler. The band admired Ellis because he brought an awareness of the link between rock ’n’ roll and literature. When they met, Ellis had written a book called The Big Beat Scene, which provided a survey of the British Beat music of the late fifties. Ellis entertained the idea of having the Beatles perform behind him as he read his poetry, but before they could play Steve Allen to Ellis’s Jack Kerouac, the band got the break they were looking for. Allan Williams, who owned a coffee bar in Liverpool called the Jacaranda, was also a music promoter. Since he was near the art college, the bands used to come to play in the basement for free. That summer, Williams was putting together a big tour for Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, when Cochran was tragically killed in a car accident. In a panic, Williams contacted the booker Larry Parnes who supplied a replacement group calling themselves the Beatles. He told them they should call themselves the Silver Beatles. Whatever name was required, they were in. Lennon taught Sutcliffe the only two chords he knew and suggested that he turn his back to the audience so they wouldn’t be able to see that he couldn’t play. Larry Parnes was impressed with the group and offered them a role backing the popular singer Billy Fury—if they got rid of Stuart. But the band stuck together and turned Parnes down. They were given a job instead backing singer Johnny Gentle for a tour of Scotland. The group might have continued traveling the countryside, if they hadn’t heard about a whole other scene waiting for them in Hamburg, Germany. Allan Williams had about 300 bands all over England. While scouting dates and locations for them to play, he kept hearing about German seamen arriving at port in Liverpool talking about all the work to be found in Hamburg for hungry musicians. With the possibility of more money to be

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made abroad, Williams started setting up gigs for them in Germany. When the Beatles asked about the possibility of including them, Williams said they needed a drummer. Pete Best had only been playing with them periodically, so to get the Hamburg gig, they made him their official drummer. From the moment the Beatles arrived in Hamburg, its shady enchantment beckoned to their adolescent hunger for experiences both forbidden and hidden— exactly what the Beatles themselves would release in the culture at large within a few years. When the Beatles entered Hamburg, a prosperous commercial city that since the nineteenth century had attracted ships with cargo and people, it was as if they had stepped into a dark mirror. Hamburg offered them a reverse image of the repressive postwar Britain they’d known. Suddenly they entered a world of free sex and prostitution, drugs and alcohol. All of this and more awaited these innocent lads who grew up on food rations. ‘‘If anything, Hamburg helped to level the schoolboy hierarchy that had governed their relations in Liverpool, since the differences in their ages meant nothing in a place where, by local standards, all five were babes in the woods,’’ wrote Jonathan Gould in Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America.36 The German audience they faced in Hamburg was still living in its own mirror. They existed in the silhouette of a history that was shared with the Beatles—the war and the Holocaust. Germany still wasn’t that far removed from those horrors, but now the German audience wished to distance itself further from the violence it perpetrated a decade earlier. The Beatles, though, sought through the force of their stage presence, a certain retribution for the violence that was perpetrated upon them. ‘‘They traded curses and outrages with their crowds,’’ wrote Devin McKinney in Magic Circles. ‘‘Lurched about like cartoon cripples, hollering holy hell into the sunrise, Lennon in particular must have found it a kind of heaven: demented mind theatre, Goon Show without censor or good taste, as he goose-stepped and played Der Fuhrer to the crowds.’’37 Playing off the Nazi horrors of the recent past, the Beatles turned the audience into their adversary—and their muse. In the process, they found their identity as a group. By treating this drunken mass as their foe, they discovered a way to mold their own distinct differences into one soul. Their ultimate goal was to become a musical force that would conquer the world. The Beatles played in the Reeperbahn, the red light district of Hamburg, filled with gangsters, prostitution, drugs, and booze. The group partook of the booze because the clients liked to show their appreciation. Before long, though, they also sought favors with the women and downed uppers to keep their energy going. ‘‘Hamburg was the training ground for the band,’’ Allan Williams recalled. ‘‘It was a 24-hour scene, non-stop, and it kicked off at something like 8:00 in the morning and carried on till 8:00 the next morning.’’38 Apparently, after the Berlin Wall went up, the gangsters from East Germany immediately settled into the West and into the Hamburg scene.

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As a result, crime became lucrative, especially the gun running due to the Algerian War. ‘‘Then along came these little innocent Liverpool lads,’’ Williams remarked.39 What made Hamburg significant to the future of the Beatles was that they could develop an eclectic repertoire of material. Given the venues they played, including strip clubs, gay and transvestite bars, and mud wrestling parlors, they were able to perform the hard rock they liked and (thanks to various requests) the comic pop of ‘‘Besame Mucho.’’ In the dim underbelly of Hamburg grew the idea of Nowhere Land, where music from anywhere, and at anytime, was possible to play. For two months, they performed at the Indra Club, until it was closed because of noise complaints. The Indra especially had something of an ironic flavor for McCartney. ‘‘[I]t had a big elephant over the street to signify India,’’ McCartney recalled. ‘‘Later, with our India influence, it seemed funny that that should have been our first place.’’ 40 While playing there, however, they stayed in the less-than-regal surroundings of the Bambi Kino. ‘‘We were put in this pigsty,’’ Lennon recalled contemplating the backstage of the Bambi Kino, which was also part cinema. ‘‘We were living in a toilet. . .We would go to bed late and be woken the next day by the sound of the cinema show.’’41 McCartney remembered the aroma all too well. ‘‘[Y]ou could always smell them,’’ he explained. ‘‘[Our] room had been an old storeroom, and there were just concrete walls and nothing else. No heat, no wallpaper, not a lick of paint, and two sets of bunk beds, like little camp beds, with not many covers. We were frozen.’’42 Not only were they cold, they often weren’t very clean either. ‘‘I never used to shower,’’ Harrison admitted. ‘‘There was a washbasin in the lavatory at the Bambi Kino, but there was a limit to how much of yourself you could wash in it.’’43 Hamburg had opened their eyes to the seedier side of show business. By doing 12-hour sets, though, the band developed their chops, kept the Germans engaged, and sometimes enraged them with their antics. ‘‘The Hamburg days, in retrospect, were probably the most important times of our lives because it was what you could call our apprenticeship,’’ Harrison asserted. ‘‘We worked very hard and we worked long hours. We played for eight hours a night, seven days a week for over four and a half months on our first go-round there. We really got a lot of material down, a lot of material we would never have learned if we hadn’t gone there.’’44 Because of their growing popularity, the Beatles had to move to a bigger location, but with similar clientele, the Kaiserkeller. There they alternated with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, whose drummer was Ringo Starr. Ringo would often stay late into the evening, after everyone else went home, to hear the Beatles play some of their bluesier numbers, meaning all the B-sides they knew. What the early crowds heard was a repertoire of Gene Vincent, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers—perhaps even an instrumental take on ‘‘Moonglow.’’ On some nights, Ray Charles’ epic ‘‘What I’d Say’’ became

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an hour and a half tour de force. They kept up the pace by taking Preludin, a slimming drug that had the impact of speed. It was at the Kaiserkeller where the Beatles’ fortunes started to change. Bohemian art student Klaus Voorman, who lived near the club, was heading home when he heard something new to his ears that enticed him to the club. ‘‘As I walked along, I heard this rock music,’’ Voorman remembered. ‘‘All the rest of the places were mostly strip clubs and such. I heard this band playing and thought [they] sounded great. [But] I was scared to go into the place.’’45 His fear was justified. Most of the art students attended the jazz clubs because jazz best defined their outsider bohemian lifestyle, whereas rock was that commercial, roughhouse stuff. Although Voorman experienced discomfort in these shabby surroundings, it would be magically transformed when the Beatles came on. ‘‘They were giving a lot of enjoyment to the audience which was a hard thing to do,’’ he recalled. ‘‘They just wanted to give pleasure, and that’s what they did.’’46 Voorman lived in the attic of his 22-year-old photographer girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr’s home. One night, after he’d become better acquainted with the group, he talked her into going with him. ‘‘I was pretty frightened when he asked me to go there,’’ Kirchherr remembered. ‘‘I didn’t converse with the Beatles the first time, but I immediately thought how wonderful they were and how much I would like to really get to know them.’’47 She would get to know them better by taking a series of dramatic photos that captured both their toughness and their humor. Although it was Klaus who introduced Astrid to Stuart Sutcliffe, who would eventually be her lover, it was the music that initially overpowered her. ‘‘I had never seen performers like them before. I was into jazz and classical music . . .It was like a merry-go-round in my head—seeing the Beatles perform and liking them as people,’’ Kirchherr recalled.48 Like her friends, Kirchherr was an existentialist. ‘‘Existentialism was our way of expressing our difference from the old Germany,’’ Kirchherr explained. ‘‘Our major influence was France. America was too far away, and it couldn’t be England for they were our enemies.’’49 The Beatles, arriving from that enemy country, dramatically altered their perception. Unlike the existentialists, or ‘‘exis’’ as they were called, who offered doubt and uncertainty, the Beatles were a powerful affirmative force. You could later hear it in the boisterous enthusiasm of their music, in the ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah’s’’ of ‘‘She Loves You,’’ in the shake of their heads crying ‘‘ooooh’’ in that song’s bridge, or in the primal screams of release in ‘‘Money (That’s What I Want).’’ Out of the rubble of the blitz in Britain, and the dolorous subculture of Hamburg, the Beatles found cause to say ‘‘yes.’’ The band created such noise in Hamburg that the news quickly traveled back to Liverpool. In January 1961, when they returned home to play the Litherland Town Hall, the enthusiasm was simply uncontrollable. ‘‘This is pure excitement,’’ remembers Bill Harry, who would start the Liverpool music paper Mersey Beat in July of that year. ‘‘It was like an underground movement.

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The kids had something that belonged to them, and the Beatles were gradually emerging as the big group coming out of the little cesspools like the Casbah Club and the Jacaranda Club into the big halls.’’50 But with the excitement also came the danger, their constant companion. One evening, Sutcliffe was giving his guitar to Pete Best to put in the van when he got jumped and badly beaten up by some Teddy Boys. He was so viciously attacked, especially around the head, that he likely procured a fractured skull. It was likely this fierce beating that lead to the brain hemorrhage that killed him 10 months later. On February 21, 1961, they were back at the Cavern Club, where the Quarry Men had debuted four years earlier, backing up the Bluegenes. Introduced by local DJ Bob Wooler, the band defiantly charged onto the stage dressed in black leather. After kicking off with ‘‘Johnny B. Goode,’’ they immediately changed gears with ‘‘Till There Was You’’ from The Music Man. The force of Barrett Gordy’s ‘‘Money’’ followed right after McCartney finished crooning ‘‘Over the Rainbow,’’ as Lennon mocked him. ‘‘The Beatles were a human jukebox,’’ Albert Goldman wrote in The Lives of John Lennon. ‘‘They played song after song without rhyme or reason: rock ’n’ roll, rhythm and blues, country and western tunes, pop songs, radio themes, music hall novelties, and anything else that struck their fancies . . .It was precisely their spontaneous humor and free-associative word-and-song play that made their shows so different from what any other rock band had ever done before—or has done since.’’ 51 With that triumphant homecoming under their belt, it was back to Hamburg, where another step of their dream beckoned. At the start of the sixties, producer Bert Kaempfert, a prominent bandleader and performer, known for the #1 hit ‘‘Wonderland By Night,’’ plus composing ‘‘Wooden Heart’’ for Elvis Presley, was looking for exciting new artists to record for Polydor Records. When the Beatles were playing the Top Ten Club, Bert started hearing about the furor they were generating, so he decided to check them out. At that time, the Beatles were backing singer Tony Sheridan, a self-consciously theatrical performer who copied the style and manner of Elvis. Since there were no German groups performing rock like the band he heard that night, Kaempfert decided to try and sign them for the German market. But just before the sessions, Sutcliffe quit the group to study at the Hamburg Art College. His decision saved the Beatles the trouble of demoting him. The group knew—especially McCartney—that Sutcliffe’s lack of skill was holding them back. But since no one wished to inherit the mantel of bass guitarist, it reluctantly fell to Paul, who would never abandon the post. The recording session was done on June 22, 1961, in a school hall rather than a studio. The group was set up on a stage with the recording equipment resting in a back room. They did one run-through of a traditional standard called ‘‘My Bonnie’’ and finished it in three takes.

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Sung by Sheridan, the rock arrangement of this chestnut was done in a mock Elvis-style. Since the song was a popular request by drunken sailors, the Beatles answered Sheridan’s cries of ‘‘bring back my Bonnie to me,’’ like sodden sea dogs. The single made it to #32 in the German charts, but it wasn’t released in the United Kingdom. They followed up that recording with ‘‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’’ done later in the studio, along with ‘‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’’ ‘‘Nobody’s Child,’’ Jimmy Reed’s ‘‘Take Out Some Insurance,’’ and ‘‘Why Can’t You Love Me Again.’’ For backing up Sheridan, the Beatles also had the opportunity to record some other sides without him. They chose ‘‘Ain’t She Sweet,’’ a standard written in 1927 by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen, and sung by Lennon, who discovered the tune through the 1956 Gene Vincent cover. ‘‘Gene Vincent’s recording of ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ is very mellow and highpitched and I used to do it like that,’’ Lennon recalled. ‘‘[B]ut the Germans said, ‘Harder, harder’—and they all wanted it a bit more like a march—so we ended up doing a harder version.’’52 The number would remain in the Beatles’ repertoire until the next year. They also recorded the instrumental, ‘‘Cry For a Shadow,’’ which was written by Lennon and Harrison as a tribute to Cliff Richard’s band the Shadows. The song came about quite by accident when Harrison was trying to play a Shadows’ song for Rory Storm in Germany and he couldn’t remember it. This unimaginative pastiche would in time also become barely memorable. The Beatles never collected any royalties on the sales of ‘‘My Bonnie,’’ but instead acquired 200 marks in session fees. The recording did little to reveal what would make the Beatles a group that would storm the planet because they were merely providing the backbeat for Sheridan. In the meantime, ‘‘My Bonnie,’’ being issued only in Germany, didn’t have much chance to be heard in the United Kingdom. But when Pete Best sent a copy to the Cavern DJ Bob Wooler, he excitedly played the song one night at the Aintree Institute and Litherland Town Hall. At first listen, local followers of the group immediately clamored to buy it. One of those followers was 18-year-old Raymond Jones. On October 28, 1961, Jones walked into NEMS (North End Music Store) to find the record. Every Saturday, he arrived like clockwork buying records that he had heard the Beatles play, especially those by Carl Perkins and Fats Domino. His sister’s ex-husband told him that the Beatles had made their own record of ‘‘My Bonnie,’’ so Jones went to NEMS to see if they had it. The owner, Brian Epstein, then asked Jones who the Beatles were. Jones told Epstein that they were the most fantastic group, arousing the curiosity of this rather selfeffacing shop-owner. Although Epstein had read about them in Mersey Beat, this was the first time any customer brought them to his attention. He sent his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, on a hunt for the record. Taylor discovered that not only was it not available at their store, the catalog listed it as recorded by Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers. Taylor found out

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that it was a German import and ordered a box of 25. When they arrived, they were gone in a half an hour. After that, Epstein and Taylor prompted Polydor in England to begin pressing copies domestically. While it took some convincing, they eventually began printing them. Epstein had been taking a bigger interest in the growing rock scene in Liverpool since Bill Harry started bringing copies of Mersey Beat to the store. According to Jim Gretty, a salesman and guitar teacher at Hessey’s Music Store in Liverpool, Epstein’s desire to manage a band came out of conversations had with him before Raymond Jones even entered NEMS. According to Gretty, Epstein asked him about some of the better bands in Liverpool. Gretty mentioned a few like the Fourmost, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Rory Storm. He also casually mentioned the Beatles. Epstein asked Gretty where he could see them. Gretty acquired tickets for a fundraiser concert they were performing at on October 15, 1961 at the Albany Cinema at Maghull. It was there that Gretty claimed Epstein saw the Beatles for the first time, while in the company of Member of Parliament, Bessie Braddock, and a number of other invited guests. After the show, Epstein expressed interest to Gretty to manage the Beatles. Epstein meanwhile insisted that he first saw the group at the Cavern Club on November 9, 1961, as does every other reliable biography, because of Raymond Jones’s enthusiasm for the group. ‘‘The first thing that struck me, really, was that they had a very honest and unrehearsed sound,’’ Epstein remembered. ‘‘I thought that if I liked it, and all these teenagers liked it, then there was something worth exploring.’’53 Epstein arrived at the Cavern with Alistair Taylor. ‘‘We looked out of place in white shirts and dark business suits,’’ Taylor recalled. ‘‘The Beatles were playing ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Twist and Shout,’ but we were particularly impressed that they included original songs.’’54 On December 13, 1961, Epstein signed the group. Brian Epstein’s career as the Beatles’ manager was as serendipitous as the Beatles’ own convergence as a group. Epstein, who came from a middle-class family, left school at the age of 16, with the hopes of becoming an actor. But his family had different ideas. They pushed him to join the Epstein furniture business. Brian’s grandfather had started the NEMS stores, which began in the furniture trade, but eventually expanded to include other furnishings and accessories like records. Epstein got bored, however, and continued to dream about acting. He actually did an audition test for RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts), passed, and even joined. However, he couldn’t fully adjust to the life in the dramatic arts because he didn’t discipline himself to stay with it. The family then put him back in the business running the records division of NEMS in Whitechapel, something that interested him more. When Epstein finally had his opportunity to manage the Beatles, he partially transformed them into a fantasy image that he desired for himself. Epstein allowed the individual Beatles an opportunity to create a popular image in roles that Brian had fashioned for them to play. He took the

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irreverent spirit of the Beatles and integrated into that spirit a more cultured, acceptable image. The first major change was to get them out of their leather gear into respectable Pierre Cardin suits. Smoking was banned not to mention their swearing onstage. But what was most curious about this particular transformation of the Beatles was the way it provided an ideal mirror to reflect Epstein’s own fractured life. A closeted homosexual, with an attraction to the sadomasochistic side of gay life, the public image of Epstein was, by contrast, an urbane, cultured man. Besides growing up gay, Epstein came from a prominent Jewish family in a working-class city with deeply ingrained anti-Semitic attitudes. This elegantly dressed young man, with refined tastes, secretly frequented public washrooms in West Derby, a Liverpool suburb, to seek sexual satisfaction. On one occasion, he even got robbed and assaulted. With the Beatles, Epstein sought to consolidate the split in his personality between the roughhouse life he privately desired and the refined life he publicly wanted. It’s no small irony that this lavishly cultured man, who sought his sexual pleasure in the secret confines of public bathrooms, took a fancy to a group that had emerged out of the public toilets of Hamburg—only to be culturally attired in his care. The one area Epstein didn’t change, though, was the one most discussed: their haircuts. It’s often been written that Astrid invented the Beatles’ hairstyle, but the truth is that all the boys in Hamburg had that fashion. Klaus Voorman, Kirchherr’s boyfriend before Stuart, wore that long, cereal-bowl look before the Beatles did. Voorman looked so cool that soon both Sutcliffe (who’d now become Astrid’s lover) and Harrison wanted Astrid to cut their hair in the same manner. Lennon and McCartney decided to hold off until October 1961 when they went to Paris. Astrid and Klaus got their friend Jurgen Volmer to do the deed. The first order of business for Epstein, though, was to get the group out of their contract with Bert Kaempfert, since Polydor had more interest in Tony Sheridan than with the Beatles. At which point, Epstein set up an audition with Decca Records in London. Epstein discussed the idea with Mike Smith, an A&R man from the company, to come hear the group at the Cavern. Smith really liked the band so he secured the audition for January 1, 1962 at 11 a.m. On their way, the group got caught in a snowstorm that made them arrive late. Epstein was livid with their tardiness. When they did show up, they found the studio freezing. They also preferred to do their rock numbers, but instead, Epstein insisted they perform a varied repertoire to reflect their live shows. While this may have worked in the context of a live concert audience, in this impersonal studio setting, the group seemed lost, unsure, and as flat as stale champagne. It didn’t help either that they were restricted to one take only. ‘‘Far from sounding like a pack of fierce rockers in full cry, these Beatles came on like a hotel band in the Catskills,’’ wrote Albert Goldman in The Lives of John Lennon. 55 They performed

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McCartney’s ‘‘Like Dreamers Do,’’ a pert pop number written in 1957, which had its origins in ‘‘Stairway to Paradise.’’ ‘‘Like Dreamers Do’’ was also one of the first numbers they performed at the Cavern. The Applejacks eventually covered it and it became a Top 20 song in July 1964. ‘‘The Sheik of Araby,’’ sung by Harrison, was a 1922 standard by Ted Snyder, who was Irving Berlin’s New York writing partner. But Harrison based his own rather strained arrangement on the music hall version done by his friend Joe Brown, who often played with the Beatles on their first British tours. Brown had been popular on variety shows like Six-Five Special and Oh Boy! which was heavily influenced by the ukulele songs of George Formby in the thirties and forties. (Brown would perform a Formby standard at the tribute concert to Harrison a year after his death at Royal Albert Hall in 2002 to bring their friendship full circle.) The Beatles did a full range of selective material, the Teddy Bears’ ‘‘To Know Her Is to Love Her,’’ Bobby Vee’s ‘‘Take Good Care of My Baby,’’ Chuck Berry’s ‘‘Memphis, Tennessee,’’ Carl Perkins’ ‘‘Sure to Fall (In Love with You),’’ the Coasters’ ‘‘Three Cool Cats’’ and ‘‘Searchin’,’’ Dinah Washington’s ‘‘September in the Rain,’’ and Buddy Holly’s ‘‘Crying, Waiting, Hoping.’’ They also included more original songs like Lennon’s ‘‘Hello Little Girl.’’ Written by John in 1957, it was the first original tune to be done by the Quarry Men. ‘‘Hello Little Girl’’ was based loosely on the Cole Porter song ‘‘It’s De-Lovely,’’ which his mother taught him from a recording of the stage musical Red, Hot and Blue by Carol Gibbons and the Savoy Hotel Orchestra in 1938. (Bob Hope had sung the original version.) Lennon made attempts to give the tune the vigor of Buddy Holly’s ‘‘Maybe Baby,’’ but it lacked the free-spirited bounce of Holly’s best work. While their Decca sessions didn’t differ in concept from their remarkable debut album Please Please Me, the versatility was constrained here, as if the Beatles couldn’t imagine an audience beyond those chilly studio walls. Listening to these tapes, you can’t hear their goals, their personality, or even the force of their sound. That same day, Mike Smith was auditioning the London-based Brian Poole and the Tremoloes, and Smith decided to sign them because their audition was simply better. Since the Beatles lived in Liverpool, he also figured it would cost the company too much money to even have them commute. His own manager Dick Rowe agreed. In judging the sound of that audition, Rowe was correct in assuming that there was nothing distinctly exciting about the Beatles. But he was wrong in assuming, as he told Brian Epstein, that guitar bands were on their way out. As he was to discover, it was quite the contrary. They were on their way in. The rejection by Decca may have been deflating, but it didn’t deter the Beatles from storming through Britain playing clubs and appearing on BBC radio pop shows like Teenager’s Turn. By the spring, they were heading back to Hamburg for a residency at the newly opened Star Club. When they

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arrived on April 11, Astrid met them at the airport to give them the news that Stuart had died of a brain hemorrhage a day earlier. The news was shattering—especially to John Lennon. Besides being one of his closest friends, Sutcliffe was the early spirit of the Beatles. His bohemian panache and openness was what the Beatles aspired to be for themselves. But Stuart wasn’t the man to help Lennon carry the Beatles, he passed that role onto Paul McCartney, just as nimbly as he handed him his bass guitar. ‘‘When you’re so young, like we all were then, death is so far away that you never think about it,’’ Astrid recalled. ‘‘That is why it was like a dream for all of us.’’56 Yet Sutcliffe was a reminder that death was always an abiding part of the dream of the Beatles, just as the bold energy of life was a huge part of their sound. In the next few years, out of life and death in Hamburg, the Beatles would begin to make good on the promise that their music held out.

CHAPTER 2

Like Dreamers Do Extraordinary how potent cheap music is. Noel Coward, Private Lives Their namesake was bugs. And like bugs, they came from the subterranean underworld of cellars and seedy bars; toilets and beer vomit; sweat and mould. Yet they rose from the squalor and infiltrated the mainstream world disguised in suits and matching haircuts. Their goal was to make history, their own history, built on a shared wavelength, and to bond with an audience in which they promised to bring pleasure. In spite of all the danger, there’s a place. We’ll take you there. The basis of Nowhere Land was first created in the persona of the Beatles themselves, their utopian ideals which were based on the fundamental idea of unity in diversity. ‘‘[In the place of harmony] was a distinction so contrary, a conflict so profound, that the friction it produced built up an armor,’’ Bob Spitz wrote in his Beatles’ biography.1 Besides Lennon and McCartney meshing their own personalities, there had to be a group identity for the band to accomplish what it did. ‘‘As a kind of safety barrier we had a lot of ‘in’ jokes, little signs, references to music, we had a common bond in that and it was very difficult for any ‘outsider’ to penetrate,’’ McCartney explained. 2 As with any bug colony, they stuck together. Unlike a bug colony, however, they didn’t seek isolation. At least, not in the beginning. They sought an audience, but not just a crowd to blindly worship them, or one to eagerly admire their musical versatility. When they saw Elvis shake up a generation, they wanted to keep them shaking—but how? Elvis’s audience in 1962 definitely wasn’t shaking anymore. When the King returned from his stint in the army, all that was left was his tired

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Hollywood movies, bum flicks that rendered him so innocuous that all he could do was go Blue Hawaii and have Fun in Acapulco. ‘‘Elvis had sent out cultural shock waves in the fifties, but he didn’t write his own songs and had no understanding of the social dimensions of his performance,’’ critic Steve Turner remarked.3 To a degree, Elvis followed familiar road maps provided by earlier idols like Frank Sinatra, or maybe Rudolph Valentino. ‘‘The old stars were content to accept their fates, leading lives of mysterious seclusion that left their images spotless, blank screens inviting the projections of the mass mind,’’ wrote culture critic Albert Goldman. ‘‘The modern star, younger, less disciplined, more self-involved, has often rebelled against the tyranny of his image, behaving in ways that contradict his perceived identity.’’4 By 1962, the Beatles rejected a path that lead to conventional acclaim. In doing so, they also began to see themselves in their own audience. If you listen to those early songs, you’ll hear them reaching out to us. The Beatles set out, with a strange, undeniable force, to take us to a higher plane. They chose to leave behind the turbulent clubs of Hamburg, and the dank basement of the Cavern in Liverpool, to seek a communion with the world. With all the dreamers in this world, they would imagine a better one. ‘‘If they became the greatest thing in rock ’n’ roll it was because they chose to live in filth and perform in fear, and then make music that was undeniable because it had been put daily to that test,’’ Devin McKinney explained in Magic Circles.5 To pass those tests, they developed a roster that was discriminating, a repertoire that covered a huge spectrum of music, from Broadway to balladry, ragtime to R&B, Tin Pan Alley to classic rock. In his book, Tell Me Why, Tim Riley describes quite succinctly the process by which the Beatles found their own voice in the works of others: The more they polished their imitations of songs, the closer they came to an individual sound. The more John sang Richie Barrett’s ‘‘Some Other Guy,’’ the more he invested his own jealous longing into it; the more Paul sang Little Richard’s ‘‘Lucille,’’ the more he flavored it with his giddy brand of camp. George couldn’t help sounding like George even when he mimicked Eddie Fontaine’s ‘‘Nothin’ Shakin’ (But the Leaves on the Trees).’’ What they learned from the records they copied was not merely how to sound like someone else but how to play and sing, how to put a song forward. ‘‘Don’t copy the swimming teacher, learn how to swim!’’ is how John later put it.6 By learning to swim, they invited us to join them in the water. The spirit of community they created in the process of becoming who they were in their artistic collaboration started us dreaming of such an artificial paradise. Once they achieved their goal, the Beatles proved themselves different from the pop stars of the past.

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Before that history would be made, though, the Beatles sought to rebound from the disaster at Decca Records. While they were back in Hamburg playing the Star Club in May 1962, Brian Epstein told them that he had just arranged another audition, this time with EMI Records in June. What he didn’t tell them was that it was a tryout with no guarantees for a contract. EMI studios weren’t originally conceived for recording music. In 1831, it was a nine-bedroom residence with servant’s quarters, including a wine cellar and five different rooms for parties and receptions. The dwelling wasn’t converted into a recording studio until 1928. For McCartney, it seemed way too small when he entered. Pete Best described it as stepping into another world. On that first session, which took place on June 6, 1962, the Beatles unveiled their all-purpose repertoire, launching feverishly into ‘‘Besame Mucho,’’ a popular number with their German crowds. Consuelo Velasquez and lyricist Sunny Skylar wrote this 1940s’ Latin rumba tune and it first appeared in the film Follow the Boys (1944), an all-star revue featuring George Raft. In the film, Raft organizes USO shows that feature Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Dinah Shore, and Jeanette MacDonald, who sings ‘‘Beyond the Blue Horizon.’’ ‘‘Besame Mucho’’ would also become a hit for the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. A song with a long shelf life, ‘‘Besame Mucho’’ would be resurrected years later in Alfonso Cuaron’s intoxicating update of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1998), where the bitterly lovesick Miss Dinsmore (Anne Bancroft) repeatedly plays the song on her record player. She does this to endlessly remind herself of the man who abandoned her on her wedding day. The Beatles often introduced it in Hamburg as a goof, to lift the mood of the band in the early morning shows. While their version at EMI had more verve than the group showed earlier in the year at Decca, the song was still no more than an impersonal curiosity. They had yet to master in the studio the identity they found for themselves in front of a live audience. They introduced an original composition, ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ which had a bit of the flavor of the Everly Brothers, but Pete Best’s erratic drum fills in the middle section seemed to throw the group off. Two other Lennon and McCartney tracks, ‘‘Ask Me Why’’ and ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ were introduced, but seemed to flit by without raising an eyebrow. One Parlophone producer, Ron Richards, thought they did a competent session, but none of the songs had truly grabbed him. Engineer Norman Smith was even less impressed. The session producer, George Martin, concurred that although he liked their voices, he found their own material pretty forgettable. When the production collective met with the group after the recording, they decided to be brutally honest. Afterward, Martin asked in fairness if there was anything they didn’t like. Harrison quickly quipped, ‘‘I don’t like your tie for starters.’’ When Martin realized that Harrison was cracking a joke, which was the Beatles’ particular manner of confronting adversity, it broke the ice. It was the same posture they would use in press conferences during

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the madness of Beatlemania. Richards, Smith, and Martin were now convinced that somewhere in that joke also lay something unique. They decided to sign them on the basis of their irreverent personality—just the attitude that inspired Martin to become a producer in the first place. George Martin was a very tall, upstanding, gentlemanly taskmaster. Rather than carrying the demeanor of a record producer, he gave the impression of having trained dutifully to be a private school principal. But Martin absolutely adored music. A huge fan of Ravel and Rachmaninoff, he studied oboe and piano at London’s Guildhall School of Music. Until the Beatles, though, the closest he ever came to pop music was spinning discs by Cole Porter and Johnny Dankworth. Martin was hired by EMI in 1950 to work with the German imprint label Parlophone. This label had grown so negligible to EMI that they stuck its most insignificant acts on it, including light classical music and some of Britain’s most obscure artists. When EMI set up Capitol Records in the United States in 1956, the most popular acts got nowhere near Parlophone. Capitol even had the legal right of refusal from their own parent company, a decision that would later have a hampering impact on the Beatles’ getting their early singles released in America. But rather than bail out of the job due to hopelessness, Martin found that he actually enjoyed operating in the shadows, where he was unfettered by executives who didn’t really care what he did. ‘‘When I started in the music business way back in 1950, there was no such thing as a record producer,’’ Martin recalled. ‘‘All that person did was to troubleshoot, make sure the engineer did a good job, and make sure the artist was happy. So gradually the producer evolved into being something a little bit more creative. He had to become a force in his own right and become a partner with the musicians.’’7 What Martin opted for, out of practical necessity and inquisitiveness, was producing comedy records. Who would have guessed that this formal gentleman even had a sense of humor? Not only did he enjoy producing comedy, those records were quite popular in England, plus very cheap to make. In the mid-fifties, his first hit comedy album was At the Drop of a Hat, featuring Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, which stayed on the British charts for close to 25 years. More popular, of course, was the comedy group Beyond the Fringe, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller, whose sharply absurd and irreverent humor scored big on university campuses. Within a few years, he’d be working with the equally outrageous Goon Show featuring Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan. After the war, Liverpool had quickly become a hotbed of anarchic comedy from the likes of the quick-witted Tommy Handley. His forties radio show It’s That Man Again sent up British social mores with the kind of cynical satire then more common in America. When Handley died in 1949, the Goons would continue that tradition, beginning in 1951, with their legendary BBC radio show.

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Although Martin’s comedy albums started making money for EMI, he still had his heart set on recording music. By the time Brian Epstein brought the Beatles to Martin’s attention, it was their love of Martin’s taste in comedy that helped melt the ice. Ultimately it would become an ideal partnership. But all jokes aside, one aspect of the group still didn’t impress Martin: their drummer. Pete Best may have had some of the charisma of Stuart Sutcliffe, but he had none of Sutcliffe’s flair and imagination. Mostly, he was only marginally more talented on his instrument than Sutcliffe. Best could certainly keep a steady beat, but he was a recessive musician, playing what he had to play. One sensed, especially listening to the audition tape of ‘‘Love Me Do’’ (heard on Anthology 1), that Best was moving to the beat, as it were, of his own drummer. He could seldom respond to the needs of the rhythm section. His randomness created a breach in the tight circle the Beatles were becoming. However, Best was hugely popular with fans because of his dark good looks, but if the Beatles were going to fulfill their ambitions to be the greatest pop band, he would have to go. On August 16, 1962, Best was fired and replaced by Ringo Starr. Familiar and friendly with Ringo from their gigs in Hamburg, they knew that he could provide the steady backbeat needed to drive home the power and excitement of their songs. Starr played the drums with great sensitivity to the individual players in the group. ‘‘He keeps flawless time—never giving in to the tendency to rush or slow down—an essential element of driving rock ’n’ roll,’’ Tim Riley wrote about Ringo in Tell Me Why. ‘‘He doesn’t dominate his set the way The Who’s Keith Moon did, nor does his relatively earthly musicality compete with that of a jazzer-turned rocker like Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones.’’8 Quite the contrary, Ringo became a perfect fit for the Beatles because he’s adaptable without sacrificing his unmistakable personality in the process. ‘‘I only have one rule and that is to play with the singer,’’ Ringo explained. ‘‘If the singer’s singing, you don’t really have to do anything, just hold it together.’’9 Besides holding it all together, you could always identify Ringo on the drums, without needing a solo to do so. A cursory listen to ‘‘Rain,’’ the explosive opening roll of ‘‘She Loves You,’’ the definitive bass/snare combination that begins ‘‘What You’re Doing,’’ or the lyrical responses to Lennon’s fretful singing in ‘‘A Day in the Life’’ reveals a drummer whose personality is continually stamped on every composition. Not surprisingly, when he did do drum solos, as on ‘‘Birthday’’ or ‘‘The End,’’ he sounded least like himself, and therefore less interesting. ‘‘Ringo was the guy who made you think about drumming,’’ Genesis percussionist Phil Collins explained. ‘‘Before him it was Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, and [British] drummers like Tony Meehan and Brian Bennett who were flashier. . .I never thought of Ringo as good or bad, simply right for the songs.’’10 Before he could hold a band together, though, Ringo had to pull together his own life. Ironically, it was his ill health that fated him to be a

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percussionist. While in the hospital in 1954, because of a horrible bout of peritonitis, Ringo learned to play the instrument. ‘‘To keep us entertained, [the hospital staff] gave us some schooling,’’ Ringo recalled. ‘‘A teacher would come in with a huge easel, with symbols for instruments shown on a big piece of board. She gave us percussion instruments: triangles, tambourines and drums. She would point at the yellow and the triangle would sound, and she would point at the red and the drum would sound. I’d only play if they gave me a drum.’’11 While his real name is Richard Starkey, he came by the name ‘‘Ringo’’ while in Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Always one to wear many rings, it became an apt stage name. George Martin had told Brian Epstein that he had a session drummer who could sit in until the group found a replacement for Best, but the Beatles were already considering replacing him with Ringo. George Harrison had in fact been pushing to get Ringo into the group for quite some time. At the time the Beatles approached him, Ringo was playing a series of gigs with the Hurricanes, plus entertaining offers from King Size Taylor and the Dominoes. Gerry and the Pacemakers were even considering getting Ringo as their bass player (even though he didn’t play the instrument). But once he finished his dates with the Hurricanes, Ringo shaved off his beatnik beard, cut his hair to match the Beatles’ style, and he immediately joined the band. While history now tells us that the right decision had been made, it didn’t make it any easier on Pete Best. Here was the guy who had sweated it out in Hamburg, only to get booted out as they were on the cusp of success. Some, like Mona Best, thought her son’s firing had more to do with Pete’s popularity with the girls. But McCartney begged to differ. ‘‘Pete Best was good, but a bit limited,’’ he explained. ‘‘When Ringo joins us we get a bit more kick, a few more imaginative breaks, and the band settles.’’12 After Epstein broke the news to Best, the Beatles first gig at the Cavern with Ringo turned into a huge donnybrook as their fans cried out for Pete. When Harrison tried to quell the noisy mob, all he got was a black eye from an angry Best fan who popped him. On September 4, 1962, the Beatles went back into the studio to record their first single. George Martin suggested that they record a Mitch Murray song he acquired from his good friend, publisher Dick James, called ‘‘How Do You Do It?’’ In the beginning, Martin didn’t think the group’s original material was strong enough, whereas this light pop confection he viewed as a definite #1. But the song didn’t sit too well with the group because it was too conventionally ‘‘popish.’’ One listen tells you that ‘‘How Do You Do It?’’ is a bland concession to chart success, rather than a song that could define new standards for chart success. ‘‘It didn’t give them the freedom to express themselves the way they wanted to,’’ Martin explained. ‘‘They really wanted to write their own songs, not from a greed point of view, but because they felt it depicted their musical direction [better].’’13 The Beatles wanted to record music that best defined their persona. ‘‘Well, it may be #1 but we

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just don’t want this kind of song, we don’t want to go out with that kind of reputation,’’ McCartney remembered telling Martin. ‘‘It’s a different thing we’re going for, it’s something new.’’14 The Beatles recorded ‘‘How Do You Do It?’’ anyway—out of duty. On the song, though, they sound like schoolboys, serving a detention and writing obligatory notes on the blackboard explaining why they should behave more often. In their hands, the tune became lifeless, a dull exercise in technique. ‘‘How Do You Do It?’’ is the kind of gentle formula pop the Beatles were attempting to transform. ‘‘[It] was more George Formby than anything else,’’ McCartney told Barry Miles. ‘‘We knew that the peer pressure back in Liverpool would not allow us to do ‘How Do You Do It?’ We knew we couldn’t hold our heads up with that sort of rock-a-pop-aballad. We would be spurned and cast away into the wilderness.’’15 As a result, their performance was done with what critic Ian MacDonald rightly pointed out as ‘‘obliging efficiency [and] affable indifference.’’16 ‘‘How Do You Do It?’’ is so tepid that a mediocre band could take comfort in it, allow the song to define them, rather than the other way around. It is perhaps for this reason that the pleasant, amiable, but ultimately innocuous Gerry and the Pacemakers took the song to the top of the charts in April 1963. What they wanted to put out instead was ‘‘Love Me Do.’’ Written by Paul in 1958, when he was 16, it was the proud product of an act of truancy. McCartney composed it while skipping school at the Liverpool Institute. The band first performed it during the Beatles’ third trip to Hamburg in April 1962, but had never recorded it, except in a home rehearsal taping. It was clear why ‘‘Love Me Do’’ was the better song. The track has a bluesy swing that anchors its sweet harmonies. ‘‘‘Love Me Do’ was quite a cunning record,’’ remarked Ian MacDonald. ‘‘[There was] a candour [that] perfectly complemented the group’s forthright image, setting them apart from everything else on offer.’’17 Lennon usually took the vocal until Martin suggested a harmonica opening. Although McCartney possessed a harmonica, John was the better player. ‘‘John was quite a good harmonica player, which showed itself in ‘Love Me Do,’ though not really until then,’’ McCartney told Barry Miles. ‘‘John expected to be in jail one day and he’d be the guy who played the harmonica.’’18 Since childhood, Lennon had been interested in the instrument. One time, a student boarder in his home had one, and he promised to buy Lennon a mouth organ—if John could learn to play a tune in one day. To top the bet, Lennon learned two songs and the kid kept his promise. By early adolescence, Lennon was playing popular tracks such as Vaughn Monroe’s ‘‘Cool Water’’ (1948) and Johnny Ray’s ‘‘Walking My Baby Home’’ (1952). But the sound Lennon captured here was directly inspired by the American singer Bruce Channel’s 1962 hit, ‘‘Hey Baby,’’ which had a sweet, blues harmonica solo by Delbert McClinton. ‘‘Hey Baby’’ was a catchy mixture of blues shuffle and country swing, but the key to the song’s appeal, for Lennon, was the slightly mournful tone that

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Channel rises above. In asking a girl he likes to go out, Channel’s vocal tells you that he fears the answer, and the news ain’t good. The hanging wail of McClinton’s harmonica expresses both the depths of his desire and the extent of his dread. Lennon had a chance to meet McClinton in June of that year, three months before they recorded ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ when the Beatles shared a bill at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton with Bruce Channel. ‘‘He wanted me to show him whatever I could,’’ McClinton remembered. ‘‘He wanted to know how to play. Before our time together was over he had his own harmonica ready in his pocket.’’19 But if John was to play the mouth organ, it meant that Paul had to take over the line, ‘‘so please, love me do.’’ ‘‘I can still hear the nervousness in my voice!’’ McCartney recalls today. ‘‘At least there was some credibility in the fact that it was a bluesy song rather than ‘How Do You Do It?’ So that was it, we were started and our credibility as songwriters had started then. So we realized, ‘Wow, we could get good at this.’’’20 But George Martin was still having reservations about having ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ as their first single. It’s possible Martin may have been lukewarm toward the song because of the sloppy recording they got during the band’s audition with Pete Best. Unfortunately, when they tried it again with Ringo, right after recording ‘‘How Do You Do It?’’ it wasn’t much better. Perhaps because of nerves, or simply the result of a bad day, Starr just couldn’t nail it. He was erratic and rushing the choruses in the song. Martin was patient, though, deciding that they should work on it, come back in a week, and try again. Yet Martin feared that he may be dealing with another Pete Best scenario, since he didn’t know Ringo as well as the rest of the Beatles. To cover himself, Martin invited Andy White, a session drummer, to sit in when the band came to rerecord it. Unfortunately, Ringo wasn’t informed and he showed up to the session to find another drummer in his place—and only a little tambourine for him to tap. This caused some friction between the amiable percussionist and his new producer. ‘‘I was devastated that George Martin had his doubts about me,’’ Ringo recalled as if it were yesterday.‘‘I came down ready to roll and heard, ‘We’ve got a professional drummer.’ He has apologized several times since, has old George, but it was devastating—I hated the bugger for years.’’21 In time, Martin would come to assess Ringo’s definitive contribution to the group quite differently. On this day, they would record the song twice. The single featured Andy White on drums, but the version on the Please Please Me album would feature Ringo. In 1998, Ringo returned to the song by covering it on his Vertical Man album. ‘‘I’ve got the hang of it now,’’ Ringo said wryly to Patrick Humphries in Mojo. ‘‘We worked out the key and did it quickly.’’22 Originally they rejected the idea of duplicating John Lennon’s harmonica line, because Ringo didn’t want to copy—or be diminished—by the original. But after trying it without the harp break, he felt ridiculous avoiding it and the harmonica was back.

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As the B-side, another McCartney composition, ‘‘P.S. I Love You,’’ was chosen. Written while in Hamburg in 1961, ‘‘P.S. I Love You’’ took its title from the 1934 Gordon Jenkins and Johnny Mercer song that the Hilltoppers rode to the top of the charts in 1953. The Beatles’ song is a slight, yet captivating serenade that became a standard in their early stage shows. The number has a lilting Latin arrangement, with Ringo providing a cha-cha rhythm on the maracas. Lennon perceptively thought that ‘‘P.S. I Love You’’ was Paul’s attempt to write a song like the Shirelles’ ‘‘Soldier Boy.’’ It certainly shares with the Shirelles’ song an acute understanding of anguish typical of the Beatles, where the singer professes a dedicated devotion while suffering heartache. ‘‘P.S. I Love You’’ is perhaps a thematic warm-up for ‘‘All My Loving.’’ Music critic Walter Everett, however, did recognize something more sophisticated at work. According to Everett, the contrasting phrase lengths in ‘‘P.S. I Love You’’ yielded an ‘‘asymmetrical structure’’ that allowed McCartney both an introspective unfolding of his desires and an ambiguous quest for words that took him deeper into his thoughts and emotions. ‘‘I believe this asymmetrical nature of the Beatles’ rhythmic/harmonic expression, a hallmark of their style and one not typical of other pop hits, helped them forge a more direct bond with their listeners,’’ Everett explained.23 Ian MacDonald heard the temperamental differences between Lennon and McCartney being expressed. In the middle-eight, where Lennon and McCartney establish a call and response, McCartney’s sense of optimism is apparent in the rise and fall of his bass lines. Lennon, however, relies more on his ‘‘lazy irony’’ with an ‘‘inclination towards the minimal intervals of everyday speech.’’ 24 MacDonald indicates that although the melody covers more than one octave, Lennon only harmonizes on one note. ‘‘P.S. I Love You,’’ which like ‘‘Love Me Do’’ featured Andy White on drums, would be released on October 5, 1962. It entered the charts in Britain on October 24 at #27 before almost vanishing immediately. In the United States, it would be issued as a single in June 1964 on the independent Tollie label. (EMI’s American affiliate, Capitol Records, had rejected it.) Although ‘‘P.S. I Love You’’ became an early favorite of many female fans, McCartney’s girlfriend at the time, Dorothy ‘Dot’ Rhone, thought it was written for her. McCartney firmly denied it. ‘‘It’s just an idea for a song really, a theme song based on a letter, like the ‘Paperback Writer’ idea,’’ McCartney explained to Barry Miles. ‘‘The letter is a popular theme and it’s just my attempt at one of those. It’s not based in reality.’’25 The promise the Beatles offered in their music might not have been based in reality, but the emotional force of that promise was. ‘Dot’ Rhone may have heard ‘‘P.S. I Love You’’ as a song that spoke specifically to her, but within a few years, she wouldn’t be the only one making such claims of the Beatles’ music. When Joe Strummer announced the arrival of the Clash in 1977, gleefully joining the Punk Revolution that was launched by the Sex Pistols, he did it in

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a song called, naturally enough, ‘‘1977.’’ The purpose of punk was to clean house of the rock dinosaurs that no longer stood for the ideals they once claimed. For the British bands that came out of the rubble of the burst dreams of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other pretenders to the throne, they were worthy of a safety pin through the cheek. Punk proudly stood for nothing, no future, just the bare necessity of pedal-to-the-metal rock. But the Clash refused a claim toward rock nihilism in favor of a new political direction, a tabloid Marxism, to address how England’s dreaming had been transformed into expedient cynicism. To do that, ‘‘1977’’ set out to lay waste to the pioneers of the past who made the mistake of dreaming in the first place. ‘‘No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,’’ Strummer announces off the top like a Depression-era newsboy bellowing the headlines of the papers he needs to sell. It’s a bald claim, one he’d reiterate a few years later in the authoritative ‘‘London Calling,’’ when he’d bring forth an apocalypse while telling us that ‘‘phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust.’’ In 1977, one of those dinosaurs, Elvis Presley, had just died. His death likely prompted ‘‘1977,’’ as it would inspire Neil Young to write ‘‘Hey, Hey, My My (Into the Black)’’ two years later (a song that explicitly linked the story of Elvis’s demise with the rise of the Sex Pistols). The King was dead, but what about the Rolling Stones? That year, after a few desultory records, they came out with a live double-album, Love You Live, that was pretty much dead on arrival. The only pulse found on it was heard on one portion of the record, where they played a surprise show at Toronto’s El Mocambo tavern on Spadina Avenue, and briefly made a groupie out of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s wife, Margaret. Drawing on the R&B and blues covers of their past, they demonstrated with fiery assurance that they were hardly corpses about to be consigned to the graveyard. Within a year, they would even join the punk brigade with Some Girls, one of their sauciest and boldest records in years. As for the Beatles, well, they’d been given up for dead almost a decade by then. Aside from the occasional bleat for a reunion concert, the stores had just stocked a repackaged collection of love ballads called—simply—Love Songs, plus a collection of live sets from the era of Beatlemania that made up The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl. In short, the group was a perfect fossil for the cross hairs of punk’s firearm until a lost tape turned up out of nowhere to refute Joe Strummer’s claim. A few months after the release of ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ in mid-December, the Beatles returned to Hamburg to open a 14-night residency at the Star Club. Between the ‘‘Love Me Do’’ session and the German date, the Beatles had been touring relentlessly throughout England and making glowing appearances on TV shows like Discs A Go Go and the children’s program, Tuesday Rendezvous. As their popularity started to flourish, their arrival in Hamburg was no longer celebrated as young innocents trying to find their chops, but instead a band ready to chop down anything in their path. Their first show

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kicked off on December 18, 1962, with a flurry of excitement. By the time the week was out, John Lennon was appearing on stage with a toilet seat draped around his head to demonstrate his displeasure with the management. Besides being a piece of dada stagecraft that Johnny Rotten could be proud of, the use of the toilet seat was a clever touch given the Beatles’ lavatory beginnings in their early days in Hamburg. It was as if Lennon were telling the crowd: Once you led the Beatles to the toilet, but now we’re bringing the toilet to you. They were taking on the world. On New Year’s Eve, they agreed to record the event, employing Ted ‘‘King Size’’ Taylor, who was the lead singer with a band that sometimes opened for the Beatles at the Cavern in Liverpool. For years, the tape had been considered lost, then forgotten, until it was found buried in debris in a Liverpool office in 1972. The German label Bellaphon got their hands on the tape and released the record as The Beatles Live! At the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, 1962.26 On record, the sound the Beatles made that night at the Star Club reduced Joe Strummer’s brazen proclamation in ‘‘1977’’ to hyperbole. Besides ripping through some new songs from the pumping ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There’’ to the soulful ‘‘Ask Me Why,’’ the Beatles took the crowd through the entire canon of Western pop music. They would jump, from genre to genre, without a care for personal taste, or prejudice. Out of a ribald take of Chuck Berry’s ‘‘Little Queenie,’’ Marlene Dietrich’s torch number ‘‘Falling in Love Again,’’ from The Blue Angel (1929), gets introduced. Here’s a song where film critic Pauline Kael once described Dietrich’s ‘‘smouldering voice’’ as one filled with ‘‘sadistic indifference suggest[ing] sex without romance, love, or sentiment.’’27 That indifference was quietly answered by McCartney’s earnest romantic interpretation. The Beatles changed gears all evening: ‘‘Red Sails in the Sunset’’ would shake hands with Carl Perkins’ ‘‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby’’; Gene Vincent’s ‘‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’’ would be on hand to cross paths with Ray Charles on ‘‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So.’’ Unlike the future punk bands that would shun romanticism, declaring it ostensibly fake, the Beatles, with their own punk fury, injected romanticism or defeat into any type of song they wished to put in their ammunition dump. ‘‘For the Beatles a song had to be reduced to a vehicle for expression with all emotional meaning—the song’s power to connect in some deep way with whoever heard it—implied by the performance,’’ Devin McKinney wrote. ‘‘Either it would rock, or it would do nothing at all.’’28 On this evening, from ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ to ‘‘Besame Mucho,’’ they would risk total failure to achieve greatness by taking on any song from the pop catalog—even placing their own in that roster, daring the audience to deny that their songs deserved a place there. ‘‘The reason [our later] records were so musically diverse was that we all had very diverse tastes,’’ McCartney explained. ‘‘We’d served our apprenticeship in Hamburg where businessmen would come to the club and say, ‘Can you play a mambo? Can you do a rhumba?’ And we just couldn’t just keep

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saying no . . .we had to learn these different styles.’’ 29 They turned those diverse styles into their own style. The Beatles effortlessly fused the past to the present, while simultaneously looking ahead into the future. If they hit a wall, they were determined to turn it into a bridge to cross. Before the Beatles headed off to Hamburg, they went back into the studio to record a follow-up to ‘‘Love Me Do.’’ While their debut wasn’t anything groundbreaking, George Martin heard the stirrings of something new and exciting. Lennon had a song he was working on called ‘‘Please Please Me.’’ In the great tradition of rock songs about sex that cleverly mask their intent, ‘‘Please Please Me’’ is probably the best #1 song ever written about oral sex. Given the sly innuendo of Fats Domino’s ‘‘Blueberry Hill’’ or Smiley Lewis’s ‘‘One Night of Sin,’’ it’s likely that Lennon was being equally crafty. McCartney wasn’t so sure. ‘‘If [critics] had wanted to they could have found plenty of double meanings in our early work,’’ he remarked. ‘‘Everything has a double meaning if you look for it long enough.’’30 However you want to read the song, its cascading harmonies are intoxicating. While Lennon is craving satisfaction from his lover, in the grain of his voice, we can also hear that he can imagine what it will feel like. Lennon wrote the song at his Aunt Mimi’s house on Menlove Avenue. But the origins of the tune are light years from what it would become. The arrangement was originally shaped in the melodramatic style of Roy Orbison’s 1960 singles ‘‘Only the Lonely,’’ ‘‘Blue Angel,’’ and ‘‘I’m Hurtin’.’’ (Lennon also borrowed a line from Buddy Holly’s ‘‘Raining in My Heart’’ for the chorus.) But the track’s influence actually goes back to the opening line in Bing Crosby’s 1932 song ‘‘Please’’—a tune his mother Julia used to sing to him. ‘‘I was always intrigued by the words of [sings] ‘Please, lend your little ears to my pleas’. . .I was always intrigued by the double use of the word ‘please’. So it was a combination of Bing Crosby and Roy Orbison,’’ Lennon recalled.31 However, Lennon didn’t have the near-operatic range of Orbison’s falsetto. Orbison brought a lonely, tormented spirit to the communal aspect of rock. But Lennon had a way of getting to the same depths of romantic desperation. ‘‘If you imagine it much slower, which is how John wrote it, it’s got everything, the big high notes, all the hallmarks of an Orbison song,’’ McCartney told Barry Miles.32 The Beatles tried to record Lennon’s original idea during the session for ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ but Martin wasn’t impressed with it. He suggested speeding up the tempo to alter the melodramic pull of the song and turn it instead into a call and response between Lennon and McCartney and Harrison. ‘‘[S] uddenly there was that fast Beatles spirit,’’ McCartney recalled. ‘‘I did the trick of remaining on the top note while the melody cascaded down from it. A cadence.’’33 Rather than simply mimicking the forsaken heart of Roy Orbison, the song now resembled a Buddy Holly rave-up as interpreted by the Everly Brothers. In fact, it owes something to the Everly’s 1960

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hit ‘‘Cathy’s Clown,’’ a song about a man mournfully refusing the love of a woman who has betrayed him. ‘‘John and Paul’s verse duet gains on the Everly formula: Paul stays on the initial high note as John pulls away beneath him. . .putting the Everlys’ ‘Cathy’s Clown’ lilt to a brighter beat,’’ critic Tim Riley wrote in Tell Me Why.34 Lennon makes no attempt to sound charming, or coy, in his demands for equal attention from his lover. He wants to stir the pot and get you reacting to the emotions he stirs. Yet the demand is so irresistible that the lover would be a fool to deny him. As in ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ the secret heart of Lennon’s love call is in the sweet sound of his harmonica opening each verse. George Martin had come up with the idea so that Lennon’s mouth organ could mask Harrison’s clumsy guitar melody. After the recording, Martin exclaimed, ‘‘Congratulations gentlemen, you’ve just made your first #1!’’ The record rightly tore up the charts in the United Kingdom the week of January 11, 1963, and landed the Beatles with publisher Dick James to form their own copyright company called Northern Songs. While they were touring with the 16-year-old sensation Helen Shapiro, ‘‘Please Please Me’’ had hit #1. They were immediately plucked from the road to record their first album. Perhaps as part of a joke, or maybe a stab at retribution, engineer Norman Smith sent an early promo copy of the song in a plain wrapper to Dick Rowe at Decca Records, the man who had turned down the Beatles. ‘‘We hoped he would think it was from a struggling artist looking for a break, and that maybe he would turn them down a second time!’’ Smith recalled. ‘‘I honestly can’t remember what, if anything, he replied.’’35 History does recall: Dick Rowe didn’t fall for it. The tune was offered with more sincere intent to EMI’s American affiliate Capitol Records, but they refused it, believing the Beatles to be nothing more than a passing fad. Besides, as Ian MacDonald claimed, the American executives found the production ‘‘too raw and raucous for a white group.’’36 Within a few months of ‘‘Please Please Me’’ charting in Britain, Roy Orbison would join them on a three-week tour of the United Kingdom. As to his own impression of the group? ‘‘The Beatles could well be tops in America,’’ Orbison said rather prophetically to the New Musical Express. ‘‘These boys have enough originality to storm our charts with the same effect as they’ve done here. . .They have something that is entirely new even to us Americans. . .I am sure this will be hailed as the new British sound in America.’’37 Within a couple of years, of course, they were. Orbison would never leave the Beatles’ orbit. He would play with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne as part of the genially selfdeprecating ensemble, the Traveling Wilburys in 1988, just before his sudden death of a heart attack. In tribute to Orbison, Lennon returned to his operatically romantic style when he wrote his last single, ‘‘(Just Like) Starting Over,’’ as a reconciliation letter to Yoko Ono, before his murder in 1980. For the B-side to ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ the band chose the R&B ballad ‘‘Ask Me Why.’’ Although it was first premiered back in June, on the BBC

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show Teenagers’ Turn, the track was demoed the same month as their first EMI session. Written by Lennon and McCartney in the spring of 1962, this soul ballad shows the strong influence of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, who were one of the more poetic Motown groups the Beatles would cover in the early days. In particular, you can catch Lennon duplicating Robinson’s singing style with his phrasing on lines like ‘‘I. . .I-I-I’’ and ‘‘You. . .oo-oo.’’ The guitar melody also borrows from the Miracles’ 1961 song, ‘‘What’s So Good About Goodbye.’’38 ‘‘Ask Me Why’’ is one of those rare love songs about how the happiness of true love can also bring pain when it’s something you’ve never experienced before. Lennon teeters between exhilaration (‘‘I can’t believe it’s happened to me’’) and heartache (‘‘My happiness still makes me cry’’). The paradoxical aspect of Lennon’s expression of devotion, where pain and pleasure commingle, has its source in all likelihood in Lennon’s unresolved childhood. But this duality would continue right up to ‘‘Julia’’ in 1968, when the ‘‘seashell’’ eyes of his own mother would meet the ‘‘ocean child’’ of his new lover Yoko Ono. Usually the single was the choice of record buyers in the early sixties—and the B-side was often the wastebasket for litter. As the Beatles started releasing their ’45s, radio programmers were having difficulty deciding which side to play. Lennon and McCartney often used the two sides of the single to answer each other’s songs. As ‘‘Please Please Me’’ sat happily for two weeks at the top of the charts, providing a quick fix for listeners, the Beatles were about to introduce a new generation to more long-term pleasures. The late British poet Philip Larkin beautifully summed up the liberating spirit of the Beatles in 1963 with his poem, ‘‘Annus Mirabilis.’’ It captured that magical moment between the lifting of the ban on D. H. Lawrence’s erotically charged Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Beatles’ debut album. It was significant that Larkin would mention Lawrence’s controversial 1928 novel. Here was a book that shook up the demure social climate of its time and found itself expurgated in 1932. The full text of Lawrence’s richly erotic tale of a love affair between Constance Chatterley, a rich landowner with a crippled husband, and her sexual awakening with her gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, didn’t get restored in Britain until 1960. Like Lawrence, the Beatles sought to loosen the grip of class prejudice to dramatically alter the sexual mores of British decorum. To do that, the band decided to introduce themselves on their first album exactly the way they had on stage in Hamburg. The record would document the full excitement of a Beatles’ show. Facing an audience, that’s when the Beatles found their group soul. With an album, listeners could imagine the show in the confines of their own home. George Martin had initially considered doing the album live at the Cavern Club, but unfortunately time constraints made it impossible to work out the acoustics for the recording. In the end, they decided to make it a studio

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debut. The album, Please Please Me, titled after their first #1 single, was recorded in three three-hour sessions (plus an additional hour)—beginning at 11 a.m. and wrapping up at 10 p.m.—on February 11, 1963, right before the group headed back out on the road. But since the group was used to playing all night in Hamburg, the task wouldn’t be that difficult except that Lennon had a bad cold on the day of recording. In many ways, the goal of Please Please Me was to duplicate successfully what the Beatles failed to accomplish during their Decca audition. They wanted to recreate the excitement generated live on stage with their varied repertoire. According to McCartney, to work out the songs for the session, John and Paul sat with the group spending 20 minutes to a half-hour on the set list. While the duo would pluck away on their guitars, Ringo would tap his drumsticks on a chair or packing case. George would get his guitar and watch the chord progression of the song to see what he could contribute. At which point, Martin would see what they had. Martin’s role within the group can’t be overemphasized. Once they completed their arrangement of a song, he would often play along with the Beatles while Norman Smith, his assistant until 1965, would adjust the sound levels and direct the recording. Before long, each Beatle would retreat to their corner with their instrument and within the hour they would have the arrangement of the song. As was the case with their early singles, Please Please Me was recorded live as a two-track recording. Each guitar player had a microphone placed directly in front of their amplifier, while the remaining mike was hung over Ringo’s drums. One track would contain the whole instrumental section, while the other track would hold their singing voices. This allowed Martin and his engineers to properly balance the sound when they were mixing the songs down to mono. In doing this, they could create a cleaner ‘live’ sound than they could have if they’d done it at the Cavern. Since the record was to be a composite of a live performance, it starts off with McCartney’s celebrated ‘‘one-two-three-fah’’ opening to ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There.’’ Besides starting the album with a raucous dance number to get people jumping on the floor, the tune also shows what McCartney had learned listening to Little Richard. Originally titled ‘‘Seventeen,’’ the song has some of the gleeful ribaldry of Richard’s ‘‘Miss Ann.’’ Iris Caldwell, the sister of Rory Storm, had inspired McCartney’s song. In 1962, Iris just happened to be 17, not to mention, a trained dancer. Paul first saw her performing the twist at the Tower Ballroom at New Brighton, just outside Liverpool. Often, McCartney would drop by her house with John to write songs. Although they dated, the relationship was never considered serious. One night, though, while leaving her place and driving home, he got the first lines of his song, ‘‘Well she was just 17/And she’d never been a beauty queen.’’ Not bad, he thought. ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There’’ was completed in September 1962 while McCartney and Lennon were skipping school at Paul’s home at 20 Forthlin

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Rd, in Allerton, Liverpool. It was written on their acoustic guitars with Paul later trying it out on the piano. In composing the tune, McCartney was also taken by the opening lines of the Coasters’ libidinous ‘‘Youngblood’’ (which the Beatles covered many times) and probably Chuck Berry’s rowdy ‘‘Little Queenie’’ (where the girl was far too cute to be ‘‘a minute over seventeen’’). The bass line was borrowed from another Chuck Berry hit ‘‘I’m Talking About You’’ (1961). McCartney was trying to come up with a personal song that would immediately draw in the female audience. But Lennon didn’t think the opening line McCartney wrote that night would score with anybody. ‘‘It sounded like a good rhyme to me at the time,’’ McCartney recalled. ‘‘But when I played it through to John the next day, I realized that it was a useless line and so did John. So we both sat down and tried to come up with another line which rhymed with 17 but which meant something.’’39 Since 16 was the sexual age of consent, Lennon felt the song needed some provocative insinuation from a bragging teenager. He replaced the formal ‘‘she’d never been a beauty queen’’ with the wink of ‘‘you know what I mean.’’ Martin thought the track was a potboiler—but it’s still a beauty. While the band happily surrounds him, listening in on his exploits, McCartney sings with the full confidence of a young man satisfied to be the cock-ofthe-walk. Although many critics over the years suggested that the early Beatles material was puppy love next to the sophistication of the songs on Rubber Soul or Revolver, they are being far too literal about the simplicity of the lyrics. If you listen to the delivery in the song, when McCartney says his heart went ‘‘boom’’ as he walked across the dance floor, it hits you like a cannon shot. Most love songs of that time, when it came to matters of the heart, preferred that it just went pitty-pat. When he sings about holding her hand in his, he draws out the word ‘‘mi-i-i-ne-ee-eeen,’’ savoring the touch of her fingers—and maybe more than that. ‘‘. . .[T]he anticipation in [McCartney’s] voice instantly signals that something big is about to happen,’’ wrote Tim Riley. ‘‘There is a simple, almost unconscious naivete to his gusto, but it has become a classic call to rock, and it continues to resonate in the history it helped to shape. Aside from the palpable thrill in his voice, the count-off shows just how important the beat is to everything that follows.’’40 If D.H. Lawrence sent streams of voltage through the literary world with his words, the Beatles sent the same intensity through the British pop scene with their beat. ‘‘[‘I Saw Her Standing There’] threw down a gauntlet to the ‘chintz-merchants’ of Denmark Street with their moody, misunderstood ‘Johnnies’ and adoring ‘angels’ of sweet sixteen,’’ critic Ian MacDonald stated bluntly. ‘‘No quaint emotions here.’’41 By the end of 1962, ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There’’ became a regular staple of the Beatles’ live repertoire. Sometimes, as was the case with Ray Charles’ ‘‘What’d I Say,’’ their versions could run up to 10 minutes in length. The Graham Bond Quartet, with singer Duffy Power, recorded the song on April 26, 1963 on

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the Parlophone label, but it didn’t have quite the spark to be anywhere near as big. The Beatles’ version would eventually become a hit single in the United States, as the B-side to ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ in January 1964 (when Capitol Records finally got around to releasing it). The next track, ‘‘Misery’’ was a tongue-in-cheek melodrama that was written by Lennon and McCartney (with some help by two of the Hollies, Allan Clarke and Graham Nash) on January 26, 1963, while backstage before a concert at the Kings Hall.42 ‘‘Misery’’ is a gentle parody of popular heartbreak songs like Brenda Lee’s 1962 dirge ‘‘All Alone Am I.’’ Even the ‘‘la-la-la-la-la’’ outre affectionately pokes fun at the Gladiolas’ 1957 doo-wop number, ‘‘Little Darlin’.’’ ‘‘Lennon and McCartney turned [the song] into a chip-on-my-shoulder piece of romantic paranoia,’’ music critic John Robertson explained. ‘‘What’s remarkable is not the simplicity of the song structure, or its admission that even big Lennons cry, but the sheer fact that a song about misery can sound so damn optimistic.’’43 The optimism in this song comes from the Beatles’ own open sense of humor. In ‘‘Misery,’’ they mock pop conventions without mocking the emotions germane to pop. Even George Martin’s playful dramatic piano triplets that answer Lennon’s mournful reminiscences are as gorgeous as they are a punch line to the song’s joke. Initially, ‘‘Misery’’ was composed with Helen Shapiro in mind, but her A&R man, Norrie Paramor, turned it down before she ever heard it. That refusal became a somewhat unfortunate move because Shapiro, who possessed a deep tenor that earned her the nickname ‘‘Foghorn’’ at school, was an ideal candidate for the tune. Kenny Lynch, a black R&B singer, who was one of the opening acts on the Helen Shapiro tour, picked up ‘‘Misery’’ instead. He recorded it in March 1963. Although it wasn’t a hit, he had the distinction of being the first performer to ever cover a Beatles’ song. ‘‘Anna (Go to Him)’’ is the album’s first cover version. Written by Arthur Alexander, a black singer/songwriter from Florence, Alabama, ‘‘Anna (Go to Him)’’ was released by Alexander as a single on September 17, 1962 on Dot Records. With his lovely, smooth tenor voice, he would quickly develop a strong following in England. The Rolling Stones would record ‘‘You Better Move On’’ a year later, while the Beatles did his ‘‘A Shot of Rhythm and Blues’’ and ‘‘Soldier of Love’’ for BBC Radio. Although Lennon sings the song, the group discovered him through their resident R&B collector, George Harrison, who had a few of his recordings. The Beatles were quite taken by Alexander because, like Chuck Berry, Alexander had as much country in his soul as he had soul. Influenced primarily by Eddy Arnold and Gene Autry, Alexander sang with raw emotion that was distilled of any affectation. ‘‘If the Beatles ever wanted a sound, it was R&B,’’ McCartney explained. ‘‘[T]hat was what we listened to, what we wanted to be like— Arthur Alexander.’’ 44 As Beatles’ biographer Bob Spitz pointed out, Alexander’s songs ‘‘were direct, heartfelt and earnest, infused with great

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melodies.’’45 But Lennon might have heard something else that drew him to this stirring performer. Alexander’s songs weren’t just declarations of hope and loss, they examined what those very emotions cost. ‘‘I was trying to get a fix on how I really felt about love in general,’’ Alexander explained after he wrote ‘‘Anna.’’ ‘‘There had been no other girl who had meant as much to me as she did. That line, ‘All of my life I’ve been searching for a girl’ is true. I was real young and naive, and when I got to that part, that thrilled me so much.’’46 The tone of Alexander’s voice in his version carries the same noble sentiments of Humphrey Bogart releasing Ingrid Bergman to Paul Henreid at the end of Casablanca (1942). Lennon, however, is not as convincing in the part. ‘‘Alexander’s moody romantic resignation held obvious appeal for the rebel in Lennon, but the discreet display of sensitivity in the lyric— the singer attempting to melt Anna’s heart by assuring her that he cares more for her happiness than his own—found no echo in Lennon’s dealings with women at the time,’’ Ian MacDonald correctly intimated in Revolution in the Head.47 What Lennon does, however, is give himself over to the anguish of the circumstance, instead of stressing what Anna means to him. By the end of the song, we don’t feel any nobility in Lennon’s gesture, only his abdication to fate. In the songs ‘‘Chains’’ and ‘‘Boys,’’ the Beatles take a radical departure from standard pop norms of recording other artists. Rather than strictly covering songs by other male artists, who might have female backing vocals (like Ray Charles), they reached out to all-girl bands like the Shirelles and the Cookies. Besides giving their work a more encompassing view of love relations between the sexes, they could also step inside women’s shoes and look at love through their eyes. On their first two records alone, they covered five girl group songs—and for good reason. ‘‘The girl group sound was borne equally from knowingness and naivete,’’ explained critic Vivian Mackay. ‘‘Like teenage life, it was violently honest, lived faster and more vividly than anyone over 25 can imagine.’’48 Girl group bands came out of the Tin Pan Alley of the Brill Building between 1958 and 1965, and would include the Chantels (‘‘Maybe’’), the Shirelles (‘‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’’), the Paris Sisters (‘‘I Love How You Love Me’’), the Crystals (‘‘There’s No Other’’), and the Sensations (‘‘Let Me In’’). While their compositions were mostly written by contract songwriters, these women could turn those tunes into what Greil Marcus called ‘‘music of celebration—of simple joy, of innocence, of sex, of life itself, at times—but most often it was the celebration of The Boy.’’49 The Boy was as mythic to these bands as the Girl would be to the Beatles, an ideal, a perfect partner for Nowhere Land. ‘‘It was utopian stuff—a utopia of love between a boy and a girl, a utopia of feeling, of sentiment, of desire most of all,’’ Marcus continued.50 The warmth in the sound of these records also made the rock ’n’ roll by male groups and singers rote by comparison. In that quest for a utopian

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spirit in their music, the Beatles found that these songs fit right in with that quest. ‘‘Chains,’’ which was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King for Little Eva’s (‘‘The Locomotion’’) backing group, the Cookies, became a minor hit for them in October 1962. It’s a song about possessive love, where the singer can’t escape the desire of her old boyfriend in order to reach out to her new one. Since the Cookies’ sound is so innocent, the creepier aspects of the tune (which could be read as a tale about a stalker-as-boyfriend) are downplayed. The singer seems to be saying that, as much as she’s attracted to this new guy, she’s amazed that she’s still so strongly desired by her current partner. In the Beatles’ version, sung by George, with his limited range, the song lacks the sterling harmonies of the Cookies. But Harrison’s self-consciousness in his delivery compensates for that. He sings like he can’t believe what his baby is doing to him. As for ‘‘Boys,’’ the Shirelles, who included it on the B-side of their sublime 1961 masterpiece ‘‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’’ performed it as a funky blues with a purring sax solo that told you that these gals are happy world travelers when it comes to guys. The Beatles reverse the song’s meaning. They’re celebrating guys on the prowl. Sung with a modest gusto by Ringo, who once performed it in Hamburg with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Starr sounds tickled that he gets to swagger so proudly. As the group howls and hoots around him, Ringo gets so delirious that he can barely keep up. At one point, out of breath chasing those birds, he hands the proceedings to George for a solo. ‘‘‘Boys’ shows us that [Ringo] came out of a classic mold of rock singers— those whose power is rooted in their lack of talent, not lessened by it,’’ Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone.51 For much of their career, the Beatles (in their official UK releases) left their singles off the albums. But on Please Please Me, to make up space, and save time, they included the title song, ‘‘Ask Me Why,’’ ‘‘P.S. I Love You,’’ and ‘‘Love Me Do.’’ The next new song was ‘‘Baby It’s You,’’ another girl group composition by the Shirelles. Written by Burt Bacharach, Mack David, and Barney Williams (Shirelles’ producer Luther Dixon writing under a pseudonym), the tune is basically about a guy who does nothing but cheat on his girl—however, she still loves the guy. Girl group songs, in many ways, got at the honest and strange anomalies in romance better than any other pop music. The singer, who is often wronged, still implicates herself by giving in to the uncontrollable desire of her own libido. Since jealousy is the motivating emotion in ‘‘Baby It’s You,’’ Lennon brings a defiance to the song that the Shirelles can only hint at. Shirley Alston, in her ethereal voice (which critic Tim Riley compares eerily to Yoko Ono’s),52 gamely defies her lover’s infidelities while the chorus chants back, ‘‘cheat! cheat!’’ Rather than hide in the heartbreak of this unrequited love, Lennon conveys the price of having such strong romantic desires. When he says that he wants nobody else, he practically shrieks the lyric as if losing her will cost him more than he can bear.

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John Lennon wrote ‘‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’’ in August 1962, while beginning his married life with Cynthia Powell, who had recently discovered she was pregnant with Julian. Lennon’s song is inspired by Larry Morey and Frank Churchill’s ‘‘I’m Wishing,’’ from Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (‘‘Wanna know a secret?/Promise not to tell?/We are standing by a wishing well’’), where Snow White is singing to the doves while working as a maid in the kitchen. Yet, as with Bing Crosby’s ‘‘Please,’’ the song was taught to Lennon by his mother. Although Harrison would sing it, perhaps too tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure he could let us in on any secret, the tune sums up the Beatles’ ethos. ‘‘[T]he secrets the Beatles shared had to be told—in a way, sharing the secret was the secret,’’ wrote Dave Marsh in his book The Beatles’ Second Album. ‘‘The secret is, when you find such joy as this, it makes you feel not alone with your dreams but as if the entire world wants to join in.’’ 53 That’s how, according to Marsh, our dreams were made more real and palpable. While the Beatles couldn’t put those thoughts across in their performance of the song, another young Liverpudlian tried in the summer of 1963. Billy J. Kramer, whose real name is William Ashton, was ready to pack in the idea of a music career and take a job with British Rail. One night, Kramer ran into Brian Epstein at the Grapes, a pub near the Cavern Club. Epstein suggested that Kramer hook up with a band called the Dakotas. While the Dakotas found Kramer, in his gold and pink lame suit, not to their style exactly, Epstein promised he could change him into something that would be right up their alley. They began by rehearsing at the Cavern and ultimately found some common ground. Epstein told the Dakotas that if they backed Kramer, they could finally make some records. Kramer would record ‘‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’’ after returning from a tour in Germany with the Dakotas in early 1963. While he didn’t think much of the song, EMI offered him a contract upon hearing it. The acoustic demo Kramer was given was recorded by Lennon over a different kind of wishing well— a toilet, which Lennon flushed as he completed the song. When Kramer’s version reached #2 that summer, it was the first Lennon/McCartney cover song ever to make the Top 10. ‘‘It took a long time to record because it was the first time I’d ever been in a studio,’’ Kramer recalled. ‘‘I couldn’t make certain notes because I was so nervous and uptight.’’54 Truth be told: Kramer may have been polished but he always conveyed blandness, especially with his cloying performance of the hit ‘‘Little Children.’’ When you listen to ‘‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’’ you also can’t help ask: This man has secrets? Do I really care to know what they are? Harrison’s shyness may take the mystery out of any secret in the song, but you at least feel he might possess some. There’s not much mystery to ‘‘A Taste of Honey,’’ other than it reflected Paul McCartney’s love of romantic kitsch. (Lennon would call it ‘‘A Waste of Money.’’) Written by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow, ‘‘A Taste of Honey’’

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was likely inspired by the 1958 British play by Shelagh Delaney that reached Broadway in 1960 and would become a popular Tony Richardson film the following year, starring the Liverpudlian actress Rita Tushingham. A Taste of Honey is set in the fifties in Manchester, England. It’s the story of Jo, a young working-class girl, whose mother, Helen, abandons her after finding a rich and younger lover. As Jo begins her own affair with a black sailor she meets in school, it soon develops into a marriage proposal. However, Helen denounces the marriage and the sailor heads off to sea. Jo soon discovers she’s pregnant and finds lodgings with Geoffrey, a gay acquaintance, who takes on the role of her companion to legitimize her illegitimate pregnancy. A Taste of Honey tackled questions about sex and race and the nuclear family in sixties Britain, and its questions seemed to perfectly coincide with changes in attitudes represented by the Beatles. ‘‘A Taste of Honey’’ only made the album when George Martin refused McCartney’s request to record the Marlene Dietrich torch number, ‘‘Falling in Love Again,’’ which the group had just performed at the Star Club. While it’s possible that McCartney learned the song from seeing The Blue Angel, it is more likely that he saw her sing it on German television during a UNICEF gala in Duesseldorf in 1962. McCartney briefly argued about the selection, but Martin convinced him that the Dietrich number would come across as ‘‘corny’’ and that ‘‘A Taste of Honey’’ would be more suitable to the record. Since the Beatles were more concerned about getting their original songs on the record, they relented. ‘‘A Taste of Honey,’’ which stresses the hope that the sailor will return to Jo, is given a passable read because McCartney underplays the pathos and stresses the catchy melody. Their arrangement was based on the 1962 version that clarinetist Acker Bilk (‘‘Stranger on the Shore’’) was having great success with while the Beatles were recording Please Please Me. ‘‘There’s a Place’’ set the foundation for the Beatles’ utopian dream, but it was rarely performed or ever heard. In the song, Lennon tells us that true freedom begins when one finds it in the mind, something he would continue to remind us of through songs like ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping,’’ ‘‘Rain,’’ ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ and ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’’ If Please Please Me invited—no, pulled—dancers onto the dance floor, ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ got them shaking once they got there. Written by Bert Russell and Phil Medley, ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ had been a hit for the Isley Brothers in the spring of 1962. Their delightfully funky little number, which drew on the dance craze first spawned by Chubby Checker’s cover of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ ‘‘The Twist,’’ got people happily swinging. The Beatles, though, would take it to the level of frenzy. Although the song is associated with the Isley Brothers, the Beatles took their arrangement from a version performed by the Swinging Blue Jeans—while also adding a little touch of Richie Valens’ ‘‘La Bamba.’’ (The Beatles had offered the Blue Jeans their version of ‘‘Hippy Hippy Shake’’ in the trade. No contest.)

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Due to Lennon’s cold, his voice was just about shot when they arrived at this throat shredder. The band had just finished recording ‘‘Baby It’s You’’ and Martin knew that they had to get it in one take. Lennon first gargled a carton of milk, then stripped off his shirt and walked to the mike. He then signaled to the band, then to Martin, and finally looked to Norman Smith. He was ready to go. Holding nothing back, Lennon tore into the song, past the point of singing it, but letting the notes tear away at his raw larynx, creating the sensation of pleasure and pain swirling in a whirlpool of throbbing notes. The sound behind him was so explosive that one couldn’t tell if he was pushing the band or if they were gleefully bulldozing him to the end of the song. When Lennon builds to the scream in the chorus, McCartney and Harrison join in like a demonic duo daring to take the song past itself, into something resembling righteous possession. As they finally get to the end, to the final gathered howls, Ringo’s drums slam down hard, hammering nails into the floorboard of their mythical dance hall. McCartney yells a final victorious ‘‘Hey!’’ while Lennon lets out a barely audible gulp, and collapses, now fully spent on the fade. Not surprisingly, ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ would close their concerts until 1964, when Little Richard’s ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ would earn the honor. And who could argue? When they performed it, they always began with that rising scream, as if taunting us to see if we thought they could reach that crescendo yet again. Indeed they would hit it every time. When it was released on March 22, 1963, Please Please Me stayed at the top of the charts for a record 51 weeks. Its success was marked by the Beatles’ desire to take listeners to a place where pleasure could grow magically out of songs of heartbreak, where rock, pop, and balladry could coexist as part of the same egalitarian spirit. The risks taken in this music were only the beginning of where those risks would take them—and us. As a map of their music, it expresses little doubt that it knows how to get where it’s going. Most of us couldn’t wait to find out where that would be. Some groups arrive at an album as accomplished as Please Please Me, but that’s where the Beatles began. The stakes were already high, which meant that the distance they could go was unimaginable. The cover art for the album was originally set at the London Zoo, outside the insect house, but the Zoological Society of London turned George Martin down (despite his being a Fellow of the London Zoo). As an alternative, Angus McBean shot a color photo of the band looking down from the stairwell inside EMI’s London headquarters in Manchester Square. Since they came out of a basement, it was only fitting that the cover photo of their debut album showed them from an elevated position looking down.55 Their next single followed quickly just a month after their debut album. ‘‘From Me to You’’ was written on February 28, 1963, while the band was on the Helen Shapiro tour going from York to Shrewsbury. The title came from the letters’ column in the weekly pop paper New Musical Express titled

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‘‘From You to Us.’’ While reading the February 22 issue, which advertised their tour dates, Lennon and McCartney began trading lines until the lyrics were completed upon arrival at Shrewsbury. Shapiro heard perhaps the first performances of ‘‘From Me to You’’ and ‘‘Thank You Girl,’’ the song destined to be the B-side. Lennon and McCartney asked her which tune she preferred as the A-side and she chose ‘‘From Me to You.’’ Initially, Harrison’s guitar served as the intro, but Martin thought it sounded too obvious and too familiar. There was no freshness in it. Instead, he suggested that Lennon and McCartney sing Harrison’s guitar notes, making it one of the first modern pop compositions where the singers opened a song by mimicking the melody. In April 1963, it became their second #1 hit in the United Kingdom and truly began the mass hysteria of Beatlemania. The track was a further refinement of the promise they offered in ‘‘In Spite of All the Danger,’’ ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ and ‘‘Please Please Me.’’ ‘‘From Me to You’’ offered us a bond that was unconditional, giving us anything we wanted, we just had to call and they’d send it with love. The physicality of their sound, the frank desire they expressed, had touched a further desire in us to abandon ourselves, to offer our screams as a release, and to become one with the pulse of their tactile force. ‘‘Thank You Girl,’’ though, seemed an afterthought next to ‘‘From Me to You.’’ The tone is too polite, almost afraid to match the peak of yearning reached in ‘‘From Me to You.’’ One thing was becoming clear, when Lennon tried to fake it, he sounded fake. The other thing he couldn’t mask, however, was his anger. While sudden fame had satisfied his wish to touch the dream world that Elvis’s ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel’’ held out to him, he still had to live in the real world. That same April, after Cynthia gave birth to Julian, Lennon went on vacation to Spain with Brian Epstein. As John had his dreams, so did Brian. Since he had to live out the agony of keeping his homosexuality secret, it was sublimated into his devotion to the band. While Epstein never felt a strong attraction to McCartney, Harrison, or Ringo, Lennon had the kind of complex and violent characteristics that strongly appealed to him. He knew that Lennon’s tough guy stance, his occasional homophobic remark, had masked some ambiguous notions about his own sexuality. While the band was largely unaware of Epstein’s gay lifestyle, Lennon was indeed very conscious of it. A few years earlier, when Cynthia, himself, and Pete Best were getting a lift home from Brian, Epstein asked Best if he’d like to stay the night with him. Best told Epstein politely that he wasn’t interested. The dynamic between Lennon and Epstein was put to the test during their trip. In Barcelona, they would spend evenings sitting in sidewalk cafes spotting potentially gay men, with Lennon asking his manager what made them attractive, or what didn’t. Lennon would claim years later, in interviews before his murder, that he was playing journalist, thinking like a writer, imagining the experience of being homosexual. But Albert Goldman in The

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Lives of John Lennon went much further, stating that Lennon and Epstein actually did have an affair in Spain. ‘‘They were sexually involved for the balance of Brian’s life, and their relationship was a controlling one, with John playing the cruel master and Brian the submissive slave.’’56 Goldman sourced Allen Klein, the future manager of the Beatles, when he stated that Lennon expressed a need to control the man who had their career in his hands. Although Epstein’s sadomasochistic characteristics and Lennon’s nascent sadism made all of this plausible, there is no reliable corroborating evidence to back this up. As for Lennon’s own divided personality, perhaps an episode three months after the Spain trip shed some light on his own sexual ambivalence and the violence at the heart of it. On June 18, McCartney was celebrating his twenty-first birthday at his Auntie Gin’s house in Huyton. With a huge guest list of all the major bands and DJs in Liverpool, the party was a happy affair except for the darkening mood of John Lennon. Arriving with Cynthia, he began to drink and get abusive toward her until he eventually settled into a corner to sulk. On his way to the bathroom, he ran into local DJ Bob Wooler who asked Lennon, ‘‘How was the honeymoon, John?’’ From that innocent question, Lennon assumed Wooler was making a passing remark about his trip to Spain with Epstein, thus insinuating that Lennon was gay. John immediately smashed Wooler in the nose, then grabbed a shovel that was laying in the yard and began beating the prone DJ to death. It took three partygoers to restrain him. Wooler had suffered a broken nose, three broken ribs, and a cracked collarbone. After the ambulance had taken Wooler away, Lennon began groping a girl who was with Billy J. Kramer, as if to desperately prove that he wasn’t gay. When Kramer intervened, Lennon told Billy that he was nothing and that the Beatles were tops. The next morning, Brian Epstein was confronted by a press storm, including lawyers for both Bob Wooler and Billy J. Kramer. When Epstein’s publicist, Tony Barrow, tried to get Lennon to apologize, he initially refused. He was unrepentant, accusing Wooler of calling him ‘‘a queer,’’ and so, naturally, struck back. Besides the bad publicity for the Beatles, Epstein (being in the closet) feared the repercussions of Lennon’s stance. Don Short, of London’s Daily Mirror, ran a story on the back page that painted a picture of an apologetic Lennon (and later would earn Short a prominent place in the Beatles’ press entourage). The article was called ‘‘Beatle in Brawl—Sorry I Socked You!’’ In the piece, Lennon is quoted regretfully telling Wooler that he had gone too far. The quote, though, actually belonged to Tony Barrow. Epstein got Wooler, who was marginal next to the rising pop fortunes of the Fab Four, to agree to a settlement of two hundred pounds. The first sign of the Beatles’ success revealed that their utopian dream would lie in the music, not in the world they occupied. Shortly after the Wooler assault was settled, Lennon and McCartney immediately set down to composing their next single. That June, an idea

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would germinate in McCartney’s mind as the group travelled in a van back to their hotel room in Northern Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The band was about to have a rare day off before heading to Leeds. So McCartney took the occasion to write an answer song, where one person talks about love and the other replies. Lennon and McCartney sat on separate beds at the Turk’s Hotel facing each other with their acoustic guitars. Up till now, their first three singles about love followed the standard pop tradition of being in the first person, that is, they allowed the listener to imagine him or herself as the subject of the song. In ‘‘She Loves You,’’ McCartney decided to switch the focus from ‘‘me’’ to ‘‘you’’ and to ‘‘she’’ and ‘‘you.’’ The listener became an observer on the relationship. This bold shift of perspective dramatically changed the love song from one that speaks to us in a private place to one that is inclusive of others. In ‘‘She Loves You,’’ we feel something at stake in the survival of this love affair, even though it isn’t our love affair to share. Suggestive of ‘‘My Boyfriend’s Back,’’ McCartney actually based his idea on Bobby Rydell’s June 1963 hit song, ‘‘Forget Him,’’ where the singer tells a girl to forget a boy who doesn’t truly love her. However, Rydell lectures the girl, and with the help of a female backing chorus, just airs his complaints. In ‘‘She Loves You,’’ the Beatles transcend the conventions of the message song, where spurned lovers are given finger-wagging advice, into something more daring. ‘‘She Loves You’’ is an affirmation of action, of belief, of saying to this guy that if you don’t declare your love for this woman, I certainly will. Within a few days of writing it, the band was recording the track in the studio on July 1, 1963. ‘‘‘She Loves You’ was a brilliant song and certainly one of the most vital the Beatles had written so far,’’ George Martin enthused. ‘‘It was the kind of song that not only aroused emotion when you first heard it, but the way they actually sang and the way they shook their heads and so on, the young girls would be moved enormously by it.’’57 The significance of those primal cries of ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah,’’ soon to be a Beatles trademark, is an invitation to experience the pure ecstatic power of what they feel love could offer. And they did this by blowing away the polite formalities of simply stating, ‘‘yes, yes, yes,’’ and instead inserting the bolder ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah.’’ They insisted that we had no choice but to embrace the tidal force of sensual pleasure. ‘‘She Loves You’’ also radically alters the way most pop songs are structured. Rather than begin with the verse, which naturally leads into the chorus, they begin with the chorus. It’s a technique they would also employ successfully later on ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love.’’ To conclude the song, however, they revert to something quite conventional, but for a different purpose. In using the traditionally optimistic sixth chord, the Beatles deliberately draw on an archaic device from out of the Swing Era. But they are not simply manufacturing a cliche´, instead they’re illustrating that, what had once been a cliche´ of the early love song, could today be

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supported by something dramatically new. ‘‘I thought that was pretty corny,’’ Martin recalled. ‘‘It was almost like Glenn Miller’s orchestration, and I told them I’d heard that so many times in my life and did they have to do that, but they’d never heard it before. They thought it was pretty smart and, of course, they stuck to their guns. And they were quite right, because it became a hallmark hit.’’58 With that clever combination of radical innovation and traditional song craft, ‘‘She Loves You’’ became the perfect distillation of the Lennon/McCartney temperament. It beautifully illustrates McCartney’s desire to shape third-person material, but it also contains Lennon’s opposing view of making a song vividly real by infusing it with personal experience. Their partnership would forge a boldly modern romanticism that shunned solipsism in popular song in favor of a radically more expansive view. Although ‘‘She Loves You’’ would be a massive hit that summer in the United Kingdom, EMI’s Capitol Records in the United States turned down the single. However, their Canadian affiliate wisely released it as a single in September 1963. CKWS in Kingston, Ontario was then to put it into regular play rotation. As it slowly crept up the charts, CHUM radio in Toronto introduced the song to listeners at the beginning of December where, within two weeks, it had jumped from #42 to #15. By Christmas, it was #5. On January 13, 1964, ‘‘She Loves You’’ had reached #1 where it stayed for nine weeks. It wouldn’t become a hit in the United States until after the explosion of ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’’ In February, the track would be included on the Canadian album, Twist and Shout, which consisted mostly of the songs from Please Please Me (leaving off ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There’’ and ‘‘Misery’’), while adding the single ‘‘From Me to You.’’ It was the second Beatles’ album released in Canada. For the B-side of ‘‘She Loves You,’’ they selected ‘‘I’ll Get You,’’ another song that reveals something of the divided soul of this dynamic writing team. ‘‘‘I’ll Get You’ is one of the earliest songs to formulate John’s belief in creative visualization—the idea that by imagining the changes we want to see, we can actually bring them about,’’ wrote Steve Turner. ‘‘For Paul . . .the use of the word ‘imagine’ evoked the beginning of a children’s fairy tale and offered an invitation to a fictional world.’’59 Dave Marsh heard ‘‘I’ll Get You’’ as a stalker tale. While not in the same category as the Police’s ‘‘Every Breath You Take’’ or the Stranglers’ ominous take on Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s ‘‘Walk On By,’’ the lyrics do have a spooky prescience. ‘‘[W]hat’s now creepy about Lennon as stalker is, among other things, the way he died,’’ Dave Marsh wrote.60 But Marsh also puts his finger on the usual paradoxes with Lennon’s bravado, the jealous boasting, and his human need that intertwines with his swagger. ‘‘John’s singing throughout ‘I’ll Get You’ is very gentle, and he doesn’t sound truly desperate—he’s pleading and there’s no hint of false bravado, only real conviction.’’61

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After making their last appearance at the Cavern Club on August 3, 1963, the Beatles settled down to record their next album. If Please Please Me was designed to give listeners an idea of the Beatles’ stage show, their second album would be conceived as a studio project. ‘‘The first album was really a recital of their repertoire,’’ George Martin explained. ‘‘We weren’t thinking in terms of an album being an entity in itself back then. We could record singles, and the ones that weren’t issued as singles would be put onto an album—which is how the second album, With the Beatles, was put together.’’ 62 With The Beatles, which they began recording back in mid-July, was conceptually shaped as a tribute to the group’s love of R&B (with the exception of ‘‘Till There Was You’’). The cover versions were decided by whoever liked the particular song. While John, Paul, and George had their interest in rock and R&B, Ringo would soon introduce the band to the country artists he liked which would have some influence on the writing of ‘‘All My Loving.’’ With The Beatles was a musical cyclone next to Please Please Me. The sheer emotional drive of the record was pitched as high as the decibels in the songs, which took love, doubt, desperation, and regret, and turned the record into pure ecstasy. Lennon’s cry of ‘‘It Won’t Be Long’’ jumps out of the speaker before the band seems to realize the song’s already started. Written by Lennon as a possible follow-up single to ‘‘She Loves You,’’ ‘‘It Won’t Be Long’’ revels in that tune’s triumphant ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah’’ refrain (as did ‘‘I’ll Get You’’). Although it’s a striking composition that expresses the sheer joy of finding a partner who reciprocates your desires, there is also an underlay of torment in Lennon’s tone. ‘‘Lonely and rejected, he sits at home waiting for the girl who has walked out on him to come back and make him happy,’’ critic Steve Turner wrote in A Hard Day’s Write. ‘‘As in so many later songs, he contrasts the carefree life he imagines everyone else is having with his own anguish, believing that once he’s reunited with his loved one all his problems will be solved.’’63 What Turner is describing here becomes the full tenor of Nowhere Land, imagining a place where all difficulties can be resolved. The razor sharp harmonies make that seem quite plausible. ‘‘It Won’t Be Long’’ has its roots in pure R&B, which may be why it bares a melodic relation to Arthur Alexander’s ‘‘Soldier of Love,’’ which the Beatles had covered at the BBC for the program Pop Go the Beatles. This is the first song where Lennon, with the help of George Martin, discovered how to double-track his voice, a voice in which he never felt comfortable singing. When he found that he could create a rich harmony by this method, he rarely abandoned the technique again. ‘‘It Won’t Be Long’’ also has the pleasure of introducing Lennon’s passion for wordplay, matching ‘‘be long’’ and ‘‘belong,’’ which ultimately resolves the painful distance between loved ones. Like ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ this irresistible track was oddly absent from their live performances. ‘‘All I’ve Got to Do’’ becomes a quiet exhale of breath after the exuberant shouts of ‘‘It Won’t Be Long,’’ but the yearning is equally intense. Composed

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by Lennon in 1961, ‘‘All I’ve Got to Do’’ sets out to capture, like ‘‘There’s a Place’’ and ‘‘Ask Me Why,’’ the Motown sound—especially the seductive mood of Smokey Robinson, who Lennon continues to emulate. John draws thematically from the Miracles’ ‘‘You Can Depend On Me,’’ which would also serve his later ‘‘Any Time at All.’’ There are some truly innovative arrangements in this song that set it apart from the work in which he’s paying tribute. For instance, when Genesis drummer and vocalist Phil Collins first heard the album, when he was 12, he was inspired by a drum technique that Ringo employed. ‘‘On ‘All I’ve Got to Do’ [Ringo] does this very clever snare-drum, hi-hat, bass drum part, which was very off-thewall for that time,’’ Collins explained.64 If Lennon’s most optimistic songs are often tinged with fear and doubt, McCartney’s most pessimistic tunes are usually filled with confidence. ‘‘All My Loving’’ is probably the most joyful song he’s ever written about abandoning your lover. And it began life as a poem. McCartney wrote the lyric while on the bus during the tour in England with Roy Orbison, and by the end of the day, he had the music to complete it. Despite its irresistible appeal, McCartney never saw the song as a possible single. The potential of ‘‘All My Loving’’ didn’t truly occur to him until he watched the audience at their Ed Sullivan Show debut go completely crackers when they opened their set with it. Conceived as a country and western song, with a rhythm section nicked by Lennon from the Crystals’ ‘‘Da Doo Ron Ron,’’ the tune aches with longing. The sweet desire in McCartney’s voice is answered by Harrison’s supple guitar solo, which is as beautifully economical as James Burton’s deft touch in Ricky Nelson’s ‘‘Hello Mary Lou.’’ ‘‘His lead on songs like ‘All My Loving’ is so finally considered, it simply can’t be improved upon,’’ guitarist Robbie McIntosh, who would play for McCartney’s Wings, told Mojo in 1996. ‘‘George is often overlooked because his guitar parts are so finely tailored, but if you listen carefully you conclude that they’re perfect. His guitar style came from an era that has now probably gone forever, before guitarists used to take up a load of tracks on the tape machine for different solos, and it’s almost impossible to find that sort of discipline these days.’’65 ‘‘All My Loving’’ was also McCartney’s first song for Jane Asher. In 1963, Asher was 17, much like the girl in ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There,’’ an aspiring actress who happened to see the Beatles perform on April 18, 1963 at Royal Albert Hall (a show the BBC was recording for broadcast). Asher was already appearing in numerous plays, starred in television dramas and a few films, plus she was a guest on BBC’s Juke Box Jury. Listed as the ‘‘best-known teenage girl’’ in Britain by Radio Times, the BBC programming magazine, they asked her to write about her experiences seeing the Beatles at Royal Albert Hall. Her review was pretty succinct: ‘‘Now these I could scream for.’’ Asher would finally meet the group at a later show at Royal Court Hotel in Chelsea and started dating McCartney shortly after. Before the end of the year, McCartney would move into the Asher household at

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57 Wimpole Street in London’s West End. Her family would open up for Paul the world of art and theater. Indeed that may be one reason that this song is so optimistic about the future. If ‘‘All My Loving’’ is optimistic about the future, George Harrison’s first composition for the group, ‘‘Don’t Bother Me,’’ speaks for its title. Harrison composed the song in August 1963 at the Palace Court Hotel in Bournemouth while the group was playing a series of shows at the Gaumont Cinema. While sick in bed (and likely not wanting to be bothered by anybody), Harrison claimed it was an attempt to see if he could actually write a song. ‘‘Don’t Bother Me’’ is a pretty good first effort, a rock rhumba motored along with the rhythm of African percussion. In retrospect, his contribution can be heard as foresight, early in the game, for privacy from what he would later perceive as the madness of Beatlemania. Lennon’s ‘‘Little Child’’ follows with the notes of his harmonica opening the song like a saw cutting through wood. The dashing dance track was originally intended for Ringo to sing, until Lennon had second thoughts. According to McCartney, some of the composition was inspired by British folk singer Elton Hayes’ ‘‘Whistle My Love,’’ a song from Walt Disney’s Robin Hood. However, there’s no doubt that the ‘‘I’m so sad and lonely’’ line comes right out of the Everly Brothers’ ‘‘Then I Kissed Her.’’ While it’s easy to assume that only McCartney would have been attracted to a ballad like ‘‘Till There Was You,’’ both he and Lennon had been steeped in the history of Broadway tunes. For McCartney, it came from his father, who played many traditional standards in his jazz band. As for Lennon, it came from his mother who taught him a variety of songs on the ukulele. Taken from Meredith Wilson’s 1957 Broadway musical, The Music Man, McCartney discovered it through Peggy Lee’s 1958 Latin-flavored version. The musical is about Harold Hill, a con artist, who tries to sell a small Iowa town the idea of starting a children’s band, where he would supply all the instruments and uniforms. What he doesn’t take into account is falling head-over-heels for Marian, the town’s scrupulous librarian. A rather lackluster film version, which starred Robert Preston (who played the lead character with all-American gusto) and Shirley Jones, made it to the screen in 1962. Since ‘‘Till There Was You’’ was written as a duet between Harold and Marian, McCartney duplicated the idea by arranging the duet to take place between his and Harrison’s flamenco acoustic guitars, while Ringo provides soft and steady percussion on the bongos. Although McCartney’s taste often ran toward kitsch, ‘‘Till There Was You’’ is more a romantic reverie than a concession to sentimentality. There’s a delicacy in the singing that’s sensitively matched by the beautiful precision of the playing. Apparently when Harrison bought his acoustic guitar at Frank Hessy’s Music Store, the shopkeeper, Jim Gretty, taught him some specific jazz chords that came in handy for the arrangement on ‘‘Till There Was You.’’

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Out of the soft classicism of ‘‘Till There Was You’’ jumps ‘‘Please Mr. Postman’’ with a desperate cry of ‘‘Wait!’’ over Ringo’s urgent drumbeat. Sung by Lennon, this cover of the Marvelettes’ first #1 song in December 1961 has an urgency that dramatically changes the original intent of the song. The Marvelettes were a Motown girl group led by Gladys Horton that hailed from Inkster, Michigan. In their version of ‘‘Please Mr. Postman,’’ lead singer Horton goes for charm in conveying her despair. If the letter doesn’t arrive, you know she’ll get by. You can pretty much figure out that it’s the boyfriend’s loss if he doesn’t write her. ‘‘Horton is pretty cool, for a woman in despair over the silence of her lover,’’ critic Dave Marsh explained. ‘‘The other Marvelettes sing like they’re just. . .wanting to help out the lady with the problem—they’ve seen it before, they’ve been this woman, their job now is just to get the mailman’s attention, snapping ‘Wait!’ and adding ‘oh yeah’ to her every plea and explanation, the girlgroup equivalent of shouting ‘amen’ and ‘hallelujah.’ ’’ 66 John Lennon, however, approaches the song with desperate abandon, his voice a gale of craving that emanates from an undercurrent of anxiety. He seems to be saying, if he doesn’t get the letter, he’d just as soon die. There’s so much anguish in Lennon’s voice that by the time he reaches, ‘‘you didn’t stop to make me feel better,’’ you can hear primal echoes out of Lennon’s past. ‘‘The scene is so primordial, so physical, so rejected and revolted, and in love and stunned and bemused and terrified that I imagine 17-year-old John on the corner of Menlove Avenue, watching his beloved Julia—mother, muse, nemesis—as she’s hit by the car,’’ Dave Marsh wrote in The Beatles’ Second Album.67 Lennon’s anguish, though, is typically undercut by his sense of humor. When he gets to ‘‘deliver the lett-ah/the sooner the bett-ah,’’ he can’t fit the ‘‘bett-ah’’ into the bar of music, so, with a smile in his voice, he leaves it as ‘‘bet.’’ The second side of With The Beatles cuts loose with Harrison’s take on Chuck Berry’s grinning anthem ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven.’’ If there is one songwriter in rock ’n’ roll that has an endless gift for memorable (and enjoyable) anthems it’s Chuck Berry. Whether it’s his pledge of allegiance in ‘‘Rock and Roll Music,’’ his testament to roots in ‘‘Back in the U.S.A.,’’ or the happily defiant ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven,’’ Chuck Berry is the supreme storyteller, rock’s Johnny Appleseed, a smooth talker and smooth walker. He is a poet with a gift for language that would certainly appeal to Lennon who, outside of ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven,’’ did the rest of the Beatles’ Chuck Berry covers. Born in St. Louis, Berry drew his musical influences, as the Beatles would themselves, from a variety of musical genres. The swagger of ‘‘You Can’t Catch Me,’’ for example, is unthinkable without Louis Jordan. The bravado of ‘‘Little Queenie’’ would have been right at home in the tough urban blues of Muddy Waters. ‘‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’’ might have been a country music dream imagined by Bob Willis and the Playboys. His lesser-known ‘‘Havana Moon’’ has the swooning balladry of Nat King Cole. (And it

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would inspire Richard Berry’s ‘‘Louie Louie.’’) ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven’’ is a personal manifesto and by the time the Beatles covered it, the song was a climactic cry announcing a new music that was designed to knock open doors, and put the past icons in their grave. The fact that it’s Harrison, in his self-deprecating voice, who’s chosen to take his boots to those doors, it only makes the ironies richer and the song more pleasurable. ‘‘Hold Me Tight’’ is a Lennon and McCartney original that was initially slated for Please Please Me, but didn’t make the cut after a trying 13 takes. ‘‘Hold Me Tight’’ is a failed effort that tries to emulate the style of the Shirelles (who they had covered with ‘‘Baby It’s You’’ and ‘‘Boys’’ on Please Please Me) but it is so forced that the repetitive clapping beat ends up sounding like clumping instead. ‘‘Hold Me Tight’’ had been in the band’s live repertoire since 1961, but it’s performed in a highly impersonal style that leaves the expressed sentiments seeming quite inauthentic. The Treasures, a group produced by Phil Spector, would do a stronger version in February 1964. With ‘‘You Really Got a Hold on Me,’’ the Beatles return to firmer ground with another Smokey Robinson song. As in ‘‘Please Mr. Postman,’’ Lennon dramatically changes the character of the song. In the original 1962 version by the Miracles, Robinson comes across as a man who’s feeling fragile and in need of finding strength in the wake of his own aching desires. Lennon turns those tremulous yearnings into demands and transforms Robinson’s tenderness into a resilience that’s borne out of having your heart seized by the one you desire. The Beatles’ version of ‘‘You Really Got a Hold on Me’’ cuts both ways. Yes, she has a hold on him. But Lennon makes sure you know that the hold is mutual. While ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man’’ is Ringo’s obligatory track on With The Beatles, it was originally written by Lennon and McCartney for the Rolling Stones, another emerging band in Britain, that was devoted to blues and R&B. Fronted by lead singer Mick Jagger, the band was flanked by two guitarists, Keith Richards and Brian Jones, with sturdy Bill Wyman on bass, and drummer Charlie Watts, who was schooled in jazz, but possessed by an R&B vigor. The Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, had been an early publicist with the Beatles. But when he happened upon the Stones playing at the Station Hotel in Richmond, he soon became their manager. If Brian Epstein would model his group as the adorable mop-tops, Oldham decided to model his as the ultimate bad boys—the anti-Beatles. In the spring 1963, George Harrison and Dick Rowe of Decca Records were judges at a ‘‘beat’’ group competition at Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. While there, Rowe apologized to Harrison for not signing the Beatles to their label. Harrison gracefully accepted the apology, but he also suggested to Rowe that he should sign the Rolling Stones. Rowe hadn’t heard of them but Harrison mentioned that they were playing at the Railway Hotel in Richmond. Rowe went down to hear them with his wife and he was so enthused by Jagger’s prancing and the explosive crowd reaction that he wasn’t going to make

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the same mistake twice. On May 7, he found Andrew Loog Oldham and signed the Stones to Decca. They recorded their first single, a passable cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘‘Come On’’ three days later which made it to #21 on the charts. In the fall, while looking for more material for his new band, Oldham ran into Lennon and McCartney at their music publisher’s office. Telling them of his need, they immediately suggested ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man,’’ which at that point they hadn’t fully completed. On September 10, 1963, they went with Oldham down to the Studio 51 club in Great Newport Street to see the Stones rehearse. Without one hit record to their name, they were already becoming a hugely popular live act, breaking attendance records in both ballrooms and clubs. The Beatles saw them perform at the Great Pop Prom at Royal Albert Hall, a blistering set, that left fans delirious—and the Beatles somewhat nervous. Upon hearing the only portion of ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man’’ that they’d finished, Brian Jones expressed excitement about the preview. Bill Wyman was meanwhile baffled watching the left-handed McCartney playing Wyman’s bass backward. Lennon then suggested that he and Paul should go in the other room and finish it for them. Within a few minutes they came back with the completed song. Jagger and Richards fully realized that if they were to have any chance to be as big as the Beatles, they better begin writing their own songs. As a piece of solid rock, ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man’’ isn’t anything spectacular, but it perfectly fits the Stones’ style. The melody is largely borrowed from Benny Spellman’s May 1962 hit ‘‘Fortune Teller’’ (which was the B-side to his infamous ‘‘Lipstick Traces’’), which is somewhat interesting considering that the Rolling Stones would eventually cover ‘‘Fortune Teller.’’ ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man’’ is a straight-ahead raver for Jagger, but he barely breaks a sweat performing it. The only distinguishing feature is Jones’s bottleneck slide guitar solo. Jones, with some of the stinging bite of Elmore James, jump-starts the track as if trying to prod Jagger into giving his singing some conviction. The Stones recorded their version on October 7, 1963, and it went to #12 in the United Kingdom. Much would be made through the years of the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—even fans drew lines of demarcation between them. But according to Bill Wyman, that was just a publicity scam Oldham cooked up to distinguish his group from the Fab Four. ‘‘There was always an impression created by the media that we were against each other,’’ Wyman recalled. ‘‘It was always the Rolling Stones versus the Beatles. They always tried to build a war between us as the two top bands in England. But it wasn’t true. We were quite good mates, and they liked our music and we liked theirs.’’68 More to the point, the mainstream success of the Beatles opened the door for the Rolling Stones to enter the room. ‘‘To us, the Beatles were always the door opener,’’ explains Keith Richards. ‘‘They were the ones the people would open their door to. If we knocked on the door first,

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forget it, they would just put the other chain on.’’69 Despite the great divide between people who loved the Beatles versus those who preferred the Stones, both bands tended to shadow each other in fascinating ways. ‘‘I always felt that the Rolling Stones’ thing was like a dialogue with the Beatles in the ’60s,’’ Yoko Ono explained to Mojo in 2002. ‘‘It was kind of like a Q&A, you know? One asked the question, the other would answer.’’70 The years the Beatles were together, a question and answer dynamic between them and the Stones was precisely what took place. The Rolling Stones’ records would always reflect back on the Beatles’ albums. The Stones’ debut mirrored the bold R&B of With The Beatles (right down to the stark album cover). In their examination of the contingencies of love, Aftermath would be a shadowy interpretation of Rubber Soul. Between the Buttons was their colorful reply to the eclectic Revolver. Their Satanic Majesties Request was Sgt. Pepper seen through the decadent lens of the dark mystic Aleister Crowley. (Crowley would be featured among the crowd on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, along with the Stones who were called ‘‘good guys.’’) Let It Be would be the Beatles’ final word, while Let it Bleed would be the Stones’ final word on the sixties. ‘‘Yesterday’’ would be answered with the chamber work ‘‘As Tears Go By.’’ The sonic experimentation of ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ with its Indian drone and pulsating drums, would be equally reverberated in ‘‘We Love You’’ a year later (with John and Paul joining in on the chorus). The individual characteristics of each group shined through their music whatever style it took. The despair of the Beatles’ ‘‘Help!’’ still sounded jovial, while the romantic beauty of the Stones’ ‘‘Ruby Tuesday’’ brooded brilliantly. On With The Beatles, Ringo sings ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man’’ in a diffident manner and sounds as if he were surprised the woman had any interest in him at all. The band attempts to generate some excitement behind him, but they’re hollow yelps. Ringo doesn’t lend his genial personality to this track the way he had a year earlier in ‘‘Boys.’’ In an attempt to give the song some drive, George Martin double-tracked Ringo’s voice. ‘‘A person with a very good voice doesn’t double-track too well,’’ Martin explained. ‘‘But some voices sound really good double-tracked, and it is one way to get a very effective performance.’’71 Ringo would often perform ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man’’ with more brio when they did it live in 1964. ‘‘Devil in Her Heart’’ is another R&B cover about romantic betrayal that’s sung by Harrison. The original version, ‘‘Devil in His Heart,’’ comes from a rather obscure girl group from Michigan called the Donays, featuring Yvonne Allen, as the lead vocalist, who’s backed by Michelle Ray and two sisters, Amy and Janice Gwenn. Keyboard player Richard ‘‘Popcorn’’ Whylie, who led the early Motown group Popcorn and the Mohawks, produced the song for Brent Records, a small independent label in New York that picked up the song in August 1962. In their version, Allen keeps insisting the boy she met is an angel sent to her, while the chorus advises

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her that he’s got the devil in his heart. Besides the switching of gender roles, there’s a significant difference between the Donays’ version of duplicity and the Beatles’ particular take. ‘‘[Allen]’s pissed at her friends for slandering the guy; she’s not going to even consider that they’re right,’’ writes Dave Marsh in The Beatles’ Second Album. ‘‘[Harrison]’s not denying anything, just insisting that she’s such a great, uh, kisser that he’s willing to operate under whatever set of illusions is required. . .where Allen is strident in her denial of the accusations, he’s obstinate in his denial of the truth.’’72 Harrison likely discovered the track when he made his first trip to the United States early in 1963 (after the release of Please Please Me) to visit his sister Louise before the band stormed America a year later. In visiting St. Louis and New York, Harrison had gone on a quest for black R&B songs buying Bobby Bland songs and Booker T. & the MG’s ‘‘Green Onions.’’ Like ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ ‘‘Not a Second Time’’ is one of the more underrated John Lennon songs. Written again in the spirit of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Lennon’s system of defenses that get erected against getting hurt are put to the test by his remorseful voice. Although he doesn’t want to be hurt a second time, he can’t live without the possible hope of passionate love. Although the tune never received much airplay, or any live renditions, this was the first Beatles’ song to attract serious attention from classical music critics. William Mann, the reviewer with The Times, puts unneeded weight on this pensive track by comparing the song to Gustav Mahler’s ‘‘Song of the Earth.’’ ‘‘[O]ne gets the impression that they think simultaneously of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural is the Aeolian cadence at the end of ‘Not a Second Time’ (the chord progression which ends Mahler’s Song of the Earth).’’73 When Mann described the ‘‘Aeolian cadences’’ at the end of the song, Lennon thought he was referring to exotic birds. With The Beatles concludes with the same mammoth punch in which it opened. ‘‘Money (That’s What I Want)’’ is another Motown cover cowritten by Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records. First released in 1959, and sung by Barrett Strong, ‘‘Money’’ is about a man who substitutes a lust for money over his desire for love. ‘‘Barrett Strong has no lack of desire, but really, he’s out on a lark,’’ Dave Marsh comments in The Beatles’ Second Album. ‘‘He’s broke, he’d trade his girlfriend—and probably has traded a good part of his self-esteem—for the rent, but he isn’t losing sleep over it.’’74 In the Beatles’ version, sung by Lennon seemingly in a hailstorm, he goes for the cash with a raw gusto, but he lets you know that he’s lost a lot of sleep making that choice. Lennon’s performance is as desperate as a prisoner who has spent too much time in solitary, breaking out of prison without care that—at any moment—he could be captured by the guards, or maybe defeated by his own doubts. Lennon embraces the belief that money will fulfill all his promises of freedom—but it’s a last ditch hope. Marsh

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rightly sees Lennon’s torn soul in going for the loot. ‘‘Lennon looks at the loot and undergoes what amounts to an existential crisis,’’ he explains. ‘‘[T]here is in his singing impassioned irony and ironic passion, a vision of the world that holds the lucre in contempt, a vision of something so much greater than mere wealth that, at that moment, you could almost say that rock and soul music has doubled back upon itself and referred to its gospel origins.’’75 As in ‘‘Please Mr. Postman,’’ Lennon is driven by a torment that won’t let him settle for less. In this case, it’s the attainment of a freedom he feels money will offer him. ‘‘[W]hat one is offered on [‘Money’] is not the dissection of John’s soul but its sound, and what that sound says is, Here I am, torn up and torn down but committed absolutely to the sound of my voice,’’ wrote Greil Marcus. 76 Lennon goes beyond expressing the song’s basic sentiments, and tears instead into a frenzied attempt to let the emotions carry him forward—with the sole purpose of making the experience of freedom authentic to him. The song is a testament to what rock offered John Lennon the moment he heard ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel.’’ What did rock ’n’ roll give Lennon? ‘‘Rock ’n’ roll for him . . .seems to have been both freedom and torment, freedom to do things the world claimed could not be done, torment because of the obstacles to doing them, including the ones you place there yourself,’’ Marsh concludes.77 Within the unprecedented lunacy of Lennon’s performance, the singer knows that, hidden in his demands, attaining money won’t give him the freedom he requires. So he sings like a man motivated only by his hunger, by his belief that at this brink of desire will be the only freedom he’ll ever know. It’s in this music that dreams of Nowhere Land truly exist, beyond the transient spoils of the real world where your riches can all disappear. The incongruous qualities built into the Beatles’ cover of ‘‘Money (That’s What I Want)’’ didn’t find its equal until 1983 when Cyndi Lauper, a punkier Betty Boop, startled listeners of her debut album, She’s So Unusual, with an astounding version of the Brains’ 1978 track ‘‘Money Changes Everything.’’ The Brains were an Atlanta punk band led by Tom Gray and ‘‘Money Changes Everything’’ was a modern equivalent of ‘‘Money,’’ where in this story, Gray watches his girl take off with a rich guy. As he sings it, Gray appears completely resigned to the pain caused by her departure. It’s as if her leaving was inevitable in such callow times, so he takes refuge in his defeat. Money is clearly the enemy for what it’s done to their romance. Cyndi Lauper, though, infuses her version with ambiguity just like Lennon did in ‘‘Money.’’ Portraying the role of the departing woman, she is as defiant as John, but she also fully recognizes that her love has been violated by her desire for lucre. She clearly sees that by seizing the cash, she has been made fully culpable. Lauper realizes all too well what she has given up, by acknowledging that the romantic values she’s abandoned do mean something. When she spits out, ‘‘it’s all in the past now, money changes

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everything’’ (with the emphasis on ‘‘past’’), she expresses the sting of what that past meant, and you know she’ll feel it long into the future. With a biting fury, Lauper boldly uncovers the tangled ways that true love can get corrupted by the things you fail to see or control. With The Beatles was recorded in 11 sessions, which took over 30 hours to complete. It was released in Britain the day U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated (November 22, 1963). Despite the shock and gloom of the time, the record stayed at the top of the charts for a startling 21 weeks. Capitol Records in Canada simultaneously issued it as Beatlemania! With The Beatles, while the United States continued to ignore the group. ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven’’ and ‘‘Please Mr. Postman’’ would be released as a single in Canada in December and would climb to #2 on the CHUMAM radio chart. The famous black-and-white stark cover photo, showing the band’s faces in half-shadow, was shot by Robert Freeman on August 22, 1963 in the Palace Court Hotel in Bournemouth, England. Having shown Freeman some of the work Astrid Kirchherr had done in Hamburg, the Beatles wanted a similarly bold and dramatic image for their record. They’d also seen some of Freeman’s demonstrative work with jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, so they knew he could provide the mood they were after. Freeman posed the group against some velvet curtains in the hotel dining room using only the light streaming in from the one large window along the side of the wall. He put Ringo in the bottom right corner, since he was the last to join the group. (He was also the shortest member.) Neither Brian Epstein nor EMI liked the starkness of having the band’s profile half in shadow. But it best expressed the bold new sounds found on this record. On With The Beatles, joy mixes seamlessly with sorrow, brightness is shadowed by darkness, and white boys express their devoted love of black music. The cover would become so iconic that it often got parodied, such as in the Residents’ 1974 album Meet The Residents. Genesis also invoked it for the cover of their 1986 single, ‘‘Land of Confusion,’’ a song that passionately lamented the legacy of the sixties. Despite EMI’s uncertainty, the public demand was unprecedented. When it was released that November, despite the tragedy overseas, the police still had to keep control over the crowds that were bustling into the record stores. With joy over spilling into the streets of Britain, it wouldn’t be long before the dour, griefstricken mood of America would be experiencing the same.

CHAPTER 3

Hurricane of Love [The Beatles] had become a four-headed Orpheus. They would have been torn to pieces by the teenage Furies. George Melly, Revolt into Style Much has been written about how Beatlemania brought a gust of fresh optimism to the grief-struck shores of America in early 1964. Its first explosion, though, was heard in England during the spring of 1963 in the wake of the John Profumo scandal. As the Secretary of State of war, Profumo had been having an affair with Christine Keeler, a young escort he met in 1961, during a party at Lord Astor’s estate in Cliveden. His dalliance was further compounded by Keeler’s own rendezvous with Eugene Ivanov, a Russian naval attache´ and assumed KGB agent. Despite fears of state secrets being compromised, the British papers initially avoided the story. But in June 1963, Profumo confessed to the improprieties and the London dailies had a feeding frenzy. In light of the Profumo scandal, Victorian etiquette was replaced by salacious curiosity and exploitation—to the point where any scandal became fodder for headline news. In Edinburgh, for instance, the Duchess of Argyll had her sexual proclivities exposed in the press. Open season was declared on High Court judges and prostitutes, too, including cabinet ministers having quickies in Richmond Park. Sexual behavior had become the great leveler of the British class system because everyone was indulging. The boundaries between high society and commoners had now been blurred, leaving a gap for Beatlemania, where boys and girls from all walks of life could give in to any form of ecstatic behavior. ‘‘As tradition became outmoded and a dispirited Christianity forfeited influence, the public focus began to shift from nostalgia and the compensation of a reward in heaven

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to an eager stress on the present combined with an impatient hope for a social heaven on earth in the near future,’’ wrote Ian MacDonald on the cultural shift in Revolution in the Head, which would lead to the birth of Swinging Britain.1 Along with the new sexual freedom was an added affluence creating new possibilities to act out those freedoms. As Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s Labor government raised income taxes, the property market boom and full employment led to a huge consumer growth among the young which, with the Beatles at the helm, catapulted a wave of new musical talent soon to be identified as part of what would eventually be known as the British Invasion. This new wave of musical culture arrived with little warning, tossing up the pleasant, the innocuous, and the tough. There were the lightweight sounds of the Searchers (‘‘Needles and Pins’’), Herman’s Hermits (‘‘I’m into Something Good’’), Chad & Jeremy (‘‘Yesterday’s Gone’’), and Peter and Gordon (with Lennon and McCartney’s ‘‘World Without Love’’); the dreamy balladeers, who carried the emotional weight of the American girl groups, like Dusty Springfield (‘‘I Only Want to Be With You’’), Cilla Black (‘‘You’re My World’’), and Petula Clark (‘‘Downtown’’); the urgent, desperate R&B of the Animals (‘‘House of the Rising Sun’’), the Kinks (‘‘You Really Got Me’’), the Who (‘‘My Generation’’), and, of course, the Rolling Stones. Many others emerged, some equally worthy, but the big question was: Could any of these performers be worthy invaders of America? Prior to the Beatles, British acts had mostly failed in America—especially mainstream pop performers like Cliff Richard, who was reduced to second billing behind the polished veneer of Frankie Avalon. ‘‘John was worried because no British groups or singers had ever got through to America before,’’ George Harrison told Beatles’ biographer Hunter Davies.2 It was certainly a realistic fear. ‘‘Although we had some successful British artists like David Whitfield, Dicky Valentine, and Shirley Bassey, it was impossible for them to succeed in America because they were too much like the very good and successful American artists,’’ song publisher Stephen James once explained. ‘‘So the novelty of a group of four guys with slightly different haircuts and different outfits who actually answered back was quite revolutionary.’’3 With Britain’s track record in mind, Dave Dexter Jr., the chief A&R man of Capitol Records in the United States, rejected all the early Beatles’ singles like ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ ‘‘From Me to You,’’ and ‘‘She Loves You.’’ For beginners, Dexter didn’t hear much of a revolution. He didn’t even like the harmonica sound in ‘‘Love Me Do.’’ ‘‘I had grown up listening to the old blues records and blues harmonica players, so I nixed the record instantly,’’ Dexter explained.4 With tastes that ran more toward jazz, Dexter likely never heard Bruce Channel’s ‘‘Hey Baby,’’ which was not only a hit pop song with a harmonica but also a fundamental influence on ‘‘Love Me Do.’’ Utterly baffled by his reaction (especially since Capitol was the affiliate of British EMI), George Martin contacted Transglobal

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Music, an agency in New York that licensed EMI recordings, to find a home for the single ‘‘Please Please Me/Ask Me Why.’’ Transglobal got the Chicago R&B label, Vee-Jay, to release the song in February 1963. Nothing earth shattering happened, though, since it sold only about 5,650 copies. Martin then proceeded to send them ‘‘From Me to You/Thank You Girl,’’ but a cash-crunch forced the label to refuse fulfilling its royalty payments to Transglobal. Out of that indiscretion, a termination of the agreement to distribute the Beatles’ music took place in August. After Dexter ignored ‘‘She Loves You,’’ Transglobal contacted Swan Records in Philadelphia, who released the song in September. Since the label was connected to Dick Clark, who had the popular TV music program, ‘‘American Bandstand,’’ he played the song on his show. The response, though, was minimal. ‘‘She Loves You’’ barely sold in the United States. Luckily in Canada, where there was no Dave Dexter Jr. calling the shots, Capitol Records Canada was served instead by a journalist from Britain named Paul White. White, who came to Canada in the mid-fifties, became a respected A&R man when he was able to turn an album by English jazz saxophonist Freddy Gardner into a hit. He further had great success in Canada promoting pop singers like Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. Since he hailed from England, though, White always had his ear tilted homeward. As a result, he was very much aware of the Beatles. In January 1963, White had received ‘‘Love Me Do’’ from EMI, but unlike Dexter, he heard something authentic in their music. It wasn’t that he found ‘‘Love Me Do’’ riveting, or innovative enough to start a musical uprising, but what he heard in the Beatles was the sheer pleasure of performing pop music. With the possible hope that others might bask in that delight, White released the single in Canada in February 1963. Sales, however, were less than joyous. The single sold 140 copies in six months. He tried again when EMI passed along ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ but the results were little better—it sold 180 copies. ‘‘From Me to You’’ came next, but White was up against Del Shannon’s cover version of the song. On the strength of his previous hits, ‘‘Runaway’’ and ‘‘Hats Off to Larry,’’ Shannon easily beat out the Beatles on the Canadian charts. His success was somewhat ironic given that Shannon came across the song while he toured England with the band. In September, White was sent ‘‘She Loves You,’’ which he was convinced would do the trick. But this time, he decided to introduce the track in a smaller market and let the enthusiasm for it build. By December, the song was #1 at CFPL radio in London, Ontario. CHUM radio in Toronto, who within a year would be introducing the Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens, had a popular Top 50 CHUM Chart that helped promote and sell rock music across the country. By February 1964, ‘‘She Loves You’’ had become a national hit and it brought the previous singles back into the limelight. Commenting on Capitol’s American counterpart, Paul White didn’t lay all the blame on Dexter for refusing the Beatles. ‘‘We all know American Top

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40 in those days was bland white artists,’’ White explained.5 While that was predominantly true in 1963, the Beatles were about to dramatically reverse that trend with a composition even Dave Dexter Jr. couldn’t stop. America was always within the Beatles’ sights. It was the land of dreams. But it wouldn’t be the land where they would go to be buried like all the other British acts. What stood in their way was Capitol Records who were ignoring all their singles. The group lacked a foothold in the very country whose music made their own possible. The Beatles remained adamant, however, insisting that they weren’t going to America until they had a #1 song there. Unfortunately, Brian Epstein had already booked the band for The Ed Sullivan Show, North America’s most popular TV variety show, in February 1964, to follow with a concert in Washington, and a separate date at Carnegie Hall. Epstein had booked Carnegie Hall through Sid Bernstein, a New York City music promoter. Bernstein had been a student at the New School for Social Research, in the Big Apple, where one of his courses required him to read British newspapers. The first one he picked, from October 1962, featured a story on this rising rock band from Liverpool. Bernstein became so intrigued that he sought out earlier editions until he realized that each one had a story on this group’s fortunes. By January 1963, he wanted to get the jump on anybody else, so he contacted Epstein, where they made a date for February 1964. The deal was for the Beatles to play two shows for $6,500—one in Carnegie Hall, and the other in Washington, D.C. Epstein told Bernstein that if the band flopped within the next year, he was not to be held accountable to the deal. When Sullivan booked the Beatles for his own show, right around Bernstein’s dates, he was assured that his investment was sound. Ed Sullivan had witnessed the delirious reaction to the group firsthand, when he was in the United Kingdom at Heathrow Airport. The Beatles were returning to a rousing homecoming after a show in Sweden. Sullivan was stunned at the furor and assumed it must be for someone from the Royal Family. When one of the kids told him that all the excitement was for this new pop group, Sullivan gambled that they just might grab the spotlight on his own show. He contacted Brian Epstein and booked them for his Sunday night program for three appearances—two live and one taped where the group would get paid $10,000. While all the deals were falling into place, the Beatles were playing a series of shows at the L’Olympia in Paris. But they found that there wasn’t a mob of Brigitte Bardots chasing them through the City of Lights or young girls screaming their names. Instead, it was a collection of hysterical young boys. The ability to cross gender lines in their music, covering girl groups especially, had now broadened their appeal beyond imagination, making it possible for Beatlemania to include everyone. One night, coming home from their second show, they got the news they’d been hoping to hear, but never expected. As if by pure serendipity, plus some much needed luck, they finally

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wrote a tune that made it all possible. ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ had just gone to #1 in the United States. It was no less ironic that the song’s title seemed perfectly suited as an enticing invitation. It was as if an appealing stranger was calling out to you from across the water. Written and recorded in the late fall of 1963, ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ was the greeting card that made Beatlemania an international phenomenon. ‘‘Please Please Me’’ and ‘‘She Loves You’’ had prepared British audiences for this pure explosion of happiness. But never before had vocal harmonies, so rich in texture, been delivered with such volume, such determination, and such ecstasy. Composed by Lennon and McCartney in the den of Jane Asher’s home on Wimpole Street, ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ was written by two men, who described their method, as closely playing into each other’s noses. According to Gordon Waller (of Peter and Gordon), who was present the day Lennon and McCartney wrote it, Lennon was on a pedal organ and McCartney on piano. When McCartney hit a chord on the piano, it immediately grabbed Lennon. The two men, perhaps never more close than they were that day, kept finding lost chords that became a perfect fit for their song. As they wrote, they kept reaching the peak of pop’s greatest appeal: the joy of surrendering to irresistible and fleeting elation. ‘‘It was, and remains, a great song, a joyous, reassuring sentiment riding gently atop an exuberantly beautiful melody,’’ Martin Goldsmith wrote in The Beatles Come to America. ‘‘The words may be simple, but they express tender longing and the heartfelt magic of human touch in a sentiment both innocent and profoundly worldly.’’6 Part of the track’s greatness did lie in the smooth transitions between the descending phrases that begin the song, when the singer starts to tell his girl what he wants her to know. At which point, according to Goldsmith, ‘‘the melody leaps up an entire octave to land joyfully on the word ‘hand,’ the punch line of the song. The first lines are all breathless anticipation, and when the central idea of the lover’s message is delivered, it comes bursting out in a manner that transcends everything that comes before.’’7 Their fifth single was hugely anticipated in Britain with advance orders of over 940,000 two days before it was released on November 29. The factory pressing alone was an unprecedented 500,000 copies in prerelease. A week after ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ hit the shops, it entered the U.K. pop charts at #1, where it would stay for six weeks. By the end of the year, ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ was the second-highest top selling single of the year—right behind ‘‘She Loves You.’’ Journalist Tom Wolfe once proclaimed that the Beatles wanted to hold your hand, while the Rolling Stones would burn down your town. Besides deliberately misreading the song, in order to indulge in self-conscious literary hyperbole, Wolfe misses the point. If you were to superficially compare ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ to, say, the Rolling Stones’ cover of Muddy Waters’ classic ‘‘I Just Want to Make Love to You,’’ the Beatles appear to be catering to teenybopper conventions. When the Stones perform Muddy

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Waters, the sentiment is blatant, so deliberately clear, that there’s no room for romantic mystery. ‘‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’’ is as dynamically straightforward a blues song about the satisfactions of sexual intercourse as you’ll be likely to find anywhere. But ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ carries much more of an emotional charge because it expresses and explores the anticipation of romantic excitement—before consummation. Their song communicates the exhilarating expectancy of sex, while delving into the beguiling bliss of imagining such carnal pleasures existing. In short, the Beatles make it very clear that holding your hand is only the beginning of the story. Despite the thunderous reaction to ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ in Britain, Dave Dexter Jr. still wasn’t impressed. Once again, he turned it down (although he later claimed that he knew it was going to be a hit and was thereby responsible for ultimately releasing it). What actually took place was an exasperated Brian Epstein demanded that Capitol Records’ president Alan Livingston listen to the record himself, which eventually led to it finally being released. Despite all of Dexter’s dismissals, the November 27 issue of Variety stated that the tune had been receiving large advance orders in Britain, forcing Livingston to reconsider the decision of his A&R expert. All in all, it’s likely that the reason Livingston had trusted Dexter’s judgment to this point was that Livingston’s own musical background was equally limited. After all, this was a man known specifically for creating Bozo the Clown, producing children’s records by Woody Woodpecker and Bugs Bunny (with one composing credit for Tweety Bird’s ‘‘I Taut I Taw a Puddy Tat’’). But did this ignominious oversight spell the end of Dave Dexter Jr.? Hardly. He was instead promoted to the status of issuing all the Beatles’ singles and albums in the United States. Besides picking and choosing what he deemed to be good singles (regardless of what was released in Britain), he issued albums contrary to the Beatles’ U.K. originals. The first American Beatles’ album he titled Meet The Beatles, which contained most of the songs from the Beatles’ second album, With The Beatles. He added the single, ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ its B-side ‘‘This Boy,’’ plus ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There’’ (from Please Please Me). Furthermore, Dexter gave himself a production credit (as he would on the next six bastardized U.S. releases). His ‘‘production’’ work consisted of adding reverb echo to George Martin’s clean mixes and taking the mono mix of original U.K. singles to create a fake stereo sound. He did this by recording two mono versions together, slightly out of sync, then adding echo, and calling it Duophonic sound. When ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ became the Beatles’ first #1 song in America, it might not have ever happened if it had not been for the American TV network coverage of the mass hysteria over their show at the Winter Gardens Theatre in Bournemouth in the late fall of 1963. Marsha Albert was a teenager in Washington D.C., who just happened to see the film clip, and became so taken with their music that she phoned her local radio

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station, WWDC. She asked the DJ if he could play something—anything— by the Beatles. Carroll James, the DJ who took the call, was hardly a rock fan. (His taste that ran toward the current jazz pop of Nat King Cole.) He wasn’t even the least bit aware of the Beatles. But he was curious enough to try and hunt down one of their songs. During a station break, he happened upon a copy of the British import of ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’’ On a whim, he invited Albert to the station to introduce it on the air. Marsha excitedly arrived at the station to read an introduction that James had written on the back of a traffic report. Within moments, she helped launch the Beatles into the consciousness of the nation’s capital. After playing the song, James asked listeners to call in with their own responses to ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’’ The switchboard went berserk. There wasn’t a free line anywhere as people swarmed to express their enthusiasm. Not only did James play the track within the next hour, he played it every night that week while announcing it as a WWDC exclusive. When Capitol Records caught wind of the flurry of activity at WWDC, they faced a curious problem. Although company President Alan Livingston was set to issue ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ finally overruling Dave Dexter Jr., Capitol wasn’t planning to do so until January. Because of the huge demand inspired by WWDC’s daily broadcast of ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ they moved the date up to December 17 in the United States. Nobody was prepared for the explosion of interest. After all, the last American #1 for a British act had been the Tornadoes with ‘‘Telstar’’ in 1962. Before that, you had to reach back to the non-rock of Acker Bilk’s ‘‘Stranger on the Shore’’ in 1961, and Vera Lynn’s ‘‘Auf Wiedersehen’’ in 1952. By January 10, 1964, ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ sold its first million in the United States, just in time for the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. It would be backed by the lovely ballad ‘‘This Boy,’’ a song rich in pure harmony. ‘‘This Boy’’ pointed the way to the luxurious warmth of ‘‘Because’’ that was heard later on Abbey Road. If you were to imagine Smokey Robinson singing ‘‘To Know Her Is to Love Her,’’ you’d might come close to defining the aching beauty of ‘‘This Boy.’’ When the Beatles arrived in America on February 7, 1964 at the Kennedy Airport in New York, about 5,000 screaming fans besieged them. Nobody was truly prepared for the onslaught. As critic Greil Marcus would later recall, ‘‘Excitement wasn’t in the air; it was the air.’’8 Meanwhile, hordes of reporters, equally unprepared, gathered in the Pan American Lounge. ‘‘They started asking us funny questions,’’ Harrison remembered, ‘‘so we just started answering them with stupid answers.’’9 Some examples: Reporter: Lennon: Harrison:

Are you bald under those wigs? I’m bald. And deaf and dumb, too!

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Reporter: McCartney: Reporter: Beatles: Lennon: Reporter: Starr:

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Have you heard about the ‘‘Stamp Out the Beatles’’ campaign in Detroit? First off, we’re bringing out the ‘‘Stamp Out Detroit’’ campaign. Would you sing a song? No! We need money first. What do you think of Beethoven? Great! Especially his poems.

Unlike Elvis, who had to face massive stardom alone, the Beatles were a group. They could play off each other’s verbal skills the same way they could play off each other musically. Together they achieved a group mind rather than groupthink. You were always aware of their dissimilarity as individuals, disparately funny and irreverent, throwing the reporters off their game because the newsmen couldn’t find a sole target to hit. Once they conquered the press conference, the Beatles then whisked off to the Plaza Hotel to prepare for their American television debut. When the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday, February 9, 1964, it was the night America stopped mourning the death of their youthful President. A couple of months earlier, record producer Phil Spector thought he had the answer to America’s sorrow. He had released a joyous Christmas album that was filled with great rock ’n’ roll holiday songs by the Crystals, the Ronettes, and Darlene Love. Perhaps in a better time, the Crystals singing ‘‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’’ would have provided the appropriate yuletide spirit, but the album bombed. During the Christmas of 1963, one month after the murder of JFK, nobody cared if Santa ever came to town.10 But that Sunday evening in February, over 74 million American viewers were finally ready to move on, and share in the Beatles’ exhilarating appearance. They tuned in and bided their time with the cast of the Broadway production of Oliver! impressionist Frank Gorshin (who would ultimately play the Riddler on the 1966 spoof TV series Batman) and singer and banjo player Tessie O’Shea—but, who would remember them? From the moment Paul McCartney opened his mouth to sing ‘‘All My Loving,’’ everyone else became irrelevant. What came before, or what was to come after, wasn’t a consideration. There’s a place. And we had finally arrived there. What people heard was astonishingly new, a fresh vision of America coming right back to them. The spirit of the New Frontier, which many felt was left for dead in Dallas, was again sparkling with intensity. ‘‘The Beatles did something special—not so much to revive that American music from which they drew so much, but to add meaning to it,’’ Dave Marsh wrote. ‘‘Part of what America loved about the Beatles was that they appeared not as gods but as mortals whom the gods had blessed.’’11

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Their first daring marketing move, as blessed mortals, was to kick off with ‘‘All My Loving’’ rather than ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ the song that had just paved the path to their American arrival. In choosing ‘‘All My Loving,’’ a tune with no instrumental introduction, they made sure that their voices would make immediate contact with their television and studio audience. After following with the ballad ‘‘Till There Was You,’’ they tore excitedly into ‘‘She Loves You,’’ ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There,’’ and finally ‘‘I Want to Hold Her Hand.’’ That night, the Beatles cast an image on Ed Sullivan that was far removed from the sexually leering and dynamic provocations of the hip-shaking Elvis. ‘‘What America saw was an image of unaccustomed elegance,’’ wrote Albert Goldman in The Lives of John Lennon. ‘‘Accoutered in dark, tubular Edwardian suits that exaggerated the stiff, buttoned-up carriage of these young Englishmen, the Beatles resembled four long-haired classical musicians, like Pro Musica Antiqua, playing electric lutes and rebecs and taking deep formal bows after each rendition.’’12 Goldman described Lennon as ‘‘looking positively dignified, his aquiline nose and full face giving him the appearance of a Renaissance nobleman.’’13 While the viewing audience was enthralled, the critics were less than enthusiastic. The New York Times thought the Beatles were basically a fad. The Herald Tribune thought they’d bombed. Newsweek called their music a disaster, lacking in rhythm, and only expressing naive romantic sentiments. The Washington Post, in the same American city that first launched ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ described them as homely and asexual. While most parents were concerned about the group’s long hair, there were many who found their image too clean and innocent. For a band that had forged their identity in dark clubs and basements, how could they look that innocent? ‘‘[They] look so innocent because they are absorbing the innocence of those around them, reveling in the last time that they will ever be so new to an audience, that any audience will ever be so new to them,’’ Devin McKinney remarked.14 The Beatles connected with the mass audience in a completely new way. They didn’t cater to audiences in the traditional manner of most performers, who would coddle their partisan crowd in order to win their loyalty. The Beatles did something that would ultimately prove more dangerous—they set out to change people’s lives. The band’s impact carried a powerful potency that not only lifted a nation out of its sorrow but also created in its place an opportunity for people to step out of their own shadow and into the limelight of Nowhere Land. Arthur Lee, who within a few years would launch the Los Angeles psychedelic band Love, was in his 27th Street living room convinced that he’d found his freedom the night he saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Guitarist Joe Walsh sat in front of his television, his head bobbing excitedly to the music, saying ‘‘Yes!’’ while his parents shook theirs, ‘‘No!’’ In his Florida home, the young Tom Petty claimed that he was considering becoming a farmer until he had an epiphany while watching The Ed Sullivan Show.

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He, too, wanted to play a guitar in front of live crowds. John Sebastian recalled that the Lovin’ Spoonful, who would merge jug band blues, folk, and rock ’n’ roll, was born the night he saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan at Cass Elliot’s house. It was there that he met future cofounder Zal Yanovsky. The Beatles’ appearance provided an indelible moment for one Vincent Furnier, who would later be reborn as Alice Cooper. ‘‘I just sat there in my living room in Phoenix with a huge smile on my face,’’ Cooper told Johnny Black of Mojo. ‘‘My parents looked like they were in the audience of ‘Springtime For Hitler’ from The Producers.’’15 That same year, Furnier would start his own band called the Earwigs with some of his pals. They donned some Beatle wigs and entered the school talent show. ‘‘We were so bad,’’ he recalled. ‘‘[B]ut I loved the attention. Girls started talking to me [and] I got hooked on the limelight. That’s why I went into rock ’n’ roll, for fame and sex.’’16 Dee Snider, of Twisted Sister, never got to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan because of his father banning television in the home. ‘‘The energy at school the next day was so intense over that performance that, based just on what I was hearing, I said, ‘I’m gonna be a Beatle,’ ’’ Snider declared in Uncut. ‘‘I subsequently became a serious Beatle fan. Eventually, I found out I couldn’t be a Beatle. I had to be a rock star.’’ 17 He would dramatize that transformation in the video for his 1984 hit song ‘‘We’re Not Gonna Take It.’’ As for the many young girls who gave the Beatles their screams, they may not have had ambitions to be rock stars, but their hysteria was never harmless—or innocent. ‘‘The spectacle was not tender but warlike,’’ critic Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in Sonata for Jukebox. ‘‘The oscillation between glassy-eyed entrancement and emotional explosion, the screams that were like chants and the bouts of weeping that were like acts of aggression, the aura of impending upheaval that promised the breaking down of doors and the shattering of glass: this was love that could tear apart its object.’’18 You could feel in that hurricane of love the possibility of someone being torn apart, as easily as someone being embraced. Author Steve Turner also saw, within that potentially violent dynamic, these screams as a response to the Beatles’ call for total freedom. ‘‘The call to freedom that came from the Beatles led these girls into a state of abandon,’’ Turner wrote in The Gospel according to the Beatles. ‘‘For the duration of the concert they could completely ignore society’s rules for appropriate conduct.’’19 Within the shouting and wailing was also the sensation of being transported into another place, the place Lennon had defined for listeners in ‘‘There’s a Place.’’ It was a state of consciousness where, for the duration of the concert, fans were no longer bound by the constraints of reality. The impact of Beatlemania that weekend of The Ed Sullivan Show became the subject of a charming 1978 comedy by Robert Zemeckis (Used Cars, Back to the Future) called I Wanna Hold Your Hand. The film follows six New Jersey teenagers who scheme to get to New York and meet the Beatles.

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Written with Bob Gale, who also shared credit on Used Cars and Back to the Future, Zemeckis affectionately treats the quest of this motley group of friends as a coming-of-age story where the Beatles’ visit dramatically alters their lives. Of course, nothing goes as planned. Rosie (Wendie Jo Sperber) who is crazed about the Beatles never actually gets to see them. Pam (Nancy Allen), who is planning to get married and takes the trip as a reluctant participant, ends up in the Beatles’ hotel room caressing Paul McCartney’s bass guitar. Tony (Bobby Di Ciccio), who represents the last vestige of fifties’ greaserdom, loathes the group, yet he finds an unlikely ally in Janis (Susan Kendall Newman), a folkie who initially hates the commercialism of pop. I Wanna Hold Your Hand cleverly illustrates how the Beatles united a generation by creating cultural alternatives that transformed our value system. Although the film has little of the inspired slapstick of some of Zemeckis’s later work (especially the comic peaks he reached in the tall-tale outrageousness of Used Cars), I Wanna Hold Your Hand still affectionately captures a moment when people’s lives were shaped by pop dreams. It’s a genial look at the stalking of pop stars, where benevolent, eager teenagers get caught up in the thrill of having their lives touched by experiences larger than themselves. But the film does ultimately cast its own nightmare shadow, and not just in the stalking murder of John Lennon two years after the film was released. Theresa Saldana, one of the performers in I Wanna Hold Your Hand, plays Grace, an aspiring photojournalist out to get the perfect picture of the Beatles, the one that would make her career. Yet, tragically, her career became defined by becoming a victim of a similarly determined celebrity stalker almost a decade later. After being stabbed repeatedly by a crazed fan who obsessed over her for years, Saldana eventually recovered, but not just to continue her acting career. She ultimately became an advocate helping other victims of violence, innocent prey who were no longer sure that they could trust holding anyone’s hand. The Beatles’ first American concert took place at the Washington Coliseum on February 11, in a sports arena that seated close to 18,000 people. While the centre was overflowing with typically enthusiastic fans, the group played on a small stage in the round, which meant their equipment had to move every few songs while the stage rotated. The opening acts were Tommy Roe (‘‘Sheila’’), who had played with them in the United Kingdom, the Caravelles, and the Chiffons. When the Beatles hit the stage, McCartney happily greeted the crowd, as Harrison quickly launched into ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven,’’ sending the crowd into delirium. While spirits were soaring, with the band cheerfully soaking up the adulation, they experienced the first pangs of violence, an undercurrent of what lay beneath the surface of all the wild deification. As the excitement built, from number to number, the band started to quickly react to the piercing pain of small objects striking them on the head. As the band looked from side to side, they saw that they were being pelted by jelly babies. Harrison had recently announced in an interview done

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back in Britain that jelly babies were his favorite candy. Now these American fans were knocking them senseless, literally killing them with sweetness. These tasty treats may have been tossed as an expression of love, of sweet devotion, but McCartney, feeling the sting of that love as the tiny treats struck his skin, described these love offerings as ‘‘coming [at us] like bullets from all directions.’’20 In a country where, three months earlier, bullets had struck down a President who was deeply loved, the irony was likely not lost on McCartney. But his description of the candy was also quite literal because the American jelly babies had harder shells, unlike the softer variety in the United Kingdom. Either way, it was becoming clear that the Beatles weren’t simply the object of an audience’s love, they were also its target. As the stage continued to rotate, from song to song, the band vainly tried to duck these little missiles that were now coming from all directions. After the show, the band gathered at British Embassy party to celebrate their success. The event was filled with political dignitaries, the kind the Beatles went out of their way to usually avoid, a masked ball with champagne flowing. If the party began with a sense of personal pride about the great reception they received in America, the Beatles soon began to feel as if they were animals in a petting zoo, being taunted by little children. As they slowly made their way through the crowd of embassy officials, people began touching them eagerly as if they were holy men on a sojourn. One drunken woman even went so far as to throw herself at the group. Later in the evening, after the Beatles agreed to announce the winners of an embassy raffle, one bold debutante came up behind Ringo and clipped off some of his hair. The weapons of choice in the concert audience had been an offering of sweets, but the Beatles now encountered something more bittersweet. They discovered within themselves a vulnerability they didn’t have in their days in Hamburg. On the nightclub stage, their leather jackets had provided an emblem of toughness, a means of standing up to the drunken louts who taunted them. But in their formal suits, they appeared to this Wasp enclave as cute ornaments to be fussed over, tamed, and with a cut of the hair, symbolically castrated. They furiously exited the party and vowed they would never attend such a function ever again. After the concert in Washington, the Beatles took the train back to New York to play two shows at Carnegie Hall on February 12. No rock act had ever performed there before—including Elvis Presley. But the train ride was filled with fawning journalists and sycophants trying to get on with the band. On the way back to New York, the Beatles were feeling besieged and overwhelmed. There was nowhere to hide. The screaming throng in Washington was handled diplomatically, but once at Carnegie Hall, the group realized that no one was listening to the music. In Hamburg, the group used the power of their sound and their improvised stagecraft to get the audience’s attention. The whole point was to be heard, to prove that the attention was warranted. Now the Beatles found that they had

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everybody’s attention, but without being heard. It was becoming a one-sided conversation. This had left Lennon particularly exasperated. Late in the show, leaning into the microphone, he defiantly told the crowd to shut up. But the crowd was too busy hearing itself to witness Lennon’s frustration. The Beatles were eventually relieved when they headed for Miami, for rest and sun, before playing their second Ed Sullivan Show from Miami Beach. David and Albert Maysles as part of their documentary, The Beatles First U.S. Visit, were filming the whole event, the Beatles landing in New York, their appearance on Ed Sullivan, the Washington concert, and the private moments in between. Originally it was presented as a 40-minute segment on both American and British television in 1964. In that version, we could see the traces of doubt within the euphoria. McCartney is seen concerned about the group becoming marketing fodder. Lennon is growing reticent with the incessant questioning. Those scenes though are curiously missing from the Apple-approved VHS and DVD releases, which feature a longer cut than the television version. After helping to usher in the Beatles’ hurricane of love, the Maysles would eventually bring in the hurricane of hate with their documentary Gimme Shelter (1970), about the Rolling Stones’ 1969 tour of America. The climatic show, at the Altamont Speedway, ended in tragedy with the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter at the hands of the Hells Angels, who had been hired as security. On February 22, the Beatles arrived at Heathrow Airport in London, to a huge crowd of celebrating Brits welcoming home their conquering heroes. The Beatles may have accomplished something that no other British pop act had ever done before in America, but that victory was starting to come at a hard-earned price. In March 1964, fresh from conquering America, the Beatles found themselves toasted by the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who heralded them as part of a cultural revolution at a Variety Club luncheon at the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane. Although Wilson’s comments were certainly apt, it was clear to everyone in the room that the Conservatives were still in a free-fall from the Profumo scandal that had rocked the government’s confidence to lead. What better way to earn some cachet but to jump on the Beatle bandwagon. As for the group, the bandwagon they built didn’t concern itself with the expedient behavior of the government, or their public. The Beatles were mounting a stage that continued to expand, emanating sounds yet unheard, daring themselves and listeners to risk territory untried. They didn’t define success by the victories they scored with each new record, or each new concert. Success was a process whereby they would find new means to add to what they’d already done before. Sometimes that meant building new sounds on the ones they learned from their antecedents. Those brave new steps would begin with their next single ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’’ which they had begun recording in Paris back in January, and then

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completed when they returned home from America. Composed largely by McCartney, ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love’’ is a basic eight-bar blues that’s given a pulsating and dazzling jazz swing arrangement. The theme expresses something new in the group’s work. An element of doubt is introduced when they suggest that money and success will get you anything you want. In ‘‘Money (That’s What I Want),’’ Lennon had declared a belief that money would set him free (even if he knew it would do nothing of the sort). ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love’’ made explicit what ‘‘Money’’ tucked beneath the surface. McCartney sings with the same romantic passion he gave to ‘‘All My Loving,’’ but the youthful innocence of that song wanes comparatively here. While declaring that love lies beyond the spoils of cash and diamond rings, he expresses fear that she may not believe him. As in ‘‘She Loves You,’’ ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love’’ begins with the chorus rather than the verse, and it ends exactly the same way. But ‘‘She Loves You’’ concluded with a brimming optimism about the romantic future of the couple in question. ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love’’ ends somewhat desperately with the hope that money won’t co-opt her. McCartney’s voice withers away on the word ‘‘love,’’ while Ringo bashes his symbol removing McCartney from his doubts. The B-side, ‘‘You Can’t Do That,’’ is Lennon’s own version of romantic doubt. But where McCartney always hopes for the best, even under the worst circumstances, Lennon expects the worst and becomes overjoyed if things turn out for the better. Like ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’’ ‘‘You Can’t Do That’’ is also an eight-bar blues, but Lennon’s approach is aggressive and punchy rather than swinging. McCartney’s song is a declaration of love that decries possession (as well as with material possessions). Lennon’s view in ‘‘You Can’t Do That’’ is the opposite, possessive and jealous, even threatening his woman for talking to another man. The tune is in many ways a precursor to the later ‘‘Run For Your Life,’’ where beneath the singer’s romantic possession lies the possibility of murder. Despite the powerfully assertive kick of the track, ‘‘You Can’t Do That’’ has its desperate side, just like ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love.’’ For all his gruff demands, it turns out that Lennon’s vulnerability gives the lie to his idle threats. ‘‘Lennon knew something about jealousy, and as the lyric goes on and on about what this girl cannot do, what becomes more and more apparent is that she can, and she is, and she very well may continue,’’ Dave Marsh writes in The Beatles’ Second Album.21 While the new single was being released toward the end of March, they spent the rest of that month (and early June) recording an EP (extended play) that included some of the formative songs they played in Hamburg. The EP was the middle ground between a single and an LP, where four or five tracks could be released on one disc. The Beatles’ first EP, Long Tall Sally, was released in June 1964, just before they headed out on their first world tour. It was mostly a triumphant testament to their love for rock ’n’ roll. Although Lennon first heard Little Richard’s ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ in the spring of 1957, while at Quarry Bank, Paul McCartney, who made the song his own from

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the time the Quarry Men first performed it at the Casbah Club on August 29, 1959, ultimately claimed it. ‘‘Little Richard didn’t make records to be appreciated or even whistled along to,’’ Steve Turner wrote in The Gospel according to the Beatles. ‘‘He made records to ravage the senses.’’22 ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ had created a frenzy for the senses but with a powerful gospel urgency. Originally titled ‘‘Bald Headed Sally,’’ this rocker followed on the heels of Little Richard’s raucous ‘‘Tutti Frutti.’’ Recorded in New Orleans in 1956, the racy lyrics, which hinted at transvestitism, came by way of a young teenage girl named Enortis Johnson, as Richard and Bumps Blackwell provided the rollicking backbeat. When he recorded ‘‘Long Tall Sally,’’ Little Richard was still bristling that Pat Boone’s languid version of ‘‘Tutti Frutti’’ had outsold his. During each take of the song, Richard drove the band faster and faster, convinced that the quicker he spit out the lyrics, Boone would never get his mouth around them. It was all in vain, though. Once again, Boone’s version outsold his. If ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ was Lennon’s tear-at-your-soul rave-up, ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ became McCartney’s soul driver. McCartney doesn’t go for any raw truths in this song, as Lennon would in ‘‘Twist and Shout,’’ or as he did in Smokey Robinson’s ‘‘You Really Got a Hold on Me.’’ ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ is basically a wild tale that takes place on a Saturday night. McCartney takes a showman’s pleasure in telling that story. He shares with Little Richard an unabashed desire to take flight, digging the felicity of losing control. Lennon could sometimes take you to the heart of hysteria, daring you to share in the freedom he found (as well as having us share in his fear of losing it), but with ‘‘Long Tall Sally,’’ McCartney doesn’t dare the listener, he cheerfully turns hysteria into cheap thrills. ‘‘Paul starts at a peak above Richard’s normal wild search for ecstasy,’’ writes Dave Marsh of ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ in The Beatles’ Second Album. ‘‘McCartney’s already found his, and he’s celebrating it, not sneaking around in any back alley, but bringing the alley out front.’’ 23 The Beatles would nail this number in one take with George Martin letting his hair down on the rocking piano. Inevitably, ‘‘Twist and Shout’’ would open their shows, but ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ justifiably became their concert closer. In 1958, Lennon composed ‘‘I Call Your Name’’ in a ska arrangement that resembles Barbie Gaye’s 1957 ‘‘My Boy Lollipop,’’ which the Jamaican singer Millie Small would rescue from obscurity three weeks after the Beatles charted ‘‘I Call Your Name.’’ As in ‘‘Please Mr. Postman,’’ Lennon draws emotional currency from his past, speaking to his lover through an emotional hailstorm that’s filled with unresolved currents of sadness, rage, and yearning. In 1958, McCartney channeled his own grief over his mother’s death in ‘‘I’ve Lost My Little Girl,’’ a song where he sought a place to overcome his sorrow. Lennon, on the other hand, went right to the root of his own pain, lending more depth to his unrequited desires. ‘‘Matchbox’’ is an agreeable cover of a 1958 Carl Perkins’ song, which was lifted from Blind

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Lemon Jefferson’s 1927 ‘‘Matchbox Blues.’’ Perkins, who wrote the definitive rock anthem ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes,’’ was a contemporary of Elvis Presley. Unfortunately for Perkins, the song ended up as a hit for Elvis. Perkins was badly injured in a car accident in 1956, so the King got to record it first. ‘‘Matchbox’’ is a rockabilly tune with comical overtones. It’s about being so forlorn that, while you may have a matchbox, you’ve got no matches inside. As he did with ‘‘Boys,’’ Ringo had performed ‘‘Matchbox’’ in Hamburg with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Unfortunately, he doesn’t whip up much of a storm with this rendition. Possibly because Perkins arrived at the Beatles’ session, Ringo became too self-conscious. But likely his rather lackluster performance was due to an impending illness. He would go into the hospital with tonsillitis two days after the session. If Ringo lacks the required spirit here, Harrison certainly acquires it. With Perkins being one of his guitar mentors, Harrison plays with flavor and personality, punctuating each note and giving the song a definite kick. For Perkins, however good or bad the cover was, the arrival of the Beatles was a significant boost to an interest in rockabilly music. ‘‘The Beatles and the Rolling Stones sort of saved rockabilly when it could have been lost forever,’’ Perkins remarked. ‘‘It was really in danger of dying a fast death in the early 1960s . . .they put a nice suit on it and they never strayed from its basic simplicity. They just made it a lot more sophisticated.’’ 24 As for his own comments on the Beatles’ cover of his song? ‘‘I saw the prettiest dollar sign I had seen in my life,’’ he remarked with a wink.25 ‘‘Slow Down’’ is the first of three Larry Williams’ covers that Lennon would sing with the Beatles, including ‘‘Bad Boy’’ and ‘‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie.’’ Along with Little Richard, Williams was a rock ’n’ roll raver on Specialty Records in the fifties. Beginning as a valet for Lloyd Price (‘‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’’), Specialty founder Art Rube decided to turn Williams into a facsimile of Little Richard, with the help of his A&R man, Sonny Bono, beginning with Williams’ version of Price’s ‘‘Just Because.’’ He’d follow with two smash singles, ‘‘Short Fat Fannie’’ and ‘‘Bony Moronie,’’ cut from the same cloth as Little Richard’s rockers. To compare, you could say that Williams was to Lennon what Little Richard was to McCartney—a man who liked to strut his stuff. Sadly, the Beatles’ performance of Williams’ 1958 hit lacks the cohesive fire of their Little Richard cover of ‘‘Long Tall Sally.’’ The mono mix of ‘‘Slow Down,’’ heard on the American LP Something New (now available on CD), does bury a multitude of sins. But the stereo mix, heard on the official EMI singles CD The Beatles Past Masters, Volume One, is a disaster. Lennon’s double-tracked voice is so high in the stereo version that it lays bare the previously recorded band track. He sounds as if he’s out of sync with the group. While Harrison is left inexplicably playing rhythm guitar, Lennon’s lead guitar solo is so painfully inept that it sounds like he’s only just getting acquainted with the instrument. ‘‘Slow Down’’ is arguably one of George Martin’s worst production

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efforts. His overdubbed piano, for instance, which usually provides some propulsion, is so plodding it sounds like he’s tripping over the keys. After showing some good marketing acumen under Paul White in the beginning, Capitol Records Canada clumsily tripped over their own feet just before the Long Tall Sally EP was released in England on June 19, 1964. While Canada didn’t issue EPs, as did Britain, they decided to scatter the songs over a couple of releases. After Beatlemania! With The Beatles and Twist and Shout, they put out an LP called Long Tall Sally in May 1964 (in the same cover design of the United States’ The Beatles’ Second Album), incomprehensibly repeating the songs ‘‘You Really Got a Hold on Me,’’ ‘‘Devil in Her Heart,’’ ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven,’’ and ‘‘Please Mr. Postman’’ from Beatlemania! With The Beatles. They added the singles ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ and ‘‘This Boy’’ to the album, along with ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There’’ and ‘‘Misery’’ (left off Twist and Shout). Two of the songs from the Long Tall Sally EP (‘‘Long Tall Sally,’’ ‘‘I Call Your Name’’) made their appearance here. After that album, the Canadian albums conformed to the U.S. bastardized releases. The Beatles had now deeply penetrated the public’s imagination, enkindling the audience’s dreams by drawing new maps of untold excitement. As the British Invasion of musical artists began entering America’s revolving door, the Beatles decided to walk through another door. The step they took was to move right into the ultimate dream factory. Just as the mythology of the Beatles was beginning to bloom, they began to seal their myth by making a movie. ‘‘The first rock and roll movies had little or nothing to do with rock and roll music, and everything to do with the rock and roll ethos,’’ wrote Greil Marcus in his assessment of the genre.26 That ethos he describes was present in many fifties’ pictures where adolescents were no longer accepting the proscribed values of the status quo. You could see it in Marlon Brando’s defiance in The Wild One (1953), where when asked about what he was rebelling against, he replied, ‘‘Whaddya got?’’ You could recognize it in the painfully vulnerable James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), as he attempts to wake up his incognizant parents to the misunderstood youth they were alienating. Rock ’n’ roll was practically embroidered into the fabric of those movies. According to Marcus, though, its power wasn’t fully comprehended until Bill Haley and the Comets drove home the combined sociological screeds of The Wild One and Rebel in The Blackboard Jungle (1955), with its blast of ‘‘Rock Around the Clock.’’ After that, aspiring rock artists started lining up to see their possible future on the silver screen; and John Lennon began thinking that maybe this was a cool job. The Beatles were first turned on by The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), which featured Little Richard in the opening credits singing the title song. The plot was largely superfluous, but significantly, it was about how the music business was run

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by the mob (giving a whole new meaning to the word hit men). Besides grooving to Little Richard, Gene Vincent, the Platters, and Eddie Cochran, youngsters also swooned as the buxom bombshell Jayne Mansfield strutted by in her tight clothes, clutching milk bottles to her heaving breasts. In 1956, having been one of those kids first stunned by Brando, Elvis Presley stepped onto the screen in the Civil War drama Love Me Tender, where two brothers fought over politics and the love of Debra Paget. His elegiac ballad, ‘‘Love Me Tender’’ maybe even planted the early seeds for McCartney’s ‘‘Yesterday.’’ But it was his role as the violent rockabilly singer Vince Everett in 1957’s Jailhouse Rock where the rock ethos fused effortlessly with the music. From there, just as the rock movie began, it seemed almost over. Except for the tabloid chic of High School Confidential (1958), which delved pruriently into a teen dope ring, it was the sanitized Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party movies and Elvis’s decline in Hollywood. When the Beatles considered doing their own film, they wanted it to be more than a mediocre formula flick. Having watched fellow Brit Cliff Richard traipse about like an airbrushed Presley in the glorified travelogue Summer Holiday (1963), the Beatles wanted something that might define who they were, or at least, what we might perceive them to be. The end result of their quest became the genre-defining A Hard Day’s Night, and the road leading there came about by shrewd business strategies. In 1963, United Artists was aware that Capitol Records in the United States had been refusing to issue the Beatles’ recordings. This meant that there was no provision being made for sound track records in case the Fab Four ever wanted to make a movie. Since United Artists were convinced of the Beatles’ ultimate international success, they proposed signing the group to a three-picture deal. If the Beatles agreed, United Artists was set up to release three sound track albums (which the studio assumed would go through the roof even if the films flopped). Noel Rodgers, who was the A&R man for United Artists in England, and Bud Orenstein, who served in their film division, drew up a contract that would ultimately net United Artists not only a superb Beatles’ record but a hit movie made for under a half million dollars. There was no way they could lose. After James Bond producer Harry Saltzman turned down United Artists’ offer to work on A Hard Day’s Night, the studio approached Walter Shenson. Shenson was an American expat, a producer at United Artists, whose claim to fame was casting Peter Sellers in the social satire, The Mouse That Roared (1959). ‘‘United Artists approached me when they apparently found out that the contract between Capitol Records and the Beatles didn’t cover movie soundtracks,’’ Shenson said. ‘‘They wanted to cash in on the Beatle craze, so the movie was just an excuse to release an album.’’27 Shenson introduced the group to another American, the 32-year-old director Richard Lester, who brought the same exuberant pop inventiveness to his films that the Beatles were bringing to pop music. Lester was from Philadelphia, a

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precocious kid who started grade school at the age of three. While he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in clinical psychology, he did some part-time work as a stagehand in a local TV studio. Quickly, he developed an interest in directing, becoming successful in his new trade at CBS. Having both studied music and played in a band, Lester toured Europe where he ultimately settled in England, and he continued his work as a TV director. He began with his own comedy show, The Dick Lester Show, before developing an association with Peter Sellers. This led to the production of a series of wildly comic TV programs capped by The Goon Show in 1958. Aside from his connection to the Goons, which drew the interest of the Beatles, Lester had also directed a wildly innovative slapstick short, The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film (1960), which was packed with the kinds of sight gags that would inspire A Hard Day’s Night. ‘‘I was the right film director for them,’’ Lester said candidly. ‘‘I chose them. They chose me. They’d seen a short film of mine [The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film]. They knew I’d made a pop film [It’s Trad Dad] before that. They knew. . .I would understand them musically.’’28 While the film was being negotiated in October 1963, Liverpool playwright Alun Owen was brought in to fashion a screenplay around a day in the life of the group. Owen came from the school of working-class kitchensink realism that had spawned Arnold Wesker and John Osborne. Some of his plays were adapted to television—like No Trams to Lime—a grim drama that had Shenson wondering if Owen could bring the levity required for the Beatles’ first picture. But Owen successfully caught hold of the band’s comic potential by following them while they toured Dublin and Belfast, observing them in the fervor of Beatlemania. Early in 1964, Owen, Walter Shenson, and Richard Lester then went to Paris where the Beatles were doing the Olympia concert with Silvie Varton. At the George V Hotel, they watched the group being prisoners in their own hotel room and conducting themselves as a comic troupe under the most adverse circumstances. They knew that this would be the heart of the movie. The story could then be about the Beatles scrambling through their professional life, escaping screaming fans, signing autographs, and rehearsing for a television special. The black-and-white movie opens with the definitive chime of George Harrison’s guitar, popping like a starter’s gun about to begin a race, which it does, as the Beatles are seen being pursued by shrieking fans through the street. As they scramble, falling and laughing, exhilarated by the attention, they roar through a train station. The title song calls forth both the intense enjoyment of the moment and the relief awaiting when they finally arrive home. The Beatles charging through the station becomes a true test, daring the crowd to catch up, leaving us to wonder what might happen if they did. As the cat-and-mouse game continues, Paul McCartney sits in the station, with his grandfather, reading a newspaper while disguised by a goatee not far removed from the one he’d grow for Sgt. Pepper in 1967.

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In 1964, though, McCartney’s disguise is part of the game. In 1967, the beard would be part of a transformation, an escape from the game set forth between the band and their fans in A Hard Day’s Night. For now, the group enjoyed being Beatles and the movie celebrates the genial side of Beatlemania. But it’s not all geniality. There’s a cheeky side to this picture, too, that shows the band as quick-witted when they face adversity. Whether it’s the press or an elder gentleman on a train who objects to their manner, the Beatles don’t back down or become patently cute. When the upper-class gentleman in the train car, who’s offended by the rock music on their transistor radio, tells them that he fought the war for their sort, Ringo quips, ‘‘I bet you’re sorry you won.’’ The only dramatic tension in the picture comes from whether they’ll make it to the TV show—and pull it off. Of course, they do, and in the end, they fly off in a helicopter with group photos falling to the ground below like confetti at a coronation. That’s what A Hard Day’s Night becomes, a celebration of the Beatles rising up in the sky, to (what John Lennon would often call) the toppermost of the poppermost. ‘‘The film, probably more than their music, took the Beatles across social barriers, won them an audience among the intelligentsia,’’ wrote Greil Marcus. ‘‘[It] broadened their hardcore base from teenage girls to rock ’n’ roll fans of every description—if rock ’n’ roll was about fun, then this movie was rock ’n’ roll.’’29 Lester began shooting the film from March 2, 1964 until late April, with the chase scene done around Paddington and Marylebone Station on the west side of central London. Wilfred Brambell, who had played the ‘‘dirty old man’’ character on the popular British TV sitcom, Steptoe and Son (which would provide the template for the American version, Sanford and Son), played Paul’s Irish grandfather. All through the film, a big deal is made about how ‘‘clean’’ he is in reference to his role on Steptoe. The teenage fans were brought in from a number of London theater schools. When two million preorders for the sound track were made before the film even premiered, it was clear that United Artists’ hunch had panned out. A Hard Day’s Night brought out a new sophistication in their music. Moving from the bright optimism of ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ ‘‘She Loves You,’’ and ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ the band starts writing love songs about ambiguity (‘‘If I Fell,’’ ‘‘I Should Have Known Better’’), incrimination (‘‘You Can’t Do That’’), and reflection (‘‘Things We Said Today’’). While the film happily and successfully solidified the myth of the Beatles, their music began to define the complex contours of their work. A Hard Day’s Night is the first (and only) Beatles’ album featuring all Lennon and McCartney originals—and they were mostly written before having read the screenplay. It was the first album recorded on four-track machines allowing for more intricate dubbing and mixing. ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night’’ provided the title of the movie and was based on one of Ringo’s many malapropisms (making him the Yogi Berra of the band). The title

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arose when Lennon was having lunch with Walter Shenson and he mentioned the phrase to Shenson, who was immediately taken with it. The problem was that there was no song written called ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night.’’ Although Lennon and McCartney had finished all the tracks for the movie, Shenson wanted one with the film’s new title. Lennon asked him if it needed to reflect the story, and Shenson said no. According to Maureen Cleave, a journalist at the Evening Standard (who later did the interview that contained Lennon’s controversial remark that the Beatles being more popular than Jesus), Lennon brought the lyrics to the studio on April 16, 1964, written on the back of a birthday card to his son Julian. While humming some unfinished portions to the group, the band gathered together and completed ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night’’ in three hours. ‘‘It seemed a bit ridiculous writing a song called ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’’’ McCartney told reporters in the United States while promoting the picture, ‘‘because it sounded a funny phrase at the time but the idea came of saying that it had been a hard day’s night and we’d been working all day and you get back to a girl and everything’s fine.’’30 The conflicting temperaments of Lennon and McCartney fused beautifully once again in this song. Where Lennon describes the struggle of working hard all day, McCartney responds to the hope of getting back home. Richard Lester liked the title of the song being the title of the movie since it captured the mad pace of the group in the eye of the hurricane. Lennon would use the phrase in his story ‘‘Sad Michael’’ from his Edward Lear–inspired book, In His Own Write (‘‘He’d had a hard days [sic] night that day . . .’’), released later in the year. Besides being a #1 single in the United Kingdom and the United States, ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night’’ would be covered (like ‘‘She Loves You’’) by Peter Sellers who recited the lyric ‘‘as he were Laurence Olivier delivering a Shakespearean monologue.’’31 ‘‘I Should Have Known Better’’ is a brief throwback to the spirit of ‘‘From Me to You,’’ including the winsome harmonica opening and a sprightly Lennon vocal. After the opening credits featuring the title song, ‘‘I Should Have Known Better’’ is the first track performed in the picture while the Beatles are playing cards in the train baggage car. ‘‘If I Fell’’ is a lovely, yet pensive ballad, written by Lennon in mid-February, a song he rightfully considered a precursor to ‘‘In My Life’’ (even sharing the same chord sequences). ‘‘If I Fell’’ is about an affair where the singer is asking the girl that he desires whether she’ll love him more—if he leaves his wife. With that in mind, ‘‘If I Fell’’ provided a affecting moment in Alan Parker’s hardhitting film Shoot the Moon (1982), where Albert Finney and Diane Keaton play a middle-class married couple coming apart after the husband has an affair with a younger woman. When he leaves her, Keaton sits mournfully in a bathtub singing ‘‘If I Fell’’ to herself, smoking a joint, as her voice cracks on the most painful, significant lyrics. Those lyrics refer back to the sentiments of ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ where the mysteries of romance seemed so enticing. Now the singer discovers that holding hands isn’t quite

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enough to define the intricacy of romance. Critic Tim Riley hears the consequences of romantic yearning, when the singer realizes that he’ll be leaving his girl to cry if he continues this affair. ‘‘‘If I Fell’ takes a simple secondtime-around scenario and wrings a song of real consequence from its emotional implications,’’ Riley wrote.32 Ian MacDonald thought ‘‘If I Fell’’ was a perfect example of how Lennon’s way of working out a song differed from his partner. ‘‘While one can imagine McCartney arriving at many of his tunes independently, only afterwards going to a guitar or piano to work out the chords,’’ MacDonald wrote. ‘‘Lennon’s melodies feel their way through their harmonies in the style of a sleepwalker, evolving the unconventional sequences and metrically broken phrasing typical of him.’’33 The ballad gets performed to Ringo while the band is rehearsing in the TV studio for their special. Apparently, Lester couldn’t figure any other place in the film to place the song. ‘‘I’m Happy Just to Dance With You,’’ an infectious Latin-flavored tune about seducing a woman onto the dance floor, was written for George to sing. Harrison brings his characteristic rueful shyness to his performance, as Lennon and McCartney’s harmonies cheer him on. ‘‘And I Love Her’’ is a strikingly affirmative number composed by McCartney as an exercise to see if he could write a love serenade that began in mid-sentence. It’s a song that demonstrates how much he learned about balladry by performing ‘‘Till There Was You.’’ ‘‘Tell Me Why’’ returns the Beatles to the girl group origins of ‘‘Chains’’ and ‘‘Boys,’’ illustrating how far they’d come in creating their own versions of those tracks. By Lennon’s standards, ‘‘Tell Me Why’’ is an impersonal song, but it’s such an apt demonstration of the group’s total command of harmony that you can be easily fooled into thinking that it’s about something that actually matters. ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love’’ was included in the movie for one of the most memorable scenes, where the group escapes the controlled environment of the studio, to frolic on the playing fields of Isleworth behind the Odeon Hammersmith. ‘‘Any Time at All’’ is a Lennon powerhouse classic that revisits, with a whole new authority, the sentiments of ‘‘It Won’t Be Long.’’ Albert Goldman rightfully calls ‘‘Any Time at All’’ the ‘‘most exciting song in the Beatles’ first film score.’’34 Punctuated by Ringo’s pistol-shot drumbeat, Lennon’s voice is all urgency. According to Goldman, he seems ‘‘like an ecstatic dancing about in the flames because he stems from a cooler culture, but the self-intoxicated thrust of his voice burns with the real gospel frenzy.’’35 Goldman is wrong, though, when he suggests that Lennon is less sincere when offering his undying support for the girl. Lennon balances, in the sheer beauty of his voice, both the brutal world that shaped him and the utopian world he wishes to create for himself. On the instrumental break, George Martin adds a plaintive piano melody that mirrors handsomely Harrison’s guitar line. Martin would describe his technique in Rolling Stone as providing a sustained note. ‘‘That note was what I used to

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call a wound up piano,’’ he explained. ‘‘And I used to do it with George’s guitar. You would slow down the track to half speed, play the piano right down to the bottom, then bring it back up to normal again—and that would sustain and make the note twice as long.’’36 Lennon’s ‘‘I’ll Cry Instead’’ is a country-flavored song about romantic loss which carries the same vindictive quality as ‘‘You Can’t Do That.’’ It was originally considered for the Beatles’ breakout sequence in the film, but it was relegated to the soundtrack album because of its dour tone. When the film was remastered for video in 1986, the song was used in a pre-credit montage created by Walter Shenson. ‘‘Things We Said Today’’ is one of McCartney’s strongest ballads. The sentiment he expresses here of living in the future, so he can better understand things of value in the past, is surprisingly somber. He would bring a similar pensive perspective to ‘‘The Song We Were Singing’’ on his 1997 solo album Flaming Pie. ‘‘When I Get Home’’ was written by Lennon as a tribute to American R&B, with an obvious nod to Marvin Gaye’s ‘‘Can I Get a Witness.’’ The song covers the same ground as ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night’’ in expressing the desire of finding sanctuary in the arms of a loved one after a long day at work. But ‘‘You Can’t Do That’’ was also dropped from the film possibly because, like ‘‘I’ll Cry Instead,’’ it has an angry rancorous edge that plays against the celebratory spirit in the film. John Lennon’s ‘‘I’ll Be Back,’’ based on Del Shannon’s 1961 hit ‘‘Runaway,’’ concludes the record with a tinge of uncertainty. In his best songs, including ‘‘Runaway,’’ ‘‘Stranger in Town,’’ and ‘‘Hats Off to Larry,’’ Shannon sang in a friendless voice. His stark power emanated from the paranoia brought on by unrequited and lost love. Listening to Del Shannon, who would ultimately commit suicide, is akin to getting periodic bulletins from a desperate hitchhiker who cruises aimlessly from town to town, chasing phantoms and hopelessly seeking answers for why his loved one was now lost to him. His famous high falsetto didn’t express longing, as the doo-wop vocalists of the fifties did in their songs, Shannon instead carried the anguish of never finding a release from his pain. In ‘‘I’ll Be Back,’’ Lennon doesn’t exactly amble down Shannon’s lonely streets. While retaining the torment of Shannon, Lennon keeps the acoustic rhythm section both warm and alive with hunger. Unlike Shannon, Lennon is examining the conflicting emotions tearing his love apart rather than running from them. The singer is departing because his heart is getting broken, but he’s also determined to come back. He knows their love is stronger than the issues that are pulling them apart. A Hard Day’s Night premiered at the London Pavilion Cinema on July 6, 1964, while the single and soundtrack album were released on July 10. The film opened on one hundred screens in the United States in August where it made $5.6 million. It became the match to light the fire of the Beatles’ world tour in 1964 and would be instrumental in convincing folkies like Roger McGuinn and David Crosby to exchange their acoustic axes for electric

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ones, and then form the Byrds. ‘‘I guess the thing which struck me was that they were using a lot of folk music chord changes,’’ Byrds cofounder Roger McGuinn recalled. ‘‘They were using passing chords up until that point, so in a way they were subtly combining folk and rock. This is what inspired me and gave me the idea [to play electric rock & roll music].’’37 Chris Hillman, who would later join the Byrds, remembers McGuinn turning up at the Troubadour with a 12-string acoustic Gibson guitar and playing ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’’ Byrd David Crosby would say that their band ‘‘was an attempt at democracy or a kind of family’’ which they learned from the Fab Four.38 The Byrds would, of course, eventually rival the Beatles in becoming a bickering family. The critics were exuberant in their praise of the picture. Rather than cater to the popularity of the group, the movie was appraised as a movie. ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night has turned out to be the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals,’’ wrote Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice. ‘‘[T]he brilliant crystallization of such diverse cultural particles as the pop movie, rock and roll, cinema-verite, the nouvelle vague, free cinema, the affectedly hand-held camera, frenzied camera, frenzied cutting, the cult of the sexless subadolescent, the semi-documentary, and studied spontaneity.’’39 The Daily Express meanwhile called it ‘‘delightfully loony’’ and compared the Beatles to the Marx Brothers. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times thought the film ‘‘tickle[d] the intellect and electrifie[d] the nerves.’’40 Roger Ebert would later echo Sarris’s comparison to Citizen Kane. Of course, A Hard Day’s Night gave us an idealized view of the Beatles, but there was a shady tinge to the reality of their massive success celebrated in the picture. To provide distraction between scenes, they kept their energy up with amphetamines and scotch. There were also many young females, used as extras, who were steered into the Beatles’ trailers for quick bouts of shagging before going back before the camera. One extra, who had no interest in a quickie, was a 19-year-old model named Pattie Boyd. Lester had recalled using her in a commercial he’d directed, so he invited her to be one of the smitten girls on the train meeting the band. She would eventually go out with George Harrison after he gave her an autograph with seven kisses on the photo. They would eventually marry in 1966. Early in 2007, I happened to catch a number of fake movie trailers appearing on the Web site YouTube. If there was a concept to these faux coming attractions, it was to deliberately misrepresent the original movie, perhaps as a way to satirize the manner in which trailers provide false hooks to steer us to the picture. So Stanley Kubrick’s familial horror film The Shining (1980) was recut to suggest a father/son reconciliation drama directed by Cameron Crowe. Martin Scorsese’s feverish Mean Streets (1973) was crossed hilariously with Sesame Street. There were quite a number of other films represented, but one in particular caught my eye. It was for a movie titled A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead. The trailer begins typically

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as a teaser announcing the legendary Beatles in their landmark debut A Hard Day’s Night. As well, we soon start to recognize the usual swarm of fans about to greet them. Moments later, however, the tone dramatically changes. As the opening scenes of A Hard Day’s Night unfold in the train station, the band is being pursued not by eager and happy fans, but by the zombies from Zack Snyder’s remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (2004). As the Beatles laugh and cajole their way through alleys and cars, the screams of the undead, bloodthirsty for flesh, continue to bear down on them. The cutting between both pictures is so seamless that the zombies seem to be moving in rhythm to the music. The original 1978 Dawn of the Dead was a blood-spattered comic-strip satire of consumerism gone mad, but the remake is a post-9/11 apocalyptic calamity where every facet of societal decorum breaks down. Nightmares have replaced dreams. Over the opening credits, we hear Johnny Cash singing about a man taking names, the Grim Reaper cataloging death on every corner of the planet. If the screaming throngs of A Hard Day’s Night were once participants in the Beatles’ utopian dream, the zombies of Dawn of the Dead are former participants in the grind of life. Their hunger isn’t driven by the delight brought on by the Beatles’ music, it’s brought on by the instinctual drive to consume. In A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead, the band is oblivious to the danger of becoming zombies themselves. They don’t even recognize that they’re being blindly fed upon by their followers, who don’t follow because of their shared ideals, but because the cadavers need to feed on the living beings in front of them. ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night showed the Beatles in implicit opposition to the cult of mindless consumerism, not because they were Marxist but because in their new fame they realized they had become its latest tool,’’ wrote Devin McKinney in Magic Circles.41 What’s missing from A Hard Day’s Night is an awareness of that reality—something A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead cleverly gets at. If the Beatles truly fought becoming a tool of mindless consumerism, wouldn’t their fame be evidence of still potentially being its tool? If fans continued to impulsively scream at the mere sight of the Beatles, and buy every record whatever its quality, would the excitement of consuming it truly bring the satisfaction that the music promised? A Hard Day’s Night had no intention of raising these prickly questions, but there was another film, almost completely forgotten, that would—and it came from another popular group associated with the British Invasion. Although the Beatles get the credit for spearheading the British Invasion into America, the first British rock band in that period to tour the United States was the Dave Clark Five. Driven by a heavy beat that Time magazine compared to an air hammer, the Dave Clark Five, led by the saturnine drummer Dave Clark, sold in excess of 50 million records and appeared a record 12 times on The Ed Sullivan Show. Between 1964 and 1966, the band

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had 15 consecutive Top 20 hits, including the sturdy ‘‘Glad All Over,’’ the stomping ‘‘Bits and Pieces,’’ the swinging ‘‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine,’’ and the softly suggestive ‘‘Because.’’ Besides Clark, the group included the lanky keyboardist and lead vocalist Mike Smith, saxophonist Denis Payton, bassist Rick Huxley, and the calmly assured lead guitarist Lenny Davidson. Clark had become Britain’s first independent producer. He owned all the band’s recordings and leased their records to Capitol Records, unheard of in the early sixties. Clark managed the band, while taking an active role in picking their opening acts during their U.S. tours. Besides Little Richard, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis, Clark sought out the young Aretha Franklin, invited the Supremes on board, and included Sonny & Cher on their first tour. He discovered the Young Rascals (‘‘Groovin’’’) in a New York club and convinced them to join the trip across the United States. So given all of these accomplishments, why didn’t the Dave Clark Five reign supreme? First of all, musically the band was nowhere near as talented, or as imaginative, as the Beatles. While their songs have an attractive Big Beat, their sound eventually grows deeply monotonous. The group was also colorless, almost indistinct, by comparison to the humorous Fab Four. But as commercial pop artists, they seldom got the credit they deserved for the mainstream vigor in their work. ‘‘Sure, they were crude and of course they weren’t even a bit hip, but in their churning crassness there was a shout of joy and a sense of fun,’’ Lester Bangs once wrote.42 Given that their greatest appeal was in that spirit of simple fun, it was a huge shock to discover that in their first movie, Having a Wild Weekend (1965), they would provide such depth. To borrow Andrew Sarris’s comparison: If A Hard Day’s Night is to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, then Having a Wild Weekend is to his The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), an uneven, but emotionally richer experience than the former. Having a Wild Weekend, which was more aptly titled Catch Us If You Can in the United Kingdom, is a story about the cost of being a tool of mindless consumerism. It’s about how one defines success, and whether or not it does bring complete happiness, or even satisfaction. Having a Wild Weekend is not about the alienation of youth (always a popular theme), it’s about disenfranchisement. The movie examines the price of utopian dreams, how they’re defined, or if they can be sustained once they’re ever found. A Hard Day’s Night set out to celebrate the Beatles’ success, and it did so with great affection. Having a Wild Weekend asks more unfriendly questions about what success really has to offer. Directed by John Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur), in his first dramatic feature, and written by playwright Peter Nicols (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg), Having a Wild Weekend took a number of risks that A Hard Day’s Night chose to avoid. A Hard Day’s Night has the Beatles playing themselves in a film that both mythologizes and celebrates their music. In Having a Wild Weekend, the Dave Clark Five don’t play themselves. The movie isn’t even about how a

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rock band achieves fortune. The Dave Clark Five are playing stuntmen working on a TV commercial being produced for an advertising company selling meat. (‘‘Meat For Go’’ is the name of their campaign.) Steve (Dave Clark) is a model, who is unhappy with his life, and he works with Dinah (Barbara Ferris), the ‘‘Butcher Girl’’ in the company billboard ads. One day, they both grow weary of the vapid commercialism, of being turned into products of the advertising firm. In an act of desperate rebellion, they impulsively leave London to explore the English countryside. Their valiant hope is to find a better and more meaningful life, while the advertising company spends the movie trying to hunt them down. What they discover on their journey is more people desperately trying to survive their shattered dreams. They first encounter some squatting hippies on Salisbury Plain in a gutted house smoking grass—but they’re looking for heroin. Although it’s 1965, the commune members suggest more the dissipated drugged wanderers of the late sixties, those who would become fodder for the crazed visions of Charles Manson. They later meet an unhappily married couple (played superbly and sympathetically by Yootha Joyce and Robin Bailey) who are collectors of arcane objects that help them cling to the past in their extravagant estate. But their antique goods can’t heal the bitter emotions that continually tear the couple apart. When Steve and Dinah visit a ranch run by Louie, a friend from Steve’s childhood, Louis can’t even remember Steve’s name. He also fawns over Dinah, a celebrity that he recognizes, and hopes she will bring some status to his business. The thrust of Steve and Dinah’s journey, throughout the movie, is to get to an island off the mainland in Devon where they can find sanctuary from the corrupted world around them. The island beckons large by this time in the movie because it might be the only sanctuary they’ll ever find. When they do arrive, however, the advertising company has already anticipated their move and they’ve used Dinah and Steve’s escape to their advantage. The company stages Dinah’s ‘‘rescue’’ to help boast their meat campaign. Worse, her dream island turns out to be fake. At low tide, it is reachable from the mainland. In the end, they are both forced back into the life they vainly tried to escape. It’s not hard to understand why Having a Wild Weekend failed to score with the fans of the Dave Clark Five, let alone the youth audience. The picture doesn’t play off the band’s pop appeal. (Lenny Davidson doesn’t even get one line of dialog in the entire picture.) The film also doesn’t celebrate the spirit of liberation in the air. John Boorman instead speculates as to what freedom Steve and Dinah could possibly find outside of their own milieu. Dinah wishes to escape but she has no sense of what she really wants. For her, it’s the journey that defines her. Arrivals solve nothing. When she reaches her island, it doesn’t satisfy her, or change anything. Dinah even comments that ‘‘it smells of dead holidays.’’ The oasis is merely a reminiscent of happy days long gone and no longer attainable. Steve is looking for a place, a portal of freedom, from the banal and the empty. When Dinah

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criticizes him for not enjoying the journey, he accuses her of giving up too easily. Steve comes to recognize that Dinah is more pliable than he imagined. Dinah is adaptable; Steve isn’t. Having a Wild Weekend takes place in the winter, and Boorman plays into its frigid discontent. He presents the chilled country landscape as desolate, rather than inviting. All through the movie, we hear songs by the Dave Clark Five, but they could be the random samplings of any radio program. They don’t seem connected to the people on the screen who are—implicitly— removed from being identified as the authors of their own work. When Steve and Dinah come close to finding that mythical island, we hear what is perhaps the Dave Clark Five’s most substantial song, the beautifully lamenting ‘‘When.’’ The tune is like a burst of sun that’s trying to break through the foreboding clouds. Over the demonstrative minor chords of the piano, the singer desperately calls out for his lover to accept him unconditionally, and only then will they experience the true meaning of love. The song, like the movie, is seeking values that aren’t illusory, but ones that do have consequence. The contrast between the passionate reserves in ‘‘When’’ and the empty landscapes the couple inhabit render a bittersweet aspect to their fate. Many critics ignored the movie, but Pauline Kael in The New Yorker rightly compared the story to Chekhov. ‘‘It’s as if Pop art had discovered Chekhov— the Three Sisters finally set off for Moscow and along the way discover that there isn’t any Moscow,’’ she wrote.43 Her comparison is apt because Three Sisters has the same utopian ideals of a quest for Nowhere Land, this magical place that isn’t the reality of Moscow, but the possibility of what it might represent. Having a Wild Weekend slipped out of consciousness because the possibilities it presented hadn’t entered people’s consciousness yet. It was a similar problem that Arthur Penn encountered with his contemplative and equally bittersweet counterculture story Alice’s Restaurant in 1969. As for the Dave Clark Five, they would break up by 1970. Having a Wild Weekend was a sober meditation on a period that people then wished to define as idyllic. It didn’t spoil the party, even if the picture couldn’t join it—and the band would soon fade from popular memory. In 2008, though, the Dave Clark Five would finally be admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But two weeks before their induction, vocalist Mike Smith, the impassioned voice of ‘‘When,’’ didn’t live to see the ceremony. He died of pneumonia in London. While the Dave Clark Five experienced a relative obscurity next to the Beatles, the Fabs would soon begin to live out aspects of what was so presciently unveiled in Having a Wild Weekend. The Beatles’ invasion of America in 1964 took place on the cusp of the international success of their single, ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’’ Arriving on the heels of the national tragedy of JFK’s assassination, the Beatles offered a salve to heal the wounds of a traumatized American public, setting

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loose a pandemonium that left audiences screaming and fainting, while establishing a deep and indelible bond between themselves and their audience. As the band was about to return that summer, that connection continued to be strong. People still innocently identified with the group and imagined themselves part of this quixotic world that their energetic music helped create. The Beatles had freely bonded with a nation of dreamers. ‘‘An illusion of intimacy, of companionship, made the Beatles characters in everyone’s private drama,’’ wrote critic Geoffrey O’Brien about that bond in Sonata for Jukebox. ‘‘We thought we knew them, or more precisely, and eerily, thought they knew us. We imagined a give-and-take of communication between the singers in their sealed-off dome and the rest of us listening in on their every thought and musical reverie.’’44 In that summer of 1964, America’s torn legacy toward its black citizens had shown its promise with the Mississippi Summer Project underway in the South recruiting college students to increase voter registration for blacks. But its ugly side was equally evident when the bodies of Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner were discovered in June, buried in a dam in Neshoba County after being beaten and shot. It was in that summer, a season of hope and despair, when the Beatles were about to put all the goodwill they had inspired in February to the test. The 1964 world tour began as inhumanly demanding. They did 32 shows in 24 cities in 33 days across North America. While A Hard Day’s Night, with its charmed view of touring, was still playing in 500 movie theaters across the United States, the reality of life on the road was quite different. There were late night flights to avoid terminals filled with screaming kids. Hotel security had to prepare for any kind of attack from fans, while the Beatles were under a friendly form of house arrest to assure their safety. In Seattle, they were placed in a concrete tower at the end of a pier in Puget Sound, with a 350-foot fence barricading them and topped with two feet of barbed wire. The tour was quickly demonstrating that the group was exposed to more danger than the teen idols of the past. ‘‘The Beatles, more than anyone, had transformed the rock show from a conventional performance into a bash,’’ wrote biographer Bob Spitz in The Beatles. ‘‘The audience was asserting itself without even realizing what it was doing. The feeling generated at the Beatles’ shows bordered on spiritual anarchy.’’45 Adding to the building tensions, on June 3, 1964, a few days after recording Carl Perkins’ ‘‘Matchbox,’’ Ringo collapsed during a photo session for the Saturday Evening Post just before the band headed for Copenhagen. He was diagnosed with laryngitis and pharyngitis and was hospitalized at University College Hospital. The Beatles considered postponing the tour, but tickets in Holland and Australia were already purchased. George Martin began looking for a replacement drummer for the tour and he settled on Jimmy Nicol, a competent young percussionist from London who had some of Ringo’s humility, plus good steady hands to back the group. Nicol had

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played with Georgie Fame, as well as briefly fronting his own group, Jimmy Nicol and the Shub Dubs. They had one small hit single titled ‘‘HumpityDumpity.’’ Nicol’s inaugural tour with the Beatles was a whirlwind of adulation and partying. The emotional exhaustion brought on by the huge demands put on the group was now bringing out the group’s least attractive side. In Blokker, Holland, the mayor came up to George Harrison in order to give him the keys to the city, only to hear Harrison tell him to fuck off. On June 11, the Beatles arrived in Darwin, Australia. The next day, close to 100,000 fans lined the streets along a six-mile route to the Centennial Hall where the band would play two shows. A couple of days later, not content to scream at their idols, 250,000 fans in Melbourne attempted to defiantly break through barriers just to reach the group almost causing a riot. In Sydney, danger seemed to rear up everywhere. A 13-year-old fan was caught outside the eighth floor of their hotel, barely holding on to the balcony, while climbing up to their suite. When the band performed, they were once again pelted with jelly babies, just as they were in their first American concert in Washington. ‘‘I hate people throwing things while we’re performing,’’ Lennon told a reporter during the tour. ‘‘Many times we come off the stage and it looks like we’ve gone through a war zone.’’46 Lennon found it particularly hard to keep singing with these sugar bullets consistently hitting him. ‘‘It does take the pleasure out of it,’’ he remarked. ‘‘Now you know why we run off quickly.’’47 If it wasn’t candies being chucked, handicapped people along the parade route had started tossing their crutches at their motorcade. The whole episode prompted their press agent Derek Taylor to remark that the Beatles could just as well launch an old-fashioned Bible-thumping tour. Lennon’s remark about the group being more popular than Jesus might have grown out of scenes like this. They suddenly found themselves at two extremes of intense emotional identification. If it wasn’t screaming girls longing to touch them, they had to face the afflicted in wheelchairs looking to the Beatles to heal them. ‘‘John didn’t like it,’’ Harrison recalled. ‘‘You could see he had a thing about them; I think it was a fear of something. You can see in all our home movies, whenever you switch a camera on John, he goes into his interpretation of a spastic.’’48 Lennon, who would one day in a song confess to feeling crippled inside, now felt like he was the freak in a traveling sideshow. ‘‘When we would open up, every night, instead of seeing kids there, we would see a row full of cripples from the front,’’ Lennon recalled.49 In the States, it was worse. People were wheeling hundreds of them backstage, where Lennon could barely look at them. Often he turned his head away. Instead of fronting a band, he began to feel as if he were being treated as a faith healer. As Lennon expressed revulsion brought on partly by his own personal insecurities, McCartney caught more of the cruel irony of the circumstances. ‘‘The spirit of the Beatles seemed to suggest something very hopeful and youthful,’’ McCartney explained. ‘‘So, often, someone would

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ask us to say ‘hello’ to handicapped kids; to give them some kind of hope, maybe. But it was difficult for us, because part of our humor was a sick kind of humor. We were almost having to bless the people in wheelchairs; so there was this dual inclination going on for us.’’50 Besides being welcomed as faith healers, they were also greeted by many women eager for a different kind of healing. Many reporters described those episodes as something out of Fellini’s Satyricon. One reporter who followed the Beatles during their Australia venture was Bob Rogers. Quoted in Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon, Rogers said that he had never seen so much flagrant fucking by any pop band. ‘‘There was no pill in 1964 and with the amount of Beatle screwing that went on, I just can’t believe that there wasn’t an explosion of little Beatles all over Australia in 1965,’’ he recalled. 51 Jim Oram was another Australian journalist who followed the group that summer. Oram describes ‘‘a seemingly endless and inexhaustible stream of Australian girls [passing] through their beds; the very young, the very experienced, the beautiful and the plain.’’52 In Adelaide, one happy deflowered virgin, he recalled, ‘‘proudly took her blood-stained sheet home with her in the morning.’’53 Singer Ronnie Spector, who toured with the group in 1964 as part of the Ronettes, remembers the sexual escapades clearly. ‘‘There was a big party with a naked girl dancing on a bed and the Beatles were taking pictures of roadies having sex with her,’’ Spector remembered. ‘‘I was sitting on John Lennon’s lap and felt something very hard in his pants.’’ 54 Years later, composer Frank Zappa would be continually assailed by prurient rock critics for his salacious lyrics about rock stars on the road. But in compositions like ‘‘The Mud Shark,’’ ‘‘Bwana Dik,’’ and ‘‘Crew Slut,’’ he honestly portrayed the behavior of rock stars on the road by cleverly satirizing their escapades. Most bands, however, including the Beatles, worked hard to keep a distance between their image and their backstage activities, which were to be kept private. By the time Ringo rejoined the band in Melbourne, the group was alerted to bomb threats in New Zealand. When they arrived in the United States in San Francisco on August 19, the tour continued with Jackie DeShannon, the Exciters, the Bill Black Combo, the Searchers, and the Righteous Brothers opening the show. The Righteous Brothers would leave midway through the tour when, during a rendition of their great hit, ‘‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,’’ in an outdoor arena, the Beatles hovered overhead in their plane and all heads went to the sky rather than the stage. The Exciters, a young black R&B quartet, were quite enthusiastic about doing the tour. Their infectious single ‘‘Tell Him’’ had already been a huge hit that year in the States (and later revived by The Big Chill in 1983), but it was becoming quite popular in the United Kingdom as well. While the Beatles loved the group, their fans would make life difficult for them. In Texas, the Exciters would almost be crushed in their limos from the excitable throng. Even worse, one day they went shopping only to find when they returned to their

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hotel that they weren’t allowed to enter because they were black. They were told they had to take the freight elevator to their rooms. As they boarded the elevator, they encountered singer Pearl Bailey, only to discover that she, too, was being subjected to the same humiliation. On August 26, in Red Rocks, Denver, the Exciters encountered more vicious racism when they were chased from the stage by Beatles’ fans booing and yelling, ‘‘Niggers go home!’’ Determined not to cower to these thuggish threats, they stormed back to give the performance of their lives. They sang with such passion and determination that the crowd gave in. The group got a standing ovation. The Exciters, a group of young black kids barely into their twenties, lived up to their name, staring down racist adversity and performing two encores. The tribulation at Red Rocks wasn’t limited to the racism being expressed. There had also been death threats. During the show, Brian Epstein and George Martin had climbed up on a gantry overlooking the stage, and they looked down at the Beatles during the performance to see that the amphitheater was perched in such a way that you could have had a sniper on the hill picking off any of the Beatles at any time. ‘‘I was aware of this, and so was Brian, and so were the boys,’’ Martin explained.55 The tour may have been greeted with a frenzied enthusiasm, but it also was permeated with grim undercurrents. For example, celebrations turned somber right at the start in San Francisco on August 19, when George Harrison rejected the idea of riding in an open car. He had to remind organizers that Kennedy had been killed just one year earlier. It didn’t matter. Screaming girls became a liability in the wall-to-wall traffic and the motorcycles colliding. On stage, the band was consistently ducking ‘‘love objects’’ and often not successfully. McCartney was clocked by a cigarette lighter in one city. In another, a shoe flung at the stage banged Lennon. A Beatles’ button was also thrown at the group, catching Lennon, and cutting him. Reporter Larry Kane, who was touring with the Beatles that summer, would say, ‘‘it wasn’t a wound—but it was a wake-up call.’’56 Kane was a traditional news reporter, with no experience covering rock ’n’ roll, which initially put him at odds with the upstarts from Liverpool. But maybe because he was a good newsman, he asked more intelligent questions of the group than the helplessly fawning queries of his colleagues. If other reporters would ask about the band’s favorite color, Kane would quiz the group about their political beliefs or maybe their opinions on Vietnam. Obviously they weren’t prepared to directly answer those questions, but Kane immediately earned their respect—especially from the more caustic John Lennon. On August 22, in Vancouver, fans stormed Empire Stadium where the police couldn’t handle the mob and screaming kids were almost trampled. ‘‘The Vancouver police called it the worst night in their city’s history,’’ Kane remembered. ‘‘Once the gig started, the crowd went mad, they jumped out of their seats, roared onto the pitch—it was a football stadium—and headed

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straight for the stage. The police all had guns and armor and [it] looked like there was going to be a riot.’’57 Nobody was prepared for the mayhem. It got so bad that McCartney had to warn the audience partway through the concert that they’d end the show if it didn’t stop. Nothing helped. Broken ribs, hysteria, and heat prostration ensued. When the group arrived in Los Angeles the next day, they quickly got a taste of the Hollywood paparazzi when they went to the Whiskey A-Go-Go with blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield. ‘‘It was a total set-up by Jayne Mansfield to have pictures taken with us,’’ Harrison recalled. ‘‘John and I were on either side of her and she had her hands on our legs, by our groins—at least she did on mine.’’58 When they arrived inside, photographer Robert Flora continued taking pictures after the rest of his colleagues had finished. After Flora was politely asked to cease, he refused to listen and kept snapping away. In frustration, Harrison fired his scotch at the persistent photographer, only to spray actress Mamie Van Doren instead. Naturally, The Herald Examiner featured the story with photos showing the quiet Beatle being anything but docile. With the endless succession of concerts, the novelty of Beatlemania was wearing off. Besides the cacophony of noise from the audience, the band couldn’t hear the music they were playing. The only peace the Beatles found was in the very room they first emerged from in Hamburg. ‘‘The only place we ever got any peace was when we got in the suite and locked ourselves in the bathroom,’’ Harrison remarked. ‘‘The bathroom was about the only place you could have any peace.’’59 On August 28, 1964, while in New York, the group finally did find some peace, as well as a kindred spirit, when they learned to smoke pot with Bob Dylan. The Beatles had first become aware of Dylan while in Paris in 1964 when a radio interviewer gave McCartney a copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1962). Although McCartney had heard some of Dylan’s folk songs in Liverpool, Lennon was discovering him for the first time. Dylan had become aware of the Beatles the same way most of us had: the AM radio. ‘‘[W]hen we were driving through Colorado we had the radio on and eight of the Top 10 songs were Beatles songs,’’ Dylan told biographer Anthony Scaduto. ‘‘In Colorado! ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ all those early ones. They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians . . .I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.’’60 Dylan was essentially hearing his own future, where his own music had to go, too, when he discovered the Beatles. He first began playing rock back in Hibbing, Minnesota, when he was just a kid, before he opted to be a folk troubadour. But now he saw himself comfortably moving from that role into becoming an electric artist who played with a band. His desire to turn the Beatles on, though, came from his misunderstanding of the lyrics to ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’’ Apparently, he thought the line ‘‘I can’t hide’’ was ‘‘I get high.’’

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Although much is made of comparing Lennon’s songwriting style to Dylan’s, especially in later songs like ‘‘I’m a Loser’’ and ‘‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,’’ the comparison is mostly superficial. People heard an acoustic guitar and a harmonica and assumed it was because of Dylan. Later songs, like ‘‘Norwegian Wood’’ and ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ critic Devin McKinney in Magic Circles sees as ‘‘cool’’ and ‘‘minimal’’ next to Dylan’s cascading imagery. The wordplay of ‘‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’’ or ‘‘I Am the Walrus,’’ for McKinney, ‘‘owe far more to the British tradition of literary nonsense than to Dylan’s store of Beat-influenced archetypes.’’61 As they began smoking the grass Dylan offered, the Beatles did begin to ‘‘see’’ their imagined Nowhere Land, the artificial paradise that lay beyond the material world they lived in. Within the next few years, their songs would begin to trace the intricate geography of that imagined world of the mind. The band soon arrived in Atlantic City for a gig on August 30 at the Convention Hall. When the Beatles’ press agent Derek Taylor brought Larry Kane, and some other journalists, to their hotel room for interviews, some women (who weren’t exactly the usual pubescent fans) passed by the scribes. ‘‘I think this was the first time the Beatles were offered the service of prostitutes,’’ Kane remarked.62 Sleeping with hookers was common coin in the early days of Hamburg, but that was before the band was scrubbed of their leather outfits and put into their natty suits by Brian Epstein. Somehow it didn’t mesh with the image the band was projecting to the public in 1964. ‘‘There were about 20 of them in a line,’’ Kane recalled. ‘‘[They were all] wearing revealing dresses and it was very much, ‘Here they are, take your pick.’ ’’ As was the case with the sexual activities of JFK, the press didn’t reveal to the public the details of what was going on—as the media does ad nauseam today. ‘‘I didn’t want to break their trust,’’ Kane says defending his decision not to publish these stories back then.63 There were race riots in Philadelphia in late August, a few days before the Beatles performed on September 2. The band had to be given presidential level security as they were driven to an underground garage at the Philadelphia Convention Center. It didn’t help matters either that the week before the Philadelphia show, the American psychic Jeanne Dixon predicted the Beatles would be killed in a plane crash. Having forecast the death of JFK, Dixon’s comments weren’t laughed off by the group. ‘‘If you crash, you crash,’’ Harrison remarked drolly to Larry Kane. ‘‘When your number’s up, that’s it.’’64 No doubt Harrison was giving due consideration to Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, when he made those remarks. Before the Beatles hit Florida on September 11, Hurricane Dora had destroyed the location where the band would play in Jacksonville. Although the worst of the storm had passed, the weather was still hazardous. Despite the joyous stream of music flowing from the stage, the concerts never ceased presenting potential danger. While in Montreal, Canada, on

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September 8, Ringo had his life threatened by some anti-Semite who assumed he was Jewish because of the length of his nose. It was the first time he had been surrounded by officers on stage protecting him from possible gunfire. Ringo was already riding his cymbals up high for protection, but he still had to have an officer sitting beside him. ‘‘I started to get hysterical because I thought, ‘If someone in the audience has a pop at me, what is this guy going to do? Is he going to catch the bullet?’’’65 On September 12, in Boston, fistfights broke out in front of the Boston Garden that led to the police pouring into the crowd and causing a minor riot. In Cleveland, during a performance of ‘‘All My Loving,’’ jelly beans and heavy toys were being heaved at the stage as girls began to swarm the stage and breaking a brass railing separating them from the band. While the group continued to play, the Deputy Inspector Carl Bare mounted the stage and attempted to halt the show. The Beatles refused to stop, even mocking the officer who continued to try and bring the proceedings to a conclusion. Suddenly a rain of boos started to flood the arena. When Bare got some help from another officer, ‘‘Iron Mike’’ Blackwell, the show came to an end. ‘‘Iron Mike’’ apparently found certain intimidating methods to get the band to follow him off the stage. Their departure created in the crowd a deafening, angry roar before windows started getting smashed as the fans tried to get backstage. Derek Taylor came to the rescue by calming the crowd and promising an additional 20-minute concert if people calmed down. Fortunately, the crowd did and the show went on. The 1964 tour was often portrayed, and recalled, not altogether inaccurately as euphoric and ecstatic. But it also masked some uglier intimations that would begin to tear away at the group in the following years. ‘‘We were bastards,’’ Lennon would admit in 1970 when the Beatles were finally over. ‘‘Those things are left out, about what bastards we were. . .You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles were the biggest bastards on earth.’’66 They were also the biggest performing act going in 1964, which took audiences to the extremes of pure obsession. ‘‘We were the Caesars,’’ Lennon declared. ‘‘Who’s going to knock us when there’s a million pounds to be made, all the hand-outs, the bribery, the police and the hype?’’67 In the next few years, Lennon would find out.

CHAPTER 4

You Won’t See Me What were the Beatles’ beginnings but an attempt to rewrite in their own tongue the myths of a foreign land? America in England: a mythos of America enlarged and invigorated by foreigners’ love and hate and envy of America, their desire to outdo the land of dreams itself, hurled back at its progenitor as a whole new myth—full of the grip of the familiar, and the lure of the strange. Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History When the Beatles returned from their first international tour, they were as world-weary as they were becoming worldlier. As the fall and winter beckoned, so did the task of returning to the recording studio. With very little time to rest, or absorb the full impact of their summer whirlwind, Lennon and McCartney came up with a new single to answer any queries as to their state of mind: ‘‘I Feel Fine.’’ Begun by Lennon in the studio in early October, while recording a new song called ‘‘Eight Days a Week,’’ ‘‘I Feel Fine’’ bore some relationship to the earlier ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’’ where true love wins out over the desire for material goods. The singer here knows that his lover is tempted by a man who offers her diamond rings, but he’s also convinced that her heart belongs only to him. The mood of ‘‘I Feel Fine,’’ though, is far more resolute than in ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love’’ because Lennon expresses no doubts about who the woman loves. Based on the melody of Bobby Parker’s minor R&B hit ‘‘Watch Your Step,’’ the feedback that opens the song was purely accidental. When the Beatles finished recording one take, Lennon leaned his semi-acoustic Gibson guitar against his amp. He had

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placed a pickup on the guitar so it could be amplified. Naturally, after setting down the instrument, some feedback erupted from the tiny box. The buzz saw tone that filled the studio so totally captivated the group that they asked George Martin if they could open ‘‘I Feel Fine’’ with that sound. As for the song itself, Lennon claims full credit for writing it. However, Harrison said that it was much more of a collaborative effort. He remarked that ‘‘I Feel Fine’’ had evolved much earlier while the group was crossing Scotland in a car. The band was singing Carl Perkins’ ‘‘Matchbox’’ in three-part harmony, and their efforts, ultimately, developed into ‘‘I Feel Fine.’’ While ‘‘I Feel Fine’’ is based on basic blues changes, as was ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’’ the tone of the song is more exhilarating than most blues tracks. Once again, the Beatles find a radical way to successfully invent a vivacious pop song based on blues structures, which gives their sound a powerful and tougher bottom end. Paul McCartney provided the B-side with ‘‘She’s a Woman,’’ a brisk ska tune he wrote while walking the streets of St. John’s Wood on his way to the studio. (He would finish it the same day.) As usual, with their singles, McCartney appears to answer Lennon’s ‘‘I Feel Fine’’ with another song about how love overcomes the desire for material possessions. Uncharacteristic of McCartney, though, he tries to match Lennon with some clever word play. Unfortunately, in that department, he’s no match for the cagey wit of John. When McCartney says his lover never gives him ‘‘presents,’’ he follows by saying—in desperation—that he knows that she’s no ‘‘peasant.’’ Since the band had now been happily introduced to grass, ‘‘She’s a Woman’’ has the first—but not the last—deliberate drug reference in a Beatles’ song. As McCartney sings ‘‘she turns me on when I get lonely,’’ many then likely had thoughts of sex rather than weed. While the reference escaped radio censors at that time, it did catch their ear when the phrase was borrowed again for ‘‘A Day in the Life’’ in 1967. If ‘‘I Feel Fine’’ had its basis in Bobby Parker’s ‘‘Watch Your Step,’’ the Beatles were now starting to find that their influence was being heard in other contemporary bands. For instance, it’s hard to imagine the Sir Douglas Quintet coming up with their snappy 1966 hit ‘‘She’s About a Mover’’ without ‘‘She’s a Woman.’’ Shortly after the release of ‘‘I Feel Fine/She’s a Woman,’’ in late November of 1964, the Beatles were well at work on their new album. Titled rather ironically Beatles for Sale, the cover photo showed the group, in fall colors, looking spent from sheer exhaustion. Unlike the exuberant adolescents that appeared to jump out off the cover of Please Please Me, the band was now wearily offering itself up for public consumption. They looked beaten. Critic Steve Turner had aptly called the record the ‘‘flip side of Beatlemania—the exhaustion, bewilderment and loneliness of life at the top.’’1 There had only been two months and eight days between making A Hard Day’s Night, recording the soundtrack album, and beginning the June session that started Beatles for Sale. The Beatles discovered that they were now living up to the title of their debut film. Between two

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albums, the Beatles had toured Down Under, spent two nights in Hong Kong, and did concerts in Denmark and Sweden (not including their various radio appearances in England). The Beatles were so exhausted that they started to consider further reducing the half-hour length of their concerts. Once they completed composing all new songs for A Hard Day’s Night, Lennon and McCartney came up with smaller ambitions for their next album. There were only eight original songs on Beatles for Sale, but some of them dated back to their teenage years. ‘‘I’ll Follow the Sun’’ came from the Quarry Men days. Some of the covers, like ‘‘Rock and Roll Music’’ and ‘‘Mr. Moonlight,’’ were part of their stage act in Hamburg and the Cavern Club. Critic Walter Everett thought that their diminishing output, especially after the solid original work on A Hard Day’s Night, reflected the tedium of touring. ‘‘Beatles For Sale is often found wanting, as if the ‘tired’ expression on the faces on the cover, explained by the quartet’s grueling schedule, portrays the group’s exhausted inability to compose,’’ Everett explained.2 Besides the lack of original material, Everett also found that the group harmonies had been altered considerably from the youthful buoyancy of their early records. ‘‘The melodramatic time-defying caesuras that conclude ‘She Loves You’ and ‘It Won’t Be Long’ are not heard again until Lennon’s backward looking ‘In My Life’ (1965), ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ (1968), and, for that matter, ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ (1980). It’s almost as if the waxing and waning of the initial burst of Beatlemania itself, spreading over the world from October 1963 through to the opening of A Hard Day’s Night, is simultaneously reflected in the group’s most central musical structures and its most vital means of expression.’’ 3 While this did affect the output of Lennon and McCartney’s writing, the exhaustion they felt also brought a whole new depth to their performances. Rather than continue to ride on the euphoric bubble of ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’’ their songs now seemed to be about what happened after you embraced that hand. Beginning with the beautifully mournful acoustic ballad ‘‘No Reply,’’ John Lennon takes the Rays’ 1957 hit ‘‘Silhouettes’’ and creates a completely different scenario. ‘‘Silhouettes’’ is about a guy who discovers that his girlfriend is cheating on him. He sees her with her new lover through the silhouettes in her window. Lennon’s composition, though, is much more suggestive. For one thing, he leaves much to our imagination, as if we can imagine full well what the painful outcome will be—after all, we’ve all heard ‘‘Silhouettes.’’ But ‘‘Silhouettes’’ confronts the romantic conflict so explicitly that there’s no mystery to the song, no room for our own emotional participation in the broken heart of the matter. The Rays (and also Herman’s Hermits’ 1965 cover) play safely within the confines of the cheating love song, where the conflict gets so carefully laid out that it lacks nuance. By contrast, in ‘‘No Reply,’’ Lennon has the guy slowly growing distrustful. First, the girl won’t answer her door. Her folks deny that it was even her that he saw. But the singer catches her peeping through the window—and he knows that she

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saw him peering at her. When he tries to telephone her, her folks reply that she’s not home. But he knows they’re lying. He saw her earlier in the evening enter the house with another man, which finally confirms the singer’s suspicions. As Lennon sings, with trustful reflection, ‘‘No Reply’’ builds slowly into an anguished expression of rejection. By gradually uncovering the tale, he’s able to slowly deliver the full weight of what that final revelation does to him emotionally. ‘‘No Reply’’ ends with an ultimate reply of loss. That same year, Paul McCartney wrote his own variation on ‘‘No Reply,’’ called ‘‘From a Window,’’ for Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, but nobody lost any sleep from the revelations in that tune. The country ballad, ‘‘I’m a Loser,’’ further examines Lennon’s struggles with his sense of identity, a conflict that would find a whole new urgency in the years to come. Written in a highly confessional style that, according to Steve Turner, was attributed partly to a discussion Lennon had with journalist Kenneth Allsop. Allsop was a correspondent with the Daily Mail and an interviewer on the BBC for their news magazine show, Tonight. When they met in March 1964, Lennon was being interviewed about his recent book, In His Own Write. Allsop had encouraged Lennon to move away from the impersonal romantic pop songs like ‘‘She Loves You’’ into experiences that revealed more about himself. Lennon obviously took it to heart considering many of the songs he’d write following that interview.4 ‘‘I think it’s the best thing I’ve done,’’ Lennon told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner about ‘‘I’m a Loser’’ in 1970. ‘‘I think it’s realistic and it’s true to me.’’5 Being true, of course, meant that Lennon was moving away from thirdperson material (a style of song McCartney preferred), which would soon create conflict between the partners. This first-person music would find its fullest, and least satisfying, expression in his solo years. ‘‘I’m a Loser’’ can actually be heard as a more candid version of ‘‘Misery,’’ though it often gets compared to the work of Bob Dylan. It’s a specious comparison. For one thing, Dylan is far more elliptical, often abstract, in his work. (His confessional 1974 masterpiece, Blood On the Tracks, dealing with the aftermath of his failed marriage, might be the one exception.) ‘‘I’m a Loser’’ has more of the naked self-reflection of Smokey Robinson. Robinson, in fact, may himself have been influenced by ‘‘I’m a Loser,’’ when he wrote ‘‘The Tracks of My Tears’’ a year later. The comparisons to Dylan are made largely because of Lennon’s use of an acoustic guitar and harmonica. Where I hear Dylan’s influence most is in songs like ‘‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’’ on Rubber Soul. Dylan obviously did, too. On Blonde on Blonde (1966), Dylan answered Lennon’s own poetic account about adultery with ‘‘Fourth Time Around.’’ Borrowing the melody of ‘‘Norwegian Wood,’’ and trafficking in more poetic abstraction, Dylan tells a similar tale of transient love. However, the song’s concluding line, ‘‘I never asked for your crutch/Now don’t ask for mine,’’ might well have been intended for Lennon as the girl in question.

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‘‘Baby’s in Black’’ continues the album’s themes of regret and loss. Composed collaboratively by Lennon and McCartney in their hotel while on tour, ‘‘Baby’s in Black’’ is another country tune, performed in the cadences of a sea shanty. It’s about a guy who loves a girl who doesn’t love him. But since she loves someone who doesn’t love her, she therefore dresses in black. Although the track overworks some cliche´ rhymes, rare for a Beatles’ song, ‘‘Baby’s in Black’’ has the shadings of a darker, bluesier Everly Brothers’ number. A cover of Chuck Berry’s 1957 hit ‘‘Rock and Roll Music’’ quickly picks up the mood of the record. The tune, which Berry performed with a pioneer’s joy at being one of the progenitors of this bold new music, is given a more dramatic reading by Lennon. ‘‘Rock and Roll Music’’ had been in the Beatles’ repertoire since Hamburg and it’s Lennon’s cry of freedom. Since he’s not one of rock’s pioneers, but instead, one of its most rabid inheritors, Lennon performs it like a dog violently clutching a bone, savoring and protecting it, and not relinquishing ownership to anyone. When he states that he won’t dance with anyone, unless it’s rock ’n’ roll music, his passion becomes his triumph. ‘‘I’ll Follow the Sun,’’ written by McCartney in 1959 at Forthlin Road after a bout of the flu, has been transformed from its rockabilly roots to a charming, straightforward folk song. It stands in strong contrast with Lennon’s ‘‘I’m a Loser,’’ once again illustrating the essential conflict in this songwriting duo, a conflict that would ultimately tear them apart. In ‘‘I’m a Loser,’’ Lennon’s hopes grow out of personal desperation, while Paul’s, in ‘‘I’ll Follow the Sun,’’ come from his attempts to transcend life’s tragedies. If McCartney just moves on, following the sun, so to speak, Lennon has to take stock of the tears he feels are falling ‘‘like rain from the sky.’’ ‘‘Mr. Moonlight’’ is a holdover from Hamburg, originally the B-side of Dr. Feelgood and the Interns’ 1962 R&B hit, ‘‘Doctor Feel-Good.’’ Complete with an overdramatic kitsch arrangement, including African drums and a Hammond organ solo (right out of a sixties’ afternoon TV soap opera), Lennon feigns passion much the way McCartney did in ‘‘Besame Mucho.’’ No other Beatles’ song featured such a comical surrender to cheap melodrama. (It’s as if John Lennon had suddenly, before our ears, been transformed into Johnny Ray.) Yet the Beatles’ version, as weirdly over baked as it is, does not play down to its corny overstatements. ‘‘[U]nlike Elvis, [the Beatles] don’t condescend to songs they know are beneath them,’’ critic Devin McKinney said in discussing the Beatles’ version of ‘‘Besame Mucho.’’ ‘‘Instead they drive. . .at top speed until it crashes into a real wall, into genuine things like power and release, and bellow joyfully as it explodes.’’6 It’s as if, on ‘‘Mr. Moonlight,’’ the Beatles wish to feel the exhilaration of plunging deep into the very heart of pure ham. ‘‘Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey,’’ which combines Leiber and Stoller’s ‘‘Kansas City’’ with Little Richard’s ‘‘Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey,’’ has its own kind of exhilaration. And McCartney performs it with supreme confidence.

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One of the Beatles’ best covers, again dating back to Hamburg, it demonstrates both Paul’s love of the romantic drama of fifties’ rock (something he’d revel in again on ‘‘Oh! Darling’’ heard on Abbey Road) and the band’s unadulterated love of vocal harmonies. By the time, Paul is singing goodbye to his girl, before quickly dashing off into the night, Lennon and Harrison back him up with cocky smiles in their voices, as if they’re driving his getaway car. ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ might be one of the most pleasurable Beatles’ song they ever performed. Written by both Lennon and McCartney, and originally considered as a single until Lennon composed ‘‘I Feel Fine,’’ ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ is powerhouse pop and it builds soundly on the promise first heard on ‘‘There’s a Place.’’ From the opening notes, fading in at the start, Lennon easily convinces you that his love has the power to extend the calendar beyond the expected seven days. He does it, too, in a voice that demands that those deeply expressed sentiments be shared and requited. The idea for the song first came to McCartney when he was taking his limo to Lennon’s home to work on some new pieces. When Paul asked his driver how he’d been, the driver replied, somewhat reminiscent of Ringo’s malapropisms, ‘‘Oh, working hard, working eight days a week.’’ When McCartney got to Lennon’s door, he immediately told him he’d already acquired the title. At which point, they got to work firing off lyrics which played off the idea of eight days a week. Surprisingly, Lennon would dismiss the song in later interviews, even though it would be one of their most joyous tunes. While it was only an album track in the United Kingdom, it would be released in North America as a single and go to #1. ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ was also briefly considered as the title song for Help! Riding on its luminous melody, ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ epitomized that, exhausted as the Beatles might be, their dedication to the pleasure principle was wide awake. ‘‘Words of Love’’ is their only officially released cover of a Buddy Holly song. While Holly is the sole voice on his version, performing it as if he were reciting a private love letter to the girl of his dreams, Lennon and McCartney wish to share those amorous feelings for this woman. Harrison’s neatly picked, chiming guitar notes, which (especially in this song) would inspire the playing of Roger McGuinn in the Byrds’ cover of Dylan’s ‘‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’’ savor the melody, as Lennon and McCartney settle into a softly yearning groove. ‘‘Honey Don’t,’’ the B-side of the 1956 ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes,’’ is another cover of a Carl Perkins’ song. Originally sung by John in Hamburg (and on their BBC appearances), here it’s taken on by Ringo, just as he did with ‘‘Matchbox.’’ Ringo might have been outmatched on ‘‘Matchbox,’’ but here on ‘‘Honey Don’t,’’ his hangdog character blooms, giving his performance his customary ‘‘aw, shucks, who me?’’ feature. The song, about a guy who loves a woman no matter how much she drives him nuts, is perfectly suited to Ringo’s quirky befuddlement. When Lennon sang it, he merely sounded miffed at this annoying woman. Ringo has a sheepish quality, a guy totally enthralled with the girl, even as she’s exasperating him.

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When he calls out for Harrison’s solos, he’s like the under-matched guy trying to convince the girl that he has some pretty cool friends. ‘‘Every Little Thing’’ might rival ‘‘Eight Days a Week’’ as one of the Beatles’ most stirring love songs about unconditional devotion. While McCartney wrote it for Jane Asher, Lennon rightfully sings the song with that sharp grain in his voice. Although Lennon had always hated his voice, begging George Martin to alter it anyway he could, the purity in his singing in ‘‘Every Little Thing’’ lets you know what it would cost him to lose someone this important. ‘‘I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party’’ is a moody country song written by Lennon in his hotel during the 1964 world tour. The track mirrors the disenchantment revealed in ‘‘I’m a Loser,’’ plus the grind of the endless parties brought on by the wave of Beatlemania that year. It’s possible he wrote it while the rest of the band were having a blast attending a gathering at Burt Lancaster’s house in Los Angeles. ‘‘What You’re Doing’’ is one of McCartney’s most dramatic—yet unacknowledged—love songs. Written while in Atlantic City, also during the 1964 tour, there’s a certain despondency in this track that’s more characteristic of Lennon. Since the number deals with the frustration of not having your love requited, McCartney’s optimistic demeanor still shines through. ‘‘What You’re Doing’’ opens with one of Ringo’s many memorable and well-defined drum patterns. He alternates, on the downbeat, a declarative thump from the bass drum with an enthusiastic roll on the snare, just before Harrison introduces the melody. The effect brings together both the frustration in the singer’s pleas and his equal desire for resolution. The album concludes with Carl Perkins’ ‘‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,’’ which could have been tailor-made for Harrison’s bashful charm. But he must have left the charm at home that day. Harrison sings as if he’s just been handed the song to play on the spot. Although his singing lacks personality, his guitar work has plenty to spare. Since Carl Perkins was his hero, Harrison is caught between the awkwardness of hero worship and eagerly paying tribute. During the sessions for Beatles for Sale, the band recorded a punchy version of Little Willie John’s ‘‘Leave My Kitten Alone,’’ which probably would have made for a better album closer than ‘‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby.’’ Harrison would return to this song many times later in his career, often with better results, when he became a peer to his own mentor. If Beatles for Sale, which went on sale before Christmas in 1964, illustrated some of the exhaustion of the past year, it also showed that, under the circumstances, the Beatles could be endlessly resourceful. Knowing their musical roots intimately, Beatles for Sale was essentially a roots album. They introduced the cover songs as maps of their own work, along with original compositions that showed us what they’d gained from their predecessors. The record was a cornucopia of influences, a huge divergent marketplace with priceless and flawed gems available for the asking. Just because the record was called Beatles for Sale, didn’t mean that the Beatles were selling

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out. In the upcoming months, their schedule would be no less taxing. The frenzied adoration of Beatlemania had begun to reveal a discordant texture in their music. Their songs, which began as an open invitation—from me to you—were now about considering the consequences of that invitation. If the pleasures found in their new music were becoming more substantial, with shadings and depth, the band was simultaneously being stripped of its innocence. The Beatles had reached the zenith of popular acclaim because of the startling immediacy of that innocence. But from their newly acquired peak, the view from the top wasn’t the paradise they had originally imagined. In early February 1965, before heading off to the Bahamas with Richard Lester to film their next feature, the Beatles began the New Year with a radical new single. ‘‘Ticket to Ride,’’ which was released in April, was their first heavy-metal song. Not to be confused with the dark brooding musical colors of future metal groups, this tune provided a heavy beat that was decorated with happily ringing guitar arpeggios. Composed and sung by Lennon, ‘‘Ticket to Ride’’ was initially mistaken as a reference to a British Railways ticket to the town of Ryde, but it’s actually about a girl who is taking a ticket out of her life with the singer. If the promise of love and affection, with its implications, were resoundingly affirmed on ‘‘From Me to You’’ and ‘‘All My Loving,’’ ‘‘Ticket to Ride’’ illustrated that unconditional love was just the start. In the composition, the singer knows he’s sad that his lover has left him, but he also knows that she’s leaving because his whole lifestyle is bringing her down. The promises he’s made have become promises he can’t keep. His appeals, ultimately, have become more desperate— even as vindictive as in ‘‘You Can’t Do That’’—when he demands that she simply do right by him. He has nothing to offer her but the aching sound of his voice. ‘‘In ‘Ticket to Ride,’ John gives voice to self-pitying romantic disappointment,’’ wrote biographer Bob Spitz in The Beatles. ‘‘[He’s] stripped of all adolescent pretensions and reduced to the bitter aftertaste that clings to rejection.’’7 By the end, Lennon is left lamenting in a high falsetto, like a schoolboy taunting another, that ‘‘my baby don’t care.’’ But the refrain is performed with such lively abandon you barely notice that the singer has been dumped. On ‘‘Yes it Is,’’ the B-side to ‘‘Ticket to Ride,’’ Lennon makes sure you know that he’s been abandoned. In one of his most haunting performances, Lennon revisits the melody of ‘‘This Boy,’’ only this time the boy has lost any hope of getting his loved one back. In ‘‘Yes it Is,’’ you feel the weight of her absence, just as James Stewart did with Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958), where he’s overwhelmingly obsessed by her loss. But where Stewart’s fixation drove him to remake his current lover in the image of the woman he believed he’d lost, Lennon wants no evidence reminding him of her. He wants his present lover deprived of the colors that suggest her

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memory—especially the color red. The effect is eerily gothic. ‘‘‘Yes it Is’ is positively 19th Century in its haunted feverishness, its Poe-like invocation of the color scarlet, and its hint that the lost lover of its lyric is dead,’’ wrote critic Ian MacDonald of ‘‘Yes it Is.’’ ‘‘The fantasy figure conjured here is probably a transmutation of Lennon’s dead, red-haired mother, Julia.’’ 8 Lennon’s ties to his tragic past, the ghosts he once believed rock ’n’ roll might finally exorcise, have instead become the bedrock of his strongest work. As he desperately tries to shake off the power that this lost woman has over him, Harrison’s whining guitar, affected by a newly purchased volume pedal, provides the tears that Lennon himself can’t shed. Once Ringo got married to hairdresser Maureen Cox in early February, the group began work on their new film that was being prepared for an August release. While Richard Lester was back at the helm, hoping to recapture some of the fun and magic of A Hard Day’s Night, their second movie, Help! ended up needing it. Besides operating from a more labored script, the Beatles were so wasted on grass that it made them a pretty giggly lot to direct. ‘‘We couldn’t have shot a film about what the Beatles got up to at night, as it would have been X-rated,’’ Lester recalled in 2007 after remastering the picture for DVD release.9 They had obtained the grass through their friend, actor Brandon De Wilde, who played the fraudulently virtuous lads in both Shane (1953) and Hud (1963). While the group was flying to the islands, De Wilde offered them a bag and they all smoked together on the plane. To not attract attention, Mal Evans had to consistently smoke cigars to disguise the smell. Unlike the plot for A Hard Day’s Night, which was a celebration of the Beatles’ success, in Help! they were young men now basking in their middle-class suburban bungalow. As in A Hard Day’s Night, Help! shows the group still being obsessively pursued. Only the people chasing them here are not the excitable crowds from A Hard Day’s Night, but instead an Eastern religious cult. After a sacrificial ring was given to Ringo by a fan, the cult goes on the hunt to retrieve it—even if it means killing the kindly drummer. The movie, which ironically started the Beatles’ interest in India, also became a precursor to the death threats ahead in 1966. In Help! the Beatles are stalked by those who wish to do them harm, rather than the adoring fans of A Hard Day’s Night. All through the film, the group is subjected to a different kind of idol worship. The Beatles get electrocuted, shrunk, strapped to operating tables, blowtorched, and shot at by tanks. ‘‘They become the target of everyone’s animus, and spend the movie trying to survive,’’ wrote critic Devin McKinney on Help!10 Help! begins with the cult about to perform a sacrifice on a young woman only to discover that the ring is missing—and that Ringo possesses it. When the opening credits suddenly begin, in black and white, with the band playing ‘‘Help!’’ we’re thrown back to the pristine glorious image of them on stage during their television special in A Hard Day’s Night. But

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along with their familiar smiles, we can see that they have grown a little heavier, and not quite as weightless on their feet. As the song propels us along, the shock of a colored dart hitting Ringo in the eye jolts us out of our basking in the Beatles’ glory. Within moments, as the credits continue to roll, we realize that we’re watching the cult viewing the same movie footage of the Beatles performing as we are. Instead of enjoying what they see, though, they perceive corruption and indulgence. If Beatles’ fans affectionately threw jelly babies on the stage, the cult’s offering is darts to pierce the singers on the screen. Obviously intended by Lester as a clever sight gag, the opening scene begins to unravel how the Beatles, who began as objects of love, were now quickly being turned into targets of hate. The original script, by American writer Marc Behm, had even more lethal implications. In that story, Ringo unwittingly signs a death warrant and gets hunted down by a serial killer played by Peter Sellers. When it was discovered that Italian director Phillipe de Broca (King of Hearts) was filming Up to His Ears (1965), which featured Jean-Paul Belmondo as a wealthy young man who decides to hire a hit man to kill him before suddenly changing his mind, Behm altered his story. The final script, then called ‘‘The Indian Giver,’’ was rewritten by Charles Wood to suit a more British vernacular. Help! is essentially a comic-strip James Bond pastiche, an endless chase, with little personality, and plenty of slapstick satire. ‘‘Help! was a strait-jacket of a film for the Beatles,’’ said Victor Spinetti, who played the TV special producer in A Hard Day’s Night, and now portrayed the mad scientist out to cut Ringo’s finger off and possess the ring. ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night was basically the truth about them coming to London. In Help!, they had to act out parts and weren’t really happy about it.’’11 Help! is nothing but spare parts from other popular action genres. Even film composer Ken Thorne, as part of his dramatic score, wove together a musical tapestry of Beatles’ songs from A Hard Day’s Night, a touch of John Barry’s Bond theme, then added tiny sprinklings of Wagner, Beethoven’s ‘‘Ode to Joy,’’ and some Indian sitar music. The India connection, however, became the most significant aspect of Help! During the early portion of the filming in February, on his birthday, George Harrison met Swami Vishnu Devananda, a hatha yoga exponent. Devananda was from Montreal, but his ashram was located in Rishikesh, where the Beatles would eventually meet with Maharishi Yogi. Devananda gave Harrison his book The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, his guide to yogic exercises and Hindu religion, which he’d written in 1960. This introduction to yoga coming as Harrison grew more tired of the material world would begin Harrison’s sojourn to Eastern thought. From that new perspective, he grew to believe that the truth could finally be found when one could surmount the personal ego. The title track, ‘‘Help!’’ became the Beatles’ next single in late July. Written by Lennon, with some assistance from McCartney, it was described by John shortly before his murder in 1980 as a personal cry for help. In the

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song, Lennon portrayed himself in what he called his ‘‘fat Elvis’’ period, a star who’s bloated by his own fame. ‘‘The whole Beatle thing was just beyond comprehension,’’ Lennon recalled in one of his last interviews. ‘‘I was eating and drinking like a pig, and I was fat as a pig, dissatisfied with myself, and subconsciously I was crying for help.’’12 Only in 1965, Elvis had yet to enter his own ‘‘fat’’ period. In 1980, Lennon used the hindsight of Elvis’s death to give his song a meaning he may not have intended at the time. Of course, Lennon was eating and drinking and getting high, but whether or not he wrote the song to specifically address his unsettled state of mind is uncertain. What is certain is that John Lennon generally was starting to feel dissatisfaction with the life of being a Beatle. Lennon biographer and culture critic Albert Goldman believed that ‘‘Help!’’ accurately reflected the author’s frame of mind. ‘‘[Lennon] had lost his way, lost his pride, lost his satisfaction, and, above all, lost his soul,’’ Goldman wrote. ‘‘Hence, it wasn’t just his looks but his whole condition that was reminiscent of the fallen Elvis. Like his old hero, John Lennon was a once-brilliant, rebellious, virile young rocker whom success had puffed up into a fat clown.’’13 Goldman’s tone here, more churlish than it requires, is itself a little bloated. If you just listen to the song, you don’t hear ‘‘a fat clown’’ or the gurgling, bloated Elvis of ‘‘My Way.’’ ‘‘ ‘Help!’ isn’t a compromise,’’ critic Dave Marsh writes. ‘‘[I]t’s bursting with a vitality that Lennon’s less mediated solo albums never achieve. And John certainly doesn’t sound like he’s trying to spit the bit; he sounds triumphant, because he’s found a group of kindred spirits who are offering the very spiritual assistance and emotional support for which he’s begging.’’14 As urgently as Lennon cries out for help, you never get the impression that the man is totally doomed to be ‘‘fat Elvis.’’ As Marsh rightly states, the Beatles are there to back him up vocally, picking up his cries, indeed reminding him that help is on the way. Harrison even gets downright playful, ‘‘mickey-mousing’’ Lennon’s cries on his guitar. By performing descending notes, as Lennon shouts for assistance, Harrison parodies the sinister ‘‘dah-dah-dah-dah’’ cliche´ s that often underscore suspense scenes in a movie. As usual, McCartney answered his partner on the B-side, with his own mock cry of help. ‘‘I’m Down’’ is a good-natured ribbed response to John. McCartney may be crying that he’s down, but his song kicks down doors with such a savage power that you know McCartney won’t be on his back for long. ‘‘I’m Down’’ provides ample proof that the Beatles could rock as hard as anyone. With a vocal that’s part Little Richard from ‘‘Long Tall Sally,’’ Larry Williams’ ‘‘She Said Yeah,’’ and a frenzied arrangement out of Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘‘Breathless,’’ McCartney madly wails in his hilarious tale about a guy who is indignant about being dumped. Yet as much fun as McCartney has unloading his misery, a rooster crowing his claim to be king of the pen, the band’s performance cuts so deep you can feel the blood on the tracks. ‘‘[T]he tension of the performance increases so brutally it seems the

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group will get out of it only by exploding,’’ Greil Marcus wrote of the impact of the song. ‘‘[Y]ou can almost feel George’s fingers cutting into the strings, his playing is so hard.’’15 During their 1965 and 1966 tours, this intensely entertaining barn burner would close down the house. When the soundtrack to Help! was released in early August, the album was filled with both songs from the movie and some additional studio tracks to help fill out the album. In North America, Capitol continued to rearrange their own versions of Beatles’ singles and albums. Help! had the songs used in the movie, plus some of Ken Thorne’s orchestral soundtrack selections. The official British version would spend 11 weeks at #1. The album opens with the title song followed by McCartney’s impressive ‘‘The Night Before.’’ ‘‘The Night Before’’ would be another of his unsung great tracks. Although it was composed independent of the picture, Lester wanted to use it once he heard the demo. He placed it in the scene where the Beatles are seen performing it in a field with military maneuvers going on around them. ‘‘The Night Before’’ is a song of regret for a lost love. But where Lennon wishes to rid himself of memories of loss, as he did in ‘‘Yes it Is,’’ McCartney wants to hold on to the happy thoughts of the night before, even if it means he’s being abandoned. ‘‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’’ is a touching ballad where Lennon laments the agony of facing the world after you’ve been rejected by your lover—and everybody knows it. Essentially a simple song, ‘‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’’ serves as an appealing warm-up for ‘‘Norwegian Wood.’’ It’s also the first number where someone outside of the Beatles’ immediate core group plays on the track. Johnnie Scott, who doubles on tenor and alto flute, plays the beautifully mournful wind solo at the end of the song. Some assumed that ‘‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’’ was about Brian Epstein’s closeted homosexuality (in the Anthology documentary, an outtake of the track is played during the sequence when Brian Epstein dies). But it’s really a song about losing your pride after you’ve been dumped, and then left feeling the shame of abandonment. Lennon here pulls down his mask and reveals sides of his personality that he usually feels less comfortable revealing. ‘‘There were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade, the armor,’’ McCartney recalled about his late writing partner. ‘‘But it was wonderful when he let the visor down and you’d see the John Lennon that he was frightened to reveal to the world.’’ 16 ‘‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away’’ is a small sample of where Lennon lets his visor down. George Harrison wrote ‘‘I Need You’’ for his girlfriend Pattie Boyd. His first composition since ‘‘Don’t Bother Me,’’ on With The Beatles, ‘‘I Need You’’ sheds the dour hermetic spirit unveiled on that song. Harrison hints here at some deeper more companionable desires that he’d plumb later in the superior ‘‘Something’’ on Abbey Road. ‘‘Another Girl’’ is a nice piece of country swing by McCartney, written during a holiday in Tunisia at Sebastian’s Villa in the coastal resort of Hammanet. He composed the song

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the day after he came back from his holiday. While McCartney considered it a throwaway for the album—and the movie—it could also be read as part of the frustration that was now developing in his relationship with Jane Asher. While McCartney was expecting her to be a more traditional domestic woman, Asher was an aspiring actress who loved touring with the Old Vic. She was also very protective of her privacy, where McCartney, culturally deprived as a boy, was consistently hungry for a social scene. Therefore, given these thoughts of another girl, especially the kind the Beatles were likely to meet on the road, it may not be simply innocuous filler. ‘‘You’re Going to Lose That Girl’’ is a terrific rewrite of ‘‘She Loves You,’’ begun by Lennon, but completed by McCartney at John’s house in Weybridge. As they did in earlier tunes like ‘‘She Loves You,’’ ‘‘It Won’t Be Long,’’ as well as ‘‘All My Loving,’’ their voices jump out of the mix before the band begins to play. In many of their first songs, the Beatles have their voices with their stated desires connect with us immediately and directly before their instruments do. The remaining songs on Help! were absent in the movie, but recorded to fill out the album. ‘‘Act Naturally’’ is a likeable Buck Owens’ country number from 1960, that’s—naturally—about the movies. Given Ringo’s genial appeal as an actor in both of their films, and his love of country music, made this one a natural for him to sing. It gently mocks the Beatles’ movie career, but the song also has a practical reason for being included. Another Lennon/ McCartney original was written for Ringo to sing called ‘‘If You Got Trouble,’’ but it turned out to be nothing but trouble. Burdened by clunky lyrics and the least imaginative backbeat since Pete Best held a pair of drumsticks, ‘‘If You Got Trouble’’ was so monotonous that when Harrison takes his guitar solo, Ringo yells out desperately, ‘‘oh, rock on, ANYBODY!’’ It’s a disaster (featured on Anthology 2). Lennon considers ‘‘It’s Only Love’’ to be something of a disaster as well, but if it is it’s a minor one. Steve Turner complains that the song traffics in ‘‘platitudes rather than real feeling,’’17 but I’m not so sure that his observation captures the appealing slightness of the material. If anything, ‘‘It’s Only Love’’ is nothing more than an amiable pop standard. It could even be heard as a tribute to Buddy Holly, a variation on his trifling, but catchy ‘‘Everyday.’’ While the song may be nothing significant, Lennon’s vocal has embracing warmth. The nimble vibrato on Harrison’s lead guitar also gives ‘‘It’s Only Love’’ a pining characteristic. Harrison’s own ‘‘You Like Me Too Much,’’ on the other hand, has no character at all. Composed for the movie, the track was rejected and not surprisingly so. George tries to do the kind of boastful love song Lennon can usually do in his sleep, only Harrison comes across as if he is asleep. The girl can’t leave him because she likes him too much, but Harrison is vividly uneasy boasting the girl’s affections. When he makes aggressive claims to follow her if she leaves him, he sounds so sheepish you think he’d get lost trying. Besides the tasty Chet Atkins tribute in Harrison’s guitar solo,

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that nimbly duels with George Martin’s honky-tonk piano, ‘‘You Like Me Too Much’’ leaves not much to like. ‘‘Tell Me What You See’’ is a surprisingly basic number from McCartney, saved by the spry Latin rhythm in Ringo’s percussion and the punch in McCartney’s funky electric piano breaks. ‘‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’’ is a lovely piece of bluegrass music about falling head over heels that unfortunately gets buried on the Help! album. It finds a more appealing and visible presence opening the North American version of Rubber Soul, but in doing so, it alters the intent of that album. Its inclusion makes it seem like we’re about to experience a folk album. (The shrewd R&B of ‘‘Drive My Car’’ more accurately set the tone for Rubber Soul on the official U.K. release.) Since ‘‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’’ was written after they finished filming Help! it didn’t find a way into the movie. If ‘‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’’ barely touched the public’s consciousness, ‘‘Yesterday’’ became one of McCartney’s best-known—and most covered— serenades. It also has rightly earned its legendary status. ‘‘Yesterday’’ had been in gestation for some time. McCartney first conceived it a couple of years before he actually came to record it. One morning, upon waking in his attic bedroom at the Asher’s home, he possessed a tune he couldn’t get out of his head. He immediately sat at the piano by his bed, played it, and somehow felt that the song couldn’t be his. Woody Guthrie once stated that he didn’t compose his songs, he just pulled them out of the air. In this moment, McCartney had also found himself tapping into forces outside of his control, but he wasn’t sure what they were, only that he thought his new tune already existed and that he was bringing about its realization. During the time they were shooting Help! McCartney came up with a dummy title for it, ‘‘Scrambled Eggs,’’ and even some dumb lyrics (‘‘Scrambled eggs/Oh baby, I love your legs’’). But it wouldn’t take full form until he was on holiday in Portugal, in early 1965, at the villa of Shadows’ guitarist Bruce Welch. Borrowing Welch’s guitar, while Welch was packing to leave the villa, McCartney just started strumming the song, as if it were playing him. On his way home from the airport at Lisbon, the lyrics he needed had finally emerged. Two days later, McCartney was in the studio recording ‘‘Yesterday’’—mere hours after ripping through his recording of ‘‘I’m Down.’’ Like his partner’s later ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ the song was elliptically tied to those areas of grief and pain that the Beatles, and their dreams of Nowhere Land, meant to absolve. If Lennon’s ‘‘Julia’’ in 1968 would be an explicit expression of the unbearable loss he felt for his dead mother, McCartney implicitly linked his song to the death of his own. This mournful ballad, which attempts to take the singer back to a time when his life felt less complicated, is actually McCartney’s own version of ‘‘Help!’’ Both songs, in ways distinct to each composer, set out to fix places in the past to resolve confusions in the present. But unlike Lennon who seizes directly on the desperation of his condition, McCartney becomes almost philosophical

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about his loss. He believes that his salvation lies in the past, where Lennon seeks to break from his painful history. McCartney believes in yesterday; Lennon chooses to abandon it. The song cuts clearly to the core of McCartney’s sensibility. For Paul, tragedy becomes bearable because it can always be transcended. ‘‘Yesterday’’ plainly expresses a man’s need to get back, to retreat, to find his way to the simple comforts of home. Only then, can he find the means to head confidently into the future. McCartney thought he had heard ‘‘Yesterday’’ before he even wrote it because he’d been living with it all his life. Although it’s likely that being in the Beatles made it possible to compose ‘‘Yesterday,’’ it became the first Beatles’ song that didn’t feature the ensemble. When McCartney first performed it for the band, Ringo tried to play along but it didn’t fit the group dynamic. George Martin then suggested trying a string arrangement, but McCartney balked. He assumed his song would turn into something conceived by Mantovani. Martin told him that a string quartet might give ‘‘Yesterday’’ the classical feel of a chamber work. Since McCartney had been opening up to classical music since living with the Ashers, he eventually agreed. Both Martin and McCartney collaborated on the arrangement with Paul specifically developing the cello line. It’s a beautifully balanced performance with the strings softly answering McCartney’s plaintive tale. For a short time, there was consideration to make this a McCartney solo track, rather than a Beatles’ record. But Brian Epstein who didn’t wish to set a precedent that would open the door to other solo ventures within the band vetoed the idea. ‘‘Yesterday’’ was released as a single in the United States in September 1965, where it sold over one million copies in 10 days. The tune hit #1 twelve days after its release, a chart position it didn’t relinquish for four more weeks. Perhaps inspired by the success of ‘‘Yesterday,’’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took their own song, the similar ‘‘As Tears Go By,’’ which was a hit for Marianne Faithfull in the fall of 1964, and got the Rolling Stones to record it. ‘‘As Tears Go By,’’ with its own string backing, would be a Top 10 hit by Christmas 1965. Since the Beatles needed another song for the album, the group went back into its bag of covers. ‘‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’’ is another Larry Williams rocker featuring a full-throated Lennon performance. Although you can hear their continued passion for fifties’ rock music in their performance, you can also hear that they are trying to move past it. Lennon’s screams are sounding too practiced, as if he knows that they’re expected of him. They no longer have the ability to spark reaction in ‘‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’’ as they once did in ‘‘Twist and Shout.’’ They also recorded, with even less success, Williams’ ‘‘Bad Boy,’’ a minor hit about a kid who won’t behave because he wants to rock ’n’ roll. No doubt Lennon identified with the role (he sings with a wink in his voice), but the song is so polished the band barely breaks a sweat. EMI also treated it as a throwaway. It would first premiere on the North American release of Beatles VI, then appear on the U.K. release, A Collection of

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Beatles’ Oldies (But Goldies), a greatest hits collection put out in 1966, while the world was waiting for the stunning arrival of ‘‘Penny Lane’’ and ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever.’’ The film Help! premiered in London on July 29, 1965, and it would be their last film with Richard Lester. They did have a third film contracted, based on a book by Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate), with a screenplay by Joe Orton. But when Orton died, with his body discovered rather ironically by Lester’s driver, the film never came to pass. As the Beatles headed back out on the road, the anticipatory spirit they had invoked during those early concerts in 1964 were now becoming a common routine where they began turning into human jukeboxes. The working relationship between Lennon and McCartney had also begun to change as well. A competitive tension was starting to replace the creative one that had shaped their early compositions. A tug of war soon started as both men sought to establish authority over the group and the direction it would take. But, for now, what held the Beatles together was the dynamic relationship between the band and its audience. Playing in front of a live crowd, despite its hazards, kept the group’s identity intact. As long as they stayed on the road, the inner tensions of each group member was sublimated into the greater good of the band and its music. On August 15, 1965, the Beatles performed a landmark show at Shea Stadium in New York, a concert that was defined as the last great gig in waning years of Beatlemania. Sid Bernstein, the same man who had put together the Carnegie Hall show a year earlier, organized the massive event, held in the middle of the New York Met’s baseball field. Introduced by Ed Sullivan, the concert ended up making over $300,000. But the sound of the screaming crowd, a noise described by McCartney as ‘‘supersonic seagulls,’’18 was so deafening that nobody heard a note. There were between 300 and 400 fainting girls, while paramedics were required to work under the stands. Since the concert was being filmed, the producers used the soundboard to pick up the stage performance. As a result, you can actually hear the music more clearly in the movie than you would have at Shea Stadium. ‘‘The audience was buzzing away and leaping up and down and doing all that, and we were just playing loud,’’ Harrison recalled. ‘‘But the sound was bad, and we all joked to each other to keep ourselves amused.’’19 Ironically, among the screaming throng were both Ringo’s future wife, Barbara Bach, and Linda Eastman, who within a few years would become Mrs. Paul McCartney. Since they could barely hear a note, they were not amused. When, as teenagers, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had first heard Elvis Presley sing ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ he had represented a dream of what they could become. The day they witnessed Elvis shake his hips while singing ‘‘Jailhouse Rock’’ on the big screen, he’d become a legend to them. Elvis was

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a huge part of their utopian aspirations. He didn’t exactly point the way to Nowhere Land, but he made it possible for the Beatles to imagine its existence. On August 27, 1965, they were heading to Hollywood for two concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. At the same, Elvis was in town making yet another dreadful film. A meeting had been arranged and the band was about to come face-to-face with their hero. For Elvis, it was an irksome task. He had watched passively as wave upon wave of British rock bands had come and usurped the territory he once ruled. Elvis had sold his claim to the kingdom before him, wasting his life in Hollywood, having abandoned the deeper roots of his music. Put simply, Elvis was no longer the passionate force in music that he had been before he went into the army. The Beatles, meanwhile, were continually scaling artistic and musical heights. But as the Beatles drove to Elvis’s Bel Air home, they discovered that they were so nervous, so scared, that they got stoned in the back of the limo to calm down. But doing so, they quickly turned into the same giggly fans who had been recently screaming for them. They even forgot where they were going. ‘‘We pulled up at some big gates and someone said, ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to see Elvis,’’’ Harrison recalled amusingly. ‘‘[A] nd we all fell out of the limo laughing.’’20 Stumbling along like cartoon characters, the Beatles entered the house to find their mentor sitting in front of the TV, playing a bass guitar, while surrounded by his bodyguards and his manager Colonel Tom Parker. As Parker asked for seats for Brian Epstein and his boys, Elvis sat in his big chair with his new invention, a TV remote, changing channels while strumming his guitar. In the background, Charlie Rich’s recent hit, ‘‘Mohair Sam,’’ blared on the jukebox. After a few awkward moments with the Beatles sitting and staring in disbelief at the King in his domain, Elvis grew impatient and told them that if they were just going to sit and gawk at him, he was going to bed. It broke the ice in the same way that George Harrison’s joke about George Martin’s tie did in the Beatles’ first EMI session. In a matter of moments, guitars were delivered and they began to jam. Since Elvis was playing bass, McCartney found some common ground to engage Presley. But when Elvis asked for a pick for his guitar, McCartney looked to their roadie Mal Evans for one. Apparently, Mal always had a few handy in case one broke during concerts. Unfortunately, the cleaners had recently sown up his suit pockets, right where he kept them, so Evans had to retire to the kitchen, where he began breaking plastic spoons to create some makeshift little strummers. Before long, Elvis and the Beatles began jamming on Cilla Black’s hit, ‘‘You’re My World,’’ while Ringo sat forlorn with no instrument to play. During their improvised session, Lennon prodded Elvis for information on any new music or his latest film. The King began describing the story of his new movie and the Beatles realized that the formula plot he was describing could have been from his last picture. As everybody laughed in recognition of that fact, the group fully realized that

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their idol was trapped in the very role he’d created for himself. What began for Elvis as a quest for freedom, to become a man set apart from all others, had now become chains of bondage to what people wanted from him. Afterward, some of the Beatles played some pool with Elvis’s guys, while Harrison was roaming the house looking for anyone with some reefer to smoke. Elvis’s wife, Priscilla, was soon brought in and introduced to the group. ‘‘I got this picture of her as a sort of Barbie Doll—with a purple gingham dress, and a gingham bow in her very beehive hair, with lots of makeup,’’ was how McCartney remembered her.21 At around 2 a.m., they called it a night and the Beatles departed with each given a complete set of Elvis records, a table lamp in the shape of a wagon and a gun holster with a gold leather belt. They invited Elvis to the place they were staying in Hollywood, but it seemed unlikely. While the Beatles were roaming the American countryside, Elvis was trapped in his estate, unable to live freely in a country that he exalted in his music. On December 21, 1970, a few years after their jam session, Elvis Presley attended a meeting at the White House to meet President Nixon. While there he told the President that he supported Nixon’s attacks on the counterculture, saying that the Beatles, in particular, had been a force for anti-Americanism. While stoned on the multiple pills that would ultimately kill him in 1977, Elvis condemned the Beatles’ drug use. ‘‘The great joke was that we were taking drugs, and look what happened to him,’’ McCartney later remarked. ‘‘He was caught on the toilet full of them!’’22 Lennon felt that the drugs were merely a symptom of Elvis’s demise. For him, it was the army that did him in. ‘‘That’s when they killed him,’’ Lennon explained. ‘‘[A]nd the rest was a living death.’’23 Heartbreak Hotel had suffered its ultimate casualty. On October 26, 1965, the Beatles received their MBE (Member of the British Empire) medals outside Buckingham Palace with thousands of fans present. Along with some earlier winners, there were a number of war veterans present who protested the medal being given to this pop band. For many veterans, the Beatles were part of the generation that rejected the legacy they had fought for in the war. Their supporters, and many in the government, saw the band quite differently as ambassadors for the post-Empire England. The group was conquering nations by entertaining them, not with the intent of being colonizers. The Beatles, in other words, had made Britain fashionable. While the controversy over the MBEs continued to make headlines, the Beatles made for the studio to record a new single and an album that would provide a radical departure from anything they’d previously recorded. That December, EMI had put the Beatles under the gun to come up with a new Christmas single—along with a new LP. Their latest 45, ‘‘Day Tripper,’’ has often been interpreted as a drug song, but John Lennon insisted it was about a girl who leads guys on while living like a weekend hippie. Musically,

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the group was providing a preview of the new direction their work would take on the next album. If their early material paid tribute to the pop R&B of Motown, they were now becoming more strongly influenced by the funkier Memphis sound of Stax Records. Stax was started originally in the late fifties by Jim Stewart, a songwriter and country artist, as Satellite Records. Stewart, who was also a banker, brought on board his sister, Estelle Axton, and Chips Moman, a producer and songwriter, to run the operation. Their first big hit was ‘‘Cause I Love You,’’ by a DJ named Rufus Thomas and his daughter, Carla, both of whom would go to long careers with the label. Since Rufus worked in radio, he managed to persuade his colleagues to play the song. The tune would go on to sell 15,000 copies in Memphis, which soon attracted the attention of Jerry Wexler, of Atlantic Records, who licensed the song from Jim Stewart and began a long, prosperous relationship between the companies. In 1960, Satellite became Stax Records (the name being a combination of Stewart and Axton’s surnames) that would quickly sign a bevy of great soul artists, including Booker T. & the MG’s (‘‘Green Onions’’), Eddie Floyd (‘‘Knock on Wood’’), Sam and Dave (‘‘Soul Man’’), the Staple Singers (‘‘Respect Yourself’’), Albert King (‘‘Born Under a Bad Sign’’), and Otis Redding (‘‘Respect’’). While they were touring, the Beatles discovered and fell in love with this music, especially Booker T. & the MG’s, who were the Stax house band. In contrasting the soul sounds of Detroit with Memphis, writer Gary Graff made very significant comparisons. ‘‘Where Motown was smooth and urbane, Stax was gritty and rural,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Motown was polished; Stax was passionate.’’24 Unlike Motown, Stax was also more racially integrated. Coming from the American South, the hopes of the Civil Rights struggle had made a huge impact on the artists in Memphis. Whites were playing black music, side by side with blacks, making determined efforts to act on Martin Luther King’s version of the American Dream. The Beatles themselves had surged forward by integrating American black R&B styles, so as their music grew tougher, in that cyclone of Beatlemania, they started growing closer to the toughness of the Stax sound. ‘‘Day Tripper’’ is their first song to collar that toughness. It’s a blues scorcher, written by Lennon, who composed the basic guitar riff. McCartney meanwhile contributed some of the verses, his bass line borrowing from Roy Orbison’s recent hit, ‘‘Pretty Woman.’’ The bluesy guitar melody, besides having its antecedent in their previous hit single, ‘‘I Feel Fine,’’ was also a variation of the guitar opening by Robert White on the Temptations’ 1964 hit ‘‘My Girl.’’ You could say that it also has some of the raw soul heard in Otis Redding. Critic Jon Landau would one day say of Redding that his music was ‘‘frantic, powerful and charming,’’25 which is exactly how one could describe the dominant sway of ‘‘Day Tripper.’’ Redding, too, may have caught sight of those elements himself in ‘‘Day Tripper.’’ He would perform his own definitive version of it in 1967.

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‘‘We Can Work It Out,’’ the B-side of the single, illustrates the fullest integration yet of Lennon and McCartney’s sensibilities as songwriters. Could there be any other song in their catalog that perfectly meshes the differences between the two men? Although McCartney composed this richly moving track (with the middle-eight by Lennon), the presence of both men, mirror opposites poised directly toward each other, magically merges into one person here. ‘‘We Can Work It Out’’ is essentially about McCartney’s continued dissatisfaction with Jane Asher’s career moves, which led her in 1965 to join the Bristol Old Vic Company, taking her from London to the west of England. Having refused the spoils of being a Beatles’ girl, Asher was determined to be an independent career woman. ‘‘We Can Work It Out’’ is also, though, a distillation of the conflicted dynamic between Lennon and McCartney. Whether they were writing about their wives or girlfriends—or fictional characters—Lennon and McCartney often mirrored each other in their music. According to Lennon, Paul was the optimistic one saying that everything can work out, while he was the impatient one reminding us that life is short. But, as Ian MacDonald would correctly point out in his book, Revolution in the Head, Lennon misreads the text.26 While McCartney may be hoping that things will work out, he’s also saying that if they don’t, they will say good night to the whole affair. So is Lennon’s impatience any different than McCartney’s? In fact, the urgency in Lennon’s voice, as he warns against wasting time, indicates that he feels the relationship is worth saving—or why bother caring about its fate? The harmonium added to Lennon’s middle-eight section was an afterthought by Harrison, who suggested that it should be done in waltz time to imply the endless dance of love and romance. On December 3, 1965, the same day that they released this stunning new single, they also issued a radical new album called Rubber Soul. While taking over 113 hours to record, compared to the one-day they took putting Please Please Me together, Rubber Soul was a stunningly innovative R&B album. Its aim was to take the genre totally beyond its purist roots. Unlike any other white performer, especially the ones who merely copied the style and attitude of the black blues and R&B, or channeled the essence of the genre (as did Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac), the Beatles sublimated the music into their pop fabric. In these densely intelligent collection of love songs, they confronted a variety of issues: the cost of romantic desire; the power of love to heal, as well as to hurt; contemplation; and the deep regrets of loss. The Beatles had grown frustrated by their live performances. The din of continually screaming audiences who no longer cared to listen hampered them. Within the confines of the studio, they set out to add dimensions to their music that they couldn’t do on stage. The vision of Nowhere Land always existed within the fiber of the sounds they created. But since those sounds couldn’t breathe in the huge halls and hockey rinks they played in, the studio would become their new dream chamber. On Rubber Soul, they broadened their musical identity by introducing an original interpretation

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of classic American R&B. By not letting themselves become defined by black music, as many other British blues bands had done, the Beatles could here define black music for themselves. In their earlier records, the Beatles reached out with supple enthusiasm to grab you, but this music was sly, subtler, even crooking its finger and inching you nearer. ‘‘This music was seduction, not assault,’’ critic Greil Marcus wrote. ‘‘[T]he force was all beneath the surface.’’27 Seduction was a key part of their new musical direction because, since they had your attention with ‘‘She Loves You,’’ they could now introduce you to love’s transgressions in songs like ‘‘Girl.’’ ‘‘The direction was moving away from the poppy stuff like ‘Thank You Girl’ and ‘She Loves You,’’’ McCartney explained. ‘‘The early material was directly relating to our fans, saying, ‘Please buy this record,’ but now we’d come to a point where we thought, ‘We’ve done that. Now we can branch out into songs that are more surreal, a little more entertaining.’’’28 Being entertaining was almost an understatement of purpose. Critic Albert Goldman, for one, saw the album as the full emergence of the whole sixties’ ethos: For those who had followed the Beatles’ career closely, the pleasure afforded by [Rubber Soul] was heightened greatly by the recognition that the group was boldly progressing, unconstrained by the market forces that oblige most pop stars to go ’round and ’round in the grooves of their first success. Building on the solid foundation provided by their previous achievements—their mastery of American pops, their extensive experience as songwriters, and their growing skill as singers, instrumentalists, and record makers—the Beatles were now beginning to erect that glittering edifice, the Sixties.29 The cover photo certainly reflected that glittering edifice. Once again taken by Robert Freeman, the picture was taken at John Lennon’s house in Weybridge. When Freeman was showing the group his contacts in the form of slides, one of the images got tilted backward, inadvertently elongating their faces. The group was immediately seized by the image, reminding them of the distorted perspective they were now getting on drugs. They told Freeman that they wanted to see their stretched reflective faces on the cover of the album that would take their music in new directions. It would also frame the musical ideas on the record: soul music bent and stretched beyond its conventional form. Steve Turner saw a significant difference in mood between this cover and Beatles for Sale. ‘‘The cover was similar to Beatles For Sale,’’ Turner wrote. ‘‘The four of them stood facing the camera in exactly the same line-up. . .[b]ut this time the leaves were green rather than brown, and the boys, although not smiling, didn’t look burned out. They looked cool and slightly detached. Instead of looking at us directly, as they had done on the cover of Beatles For Sale, they looked down on us, although

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only John made eye contact. They were above us.’’30 The title of the album came from McCartney and was first referenced at the end of an outtake of ‘‘I’m Down’’ on the Anthology 2 CD. ‘‘I’m saying [during the take] how I’d just read about an old bloke in the States who said, ‘Mick Jagger, man. Well, you know they’re good—but it’s plastic soul.’ So ‘plastic soul’ was the germ of the Rubber Soul idea,’’ McCartney explained. 31 From this album onward, too, the music included would be entirely original material. Cover versions were recorded only while rehearsing, as they were during the later Let It Be period. Rubber Soul was an album conceived on pot, often smoked between takes of songs, when the reefers were being rolled simultaneous to the rolling tape. McCartney composed the opening track, the sly, dynamically sexy ‘‘Drive My Car.’’ Its craftiness comes from comically reversing the sexual roles. ‘‘A first hearing of ‘Drive My Car’ might suggest that the Beatles are telling some ‘baby’ to drive their car,’’ critic Steve Turner observed in A Hard Day’s Write. ‘‘[B]ut closer inspection of the lyric reveals that it’s the male narrator who is being asked to do the driving.’’32 As the Beatles once stepped into the woman’s shoes, when covering girl group songs like ‘‘Baby It’s You,’’ ‘‘Boys,’’ ‘‘Please Mr. Postman,’’ or ‘‘The Devil in Her Heart,’’ they now worked comfortably from sexual innuendo. They did this by drawing on ancient blues and R&B metaphors, like Memphis Minnie in her 1941 ‘‘Me and My Chauffeur Blues,’’ which used the automobile as a sleek euphemism for sex. Originally, McCartney had written a line about the lady giving the guy gold rings, but Lennon rightly dismissed the jewelry image as old hat, having already done that earlier in ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love.’’ So they both came up with the idea of driving the car, which worked as both a sexual double entendre (concluding with the knowing wink of ‘‘beep-beep, beep-beep yeah’’) and a sign of status. Another role reversal was the change of personnel on the recording. McCartney turned up on lead guitar, providing the biting solo, while Harrison played bass, even borrowing Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn’s melody line from Otis Redding’s version of ‘‘Respect,’’ which came out a month before ‘‘Drive My Car.’’ Lennon’s ‘‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’’ was written as a confession of adultery (some thought with journalist Maureen Cleave), but like ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ it’s also a song about a woman who has the upper hand. The number was written in February 1965 while Lennon was on a skiing holiday in St. Moritz, Switzerland, with Cynthia, and George Martin and his future wife, Judy. Lennon came up with the melody and the basic story, but it was McCartney who suggested that while the guy thinks he’s had the girl, she actually, in the end, should have him. After inviting the singer in, she shows him her room, which is made of Norwegian wood. They drink and chat, and she asks him to stay. But since she has to work in the morning, she asks him to sleep alone in the bathtub. When he wakes in the morning, to find her gone, he lights a fire and admires the Norwegian wood

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and what might have been. McCartney claimed they both wrote the song together with the title taken from an inside joke about the pine walls in Peter Asher’s bedroom.33 The song became notable mostly for the first time use of the Indian sitar by George Harrison, who became intrigued with it during the shooting of Help! While they were filming the scene where they were eating in an Indian restaurant, some of the Indian musicians were present playing for the customers. Fascinated by this exotic instrument, Harrison approached one of the group members after the filming was done in April 1965. At first, he timidly borrowed the sitar and began to gently strum it, admiring its tone, before immediately falling under its spell. Shortly after, Harrison went to Indiacraft, a shop on Oxford Street, to buy one. When the group was looking for an instrument to bring the right color to the melody, which had only been played on acoustic guitar during rehearsals, Harrison suggested the sitar and it added the right rustic mood to the song. While most Beatles’ songs have a narrative line, ‘‘Norwegian Wood’’ is one of the first to tell a story. Even if it’s defined as a romantic ballad, it isn’t your typical love song. Lennon’s tale about an affair that never gets consummated is a character drama. In ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ the sparks between the girl and her possible driver are hidden within the innuendo, but the feelings expressed in ‘‘Norwegian Wood’’ are actually between the lines of the story. Before long, the sitar would be picked up by a number of British musicians, including Brian Jones who would use it most notably on the Rolling Stones’ 1966 single ‘‘Paint it Black.’’ After the opening two tracks, the story in ‘‘You Won’t See Me’’ is surprisingly straightforward. McCartney is heard still grousing about his current romantic problems with Asher, so the song’s purpose is significantly direct. At the time he wrote it, Asher was performing in a rep house in Bristol. But as Steve Turner remarked, ‘‘The dip in his romantic fortunes raised his writing to new heights because he now found he was the one in the vulnerable position.’’34 This is one of the rare moments in a McCartney song where his romantic disenchantment has him lapse into a form of self-pity. The overall energy of the track, though, is helped considerably by backup vocals that seem to parody McCartney’s grief. Their ‘‘la-la-la’s’’ bring back memories of similar moments in ‘‘Misery.’’ ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ is Lennon’s second character study. Beginning with a beautifully doleful a cappella phrase to introduce the Nowhere Man, Lennon himself appears to be feeling lost in a Nowhere Land. But this isn’t the Nowhere Land he had envisioned out of ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ where his utopian dream seemed possible, now it’s the opposite. The Nowhere Land of ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ is the land of the alienated. Lennon is addressing the same kind of estranged individual Dylan would sing about the same year in ‘‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’’ Mr. Jones is a character Lennon would eventually identify with in ‘‘Yer Blues’’ on The Beatles in 1968. McCartney believed that ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ was about

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Lennon’s deteriorating marriage to Cynthia and his boredom with middleclass suburban living—a Nowhere Land very different from the utopian ideas in many of his songs. Yet Lennon sings ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ with the kind of empathy that keeps his visionary spirit alive, even if he’s beginning to fear that the ideas aren’t anymore attainable. George Harrison composed ‘‘Think for Yourself’’ as a plea for independent thought. To some degree, he picks up on the same theme of ‘‘Nowhere Man,’’ but rather than inhabit the lost soul that Lennon does in his song, Harrison takes the more accusatory role. He condemns those who fall short of his own standards—a role he would continue to play out as he became more interested in Eastern religion. What saves the track from being insufferably smug is its musical toughness, the R&B pulse led by McCartney’s deft pulsating bass-playing, with its raw fuzz tone. Albert Goldman was quick to notice how McCartney’s contribution elevated the track. ‘‘In the greatest feat of instrumental playing on any Beatles’ track, Paul fused his sense of black machismo with his British sense of courtly pomp and politesse to produce that great basso-bombastico strut,’’ he wrote in The Lives of John Lennon.35 Lennon and McCartney as a fresh interpretation of gospel music composed ‘‘The Word.’’ Instead of pleading surrender to the power of God, though, Lennon tells us that the word love can set you free. ‘‘It sort of dawned on me that love was the answer,’’ Lennon explained. ‘‘It seems like the underlying theme to the universe. . .Even though I’m not always a loving person, I want to be that, I want to be as loving as possible.’’36 Part of the loving spirit was inspired by the communal experience of smoking grass (which he and McCartney did before they wrote the song). ‘‘The Word’’ is a happily energetic piece of gospel pop that pulls the listener out of the topical pop world of personal relationships and into the larger world. In a sense, ‘‘The Word’’ is the first Lennon anthem, to be followed in the coming years by the more self-conscious ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ the preachy ‘‘Give Peace a Chance,’’ and the potent ‘‘Instant Karma.’’ Almost as famous as ‘‘Yesterday,’’ ‘‘Michelle’’ was another signature song by Paul McCartney that drew as much derision as it did praise. Some critics single out tracks like ‘‘Michelle’’ as a betrayal of McCartney’s rock roots, when it was merely a modest example of his attraction to very diverse styles of music. While his taste could often be erratic, McCartney also had an openness to music, refusing to let any one genre provide street cred for him. Moreover, ‘‘Michelle’’ was born out of a kind of parody. First written as an instrumental in 1963, where McCartney would perform it at various parties in a French cabaret style, he designed it as a satire of a particular beatnik attitude, where the singer is bent over his guitar with his beret and beard doing a French song—Beatles parodying Beatniks. On Rubber Soul, ‘‘Michelle’’ is turned into an elegant love song. With some help from Jan Vaughn, wife of his boyhood friend Ivan Vaughn, a French language teacher, McCartney came up with some appropriate French words. The

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arrangement, according to Walter Everett, owes something to the fingerpicking style of Chet Atkins’ 1962 song ‘‘Trombone,’’ and, of course, Nina Simone’s 1965 version of ‘‘I Put a Spell on You,’’ especially in the ‘‘I love you, I love you’’ section.37 ‘‘Michelle’’ also shows how far the Beatles had come using certain jazz phrasings on the guitar, which they first attempted on ‘‘Till There Was You.’’ ‘‘Michelle’’ would be a hit in 1965 for David & Jonathan. By 1968, it would become the Beatles’ second most covered song reaching over 201 recordings. ‘‘What Goes On’’ is the only truly uninteresting song on the album, an innocuous country number written years earlier by John Lennon. It was originally played to George Martin as a possible tune to follow ‘‘Please Please Me’’ back in 1963, but it was soon forgotten. Introduced on Rubber Soul, as the song for Ringo to sing, it’s equally forgettable. ‘‘What Goes On’’ is no more than a banal follow-up to Ringo’s country cover of Buck Owens’ ‘‘Act Naturally’’ on Help! The only significant aspect of it is that Ringo shares his first co-credit on a Lennon/McCartney song because he helped Paul with the middle-eight (‘‘about five words,’’ says the modest drummer). ‘‘Girl’’ is an extraordinarily complex portrait of an enigmatic lady composed by Lennon. While conceived ambiguously as a paean to his ideal woman, it also describes a female so deeply insensitive that she would ultimately demean him. Saying years later that the song anticipated the soul mate he found in Yoko Ono, Lennon gives one pause. He may be unwittingly revealing that their relationship was not the Robert Browning/Elizabeth Barrett Browning coupling they portrayed on Double Fantasy (1980). When ‘‘Girl’’ describes this woman being taught how pain would lead to pleasure, Lennon lands his first criticism of Christian catechism, a critique that would bring violent repercussions a year later. Perhaps to add a sacrilegious touch, the band then sings harmonies of ‘‘tit, tit, tit’’ behind him. ‘‘Girl’’ is filled with a number of clever little touches like John’s intake of breath, sounding like a backward cymbal, as he invokes the title. ‘‘Girl’’ is an intricate romantic lament. It’s about how the powers of attraction can sometimes bypass our better judgment in choosing our partners. ‘‘I’m Looking Through You’’ is another McCartney riposte directed at Jane Asher. But where Lennon lets you feel his rage when he sings about rejection, McCartney wants you to feel what you’re going to miss by rejecting him. In this case, he sees rejection as a flaunting of his idealized idea of love. As Steve Turner aptly suggests, ‘‘Rather than question his own attitudes (as he obviously did later), Paul accuses his woman of changing and holds out the thinly veiled threat of withdrawing his affection.’’38 No matter how frustrated he gets toward Asher, the threat of McCartney’s demands gets buried beneath his convivial manner. But there’s nothing soft about ‘‘I’m Looking Through You.’’ His manner may be polite, but his sentiments cut deep to the bone. Although the song is written specifically for Asher, it’s still possible to hear the song directed toward his artistic other half, too.

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Since Lennon and McCartney became idealized creative partners, through the quixotic standards they strived for in their work, it makes sense that their songs might also address each other. Throughout the Beatles’ career, both men created a parallel world, both in their compositions and in their personal lives. Even their eventual romantic partners (Yoko Ono and Linda Eastman) became participants in their work when the Lennon/McCartney team itself dissolved. ‘‘I’m Looking Through You’’ could just as easily be addressed to the frustration McCartney was feeling as the two men began to grow apart. One of Lennon’s most personal songs, ‘‘In My Life’’ stands with ‘‘Yesterday’’ as a beautifully constructed deliberation on the value of the past. ‘‘In My Life,’’ with its understated references to his closest friends, Pete Shotten and Stuart Sutcliffe, remains today a compassionate excavation of the loves and losses of Lennon’s life. ‘‘ ‘In My Life’ was not a song about growing older,’’ Devin McKinney explained in Magic Circles. ‘‘[I]t was about the sudden realization that you are older.’’39 Yet unlike his partner’s realizations in ‘‘Yesterday,’’ Lennon refuses to look for comfort or solace in his youth. He attempts instead to find meaning in the present. He finds, as an adult, that he can only do this by recovering those past moments that brought him here. While Lennon claimed it to be solely his own work, McCartney insisted that John wrote the words, while he composed the music, and based the melody on their previously covered Smokey Robinson song, ‘‘You Really Got a Hold on Me.’’ Wherever the truth lies, ‘‘In My Life’’ did begin as a poem where Lennon traced his life journey from Menlove Avenue to the Liverpool dockside. But once he located the places that held meaning, he abandoned the snapshot approach (which McCartney would employ quite lovingly in the similar ‘‘Penny Lane’’) for something more impressionistic and philosophical. Steve Turner, in A Hard Day’s Write, discovered that Lennon’s lyrics shared the style and sentiment of Charles Lamb’s eighteenth-century poem, ‘‘The Old Familiar Faces’’: I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. . . How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me, all are departed; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.40 George Martin provides a classical piano solo in the bridge that’s performed in the spirit of Bach. It was recorded at half-speed on a Steinway, dropped it an octave, thereby suggesting the sound of a harpsichord. Martin’s contribution gives the song a feeling of the past being recovered. ‘‘Wait’’ was originally composed by McCartney for Help! but ultimately rejected for the film. The song revisits some of the same ground of ‘‘It Won’t

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Be Long,’’ ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night,’’ and ‘‘When I Get Home,’’ as the singer longs for reunion with his lover. But unlike those earlier tracks, where those longings were expressed with anticipation and enthusiasm, the tone in ‘‘Wait’’ is somewhat desperate, tinged with a lingering fear (despite what the Beatles say in ‘‘The Word’’) that love might not be enough to hold them together. Critic Tim Riley picked up that change of tone when he compared ‘‘Wait’’ to ‘‘It Won’t Be Long’’ in his book, Tell Me Why. ‘‘Where ‘It Won’t Be Long’ is expectant, ‘Wait’ is doubtful, anxious, uncertain,’’ he said.41 But Riley finds ‘‘Wait’’ ‘‘dashed off’’42 compared to ‘‘It Won’t Be Long.’’ I think that might be an oversimplification. ‘‘It Won’t Be Long’’ is an outburst of youthful idealism, expressing the confidence that when his girl comes home to him, all will be well. However, ‘‘Wait’’ is a song about after the honeymoon, where uncertainty and struggle become part of the process of discovering the meaning of love. There are no guarantees made here, only the belief in possibilities. In the chorus, the singer hopes that since he’s been a good man this will be enough to keep their love alive. But just because he asks her to wait for him doesn’t insure that this promise alone will bring them everlasting love. On Rubber Soul, the Beatles are still writing songs about love, but with awareness now that the assurances made in ‘‘Any Time at All’’ or ‘‘All My Loving’’ are perhaps not enough to sustain you. Rubber Soul takes the fragile subject of love far deeper than the erotic charge of attraction found in their early work. The tracks on this album center on hope and fear, desire and dread, curiosity and contemplation. Put in its R&B context, a song like ‘‘Wait’’ may have the snap of a Wilson Pickett song, but it has none of the brash cockiness that characterizes, say, ‘‘In the Midnight Hour.’’ On Rubber Soul, ‘‘Wait’’ tells you that you could wait until the midnight hour, but that doesn’t guarantee that your love will begin to shine. George Harrison’s ‘‘If I Needed Someone,’’ which deals with love’s more transient aspects, is written for (one guesses) the groupies on the road. The melody, which is clearly based on the Byrds’ ‘‘The Bells of Rhymney’’ and ‘‘She Don’t Care About Time,’’43 contains some of the same hopes and fears as ‘‘Wait,’’ but here, Harrison takes a more guarded position. He claims that if he ever needs someone, he might give the girl some consideration. (He even asks her—rather impersonally—to write her number on his wall.) What Harrison is doing is returning to the theme of ‘‘You Like Me Too Much,’’ but with far greater sophistication this time. The song is about a man who may actually be deeply in love, but he still isn’t sure that this relationship will be enough to satisfy him. Harrison lets you feel both the loss of opportunity within this one-night stand and the questions that linger about his steady girl. He sings that he’s too much in love with someone else to consider this other woman, but his voice betrays him. (He sounds hotter for the groupie.) ‘‘If I Needed Someone,’’ one of Harrison’s strongest tunes, balances the burden he feels about romantic commitment and the erotic charge of promiscuity.

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Because Rubber Soul brings such delicate shadings to the material on this album, the sheer bluntness of Lennon’s concluding ‘‘Run For Your Life’’ might come as something of a shock. It was based on Arthur Gunter’s ‘‘Baby, Let’s Play House,’’ which was Lennon’s favorite Elvis Presley song from his Sun sessions. Gunter also took his composition from another source, Eddy Arnold’s 1951 hit, ‘‘I Want to Play House With You.’’ While Gunter recorded his song in 1954, it wasn’t much of a chart success. But when Elvis heard it, he immediately jumped to record it, which he did in February 1955. ‘‘Baby, Let’s Play House’’ is a song that teases, juggling raw youthful desire with adolescent fear and resentment. But Lennon’s ‘‘Run For Your Life’’ takes the playfulness out of the song, adding the jealous rage of ‘‘You Can’t Do That’’ and ‘‘I’ll Cry Instead.’’ When Lennon borrows the line, ‘‘I’d rather see you dead than to be with another man,’’ he sounds more threatening than Elvis (who issues the warning while stuttering, as if he knows that he couldn’t possibly carry it out). The tune has endured its fair share of criticism from Tim Riley to the composer, yet despite its nasty simplicities, ‘‘Run For Your Life’’ is very much in keeping with the soul and blues spirit of Rubber Soul. It borrows the jealous and murderous sentiments from a variety of landmark blues songs like ‘‘Delia’s Gone,’’ ‘‘Sleeping in the Ground,’’ and ‘‘I Can’t Be Satisfied,’’ although that’s pretty much all it does. Perhaps because the rest of the record is a recasting of R&B norms, ‘‘Run For Your Life’’ simply recreates those norms. Nancy Sinatra did, however, turn the tables on the perceived misogyny in the song by covering it herself (along with ‘‘Day Tripper’’) on her 1966 debut album, These Boots Are Made for Walking. ‘‘We chose it for the album because it was important for my whole Nasty Jones persona,’’ Sinatra recalled. ‘‘ ‘Run For Your Life’ just let me stay right in character, and it was a very powerful statement for a white woman in the sixties, with the pill, and women finally having some freedom to express themselves sexually.’’44 But for a man to sing it, especially Lennon, ‘‘Run For Your Life’’ had no other dimension to it, but the obvious one. What the rest of Rubber Soul proved was that the Beatles had grown past the self-righteous stance taken on ‘‘Run For Your Life.’’ Rubber Soul demonstrated fully that the Beatles were discovering shadows within the chimerical spirit of their music. As critic Mikal Gilmore pointed out, the music no longer bathed itself in youthful ardor. ‘‘[T]he music started losing its ‘innocence,’’’ he wrote. ‘‘It was as if the group had lost a certain mooring. Lennon was singing more frequently about alienation and apprehension. McCartney about the unreliability of love—and whereas their earlier music had fulfilled the familiar structures of 1950s rock, their newer music was moving into unaccustomed areas and incorporating strange textures.’’45 That strangeness in the music would serve to emulate the strange happenings about to take place in 1966, when the Beatles themselves would be running for their lives.

CHAPTER 5

Let Me Take You Down A blinding revelation is laid upon his plate That beneath the greatest love is a hurricane of hate. Phil Ochs, ‘‘Crucifixion’’ Is it possible that the Shirelles best embodied the idealistic spirit of JFK’s New Frontier? Perhaps. Especially with one 1960 pop song, ‘‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’’ that delicately captured both the assurance of the decade and its secret fears. Written by Carole King, and her first husband, Gerry Goffin, ‘‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’’ had an awareness that within every hope lay the possibility of failure, defeat, and maybe betrayal. The singer accepts the devotion of her lover, the light she sees in his eyes, but she’s also worried about the future, when that light may refuse to shine. In this enduringly complex tune, the stakes in love get raised so high that the fear of it all falling apart weighs pretty heavy. As Bob Dylan said in 1965, right at the cusp of his greatest glory, ‘‘when you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.’’ The Shirelles had, in a certain sense, laid the ground for the romantic dream the Beatles (who would cover their songs) were about to create. But the Beatles also inherited the possibility of failure that the Shirelles saw coming. When the hopes of the New Frontier were so cruelly dashed in Dallas in 1963, the Beatles had reached into that despair, two months later, to hold our hand. But it was coming up to two years since the Beatles rekindled those hopes, and the question of whether we’d still love them tomorrow was still up for grabs. Their electrifying early records had sought us out, demanding that we share in the pleasures those songs offered. When John Lennon said in

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‘‘Please Please Me’’ that he’d continue pleasing us, if only we’d agree to please him, we were offered a definite stake in that relationship. Each song they wrote was designed as a two-way street, the creation of a romantic bond, which required the participation of the listener in every way. The utopianism heard in ‘‘There’s a Place’’ was only viable when we first believed that the place actually existed. But by 1965, the Beatles were starting to grow weary and suspicious of its audience. There’s a place, alright, but maybe it’s now far away from you. No longer trusting the screams of adoration or enjoying the enduring isolation of hotel rooms and ducking into limos, the group began retreating into the safety of the studio. Within those walls, the sounds they began to create outclassed the sounds from the stage. The songs they wrote and covered, in the beginning, had taken the world by force, by the affection expressed in them. Now their music was more elusive, the pleasures tucked beneath the dense melodies. At this point, though, their retreat did not diminish their work. Instead, detachment took it deeper, farther into the exigencies of love and loyalty. Rubber Soul showed that the Beatles, now seeking solace from the madness of Beatlemania, were creating a new music that sought to find the more discerning listener. These songs reached out to find the one individual who dared step outside the din of the screaming throng. With this record, they asked you to lean forward, listen carefully, and take with you the doubts along with the hopes, the desire along with the fears. Rubber Soul had all the yearnings and qualms of Goffin/King’s ‘‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’’ but it didn’t stop with the question of the title. Rubber Soul went much further to ask: If you don’t love me tomorrow, then what? When Rubber Soul entered the Top 10 album chart on December 8, 1965, the Beatles certainly still felt loved. It immediately went to #1—where it stayed for an astonishing 12 weeks. This was their fifth album to go right to #1 less than a week after it was released. To say audiences were stunned by the musical boundaries the Beatles had stretched on this record would be making a huge understatement. But now it wasn’t just record buyers who were struck with a sense of profound disbelief. Certain peers of the band were becoming startled by the possibilities of what pop music could do, where it could go, and what it might mean. A young songwriter from outside Los Angeles named Brian Wilson, the cofounder of the Beach Boys, was one such individual tormented by those questions. Within days of its release, Wilson was so astounded by Rubber Soul that he decided to change the entire musical direction of his band. The first night he heard the record, Wilson was sitting in his house on Laurel Way, stoned on grass, listening to it four times in a row. He couldn’t even sleep that night. His chances for sleep didn’t improve the next evening either. ‘‘It was the first time in my life I remember hearing a rock album on which every song was really good,’’ Wilson recalled in 2004.1 After recovering from the shock of hearing this record, the Beach Boys’ resident auteur and recluse reached the conclusion

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that Rubber Soul threw down a gauntlet. He told his wife that he now had to make the greatest rock album ever. Before the Beatles created mayhem in America, the Beach Boys had already established themselves as a legendary pop group from Southern California. From their first song, ‘‘Surfin’,’’ in 1961, the Beach Boys had initiated their own utopian vision that quickly defined their appeal. Early on, at the height of their popularity, they portrayed in their music an adolescent life filled with the hedonistic pleasure of beaches (‘‘Catch a Wave’’), an endless summer of chasing girls (‘‘Fun, Fun, Fun,’’ ‘‘I Get Around’’), and new imagined freedoms offered by access to the automobile (‘‘Little Deuce Coupe’’). Unlike the Beatles, who offered a new world vision through their music, the Beach Boys had heightened something of a world in which they—and their audience—were already a part. ‘‘Brian Wilson didn’t so much create a California myth as get the details of its pop life right,’’ Greil Marcus once wrote of the group.2 California was a pop enigma, a paradoxical paradise, where the hedonism celebrated by the Beach Boys would one day intersect with the apocalyptic horrors of Charles Manson and his Family. It was the place where writer Nathaniel West, in The Day of the Locust, saw the promise of miracles turn into rampaging acts of violence. Crime novelist Raymond Chandler would deposit his incorruptible white knight, detective Philip Marlowe, into a completely corruptible milieu. Singer/songwriter Randy Newman would eventually write a tribute to Los Angeles (‘‘I Love L.A.’’) where a driver would crank up the Beach Boys on his car radio while simultaneously witnessing a homeless guy vomiting in the street. The Beach Boys offered what critic Jim Miller described as ‘‘a paradise of escape into private as often as shared pleasures.’’3 The element of escape was in large part a reflection of Brian Wilson’s unease with the world around him. While he could adeptly capture the delight held by the pop elements in the culture surrounding him, he didn’t truly live out any of it. He wasn’t a surfer (like his brother Dennis), nor did he exude the confident swagger of the characters in some of his songs. The Beach Boys were a daydream of an adolescent life Brian Wilson never had, but one he wished he might have had. If in 1962, ‘‘In My Room’’ gave hints of the troubled kid within the genius of this band, by 1964, you could sense that Wilson was trying to break through the mythical wall he’d erected around his band. Shy and withdrawn, he found release in the studio, just as the Beatles would by 1965. His songs started to reflect aspects of the Southern California youth culture that were less assured, where he could even detect hollowness in the rituals being acted out. Wilson explored all of this without once sacrificing the enjoyment offered under those California palm trees. ‘‘When I Grow Up (to Be a Man),’’ for instance, was not a braggart’s dream, but a reflection back on everything Wilson assumed to be true. He candidly asked himself—and his audience—if the things he dug as a teenager would sustain him in adulthood. In ‘‘Don’t Worry Baby,’’ the Beach

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Boys’ finest song, he takes the freewheeling driver from ‘‘I Get Around’’ and situates him into the mundane concerns of adulthood. In doing so, Wilson doesn’t sacrifice the joys of teenage freedom, even if the singer now recognizes that those joys have ended. ‘‘Don’t Worry Baby’’ is so emotionally lush that you can weep from both the richness of its performance and the perceptions that it offers. In those years, the Beach Boys still continued to tour, selling the myth of the endless summer, decked out in beach clothes, offering their endearing version of the California dream. But their leader stayed home. Brian Wilson found his sanctuary in the recording studio. And when he heard Rubber Soul, he knew exactly what he wanted to record in it. Pet Sounds, like Rubber Soul, set out to alter the Beach Boys’ identity and the audience’s relationship to the group. Wilson had been greatly influenced by the sound of the girl groups, especially those teenage symphonies produced by Phil Spector. But Wilson wanted to marry the harmonic depths of the Beach Boys’ singing style to the layered orchestration of Spector’s arrangements. By doing so, Wilson thought he could take the bombast out of Spector’s production style and deepen the effect of his new songs. He wanted to find ways to take the characteristic qualities of a Beach Boys’ song and infuse it with thematic and sonic ambiguity. First, he called in a new collaborator, Tony Asher, to write the songs. Usually he wrote with Mike Love, who was currently on tour with the band. Wilson began by building the instrumental tracks, bringing in some of the best session men in Los Angeles, and creating intricate orchestral arrangements to embellish these fresh compositions. The individual tunes would be crafted to create the effect of a song cycle. ‘‘It was the first time I used more traditional and inspired lyrics which emitted feelings from my soul and not the usual ‘Beach Boys’ kind of approach,’’ Wilson explained.4 The record began with the gorgeous yearning of ‘‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice,’’ which took the young stud of ‘‘Fun, Fun, Fun’’ and brought him to face the possibility of romantic commitment. ‘‘The idea is, the more we talk about it, the more we want it,’’ Wilson said.5 You can hear the enthusiasm build in his voice, as the possibility of abandoning the back seat of the car for a life of marital bliss dawns on him. From there, however, Pet Sounds becomes a densely orchestrated catalog of Brian Wilson’s doubts and insecurities. In a forsaken voice dipped in sweetness, Wilson would seek reassurance in ‘‘You Still Believe in Me.’’ ‘‘That’s Not Me’’ would take stock of who he’d become and question how he got there. ‘‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder),’’ almost as achingly beautiful as ‘‘Don’t Worry Baby,’’ looks for the kind of comfort that lies beyond spoken words. ‘‘God Only Knows’’ is as sublime as anything on the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. For one thing, it’s rare, not to mention daring, to begin a song about devotion that opens with the singer doubting if he’ll always love the woman he’s with. ‘‘I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times’’ is as exquisite a song about alienation as any written—there’s not a snide note in it. Pet Sounds also featured a couple of

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instrumentals: the title track and ‘‘Let’s Go Away for Awhile,’’ which resembled pleasingly relaxed bachelor pad music. Percy Faith on happy chemicals. The record concluded with the haunting ‘‘Caroline, No,’’ a touching ballad of regret, gently letting the air out of the daydream begun by ‘‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice.’’ In a sense, ‘‘Caroline, No’’ is Brian Wilson’s ‘‘Yesterday,’’ a song that harkens back to moments once savored, moments that defined one’s happiness. Unlike ‘‘Yesterday,’’ though, Wilson (who does the song solo) was able to release the song as a Brian Wilson single apart from the Beach Boys. The release of Pet Sounds in May 1966 didn’t become the hit record that the group hoped for. For one thing, Capitol Records, their label, still thought of rock as something disposable (despite finally coming to recognize the impact of the Beatles). Furthermore, Wilson was also at odds with his usual writing partner Mike Love over the album. Love was happy with the earlier brand of Beach Boys’ music, but he felt that performing these intricate pop melodies might lose them their audience. Capitol Records concurred with Mike Love and did little to promote Pet Sounds. Instead they quickly released The Best of the Beach Boys to reassure fans that they were still happily catching a wave. While the album only peaked at #10 in the chart, Paul McCartney held a different view of Pet Sounds. He was as stunned as Wilson was listening to Rubber Soul. In particular, McCartney was amazed at how Brian Wilson used the bass guitar as a lead melodic instrument. ‘‘[T] hroughout, Brian would be using notes that weren’t the obvious notes to use,’’ McCartney explained. ‘‘[He was] putting melodies in the bass line.’’6 Pet Sounds was the spiritual cousin to Rubber Soul and it would have a lasting effect on both Lennon and McCartney. ‘‘I played it to John so much that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence,’’ McCartney told writer David Leaf. ‘‘It was the record of the time.’’7 Pet Sounds would discover its own reverberation a year later when the Beatles released their own record of the time: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That album would send Brian Wilson into further spasms of shock—only this time, the spasms led to a total breakdown when he tried to top it. If Pet Sounds was the convivial companion to Rubber Soul, the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath, released in April 1966, was its evil twin. Having matched the Beatles—album-for-album, single-for-single—the Stones dug in here with a quietly menacing record, the first to feature all original Jagger/ Richards’ compositions. It’s an epic set that, in its U.K. version, ran close to an hour in length. Aftermath took the romantic skepticism of Rubber Soul and turned it into tale of underclass revolt. According to Greil Marcus, the album cast the Stones as bohemians roaming London, flashing their contempt for anything that reeked of bourgeois contentment. ‘‘They posited a duel between the sexes, choosing weapons of scorn and humor,’’ Marcus wrote.8 You didn’t have to look too hard to find that scorn. You could hear it in the coarse put-downs of ‘‘Stupid Girl,’’ the sadistic cat-and-mouse

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games of ‘‘Under My Thumb,’’ the patronizing contempt expressed in ‘‘Out of Time,’’ and the brooding self-explanatory ‘‘Doncha Bother Me.’’ The dark humor erupted right off the top when the Stones turned society’s contempt for the youth drug culture back on its accusers in ‘‘Mother’s Little Helper.’’ The song parodied the daily anxieties of the middle-class housewife who grows dependent on pills to get her through the day. Despite their disdain, though, the Stones’ arrangements, as softly intricate as Brian Wilson’s on Pet Sounds, share the seductive ambience of Rubber Soul. The hushed marimba takes the edge off both ‘‘Under My Thumb’’ and ‘‘Out of Time.’’ The harpsichord on the baroque ‘‘Lady Jane’’ lends it a lovely quaintness, as it does also on the lamenting ‘‘I Am Waiting.’’ The Stones don’t abandon their blues roots on Aftermath. With the astonishing 11-minute reverie ‘‘Goin’ Home,’’ Mick Jagger considers getting back to his girl and then takes his sweet time arriving there. Just as Rubber Soul had dramatically altered the pop landscape, by introducing the record album as a conceptual art statement, Aftermath and Pet Sounds did nothing less than change the very texture of popular music. While the Stones were unleashing their response to Rubber Soul, the Beatles were in the studio working on their new single. ‘‘Paperback Writer’’ was essentially a McCartney rewrite of Lennon’s ‘‘Day Tripper.’’ On it, he attempted to move the Beatles’ music further from the standard love song to create more conceptual stories. And there was no better place to start than by writing a song about someone who writes stories. Encouraged by his aunt to write about something other than love, McCartney took it upon himself to compose the tune as if it were a letter. ‘‘Paperback Writer’’ concerns a dream the singer has of mass success through writing a paperback novel. But his story is about a writer of books named Lear (after Edward Lear, no doubt, the Victorian poet who wrote nonsense poems that inspired Lennon), who writes a dirty story about a dirty man. As McCartney recounts the tale, Lennon and Harrison provide a rhyming chorus of ‘‘Frere Jacques,’’ giddily making fun of the writer’s goal. ‘‘Paperback Writer’’ is a powerfully bracing piece of rock where McCartney further uses his bass guitar as the lead instrument. By taking his new Rickenbacker and sending it through two Altec compressors, he creates a thick fuzzbox sound that leaps through the speakers. Unfortunately, the song didn’t get a jump start into the charts in its first week because Frank Sinatra found resurgence with his lushly orchestrated hit, ‘‘Strangers in the Night.’’ John Lennon’s ‘‘Rain’’ is a moody philosophical tract that reflects on various states of consciousness by using simple demarcations: the joys of sunshine contrasted with the gloom of rain. Once again, appealing to that place in our mind that defines and determines higher states of being, Lennon breaks down the conventions of listening to a pop song. By concluding ‘‘Rain’’ with the sound of his singing voice being played backward, Lennon

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anticipated a practice that in the coming years would be highly contested. ‘‘Backward taping became a controversial issue in the rock industry during the seventies and eighties when some artists were accused of concealing hidden messages within their recordings,’’ Steve Turner explains in A Hard Day’s Write. ‘‘The Beatles had not done it to conceal messages but simply to suggest a mind free from conventional logic.’’9 But, as early as 1969, it would become clear that Lennon’s methods would become more contentious than he realized. The freedom from conventional logic that Lennon was reaching for would turn into a deadly nihilistic game fuelled by the very drugs that Lennon claimed brought him to this enlightened state. The new drug of choice was LSD. The influence of LSD on the record was significant. The hallucinogen was first developed in 1938 as an attempt to cure migraines. But what scientists discovered, however, was that d-lysergic acid diethylamide’s function was to momentarily disable the brain’s neural concierge. In doing so, the mind had no defense with which to cope with sensory information entering the brain. At the end of World War II, the drug was thought by many physicians to have therapeutic value (while the military, meanwhile, began to consider it as a tool for interrogation and brainwashing). Soon a number of wellknown individuals, writer Aldous Huxley in 1955 and psychologist Alan Watts in 1958, began to experiment with the drug and started to think of the hallucinogen in terms of enabling spiritual awareness. Their view was that by disabling the brain, it provided an open, uncensored perception of reality. The use of drugs combined with the inclusion of Indian Hinduism reinforced the idea that the material world was an illusion. One hears that view implicitly in a song like ‘‘Rain.’’ ‘‘Rain or shine? Alive or dead? I or IV? Forward or backward?’’ Walter Everett asks. ‘‘[Lennon] particularly wished to convey [what John Robertson called] ‘the feeling that the physical world was insubstantial compared to the world of the mind.’’’10 The point was to sustain the illusion of Nowhere Land. When the Beatles discovered that their fame had not fully freed them in this world, they pursued more strongly the world of the imagination where they weren’t locked in hotel rooms, pushed into limos, and turned into performing mice on stage. The counterculture’s new desire was to bring one’s utopian idea of the world into line with its reality. When the real world didn’t follow the plan, the counterculture escaped into a hallucinatory world. According to Albert Goldman, Lennon’s first trip took place in 1964 when Michael Hollingshead, the man who introduced the drug to the Harvard professor Timothy Leary, brought some samples to England. His questionable habit of spiking people’s drink with the hallucinogen got him out of favor with Leary, though, and he moved to England to set up the Castalia Foundation, named after the quixotic learning retreat in Hermann Hesse’s final 1943 novel, Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game). Hollingshead had also supplied Victor Lownes, the manager of the Playboy Club, with a huge

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quantity of pure LSD, which Lownes then passed on to a cosmetic dentist whose girlfriend was the supervisor of the Playboy bunnies. This dentist invited Lennon and his wife Cynthia, plus George Harrison and girlfriend, Patti Boyd, to dinner with the intent of dropping it in their coffee. When the dentist informed them of what he did, he advised them to stay at the house. But Lennon assumed the doctor was secretly planning an orgy, so they quickly decided to split. The dentist, naturally, went after them fearing what the effects of the drug might have on his guests while in transit. As Harrison drove, the dentist chased them through the streets for a short time until he lost them. George then took his charge to the Pickwick Club where the drug had finally kicked in. Within moments, red lights in elevators turned into fires blazing, and tables became elongated, as if the group had walked into a Salvador Dali painting. Eventually arriving at Harrison’s place, the four of them settled in for the night. Lennon took some speed to counter the drug, but it only sped up the hallucinations. Shortly after, he imagined himself as the captain in a submarine floating over the wall. Lennon would take acid again in August 1965, at a party in Los Angeles, but, by 1966, he was looking for spiritual answers. He thought he found them in Timothy Leary’s 1964 book, The Psychedelic Experience, a lyrical interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Upon his request, journalist Barry Miles, who ran Indica Books in Southampton Row, sent Lennon the book. The night John Lennon discovered backward sounds on tape when he was high on grass. So when he tried to thread the tape of his demo of ‘‘Rain,’’ he spooled it backward on the playback machine. At first listen, he thought he was hearing religious revelations—so naturally, he wanted it on the record. George Martin, though, perhaps feeling that Lennon was too stoned to recall what happened that clearly, claimed that it was he who came up with the idea while the band was taking a break. ‘‘The Beatles weren’t quite sure what to do at that point,’’ Martin explained. ‘‘I lifted off a bit of John’s voice. [I] put it onto a bit of tape and turned it around and shoved it back in—slid it around until it was in the right position. . .And I played it to John when they came back.’’11 Whoever came up with the idea, Steve Turner rightly claims that ‘‘Rain’’ opened another avenue to the artificial paradise of Nowhere Land. ‘‘In ‘There’s a Place’ on the Beatles’ first album, John had voiced the opinion that states of mind matters more than events ‘out there,’ ’’ Turner wrote. ‘‘In ‘Rain,’ he returned to the theme but this time with the experience of psychedelic drugs as a subtext.’’ 12 According to Turner, Lennon saw no difference between whether the sun was shining or it was pouring rain. All that mattered was our attitude toward it. When the Beatles went out on tour in 1966, attitudes in general began to curdle. ‘‘This was their year of living dangerously, the harrowing passage leading them into the meaty, complicated center of everything,’’ Devin McKinney explained in Magic Circles. ‘‘[It was] the year they located, lived

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out, consumed, and regurgitated the nightmare that lay coiled inside the Beatle dream.’’13 That nightmare was already at loose in the world. In the summer of 1966, a former U.S. marine named Charles Whitman gunned down 13 people from a tower in Austin, Texas. The gifted scatological comic Lenny Bruce died of a drug overdose. A loner named Richard Speck would single-handedly murder eight student nurses in Chicago. Along with these separate acts of murder and self-destruction, the war in Vietnam was escalating and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was slow to heal the wounds of racial disenfranchisement. For the Beatles, they were fully aware that they were turning into product. In Having a Wild Weekend, the Dave Clark Five were seen as part of an advertising campaign selling meat. In 1966, the Beatles literally became meat. Since 1964, Capitol Records in the States had made themselves selfappointed butchers by freely cutting up their albums and singles into repackaged—and remixed—versions of their records without the approval of the group. By 1966, the Beatles finally had enough. During a photo session with Australian photographer Robert Whitaker, the Beatles encouraged him to disrupt the marketing conventions of selling pop stars. To accomplish this task, Whitaker brought with him a set of white butcher smocks, false teeth, doll parts, a box of nails, a birdcage, and a couple of strings of sausages and raw meat, so he could act on an idea inspired by the German surrealist Hans Bellmer. In the thirties, Bellmer had created a photo book called Die Puppe (The Doll). In it, he posed life-sized dolls in violent poses suggesting both violation and murder. With his own collection of props, Whitaker decided to assist the Beatles in taking a number of provocative shots at Capitol Records to protest the manner in which they’d been marketed in the United States. But who knew that Capitol would participate in this mockery by selecting one of the photos as the cover of their latest butchering job? To add yet more irony, the picture they selected was a shot of the Beatles in butcher smocks covered in raw meat and holding decapitated baby dolls. The picture was selected for the June 1966 release of Yesterday. . .and Today, which was a hodgepodge collection of tracks from the British Rubber Soul (‘‘Drive My Car,’’ ‘‘Nowhere Man,’’ ‘‘If I Needed Someone,’’ ‘‘What Goes On’’) and Help! (‘‘Act Naturally,’’ ‘‘Yesterday’’). They also added a single (‘‘Day Tripper’’/ ‘‘We Can Work It Out’’) and some new tracks from their upcoming album Revolver. But the cover concept Capitol created had nothing to do with Whitaker’s original idea. ‘‘I wanted to do a real experiment with them,’’ Whitaker explained. ‘‘The original cover concept never really materialized. It was meant to be a double-folded album cover where the front showed the four Beatles holding sausages, which would have stood for an umbilical cord. Therefore, each of the Beatles would be linked to a woman by means of these sausages. Now this woman was going to be inside the double-album cover and there was going to be people blowing trumpets announcing the birth of the Beatles and all kinds of surreal, far-out images.’’14

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Capitol released to radio stations that summer close to 750,000 copies of Yesterday. . .And Today with the ‘‘butcher cover.’’ The Top 40 DJs reacted naturally with a strong distaste for it. Capitol immediately withdrew the record and inserted a new cover from the same Whitaker sessions showing the Beatles indifferently gathered around (and inside) a huge trunk. But some Capitol factories in Los Angeles and Scranton got lazy and simply glued the new cover overtop of the offending one. Before long, a small number of butcher sleeves found their way back into the stores, where eager fans found that they could use steam, or erasers, to remove the new cover. Besides commanding up to $40,000.00 among rare vinyl collectors, these fans ripped away the sanitized, approved image of the Beatles, and uncovered the butchers beneath. This hidden cover of Yesterday. . .and Today became something of an emblem for the grim tour ahead, which would be a darkspirited affair. ‘‘If the first U.S. visit had been a quintessential, and touching, display of American insanity—our dizzy infatuation with the new—this last tour was all-American in its ugliness,’’ Devin McKinney explained. ‘‘[T]he raw quality of the hysteria it threw up as Beatlemania plowed across the continent, helpless to avoid leaving scars wherever it passed.’’15 As the tour started, those scars McKinney referred to began to appear. Their return trip to Germany with six shows over four days in three cities— including a date in Hamburg—was hardly a dream reunion. In Essen, eager fans were taken outside and beaten up by bouncers. As the guys inside screamed and sang along to the band, their enthusiasm became a form of angry defiance, the kind later found in the mad pogoing at Sex Pistols’ concerts in the seventies. While playing Hamburg, a riot broke out at the Ernst Mercke Hall, where Beatles’ fans squared off against those opposed to the group. These sharp dividing lines became a harbinger for the rest of the tour. Visiting the Star Club, for the first time since New Year’s Eve 1962, they encountered a boarded up building, completely dilapidated, instead of a den of hot excitement. The only enjoyment they experienced while in Germany came when Astrid Kirchherr arrived at their show and gave Lennon some of the letters he’d written Stuart Sutcliffe in 1961 and 1962. As for the press conferences, which used to be good-natured verbal sparring matches, they were now petulant affairs where the Beatles gave indifferent answers to inane questions like ‘‘Do you wear longpants in the winter?’’ A devouring world awaited them and began to sharpen its teeth early that summer. Their concert in Japan to play Tokyo’s Budokan Hall stirred ugly nationalist sentiment. Since the Budokan was considered sacred territory, a faction of the students threatened that the Beatles would be murdered if they played there. Press agent Tony Barrow, who was aware of the threats, kept it secret from the band. While they played, the group didn’t realize that there were armed guards surrounding the stage to protect them. (Curiously, both Bob Dylan and Cheap Trick would play the Budokan in the seventies with little fuss and two released albums to boot.) In July, a trip to the Philippines,

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where they snubbed a government dinner reception from the first lady Imelda Marcos at the presidential palace, caused a riot. The Beatles barely made it out of the country alive after Marcos pulled the security detail, leaving both Filipino soldiers and disgruntled fans to repeatedly kick the band as they desperately boarded their plane. Yet given all the animosity being stirred, it would pale in comparison to a simple comment made by John Lennon to a British reporter earlier in the year. On March 4, 1966, Lennon had given an interview to Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard. The article was essentially a profile piece on the Beatles’ domestic life, but Lennon, in the midst of discussing his middle-class existence, asserted that the Beatles were now more popular than Jesus Christ. ‘‘Christianity will go,’’ he told her. ‘‘It will vanish and shrink. . .We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.’’ 16 Lennon was simply making an obvious observation on how popular culture was becoming the new religion. After witnessing some people with crutches, others in wheelchairs, looking to the Beatles to heal them, Lennon was recognizing that the old models of morality were no longer holding firm. The American Bible-belt, however, perceived his remarks quite differently. Just prior to arriving in the American South that August, the band was subjected not only to death threats but to mass record-burnings as well. DJs Tommy Charles, Jim Cooper, and Doug Layton, from the Birmingham radio station WAQY, urged their listening audience to tear up their Beatles’ records, while doing so themselves over the air. The Ku Klux Klan, who were looking for leverage after all the recent victories of the Civil Rights Movement, were setting forth to crucify the very band who was championing black music. To start, they attached Beatles’ records to their wooden crosses and began burning them. While the albums were aflame, young children, looking like they stepped out of Village of the Damned, carried signs that read, ‘‘The Beatles are dull and ordinary.’’ ‘‘We were in the American South just after the story had broken,’’ McCartney recalled in 2004. ‘‘I still remember this young blond boy, no more than 12 years old, banging on the window, raging, like we were devils.’’17 Protest wasn’t just limited to the South. Reverend Thurman H. Babbs, a Baptist minister in Cleveland, threatened to revoke the membership of any member of his church who played Beatles’ records or supported John Lennon in his remarks. ‘‘I was astonished that John Lennon’s quotation was taken out of context from my article and misinterpreted in that way,’’ said a surprised Maureen Cleave. ‘‘[H]e certainly wasn’t comparing the Beatles to Jesus Christ. He was simply observing that, to many, the Beatles were better known.’’18 But no one was as shocked as John Lennon. ‘‘When I first heard about the repercussions I thought, ‘It can’t be true—it’s just one of those things,’’’ Lennon remembered. ‘‘And then when I realized it was serious, I was worried stiff because I knew how it would go on, and the things that would get said about it, and all those miserable pictures of

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me looking like a cynic, and it would go on and on and on and get out of hand, and I couldn’t control it. I can’t answer for it when it gets that big, because it’s nothing to do with me then.’’19 Yet it had everything to do with John Lennon. The man who had made himself the key figure in the Beatles’ utopian aspirations had just challenged the biggest utopian dream in the Western world. Suddenly beneath what appeared initially to be love for the Beatles had now turned into the ultimate betrayal. His comment made many of those die-hard fans realize that the group hadn’t parted the waters, divided the loaves, or delivered anyone to the Promised Land. Here they were instead putting themselves above the one prophet that Christians were waiting to deliver them from sin. In that one brief moment, John Lennon had unwittingly turned the Beatles into the Golden Calf. ‘‘John’s mistake was simply stating for publication what he truly believed and often discussed in private,’’ said Albert Goldman. ‘‘By doing so, he violated the taboo that forbids the superstar from calling attention to the fact that he is being treated as if he were the Messiah.’’20 Over the next few years, though, as he continued to consume LSD, Lennon would begin to consider himself a Messiah. On ‘‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’’ he would even strike out at people he thought wanted to crucify him. In 1980, Mark Chapman, a desperate loner who was a Beatles’ fan, and who also consumed copious amounts of LSD, even looking a little like Lennon in his ‘‘fat Elvis’’ period, would (to paraphrase Norman Mailer) cash the check that Lennon wrote that summer. ‘‘[The] explosion that [summer] might well have resulted in Lennon’s assassination years before the event and [it] did contribute to his eventual murder because his killer was a religious crazy from the Bible Belt, who believed that he had been divinely appointed to strike down a false messiah,’’ Goldman asserted.21 While Lennon became the ultimate victim of his frank observation, the group ultimately suffered for it. ‘‘We all had to pay for it and it was a pretty scary time,’’ Ringo recalled. ‘‘John had to apologize, not because of what he’d said, but to save our lives because there were a lot of very heavy threats—not only to him, but to the whole band.’’22 Ringo’s fear became even more palpable when the Beatles arrived to play Memphis, Tennessee. During the show, a firecracker was set off in the crowd that had everybody on stage looking to Lennon to see if he had been shot. In Cincinnati, there was heavy rain before their show at Crosley Field that put soaked fans in a less than inviting mood. A canopy was hung over the stage to protect the group, but the stage became so wet that the Beatles would have been electrocuted had they attempted to play. Paul was so scared at the thought of mounting the stage that he threw up in the dressing room. In the end, they cancelled their only gig in the three years of touring America. In St. Louis, at Busch Stadium, the weather was no better, but the show went on anyway. But all through their set, sparks of electricity flew over their heads. As they left the stage for their usual getaway, they were

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quickly placed in a chrome-paneled truck. As the vehicle took off, the Beatles were left sliding around helplessly with no railings to hang on to. There was nothing to hang on to. It was an apt metaphor. If anything was clear by 1966, the Beatles were no longer in control of their meteoric success—it was now driving them. When they chose to engage their audience in 1962, it wasn’t simply to become entertainers, they demanded something more substantial. They wished to take both pop music and their fans to another place. And they did. But, in doing so, the Beatles couldn’t change the course of the world around them. Nor did they intend to. They sought rather to change our perspective on the world. But Lennon’s remark about Jesus showed that any provocative outspokenness would have its price. ‘‘The audience discovers hostility and hunger mingling with love in its well of feelings, and the Beatles withdraw into the guarded bubble of their private entertainments,’’ Devin McKinney points out in Magic Circles. ‘‘In the cause of self-protection—from physical harm as well as ‘mere’ humiliation—they are close to canceling themselves as individuals.’’23 The rules of engagement with their audience had clearly changed. The Beatles were now fixed in the sights of devoted fans, ready to strike if displeased. For self-preservation, the band realized that it was time to stop being Beatles. ‘‘The Beatles were hated, as much as anything, for representing the principle that freedom was worse than available,’’ Dave Marsh wrote while touching on the paradox within the pleasure principle of the Beatles.24 Overall, the band sensed the rising discontent beneath the huge expectations they had raised in their fans over the years. But they were also exhausted due to the rigors of touring. Paul McCartney, the born entertainer, still loved the glamour and excitement of playing in front of live crowds, but Lennon hated the fact that no one cared about the music. George Harrison, too, grew more dissatisfied, feeling wasted and imprisoned by Beatlemania. Ringo meanwhile felt he hadn’t developed any further as a drummer when he couldn’t hear what his mates were playing. ‘‘No one would have hated the Beatles in ’66 if they hadn’t been so loved in ’64,’’ Devin McKinney reminded us. ‘‘Their mania always held the potential for a different, darker brand of madness.’’25 Before the madness could consume them, the Beatles decided to quit the road. On Monday, August 29, 1966, their last live show took place at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. They would play 11 songs that night. But unlike their other shows, the group was aware that this may be their last live appearance. Time had certainly become a factor. The years they’ve put in now felt like decades. When George Harrison introduced Lennon to sing ‘‘I Feel Fine,’’ he called it a song from 1959. In the middle of one tune, McCartney took a time out—stopping both the song and time itself—to watch the police coral a fan who had run onto the field. Lennon announced ‘‘Day Tripper’’ as a song from long ago. (It had actually been nine months.) As the show ended, McCartney took the group out with ‘‘Long Tall Sally,’’ a song almost as old as the day they first started playing music. It had lasted

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that long. And as the group, now weary—and more than a little scared from the violence unleashed that summer—were about to exit the stage, they went out with a blast of one last happy party going home. While McCartney exhorted the crowd to have some fun tonight, it was clear that for the Beatles the fun was over. On the way home on the plane, Harrison finally relieved said, ‘‘Well, that’s it. I’m not a Beatle anymore.’’ That fall, they retired to the studio and never toured again. Before they abandoned the stage, though, the new studio music they released that summer would bring the group full circle to their first session at EMI in 1962. To commemorate the concept of completing a circle, the record was called Revolver. Recorded from April through June 1966, Revolver is a rich panorama of musical and philosophical styles, a masterpiece of eclecticism. George Harrison’s interest in Indian music and religion came full bloom. The fruit of McCartney’s venture into the world of avantgarde theater, visual art, and music fully emerged. Lennon’s fascination with Eastern thoughts about mortality, brought on through chemical enhancement, reached its apex. Ringo decided to redefine the sound of his drums that provided more personality to the music. George Martin knew the group was looking for ways to get more color into their music, too, so he needed to discover the means to translate their musical ideas by using instruments they hadn’t used before (like the saxophones on ‘‘I’ve Got to Get You into My Life’’ and the tape manipulations used on ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows’’). To achieve this end, Martin promoted Geoff Emerick, one of his assistants, to the role of engineer. ‘‘The group encouraged us to break the rules,’’ Emerick recalled of his first session as engineer. ‘‘[They told me] that every instrument should sound unlike itself: a piano shouldn’t sound like a piano, a guitar shouldn’t sound like a guitar, hence putting things thru a Leslie speaker, and so on.’’26 Norman Smith, Martin’s usual collaborator, had now moved on to be a producer himself, beginning with Pink Floyd’s debut record, The Piper at the Gate of Dawn, a year later—an album that would owe something to the innovations used on Revolver. While indicating the stronger influence that drugs had on Revolver, Walter Everett saw the record as ‘‘[r]eflective of their reading of Timothy Leary, their own experiences with LSD, and an exploration of Hindustani music and philosophy, Revolver was fundamentally unlike any rock album that had preceded it.’’27 Rubber Soul might have been their pot album, but Revolver was most certainly their acid album. After reaching new emotional depths in Rubber Soul, the group sought now to explore the very source of those depths, examining the cycle of life and the many sides of issues like loneliness and death (‘‘Eleanor Rigby’’), rebirth (‘‘She Said, She Said,’’ ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows’’), retribution (‘‘Taxman’’), childhood adventures (‘‘Yellow Submarine’’), romantic desolation (‘‘For No One’’), and the fragility of sexual union (‘‘Love You To’’). If Rubber Soul peered into the

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value of experience, Revolver set out to define what new experiences were now before the group. But this amazing record also harbored an irresolvable contradiction. While it would be their most exciting and versatile recording, showing a stunning resource for creating unity out of diversity, Revolver also illustrated how the Beatles, as a utopian entity, were coming to an end. The album opens with the same 1-2-3-4 count-in that set off ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There’’ on their debut LP, except this time, it’s not the combustible sound of a brash young band about to get people jumping onto the dance floor. Instead, we hear, under the count-in, the synthetic atmosphere of the recording studio. Revolver opens with the background sound of recording tape revolving. The count-in on the Please Please Me album had signaled a charge let loose into the world; but on Revolver, it’s a deliberately dispassionate and mechanical intro indicating a withdrawal from the world they once sought to conquer. We’re now alerted to the new age of Beatle music: from the live stage to the magical illusion of the studio. ‘‘Taxman’’ is the first Harrison track to lead off a Beatle record. With a melody that suggests Neil Hefti’s theme to the TV series Batman, he launches a dour attack on the government’s taxation of the group, which now found itself in a higher tax bracket due to the reality of their success. ‘‘In those days we paid nineteen shillings and sixpence out of every pound,’’ Harrison explained. ‘‘[A]nd with supertax and surtax and tax-tax it was ridiculous—a heavy penalty to pay for making money.’’ 28 Within the ribald glee of ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There,’’ the Beatles opened their career with the possibility that success would give them ultimate freedom and wealth. In 1966, ‘‘Taxman’’ delivers them into perceived poverty, an assumed indigence they thought their career would help them overcome. The irony for Harrison, a millionaire who would eschew the material world for years to come, is hearing him complaining about material matters. The Beatles’ idealistic daydream, a state of mind free of conventional trappings, couldn’t change the trappings of the world that Harrison vainly rails against. ‘‘[B]y firing the first shot of their revolver at the tax man, the Beatles blew a jagged hole in their lifelong identification with the teenyboppers,’’ Albert Goldman commented. ‘‘[They aligned] themselves now with an older, hipper crowd that would appreciate their sour-mouthed complaint as well as their audacity in voicing such grievances through a medium consecrated to love sighs.’’29 ‘‘Taxman’’ tells us that the Beatles aren’t idealistic kids anymore. ‘‘Eleanor Rigby,’’ which the Beatles released as a single, was an exquisite chamber work about inconsolable loneliness and bereavement. Written by McCartney, while he was living in London, the song began as a story of Miss Daisy Hawkins, a young girl, picking up rice in a church after a wedding. But realizing that the woman should be older, a woman whose opportunity to marry had passed her by, McCartney came upon the idea that this lonely woman would be able to perceive the loneliness in the people who surrounded her. For the name, McCartney had visited a graveyard in Putney Vale

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Cemetery in London with composer Lionel Bart. There he discovered the name Eleanor Bygraves that he thought would fit the character. He would change her last name to Rigby after he saw a Bristol shop called Rigby & Amp while visiting Jane Asher earlier in the year. Once the story of Eleanor Rigby developed as a forsaken cleaning woman in a church, McCartney brought the song to the group in Weybridge to create the figure of Father McKenzie. Ringo suggested the idea of the minister darning his socks, while Harrison suggested the notion of her bearing witness on all these lonely people. John Lennon, though, remembered his annoyance toward McCartney. ‘‘. . .[T]he first verse was his and the rest are basically mine,’’ claimed Lennon. ‘‘But the way [Paul] did it. . .he didn’t want to ask for my help, and we were sitting around with Mal Evans [the road manager] and Neil Aspinall [the Beatles’ accountant], so he said to us, ‘Hey, you guys, finish up the lyrics.’. . . I was insulted and hurt that Paul had just thrown it out in the air. He actually meant he wanted me to do it, and of course there isn’t a line of theirs in the song because I finally went off to a room with Paul and we finished the song.’’30 Paul, on the other hand, claimed Lennon wrote about half a line. After the success of the string section in ‘‘Yesterday,’’ McCartney next turned to George Martin for another chamber arrangement for ‘‘Eleanor Rigby.’’ Paul was thinking of something in the flavor of Vivaldi, as he had recently discovered the legendary Venician violinist through Jane. Martin, on the other hand, was considering something in the style of the scherzo rhythms heard in Bernard Herrmann’s score for Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film, Fahrenheit 451. The result is something in between. But, as Devin McKinney rightly points out in Magic Circles, the intensity of the strings actually comes closer to Herrmann’s earlier score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.31 (When the song was performed in McCartney’s 1984 film, Give My Regards to Broad Street, McCartney included an extended dream sequence where the Martin’s string arrangement briefly samples Herrmann’s ominous string narrative.) For the string background, Martin booked a double string quartet, consisting of four violins, two violas, and two cellos. The resemblance to Psycho, rather than Fahrenheit 451, had plenty to do with Geoff Emerick close-miking the string section giving the chamber section the power of amplified guitars. This radical approach, however, didn’t sit too well with the players. ‘‘Strings would be traditionally recorded six feet away from the instrument, so I got the mikes really close to the strings,’’ Emerick explained. ‘‘That unnerved the players, because with quartets, there’s always one player who isn’t so good and he always sits at the back, so you can’t hear him as well.’’32 The intensity Emerick creates through his miking, where the musicians’ bows strike the strings like knife thrusts, created a powerful sense of anguish in the tragedy of this story. On Revolver, we can discern off the top that the concept of community that the Beatles once spoke to in their music was now becoming fractured. In ‘‘Taxman,’’ it’s clear that the government doesn’t speak for its people,

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or even represent the organizing principle of a society anymore. It isolates and indifferently taxes people instead. Throughout ‘‘Eleanor Rigby,’’ we’re confronted with unbearable isolation. Eleanor Rigby picks up rice in a church for a wedding she’ll never get to experience for herself. Father McKenzie writes sermons he knows that no one will ever hear. When Eleanor Rigby dies, no one bothers to come to her funeral. Father McKenzie, when he walks from his grave, knows that no one will be saved. It is perhaps somewhat serendipitous that, during the eighties, someone actually discovered a gravestone bearing the name of Eleanor Rigby. She died in October 1939, almost exactly a year before Lennon was born, in the churchyard of St. Peter’s, Woolton. To add to the coincidence, a mere few yards to the right is a grave for John McKenzie. The grave is also mere yards from where Lennon and McCartney first met at the summer fete in 1957. Lennon’s ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping’’ also shows signs of the splintering of the Beatles’ vision. In the song, John envisions a dreamy retreat from the world. Where ‘‘There’s a Place’’ took us to the boundless world of the imagination, providing a skeleton key to the real world in front of us, ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping’’ has more in common with the hermetic beauty of the Beach Boys’ ‘‘In My Room,’’ where one seeks not to connect with the real world, or the people in it. ‘‘‘I’m Only Sleeping’ [is] a lugubrious strain, reminiscent of the songs of the Great Depression, with a melody that stretches like a cat up and down the aeolian scale in the distant key of E-flat minor,’’ Albert Goldman observed in The Lives of John Lennon. ‘‘[T]he song is loath to move as was its author, whom it also mimics by breaking off abruptly from time to time, as if the song, like its singer, had suddenly lost consciousness.’’33 More than anything else, ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping’’ begins the steady withdrawal of John Lennon from the spirit of community offered by being a Beatle. His retreat would become more explicitly stated in ‘‘I’m So Tired’’ in 1968, and then ultimately concluded, long after the Beatles’ demise, with ‘‘Watching the Wheels,’’ on his final 1980 album, Double Fantasy. ‘‘John’s craving for somnolence testifies to the terrible depletion of his vital energies wrought by years of rockin’ ’round the clock, going for days without sleeping, driven by Prellies and Dexies, travel jitters and stage fright, to say nothing of the long-term effects of chronic rage, paranoia, and nightly hotel-room orgies,’’ Goldman further concluded. ‘‘John Lennon became Yawn Lennon.’’34 Since Lennon grew more content to retreat from the world, McCartney began his ascent toward leading the band, both in their songs and toward a whole new direction. Where ‘‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’’ introduced Beatles’ fans to the sitar, ‘‘Love You To’’ is the first piece of Indian music composed by George Harrison. Since Revolver takes into account the cycle of life, Harrison’s relationship to Indian music may have begun before birth. Apparently when his mother was pregnant, she used to listen to Radio India on Sunday mornings. George’s sister Louise suggested that he might have actually heard the sitar before he got out of the womb. ‘‘Love You To,’’ a

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Hindustani song whose title does a reversal on ‘‘Love to You,’’ has no connecting relationship to the familiar Beatles’ sound. It doesn’t even feature the other Beatles, only a number of fine Indian instrumentalists, such as Anil Bhagwat on the tabla. When the sonorous, cautionary notes of the sitar open the song, it creates a foreboding sonic dreamscape wherein the quest for perfect love brings with it a profound awareness of mortality, or what Devin McKinney also calls ‘‘snide sounds from a nowhere that is alive with secrets.’’35 Within those secrets of ‘‘Love You To’’ is the emerging personality of George Harrison, who is no longer the quiet unassuming Beatle, but now becoming his own musical force. If McCartney makes you feel the sting of loneliness on ‘‘Eleanor Rigby’’ and Lennon expresses the need to separate in ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping,’’ Harrison seeks to replace the waning communal spirit of the Beatles with a higher spiritual purpose. ‘‘[Harrison became a] modern day Siddhartha who, lured by the sound of an exotic instrument, climbed the rock palace walls. . .with little precedent to follow, popularized the concept of rock song as popular conversation with God,’’ wrote musician Ashley Kahn in a Mojo appreciation of Harrison after his death. ‘‘[He was a] frustrated gardener who never fully mastered—yet never stopped reaching for—the perfect balance of superstardom, spiritual apprenticeship and rural repose.’’36 Harrison’s dramatic use of the Indian modal in ‘‘Love You To’’ would have a profound influence on other pop music to come like the Rolling Stones’ ‘‘Street Fighting Man’’ and Donovan’s ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man.’’ ‘‘Here, There and Everywhere’’ represents one of McCartney’s most satisfying love ballads. It portrays a happier portrait of his relationship with Jane Asher than many of his more recent songs. Written in June 1966, while visiting Lennon, McCartney ended up composing it alone at the side of Lennon’s outdoor pool when his writing partner didn’t want to get out of bed. Paul had intended it as a tribute to the standards of Tin Pan Alley—for example, delaying the word ‘‘everywhere,’’ just as Cole Porter did to the word ‘‘heaven’’ in ‘‘Cheek to Cheek.’’ Motown composer Lamont Dozier also picked up on this when ‘‘Here, There and Everywhere’’ was picked #4 by Mojo magazine in their 100 Greatest Songs selection in 2000. ‘‘There’s something about the feeling that makes it sound like you’ve always known it,’’ Dozier told Mojo’s Johnny Black. ‘‘When I first heard it, I couldn’t believe that it was Lennon and McCartney. I was sure it was more like George Gershwin or Cole Porter. It was that familiar to my spirit.’’37 But having also been duly influenced by the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and in particular, the romantically ethereal ‘‘God Only Knows,’’ McCartney composed a love song that is an equally glistening beauty. Although ‘‘Yellow Submarine’’ was conceived as the group’s standard platform for Ringo, it is likely the catchiest, most comically imaginative song he ever sang. McCartney composed it while in that semi-dream state before sleep. He was imagining a story about a kid who hears stories concerning a land of submarines from an old sailor, and then the boy desires to sail there

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to see that magical world for himself. Conceived as a simple children’s singalong number, it initially had a spoken introduction by Ringo that was later dropped. ‘‘Yellow Submarine’’ begins as a simple sea chantey. But it soon turns into a full-scale comedy production featuring various sound effects produced by items like cash registers, chains, bar glasses, tap dancing mats, hand bells, and wind machines. Marianne Faithful, Pattie Harrison, and the Stones’ Brian Jones picked their choice of instrument and rattled away. With George Martin at the controls, he orchestrated the song in the same manner he handled some of his early comedy recordings of the Goons. But the comic middle section, where we hear the inhabitants of the submarine, isn’t just a nod to the Goons, it incorporates the spirit of a number of early schmaltzy songs like ‘‘I’m a Pink Toothbrush, You’re a Blue Toothbrush’’ and ‘‘The Railroad Runs Through the Middle of the House,’’ comedy tunes that Harrison had listened to growing up. John Lennon added some words, while folk singer Donovan added the ‘‘sky of blue/sea of green’’ part. Roadie Mal Evans, assistant Neil Aspinall, and some of the staff at Abbey Road provided the chorus in the studio. ‘‘ ‘Yellow Submarine’ made me laugh,’’ stated that famously reclusive Beach Boy Brian Wilson. ‘‘I mean, livin’ in a submarine?’’38 ‘‘Yellow Submarine’’ would rightly become a classic children’s standard and later the title song and story of a popular animated picture. From the gaiety of ‘‘Yellow Submarine,’’ we shift abruptly into the heavymetal luster of John Lennon’s ‘‘She Said, She Said.’’ The song was developed out of an incident that took place in Los Angeles, in August 1965, at a rented house during their American tour. One night, the Beatles threw a party celebrating Jane Fonda’s new movie, the western parody Cat Ballou, inviting her actor brother Peter Fonda, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby from the Byrds, plus Don Short, the Daily Mirror entertainment correspondent. Most of the guests were dropping acid, with John and George taking it intentionally for the first time after being slipped the drug by the dentist earlier that year. It was also the first time that Ringo would try it. As Harrison was describing his LSD experience, speaking as though he were dying, Peter Fonda started assuring Harrison that there was no need to fear death. Apparently, Fonda had almost died himself from an accidental gunshot wound when he was a child. While also tripping, Lennon became unnerved by this casual talk of death, fearing that Fonda’s flippant remark might set him off on a bad acid experience. Lennon immediately told Fonda to leave, telling him that he was making him feel like he’d never been born. If one is never born, then how can one die? The awareness of that question, the cycle of life and death, became central to Lennon’s LSD experience. It also came to signify the revolver of the album title. Thoughts of death had sent Lennon back to his troubled youth, recalling feelings of never being born. But to affirm that he does exist, the singer must cling to the simple adolescent perspective of seeing the world as eternally good (‘‘When I was a boy/everything was right’’). But that naive worldview was now ruptured

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by the LSD experience, which brought about for Lennon an innate awareness of mortality. ‘‘I’m not afraid of dying,’’ Lennon once remarked. ‘‘I’m prepared for death because I don’t believe in it. I think it’s just getting out of one car and getting into another.’’39 In the song, Lennon is reminded that death is an inevitable part of a revolving circle. In time, that revolving circle could take the form of another revolver, a weapon that would ultimately end Lennon’s own life, when an assassin used one to kill him. Yet the song’s ironies don’t end. In the 1969 movie Easy Rider, Peter Fonda would play Captain America, a mythic hero traveling the American landscape looking for the Nowhere Land of the American Dream. After an LSD experience leaves him mourning the death of his mother, Captain America finds his own death at the end of a shotgun fired by a redneck. Out of the dark discourse of ‘‘She Said, She Said’’ comes Paul McCartney’s bright optimism of ‘‘Good Day Sunshine.’’ While owing no small debt to the Lovin’ Spoonful’s cheerful ‘‘Daydream,’’ the tune was also a hybrid of the Supremes’ ‘‘Where Did Our Love Go?’’ and ‘‘Baby Love.’’ There’s such an unaffected sunny quality to the song that it would in turn influence the seventies’ rock band Chicago, who would create their own variation on McCartney’s theme with ‘‘Wake Up Sunshine’’ on Chicago. Lennon described ‘‘And Your Bird Can Sing’’ as nothing special, but (besides its incandescent charm) the track candidly addresses Lennon’s belief that one can have everything, your bird can even sing, but it won’t guarantee you knowledge of the self, or of others. However, if you ultimately look in his direction, he’ll be around. McCartney’s ‘‘For No One’’ is a startlingly evocative song about desolation. When Paul wrote it on a Swiss skiing vacation in March 1966, the original title was the lugubrious ‘‘Why Did it Die?’’ Once again, we get a cyclical song, this time about the life and death of a romance. ‘‘For No One’’ has an inescapably lamentable beauty, a quality that in McCartney’s best work, examines the past without reducing it to a cheap, manipulative sentiment, or what musician Brendan Benson refers to as ‘‘melancholic nostalgia.’’40 While technically ‘‘For No One’’ isn’t a country number, it has a stark sadness that is sometimes integral to country music. Country artist Emmylou Harris likely considered that when she covered the song on her 1975 Pieces of the Sky album. ‘‘[I]t has that real deep country sadness,’’ Harris remarked. ‘‘[T]he song is being written from a really interesting perspective: it’s being written for [the singer] but it’s so sympathetic towards her. It moves between two voices until you feel that it’s being sung as a third voice: ‘There will be a time when all the things she said will fill your head.’ How can a 23-year-old man have gone so deep?’’41 The solemn horn motif that adds some of that depth was by classical player Alan Civil, who George Martin had called upon to perform the part. The session started after midnight because fans were constantly disrupting things during the day. Since nothing was written, Civil had to improvise something that Paul could

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only suggest. Martin had to lower the pitch through varispeed on the guitar and piano because Civil couldn’t match the key. Even with all the difficulties getting this lovely brief melody down, Civil is highly remembered for it. ‘‘Dr. Robert’’ is a straight ahead rocker written by Lennon that’s based on Dr. Robert Freymann, a New York physician of German descent who provided a variety of drugs to the city’s art scene—including Charlie Parker, whose death certificate he ultimately signed. Freymann lost his license for six months in 1968 and was ultimately expelled for malpractice in 1975. He later died in 1987. ‘‘Dr. Robert,’’ which endorses chemical enhancement to provide altered states of higher consciousness, has some melodic resemblance to ‘‘Ticket to Ride.’’ Harrison’s ‘‘I Want to Tell You’’ is a song about how our attempts to utter the simple truth are ruptured when our conscious thoughts interfere. He suggests, in a less ostentatious manner than he would a year later on ‘‘Within You Without You,’’ that a higher consciousness in the mind leads to a truth that can’t be spoken so clearly. ‘‘Got to Get You into My Life’’ is a brassy tribute to Motown R&B. It’s also the first Beatles’ tune to feature a brass section. Scored for three saxophones and two trumpets, it began life simply as an acoustic song. Over the eight takes, though, McCartney’s ode to his love of pot got turned into a classic soul arrangement. When McCartney didn’t think the song rocked quite enough, however, Geoff Emerick decided then to move his microphones further down into the bells of the instruments to give their sound more punch. ‘‘Paul could be very precise as to what he wanted, if you were trying to pursue something and you weren’t quite there,’’ Emerick explained. ‘‘John might accept it, [but] Paul would say, ‘No, come on John, let’s have another go, let’s try something else.’’’42 John Lennon’s radically innovative ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ the final track on Revolver, would certainly be considered an example of trying something else. It was the most drastic departure from anything the Beatles ever attempted. What led to the innovations that created this song had everything to do with the transformation of both McCartney and Lennon prior to Revolver. While success had turned the other Beatles toward domesticity in their middle-class comfort, McCartney restlessly turned his attention toward the larger cultural world. There was no question that Jane Asher had played a huge role in opening those doors for him. For one thing, he lived in her parents’ house, a very cultured home, with her mother being a stage director and music teacher, while her father was a psychiatrist. Jane’s brother Peter was, of course, also a musician in Peter and Gordon, for whom Paul had written a number of songs. Therefore, in McCartney’s room, there were drawings from Jean Cocteau’s Opium series, a volume of dramatist Alfred Jarry’s work (whose term ‘pataphysics’ would make its way into McCartney’s ‘‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’’). Basically, the Ashers had made McCartney aware of a world larger than pop. He imbibed in all aspects of the art world—from the avant-garde to mainstream—which would

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ultimately help take the Beatles from the pop rock of A Hard Day’s Night to the imagined art-rock of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. While McCartney both fed and enlarged his ego, Lennon set out to annihilate his through LSD. The concept of destroying the ego had come to him in a vision he had during one of his first acid trips. In the early winter of 1966, he went to Barry Miles’ Indica Bookshop to seek out Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (1964), which was Leary’s reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the book, Leary had written of spending seven months in the Himalayas with Lama Govinda studying Tibetan Buddhism. During that time, Leary was told about the death of the ego, as opposed to the death of the body. The Book of the Dead was to be spoken to a dying person to help them through the various stages of death. But for Leary, it could also be spoken to those on acid fearing the death of their ego. Lennon’s original title of ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows’’ was ‘‘The Void,’’ citing Leary’s comment about the void being ‘‘beyond the restless flowing electricity of Life.’’ 43 Lennon’s words were written before any idea of the tune and since the words were unlike any other Beatles’ song. The Beatles wanted this music to be as powerful as Lennon’s lyrics. In the first few hours of recording on April 6, 1966, what begun as ‘‘Mark 1’’ soon became ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’’ The song’s melody was in the chord of C, arranged as a liturgical Eastern religious chant. Since Lennon was using acid to strip away his ego, he also stripped away the track’s very structure, thus providing a drone. To give it more color, McCartney came up with the idea of using tape loops—something he learned after he listened to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Junglinge, which had fused both electronic notes and vocals into a form of musique concrete. By sending a number of tape loops, of various phrases and whoops, revolving through a number of machines, they began layering the effects. Through this process, the Beatles had provided a saturation of random sounds. George Martin varied the speed on some of the loops, as well, to create an ever-evolving soundscape. ‘‘I think it was Paul who found out that if you removed the erase head and put a loop of tape on it, you could actually play a short phrase that would saturate itself,’’ Martin recalled. ‘‘They each went home and made these funny little loops and they would bring various tape loops in for me to hear. They recorded them at different speeds. . .[w]ith ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ I selected eight of them and put them all on different machines.’’44 Since Geoff Emerick had done a number of sessions with the World Record Company, who had recorded a series of Shakespeare plays that used tape loops and avant-garde music, he was instantly comfortable with the experiments here. The song begins with the same buzz saw drone that opened ‘‘I Feel Fine,’’ except it isn’t caused by feedback from a guitar amp. Harrison recreates the effect on the Indian tamboura, while Ringo lays down a steady 4/4 drum pattern. What sounds like seagulls swooping through the musical haze begin to coil through the composition. This fragment is nothing more than a tape loop of

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McCartney laughing and was being manipulated throughout the mix. Overtop of this, Lennon wanted his tribute to The Book of the Dead to sound like the Dalai Lama preaching from a mountaintop. Emerick was game to try any effects to aid the song, but they became difficult to achieve when Lennon wasn’t terribly good at articulating what he wanted. ‘‘John was difficult to please, because he didn’t have a lot of patience,’’ Emerick recalled. ‘‘He couldn’t express what he was hearing in his mind, so you had to figure it out over a series of conversations what he wanted.’’45 Out of Lennon’s garbled concept, Emerick came up with an idea. While the first half of the song has Lennon properly miked, after the break for the backward guitar solo, Emerick dramatically altered the sound of John’s voice by putting it through a rotating Leslie speaker from the electronic organ cabinet. Emerick desired to have Ringo’s continuous drum roll, which itself played like a tape loop, to provide an imposing presence. ‘‘I moved the bass drum microphone much closer to the drum than had been done before,’’ Emerick explained. ‘‘There’s an early picture of the Beatles wearing a woollen jumper with four necks. I stuffed that inside the drum to deaden the sound. Then we put the sound through Fairchild 600 valve limiters and compressors. It became [Ringo’s drum] sound of Revolver.’’46 Given the album’s conceptual theme of life’s cycles, they turned to someone from their very beginnings to provide the cover art. That year, Klaus Voorman had been wrapping up a tenure with his band, Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, in Germany, and about to join Manfred Mann, when he got a call from John Lennon to ask if he could provide an idea for the album cover. Although he hadn’t done any drawings in a number of years, Voorman agreed and did a number of sketches until he settled on the one featuring the group with their familiar long hair surrounded by a collage of photos from various stages of their career. ‘‘I asked them to bring in their private pictures from when they were babies, or whatever,’’ Voorman recalled.47 Since it was Voorman who first created the hair style they would soon adopt for themselves, hiring Voorman to do the cover was a significant connection to their origins. When he was done, Voorman took the design to EMI to show the group, as well as to George Martin and Brian Epstein. They all loved it (although the picture Paul supplied of himself sitting on a toilet in Hamburg was excised). Epstein was apparently so impressed that he broke into tears because he had initially feared that it might not work. But it might have also been that he knew that with the conclusion of Revolver his own usefulness (now that the band was retiring from touring) might be ending. Providing the conclusion to Revolver, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows’’ becomes one of the Beatles’ most dazzling and exotic compositions. It reinterprets their music while redefining the utopianism in their sound. The track neither makes concessions to any pop trend (since no such psychedelic trend yet existed) nor does it provide a protective cocoon for the singer

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to take refuge in (as did ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping’’). As with ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ Lennon again invites the participation of the listener to journey to the Nowhere Land of the mind. But unlike the brighter utopian hopes cited in ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows’’ takes us into the void. Of course, Nowhere Land, as a utopian concept, is itself a void, but its realm was once brightly colored and charged with enthusiasm. In ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ we become aware of a Nowhere Land brought on by death. The spirit isn’t revitalized, it’s set loose from the body, never to find substance, caught forever in a swirl of whooping birds and backward guitar solos. The presence of death at the conclusion of Revolver was significant. With this record came the end of the Beatles, at least, the Beatles as they were through the years of Beatlemania. The tunes on this record didn’t conform to an image of four mop-tops in matching suits, shaking their heads in unison, singing ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah.’’ The 1966 tour had shown the group that love songs didn’t teach the world to love. The world could still hate just as passionately as it could love. Their compositions changed none of that. While this sober realization didn’t stop them from writing love songs or creating love anthems such as ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ the Beatles no longer believed that the word love would ultimately set you free. In more ways than one, Revolver had indeed brought the Beatles full circle. After the 1966 American tour, the Beatles went their separate ways. John Lennon ventured off to Spain to shoot Richard Lester’s antiwar film, How I Won the War. George Harrison took a two-month sojourn to India to meet Ravi Shankar and take formal sitar lessons. Paul McCartney went vacationing with roadie Mal Evans and composed his first film score for the Boulting Brothers’ picture, The Family Way. Ringo Starr took the time to relax. As the Beatles disappeared from the pop landscape, Tin Pan Alley was preparing its own form of revenge on the Fab Four. As the Beatles had transformed American pop songwriting by instilling the idea that songwriters could perform their own material, the young songwriters of the Brill Building in New York were finding fewer and fewer outlets for their material. Some, like Neil Diamond and Carole King, began recording and singing their own compositions. But when two burgeoning Hollywood producers named Bert Schneider and Rob Rafelson came up with the concept of creating a Pre-Fab Four for television, the Monkees were born. Besides cashing in on the absence of the Beatles, they now had a group to perform material produced by the Brill Building songwriters. The idea was hatched actually a year earlier, in October 1965, to create a group in the persona of the Beatles during their A Hard Day’s Night period for a weekly TV series. Many notable Los Angeles musicians were auditioned for parts, including the eccentric Van Dyke Parks, who would ultimately collaborate with Brian Wilson on the doomed Smile project; Steven Stills, who was rejected because his hair and teeth were not TV friendly; Bobby ‘‘Boris’’ Pickett, who did the

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novelty song ‘‘Monster Mash’’; and Danny Hutton, who went on to fame in Three Dog Night. In the end, they went with British actor Davy Jones, American musicians Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith, plus American TV actor Mickey Dolenz. While the Monkees would appear to be performing as a pop band, it was session musicians who were providing the music. The show kicked off on September 12 with an episode called ‘‘Royal Flush,’’ where Dolenz tries to save a Princess from her evil uncle. When the show began, the Monkees had only one single, ‘‘Last Train to Clarksville’’ (which composers Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart based on the fade-out harmony of ‘‘Paperback Writer’’). The other songs ranged from the Three-Blind-Mice melody of ‘‘The Monkees Theme’’ to the cloying ballad ‘‘I Want to be Free.’’ Their attempt at straight-ahead rock was the tepid Freddie Cannon imitation ‘‘Let’s Dance On.’’ Schneider and Rafelson knew that the band needed to fill at least six or seven minutes of the show with music because the scripts were (to put it charitably) pretty thin. They made a phone call to Don Kirshner, who was the head of the Columbia/Screen Gems’ music division and had a songwriting empire at his fingertips. Kirshner saw an opportunity to put his stable—Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill—back into the spotlight after Beatlemania had knocked them out. Within the week, Kirshner sent a dozen prerecorded music tracks for the group to dub their voices onto, plus a number of new songs. There was now enough material to fill out the season, plus some extras to fit a debut album. The fall of 1966 saw ‘‘Last Train to Clarksville’’ reaching #1, along with the TV show. The band’s relationship with Kirshner over the next few years, though, was hardly reciprocal with generosity. In particular, Mike Nesmith, a gifted Texas musician and songwriter, was feeling more like a trained chimpanzee. He wanted the group to be a group and play their own instruments. In time, the band would squeeze Kirshner out for $35 million in compensation thanks to Nesmith’s rants (and threats). By their third album, Headquarters (1967), they finally became more of an autonomous group. But without Don Kirshner to hate, the Monkees began to fragment over the years. Before the end of the decade, their show was off the air. They rallied to make one counterculture cult film, the inchoate Head (1968), which had an improbable cast that included boxer Sonny Liston, Victor Mature, Annette Funicello, and composer Frank Zappa. While many saw the Monkees as an inauthentic rip-off of the Beatles, merely hired hands playing trivial pop, the group did have some substance beneath its plastic cover. In fact, Zappa, who had been snidely satirizing the values of American plastic culture, thought the Monkees sounded better than the love-and-beads bands that were sprouting up in the wake of the Beatles’ retirement from touring. He would even make an appearance on their television show where he and Mike Nesmith switched identities to do a mock interview. The ascension of the Monkees made it clear that, in the wake of

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the Beatles leaving the road, pop fans were still hungry for a spark of magic, a sense that what they believed back in 1964 wasn’t a false promise. The Monkees were a false promise, possibly one of the first clone bands that ultimately made some good pop records. As the Monkees continued to make headlines in late 1966, John Lennon had returned from Spain and, in November, went to an art exhibit at the Indica Gallery in London where he met Yoko Ono for the first time. Born in 1934, Ono, whose name means ‘‘ocean child,’’ was the eldest daughter of an aristocratic Tokyo family. Moving to San Francisco in 1936, where her father was a banker, they moved between the coast and New York until Pearl Harbor forced the Ono clan back to Japan. While being left to servants by her mother outside Tokyo, Yoko had to fend for herself and her siblings until after the war when she was reunited with her parents. By the early fifties, they were back in New York, where Yoko did three years of philosophy at Sarah Lawrence. After dropping out, she eloped with Japanese composer Toschi Ichiyananagi. They stayed married for seven years, as Yoko tried to make her way into the Manhattan avant-garde scene. She first associated with composers John Cage and La Monte Young before setting up her own art show in 1960 at a Madison Avenue gallery that was operated by George Macunias, who had organized various live dadaist events known as ‘‘Fluxus.’’ Yoko’s work philosophically fit in with Macunias’s concept. One of her pieces, that she called the ‘‘Eternal Time Clock,’’ was a clock that had only a second hand that was encased in a plastic bubble. By 1961, she was doing live events at the Village Gate, including the placing of microphones hidden in the bathroom, so that the audience would hear urinating, defecating, and toilets flushing. In early 1963, Ono divorced Ichiyananagi to marry the avant-garde artist Tony Cox, with whom she had a child, Kyoko, that summer. She was still determined to have a career, though, but felt that New York provided her little hope. By 1966, she was becoming encouraged when she and Tony were invited to a British symposium, ‘‘The Destruction of Art,’’ after contacting an old American friend from the art world named Dan Richter. He found her and Tony a place to live in Park Row. Within a few weeks, she got the show at the Indica Gallery where she first met John Lennon. Ono claimed at the time that she had no idea who the Beatles were, but her assertion makes little sense. The Manhattan art world was well aware of the Beatles at the time she was performing and exhibiting. Besides, when she came to London, according to writer Barry Miles, she visited Paul McCartney to collect some musical manuscripts to add to John Cage’s Notations collection of contemporary music scores. It was after Paul gave her a manuscript that he put her on to Lennon. Lennon meanwhile arrived at her show the day before the opening and was immediately taken with her minimalist, ironic art statements that combined elements of both John Cage and Andy Warhol. When they first met, she gave him a card that said ‘‘Breathe’’ on it.

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He panted. She laughed. But it was her ‘‘Ceiling Painting’’ that made him consider her more favorably. The piece—on the ceiling—was a canvas with one word on it. You had to climb a ladder, grab a magnifying glass hanging from a string, and read the word. It said ‘‘yes’’ (rather than ‘‘fuck you’’) which impressed Lennon. After the show, Yoko tried to hitch a ride with him in his Mini, but he quickly broke free and disappeared. Eighteen months later, she would rarely ever leave his side. While the Beatles were no longer a touring outfit, they still wanted to make records. The thought of being strictly a studio band, at first, seemed greatly liberating because they no longer had to endure the pressures of going on the road. On November 24, they would begin work on a track they intended to include on their new album. ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ was a song that Lennon wrote while in Spain working on Richard Lester’s movie. In the midst of shooting a battlefield scene, Lennon took a break smoking some Spanish pot and lying on a beach slowly composing this new song. Actor Michael Crawford, who costarred in the film, shared a beach house with Lennon and heard him play this new tune with lyrics saying, ‘‘Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see. . .’’ Strawberry Field was actually a Salvation Army orphanage in Beaconsfield Road in Woolton, a mere five minutes from Lennon’s childhood home on Menlove Ave. It acquired its name during an earlier era when it was a farm that produced strawberries. As a child, with his Aunt Mimi, Lennon would visit the summer fetes at the orphanage and sell bottles of lemonade with his friends Ivan Vaughn and Pete Shotten. His aunt would remember John responding excitedly to the sound of the Salvation Army brass band, pushing her to hurry so he wouldn’t miss the music they played. As Albert Goldman would point out in The Lives of John Lennon, this was a prescient memory. The Salvation Army brass band suggested the later Sgt. Pepper image the Beatles stepped into a year later. But, as Lennon thought back on the orphan children he watched play, he knew he couldn’t conceive ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ as a nostalgic childhood memory. ‘‘[Lennon] knew perfectly well that the little girls in blue and white dresses, their straw boaters tied with red ribbons about their chins, were orphans, like himself,’’ Goldman asserted. ‘‘Strawberry Field was not simply John Lennon’s playground—it was his spiritual home.’’48 In many ways, it was also John Lennon’s ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel.’’ If the early Beatles’ music was an attempt to forge a dream out of the nightmare of growing up in postwar Liverpool, enduring the tragic death of his mother, in ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ Lennon finds a nightmare within the dreamy texture of his song. As Devin McKinney sharply observed, ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ is a ‘‘clash between an ineffable dream and its countervailing nightmare—life as it is in a dream, versus life as it is.’’49 ‘‘Let me take you down,’’ Lennon states mournfully after the soft opening notes of the mellotron begin the song. Once again, Lennon says, ‘‘there’s a

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place.’’ Only this time, it’s not necessarily in his mind or the mystical void offered up in ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’’ He’s found a new place to dwell in another version of Lonely Street. Unlike ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ Lennon discovers a house of phantoms where nothing is real. The song is about finding one’s true identity in a world where the imagination can provide other versions of that identity. For Lennon, the years of Beatlemania had provided an identity he sought to escape. This song not only musically tears at the texture of his Beatle self, it offers the rather frightening notion of being left totally alone, an orphan to the world he’s been living in. To express that desolation, to revel in the surreal rendering of his childhood, Lennon creates a musical bed that invokes both Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali. ‘‘When Lennon sings ‘Strawberry Fields’ he sounds like Robert Johnson or something,’’ Elvis Costello commented to Mojo magazine in 1996. ‘‘You can tell it’s all in his head. He’s so focused on what he’s doing it’s scary.’’50 It’s not surprising that Costello would hear Robert Johnson since the song was originally conceived as a talking blues. In that original version, Lennon declared the paradox of who he truly was, different from all others, forever burdened by the knowledge that he was alone both as a boy and a creative man. As Steve Turner explained, ‘‘[His visits] were. . .like Alice’s escapades down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. He felt that he was entering another world, a world that more closely corresponded with his inner world, and as an adult he would associate these moments of bliss with his lost childhood and also with a feeling of drug-free psychedelia.’’51 For that reason, the song would evolve from a talking blues into an elliptical, dreamy psychedelic ballad. The looking glass aspect of the song similarly unnerved Martin Carr, of the Boo Radleys. ‘‘It’s hard to imagine this being tied down to something as tangible as vinyl—it’s more of a dream than a song,’’ Carr explained. ‘‘It transports me to half-remembered places and times.’’52 As eerily memorable and evocative as the song is, Lennon himself wasn’t happy with the original recording of it. Hearing that the piece didn’t quite resolve itself, he suggested to George Martin that he prepare an orchestral score to compliment it. When it was finished, Lennon still wasn’t impressed. He preferred the beginning of the first take of the song and the conclusion of the other one. He asked Martin if he could just splice the two parts together. Martin told him that it was impossible since they were in different keys and tempos. Lennon balked leaving Martin ‘‘to fix it.’’ To do so, Martin figured if he speeded up the tempo of the second part, he could match it to the first part of the song. When he and Geoff Emerick put it together, they created what Albert Goldman accurately described as ‘‘a stoned descent into the maelstrom of the unconscious mind.’’53 It took 45 hours of work to make this surreal masterpiece work. Since Lennon wrote a labyrinthine study of his childhood, McCartney wished to contribute his own more nostalgic view. ‘‘Penny Lane’’ was

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McCartney’s own version of Lennon’s ‘‘In My Life.’’ He recollects the places of his youth where, ironically, none of the things he lists are even found on Penny Lane. Curiously, it was Lennon who once lived on the street with his mother and father. (John had originally included Penny Lane as part of ‘‘In My Life,’’ but ultimately dropped it.) The street was named for James Penny, an eighteenth-century slave ship owner, back when Liverpool was the hub of the slave trade. McCartney mentions Bioletti’s barbershop, which had a collection of photos in the window of various haircut styles, plus the St. Barnabus Church where he was once a choirboy. Like ‘‘Strawberry Fields,’’ the song revisits the past only McCartney is less opaque than Lennon. Childhood is seen as a comfort zone of happy memories, as opposed to John’s picture of confusion and sorrow. In 2006, there was some considerable debate over whether the street should be renamed because of its dubious heritage. After all, a number of other streets named for slave traders were being renamed after abolitionists, or for Anthony Walker, a black teenager who was murdered in 2005 in a racial attack. But Penny Lane, however, retains its name, perhaps due to the Beatles’ lovely rendering in this song. Over the years, Penny Lane has even become a tourist attraction. The imposed isolation of fame had brought the two writing partners a need to revisit the real life of their youth. ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ like ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ is an impressionistic view of the lingering memories of the past. But where Lennon’s is a riveting dirge, McCartney’s is a brightly colored piece of baroque pop. As if to make that association more explicit, McCartney sought out trumpeter David Mason to provide the solo in the bridge. Paul had heard him on the BBC performing Bach’s Second Brandenberg Concerto from Guildford Cathedral. McCartney asked George Martin if they could get him to come and record on ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ and Mason agreed. McCartney directed Mason in the studio, while Martin did the musical notations. Three hours later, they had the solo. While ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ comes across as the more avant-garde of the two songs, it was McCartney who was the Beatles’ avant-gardist. But Paul was also a born entertainer. When he looked to the past, he wanted to present it as he wished it could be. He sings with great delight, whether it’s remembering a banker with a motorcar or having a go making out with his girl and doing ‘‘finger pies.’’ While George Martin was eager for ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ backed with ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ to become part of the group’s next album, Brian Epstein thought it was important to have a new single out for the New Year. It would come out in February 1967—and AM radio never sounded the same again. The single, a conceptual 45 if ever there was one, represents one of the last samples of the magic calling of Nowhere Land. For Lennon, in ‘‘Strawberry Fields,’’ he takes you to a forlorn past where he’s anxious to find relief, and to ultimately find his true self. His voice, which has the beautiful grain of worn sandpaper, reveals a performer who sings with a hungry desire to be

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released from the pain he can’t seem to escape from. For McCartney, in ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ his visionary spirit is heard in his effortless ability to counter pain and remorse with an ache for the beauty of life. When the Beatles began their quest for fame, they sought out their American musical roots in order to find their own identity as the Beatles. But now removed from the road, from that original quest, the group returned to their own British roots in these two songs. When the single was released, the song became a #1 hit in America. But it stalled at #2 in Britain, when it was ousted by Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘‘Release Me.’’ But that was okay. The charts no longer held the same allure as they did in 1964 when ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’ shot to #1 worldwide. What started as a love affair between a band and its eager, expectant audience had now turned to ritual, routine, and retribution. They began their 1962 Please Please Me album session with the anticipatory ‘‘There’s a Place.’’ They would then start the Revolver album with the final surrender of ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows.’’ That title, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ was yet another malapropism from Ringo, and it turned out to be prophetic. After ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ and ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ tomorrow didn’t know. All the Beatles really knew was that they were no longer continuing to face and confront their live audience. For the first time, they were about to truly face each other.

CHAPTER 6

Fixing a Hole There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves. Bharti Mukherjee, Jasmine When the Summer of Love arrived in 1967, it was less a sudden burst of altruism than a withdrawal from the abyss of 1966. In the previous year, during a Summer of Hate, American cities burned in reaction to the continued racial unrest. The escalation of the war in Vietnam had also all but diminished President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Violence was becoming exactly how black activist H. Rap Brown described it—as American as apple pie. Amidst this chaos, the mounting frustration over the dashed ideals of the New Frontier had made the Beatles easy targets for the angry and the disillusioned. The Fab Four were, to a large degree, at the apex of those very ideals being dashed. But they weren’t alone. While John Lennon was worried about whether he’d be killed as the Beatles crisscrossed America that summer, another performer was having similar qualms: Bob Dylan. Not long before the Beatles began confronting the many pitfalls of being idolized pop stars, folk troubadour Bob Dylan decided to enter the pop arena himself. During the early part of the sixties, Dylan had been an active member of the American folk revival, a dedicated musical movement that had aligned itself with the Civil Rights struggle and was committed to carrying on the long, ennobled tradition of left-wing activism. The movement was led by such stalwart figures as Pete Seeger, Odetta, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Joan Baez—and they had as their figurehead, the legendary Woody Guthrie. What Elvis had been to the birth of rock, Guthrie was to the heart of the American folk movement. Within this revival was yet another quest

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for Nowhere Land and the music carried a righteous spirit to get them there. Contrary to the Beatles’ utopian ideals, their vision was of a new country, with an authentic set of values attached, and it wasn’t located in a place in the mind. These believers looked out into America with an obligation to the dream of JFK’s New Frontier. They demanded an America with justice for black and white, men and women. In their music, it was held that the values of the marketplace would never take precedence over the value of human life. They refused the urban hustle and bustle for what they saw as the honest simplicity of the rural communities. Unlike pop music, perceived by the folk community as an ugly symbol of capitalist corruption, their music set out to document the pure struggle of all peoples, not just one artist’s petty self-interest. If you were to write a folk song, it wasn’t going to be ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man,’’ but rather, ‘‘We Shall Overcome.’’ Into this sacred world, stepped an enigma named Bob Dylan. Dylan had abandoned his actual name of Robert Zimmerman, and he set out to become a folksinging legend before the age of 25. Arriving in New York, with the rebellious symbol of Brando’s corduroy cap on his head, Dylan showed the skilled cunning of a vaudevillian troubadour. He slung his acoustic guitar over his shoulder with a chameleon’s aplomb and he sang as if he were the Second Coming of Woody Guthrie. Dylan had positioned himself, like Guthrie, to be a man of the people, the one who would lead a charge against social injustice. His most popular anthems, ‘‘Blowin’ in the Wind’’ and ‘‘The Times They Are a-Changin’,’’ weren’t just protest songs, they were clarion calls. But just as those anthems started changing peoples’ minds, Dylan started a-changin’ himself. In 1965, he abandoned the corduroy cap and donned a leather jacket. Dylan radically altered his repertoire as well by borrowing players from Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band, picking up an electric guitar and plugging in. One night, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, a loud and unhappy community expressed their displeasure when Dylan took a traditional folk song named ‘‘Penny’s Farm’’ and turned it into the loud urban blues of ‘‘Maggie’s Farm.’’ With this song, he declared his independence from a movement that had recently crowned him their young leader. ‘‘I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more,’’ he boldly cried out. It was quite clear from the power of his voice exactly whose farm he wasn’t gonna work on. Just before Newport, Dylan stated his mission when he tore up the pop charts with an electrifying six-minute single called ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone.’’ In it, he announced to his followers that, unlike their topical songs, his music was no longer going to usher in a better world. Dylan had made it clear to those who loudly booed him, and to anyone who cared to listen, that his music wasn’t a product of history. His music was about to make history. By 1966, as Dylan continued to embrace urban blues and rock ’n’ roll on his stunning two-record set, Blonde on Blonde, many in the folk community declared that Dylan had sold them out. In their eyes, he had embraced the Golden Calf and got seduced by rock’s vulgar paganism. He’d abandoned

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the pastoral integrity of their indigenous music. Of course, in this perceived act of apostasy, Dylan’s decision was duly affected by the pop storm created by the Beatles. Dylan claimed that he saw a line being drawn and that this British group was no teenybopper fad. He saw a new possibility for himself in reaching a larger audience by providing a greater scope for his music. As he embraced the challenge the Beatles posed, Dylan abandoned the selfrighteous dogmatism he saw inherent in the ambitious goals of the folk movement. He immediately made haste for the abstract language of dreams, surrealist tales, and comic allegories that were filled with real and wildly imagined personalities. When he launched his electric tour that spring of 1966, the concerts that followed were charged with a peculiar ambience, a prophecy of what was to come to pass by 1968, when assassinations, riots, and an escalating war would tear America in half. To face the angry swarm of betrayed folk fans, Dylan brought on board a Canadian rock group from Toronto called the Hawks. As the American crowds hissed, jeered, and loudly booed, drummer Levon Helm (the only American in the group) decided to haul his tail back to Arkansas. Being a proud Southerner, Levon didn’t play music to bear insults. After then securing drummer Mickey Jones, the group headed to England, the proud home of the Fab Four. But unlike the Fab Four, they weren’t greeted with any ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah’s.’’ The hostility, in fact, grew so intense that each concert became one more bloody battle in a long, protracted war. Dylan began every show with a set of his acoustic music, but the lyrics were sometimes slowly drawn out, emphasizing the sound of his voice rather than the literal meaning of the lyric. When he came back from the intermission, though, with the crowd mostly calmed and expectant, he and the Hawks launched into some of the loudest, most powerful rock heard from a live stage. Their highly amplified music took no prisoners and it asked no favors. ‘‘It was a musically revolutionary time,’’ remembers the Hawks’ lead guitarist Robbie Robertson. ‘‘Who else can talk about playing all over North America, Europe and Australia and being booed every single night?’’1 Before Dylan embarked on this tour, there were many who feared for his life. Folk singer Phil Ochs actually raised that concern a year earlier. ‘‘Dylan has become part of so many people’s psyches—and there are so many screwed up people in America, and death is such a part of the American scene now,’’ Ochs remarked.2 In 1965, when Ochs made that frank observation, death was just beginning to be part of the American scene. John Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Medger Evers were already dead from assassin’s bullets, but nobody had yet gunned down a pop star, let alone a celebrated folk artist. Ochs understood that Dylan was making himself a lightening rod for the rage of those beginning to feel dispossessed from the dreams of their country. But the dispossessed were no longer just the alienated loners, like Lee Harvey Oswald, now they could just as easily be angry and forsaken idealists. When audiences countered Dylan, these pacifists, who had been

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dreaming of a new country based on egalitarian values, were coming up against some dark primal emotions within themselves. Listening to their cascading jeers, Dylan certainly wasn’t unaware of the fuss he was causing. He could feel the turbulent waves of resentment building with each show— and the audience definitely let him have it. Who was he kidding offering the frivolous ‘‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’’ over ‘‘Blowin’ in the Wind’’? How dare he take those condescending shots at Mr. Jones in ‘‘Ballad of a Thin Man’’? At the Manchester Free Trade Hall, on May 17, 1966, one frustrated individual decided to speak up. Keith Butler had been a mildmannered Dylan fan from Toronto, attending school at Keele University in England. There would come a time, not too long in the future, when Butler would find a relatively normal life, happily raising a family, and finding mainstream employment as a banker. But on this particular evening, he impulsively stepped forward to change the course of Dylan’s show. If Dylan could change history with his music, Butler perhaps thought, he could step into history and change it back. Butler had actually enjoyed the acoustic half of the show like most of the folk purists. But when Dylan returned with the Hawks to play electric rock ’n’ roll, his mood changed as drastically as the crowd’s. In particular, he was resentful about Dylan’s radically altered versions of the once folkflavored ‘‘Baby, Let Me Follow You Down’’ and ‘‘One Too Many Mornings.’’ ‘‘I was disappointed, very emotional, and my anger just welled up when he did two songs I loved in that electric guitar way,’’ he told Andy Gill of Mojo years later.3 With his rage boiling over, Butler stood up and uttered one simple word—and it had the impact of a cold bullet. At the moment Dylan finished ‘‘Ballad of a Thin Man,’’ in the silent second that briefly cut into the endless clatter of displeasure heard in the hall, he yelled out to Dylan, ‘‘Judas!’’ After Butler made his remark, the shock waves rippled through the audience with the surging power of an electrical current. Some in the crowd nervously cheered him, but Dylan was visibly shaken. In his 1963 ‘‘Masters of War,’’ he had already identified the arms merchants as Judas Iscariot—and he was applauded for saying so. A year after, in ‘‘With God on Our Side,’’ he asked listeners if Judas possibly had God on his side? Now on this evening, with nobody but the Hawks on his side, a fan in the audience had accused Dylan of being the ultimate betrayer. He now realized that this electric music, which he delivered with imagination, freedom, and power, was more potent than he could have ever imagined. But he didn’t know that it would bring forth a whole different set of consequences than the world-changing tunes of ‘‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.’’ The only way for him to claim back the truth of this music was to come back hard. ‘‘I don’t believe you,’’ he told Butler curtly. The band then sought to regain their composure when Dylan called out, ‘‘You’re a liar!’’ Turning back to Robbie Robertson, to break Butler’s spell and gather the troops, Dylan refused to passively accept the role of the apostate. He calmly

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told the group, ‘‘Play fucking loud.’’ With those words, Dylan unleashed a torrential version of ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone.’’ Bob Dylan, in this 1966 performance, was telling his followers that they were now on their own with no direction home. Lines were clearly being drawn in the sand—and the sand was shifting. Putting aside for a moment the anti-Semitic intent of yelling ‘‘Judas!’’ at a Jew, the persona of Jesus seemed to be taking on a curious shape that year. After all, it was Lennon, mere months after Dylan’s confrontation with Keith Butler, who became a target for saying that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Now Bob Dylan was being identified as Judas. Pop music was once basically a vehicle for immediate gratification, but now a messianic spirit was beginning to emerge. All of pop’s participants could play out grander roles with higher stakes to win or lose. In particular, pop stars could believe they were delivering the Word (and perhaps even imagine themselves being crucified for doing so). The pop audience could also play a crucial role in this sacrificial ritual. Like Roman soldiers, they could hoist their charlatan heroes on the cross and hammer in the nails just to watch them die for our sins. Before the end of the sixties, all of this religious masochism was getting explicitly acted out in musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar, rock operas like the Who’s Tommy, and films like Privilege. The listener, no longer content to be a mere consumer of music, now sought to be a protagonist in a larger story. Viewed in this particular context, Dylan didn’t just perform a disappointing concert that Keith Butler happened to attend. For Butler, the show represented a larger drama with core values at stake. Butler stepped right into Dylan’s music that night, making himself part of its very fabric, and demanded a change to the concert’s outcome. If, for his audience, Dylan had once been a Jesus figure, Butler would take the role back by accusing Dylan of being a false prophet. In 2002, when singer/songwriter Robyn Hitchcock reenacted the entire Manchester Town Hall show from 1996 at the Borderline Club in London, many in the audience sought to play Keith Butler during the evening performance. A few yelled ‘‘Judas!’’—after the wrong song—either unable to remember Butler’s place in the story or perhaps wishing to alter its time line. Maybe they wanted to see if they could change the outcome of the show. But someone did eventually step into Butler’s shoes at the correct moment before Hitchcock and his group, imagining themselves as Dylan and the Hawks, found their way into ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone.’’ Although the spirit of the evening was all in good fun, with an absence of the possible danger lurking in 1966, Hitchcock’s performance held up as a reminder of the shadow side hidden in the allure of utopian ideals. The Beatles’ ‘‘There’s a Place’’ once held out a hand inviting us to venture to another place, asking us to be an active partner in a dream rather than being a passive consumer. ‘‘I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,’’ Dylan had sung in ‘‘Talkin’ World War III Blues.’’ But what Dylan and the Beatles were to discover in 1966 was

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the risk of asking people to take part in your dreams. Once they do, maybe the dream is no longer yours to control. Shortly after his raucous tour, Dylan suffered a serious motorcycle accident that led to his retreat from the stage to his home in Woodstock, New York. Rumors of his death, or possible disfigurement, had filled the huge hole in the culture that his sudden absence had caused. The very people who once booed Dylan loudest were now desperate to fill the void with conjecture and gossip. In a matter of months, Dylan and the Hawks (soon to be renamed the Band) retreated to a Woodstock basement to make more music. But this new material was far removed from the sound and the fury that stirred audiences to anger. They reached this time into the mythical American past for inspiration and delved into the deeper mysteries of the folk tradition before it became politicized. On the recordings they made, Dylan and the Hawks reveled in tall tales, drunken escapades, and goofy parodies. ‘‘We were playing with absolute freedom,’’ Robbie Robertson told Greil Marcus in The Old, Weird America. ‘‘We weren’t doing anything we thought anyone else would hear, as long as we lived.’’4 He went on to tell Marcus that they were simply killing time.5 But stopping time might be a more accurate way to describe these sessions. Dylan had created a breach in the culture by suspending time with his growing absence. He had severed the umbilical cord connecting him with his audience. But while Dylan fled down the rabbit hole into a basement of his own awaiting pipe dreams, the Beatles sought another hole in which to escape. If the Beatles had become what literary critic Leslie Fiedler once described as imaginary Americans, perhaps they could now imagine themselves as anything. In that world, they could also create an imaginary audience to hear their radical new work. The first step in that process began with a promotional film they made earlier in 1966 for ‘‘Paperback Writer’’ and ‘‘Rain.’’ While the film did little more than capture them in a garden lip-syncing their songs, it did show the Beatles singing and playing without the accompaniment of their screaming fans. For the first time, we could see them performing their music without the hysteria of the crowd surrounding them. When they issued the conceptual single ‘‘Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever’’ in February 1967, they went even further by accompanying it with a conceptual film. Director Peter Goldmann, along with Beatle aide Tony Bramwell, created two very distinct portraits of the band to promote the songs. For ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ the imagery was pretty basic. While Lennon waltzed through the busy streets of east London, he would eventually meet up with the group for some horseback riding and a picnic in the park. Curiously, as they make their way through the grounds to a huge table with flowers and candelabras, they pass—and then quickly abandon—a makeshift stage with their guitars and Ringo’s familiar drum set on it. If the movie for ‘‘Penny Lane’’ was adorned with quaint psychedelia, the surreal ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ featured the boldly experimental tinge

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of the avant-garde. Klaus Voorman had first suggested that ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ sounded like it was played on a strange instrument, so Tony Bramwell decided to invent one for his film. Bramwell first went to Knole Park in Kent, where he found an old tree, and then dressed it up with long rows of strings. Later he attached those strands to a piano and harp. The Beatles, who look like posh gravediggers, hunch over this strange piano/harp hybrid, as Lennon mournfully sings his psychedelic gothic memoir. Bramwell created the effect of the Beatles leaping back and forth from the tree to the ground by shooting it forward and backward in the camera. But the jumping about here doesn’t resemble the bounding leaps of freedom we saw in their great escape from the TV studio in A Hard Day’s Night. Unlike the youthful mop-tops defying age and custom in that scene, the group here appears burdened by age, by the weight of their dreams, and becoming more individually distinct with different cuts of hair and moustaches. Adorned with muttonchops, Lennon could have easily stepped out of an Arthur Conan Doyle mystery. Ringo appears in an unaccustomed red military tunic, while Harrison is buried in his thick balaclava. The picture sleeve for the single itself was a bold departure from the group shots projected in previous covers. Earlier, whether bright-eyed and enthusiastic (Please Please Me), exhausted (Beatles for Sale), or reflective (Rubber Soul), the Beatles were always a recognizable band, the progenitors of a radically new pop sound. But on the front of this new single, the formally posed photo of the group, set in a gold embroidered picture frame, made them appear like arcane artifacts from the nineteenth century. If not for the presence of spotlights and the bright color of the picture, this photo could be a relic from the period of their grandparents. On the back sleeve are featured four separate baby photos placed in different angles to each other. The Beatles are no longer pictured as four parts of one whole, but instead they are presented as four discrete individuals. The question for many who heard this new single, saw the cover sleeve, and watched the promotional films on television was: Are they still even the Beatles? The first test of that question came when Bramwell’s two films premiered on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand television show in early 1967. Clark’s popular long-running variety show had been a lifeline throughout the sixties for teenagers falling in love with rock ’n’ roll. Before showing the clips, Clark asked some of those in his live audience if they thought the Beatles were through. One teenage girl told him that she’d never pay to see them again while another compared them to the Monkees; one other guy told Clark that the Beatles went out with the twist. Consigning the group to fad status was apparently the easiest way for the audience to rationalize their hurt and sense of abandonment. Clark then cued the ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever’’ clip. As the audience watched this dreamy pastiche being screened before them, dismissal turned to disillusionment. One viewer expressed shock at their longer hair and thick moustaches. Another kid could only

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summon up the comment that the group was deliberately becoming weird. Once united behind the Beatles, the audience was now becoming as fragmented as the group itself appeared to be. But as the fans and the press continued to guess just where the Beatles might go, Paul McCartney couldn’t wait until the summer arrived. In the aftermath of that previous Summer of Hate, the Beatles were soon to unleash their labor of love. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released in June 1967, was the brainchild of McCartney while on holiday in Paris in September 1966. One day, while still exhausted from that year’s frantic touring, he decided to travel incognito, not wishing to be recognized. He stuck a Vandyke beard on his chin, slicked his hair back with Vaseline, and went about unnoticed to galleries, shops, and cafes. McCartney loved the freedom that being disguised offered him in not being recognized as a famous celebrity. At the end of his trip in November, while flying back from Nairobi, McCartney started to entertain the notion of disguising the Beatles and creating alter egos for each member of the group. In doing so, they could then perhaps imagine a freedom they had lost being Beatles. Through this notion, McCartney could also demonstrate that the Beatles were no longer these mop-top performers. By reinventing the band for their new incarnation as a performing studio group, McCartney was declaring that the Beatles were now pop artists rather than pop stars. Many of the American west coast rock bands developing at that time were calling themselves exotic names (i.e., Strawberry Alarm Clock), so McCartney thought of creating a concept album where the Beatles would become Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But the concept might not have taken hold if not for Jim McCartney, who had been a player in Jim Mac’s Jazz Band before forming his own ragtime group in 1919. ‘‘I unearthed a photo in the sixties which someone in the family had given me, and there [my father] is in front of the big bass drum. That gave us the idea of Sgt. Pepper.’’ 6 In McCartney’s view, Sgt. Pepper could unveil the reborn Beatles from the ashes of the Fab Four. Where once the Beatles were part of a collective identity, one that encompassed a larger community of fans, they sought now to abandon it and their connection to that community. The Beatles were taking refuge in the studio partially out of a desire to retreat from the violence they had stirred in their audience but also to use the time to deliver a more sophisticated music—only from a safe distance. ‘‘I think the strain of fame and touring had taken its toll,’’ George Martin explained. ‘‘The Beatles were going through a period when they secretly wanted not to be famous and they wanted to be ordinary people again. This could be a psychological reason why the record Sgt Pepper existed in the first place because the boys were referring to some other entity, something quite separate from them. It was as if other people were doing the record and not themselves.’’7

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From the opening sounds of the album, it became quite apparent that they were now presenting themselves as other people. At first listen, we hear an orchestra tuning, while the audience arriving gets comfortable. Aside from the foreign ambience of the orchestra, the crowd we hear isn’t recognizable from the screaming voices of past Beatles’ concerts. The Beatles here invented an ideal audience, not the potentially dangerous one the group faced for all those years on the road. After this mild shock of displacement, the sharp twang of an electric guitar brings the familiar ring of the Beatles back into focus. ‘‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’’ was written by McCartney to introduce the concept of the Beatles’ new persona, one that quickly transformed them from the Fab Four into this new creative entity. McCartney takes the Sgt. Pepper story back to 1947, the year that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. McCartney recounts how this itinerant group went in and out of style, but never failed to entertain their audience. He introduces Sgt. Pepper’s band with a boisterous orchestral fanfare, as the audience laughs and cheers, providing an agreeable bond that, by 1967, was certainly a convivial fantasy. On the first cut of the record, it was immediately clear that the Beatles had fashioned a mirage of Nowhere Land for themselves to live in, providing the illusion of performing the kind of live music they couldn’t in reality play in concert. The Beatles invented a dynamic between themselves and their audience that didn’t reflect the reality of the audience they had just abandoned. In fact, McCartney expresses so much happiness for this crowd that he even wants to take them home. (Can you imagine that kind of consideration being offered to the hordes they faced in the American South in 1966?) On ‘‘Sgt. Pepper,’’ McCartney chose to create a scenario he wished had existed for the group. As in some of his songs, he sought to get back, to reinvent a past the Beatles never had, just to make up a future that, we now know, they’ll never get to fulfill. ‘‘Paul had intended to play it both ways, writing oldfashioned lyrics delivered with a satirical psychedelic intensity,’’ wrote Steve Turner in his analysis of the title song.8 But the satire is only on the surface. When their implicit utopianism turned sour, the Beatles on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band began to explicitly imagine a Nowhere Land that would ultimately prove to be nowhere. As the song concludes, McCartney introduces the band’s singer, Billy Shears (Ringo), for the next song. As the band sings ‘‘Billlllly Sheeeeears’’ (for all the photographers in the audience taking pictures), the crowd starts to scream giving us a brief glimpse of what we remember of the Beatles’ true past. But before we can fully take in the commotion in the crowd, we hear the opening notes of ‘‘With a Little Help From My Friends.’’ The song, composed by Lennon and McCartney, and specifically for Ringo, was the Beatles’ own version of ‘‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’’ It’s a charming musical postcard written to find out if their fans have missed them. While having some difficulty coming up with

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rhyming lyrics for what was being designed as a sing-along like ‘‘Yellow Submarine,’’ Lennon suggested a question-and-answer for each verse. But there was one line that reminded Ringo of that real audience they faced year after year, and it was excised to perpetuate the loving spirit of the imagined crowd on this album. ‘‘[T]hey had one line I wouldn’t sing,’’ Ringo explained. ‘‘It was: ‘What would you do if I sang out of tune? Would you stand up and throw tomatoes at me?’ I said, ‘There’s no chance in hell I am going to sing this line,’ because we still had lots of really deep memories of the kids throwing jelly beans and toys on stage; and I thought that if we ever did get out there again, I was not going to be bombarded with tomatoes.’’9 Beatles’ biographer Hunter Davies was present at the sessions watching them diligently composing the song. He recalled that every time they got stuck they would bounce into an old rock chestnut from their past, like the Champs’ 1958 hit ‘‘Tequila,’’ reminding themselves of who they once were, until they found their new personas again. That evening, they began recording the tune with unfinished lyrics that were eventually completed in the studio. John Lennon’s ‘‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’’ was always assumed to be his tribute to an acid trip, but the story behind the song was much simpler. In early 1967, his son Julian came home from Heath House, a private nursery school in Weybridge, with a drawing of his classmate, Lucy O’Donnell, that he called Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. ‘‘The top was all dark blue sky with some very rough-looking stars, green grass along the bottom, and Lucy with long golden hair,’’ Julian Lennon recalled. ‘‘I showed it to Dad and he said, ‘What’s that then?’ I said, ‘That’s Lucy in the sky, you know, with diamonds.’ He made the song up from that.’’ 10 Rather than being about LSD, as many have claimed, the tune is a loving tribute to both surrealist art and the ‘‘Wool and Water’’ chapter from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass—especially the scene where Alice rides down a river in a row boat with the Queen who then magically transforms into a sheep. Since this was one of Lennon’s favorite childhood books, his memory of it helped him find a way to connect to his child’s drawing. In the summer tour of 1964, when Jimmy Nicol briefly replaced Ringo on drums due to illness, the Beatles would always ask Jimmy how it was going, and he would always say, ‘‘It’s getting better.’’ The song, ‘‘Getting Better,’’ was started by Paul, but finished with the help of Lennon. Like ‘‘We Can Work It Out,’’ ‘‘Getting Better’’ perfectly meshes the sensibilities of both writers. ‘‘‘Getting Better’ proved an interesting example of how they curbed each other’s excesses when they worked together,’’ explained Steve Turner in A Hard Day’s Write. ‘‘The optimism of Paul’s chorus, where everything is improving because of love, is counterbalanced by John’s confession that he was once a schoolboy rebel, an angry young man and a wife beater. When Paul sings that things are getting better all the time, John chimes in with it couldn’t get much worse.’’11 During the recording of the song on March

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21, 1967, things almost did get worse. While recording the chorus, Lennon left the vocal session saying that he was feeling ill. In response, George Martin took Lennon to the roof to get him some fresh air, not realizing that Lennon was actually tripping on acid. When Martin returned, without John, the rest of the group madly rushed to the roof fearing that Lennon, with no rails or barriers to contain him, might have fallen off and killed himself. McCartney’s ‘‘Fixing a Hole’’ addresses a desire for his mind to be free to travel wherever it needs to go. But the number is constructed so carefully that, according to Devin McKinney, McCartney attempts to fix holes rather than risk looking inside them. ‘‘The music, as elsewhere on Pepper, defeats what the lyrics seem to [saying],’’ McKinney asserts. ‘‘Instruments click together like tooled parts, while McCartney’s voice—which we tend to forget has been capable of conveying nuances of pain, frustration, and anger along with boundless good fortune—fails to suggest that anything might obstruct his mind-wanderer’s path to absolute imaginative freedom.’’ 12 McKinney picks up an air of caution that threads its way through much of this record. The smooth craftsmanship of Sgt. Pepper, which gives the album its glamorous sheen, also masks a fear in the band of the messiness of spontaneity. During the recording of Pepper, George and Ringo, in particular, complained that the group didn’t play together as a band any more. During the sessions for Sgt. Pepper, rather than work out their parts by rehearsing, the parts were worked out ahead of time and the musicians were told what to play. Of all the tracks on Sgt. Pepper, ‘‘She’s Leaving Home’’ is perhaps the one most often misunderstood. Usually cited as a sentimental weeper, it’s actually one of McCartney’s most beautifully observed songs about the pain of asserting one’s independence. While sympathizing with a young girl who wishes to leave home, McCartney extends just as much compassion toward the parents who grieve her loss. ‘‘She’s Leaving Home’’ was written in response to a newspaper article McCartney read in February 1967 about Melanie Coe, a 17-year-old girl from North London, who had been studying for her A GCD level exams and then one day just disappeared. Her father was quoted in the paper as saying, ‘‘I cannot imagine why she should run away. She has everything here.’’ Melanie ran away with a man from a gambling casino (rather than someone from the motor trade) in the middle of the afternoon when her parents were at work. As it turns out, McCartney’s embellishments turned out to be more accurate than he could have known. Melanie was an only child, but her parents, a businessman father and a hairdresser mother, were an unhappy and uncommunicative couple. The final irony to the story is that back in 1963, four years before Melanie left home and McCartney discovered the article, she had won a mime competition on the TV show, Ready Steady Go! The Beatles just happened to be guests on the program that night. When the winner was announced, the award went to Melanie Coe and was presented to her by none other than

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Paul McCartney. Once again, a McCartney song included a gorgeously understated string arrangement. Mike Leander, a Decca producer and arranger, was asked by Paul to compose the string section. McCartney met Leander when Marianne Faithfull was recording her version of ‘‘Yesterday.’’ He had turned to Leander rather than George Martin because Martin wouldn’t cancel a Cilla Black session to write the score. While the Beatles were in Knole Park to do their promotional film for ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ Lennon and Tony Bramwell went into an antiques shop near their hotel and found a framed 1843 Victorian circus poster that became the basis for ‘‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.’’ Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal, which Lennon depicts in the song, was held in Rochdale, where Fanque was the first black circus proprietor in Britain. The tune itself, a full-blown circus fantasia with Lennon happily portraying the carny barker, simply describes the various events listed on the circus poster. Lennon alters some of the details, in particular, making Mr. Henderson challenge the world rather than Mr. Kite (the Hendersons were also not ‘‘late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair’’). ‘‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’’ is done in the spirit of a Sgt. Pepper show, with Lennon orchestrating an impressionistic musical collage. George Martin, who couldn’t get his hands on an actual steam organ, plays the harmonium over dubbed recordings of a steam organ performing John Philip Sousa-style marches. ‘‘My problem was playing the ancient harmonium while John and Paul acted as producers,’’ Martin recalled. ‘‘They delighted in seeing me pedal away at that damned instrument for what seemed like hours.’’13 Collecting a series of brass-band tapes, Martin asked engineer Geoff Emerick to cut up bits of those tapes into 15-inch pieces, and then he tossed them into the air. Picked randomly, the strands were then edited into one long reel (with some pieces edited into the song upside down). Out of all this, Lennon got the sound of his fairground. ‘‘Everything was done live,’’ Emerick remembered. ‘‘I think we spent about six hours doing that, and eventually George collapsed onto the floor out of sheer exhaustion.’’14 On ‘‘Within You Without You,’’ George Harrison continues his explorations into Hindustani music, only this time, using an epic orchestral palette. Unlike ‘‘Love You To’’ on Revolver, Harrison delves more directly into his developing Hindu views. In the song, the idea of eliminating ‘‘the space between us all’’ is part of the Hindu belief in prana, where ‘‘life flows on within you and without you.’’ Through prana, the ego is perceived as an illusion that prevents us from recognizing that we are all one. But the position Harrison takes throughout the track, despite the colorful exoticism of the score, is pure egotism. The self-consciousness in his stand, his preachy didacticism, is mostly transcended by both the yearning in his voice and the song’s dreamy allure. ‘‘Within You Without You’’ maybe the richest, most innovative song on the album, but its message is still as patronizing as a fundamentalist Bible-thumping sermon. Harrison talks down to the listener rather than

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enticing the listener into the spiritual power of Hinduism. The sound of laughter at the end of the song, too, which invokes snobs at a cocktail party, cheapens his message with a pompous swipe at nonbelievers. Like ‘‘Love You To,’’ the other Beatles are not present on the recording. While Harrison and Neil Aspinall played tambouras, the session musicians gathered played a dilruba, a tabla, violin, and cello. ‘‘Within You Without You’’ represented the final transformation of Harrison, from the reticent, self-effacing Beatle to the solemn spiritualist. After first becoming acquainted with LSD, he quickly moved on to discover Eastern religion. Bob Spitz, in his Beatles’ biography, would describe Harrison as ‘‘the skinny, pale boy with big ears and no ambition, the dropout burdened with intellectual insecurity, who used to follow half a block behind John Lennon, had developed into a grimly optimistic, pensive young man clamoring for ‘the meaning of it all.’’’15 Harrison’s droll sense of humor wouldn’t really bloom again until after the Beatles broke up, in his association with the Monty Python comedy troupe and the informal sessions with his band, the Traveling Wilburys. ‘‘When I’m 64’’ was written by McCartney back in the late fifties as a tongue-in-cheek cabaret standard, but it was also a tribute to the music of his father’s generation from the twenties and thirties. Curiously, when the Beatles finally recorded the song, McCartney’s dad was 64. Although there’s a cloying coyness that renders the number ultimately too precious, it would strongly influence other songwriters, particularly Harry Nilsson in his capricious calypso ballad ‘‘Down by the Sea’’ from the 1975 Duit On Mon Dei album. Like both ‘‘P.S. I Love You’’ and ‘‘Paperback Writer,’’ McCartney conceived ‘‘When I’m 64’’ as a letter—one addressed to a woman from an awkward gentleman who wants lifetime companionship. ‘‘Lovely Rita’’ fares far better in expressing a desire for companionship because it features much more of McCartney’s exuberance. It was written after an American friend of his had been visiting and was amazed at the number of female traffic wardens (meter maids) he’d been seeing around. McCartney first imagined the tune as a snide reference to an obstinate meter maid, but he then began to truly like the character and changed the tone of the song. ‘‘Lovely Rita’’ contains within its buoyancy this fragile aura of shy affection. It’s ultimately a story about a rather bashful bureaucrat who gets a parking ticket and tries to woo Rita to get out of paying the fine. While McCartney claims that he invented the character, Steve Turner in A Hard Day’s Write claims that it was based on Meta Davies, a traffic warden who operated in St. John’s Wood in London and had given McCartney a parking ticket in 1967. When he read her name on the ticket, he asked if that was her real name and then sought permission to use it in a song. 16 ‘‘Lovely Rita’’ concludes with an improvised jam featuring George Martin’s rambling honky-tonk piano under the sound of heavy breathing that takes the tune into the abrupt roar of a rooster crowing announcing the arrival of Lennon’s ‘‘Good Morning, Good Morning.’’

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‘‘Good Morning, Good Morning’’ takes its title (and its rooster) from a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, showing that Lennon was now getting his inspiration from domestic habits. As Steve Turner observed, ‘‘Paul dominated Sgt. Pepper because John had become a lazy Beatle. He rarely ventured far from home, paid little attention to business and was drawing inspiration, not from contemporary art but from the stuff of domestic life—newspapers, school runs, daytime TV.’’ As a result, ‘‘Good Morning, Good Morning’’ reflected less of the cultured world outside the home than McCartney’s songs were doing. ‘‘[‘Good Morning, Good Morning’] was a song about his life of indolence—the result of too many drugs, a cold marriage and days measured out in meals, sleep and television programs such as Meet the Wife,’’ Turner explained.17 The track, however, with its stinging McCartney guitar solo, provides quite a rollicking gallop. (The gallop is made even more explicit toward the end with the addition of various sound effects featuring numerous animals chasing one another— one beast consuming the next in the predatory order of the evolutionary ladder.) After a brief reprise of ‘‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’’ to end the show, the curtain closer is the album’s masterpiece. If the record, up till now, represented a cheery, nostalgic celebration of life, ‘‘A Day in the Life’’ brings the party to a pensive conclusion. ‘‘[‘A Day in the Life’] comes sailing in, like a ghost ship with an ice-encrusted bowsprit, the bleak, despairing, yet resigned voice of John Lennon, sounding the eternal note of sadness and offering a view of ordinary life. . .that totally annihilates and eventually blows up Paul’s jolly Toby Mug vision,’’ wrote Albert Goldman in The Lives of John Lennon.18 The forlorn reverberation in Lennon’s voice seems to come right out of the lonely echo that had captivated him years earlier in Elvis Presley’s ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel.’’ ‘‘A Day in the Life,’’ which is made up of two incomplete songs, deals with the fragility of random events in everyday life. If McCartney was interested in fixing a hole, Lennon decided to contemplate some. The composition, which was inspired by a newspaper article that Lennon read in the Daily Mail in January 1967, begins with a spiritual hole that’s left when a man is suddenly killed in a car crash. That guy, who blew his mind out in the car, was 21-year-old socialite Tara Browne, an Irish friend of the Beatles, who was killed in an automobile accident on December 18, 1966. Although he wasn’t a member of the House of Lords, as the song states, Browne was definitely aristocratic. (He was the great grandson of the brewer Edward Cecil Guinness and son of Lord Oranmore.) Browne, who had married at 18 and had two boys before separating from his wife, spent much of his short life mingling with pop stars. He could be seen often at popular London clubs like Bag O’Nails and Sibylla’s where he befriended Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Paul and Mike McCartney. Given the psychedelic textures of ‘‘A Day in the Life,’’ it’s fitting that it was with Browne that McCartney had his first experience with LSD. As Lennon

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describes the scene of the accident, there’s a lingering crowd of observers depicting a state of haphazard alienation. There is even an absence of remorse. ‘‘The aimless T.S. Eliot-like crowd, forever confronting pain and turning away, may well become a common symbol,’’ wrote critic Richard Goldstein in The New York Times in 1967. ‘‘And its narrator, subdued by the totality of his despair, may reappear in countless compositions as the silent, withdrawn hero.’’19 This detached hero simply wanders through the song, as he wanders through life, witnessing it, but with no means to connect to it. His only means in connecting to life comes from his one desire to turn us on. That controversial line about sharing a reefer is a variation on the utopian wish Lennon expressed in ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ but the singer in ‘‘A Day in the Life’’ leads a far more disembodied life. If there’s a place, he can’t find it anymore—all he can do is turn us on. As Lennon expresses that desire, the plea is overwhelmed by the crescendo of the orchestra struggling to find its common chord until it drowns him out. When the orchestra finally does reach its peak, McCartney suddenly appears in the song as if the orchestra had awoken him from Lennon’s dream. Before McCartney can comprehend what Lennon has been witnessing, he rushes to catch a bus only to fall into slumber once again. At which point, Lennon promptly returns with his cascading voice seeking unison with the surging orchestra. Lennon seems so overwhelmed by the emotions he’s experienced that it has left him momentarily speechless. If Browne’s death had left a spiritual hole, by the end, literal ones start to overcome Lennon. Before writing the song, he read that there were 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, which ultimately leaves him with one observation: he knows how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. After reiterating his desire to once again turn us on, the orchestra builds to one final concluding crescendo, but no one awakes from the dramatic surge this time. A pounding chord on the piano drives the song into place. Finality. As the chord decays, we are left either falling back into a dream or falling through a hole in the sound, into the final dream of death. ‘‘The message is that life is a dream and we have the power, as dreamers, to make it beautiful,’’ explained critic Ian MacDonald on ‘‘A Day in the Life.’’ ‘‘The fact that it achieves its transcendent goal via a potentially disillusioning confrontation with the ‘real’ world is precisely what makes it so moving.’’20 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band began with a dream in the life of the reinvented Beatles, and it ends with the finality of death, the hole in the culture the Beatles left when they departed the road. Out of the long silence of the chord’s decay, the Beatles produced a runoff groove filled with silly nonsense, a wake-up call to remind us that the album had all been a dream. On a practical level, however, they figured that people might be too stoned to get up and change the record. So to encourage folks to rouse themselves and remove the disc before the needle bore through the grooves, the Beatles went down to the studio with engineer Geoff Emerick

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to record funny noises, including an absurd mantra that read, ‘‘couldn’t really be any other.’’ Beginning with the sound of a dog whistle, they looped and overlapped the chant until you could barely make out what was being said. Although it was created simply as a lark, a few years later, when conspiracy theorists would assume that Paul McCartney was dead, they listened to the gibberish played backward as, ‘‘We’ll fuck you like Supermen.’’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band might have been the official sound track for the heady optimism of the psychedelic Summer of Love in 1967, but the album’s cover resembles a rather mournful graveside shot of the burial of the old Beatles. The reborn group, bearded and decked out in old-fashioned marching outfits, reinvented their artificial paradise for a future where all you needed was love. Peter Blake’s conception of the Beatles’ gathering featured a motley collection of guests: people who were influences on the band, past friends, and their pop idols. Blake selected the rock singer Dion and boxer Sonny Liston. Photographer Robert Fraser selected Terry Southern, the author of the ribald novel Candy (in which Ringo would eventually star in the movie adaptation). Not surprisingly, Harrison requested a number of Indian gurus. Equally predictable, Lennon chose Hitler and Jesus, but he didn’t get his wish, as EMI didn’t care to incur more controversy. Instead, Lennon settled for the British occultist Aleister Crowley, author Stephen Crane, and Albert Stebbins (Lennon’s father’s favorite football player). He also insisted on including Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the original Beatles. Although now five years dead, Sutcliffe is a spectral presence to witness the demise of the group for which he was once a member. As for the self-effacing Ringo, he picked nobody. When Mae West’s likeness was selected, her response was, ‘‘Why would I be at a Lonely Hearts Club?’’ But then again, why would the Beatles, adored by millions, find themselves at one, too? The record package included a cutout sheet with a moustache, stripes, badges, a picture card of Sgt. Pepper, plus a stand up of the band. Music critic Walter Everett pointed out that the front cover, with various celebrities and historical figures, was already prefigured in the gatefold cover of Beatles for Sale, which had the group at Twickenham Studios with a mural of film stars in the background.21 Not surprisingly, Sgt. Pepper would sell 2,500,000 in the first three months of its release. Once audiences heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, many chose to forget the enmity of the previous year. Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman compared the record, as a happier memory, to the horror of the assassination of JFK. Sgt. Pepper, he said, inspired him to organize a Be-In in Washington with the goal of levitating the Pentagon by having various protest groups chanting at it. The reference to JFK is significant because everyone knew where he or she were when they first heard Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Peter Fonda, the butt of Lennon’s rebuke in ‘‘She Said, She Said,’’ said that every place he went he heard people playing it, as if the record was this mass tune-in. DJ Red Robinson saw Sgt. Pepper

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heralding in a new cultural revolution (ironically, just as China was simultaneously having its own horrific version of one). ‘‘Happening in tandem with all of this were the things going on with the anti-war movement in the States and with Haight-Ashbury,’’ Robinson explained. ‘‘It was as if these two separate philosophies melded, and the Beatles were at the forefront because they were experimenting with different sounds and different ways of doing things with George Martin.’’22 Steve Turner heard the record, too, as a significant part of the spirit of 1967. ‘‘It was a fruit of the belief that limits to the imagination were culturally imposed and should therefore be challenged,’’ he explained. ‘‘Anything that seemed technically possible was worth an attempt from a climaxing orchestral frenzy on ‘A Day in the Life’ to a note of such a high frequency that only a dog could hear it on the play-out groove.’’23 But there were others who heard nothing of the sort. They sensed a retreat, rather than the celebration of utopian hopes, in this new music. ‘‘Sgt. Pepper was the sound of the Beatles in hiding, avoiding danger— avoiding freedom,’’ Devin McKinney claims in Magic Circles.24 He may be right. After all, the group’s freedom was found in the chaos of Beatlemania, in the testing of their artistic worth, and their proven ability to innovate in the pressure cooker of relentless demand. For all its brilliance, Sgt. Pepper creates a false optimistic front, where the creators conveniently hide behind their innovations rather than (as they had in the past) use their innovations as a means to transform listeners. Without their audience as an adversary, the Beatles had no one to measure their utopian ideals by. ‘‘The album is an optimistic vision, but the optimism lacks weight because it has no negative factor to overcome,’’ McKinney went on to explain.25 The only negativity to overcome was found in the divisions growing among the Beatles themselves. For one, Harrison’s continued impatience with the assemblyline style of overdubbing on Sgt. Pepper. ‘‘A lot of the time it ended up with just Paul playing the piano and Ringo keeping the tempo, and we weren’t allowed to play as a band so much,’’ Harrison explained. ‘‘It became an assembly process—just little parts and then overdubbing—and for me it became a bit tiring and a bit boring.’’26 In the past, the group had to record their albums quickly because of their constant touring. Now the band had all the time in the world, but no urgency to use it. Lennon meanwhile was reeling from the instability and inertia brought on by his incessant LSD use, his unhappy marriage, and his envy of McCartney’s growing confidence. The careful planning of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was due partly to the necessity of McCartney having to take command when Lennon became emotionally absent from the group. On this album, McCartney wrote almost half the music, directed (along with George Martin) the recording sessions, developed the packaging ideas, and supervised the album’s mix. Lennon, though, was also resenting what he saw as McCartney’s rising control of the group. But critic Albert Goldman

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didn’t see Paul’s efforts truly as a power grab. ‘‘Paul never made the slightest effort to get rid of Lennon,’’ Goldman insisted. ‘‘In fact, he kept pursuing John until the last year of John’s life, hoping to revive their old partnership.’’27 Since his ego-destroying acid experiences had eroded his identity as a Beatle, Lennon turned passive-aggressive in his defense against seeing McCartney usurp his band. ‘‘Instead of having it out with Paul, as old partners should do, John sulked and played possum,’’ Goldman reiterated. ‘‘Lennon wouldn’t lead, but neither would he follow; hence, he had no choice but to tune out.’’28 On the weekend of June 16–18, 1967, people were tuning in en masse to the Monterey Pop Festival. As America’s answer to the Beatles’ love-in on Sgt. Pepper, Canned Heat, the Byrds, Janis Joplin, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Hugh Masekela, and the Buffalo Springfield gathered in California to provide a solid foundation for the dawning of the counterculture. But that quest for a peaceful community had grown out of the violence earlier in the year between the establishment and dissatisfied adolescents. First, there had been numerous drug busts, including the arrests of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, but there had also been continuous clashes between youth and the police, especially in the Los Angeles area (where those battles inspired the Buffalo Springfield’s polemic ‘‘For What it’s Worth’’). While the police busted and beat kids on flimsy curfew violations, in turn, demonstrators were equally destructive destroying buses and ripping down street signs. As definite lines were being drawn, in violent confrontations, the Monterey Festival attempted to celebrate the positive spirit of this Cultural Revolution. The spirit of good vibes that weekend tried to equal the spirit of what everyone heard on Sgt. Pepper. But as the last happy vibe concluded that weekend at Monterey, there was one rock critic who wished to communicate some bad vibes. Richard Goldstein was putting the finishing touches on his review of Sgt. Pepper for The New York Times, and by the time it was read, he would be as reviled as Lennon and Dylan were the previous summer. In his review, titled ‘‘We Still Need the Beatles, but. . .,’’ Goldstein called Sgt. Pepper an artistic failure. While he did assent to the notion that it was a hippie talisman for the season, he also didn’t think it provided a very deep perspective on the times, only a shallow reflection of it: In substituting the studio conservatory for an audience, the Beatles have lost crucial support, and that emptiness at the root is what makes their new album a monologue. Nothing is real therein, and nothing to get hung about. Too bad; I have a sweet tooth for reality. I like my art drenched in it, and even from fantasy I expect authenticity. What I worship about the Beatles is their forging of rock into what is real. It made them artists; it made us fans; and it made me think like a critic when I turned on my radio.29

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Goldstein railed about the group’s obsession with production, while expressing concern about their desire to cloister themselves. ‘‘We need the Beatles, not as cloistered composers, but as companions,’’ he wrote. ‘‘And they need us. In substituting the studio conservatory for an audience, they have ceased being folk artists, and the change is what makes their new album a monologue.’’30 For Goldstein, this wasn’t the time for monologues, and by the time his review was published, Goldstein found himself embroiled in a hailstorm of protest. Besides an avalanche of hate mail by readers of the Times, The Village Voice published a rebuttal by Tom Phillips (who was, like Goldstein, actually a writer from The New York Times). Paul Williams, in Crawdaddy, thought that Goldstein got so hung up on his own sense of integrity that he couldn’t humble himself before the album. Looking back today, McCartney similarly differed with Goldstein’s view. ‘‘The mood of the album was in the spirit of the age, because we ourselves were fitting into the mood of the time,’’ McCartney explained. ‘‘The idea wasn’t to do anything to cater for that mood—we happened to be in that mood anyway.’’31 But the mood McCartney describes wasn’t so simple to define. As beautifully conceived as the record is, in hindsight, it also represents the beginning of the end of the Beatles—as a band. ‘‘Sgt. Pepper—both the music and its cultural triumph—shapes up as a conspiracy among a large, loose band of dreamers, conjured at a state when their common dream was already near its death, worn down by pressures from within and without,’’ Devin McKinney asserted in Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History.32 Critic Mikal Gilmore elaborated further on this in his book Night Beat. ‘‘By the time Sgt. Pepper was on the streets, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury was already turning into a scary and ugly place, riddled with corruption and hard drugs, and overpopulated with bikers, rapists, thieves, and foolish shamans.’’33 Contrasted with that sordid portrait is the quaint Edwardian image of the Beatles on Sgt. Pepper, the co-dreamers and inhabitants of Nowhere Land, who—despite the rosy picture of Monterey—were now avatars of a very different Shangri-la, they now resembled the lost idealists of the commune in Having a Wild Weekend. Those disconsolate, lost faces of Haight-Ashbury represented the other side of the Sgt. Pepper faces. Into that emotional void created by the Beatles’ withdrawal, they crawled out from the kinds of holes that the Beatles couldn’t fix. They had evolved into a very different kind of fan. For other supporters, the ones not suffering from drug burnout, they turned the Beatles into their own personal obsession. ‘‘[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,’’ Bob Spitz wrote in The Beatles: A Biography.34 Some of those doing the dissecting would harmlessly imbibe the music as an addled form of fetishism. But there were others who would view the Beatles through a paranoid lens, one filled with crackpot conspiracy theories. Many of the

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Beatles’ peers, however, set out to duplicate Sgt. Pepper’s magic on their own records. Sgt. Pepper was having a seismic impact on the general public and many of the Beatles’ contemporaries attempted to duplicate its wizardry, as if they were trying to decode a secret language. In 1968, for instance, the Zombies (‘‘Time of the Season’’) matched some of Pepper’s technical innovations while adding some richly inventive music of their own on the sublime Odyssey and Oracle (which was also recorded at the Abbey Road Studios). The Rolling Stones, a mere six months after Pepper, would concoct their own psychedelic conceit with Their Satanic Majesties Request. On this record, the Stones willingly abandoned their R&B roots for exotic Indian rhythms, sound collages, and music hall pastiches. But they lacked the Beatles’ skill and temperament to make it work. The record did find fans over the years, but in 1967, it was commonly held (even by the band) as an artistic and commercial misfire. The Moody Blues, once an R&B band, led by singer Denny Laine (who in the seventies would join Paul McCartney’s Wings), had a huge hit in 1964 with Bessie Banks’ ‘‘Go Now.’’ But in 1967, shortly after Laine departed, the Moody Blues brought on board singer/songwriter Justin Hayward and bass player John Lodge, to reshape their music into a more classical rock ensemble. The band’s sensibility developed precisely in the spirit of Sgt. Pepper. Their first venture, quite unthinkable without Pepper’s ‘‘A Day in the Life,’’ would be Days of Future Past (1967), which would yield two Justin Hayward hits, ‘‘Tuesday Afternoon’’ and ‘‘Nights in White Satin.’’ What became most significant about the Moody Blues, though, was their deliberate attempt to forge a common vision on their albums. For example, Days of Future Past was conceived as a song cycle that spanned an entire day—from sunrise to evening—where every song provided a unique perspective from each member of the group. The Moody Blues consciously set out to create a utopian culture out of the band’s common identity. No one songwriter dominated an album and each individual tune served the larger theme on each individual record—from In Search of the Lost Chord (1968) to Seventh Sojourn (1972). Every track was seamlessly wedded to the album’s overall concept so that it was sometimes difficult to tell each writer apart. (The songs all segued into one another.) Considered by some critics as pompous and pretentious, the Moody Blues represented, for a short period, a pastoral mystical innocence worthy of poet William Wordsworth in the age of psychedelia. There were also many lesser, now forgotten groups, who attempted to capture Sgt. Pepper’s light in a bottle, but one American composer didn’t even try to buy into the hippie ethos that blossomed out of the Beatles’ landmark recording. Frank Zappa had become a formidable figure in American music through his L.A. band, the Mothers of Invention. Although the group had long hair, they didn’t begin to resemble the pretty groups sprouting up

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like flowers in a magical garden. To paraphrase critic Nik Cohen, the Mothers suggested a band of motorcycle outlaws out to pillage your home and kidnap your daughter—though they more likely to play her Igor Stravinsky (or maybe ‘‘Louie Louie’’) rather than sexually ravage her. With long stringy hair, an imperial goatee and Rasputin eyes, Zappa might have conjured up an image of a deranged drug-addled hippie freak, but he was one of the straightest men in Los Angeles. He fired various band members for even using drugs. Zappa’s goal (from the time he was a teenager in the desert of Lancaster, California) was to become a serious American composer. Although he wasn’t able to conceive making a living in the classical world, Zappa (who also loved fifties’ R&B and blues) decided to combine serious contemporary music with rock, jazz, and social and political satire. He created a rather unique and sophisticated brand of musical comedy that integrated the canon of twentieth-century music, including the work of Edgard Varese, Charles Ives, Anton Webern, and Igor Stravinsky, into R&B, blues, and rock arrangements. He performed this music, too, with the scabrous social wit of Lenny Bruce, while adding sprinklings of the irreverent clowning of Spike Jones. In essence, Frank Zappa brought to popular music a desire to break down the boundaries between what was perceived as high and low culture. He portrayed musical history irreverently through the lens of satire, and turning musical genres into various forms of farce. No musical ghetto could contain, or define him, and no sacred cow or social group was beyond his reach. His approach often upset many listeners who held to a more romantic view of art. But Zappa and the Beatles shared as many conceptual ideas as they did differences. In 1967, Sgt. Pepper was being hailed as rock’s first concept album—yet Zappa’s debut, the 2-LP set Freak Out! had already earned that honor a year earlier. Freak Out! had an enormous impact on Sgt. Pepper, which was evident in a number of ways. For instance, as the Beatles used images of famous people on their front cover, Zappa had already listed all of his influential mentors (an equally motley group, including Webern, Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, and Sabu from The Jungle Book) on the inside gatefold of Freak Out! On the Beatles’ ‘‘Lovely Rita,’’ the panting and wheezing that concludes the song is directly influenced by the 12 minutes of panting and wheezing heard on Zappa’s ballet score, ‘‘The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet.’’ Freak Out! inspired Sgt. Pepper most, though, in its aim to turn the LP into a conceptual statement. Freak Out! was a manifesto for the freak culture in Los Angeles, just as Sgt. Pepper became a proclamation for the hippie subculture of San Francisco. The freak culture in Los Angeles, though, was a completely different animal from the Bay area hippies. ‘‘San Francisco in the mid-sixties was very chauvinistic, and ethnocentric,’’ Zappa explained in his memoir The Real Frank Zappa Book. ‘‘Everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West . . .By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and

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outlandish.’’35 Dan Sullivan in The New York Times pointed up a more significant discrepancy between the Mothers and the Beatles. ‘‘The most striking difference between [the Beatles and the Mothers of Invention] is not in their work but in their approach to their work—the Beatles desire to please an audience versus the Mothers’ basic distrust of one.’’36 Sgt. Pepper celebrated the romantic ideal, offering the possibility that love could transcend all of our problems. But Zappa, who railed against the romantic school of music, perceived something sinister lurking beneath the flowers, beads, and incense burning. The Beatles’ album was a pleasantly well-crafted confection, but the concept of ‘‘flower power’’ itself was evolving into something resembling a successful fad. On his new record, Zappa decided to go after the fad rather than the music. ‘‘Sgt. Pepper was okay,’’ Zappa remarked to critic Kurt Loder in 1988. ‘‘But just the whole aroma of what the Beatles were was something that never really caught my fancy. I got the impression from what was going on at the time that they were only in it for the money—and that was a pretty unpopular view to hold.’’37 Like Lenny Bruce, Zappa drew on his artistic and social milieu as a worthy target for satire. ‘‘While the world swooned in cosmic brotherhood and groups rushed to emulate the Beatles’ studio-craft, Frank Zappa used Sgt. Pepper as a catalyst for a swinging attack on the meretriciousness and selfdeception that he felt it embodied,’’ Neil Slaven wrote in his Zappa biography, Electric Don Quixote.38 He did this on a 1968 record titled, naturally, We’re Only in It for the Money. Contrary to the more generous ideals attached to the group, the Beatles’ career was often preoccupied by the power of money. ‘‘Beginning with their 1963 cover version of the song ‘Money,’ financial power was the subject of several Beatles recordings,’’ music critic Walter Everett wrote. ‘‘In 1964, the Beatles professed a disdain for lucre, emphatically singing ‘I don’t care too much for money, for money can’t buy me love,’ but by the time of the breakup, McCartney was complaining ‘You Never Give Me Your Money,’ during the group’s bitter squabbles over corporate problems.’’39 Film critic Pauline Kael pointed out in her review of the animated film Yellow Submarine in 1968 that the problem of commerce undermined the Beatles’ image, which by that time, began to change in the wake of all the promotional marketing tie-ins associated with the movie. ‘‘Wasn’t all this supposed to be what the Beatles were against?’’ Kael asked. ‘‘There’s something depressing about seeing yesterday’s outlaw idols of the teenagers become a quartet of Pollyannas for the wholesome family trade.’’40 As early as 1965, when interviewed by Playboy, Lennon sarcastically remarked that they were moneymakers first and entertainers second. It was this particular aura that Zappa countered on his record. While We’re Only in It for the Money wasn’t designed as a savage attack on the band, his parody of the Sgt. Pepper cover was itself a nightmare version of the Beatles’ gathering. The Mothers of Invention were featured

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all dressed in granny gowns, and included behind them in this bizarre procession were outsiders, misfits, and assassins. Rather than the bright blue sky that was above the Beatles, Zappa has lightning and darkness filling the sky over the Mothers. We’re Only in It for the Money is basically a satirical Kafkaesque portrait of the culture wars. In part, Zappa was parodying the dissolution of the hippie scene in the Haight, which, by 1968, turned further into a druggie skid row. ‘‘Within a few months, the whole thing had become a circus,’’ observed journalist Nik Cohen in 1969. ‘‘The original hippies had all escaped, and what remained was an acid-burger nightmare. The streets were filled with beggars and pushers and pubertal panhandlers. Everything was filthy, decaying, rat-infested. Instant freaks sat on the sidewalks, munching a hash sandwich, and the tourists took happysnaps.’’41 Although initially the hippie scene was relatively benign, Zappa saw that its druggy passivity was leaving them vulnerable to collusion with authoritarian elements of the government. ‘‘The single most important [lesson of the sixties] is that LSD was a scam promoted by the CIA and that the people in Haight-Ashbury, who were idols of people across the world as examples of revolution and outrage and progress, were mere dupes of the CIA,’’ Zappa told Neil Slaven in Electric Don Quixote.42 Critic Ian MacDonald also saw the hippie community as susceptible to manipulation because they had no real identity as a community. ‘‘Hippie communality was real without being ideological, and many of its concerns—the open attitude to sex, the interest in spirituality, the pioneering focus on ecology, the enthusiasm for alternative technology and medicine—were quickly assimilated into the intelligent fringes of the mainstream,’’ he wrote in Revolution in the Head.43 Zappa’s skewering of the hippie culture was therefore not a reactionary attack on its freakishness, but on their tendency toward conformity. ‘‘Zappa’s main message for the left-behinds of the Great Society, usually expressed in a contemptuously satirical tone, was that they must shun the dominant culture and learn to think for themselves,’’ wrote music critic Walter Everett.44 We’re Only in It for the Money was a boldly experimental record, like Pepper, but it was Sgt. Pepper conceived as a Mad Magazine collage. Although Zappa didn’t spare the hippie culture on his record, he was no less harsh on the government. After lampooning hippie passivity in ‘‘Who Needs the Peace Corps?’’ the next song, ‘‘Concentration Moon,’’ with its wickedly hilarious Rudy Valee-styled arrangement, attacks the police for its blatant brutality toward the hippie community. Singing about an American police force that uses firearms to bring hippies under control might have seemed far-fetched in 1968, but the song was recorded only a couple of years before the tragic shooting and killing of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Furthermore, in 1969, a parking lot on the University of California in Berkeley was turned into a ‘‘People’s Park’’ by antiwar protesters. Governor Ronald Reagan had ordered the

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National Guard to reclaim the park and shoot all resisters. Using saltpeter, instead of bullets, they wounded many protesters and actually killed one person. Later, after the ‘‘park’’ was reclaimed, a number of individuals were arrested including journalist Robert Scheer of the leftist magazine Ramparts. They were all taken away by bus to an internment camp in Santa Rita where they were detained and violently interrogated for a couple of days. Robert Scheer wrote about this horrifying event in an essay, published in Ramparts, called ‘‘A Night in Santa Rita.’’ Right after the terror of ‘‘Concentration Moon,’’ Zappa brings it all back home on ‘‘Mom & Dad.’’ This track continues the story from ‘‘Concentration Moon,’’ where a murdered child’s parents sit at home drinking while learning that their daughter has been shot dead by the police. In this song, Zappa’s own chilling response to the Beatles’ ‘‘She’s Leaving Home,’’ he finally takes the full blame away from the hippies, and the cops, and addresses her folks. The drinking parents, hiding behind their appearances, are irrevocably linked to their drug-addled kids. ‘‘Zappa . . .never found his emotions so mixed as when observing all those genuinely idealistic, authentically dumb kids trying to forge something positive out of the plastic catastrophic America they’d inherited,’’ rock critic Dave Marsh wrote in his Rock & Rap Confidential.45 ‘‘Harry, You’re A Beast’’ is a cogent observation on male/female dynamics in an age which many considered the onset of the Sexual Revolution. In ‘‘Harry, You’re A Beast,’’ Harry and his wife, Madge, live a sexless marriage until Harry attempts intercourse. As Madge fights him off, she borrows the words of Lenny Bruce from his classic routine ‘‘To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb,’’ and cries, ‘‘Don’t come in me/Don’t come in me.’’ While it’s obvious that Harry did indeed come in her, the next song, ‘‘What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?’’ identifies the root of sexual repression—your mind. ‘‘Flower Punk’’ was a rewrite of the rock classic, ‘‘Hey Joe,’’ where a guy shoots his girlfriend and escapes to Mexico. But Zappa turns Joe into a hippie with a flower rather than a gun. (He may even have been patterned on the one who stuck flowers in the gun barrels of National Guardsmen.) The character in ‘‘Flower Punk’’ resembles the guy in ‘‘Help, I’m A Rock,’’ a song from the earlier Freak Out! who’s constantly looking for any group that will validate his existence. On ‘‘Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance,’’ Zappa comically states alternative strategies for a culture free of repressive sexual and political practices. The album’s final track, ‘‘The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny,’’ is a tour-de-force audio poem, which mixes voice, tape, and various instruments into a brilliantly conceived sound collage. Inspired by a reading of Franz Kafka’s short novel In the Penal Colony, Zappa advised record buyers to read Kafka’s story, where the victims of an authoritarian regime have their crime literally tattooed on their body, before listening to the piece. This stunning example of musique concrete is an abstract nightmare version of the casual alienation illustrated on ‘‘A Day in the Life.’’ We’re Only in It for

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the Money earned Zappa many accolades from those living behind the Iron Curtain of Eastern Europe because of its antiauthoritarian tone, but very little praise back home. We’re Only in It for the Money did eventually usher in the New Year in 1968, where it reached #30 in the U.S. charts, making the album something of a hit for Frank Zappa. But the reception to it was naturally mixed. To satirize, in 1968, the hippie culture, the status quo, and the drug culture didn’t win Zappa many friends in authority, or in the rock ’n’ roll world. ‘‘Where, the album asks over and over again, is the promise of the sixties?’’ asked critic Kelly Fisher Lowe upon hearing We’re Only in It for the Money. ‘‘Where is the society that was glimpsed on the streets of Los Angeles in 1964–65? The answer is that it has been destroyed—by advertising, government, drink, parents, television, and, indeed, ambivalence—in fact, the album is a frontal assault, from beginning to end, on the ambivalence of the cultural warriors.’’46 Looking back now, We’re Only in It for the Money challenged the political and cultural realities of that era where Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band could only passively reflect them. Money had the uncanny ability to also look ahead. A little more than a decade later, many of those same hippies morphed into yuppies—folks who, without question, were definitely in it for the money. On March 21, 1967, the same day the Beatles were recording the chorus of ‘‘Getting Better,’’ Lennon had left the vocal session while he was tripping on acid. Fearing for his partner’s well being, McCartney decided to try and get him home safely. Since it was too far to drive to John’s home in Weybridge, Paul took Lennon to his place. After arriving, McCartney was curious to see if taking LSD would bring him closer to his currently estranged writing partner. Most of the Beatles had taken acid by the time they finished Sgt. Pepper, but McCartney had earlier held out. Late in 1966, he finally dropped it with Tara Browne, but with mixed feelings. McCartney didn’t enjoy losing control, or putting himself in a position where he couldn’t find his way back home. A year later, McCartney actually caused some controversy when he admitted to the press that LSD had opened his eyes to new religious experiences. On the night he tried it with Lennon, he only wished to reestablish a bond they once had as songwriters, as brothers. ‘‘[Lennon’s] rough edges and fuck-all personality only underscored Paul’s pretensions, sparking a contrast that would haunt Paul for the rest of his life,’’ wrote Bob Spitz in his biography, The Beatles.47 From evening until dawn, the two men hallucinated together, staring into each other’s eyes, looking for the firm connection they had when they wrote ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’’ McCartney would later refer to the experience with Lennon as communing with the unknown. He saw Lennon as the Emperor of Eternity, a deity, as they both laughed and shared stories of past glories. For five hours, they communed deeply, barely moving, except for a short excursion taken into the garden. These two fractured geniuses had

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once blended together as one. But what the Beatles and their fans didn’t discover, until shortly after 1967, was that LSD had more troubling ramifications. It first gave credence to religious and political ideologues. When extremists like the Manson Family and the Weather Underground used it to further their apocalyptic agendas, the Beatles became unwitting champions of this new revolution. ‘‘The sad fact was that LSD could turn its users into anything from florally-bedecked peaceniks to gun-brandishing urban guerillas,’’ critic Ian MacDonald explained in Revolution in the Head.48 The bold quest for social, political, and sexual freedom in the sixties also contained a foreboding element that soon permeated the counterculture and had a large influence on it. While love appeared to be everywhere—and pop music definitely celebrated it—there was also a significant emergence of occultism. Before 1967, the occult was perceived as marginally archaic (and derided), but after Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Tarot, the Kabbala, I Ching, witchcraft, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and various swamis were eagerly validated. Within this celebrated mystical mosaic lay the demon seeds of Charles Manson, the Scientology of L. Ron Hubbard, Satanist Anton LaVey, and the dark mystic Aleister Crowley (who was featured on the cover of Sgt. Pepper). What made this marriage of pop artists and occultism possible was partly the continued intake of LSD, which held the possibility of reaching alternate forms of consciousness. The use of hallucinogens by 1967 had offered escape for many people from the violent realities erupting in the culture. But instead of directly confronting this violence, hippies were trying to rid themselves of evil by simply forbidding its existence. Through the use of a variety of psychedelic drugs, they sought to create a blissful state of innocence, a virtual Garden of Eden that was free of anxiety and guilt. ‘‘Guilt is the other side of moral consciousness—[but] we have ‘eaten of the tree of knowledge,’’’ wrote psychologist Rollo May in Power and Innocence. ‘‘We valiantly try to persuade ourselves that if we only find the ‘key,’ we can easily create a society in which nakedness, guilt, anxiety will all be things of the unmourned past.’’49 To find that key, many reached for the alternate realities offered by lysergic acid diethylamide-25. In August 1967, George Harrison and his wife Pattie saw the transformations brought on by acid firsthand when they made a trip to San Francisco to see the remnants of the Summer of Love. It was a couple months after the lovefest of the Monterey Pop Festival and they went to San Francisco to visit Pattie’s sister Jennifer. After being given some form of hallucinogen by a local DJ, Harrison, Boyd, press agent Derek Taylor, and tour manager Neil Aspinall eagerly headed to Haight-Ashbury. ‘‘I could only describe it as being like the Bowery,’’ Harrison recalled. ‘‘[A] lot of [them were] bums and drop-outs; many of them young kids who’d dropped acid and come from all over America to this mecca of LSD.’’50 Their visit went from bad to worse when the drug-addled group recognized Harrison. ‘‘I had the feeling that they’d listened to the Beatles’ records, analyzed them, learned what

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they’d thought they should learn, and taken every drug they’d thought the Beatles were singing about,’’ recalled Pattie Boyd. ‘‘Now they wanted to know where to go next. And George was there, obviously, to give them the answer.’’51 Circumstances weren’t helped either by the fact that Harrison’s own drug-induced hallucinations were taking hold. People were handing him a variety of drugs to take, as another offered him a guitar, begging the Beatle to lead them like the pied piper out of the park. ‘‘We walked down the street, and I was being treated like the Messiah,’’ Harrison added fearfully. ‘‘I went there expecting it to be a brilliant place, with groovy gypsy people making works of art and paintings and carvings in little workshops. But it was full of horrible spotty drop-out kids on drugs, and it turned me right off the scene.’’52 As they made a quick exit to their limo, Harrison vowed never to touch LSD ever again. What Harrison perceived was similar to what folk singer Donovan had already started to observe a year earlier. Donovan began thinking about writing a song that took into account all the remnants of occultism he saw around him. Inspired by a viewing of the 1962 British horror movie called The Night of the Eagle (or Burn, Witch, Burn) about the power of witchcraft, he began to consider a tune that addressed how the auspicious pacifism of the cheerful flower and beads hippies he witnessed quickly evolved into the paranoid counterculture occultists, who were driven by drugs and looking for followers to bring on the end of the world. To address this, Donovan composed ‘‘Season of the Witch,’’ an unnerving composition about this disquieting mutation. The song was an eerily memorable track that warned of settled scores yet to come. Though Donovan was something of a hippie enigma himself, he wasn’t being facile here. In ‘‘Season of the Witch,’’ he warned of charlatans ‘‘out to make it rich,’’ false prophets who ultimately made us pick up every stitch. No song had sized up the emerging zombie zeitgeist with such chilling prescience as ‘‘Season of the Witch.’’ When Harrison gave up using LSD, he was clearly seeing something ugly and dispirited on the horizon, too. But while that ugliness would soon embody itself in the presence of Charles Manson (who arrived in the Haight mere weeks after Harrison departed it), Harrison and the rest of the Beatles turned toward gurus to reinstate their passport to a higher consciousness. Artist David Wynne, who had done busts of the Beatles’ heads in Paris back in 1964, spoke to Harrison in early 1967 about one particular holy man who had intrigued him: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Wynne had been sketching the Maharishi, and he told Harrison that he was fascinated with him because he had a lifeline on his hand that didn’t end. (It would end, though, in February 2008 when the Maharishi would die at the age of 91.) Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was the 50-year-old founder of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement Foundation that taught Transcendental Meditation. Transcendental Meditation, which the Maharishi began in 1955, was a form of meditation taken from the Vedic tradition of Hinduism. ‘‘It’s a simple

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technique,’’ Pattie Boyd explained. ‘‘You are given a mantra, a single word, which you keep secret, to say over and over again to yourself. The idea is that in repeating the mantra you clear your mind so you can give it and your body a brief rest from the stress of modern life.’’53 By sitting with your eyes closed for about 20 minutes and repeating your mantra, Boyd claimed you could make yourself feel calm and focused. ‘‘You just sit there and let your mind go,’’ Lennon said about the process of TM. ‘‘It doesn’t matter what you’re thinking about, just let it go. And then you introduce the mantra, the vibration, to take over from the thought. You don’t will it or use your will power.’’54 Although Maharishi Yogi had been introducing Westerners to TM since 1959, it wasn’t until the Beatles became interested in 1967 that he became internationally known. While TM had serious implications for George Harrison and his own spiritual values, the Beatles’ road manager Neil Aspinall saw more rampant conformity than spiritual enlightenment. ‘‘Everybody going to the Maharishi was like everybody ending up with moustaches on Sgt. Pepper,’’ he recalled. ‘‘A lot of it was follow-the-leader (whoever the leader was at that time). One got a moustache, so everybody got a moustache.’’ 55 Although Wynne told Harrison about a lecture the Maharishi was doing on August 24, 1967, at London’s Hilton Hotel, it was Pattie Boyd who first encountered the guru. Back in February, Pattie and a friend were looking to take up meditation and came upon an ad in the paper for Transcendental Meditation courses with the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. It was over the course of a long weekend that they were given their mantras and met the Maharishi. Pattie shared the experience with Harrison who was immediately interested. When they decided to attend the August lecture, they naturally took the Beatles along. After joining Harrison in London, they went on with the Maharishi to Bangor, Wales on the train the next day. ‘‘During Sgt. Pepper, George was the most interested in Indian culture,’’ Paul McCartney explained. ‘‘We were all interested in it— but for George it was a direction.’’56 For Harrison, it was also an opportunity to seek what he found lacking before the Beatles retired from touring in 1966. ‘‘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?’ And then, purely because of the force-fed LSD experience, I had the realization of God,’’ Harrison said.57 Essentially, he no longer craved the role of being a Beatle, or the image that it created. While the Beatles were gaining transcendental knowledge in Bangor, news from the real world intruded. The group discovered that their 32-year-old manager Brian Epstein was found dead of an accidental drug overdose at his home in London. The shocking news shattered the Beatles’ first meeting with the Maharishi, who told them to keep good thoughts for Brian on his spiritual journey. The Beatles then went back to London. Although it’s true that Epstein’s death was accidental, he had been on a collision course with

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mortality since the Beatles had stopped touring. ‘‘Brian’s role with us had changed because he wasn’t booking us around the world anymore,’’ Ringo said. ‘‘We were working in the studio; we’d make a record and the record would come out. What was there left for him to do? Book the studio—one phone call. That was the extent of it at that time.’’58 The egalitarian vision the Beatles had built in the sixties had been a collaborative effort of which Brian Epstein had been a key component. The boys, as he called them, were his dream image of assimilation, a consolidation of his own fractured personality. These once tough Teddy Boys might have been schooled on the streets of Hamburg, but Epstein essentially refurbished them. He brought them from their rough leather jackets into those formally elegant suits so they could change the world. When the world was fully in their sway, Epstein could live out his own dream (even as his hidden private life continued down a sadomasochistic path). Once the violence of 1966 had ruptured the band, Epstein was equally mortified. When the Beatles abandoned the road, Epstein felt abandoned as well. His access to their dream world was gone. Epstein was now, once again, only a business manager. Consumed by pills and depression, he had become an accident waiting to happen. But that accident had a dire impact on the Beatles. ‘‘We collapsed,’’ Lennon reflected to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone in 1970. ‘‘I knew that we were in trouble then. I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared. I thought, ‘We’ve had it now.’ ’’ 59 Although the Beatles didn’t immediately collapse, John Lennon realized then that it was only a matter of time before they did.

CHAPTER 7

Turn Me On, Dead Man I’ve seen better days But I’m putting up with these. Richard ‘‘Rabbit’’ Brown, ‘‘James Alley Blues’’ Just before Brian Epstein’s sudden death in August 1967 and George Harrison’s rather rude awakening in Haight-Ashbury, Paul McCartney was dreaming of magical journeys. Since the Beatles were no longer touring the world, he thought, why not make a film that would feature the group roaming the countryside, with a group of tourists, looking for enchantment and mystery? The way McCartney saw it, the film might symbolize everything that life on the road had ultimately denied the Beatles. In the absence of doing live performances, the group could now continue reinventing themselves on the screen while simultaneously promoting their new songs. John Lennon agreed with his partner. ‘‘Records can’t be seen so it’s good to have a film vehicle of some sort to go with the new music,’’ Lennon told Rolling Stone at the time.1 The idea first occurred to McCartney while he was helping celebrate Jane Asher’s 21st birthday in Colorado. He had been hearing stories about Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their psychedelic acid-tinged bus-trips-to-nowhere that took place back in 1964. At the time, Kesey had obtained an old school bus and invited Neal Cassidy, who was the model for the Dean Moriarty character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, to drive it. Then he splashed it with wild painted designs and set off to dispense LSD to all willing participants. The trip had been filmed as part of a possible documentary, but since no distributor showed remotely any interest in picking up the rights, it never came to be seen. (Kesey, though, would later record a spoken word record for the

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Beatles’ Apple Records.) For McCartney, Kesey’s exploits had triggered an early memory of bus trips—‘‘mystery tours’’—where passengers had no idea where they were heading. The ‘‘mystery tour’’ was a British working-class custom of taking organized coach excursions where only the driver knew the destination. While flying back to England, McCartney started planning something similar for the Beatles. Magical Mystery Tour was planned as an experimental 50-minute color film for BBC TV about a madcap bus trip through the British countryside. Like Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour was another means of shedding the popular Fab Four image established earlier in their madcap adventures in both A Hard Day’s Night and Help! McCartney decided to have the group improvise on an unscripted story rather than create a dramatic foundation for their antics. He whimsically thought of Magical Mystery Tour as essentially a Beatle home movie for television. Throughout the picture, McCartney was confident that they could make up the story as they went along. After all, they were the Beatles. Magical Mystery Tour featured a Fellini-like cast of midgets, busty ladies, and contortionists (with the only exception being Victor Spinetti, who had starred in A Hard Day’s Night and Help!). The Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy music group patterned on the Goons, were also invited to perform the Elvis/ Gene Vincent song parody ‘‘Death Cab For Cutie’’ in a strip club. But before the Beatles could start haphazardly connecting the dots of their mystery tour, the BBC wanted them to reconnect to the world at large through a summer television special to be broadcast on June 25, 1967. The song chosen, ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ had been written by Lennon in response to a request for the Beatles to take part in what would be the first live global television link titled Our World. (The viewing audience was estimated to be somewhere in the vicinity of 350 million people.) The special included a two-hour feed to Europe, Central and North America, Scandinavia, Australia, and Japan. In the show, the Beatles would contribute one track that could be understood by all nationalities, thus reestablishing their utopian vision without even leaving the borders of the United Kingdom. Initially, both McCartney and Lennon were requested to write a song. McCartney ultimately offered the charming ‘‘Hello Goodbye,’’ but it was rejected as too vague. To the show’s producers, Lennon’s new work, ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ was the perfect choice since it fit so firmly with the idealistic concept of the program. Lennon had composed ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ as a simple sing-along number that would speak specifically of what the Beatles’ dream had been about all along. Two years before he would reaffirm that claim in his song, ‘‘Give Peace a Chance,’’ John Lennon set out to embrace the world with a vision of benevolent acceptance. In retrospect, however, the execution was more than a little naı¨ve. ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ was essentially a more embellished version of ideas Lennon expressed more fervidly in ‘‘The Word’’ on Rubber Soul. Where ‘‘The Word’’

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articulated with effervescent joy the discovery of the power of love, ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ is packaged sloganeering—an ad that sells love rather than communicating it. Although constructed with a fair amount of ingenuity, ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ ends up flat and dispassionate. The love songs the Beatles wrote earlier in their career had taken conventional romantic norms and radically altered them. In particular, a track like ‘‘She Loves You,’’ which McCartney parrots toward the end of ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ takes what could be a standard first-person love song and radically transforms it by emphasizing a third-person perspective. In doing so, the singer is no longer our surrogate speaking for our thoughts and feelings (as he does in most other love songs). The singer instead admonishes us, telling us that if we don’t sharpen up, we will lose the most loving relationship we might ever find. ‘‘She Loves You’’ is a dialog between the singer and the listener that opens up larger considerations of romantic desire and attachment. ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ on the other hand, tells us how we should feel rather than allowing us to feel. The Beatles’ open-ended invitation for us to be part of a larger world was the key to their transcendent dream of Nowhere Land. The Beatles might have reached a global audience with ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ but in the song, the global audience is not asked to reach back. Lennon tells us that love can change all the hate, but he never tells us how. ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ is a well-intentioned sermon that preaches to an imaginary choir.2 The setup for the live broadcast, though, was the most compelling aspect of the tune. George Martin came up with a clever idea to mark the international appeal of the song: ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ opens with the tune of ‘‘La Marseillaise.’’ Toward the end, the Beatles perform a mantra of ‘‘love is all you need,’’ where Martin closes out the song with a Charles Ives-influenced layering of Glenn Miller’s ‘‘In the Mood,’’ Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto, and the British folk song, ‘‘Greensleeves.’’ He dedicated himself to making sure the broadcast went off without a problem—despite the death of his father two days before. On June 18, Martin recorded the song’s instrumental track so that all the group had to do was sing to it on the day of the broadcast. The group had invited various friends like Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger to hold balloons and wave placards saying ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ in different languages. While the invited rock stars partied long after the broadcast, some of the classical players in the orchestra were obviously not in the mood for love. Annoyed at the frivolities, they got up and left. When the single was released in July 1967, it was backed by a more compelling track called ‘‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man.’’ ‘‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’’ was about the ‘‘beautiful people’’ of the hippie culture. Although the song is less foreboding than Donovan’s ‘‘Season of the Witch,’’ it still takes a skeptical tone about the hippie mind-set than ‘‘All You Need Is Love.’’ ‘‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man,’’ with its intricate Indian arrangement, points up the discrepancy between being a ‘‘beautiful person,’’ who is spiritually

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rich, and someone rich enough to afford the luxury of being beautiful. While the rich man in the song was sometimes eluded to be Brian Epstein (on the original single, you can hear Lennon singing sarcastically on the fade-out, ‘‘Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew’’), the song is more likely aimed at HaightAshbury. Although it was the B-side, the song did have some influence on the Zombies’ 1968 hit ‘‘Time of the Season.’’ ‘‘[There was the] idea in the Beatles’ ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’ where being rich doesn’t mean material richness but spiritual richness,’’ writer and keyboardist Rod Argent told Uncut magazine in 2007.3 When ‘‘Hello Goodbye’’ was turned down for the live BBC global broadcast, the Beatles’ made it their next single in November 1967. McCartney had composed the song based on the simple idea of learning how to write a song on the spot. He demonstrated this little game once with Brian Epstein’s former assistant Alistair Taylor. While playing a melody on his harmonium, McCartney suggested that Taylor call out the opposite of whatever McCartney sang as he struck the keyboard. If McCartney sang yes, Taylor would answer no; and when McCartney would call out stop, Taylor would respond with go. With its catchy, energetic melody, ‘‘Hello Goodbye’’ is likeable McCartney pop fodder. The end chant (‘‘Hela, hey, aloha’’), performed like a mantra, was something improvised in the studio, with ‘‘aloha’’ being the Hawaiian greeting of affection. The B-side of ‘‘Hello Goodbye,’’ Lennon’s ‘‘I Am the Walrus’’ was anything but simple. Far more radically innovative and astonishing than his previous ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ ‘‘I Am the Walrus’’ is a swirling impressionistic collage that deliberately defies simple interpretation. The event that inspired Lennon to write the song was a letter he received from a student at Quarry Bank School. A professor had assigned his class to study and analyze the Beatles’ songs. The thought of someone doing this was so amusing to Lennon that he decided to write a tune so abstract, and so convoluted, that no one would figure it out. With the help of his childhood friend Pete Shotten, Lennon invested ‘‘I Am the Walrus’’ with lines based on such schoolyard rhymes as ‘‘yellow matter custard, green slop pie, all mixed together with a dead dog’s eye. Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick, then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick.’’ While the song has its roots in such nonsense verse, it’s also based on some of Lennon’s writings in school at Quarry Bank. Lennon also combines quotes from Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘‘The Walrus and the Carpenter,’’ includes some knocks at poet Allen Ginsberg (‘‘elementary penguin’’) who was chanting Hare Krishna mantras at protest rallies, and the ‘‘eggman’’ reference was for singer Eric Burdon, who had a predilection for breaking eggs over the women he was having sex with. Lennon first laid down the track with the group, but he told George Martin that it needed some kind of score to accompany it. After some consideration, Martin added horns, violins, cellos, and a 16-voice choir that made swooping noises, laughed uproariously, and concluded chanting,

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‘‘Everyone has one.’’ At the end, Martin also superimposed some lines from a BBC radio performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act IV Scene VI). Like the ‘‘Hela, hey, aloha’’ section on ‘‘Hello Goodbye,’’ the ‘‘jooba jooba’’ chorus was influenced by learning mantras from the Maharishi. But if the Maharishi’s mantras provided some structure for the song, it was Lennon’s biting surreal wit that cut through the earnest pretensions of ‘‘All You Need Is Love.’’ ‘‘Lennon’s delivery is imbued with his master passion, rage, which he inflects across the entire infrared range from mocking and cursing to jeering and sneering,’’ wrote Albert Goldman. ‘‘In no other recording does he strike such a perfect balance between language as speech and language as action.’’4 Magical Mystery Tour, which was completed that fall, would eventually be broadcast on the BBC on December 26, 1967, but it didn’t attract any holiday cheer. While roundly panned for all its chaotic indulgences, it also didn’t help that the Beatles’ color film was inexplicably shown in black and white. As bad as the picture was, though, Magical Mystery Tour did serve as a perfect metaphor for the current state of the group. In the picture, the Beatles aimlessly head out into the country to seek magic with a group of followers, only to find themselves rudderless and lost in their dreams. The group—and the viewing audience—wasn’t alone. The film critic for The London Times was equally disoriented. ‘‘This was a program to experience rather than to understand,’’ he wrote. ‘‘I was unfortunate; I lacked the necessary key.’’5 Few could actually find the key, since the picture was so formless. As for the music, it fared little better. ‘‘Magical Mystery Tour’’ is a rollicking curtain-opener written by McCartney to state the theme of the picture. But while its aim is to provide a cheery invitation to the show, the song is little more than a pale imitation of ‘‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’’ As in ‘‘Sgt. Pepper,’’ McCartney once again plays the role of the carny barker while the chorus happily asks people to roll up for the trip. But rather than provide excitement, or anticipation, there’s an air of desperation in the song instead of the confident assurances offered on the opening track of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. McCartney’s ‘‘The Fool on the Hill’’ is heard while Paul is seen thoughtfully posed on a hill overlooking Nice, France, but the song is a banal bit of whimsy. It’s about a prophet who is considered a fool by everyone until he is ultimately declared a visionary. ‘‘I think I was writing about someone like the Maharishi,’’ McCartney told Barry Miles. ‘‘His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle he wasn’t taken too seriously.’’6 Ian MacDonald, in Revolution in the Head, believes McCartney was also thinking of the character of the Fool in a tarot deck. ‘‘[The Fool] is a paradoxical symbol, numbered 0 to 22, which stands for ‘redeeming ignorance,’’’ MacDonald wrote.7 Whatever meaning is subscribed to ‘‘The Fool on the Hill,’’ the actual idea for the song originated when McCartney read about a hermit in Italy who had lived most of his adult life in a cave. When this modern Rip

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Van Winkle finally emerged back into the world in the late forties, he discovered that he’d missed the entire World War II. ‘‘The Fool on the Hill’’ is arranged just like a childhood rhyme, but with a faint air of despondency. The fool might see all that is going on, but he’s completely cut off from the world. The song unwittingly raises the question as to whether he should even be considered a trustworthy source on the state of the planet. Before 1967, the Beatles had sought and ultimately achieved a true connection with the world, but ‘‘The Fool on the Hill’’ reveals a group that’s grown content with keeping its distance. One critic, Jon Landau, addressed the Beatles’ remoteness in his review of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding (1967). Dylan had come out of his self-imposed isolation in Woodstock to make a new record that was to go completely against the grain of the current pop trend toward psychedelia. His quiet, austere album carried an aura of pre-rock, or something closer to the country sound of Sun Records. If the texture of John Wesley Harding was linked to the past, Landau felt that its songs were deeply in touch with issues in the present. ‘‘Dylan exhibits a profound awareness of the [Vietnam] War in the same way that songs like ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ and ‘Fool on the Hill’ ignore it,’’ Landau wrote. ‘‘All I mean to say is that Dylan has felt the war, that there is an awareness of it contained within the mood of the album as a whole.’’8 ‘‘The Fool on the Hill’’ expresses only an opaque awareness of the world around the fool. (After all, according to McCartney, the fool’s head is continuously in the clouds.) At their best, the Beatles gave us a profound awareness of their time, but in tunes like ‘‘Magical Mystery Tour’’ and ‘‘The Fool on the Hill,’’ they are adrift in a world that is sealed off much like the fool himself. ‘‘Flying,’’ which was originally titled ‘‘Aerial Tour Instrumental,’’ is a group effort that grew out of a jam session. In many ways, it resembles ‘‘12-Bar Original,’’ a rambling blues instrumental recorded during the Rubber Soul sessions, but left unreleased until the Anthology 2 CD came out in 1996. In both songs, the Beatles manage to establish a groove, but they never really get groovy. In the film, ‘‘Flying’’ is heard over a rather aimless tracking shot featuring psychedelic colored landscapes and endless clouds. While the song, which climaxes rather quickly into a group chant, is underscored by the random clatter of tape loops, we are taken above the clouds where the Beatles are seen playing four magicians comically overseeing the journey of the tour bus. But their humor is so forced and disconnected that their comic lines fizzle rather than spark inspired associations. In this moment, the Beatles are as (literally) lost in the clouds as the fool on the hill. George Harrison’s rather moody ‘‘Blue Jay Way’’ was written in August 1967 while he and Pattie were in California. Harrison and his wife were staying in a cottage on Blue Jay Way, which is located in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. Press publicist Derek Taylor was supposed to meet the couple that night, but he got lost in the foggy drive to their house. Harrison recounts the story in a dreary drone that’s underscored by

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the gloomy notes of a Hammond organ (and a cello that’s imitating an Indian sarod). Many naturally assumed that ‘‘Blue Jay Way’’ was the sequel to ‘‘Within You Without You.’’ Given the portentous reading of Taylor and his entourage ‘‘losing their way,’’ it was easy to assume that Harrison wasn’t being literal, but sermonizing on the idea of being spiritually lost. After all, Magical Mystery Tour seems to support that view by framing Harrison, as he sings the song, in a meditation pose refracted through a psychedelic prism. ‘‘Your Mother Should Know,’’ a poor retread of ‘‘When I’m 64,’’ is influenced by the cabaret music of McCartney’s father’s generation. Conceived by Paul as a production number for the film, the band descended the stairs in white tail suits and roses in their lapels as a pale tribute to the musical numbers of earlier Hollywood movies. ‘‘Your Mother Should Know’’ is a rather lame attempt to recreate the generational conflict of ‘‘She’s Leaving Home,’’ without the latter’s vital poignancy. In their search for a new pop identity, the Beatles were now flailing about desperately. Brian Epstein had helped create the image that they rode to success, a concept that became a brand to market. But once they abandoned that identity, and traded it in for the retrograde marching band outfits of Sgt. Pepper, they were no longer the same group that transformed popular culture. Where once they defied pop trends by setting new standards, they were now safely catering to popular trends like flower power. Epstein’s sudden death had sent the group into a tailspin. Since he had been their conduit to the live audience, the band lost their strongest link to the underpinnings of their dream with his departure. Magical Mystery Tour was a literal Nowhere Land, a phony oasis that connects to absolutely nothing. When we watch the Beatles ride the mystery tour bus, they sit as four individuals rather than as a group (even when John and George do sit together, they could just as easily be strangers as longtime band mates). When the Beatles play their music together, as in the scene in the field singing ‘‘I Am the Walrus,’’ they barely resemble the group. They are disguised by their costumes and performing without even a live audience present to watch them. After 1967, the Beatles began to literally invent dream worlds to take the place of the dreams they serendipitously invoked in us from Please Please Me to Revolver. The self-conscious magic, hermetically conceived on Sgt. Pepper, ultimately did nothing more than reflect the short-lived fads of LSD and Love-Ins. Magical Mystery Tour was their failed attempt to relive the quest for pop freedom they sought in A Hard Day’s Night. But this quest was nowhere near as magical. In a desperate search to find fulfillment and spiritual solace, the Beatles abandoned the pop world altogether and took a long and winding road to Rishikesh. In January 1968, while the Beatles were still licking their wounds over the debacle of Magical Mystery Tour, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was in New York City to meet the press and to spread the word about Transcendental

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Meditation.9 If the Maharishi was indeed the incarnation of McCartney’s ‘‘The Fool on the Hill,’’ he was certainly no fool when it came to public relations. Before arriving in the Big Apple, he hired Solters & Sabinson, the same public relations firm that handled Ringling Brothers’ Circus, to put together an elaborate press conference. The media scrum was booked at the State Suite of the Plaza Hotel, where the Maharishi was staying. He was booked for an appearance at Madison Square Gardens in order to deliver a lecture introducing potential converts to TM. As he arrived to meet the press corps, the Maharishi’s entourage handed out pink carnations, 8×10 glossy photos, and a bio sheet explaining how millions worldwide were achieving inner peace through the Maharishi’s methods. At first, the press was deferential to this tiny deity, taking pictures and asking the swami how he enjoyed visiting America. But within an hour, the mood got testier. One radio reporter, picking up on the public relations angle to this visit, told the Maharishi that Jesus and Buddha never had the advantage of a PR firm to represent their interests. The diminutive yogi replied that perhaps that was why it took Christ hundreds of years to get known. When a young political activist asked the Maharishi about his opinion of the Vietnam War and the draft, the swami was flippant in his answer, saying that his interest in Vietnam was no more than his interest in any other place in the world. His PR firm, now growing uneasy, tried to redirect the questions toward Transcendental Meditation. But one female reporter stepped forward to ask how peace was even possible when so many individuals in the world lived in poverty. ‘‘People are in poverty because they lack intelligence and because of laziness,’’ the Maharishi calmly explained to the suddenly hushed crowd. ‘‘Transcendental Meditation centres will teach them the virtues of selfishness and give them energy not to be poor any more.’’ To the female reporter, it suddenly became clear who this presumptuous deity really was: Ayn Rand with a beard. The subject now turned more directly to the Maharishi’s money—but he refused to discuss the subject. ‘‘I am a monk,’’ he explained meekly. ‘‘I have no pockets. I deal in wisdom, not in money.’’ Of course, his humble claim didn’t answer how he acquired the cash to hire Solters & Sabinson, or book Madison Square Gardens. But many in the press who gathered that day did want some answers. After all, the New York Post had recently called him ‘‘the world’s wealthiest guru.’’ The Village Voice demanded to know if ‘‘an honest man can still be a fraud.’’ Most got their answer when they attended his lecture at Madison Square Gardens. Before his talk, he posed for numerous photographs as he praised America as the land of opportunity. Speaking of America, one of his handlers told the press photographers that the Maharishi would be touring university campuses with one of America’s most popular bands: the Beach Boys. The press suddenly expressed surprise that these Californian golden boys had turned in their surfboards for mantras. Pretty soon, they’d be expressing further disbelief that the Beatles would be collecting mantras of their own in India.

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Although the Beatles had changed our perspective on the world through their music, making us feel part of a larger cultural revolution, they themselves were no longer content with the life that this cultural revolution brought them. Their rapid success and acquired wealth had insolated them from the rest of the world. When popular acclaim didn’t bring them a sustaining inner happiness, they turned to hallucinogens for answers. When those drugs caused as much damage as personal enlightenment, the Beatles looked to religion. But in looking for spiritual answers, the zeal of their desire for quick solutions had blinded them to the con artist lurking beneath the holy robes of the Maharishi. Oddly, the Beatles once had skepticism toward received wisdom. It’s what made them both fresh and distinct, setting them apart from any other pop group. When they first confronted the international press in 1964, they didn’t acquiesce to the rules of conduct, they invented new rules to conduct a press conference. When they made records, they didn’t copy the success of their last great album, but they reached out to discover new, unheard sounds. Nowhere Land was a borderless and shapeless utopian spirit. But when the Beatles turned to the Maharishi, Nowhere Land was replaced with the false utopia of Rishikesh. Within its very real borders, the Beatles were no longer rebellious kids defiantly challenging us to think for ourselves, they were now (through the Maharishi) telling us what to think. After the group had dissolved its old identity, it had no new identity left to redefine itself. The Beatles were becoming four distinct individuals with four conflicting temperaments. Perhaps they recognized this reality emerging and sought to rediscover a common ground by taking this sojourn to India. But rather than bringing the inner harmony they sought, the journey served only to continue fuelling the continuing disenchantment the Beatles felt with themselves. Before their departure, though, the Beatles rushed out a new single. Abandoning the psychedelia of their recent work, ‘‘Lady Madonna’’ was a welcome return to the bluesy side of the Beatles’ canon. And it would become their first #1 song since ‘‘Eleanor Rigby.’’ Employing a barrelhouse piano to propel the track, McCartney performs this giddy appraisal of motherhood with the lustful joy of Fats Domino. (Maybe hearing a little of himself in the song, Fats Domino included his own cover version later that year on Fats is Back.) The catchy riff had its roots in the fifties as well borrowing the melody of Johnny Parker’s piano line from Humphrey Lyttelton’s 1956 R&B hit ‘‘Bad Penny Blues’’ (which George Martin had also produced). The idea for the composition came, though, after McCartney read a magazine article that featured a photo of an African mother with a baby at her breast. Under the picture was the caption ‘‘Mountain Madonna.’’ As McCartney wondered how the mother could survive and feed her kids, he came up with the story of ‘‘Lady Madonna.’’ McCartney dries out any potential for sentimentality in the material by rooting the song in raucous fifties’ R&B (highlighted by a nimble sax solo by Ronnie Scott). But he also

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humorously adds a chorus right out of the flapper period of American music to underscore the woman’s strength, simultaneously parodying the melodrama of her plight. The chorus was so clever—and catchy—that Harrison decided to cop the lick for the middle eight section of his song ‘‘The Art of Dying’’ on his 1971 solo album All Things Must Pass. Harrison also secured the B-side of the single with ‘‘The Inner Light,’’ his third—and best—Hindustani song. Ironically, it would also be his last. The origins of ‘‘The Inner Light’’ began when both Lennon and Harrison appeared with British talk show host David Frost on The Frost Report back in September 1967. While taking part in a special about Transcendental Meditation that featured an interview with the Maharishi, the studio audience was asked to participate in the show. Sanskrit scholar and Cambridge professor Juan Mascaro, who was present that evening, had written to Harrison and gave him a copy of a book called Lamps of Fire. It was a religious text, edited by Mascaro, which included passages of spiritual wisdom from various religious traditions. On the program, Mascaro asked Harrison if he might set music to verses from the Tao Te Ching, in particular, a poem called ‘‘The Inner Light.’’ The lyric concerned the idea of knowing all things of both earth and heaven without having to literally travel out one’s door. In the song, Harrison treats the Taoist concept in a contemplative tone. He recorded the music track, with Indian musicians, while he was in Bombay doing his film score for the elliptically abstract drama Wonderwall. (Harrison’s sound track music would be the first solo Beatle album released later in the year.) Once returning to London, he overdubbed his voice in the studio over the Indian performance. Rather than preaching The Word to us, as he did on the otherwise majestic ‘‘Within You Without You,’’ Harrison expresses how spiritual truth has changed him on ‘‘The Inner Light’’—and the song is as intimate as a prayer. The music seemingly intoxicates Harrison, too, while he speaks of the wonders before him. ‘‘The Inner Light’’ was the first George Harrison composition to appear on a Beatles’ single. But its inclusion was largely due to Lennon shelving his own latest recording of a song called ‘‘Across the Universe.’’ Unhappy with his performance, Lennon left the door open for Harrison’s debut. As the Beatles headed to India, the key words from ‘‘The Inner Light’’ (‘‘The farther one travels/The less one knows’’) couldn’t have turned out to be more unwittingly apt. On February 15, 1968, John and George flew out with Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Harrison and her sister, Jenny. Paul and Ringo followed a few days later with their partners, Jane Asher and Maureen Starkey. While both Lennon and Harrison were seeking spiritual answers from the experience, McCartney took a pragmatic approach. His going to Rishikesh was with the hope that the trip would keep the Beatles together, and also bring some spiritual happiness to the group. McCartney simply wished to learn how to meditate. Along with the other guests at the ashram, including actress Mia Farrow, her sister Prudence, Beach Boy Mike Love, flautist

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Paul Horn, and folk singer Donovan, they found the atmosphere enrapturing. ‘‘The place was idyllic,’’ said Canadian photographer Paul Saltzman who took many pictures of the sessions at the ashram, which he later turned into a photo exhibit and a book. ‘‘It was an extremely relaxed and simple existence, which is what ashrams are supposed to be about. Everything was focused on meditation and being at ease. There was no hurry. Life was full of joy and humor.’’10 Everyone would meditate for about five hours a day—two hours in the morning and three hours at night. The rest of the time people attended lectures by the Maharishi and ate vegetarian food at a communal gathering. Their sleeping quarters were spared with a single lamp, bed, and dresser. Heat was provided by a steaming bucket of water that was left just outside the door to the room. In spare moments, the Beatles relaxed with other guests and played music. Most of the new songs they performed at the ashram would be included later on The Beatles (aka The White Album). Although the surroundings may have appeared serene, the mood grew less so over the weeks. Contributing to the growing discontent was the realization that the Maharishi was operating under the notion that the Beatles would become special emissaries of his cause. ‘‘The purpose of the course was to become teachers of Transcendental Meditation,’’ explained Beach Boy Mike Love. ‘‘But I remember Paul telling me that becoming a teacher ‘wasn’t the lads’ cup of tea.’’’11 McCartney had only planned to spend a month there, while Ringo was considering staying even less at 10 days (especially since the spicy curries didn’t agree with him). While Lennon and Harrison wanted to remain, their reasons couldn’t have been more different. ‘‘John and George both took meditation seriously,’’ recalled Saltzman. ‘‘George seemed to find what he was looking for, in essence, but John was looking for something in . . .a more adolescent way. He was looking for ‘The Answer.’ Well, there isn’t ‘The Answer.’ ’’ 12 Lennon was also looking for a way out of his marriage. Each morning, he would tell Cynthia that he was going out to meditate by himself, but in truth, he was heading down to the post office to retrieve letters from Yoko Ono, who was now expressing a deeper interest in getting involved with him. ‘‘I’m a cloud, watch for me,’’ one postcard would say. So Lennon would watch the skies for her. But once Paul left in late March, John got even more restless. Lennon signaled for his friend ‘‘Magic’’ Alex Mardas, a Greek technical wizard (who would later become a technical catastrophe for the Beatles), to join him. From the moment Mardas arrived, he started putting doubts into John’s head about the Maharishi’s holiness. First of all, he told Lennon that a holy man with a bookmaker was rather suspect. But he also noticed that the Maharishi was counting on the Beatles’ support to enable him to reach new converts internationally—including having them fund and participate in a film about Transcendental Meditation. The group’s roadie, Mal Evans, also reported that, along with using the Beatles’

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name for publicity, the Maharishi wanted a 25 percent cut of the group’s earnings on their songs. All of the Maharishi’s plans though went asunder when Mardas started dating a woman on the compound who complained that the guru was making sexual advances toward her. After Mardas told Lennon about the indiscretion, the Beatle was shocked but not totally convinced. But when Harrison started expressing some doubts about the guru’s behavior, Lennon began to make their getaway plans. On April 12, at breakfast, the remaining Beatles and their partners bid farewell to the stunned Maharishi. When he asked them why, Lennon told the swami that if he were so cosmic he’d probably figure out the answer. While the claims of sexual indiscretion had some doubters (among them being Mike Love and Paul Horn), the simple truth was that the Beatles were looking for answers that the Maharishi couldn’t possibly provide. Aside from not recognizing the yogi’s con artistry, Lennon’s anger was largely due to the Maharishi not being the holy deity he’d hoped to find. ‘‘It hadn’t seemed very long ago that John Lennon had declared, casually but catastrophically, that religious disciples were ‘thick and ordinary,’’’ wrote journalist Mark Paytress in Mojo magazine. ‘‘Now . . .a stunned world looked on as pop’s reluctant anti-Christs found themselves chasing a self-proclaimed guru halfway across the globe in search of spiritual guidance.’’13 When they failed to get the spiritual sustenance they sought at the Maharishi’s ashram, the Beatles rushed back into the pop world of London and regained their role as recording artists. As they submerged themselves in making what would become an epic album, the Beatles were about to make another appearance on the big screen. During the Beatles’ time meditating in India, the film company, King Features, was contemplating a script for an animated picture featuring the group. A few years earlier, King Features had already run a TV series of Beatles cartoons without the band’s participation. Producer Al Brodax had made a deal with Brian Epstein, after the group appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, for the rights to animate the Beatles on a half-hour TV show budgeted at $32,000 per season. Since the band wasn’t impressed with the quality of the animation (which was on par with something like The Flintstones), they refused to lend their voices to the series. Nevertheless, the 1965 series went on to be quite popular, running for two seasons and then syndicated until 1969. After A Hard Day’s Night and Help! the Beatles were contracted to do a third film for United Artists. But when that movie didn’t materialize, Brodax saw an opportunity to propose an animated feature to help fulfill their obligation. Once he set the deal with United Artists, Brodax began requesting script treatments. Many writers, including playwrights Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard, were considered. Author Joseph Heller actually submitted one treatment, but it was ultimately refused as being too dense for an animated project. One

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playwright though, Lee Minoff (Come Live With Me), came up with an idea Brodax actually liked. Minoff wrote a story based on the Beatles’ song ‘‘Yellow Submarine.’’ In his outline, he tells the tale of Pepperland, a quaint music-loving society that is protected and entertained by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. When Pepperland is attacked by the musichating Blue Meanies, they seal the band inside a music-proof bubble and turn the citizens into statues (while simultaneously draining the country of its natural color). As the Meanies are attacking, Pepperland’s Lord Mayor sends the sailor Old Fred off in his yellow submarine to seek help. Old Fred goes to the comparatively gray city of Liverpool to collect the Beatles so that they can help save Pepperland with the power of love. To direct, Brodax hired George Dunning, who had (along with John Coates) worked on the Beatles’ cartoon TV series. But in order to improve the quality of the animation, Dunning hired and supervised over 200 artists, including Czechoslovakian design wonderkind Heinz Edelmann (who gave the film its stylized, art deco look). Yellow Submarine actually had a number of collaborators. Author Erich Segal (Love Story), who worked on the screenplay, came up with the actual name Blue Meanies. A forlorn character named after the song ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ was actually based on Broadway director Jonathan Miller, who Minoff felt had ruined his production of Come Live With Me. The new songs chosen were either outtakes from the Pepper sessions (‘‘Only a Northern Song’’), Magical Mystery Tour discards (‘‘It’s All Too Much,’’ ‘‘All Together Now’’), or the recently unissued ‘‘Hey Bulldog.’’ Other tracks included ‘‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’’ ‘‘With a Little Help From My Friends,’’ ‘‘When I’m 64,’’ and ‘‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’’ from Pepper. The single ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’/‘‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’’ was included. From Rubber Soul, they picked ‘‘Nowhere Man’’ and ‘‘Think for Yourself.’’ ‘‘Yellow Submarine’’ and ‘‘Eleanor Rigby’’ were contributions added from Revolver. George Harrison’s ‘‘Only a Northern Song’’ is a cacophonous mess. The title is a double entendre that pokes fun at both Liverpool (which is in the North of England) and Lennon and McCartney’s publishing company, Northern Songs. It’s likely that ‘‘Only a Northern Song’’ was rejected from Sgt. Pepper because of its caustic slam at the publishing arrangements for the Beatles. As part of the contract, Lennon and McCartney got 30 percent of whole shares on the music, while Ringo and George only received 1.6 percent each. As far as he was concerned, Harrison was not only continuing to see his songs rejected, but he was starting to feel like a hired gun in his own band. Though Harrison is trying to be both clever and funny in ‘‘Only a Northern Song,’’ the track has such a sour spirit that his humor drowns in sarcasm. Even though McCartney adds some wild trumpet improvisations, lending the song some melodic color, ‘‘Only a Northern Song’’ sees things too much in black and white. ‘‘All Together Now’’ is a pleasant sing-along folk confection performed at the end of Yellow Submarine. McCartney

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had originally envisioned the song as a sequel to ‘‘Yellow Submarine,’’ but it lacks both the imagination and the innovation of the title track. ‘‘All Together Now,’’ though, did find a better home—as a team anthem for soccer fans. ‘‘Hey Bulldog’’ is the best new track in the film. It’s a Lennon scorcher that rips through the speakers as sharply as McCartney’s 1965 ‘‘I’m Down.’’ While shooting a promotional film for ‘‘Lady Madonna,’’ McCartney decided that they should try something new. Lennon brought out this unfinished song that he felt the group could easily complete. Opening with a pounding boogie-woogie piano, this dynamic tune bolts out the gate with some of Lennon’s best introspective lyrics. Some of his words were improvised, however, like the line ‘‘measured out in news’’ which turned into the more fitting ‘‘measured out in you.’’ The song was named ‘‘Hey Bulldog’’ only because the word came up toward the end. As Lennon repeats the title lyric, McCartney barks uncontrollably while Lennon tries in vain to silence him. ‘‘It’s All Too Much’’ is aptly titled. This densely textured track is about George Harrison’s love affair with LSD just before he discovered meditation. Aside from its powerhouse opening with the startling Hendrixinfluenced guitar feedback (that parodies the dramatic opening chord to ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night’’), Harrison reveals no euphonic imagination for epic psychedelic anthems. (The track clocks in at over six minutes.) To compensate for the repetitive verses, Harrison piles on colorful overdubs of trumpets and clarinets, but they only mask and smother the dreariness of the song. The richly inventive instrumental score to Yellow Submarine, which invokes the pastoral melodies of Delius and Ralph Vaughn Williams after being cast in psychedelic tonal colors, was composed and arranged by George Martin. It would be included on the second side of the sound track album. In 1999, The Yellow Submarine Songbook would be issued with the sound track songs completely remixed while removing all of George Martin’s score. Yellow Submarine, which was released in January 1969, was a charming, old-fashioned musical fairy tale dressed up in posh garb. It not only caught the counterculture audience at their most nostalgic, but it also drew many children who swooned over the lush images and the marvelous set pieces that were scored to the Beatles’ music. In a sense, Yellow Submarine was an inspiring dream about how the Beatles remained our saviors. If the TV series The West Wing became a liberal wish-fulfillment fantasy of the White House during the second Bush administration, Yellow Submarine was a sixties’ counterculture fantasy of the Beatles that restored the power of love to a culture quickly becoming a wasteland. While Yellow Submarine shows the group heroically destroying the Blue Meanies, the real-life Beatles were closer in spirit to being the Blue Meanies when it came to lending their support to the movie. Since they were still shaking off the brutal response to Magical Mystery Tour, they wanted little to do with this project. The group was, however, pleased to see Yellow Submarine as a convenient project to complete their United Artists’

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agreement. Without their assistance, actors were hired to imitate the band’s individual voices, while the Beatles limited themselves at the very end to a live action cameo. As Lennon looks through a telescope, spotting Blue Meanies in the audience, they counter the villains with ‘‘All Together Now,’’ which the Beatles certainly weren’t on Yellow Submarine. In 1967, shortly after recording Sgt. Pepper, John Lennon had an idea of buying the Greek Islands (one for each Beatle) as their own personal retreat from the world. Although that dubious plan never came to pass, the group did start to think about going into business. Without Epstein to run their affairs, they began to consider doing it for themselves. Immediately after returning from India, Lennon and McCartney met to consider a concept that would help aspiring artists get their foot in the door. They devised a company called Apple, a title that came to McCartney shortly after he purchased a Magritte painting. While not usually the punster in the band, Paul thought Apple Corps was a clever concept. (Nobody got the joke.) ‘‘This would be their Pepperland, built on a foundation of love, fairness, and beauty, with not a Blue Meanie on the payroll,’’ wrote Steve Turner in The Gospel according to the Beatles.14 But this bold corporate plan wasn’t guided purely by altruistic impulses. The Beatles’ accountants had convinced them that if they set up their own business, they could actually save about three million pounds in tax per year. Therefore, they set up Apple as both a tax shelter and a company that could function as a record label for themselves and other artists unable to get support from other distributors. Apple was officially registered in April 1967 beginning with the opening of a boutique that was located on 94 Baker Street. The store would serve as a clothing emporium that handled the current fashions by a Dutch group called the Fool. But it was the Beatles who ended up looking foolish—even naive—creating a business when they weren’t really businessmen. Throughout their career, all they really knew how to be was Beatles. ‘‘The very basic idea of forming Apple was [to make] business fun,’’ Apple executive Alistair Taylor explained. ‘‘It would still be a business. Profits had to be made, but not excessive profits.’’15 But one of Apple’s business liabilities, typical of the time, was handing out cash to any freaky character with a far-out idea. The formation of the Apple Foundation for the Arts essentially invited anyone who believed they had talent to apply for funding. Apple even put an ad in the newspaper that implored people to send their films, tapes, or drawings and they wouldn’t get tossed in the wastebasket. One of those idea men who got funded was none other than ‘‘Magic’’ Alex Mardas. Since Lennon believed that Mardas was a genius, he acquired funding to build multitrack studios, levitate houses, and create colored air. ‘‘The thing about Magic Alex is that he had some interesting ideas,’’ McCartney recalled in 2004. ‘‘He just couldn’t pull any of them off. We didn’t know anything about physics or engineering. So, when this guy starts talking about how he’s invented musical wallpaper—‘loudpaper’—I think it was going to be

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called—we sort of went along with it. ‘Yeah, mate, why not? Off you go, here’s a load of money.’’’16 Needless to say, the Apple office was deluged with every kind of artistic manifesto, but few people were worthy of consideration, let alone cash. While Apple was entertaining numerous freaks and charlatans, all hoping to have their dreams fulfilled, others in the office were having their own free-for-all. Along with stereos being stolen, office boys were hauling off even the lead pipes from the roof. The boutique was quickly becoming a shoplifter’s paradise. Soon they were even getting visits from questionable guests. When Harrison was in the Haight, he had invited the Hells Angels to drop in if they were ever in England. One morning, taking Harrison up on his offer, the bikers (complete with their 17 Harley Davidsons) showed up at Heathrow Airport and headed to No. 3 Saville Row—just as Apple was having a Christmas party for some children. When they arrived, they immediately devoured the turkey while trampling kids in the process. ‘‘They proceeded to ruin the kids’ party—and then we couldn’t get rid of them,’’ Ringo remembered. ‘‘They wouldn’t leave and we had baliffs and everything to try and get them out. It was miserable and everyone was terrified, including the grown-ups.’’ 17 As for Harrison, the Angels’ reluctant host, he was nowhere in sight. ‘‘I didn’t go because I knew there was going to be trouble,’’ Harrison remarked. ‘‘I just heard it was terrible and how everybody got beat up.’’18 Nevertheless, despite the headaches, the label did sign many interesting artists like James Taylor, the pop group Badfinger, Jackie Lomax, and Mary Hopkin. The model Twiggy had drawn McCartney’s attention to the 18-year-old Hopkin on Opportunity Knocks, a talent-spotting TV show, in May 1968. He quite liked Hopkin’s voice and one day invited her to the recording studio. Two years earlier in a nightclub, McCartney had heard this nostalgic folk song called ‘‘Those Were the Days,’’ and he couldn’t get the melody out of his head. For months afterward, he tried to get others to record the song, figuring it would be an instant hit, but no one seemed interested. One group he suggested it to was the Moody Blues, but they were now writing cosmic rock. So he finally offered it to Hopkin, who did turn it into a #1 song in the United Kingdom. ‘‘Apple was a big learning curve for me,’’ McCartney explained. ‘‘I learnt that, if you’re going to be connected with anything like a business, it’s got to have accountants and people who watch what happens. And it’s probably not a good idea to get in a load of Hells Angels to do the job.’’19 Later in 1968, McCartney pushed Apple to move into areas other than music, like film, television, and experimental music through a subsidiary label called Zapple. ‘‘The assumption behind Apple was one that had been implicit in the Beatles’ outlook,’’ wrote Steve Turner in The Gospel according to the Beatles. ‘‘It was the belief that people are essentially good and if allowed complete freedom of behavior and imagination will behave honorably and flourish creatively.’’20 But since the band had no experience in

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running a business, calamity ensued instead. ‘‘You can’t imagine what it was like,’’ Alistair Taylor explained. ‘‘Paul would come in and say something and then John would come in an hour later and completely change it. Then we went through a period when we weren’t allowed to do anything until someone had thrown the I Ching.’’21 The company image of the unbitten green apple may have represented a return to a state of innocence out of the Garden of Eden. But the Beatles, besides being out of touch with the world, were also out of touch with the basics of human nature. The onslaught of proposals—the bad ones and good ones—had completely overwhelmed their staff and left Apple in tatters. But Apple wasn’t the only thing in tatters. After the experience in India had failed to bring the Beatles together, they began to fracture while preparing for their new record. For the first time, the group showed signs of feeding off all the friendship and goodwill they had gathered from those years together on the road. And that August, John Lennon had divorced Cynthia to begin his long, torrid romance with Yoko Ono. Besides being the end of his marriage, it turned out to be the beginning of his separation from the Beatles. In the early days of 1968, everywhere you looked, idealism was being put to the test. The Soviet Union had brought a totalitarian chill to the Prague Spring after they invaded Czechoslovakia. The assassination of Martin Luther King in April was followed two months later by the shooting death of Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Student upheavals in Paris against the Gaullist government were matched by riots in the United States over the escalation of the Vietnam War. During their various world tours, Lennon had wanted the Beatles to have more freedom to comment on the political tumult surrounding the group, but Epstein, fearing public reaction, steered Lennon against it. But with Epstein now dead, Lennon knew that there was no one around now to stop him. He immediately went to work on completing a song he first started composing in India. ‘‘Revolution’’ was written in response to the various left-wing organizations that were vying for the Beatles’ support for violent revolution. But instead of throwing his hat into the ring, he composed a stern riposte against violence that would create a huge backlash against the group from certain antiwar activists who had counted on the Beatles for support. At the time Lennon wrote his song, the peaceful struggle against injustice, whose values were seeped in the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King, had been quickly evolving into forms of violent resistance. There was also something dangerously ideological about the insurgencies now developing in democratic nations. ‘‘It was not till Mao Zedong launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966 that the European Left found a faith to replace the one shattered by Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin in 1956,’’ Ian MacDonald observed in Revolution in the Head.22 McDonald goes on to say that the attraction to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was brutally repressive

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(and served as a mere warm-up for what would take place in 1989 at Tiananmen Square), happened because it ‘‘eliminated the preparatory phases of Lenin’s model, positing a direct leap to the Communist millennium which would expunge all class distinctions at a stroke.’’23 Before long, joining their European comrades, the ideologues of the West would make their own break with history. ‘‘All that remained was to take to the streets and ‘tear down the walls.’’’24 While Lennon didn’t believe in tearing down the walls, he made sure his song blasted the eardrums. One of Lennon’s cleverest strokes in ‘‘Revolution’’ was to play the loudest form of rock ’n’ roll, the very quality that made it a revolutionary art form, in order to put across what many claimed was an antirevolutionary message. The song, though, didn’t begin that way. While recording their new album in late May, Lennon had done a slower, doo-wop version of the song that he wished to see out as the Beatles’ next single. McCartney though found it too slow and said that it wasn’t commercial enough. (That version would show up on The Beatles as ‘‘Revolution 1.’’) Bristling from McCartney’s rejection, Lennon became determined to remake the track as both commercial and fast. What he came up with was a highly distorted and gritty guitar arrangement that changed the entire character of the song. Lennon plugged his guitar directly into the recording console that overloaded the channel and created the massive distortion that would earn ‘‘Revolution’’ its spot as the B-side of ‘‘Hey Jude.’’ In the earlier version, Lennon had also expressed some ambivalence about his position on the subject of revolution when he would sing, ‘‘you can count me out/in.’’ On the single, though, he plainly says count him out. ‘‘The lyrics stand today,’’ Lennon stated flatly in 1980 shortly before he died. ‘‘They’re still my feeling about politics. I want to see the plan.’’25 In the seventies, though, Lennon ended up seduced by the same attitudes he had derided in 1968. But in that post-Beatle era, the dream Lennon had once spearheaded had died with his group. In his continued search for Nowhere Land, he threw in his lot behind former Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. By 1980, however, he clearly recognized the mistake he made. ‘‘What I said in ‘Revolution’—in all the versions—is change your head.’’26 No doubt Lennon knew instinctively that the ideals he first put forth in ‘‘There’s a Place’’ had never promised us a better kingdom on earth, or in heaven, but rather a revolution in the mind. ‘‘Even the blunt nature of his dire agitprop work . . .was itself the display of an artistic stance promoting the direct expression of utilitarian ideals,’’ music critic Walter Everett said about Lennon’s political ideals.27 However, the reaction from the counterculture was not so generous toward Lennon. In Jon Weiner’s book Come Together: John Lennon in His Time, he lists a number of damning quotes from counterculture publications. Rock critic Jon Landau in Rolling Stone said: ‘‘Hubert Humphrey couldn’t have said it better.’’ Robert Christgau, in The Village Voice, called for a nuanced response from critics while simultaneously denying one for

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himself. ‘‘It is puritanical to expect musicians, or anyone else, to hew to the proper line,’’ he wrote. ‘‘But it is reasonable to request that they not go out of their way to oppose it. Lennon has, and it takes much of the pleasure out of their music for me.’’ The Berkeley Barb claimed ‘‘Revolution’’ sounded ‘‘like the hawk plank adopted in the Chicago convention of the Democratic Death Party.’’ The New Left Review summed up Lennon’s treatise as ‘‘a lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear.’’ The San Francisco-based leftist magazine Ramparts had just one reaction: ‘‘Betrayal.’’ The magazine took issue in particular with the idea that a millionaire pop artist could tell us in 1968 that everything was going to be alright.28 Later that year, Nina Simone, perhaps still feeling the sting of Martin Luther King’s murder, felt compelled to counter Lennon in her own rewritten version of his song where she urged Lennon to clean his mind. When the Beatles released ‘‘Revolution’’ that August, the Rolling Stones followed the same week with ‘‘Street Fighting Man,’’ which was their own incendiary response to the rise of violent revolt. Back in March, Mick Jagger had attended an antiwar rally at the U.S. embassy in London, where mounted police were having their hands full controlling a crowd of 25,000 people. At the demonstration, he met one of the organizers, activist Tariq Ali, a member of the Trotskyist International Marxist Group. Besides the rally in London, Jagger was aware of the student rioting in Paris on the Left Bank as well. That summer, the Rolling Stones took a new song they were working on called ‘‘Did Everyone Pay Their Dues?’’ and changed the lyrics to address the upheaval that Jagger was witnessing. Unlike ‘‘Revolution,’’ the Stones’ ‘‘Street Fighting Man’’ opens with a sharply strummed acoustic guitar to the sound of marching drums. As Jagger reports the sound of marching feet, to accompany the drums, he invokes a significant line from Martha and the Vandellas’ 1964 hit ‘‘Dancing in the Street.’’ While she describes summer as a time for dancing in the street, Jagger rewrites the lyric to tell us that summer is the time for fighting in the street. What Mick Jagger and Keith Richards pick up on is how ‘‘Dancing in the Street’’ unwittingly became associated with street revolt. In ‘‘Street Fighting Man,’’ they make that connection more explicit. ‘‘Dancing in the Streets’’ at first was intended as nothing more than a happy dance tune, but once it hit the airwaves, the song became a rallying cry for urban American blacks. As riots were tearing apart the inner cities, young black activists, like H. Rap Brown, began using the song as a recruitment anthem. The Rolling Stones sound as if they are joining in with their guns blazing, but ‘‘Street Fighting Man’’ is even more ambivalent than ‘‘Revolution.’’ Jagger recognizes that people are fighting in the street, and he says he wants to join in, but he also understands that all he can do is sing in a rock ’n’ roll band. Rather than commit themselves to a position in the song, the Stones instead strike a provocative pose. Where Lennon’s ‘‘Revolution’’ is clearly a blatant attack on violent insurrection, Jagger and Richards can only sell

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rebellious attitude. At the end, Jagger may sing about his desire to kill the King, and rail at all his servants, but revolution is just a notion in his head. He dreams of being a street fighting man, but he knows that he’s just a singer left observing the battle raging around him. The disappointment for radicals lay with their belief that the Beatles were supposed to be on their side. In their mind, their music was supposed to change the world. Whereas Lennon felt that the Beatles’ music existed to free your mind. As radicals sought to have the band join them at the vanguard of the struggle, Lennon preferred to map out a world of possibilities beyond the institutions and bureaucracies that the extremists wished to obliterate. To paraphrase Pete Townshend in ‘‘Won’t Get Fooled Again,’’ Lennon understood that the new boss would be just like the old boss. Not all of the left, though, was critical of ‘‘Revolution.’’ The SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) newspaper at Cornell University actually praised Lennon’s pacifism. ‘‘You can argue about the effectiveness of non-violence as a tactic, but it would be absurd to claim that it is a conservative notion. . .,’’ the paper stated.29 Not surprisingly, some conservatives did speak out in favor of the song. William F. Buckley praised ‘‘Revolution’’ in his syndicated column and found himself being attacked by the ultraright John Birch Society. According to the Birchers, Lennon was no better than Lenin. They thought he was towing the Moscow line against left-wing infantilism rather than actually being antirevolutionary. The only flaw with ‘‘Revolution’’ was essentially in its explicitness—its need to tell us what to think. ‘‘Hey Jude,’’ on the other hand, was the song that Czech citizens sang while vainly attempting to block Russian tanks that very summer. McCartney’s epic masterpiece provided a passionate appraisal of loss while simultaneously transcending the pain that loss can cause. Along with being the most successful Beatles’ single ever released, selling well over five million copies, ‘‘Hey Jude’’ (which borrows its melody from the Drifters’ ‘‘Save the Last Dance For Me’’) is a deeply considered song about the reconciliation of grief. McCartney had composed ‘‘Hey Jude’’ during the period that the Lennons were divorcing. As John was taking up with Yoko, Paul’s concern was for the emotional welfare of his five-year-old son Julian. One day, while driving to Weybridge to visit Cynthia and Julian, McCartney started singing a melody with the words ‘‘Hey Julian.’’ Later, as he drove home, he started changing the lyrics from Julian to Jules, then later to Jude because he remembered liking the name Jud, a character in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 musical Oklahoma! While Julian may have inspired the song, ‘‘Hey Jude’’ also foreshadows the ultimate end of the Beatles. McCartney brings a whole new depth to his performance of the track. He sings it with as much a sense of profound grief as he does with the hope that better tidings will come. When the song reaches the climax, with the orchestra soaring and the chorus chanting ‘‘na-na-na-na, hey Jude,’’ McCartney ardently scats and shouts his way to the slow fade-out. But his shouts here aren’t the celebratory, rousing

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screams of a young man finding his freedom, as he did in ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ or ‘‘I’m Down.’’ McCartney’s cries in ‘‘Hey Jude’’ are filled with a release from pain. They are the cries of possibilities lost, but possibilities still hoping to be found. Perhaps it’s that inherent sense of loss indelibly woven into the fabric of the song that touched Czech nationals. They took ‘‘Hey Jude’’ to their heart as a song that best expressed their fading pride during the demise of the brief freedom of the Prague Spring. In 1980, Lennon made the rather provocative argument that the song was unconsciously addressed to him, rather than his son, and (for John) it revealed more about McCartney’s torn emotions surrounding their faltering partnership. ‘‘If you think about it, Yoko’s just come into the picture,’’ Lennon remarked. ‘‘He’s saying: ‘Hey Jude—hey, John.’. . .The words ‘go out and get her’—subconsciously he was saying, ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ But on a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel inside him was saying ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all, because he didn’t want to lose his partner.’’30 It’s a fascinating interpretation that Lennon makes here. After all, McCartney took the name Jud from Oklahoma! a musical that is essentially about a love triangle. It tells the story of a cowboy, Curly McLain, who romances a farm girl named Laurey Williams, while Jud Fry, the farmhand, threatens their love affair. The musical essentially follows the tension created by this conflict. Given that the presence of Yoko Ono in John Lennon’s life created a triangle between McCartney, Lennon, and Ono, one that would ultimately spell the end of the Beatles, his choice of Jude couldn’t have been more fitting. Despite the growing tensions between them, however, it was a testament to both Lennon and McCartney’s mutual trust that when it came to their art, they would always come to the other’s aid. Lennon was instrumental in assuring McCartney of the one lyric he was planning to omit. ‘‘I had the line, ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder,’ which doesn’t make literal sense,’’ McCartney told Johnny Black in Mojo. ‘‘I said, ‘I’ll change that.’ John said, ‘You won’t. That’s my favorite line.’ Because it works in its own way. If anyone else had said that, I might not have listened. We could insist that one of us trust the judgment of the other. We trusted each other enough.’’31 ‘‘Hey Jude’’ was the Beatles’ longest single clocking in at 7:11, but it wasn’t the longest single. That honor belonged to Richard Harris’ version of Jimmy Webb’s overwrought ‘‘MacArthur’s Park’’ (7:20) from earlier in May. George Martin was actually concerned about the length of ‘‘Hey Jude,’’ but the Beatles refused to shorten it. When Martin told them that DJs wouldn’t play it, Lennon told him they would if they knew it was the Beatles. Oddly enough, McCartney didn’t plan on the song’s extended conclusion, but he just kept getting carried away with the ad-libbing. According to Walter Everett, the ending was likely influenced by the Maharishi as a ‘‘wordless four-minute mantra with a grandeur that seems to suggest that given the proper understanding and encouragement, Jude has

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found his courage and moves on with grace and dignity.’’32 After Martin had recorded the orchestra to provide the overdubbing in the coda, he asked if they wanted to overdub their voices joining in the chant. While one of the string players expressed indignation at being asked and informed Martin that he wasn’t a session singer and bolted, the rest stayed and—session singers or not—they received overtime pay. But the more consequential spat on ‘‘Hey Jude’’ occurred between McCartney and Harrison. As Paul first sang the verses of the song, George answered each one with a guitar line parroting McCartney. Frustrated over many issues, including having to run the band in the emotional absence of Lennon, McCartney barked at Harrison to come in on the second chorus. But Harrison was fed up feeling like a sideman to Paul and shot back for Paul to essentially go fuck himself. By the time of ‘‘Hey Jude,’’ the Beatles were no longer collaborating equally to create great music. Each member simply staked out his own territory and then demanded the others to back him up. Somewhat ironically, Harrison would base his 1971 track ‘‘Isn’t It a Pity,’’ a song that addressed his aggravating problems with McCartney, on ‘‘Hey Jude.’’ ‘‘Hey Jude’’ may have been a powerful reconciliation song, but it couldn’t heal what ailed the Beatles. In the spring of 1964, as America was swooning to the magic of Beatlemania, a young convict incarcerated at McNeil Island Penitentiary in Washington State was starting to take notice of these merry minstrels. Charles Manson was originally known as ‘‘no name Maddox’’ when he was born to an unmarried 16-year-old named Kathleen Maddox in Cincinnati, Ohio. A few weeks after his birth, he was given the Manson surname of a laborer boyfriend of Maddox, William Manson. Growing up, Charles never came to know his biological father. Kathleen was meanwhile a heavy drinker with a criminal background. When she and her brother were sentenced to five years imprisonment for robbing a Charleston, West Virginia service station in 1939, Charles was placed with his aunt and uncle. But when his mother got out on parole in 1942, Charles and his mother lived a nomadic life in cheap hotel rooms until she finally abandoned him. The court placed the young Manson in the Gibault School of Boys, in Terre Haute, but after 10 months he escaped to find her. When he finally caught up with his mother, he was soundly rejected. From there, Manson’s young adult life was filled with various burglaries of grocery stores that landed him in a juvenile center in Indianapolis. Manson would eventually escape and commit more robberies only to be placed in more training schools until he became aggressively antisocial. An illiterate, who nevertheless had an IQ of 121, Manson was a dangerous offender imprisoned until 1955 when he was paroled. That year he married a hospital waitress whom he supported via odd jobs and auto thefts. They moved to Los Angeles a year later in a stolen car while his new wife was pregnant with his son, Charles Manson Jr. After he was charged with theft, Manson

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had his parole revoked and he found himself back in prison in San Pedro, California. Before he was released in September 1958, Rosalie received a decree of divorce from her incarcerated hubby. Within a few months, Manson was back on the street and pimping a 16-year-old girl. He would marry another young woman with a record for prostitution and moved to New Mexico to continue his dubious career choice. When one of his hookers was arrested, Manson was brought back to Los Angeles for violation of his parole and for trying to forge a check. He was then ordered to serve a 10-year sentence at McNeil Island. Noted by psychiatrists as both a psychopath and a supreme narcissist, Manson might have remained an anonymous chronic criminal doing continuous hard time had it not been for his cellmate: Alvin ‘‘Creepy’’ Karpis. Sharing a cell with Karpis, once one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Criminals when he ran with the Ma Barker gang in the thirties, Manson learned to play guitar from the career criminal. According to the famous bank robber, when Beatlemania hit in 1964, Charles Manson saw himself as the next incarnation of the Beatles. ‘‘It’s quite possibly he saw as deeply into the potential of the Beatles phenomenon as anyone, far deeper than any objective newsman or social commentator, and knew that a universe of potentials, dormant the day before, had now come to trembling life,’’ explained Devin McKinney in Magic Circles. ‘‘[It was a] chance to make a mark on his time, to influence mass consciousness. His time to go insane.’’33 When Manson was released from prison in March 1967, the Beatles had retired from public performances and he saw it as the perfect moment to head back to Los Angeles to fulfill his dream. First, he made his way to Berkeley to play guitar on campus and wooed with song and charm a librarian named Mary Brunner, his first groupie. During the Summer of Love, Manson headed to Haight-Ashbury to gather followers that he would ultimately lead to the desert. After traveling by bus, like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, or perhaps even like the Beatles in Magical Mystery Tour, Manson toured up the California coast nabbing young disciples like Susan Atkins, Bruce Davis, Patricia Krenwinkle, and musician Bobby Beausoleil, who were all cast-outs from middle-class homes. Manson’s group moved into a two-story house in Canoga Park outside of Los Angeles in January 1969. They painted their house yellow and Manson would call it the ‘‘Yellow Submarine.’’ It was in this fairyland residence in a white middle-class suburb that he began his rant about a race-war apocalypse where blacks from Watts would kill ‘‘the rich white piggies in Beverly Hills’’ until whites would retaliate. He told them that he heard it all on this new Beatles’ record, an album everyone was calling the White Album. In 1968, the divisiveness within the Beatles, their absence from the stage, and the powerful aura they continued to project had begun to spark a different reaction in the counterculture from the early euphoria of Beatlemania. If the Beatles could dream up an imaginary ideal audience to take home with

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them on Sgt. Pepper, why couldn’t their audience also dream up imaginary Beatles? But the fans’ dreams were nowhere near as benign as the Beatles’ own versions of them. When their new album had reached the public airwaves toward the end of 1968, it sparked an alternate history of the group. If Manson heard the Beatles as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, there were other listeners who heard clues about deaths, cover-ups, and deceptions. The cover of the album to be known simply as The Beatles may have been white, but the cryptic influence it had and the troubled circumstances surrounding its creation were indeed very dark. The Beatles was their first group album on Apple Records and they began recording it between late May and early October 1968. Pretty much all the material had its roots in the Maharishi’s ashram back in February. Just before the revelations of the yogi’s indiscretions sent the Beatles packing, the environment was actually bringing them much calm, due to lack of drugs and other distractions. They found themselves in a languid period of prolific creativity. In fact, they had written so many songs there that they had begun contemplating it as a double-album. In May, Lennon and McCartney came to George Harrison’s house in Esher to record demos of 23 songs they were considering for this new record. By the end of the month, they started recording at Abbey Road with some additional sessions at Trident Studios. The Maharishi Yogi once said, ‘‘Don’t fight darkness. Bring the light, and darkness will disappear.’’ On The Beatles, the group brought both darkness and light. The Beatles reflects most strongly the disillusionment growing within the group, as well as the violent upheaval happening in the world. For example, the pure fun of the opening track, ‘‘Back in the U.S.S.R.,’’ couldn’t be separated from the grimness of the Soviet tanks rolling through Czechoslovakia earlier in the year. The splendid R&B doo-wop parody of ‘‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’’ couldn’t be removed from the horrific assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, or for that matter, Valerie Solanas’ attempted murder of artist Andy Warhol. ‘‘Revolution 1 & 9’’ was intrinsically linked to the violent student upheavals in Paris and the United States. ‘‘Savoy Truffle’’ might seem a trifling Harrison track about Eric Clapton’s obsession with chocolates, but the song is about tooth decay and the possibility of having one’s teeth yanked out. ‘‘Piggies’’ joked about the pampered bourgeois clutching their forks and knives, but the Manson clan would take up those same carving blades to kill some of the Hollywood bourgeoisie within the next year. How can one today hear ‘‘Yer Blues,’’ where Lennon cries out for the release of death and hanging up his rock ’n’ roll, when he’d get his wish 12 years later? As diversely joyful as many of the songs were, they couldn’t escape their shadow sides. It’s not surprising that The Beatles had cast such a dark shadow and had inspired so many sinister fantasies when it was recorded in such an acrimonious atmosphere. First of all, Yoko Ono was by Lennon’s side throughout the recording. Her presence undermined the professionalism of the group

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dynamic in the studio. ‘‘It was uncomfortable because she was the first one to break the stronghold,’’ recalled George Martin. ‘‘Here you had a castle of four corners. Even I wasn’t a part of that. And they were impregnable; the four of them together were bigger than any individual parts. Then Yoko comes in and one corner is exposed.’’34 Besides breaking that inner circle, she also offered unsolicited advice on the quality of the recordings. For instance, during a playback of Lennon’s ‘‘Sexy Sadie,’’ she told McCartney that she thought the band could have played better. With Yoko driving a wedge between Lennon and McCartney, Paul started controlling the sessions to the degree that during ‘‘Back in the U.S.S.R.,’’ he took over the drums when he decided that Ringo wasn’t doing what he asked. Angry and hurt, Ringo quit the group until he got enticed back for a filmed promo 12 days after the recording. One day saw Lennon complaining that they were working too long (five days) on McCartney’s ska-driven ‘‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,’’ while on another, McCartney was fed up with Lennon’s week-long recording of the avantgarde ‘‘Revolution 9,’’ a piece he didn’t even care to see included on the album. Since nobody cared for McCartney’s ballad ‘‘Blackbird,’’ he did it himself. A few months later, when he was ready to tape his blues-driven ‘‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’’ he didn’t even bother to ask anyone to join him. As for Harrison, he was miserable throughout the sessions. After his spat with McCartney during the recording of ‘‘Hey Jude,’’ he wrote the sarcastic ‘‘Not Guilty’’ in angry response for being such a bother. In the song, he slammed his mates for not letting him have a more equal role in the songwriting chores. But he was also still bitter over the group’s total rejection of the Maharishi. Apparently, Harrison believed that the rest of the group blamed him for being scammed by the yogi. ‘‘Not Guilty’’ was dropped after an astonishing one hundred takes, so Harrison decided to play hooky when McCartney came to record ‘‘I Will.’’ The bickering had become so vicious that it even spilled into the control room where engineer Geoff Emerick had been growing more and more distressed with the daily bouts of meanspiritedness. So when McCartney turned on George Martin during one session, Emerick decided that he had enough and quit. Engineer Ken Scott took over for the remainder of the recording sessions. Martin would also soon take a spontaneous ‘‘vacation’’ from the record when the bickering continued to disrupt production. Chris Thomas, who within a few years would produce Roxy Music and Procol Harum, stepped in to helm the storm. Despite the turbulence recording it, The Beatles still has a rich diversity of musical pleasures. The record opens with the fade-in sound of a Pan Am 101 flight immediately invoking the anticipation of the plane that first brought the Beatles to America in 1964. But while the opening chords of ‘‘Back in U.S.S.R.’’ echo the American rhythms of both Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, the plane is actually arriving in the Soviet Union. Written by McCartney in Rishikesh, the title was partially influenced by a comment

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Mike Love made to McCartney about doing a Soviet version of Chuck Berry’s 1959 hit ‘‘Back in the U.S.A.’’ In Berry’s song, the irony of a black man lamenting the joys of returning to America with its juke boxes, hamburgers, and skyscrapers without mentioning the racial segregation and other inequities was, of course, deliberate. But in ‘‘Back in the U.S.S.R.,’’ McCartney plays off the ironic paradoxes in Berry’s song. Instead of American landmarks like Chicago or New Orleans, McCartney refers to Ukraine as if he were citing girls in bikinis lounging on the beaches of California. In one radio interview, McCartney said he was envisioning a Russian spy who had become Americanized to the point that when he goes home he starts using American phrases to his Russian girlfriend. The parodistic elements go even deeper when McCartney refers to one of Chuck Berry’s contemporaries—Ray Charles—when he refrains ‘‘Georgia on My Mind.’’ ‘‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’’ is an agile piece of rock ’n’ roll that illustrates just how much the Beatles learned from their antecedents. After years of paying tribute to Berry by covering many songs from his catalog, they’ve now written a song of their own that even Chuck could envy. ‘‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’’ concludes with the jet cross-fading into the gentle sound of the acoustic guitar of Lennon’s ‘‘Dear Prudence.’’ This delicate ballad was also composed at Rishikesh for Prudence Farrow, Mia’s sister, who had spent long periods in isolation meditating rather than mingling with the group. Lennon’s song was meant to coax her out before she went completely stir-crazy. As it turned out, Prudence went beyond stir-crazy. She was becoming ashen, not recognizing anyone but the Maharishi. ‘‘She overdid the meditating—we couldn’t get her to come out of her room,’’ Pattie Boyd recalled. ‘‘She stayed in it for something like two weeks, as if she was in a trance. We took turns trying to visit and talk to her, but to no avail. She was trying to reach God faster than anyone else.’’35 To this day, Farrow defends her dedication to TM, saying that she was more devoted to meditation than socializing after the Maharishi’s lecture. Eventually, the Maharishi did place her in a discussion group with John and George and she became quite outgoing with them in talking about the benefits of meditation. Oddly, Lennon never played the song to her. It was Harrison who told her about it before they departed. The first time she heard the tune was when the record came out in November 1968. Farrow continues today to teach meditation in Florida. The finger-picking style that Lennon uses in the song, drawn from folk styles of an earlier era, was taught to him by Donovan in India. ‘‘John showed a lot of interest in the Carter Family picking style I was using, and over two days I taught him, and he immediately started writing in this new style,’’ Donovan recalled.36 Lennon would continue to employ that graceful manner of playing on ‘‘Julia,’’ as well as later on ‘‘Look at Me’’ from Plastic Ono Band. For all those obsessed Beatles’ fans who were searching for clues about them in various songs, Lennon’s ‘‘Glass Onion’’ is his sardonic reply to all

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of their obsessions. The title ‘‘Glass Onion’’ was the original name John wanted for the Apple band, the Iveys, who would instead become Badfinger. This hodgepodge of song associations, which references a number of Beatle tunes like ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ ‘‘The Fool on the Hill,’’ ‘‘Lady Madonna,’’ ‘‘I Am the Walrus,’’ and ‘‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’’ puts down those who seek to find any substantial meaning in their lyrics. Steve Turner describes ‘‘Glass Onion’’ as ‘‘a playful response’’37 to those who try to go deeper into the Beatles’ material. Critic Ian MacDonald, more accurately, sees darker repercussions here. ‘‘As prominent advocates of the free-associating state of mind, the Beatles attracted more crackpot fixations than anyone apart from Dylan,’’ he wrote in Revolution in the Head. ‘‘While, at the time, they may have seemed enough like harmless fun for Lennon to make them the subject of the present sneeringly sarcastic song, in the end they returned to kill him.’’ 38 Lennon failed to consider that his ambivalence about being a Beatle would ultimately have tragic ramifications. Since he had made himself the point man for Beatles’ fans’ most utopian longings, he didn’t recognize that making fun of their fetishes would sew the seeds of betrayal assassin Mark Chapman would act upon. McCartney’s ‘‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’’ is a ska piece based on an African phrase for ‘‘life goes on.’’ Nigerian conga player Jimmy Scott, a stylist with dark glasses and African clothes, first uttered it to Paul in the Urhobo language that is used by the Warri people in the midwest region of Nigeria. McCartney had first met Scott, who came to England in the fifties, at the Bag O’Nails nightclub in Soho, London. Scott had already played with Georgie Fame, backed Stevie Wonder, and made a memorable guest appearance on the percussive opening of the Rolling Stones’ ‘‘Sympathy for the Devil’’ on Beggar’s Banquet (1968). Scott ultimately created his own Ob-la-da Band where, in concert, he would shout out, ‘‘Ob la di,’’ and the crowd would cry, ‘‘Ob la da,’’ and he would answer back with, ‘‘Life goes on.’’ Scott, who would die from pneumonia in 1986, also played the congas on the Beatles’ track. But he was somewhat miffed with McCartney when it eventually came out because he felt that he deserved some of the royalties. Paul defended his decision not to pay Scott saying that it was only a phrase and Scott didn’t cowrite the song. But the Beatles had their own frustrations with the tune. Fortunately ‘‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’s’’ driving piano melody ended up partly inspired by Lennon’s dislike of the composition. ‘‘Paul came along with this kind of ska thing and John actually wasn’t in the studio,’’ George Martin recalled. ‘‘We got the thing more or less together, but we were having a bit of difficulty with it. Then John came in, slightly stoned, and said, ‘What’s this rubbish you’re doing?’ He went over to the barrelhouse piano and said, ‘Right then. Here we go. One, two, three, four, da da da da da dum dum dum.’ It was a corny introduction, but it worked.’’39

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The song is about Desmond and Molly, two members of a musical group, who fall in love and eventually marry and have kids. The name Desmond was thought to be a tribute to ska artist Desmond Dekker (‘‘The Israelites’’). McCartney made a lyrical error, though, when he said that Desmond, instead of Molly, ‘‘stayed home and did his pretty face.’’ The band liked the sexual ambiguity, however, and the lyric stood. While most of the Beatles accepted the song, Lennon continued to hate it (no doubt because the idea of life-going-on-la-di-dah would hardly appeal to him). The tune drew a line of demarcation between him and Lennon that mirrored the divisiveness growing within the band. McCartney’s stance against Lennon here was defensive, pushing the song on the group, as Lennon had been pushing Yoko on the Beatles. When the band gathered, though, to record the harmony vocals, the tensions had magically drifted away. Geoff Emerick, who would leave The Beatles sessions after recording this song, recalled the way the bickering dissipated once the band had found the underlying harmony in their music: That’s all it took for them to suspend their petty disagreements; for those few moments, they would clown around and act silly again, like they did when they were kids, just starting out. Then as soon as they’d take the cans off, they’d go back to hating each other. It was very odd—it was almost as if having the headphones on and hearing that echo put them in a dreamlike state.40 Although Paul’s desire to see the track as a single never came to be because of Lennon’s objection, the Scottish band Marmalade took it to #1 in the U.K. charts for two weeks. The track would also inspire the Happy Mondays’ song ‘‘Desmond,’’ included on their 1987 debut album, which many thought plagiarized ‘‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.’’ The resemblance was indeed pretty strong. Their album was even withdrawn because of complaints from Apple. When it was finally rereleased, ‘‘Desmond’’ was no longer on the CD. ‘‘Well, we gave the game away calling it ‘Desmond,’’’ recalls leader singer Shaun Ryder. 41 When the song ‘‘Lazyitis,’’ which had a strong resemblance to ‘‘Ticket to Ride,’’ turned up on their Bummed album in 1988, Ryder smartly covered himself. ‘‘We eventually had to give the credits to David Essex, Sly Stone, Lennon & McCartney, and the fuckin’ Wombies, I think.’’42 ‘‘Wild Honey Pie’’ was the type of abstract, experimental pop McCartney would do later on his first solo album. Paul originally improvised it as a group sing-a-long in Rishikesh, but on The Beatles it’s nothing more than a deliberate piece of gibberish featuring Paul singing ‘‘honey pie’’ over a guitar vibrato as a harpsichord appears to quote the theme from The Addams Family TV show. ‘‘Wild Honey Pie’’ sets out to deliberately mock the smooth and harmonious pop stylings of the Beatles. Days earlier, Lennon had already done much the same thing with his own longer experimental

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pastiche called ‘‘What’s the New Mary Jane?’’ which McCartney vetoed. (The song would eventually turn up on Anthology 3.) Maybe the rest of the group was uncertain about including this brief bit of nonsense on The Beatles, but Pattie Boyd loved ‘‘Wild Honey Pie’’ so it was ultimately included. ‘‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’’ was composed by Lennon at Rishikesh adapting a melody based on Mack Gordon and Harry Revel’s ‘‘Stay as Sweet as You Are,’’ which he first heard in Norman Taurog’s 1934 film College Rhythm. Significantly enough, the movie is about how an All-American football star (Jack Oakie) suddenly, upon graduation, finds himself out of favor and unemployed. ‘‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill’’ is another sing-a-long ballad that draws allusions to William Frederick Cody (Buffalo Bill), the American cowboy showman in the late 1800s. It’s also based on Richard Cooke III, whose mother, Nancy, was on the Maharishi’s retreat with the Beatles at the ashram. Cooke was an American college graduate, a preppy with a crew cut, who visited Rishikesh to see his mother—but also ended up meeting the Beatles. The caustic Lennon didn’t take too kindly to what he called in the song this ‘‘all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother’s son.’’ ‘‘Bungalow Bill’’ tells the story of a tiger hunt expedition that was organized by a Texan hunter, where Cooke and his mother traveled three hours by elephant to take part. While hiding in a traditional marsh, they awaited the tiger. When it crossed their sights, Cooke shot it through the ear. When they arrived back at the ashram, Cooke started to feel some guilt about the hunt and, along with his mother, had a meeting with the Maharishi (coincidently with Lennon and McCartney in attendance). The yogi was naturally upset, but Cooke told him that he’d never again kill another animal. When Cooke was asked by the Maharishi about what he would do if he’d ever have the desire to kill another animal, Lennon questioned Cooke’s sincerity. Cooke told Lennon that, in this case, it was either the tiger or them. But Lennon felt the whole expedition was foolhardy.43 Given the macho bravado of Cooke’s actions, it’s likely no accident that Lennon provides a melody in the chorus that echoes the antiwar protesters who’d been chanting, ‘‘Hey, Hey LBJ, how many children did you kill today?’’ ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’’ is George Harrison’s sad lament for a group that he felt had lost its power to love. The title came from a toss of I Ching coins leading him to the phrase ‘‘gently weeps.’’ Harrison had begun recording the song in July 1968, but the other Beatles weren’t that interested when they heard his acoustic demo (which has since been released on both Anthology 3 and Love). After writing a larger rock band arrangement for the song, the Beatles recorded over 14 takes, from dusk to dawn, on August 16. But the other band members still wouldn’t warm up to the track. Lennon and McCartney had brought little enthusiasm to many of his compositions, so Harrison (in utter frustration) sent out for his new friend, guitarist Eric Clapton, to take part in the production. He figured by bringing in this blues guitar virtuoso

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from Cream, he might just wake up his partners. Clapton was, however, initially reluctant to play on a Beatles’ song, especially since the group rarely went looking for outsiders to perform with them. But Harrison ultimately convinced him that this would spark some interest in the track from the rest of the group. ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’’ did indeed inspire the group, in fact, because this doleful anthem would eventually turn into an FM rock classic. Although the tune expresses a fair dollop of self-pity, Clapton’s mournful notes lend a graceful majesty to the song. Since Clapton’s guitar solo didn’t have the trademark Beatles’ sound, though, the engineers had to electronically process it through ADT (automatic double tracking) to wobble its pitch. ADT was an electronic system for double tracking by which you could link tape recorders and create an instant simultaneous duplication of sound to capture on tape. This process allowed the engineers to alter Clapton’s trademark sound so that it sounded more like Harrison’s guitar gently weeping. ‘‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’’ is a cleverly constructed Lennon pastiche of the history of rock ’n’ roll. The title comes from a parody of the ‘‘Happiness is a warm puppy’’ bromide in a Peanuts comic that was featured in an American gun magazine. The magazine inserted the line, ‘‘Happiness is a warm gun.’’ George Martin brought the magazine to Lennon’s attention shortly after Robert Kennedy was assassinated. The song breaks down into three parts. The first section, a ballad, was inspired by an acid trip that Lennon took with Derek Taylor, his friend Pete Shotten, and road manager Neil Aspinall. Having started this new song, Lennon was looking for some phrases to help him finish it. He asked them to give him comments that best defined a really smart girl. Taylor replied, ‘‘She’s not a girl who misses much.’’ The line ‘‘she’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand’’ came from a discussion Taylor and his wife had at a bar in the Isle of Man with a man with a predilection for moleskin gloves. According to Taylor, the ‘‘multi-colored mirrors’’ reference came from a newspaper story about a soccer fan in Manchester City who had been arrested by the police because he had mirrors placed on his shoe tops to look up women’s skirts. The lyric, ‘‘lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime,’’ was inspired by this shoplifter who wore a cloak with plastic hands. He would rest them on the shop counter while his real hands would pocket items. The second section of the song shifted from a lyrical, impressionistic observation into a heavy rock arrangement. ‘‘Happiness’’ was partly based on Lennon’s relationship with Yoko (whom he called Mother Superior), but it was also about his addiction to heroin (‘‘I need a fix ’cause I’m going down’’). This part of the tune gets presented in a slow dirge that he would also provide for his later heroin song ‘‘Cold Turkey.’’ The third section, which drew upon a favorite R&B doo-wop song by Rosie and the Originals called ‘‘Give Me Love,’’ features Lennon using gun imagery as a form of sexual innuendo. Besides the sly humor of the ‘‘bang-bang, shoot-shoot’’ chorus, the song has an eerie prescience in light of Lennon’s murder by that

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very same weapon. ‘‘[‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’] juxtaposes [the] past with [the] present and finds horror in the contrast,’’ wrote Devin McKinney in Magic Circles.44 Like ‘‘Not Guilty,’’ ‘‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’’ would also be completed in over one hundred takes—but the effort here reaped better rewards. ‘‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’’ is one of Lennon’s most intricately imaginative rock songs. ‘‘Martha My Dear’’ was titled for McCartney’s two-year-old English sheep dog, but the theme is succinctly summed up by Steve Turner as ‘‘a plea to a girl who has always been the singer’s muse: he asks her to remember him because he still believes that they were meant for each other.’’45 Although Paul claims that this quaintly pretty song, which he based on an exercise he used to teach himself the piano, is literally about his canine friend. Turner believes the song was his sweet farewell to Jane Asher. Asher had broken off their engagement when she found McCartney having an affair with an Apple employee. So Paul’s new romantic muse was an American photographer named Linda Eastman, who he met in May 1967 at a Georgie Fame concert at London’s Bag O’Nails club. Since Eastman was on assignment taking pictures of some of England’s top rock acts, they found time to get together again at a Procol Harum concert at the Speakeasy. After attending a launch party for Sgt. Pepper, she went back to New York. But in May 1968, they hooked up in the Big Apple when he and John went to announce the formation of Apple Corps. During the recording of The Beatles, Paul invited Linda back to London where they finally started to date. Lennon wrote ‘‘I’m So Tired’’ in response to the long lecture sessions with the Maharishi that left him with insomnia. But the track is also about his growing fixation on Yoko, with whom he was just beginning to entertain having an affair. Recorded at 3 a.m., Lennon sounds like he’s carrying not only the weight of sleeplessness but the burden of years of rock ’n’ rolling as well. By the time of The Beatles, Lennon was starting to strip away the melismatic style in his voice that made it such a pleasure to hear him sing ‘‘This Boy,’’ ‘‘Eight Days a Week,’’ ‘‘Any Time at All,’’ ‘‘Yes it Is,’’ and ‘‘A Day in the Life.’’ On ‘‘I’m So Tired,’’ he pares down his voice to a blunt instrument that tears through to the essence of his own self. In order to achieve the kind of intensity and authenticity that he reaches here (and even later on ‘‘Yer Blues’’), he sacrifices beauty for truth. ‘‘John seemed to be getting closer to the essentials of his soul, which might be identified as a refusal to settle for anything short of perfection combined with a clear understanding that perfection doesn’t exist—a dilemma that, given the history of the Beatles era and the years since, is something more than one man’s hang-up,’’ wrote critic Greil Marcus on ‘‘I’m So Tired.’’46 If John reaches for the painful truth of his being, Paul continues to rise above true sorrow in order to reach a state of grace. He gets there on his lovely ballad ‘‘Blackbird,’’ a song he wrote for the American Civil Rights struggle in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April. Composed at

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his Scottish farm, and adapting a melody loosely based on Bach’s Bourree in E Minor, ‘‘Blackbird’’ is a plaintive number that speaks to the inspirational core of the movement. The stately influence of Bach, which brings a graceful calm to the song, dates back to when Paul and George used to play Bourree together at parties when they were teenagers. (McCartney would once again resurrect Bach’s influence in his song ‘‘Jenny Wren’’ from his 2005 Chaos and Creation in the Backyard.) Like most of the tunes on The Beatles, ‘‘Blackbird’’ began its origins at the ashram with some help from Donovan. But McCartney may well have been familiar with the 1962 Obie-award winning civil rights musical Fly Blackbird, which featured songs by C. Bernard Jackson and James Hatch. The term ‘‘blackbird’’ like the phrase ‘‘nigger’’ began with pejorative intent, but in the sixties, ‘‘blackbird’’ became a word reclaimed with pride by civil rights workers. After the majestic sound of McCartney’s birds taking flight, George Harrison’s ‘‘Piggies’’ delivers us right into the trough. From its opening mocking notes on the harpsichord, ‘‘Piggies’’ bears the same musically baroque touches of ‘‘Blackbird.’’ But ‘‘Piggies’’ is a deliberately churlish mocking of the middle class. Critic Steve Turner rightly points out that, during this same period, pigs was a derogatory term applied to the police (initially by the radical Black Panther Party), and earlier to the authoritarian leaders of George Orwell’s allegorical novel, Animal Farm. 47 ‘‘Piggies’’ grovels in cannibalistic and carnivorous imagery. While it’s likely that the tune inspired the comedy troupe Monty Python’s gleefully mocking ‘‘The Lumberjack Song,’’ which Harrison fully enjoyed, ‘‘Piggies’’ is too mean-spirited to reach the inspired absurdism and lunacy of ‘‘The Lumberjack Song.’’ Turner correctly described ‘‘Rocky Raccoon’’ as ‘‘a musical western’’48 inspired, in part, by the Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster song, ‘‘Black Hills of Dakota,’’ which was sung by Doris Day in Calamity Jane (1953). But the composition also has its roots in the Robert Service poem ‘‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’’ (1907), which is filled with romantic heartbreak and revenge. ‘‘Rocky Raccoon’’ is a more playful version of Marty Robbins’ 1959 tragic western allegory ‘‘El Paso.’’ But McCartney’s song is largely about spiritual renewal. When Rocky, a young upstart, is taken aback after his girl, Nancy, goes off with his adversary, Dan, he attempts to gun him down. But he discovers that Dan is a lot quicker on the draw. While recovering in his hotel from a gunshot wound, Rocky finds Gideon’s Bible (a staple in every hotel) and realizes that although Gideon has long since ‘‘checked out,’’ the book will serve to help ‘‘with good Rocky’s revival.’’ ‘‘Rocky Raccoon’’ also welcome’s back Lennon’s harmonica which makes its first appearance since ‘‘I’m a Loser’’ on Beatles for Sale. The country and western ‘‘Don’t Pass Me By’’ is Ringo’s first song where he gets the sole writing credit—though it’s not unlike his cover of Buck Owens’ ‘‘Act Naturally.’’ The title of this agreeable tune is actually rather appropriate as it had been passed over since 1963 (apparently Ringo was trying to get the group to record it for years). ‘‘I wrote ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ when I was sitting

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around at home,’’ Ringo recalled. ‘‘I only play three chords on the guitar and three on the piano—I just bang away—and then if a melody comes and some words, I just have to keep going.’’49 If ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’’ was helped by the soulful licks provided by Eric Clapton, ‘‘Don’t Pass Me By’’ is given a jaunty bit of country swing by Jack Fallon’s violin. ‘‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’’ was conceived in India when McCartney had encountered two monkeys copulating on a path. Singing in the same ribald voice he used for ‘‘Lady Madonna,’’ McCartney wanted to contrast the natural way animals approach sex as compared to humans. Apparently, John loved the song but was deeply hurt when he wasn’t included on the session recording. But Turner argues that Lennon’s chagrin had more to do with McCartney writing in a style more associated with him (something that McCartney would himself acknowledge in 1981). ‘‘Sometimes they would try to outdo each other by composing in a style more often associated with the other,’’ Turner writes in A Hard Day’s Write. ‘‘This explains why [The Beatles] contains the sensitive ‘Julia’ and sentimental ‘Good Night’ by John in Paul’s style, as well as the gritty rock ’n’ roll numbers like ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Why Don’t We Do it in the Road?’ from Paul a` la Lennon.’’50 In contrast to ‘‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’’ ‘‘I Will’’ is a charming bossa nova ballad inspired by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz’s 1964 hit ‘‘The Girl From Ipanema.’’ With both Ringo and John providing percussion, Paul sings one of his first devoted love songs to Linda Eastman. Following McCartney’s adoring lyric is Lennon’s quiet but complex ‘‘Julia.’’ Where Paul’s composition is direct and simple, Lennon’s ‘‘Julia’’ catches the ambiguity of his painful regrets for his lost mother and the desire for his newly found mother (and lover) Yoko Ono (who is the ‘‘ocean child’’ in the song). ‘‘It was natural that John should turn to Yoko because he had already developed a grand illusion about her wisdom and powers, regarding her as an almost magical being who could fulfill his every need and solve all his problems,’’ explained Albert Goldman in The Lives of John Lennon.51 Lennon would confirm this view in subsequent interviews. ‘‘Before Yoko and I met, we were half a person,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s an old myth about people being half, and the other half being in the sky or in heaven or on the other side of the universe or a mirror image. But we are two halves, and together we are a whole.’’52 One time, it was McCartney who had been Lennon’s other half, but as the group identity of the Beatles had fallen away, John looked to Yoko to help consolidate the new self he was in the process of creating. The opening lines quote the Lebanese poet Kahil Gibran’s 1927 collection of proverbs, Sand and Foam, where Gibran says, ‘‘Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so the other half may reach you.’’ (Gibran was quite popular with the counterculture through his book The Prophet.) ‘‘Julia’’ is Lennon’s attempt to reverse the trauma of having lost his mother by now gaining a new matriarch. ‘‘John’s voice as he calls out his mother’s name. . .is like a baby holding

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its arms up to be kissed in the bath,’’ Goldman wrote. ‘‘In this song John is again the sweet child who flourished before he was traumatized by Julia’s adultery and subsequent abandonment of him.’’53 Lennon digs beneath the layers of bitterness and anger that had festered in the years since her death. With no satisfaction brought forth in his triumph as a Beatle, he now sought communion with Yoko and that brings out the gentle sorrow of the song. As he gives up Julia, the muse of his best work as a Beatle, he takes his first step in giving up the Beatles for a new lease on life with Yoko Ono. However, ‘‘Julia’’ would only be a temporary respite. The gentle longing would later be transformed into the blinding rage that would fuel ‘‘Mother’’ on Plastic Ono Band. From the first loud tumble of Ringo’s drum fill, reminiscent of his intro to ‘‘She Loves You,’’ ‘‘Birthday’’ is a giddy piece of rock ’n’ roll made all the more fun by its all out intensity. (The song was more or less made up on the spot.) Surprisingly, both Lennon and McCartney dismissed it as a piece of trash, yet it’s probably the trashiest fun the band has had since their early days. In essence, it was the music of their roots that inspired the evolution of ‘‘Birthday.’’ While borrowing the opening riff from Rosco Gordon’s 1960 song, ‘‘Just a Little Bit,’’ the rest of the track actually has a passing resemblance to the Tuneweavers’ 1957 hit, ‘‘Happy, Happy Birthday.’’ After recording the backing tracks of ‘‘Birthday,’’ everyone took a break to go watch the British television premiere of The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), which featured all the acts that made the Beatles possible. First there was Little Richard singing the title song, then Fats Domino’s rumbling ‘‘Blue Monday,’’ followed by Gene Vincent’s irresistible hiccup ‘‘Be-Bop-ALula,’’ and then the Platters’ plangent ‘‘You’ll Never Know.’’ When the film ended toward 11 p.m., the group was perfectly in tune with their musical roots. They charged into the studio, making up the lyrics on the spot, adding Pattie Harrison and Yoko Ono to do backup vocals. ‘‘Birthday’’ is a ringing celebration of both the past and the present. By contrast with the party atmosphere of ‘‘Birthday,’’ ‘‘Yer Blues’’ comes out of the deepest and most intense funk. Composed by Lennon as his marriage to Cynthia was collapsing, this blistering confession also reveals just how desperate his longing was to be with Yoko. Cast in the 12-bar blues form, Lennon sings the blues with the same intensity that Paul brought to ‘‘Birthday,’’ but his is a cry of dissatisfaction—with being a Beatle as well as being addicted to heroin. After writing songs that many critics attributed to the influence of Dylan, Lennon makes that connection even more explicit in ‘‘Yer Blues.’’ In a moment of self-loathing, Lennon casts himself as the alienated Mr. Jones from ‘‘Ballad of a Thin Man.’’ Yet ‘‘Yer Blues’’ stands alone as the most passionately driven song about suicidal thoughts ever written. One day, while inspired by a lecture from the Maharishi, Lennon and McCartney both decided to write songs about their newly found spiritual

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values. Lennon first composed a tune called ‘‘Child of Nature,’’ where he spoke of how the natural surroundings of Rishikesh had transformed him into a child of God. Lennon begins his song as a confessional ballad (similar to the style of his later ‘‘Working Class Hero’’), where he speaks of his dream of finding transcendence. Although ‘‘Child of Nature’’ is a poor cousin to the similar ‘‘Across the Universe,’’ its melody would survive to eventually become ‘‘Jealous Guy’’ on his 1971 Imagine album. McCartney answered Lennon’s song with his far superior ‘‘Mother Nature’s Son’’ which would be included on The Beatles. McCartney’s ballad, which was completed at his father’s house when he returned from India, was loosely based on Nat King Cole’s ‘‘Nature Boy,’’ a song he first heard when he was a kid. Unlike Lennon, who seeks deliverance in ‘‘Child of Nature,’’ McCartney looks for harmony with the world in ‘‘Mother Nature’s Son.’’ There’s a desperate yearning in Lennon’s tune to find a better world to save him from the place in which he occupies. McCartney has no such qualms. In his piece, he may be a poor young country boy, but he’s happy being mother nature’s son. He basks in the beauty of the waterfalls, the daisies blowing in the wind, and spreading his toes in the grass. George Martin provides some delicate orchestration behind McCartney’s gentle acoustic guitar picking—except for the odd inclusion of the seventh chord on the brass that concludes the song. That chord leaves a dissonant echo, perhaps the unresolved possibility that things aren’t quite as harmonious as ‘‘Mother Nature’s Son’’ suggests. John Lennon’s ‘‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’’ definitely comes from a disharmonious place—but it yields nothing but pure listening pleasure. Originally titled ‘‘Come On, Come On,’’ this dynamic and pulsating cut was tersely addressed to the rest of the band. At the time, Lennon’s perception was that the other Beatles were paranoid about his rather symbiotic relationship with Yoko (especially as they expressed discomfort about her being present at all the sessions). ‘‘Everybody seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love,’’ Lennon told Playboy interviewer David Sheff in 1980. ‘‘Everything is clear and open when you’re in love. Everybody was sort of tense around us: You know, ‘What is she doing here at the session? Why is she with him? All this sort of madness is going on around us because we just happened to want to be together all the time.’’54 Since no one in the past had ever brought his girlfriend, or wife, into the recording studio, it was only natural that the band would balk at Lennon’s manner of being in the ‘‘glow of love.’’ In truth, Lennon wasn’t in the wonderfully amorous state he describes. He’d been emotionally crippled by his excess use of LSD. He had just experienced the collapse of his marriage. His emotional distance from Paul McCartney was getting worse. And he was currently growing more deeply dependent on Yoko Ono—plus they were also getting addicted to heroin. To spare themselves the wrath of Lennon, the group walked on

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eggshells while seething under the surface. Yet whatever paranoia Lennon thought the band was expressing toward Yoko, it certainly didn’t reveal itself in this buoyant shot of musical adrenaline. ‘‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey’’ sounds more playful than spiteful, especially since Lennon couldn’t resist quoting the Maharishi with the line ‘‘come on it’s such a joy.’’ If Lennon’s favorably quoting the Maharishi one minute, the next, with ‘‘Sexy Sadie,’’ he’s bitterly putting him down. ‘‘Sexy Sadie’’ was composed specifically to express Lennon’s disillusionment with the yogi. Originally titled ‘‘Maharishi,’’ he changed the title to avoid possible litigation. Apparently, as he and George and their wives were departing, Lennon started drawing upon Smokey Robinson’s ‘‘I’ve Been Good To You’’ (‘‘Look what you’ve done/You made a fool of someone’’) and started improvising his own song. ‘‘Sexy Sadie’’ is basically the other side of the dreamy acquiescence of ‘‘Child of Nature.’’ In other words, Lennon’s attack on the Maharishi is not borne from a place of skepticism, but rather from his feeling of betrayal. Because Lennon intently needed his utopian dreams to come true, when they were breached, he struck out with venomous wit and sarcasm. In calling the Maharishi ‘‘Sexy Sadie,’’ Lennon implies both the seduction of the spirit (which brought the Beatles into his ashram) and the seduction of the flesh (which addresses the alleged impropriety against the woman). But flautist Paul Horn believed that the real reason the Beatles (save George) became disillusioned was because their expectations of the Maharishi were unrealistic right from the beginning. ‘‘These courses were really designed for people who wanted to become teachers themselves and who had a solid background in meditation,’’ Horn recalled. ‘‘The Beatles didn’t really have the background and experience to be there and I think they were expecting miracles.’’55 ‘‘Sexy Sadie’’ clearly expresses the pain of having not encountered miracles. Yet while the song does strip away the false piety of the Maharishi, Lennon’s voice still conveys both his deeper thirst for spiritual solace and the sorrow of having not found it. Before ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ became irrevocably linked with the Charles Manson murders, it was merely Paul McCartney’s attempt to compose the loudest rock ’n’ roll song imaginable. While reading a review of the Who’s single ‘‘I Can See For Miles’’ in Melody Maker magazine in 1967, the critic had described the song as the loudest and most raucous rock ’n’ roll song ever recorded. McCartney decided to rise to the challenge. During the sessions in the summer, ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ was initially a stripped-down blues track not that far removed from the sound Lennon would later create for the Plastic Ono Band. (Another version was rumored to have turned into a halfhour jam.) By the fall, the group finally laid down the shrieking heavy-metal version heard on The Beatles. While ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ is known more figuratively as ‘‘all hell breaking loose,’’ the title actually refers literally to the helical English fairground slide. ‘‘A song like ‘Helter Skelter’ is really the idea of

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an amusement ride as a metaphor for the fall and rise of civilization,’’ McCartney explained in 2004. ‘‘But it’s nothing to do with murder or the end of the world.’’ 56 Manson, however, would hear only hell breaking loose—an apocalypse that he saw the Beatles leading. But ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ is simply a tough, relentlessly driving rock ’n’ roll song about sexual conquest. As if to prove that the man who wrote ‘‘Martha My Dear’’ and ‘‘Rocky Raccoon’’ could also turn up the amps as loud as Lennon did on ‘‘Revolution,’’ McCartney plays pure showman on ‘‘Helter Skelter.’’ McCartney enjoys the sheer thrill of getting carried away, as he did on ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ and ‘‘I’m Down.’’ ‘‘[McCartney’s] never had a problem restricting himself to one thing—he can rock out, be avant-garde, do children’s music, pop to the teens—it’s preposterous that he’s seen as the second-best Beatle,’’ remarked XTC’s Andy Partridge about the song in Mojo magazine in 2003.57 McCartney’s versatility enables him to surrender to whatever extremes a musical genre can present—whether it’s the sentimental sap of ‘‘Your Mother Should Know’’ or the sheets of feedback and pounding drums in ‘‘Helter Skelter.’’ When the track finally does ring to a conclusion with the sound of cymbals crashing, Ringo madly tries to stomp out all the errant noise. As the ringing feedback relents, the beleaguered drummer desperately collapses over his kit screaming, ‘‘I’ve got blisters on my fingers!’’ The quiet of the acoustic guitar in ‘‘Long, Long, Long’’ comes surprisingly out of the melee of ‘‘Helter Skelter.’’ This calm, meditative sonnet was one of George Harrison’s first songs about his devotion to God not written in the Indian idiom. While Harrison does borrow the chording from Bob Dylan’s ‘‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’’ and adds lyrics that he originally wrote in a daytimer diary called ‘‘It’s Been a Long Long Long Time,’’ the tune is one of Harrison’s strongest (and least acknowledged) spiritual numbers. ‘‘Long, Long, Long’’ doesn’t wax poetic verse like ‘‘The Inner Light’’ or dismiss those unbelievers as he did in ‘‘Within You Without You,’’ ‘‘Long, Long, Long’’ is a humble, yet ardent plea for acceptance by God. McCartney also underscores the track with the Hammond organ that provides a slight liturgical mood—until the end. While hitting the concluding C major chord, McCartney produces a loud vibrating note that rattles the bottle of Blue Nun wine sitting on the speaker. As the bottle shakes violently in harmony with the note, Ringo provides a quick drum roll on the snare to accompany it. This lucky accident, or act of pure serendipity, created a sonic effect resembling God’s power shaking the studio walls. George Harrison finally had his prayers answered. Lennon’s ‘‘Revolution 1’’ is the acoustic version of the single that was originally rejected by the band back in May and early June—hence the title ‘‘Revolution 1.’’ ‘‘Honey Pie’’ finds McCartney trafficking again in the musical era of his father. If the earlier ‘‘Wild Honey Pie’’ was a sample of twisted baroque doo-wop, ‘‘Honey Pie’’ is an earnest swing number done in the style of Rudy Vallee. But McCartney parodies the crooner style in

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the chorus during the guitar solo (‘‘I like this kinda hot kinda music,’’ etc.) that is played by Lennon in a style that apes Django Reinhardt. Since McCartney treats the song more as a curiosity than anything he’s personally committed to, ‘‘Honey Pie’’ is a rather blase´ tribute to the past. On ‘‘Savoy Truffle,’’ Harrison writes about Clapton’s obsession for exotic chocolates and the extensive dental work he received due to that obsession. The lyrics relate specifically to the names of the sweets in the Macintosh’s Good News assortments. While on the surface ‘‘Savoy Truffle’’ is a funky tribute to hedonistic impulses (Harrison even name-checks the phrase ‘‘ob-la-diob-la-dah’’), the undercurrent of tooth decay and extractions lends a darker tone to the track. ‘‘Cry Baby Cry,’’ a strikingly haunting tune, was based on an ad Lennon saw back in 1967 which read, ‘‘Cry baby cry, make your mother buy.’’ Although he originally demoed it at the time, Lennon fully developed the song’s mournful melody while in India. By the time he completed it, ‘‘Cry Baby Cry’’ was coupled with a verse from ‘‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’’ (including the schoolyard dare, ‘‘Cry baby cry/Stick a finger in yer eye/And tell your mother it wasn’t I’’). On the track, George Martin plays the same harmonium that had first graced ‘‘We Can Work It Out.’’ But in that song, the keyboard melody provided a harmonious bed that helped bring resolution to the conflict being expressed. But on ‘‘Cry Baby Cry,’’ the harmonium adds a more ominous note to this baroque atmosphere of kings, queens, duchesses, and children at play. Since the tune examines the life of children of privilege, Lennon is the ideal writer to bring out the hidden melancholy buried within the noblesse oblige of the pampered class. ‘‘Of all the Beatles, Lennon had the most direct access to childhood,’’ wrote Ian MacDonald in Revolution in the Head, ‘‘and this song, with its deceptive sunshine and mysterious laughter behind half-open doom, is one of the most evocative products of that creative channel.’’58 At the conclusion of ‘‘Cry Baby Cry,’’ that ends on Lennon’s breathy tremelo (something critic Walter Everett suggested may have later inspired Tommy James and the Shondells’ December hit ‘‘Crimson and Clover’’),59 a brief fragment of McCartney’s ghostly ‘‘Can You Take Me Back’’ appears. Recorded during the session for ‘‘I Will,’’ where it shares the same bossa nova lilt of the latter’s acoustic guitar arrangement, ‘‘Can You Take Me Back’’ seems to speak in the voice of the emotionally wounded children in Lennon’s song. Since ‘‘Cry Baby Cry’’ ends with a se´ance, McCartney’s portion adds a ghostly quality of desolate yearning that provides a poignant coda to a song about lost childhood innocence. Back in January, McCartney had gathered the group to perform an experimental piece of music involving a 14-minute tape of their instruments blended with various sound effects and John and Paul yelling out phrases like ‘‘Are you alright?’’ and ‘‘Barcelona!’’ All of this would comprise an avant-garde piece for an event called ‘‘Carnival of Light’’ at the Roundhouse club on January 28 and February 4, 1967. While that unreleased work

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(which was apparently vetoed from inclusion on the Anthology CDs) has become the unattainable Holy Grail for collectors of Beatles’ memorabilia, ‘‘Revolution 9’’ became the first released audio sound-poem in the Beatles’ canon. Composed as a piece of musique concrete by Lennon and Yoko out of various taped pieces, including radio broadcasts, plus outtakes from the outro of ‘‘Revolution 1,’’ ‘‘Revolution 9’’ was heavily influenced by the early pioneers of Dadaist experimentation. One such influence, Henri Chopin, was a French sound poet who composed recorded works that manipulated tape recordings of the human voice. He emphasized meaning from phonetic texture rather than the writer’s text reminding us that language began as part of an oral tradition. Along with the sound collages of Chopin, ‘‘Revolution 9’’ also draws upon author William Burroughs’ first venture into nonlinear narrative where he sliced up phrases and words to create new sentences in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch. Composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was (along with John Cage) also one of the early proponents of electronic music. He already had a big impact on the creation of the Beatles’ ‘‘A Day in the Life’’ on Sgt. Pepper (even getting his face on the album cover). Cage had developed the idea of chance-controlled music in 1951 that revolved around the use of the I Ching, the ancient Chinese text used to interpret random events. Where Lennon had little familiarity with the avant-garde (unlike McCartney), Yoko Ono’s influence is felt most directly on this particular track. (It would also form the basis of her collaborative work with Lennon on their abstract ‘‘unfinished music’’ albums like Two Virgins, Life With the Lions, and Wedding Album.) To begin their collage, Lennon and Ono went to the EMI library to retrieve some tapes to use. They grabbed a number of things from symphonies, sound effects, and tape test tones, made copies of the parts they wanted to use, and cut them into pieces. Some were looped while others were run backward. Lennon would ultimately come to call it ‘‘a sound picture, a montage of feelings in sound.’’60 As a piece of organized sound, ‘‘Revolution 9’’ is an extraordinarily inventive composition that simulates a world ruptured by chaos. Voices are heard jumping out of this dense mix of gunfire, snatches of classical music and manipulated tape, but not used to make sense of the world. The voices are either disembodied from the action or jumping into the fray. Unlike ‘‘Revolution,’’ Lennon isn’t stridently offering his views on armed revolt; he and Yoko are painting a vividly complex impressionistic map of the events that shaped the tragic arc of 1968. Although McCartney desperately wished to have the piece removed from the record (for reasons that it sounded too unlike the Beatles), ‘‘Revolution 9’’ is essential to The Beatles because it not only reflected the fragmentation of the utopian hopes that the group once invoked in its listeners but also mirrored the splintering taking place within the band itself. McCartney was indeed right in saying that ‘‘Revolution 9’’ was least like a Beatles’ song, but it’s a piece that revealed who the Beatles were in 1968. While further developing the effects he first

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used on ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows’’ and ‘‘I Am the Walrus,’’ Lennon no longer expresses interest in inviting us to that comforting place inside his head (as he did on ‘‘There’s a Place’’), he places us instead right at the heart of the tumult. Paul Leary, of the Butthole Surfers, heard ‘‘Revolution 9’’ as Lennon’s statement of pure freedom from just being a Beatle. ‘‘Here was a band that, just a few years earlier, had girls chasing them down the street and here they are, deep in the bowels of weirdness,’’ Leary remarked.61 By contrast, coming out of the organized melee of ‘‘Revolution 9,’’ ‘‘Good Night’’ is an overly lush lullaby that’s also composed by Lennon. Adapting Cole Porter’s ‘‘True Love’’ from High Society (1956), ‘‘Good Night’’ was written as a bedtime song for his son Julian. While Lennon may have composed it, Ringo gets to perform it. His voice does lend some authenticity to the sentimental arrangement where Lennon (especially after the turbulent ‘‘Revolution 9’’) might have sounded disingenuous. ‘‘Good Night’’ is an attempt to provide a quiet resolution to the discordant elements embroidered throughout The Beatles, but it only offers a tidy conclusion. The violent undercurrents of the record couldn’t be laid to rest by a sleepy soothing lullaby. When The Beatles came out in November 1968, they no longer wanted to be the Beatles. ‘‘The Beatles were getting further and further apart,’’ George Martin recalled. ‘‘They were writing and recording their own songs. I was recording not a band of four, but three fellows who had three accompanists each time.’’62 This two-record set was not only an uneven collection of numbers—some stunning and some mediocre—but it was also a preview of their eventual breakup, providing a clue to the solo work ahead. Looking back today, ‘‘Wild Honey Pie’’ or ‘‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’’ wouldn’t have been out of place on McCartney. ‘‘I’m So Tired’’ could have been a perfect fit for Plastic Ono Band. ‘‘Long, Long, Long’’ set the stage for All Things Must Pass. Ringo could have sang ‘‘Good Night’’ on Sentimental Journey, just as his ‘‘Don’t Pass Me By’’ prepares the listener for his country record Beaucoups of Blues. Yet the fragmentation on The Beatles provides a valid response to the splintering of the counterculture, just as Picasso’s Guernica provided a vivid impression of the Spanish Civil War. ‘‘Like Guernica, [The Beatles] is an excessive whole constructed of impacted vignettes, which finds unity in radical segmentation and the discreteness of its parts,’’ Devin McKinney explained. ‘‘And as with Guernica, one need not be familiar with the details of its social circumstances to be overwhelmed by its power.’’63 McKinney also calls The Beatles the concept album that Sgt. Pepper only claimed to be because it ‘‘seeps chaos, breathes it and voices it; fights it, exemplifies it, is overwhelmed by it, finally seeks a battered refuge from it.’’64 The record’s simplicity, according to critic Steve Turner, had also confounded expectations. ‘‘It was as if the group had decided to produce the exact opposite of Sgt. Pepper,’’ he wrote. ‘‘Long album title? Let’s just call it The Beatles. Multi-colored cover? Let’s go white. Clever overdubs and mixes?

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Let’s use acoustic guitars on a lot of the tracks. Other-worldly subject matter? Let’s sing about pigs, chocolates and doing it in the road.’’65 But was the album that simple? It’s definitely a record of paradoxes, of darkness underscoring light. It’s an album borne out of both grief and transcendence. Written in the spiritual glow of India, The Beatles is also formed by the dark despair of their disillusionment with the Maharishi. George Martin had always insisted that it should have been a single album. But he soon realized that the reason he couldn’t convince the Beatles otherwise was because of their contract with EMI. If they issued the maximum number of titles, their contract would end sooner and they could renegotiate a new one with higher fees. In the past, the Beatles had created an alternate world in their studio albums, one that challenged the status quo of the real world. Now the real world was infiltrating their inner sanctum and tearing their alternate world apart. Visual artist Richard Hamilton graced The Beatles with a white cover. The band had decided on this minimal design as a partial tribute to their late manager Brian Epstein who came up with that idea for Sgt. Pepper, but was voted down. Hamilton had also originated the eponymous album title. But he figured if the cover was a blank slate, he thought the inside should contain a potpourri of goodies, including a series of Beatles’ family photos and a poster with lyrics on the back. After Hamilton convinced the group to stamp a number on each edition, giving it distinct value, the band provided four 8×10 color photos of each Beatle to be included. Curiously, after always being photographed together as a band, it was significant that the photos were single shots that emphasized them as individuals rather than as a group. When the news reached the Beatles in August 1969 that there had been a brutal slaying in Hollywood of movie star Sharon Tate and six others by Charles Manson, a career criminal and cult leader, and that their latest album had inspired these bloody killings, John Lennon was the first to speak out. ‘‘All that Manson stuff was built around George’s song about pigs [‘‘Piggies’’] and Paul’s song about an English fairground [‘Helter Skelter’],’’ Lennon explained to the press. ‘‘He’s barmy, he’s like any other Beatle fan who reads mysticism into it. . .What’s ‘Helter Skelter’ got to do with knifing somebody?’’66 Perhaps the conscious intent behind a song like ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ has nothing to do with knifing somebody, but when Manson heard The Beatles album as a call to murder and a race war, it wasn’t just another symptom of his particular psychopathy. There is a hidden violence on this record despite being conceived while the Beatles were learning peaceful mantras in India. The divisiveness inherent in the creation of the album had unquestionably sparked a different reaction in the counterculture than the earlier euphoria of Beatlemania. Besides the times turning stranger, more uncertain after the violence of 1968, artists began to sense duality in the air. What once felt light was now growing heavy. What once appeared hopeful now looked ugly and

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despairing. What had once delivered happiness was now bringing a deep forlorn sadness. When Donovan wrote his song ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man,’’ he intended it as a celebration of the free-spirited counterculture. But the music that characterized that world had changed since India. ‘‘When we came back from India, the Beatles did what I would call a very gentle album,’’ Donovan told Anthony DeCurtis in 2003. ‘‘There seemed to be a lot of acoustic guitars on [The Beatles]. And yet when I came back from India, you might say I went full electric.’’67 But what you hear in the electricity of Donovan’s ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’’ is just as foreboding as what you hear in the ‘‘gentle’’ acoustic guitars on The Beatles. Donovan tells of the Hurdy Gurdy Man singing songs of love, but the mood he conveys isn’t all that loving. His tune may have been inspired by the Maharishi, but the abiding spirit on the record could just as easily be Manson—the shadow Maharishi. Donovan composed a song that was less a celebration of spiritual renewal than a harbinger of bad tidings. ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’’ held warning signs of utopian impulses turning destructive just as his ‘‘Season of the Witch’’ had done in 1966. What listeners could hear in ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man,’’ as well as on The Beatles, was what Greil Marcus called ‘‘the shame [pop fans] felt when the promise of their time, a promise [Donovan] and they shared, failed to turn into real life.’’68 The hidden dread of ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’’ wouldn’t fully bloom until many years later. Director David Fincher, in his unsettling film Zodiac (2007), used the song to underscore the first attacks of the Zodiac serial killer in San Francisco. On the anniversary of the birth of the United States, in the former locale of the Summer of Love, the Zodiac struck his first victims as ‘‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’’ played on the radio. And all of this was a mere month before Manson heard The Beatles as his own calling to commit carnage in Los Angeles. Lennon was correct in assuming that fans had taken a mystical interest in the meanings of Beatles’ songs, but he hadn’t considered the darker caste of those obsessions (or perhaps he wouldn’t have recorded ‘‘Glass Onion’’). If some listeners looked for clues on their albums to find their way back to the euphoria of Nowhere Land, Manson sought to create his own Nowhere Land. Besides hearing messages in the songs included on The Beatles, Manson and his band of followers left slogans from them written in the victims’ blood, on walls, doors, and refrigerators. Some of the remarks revealed the horrible duality of a counterculture gone to seed. For example, on the door of the Manson Family ranch, a peace symbol, written in blood, was also placed above the comment ‘‘nothingness.’’ With the word ‘‘happy’’ scrawled along the top, the bottom revealed ‘‘Helter Scelter’’ [sic]. Between the two phrases, however, lay an even stranger comment. Part of an old schoolyard rhyme, ‘‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, all good children,’’ was written along side the peace symbol. A month before Manson’s clan resurrected this childhood song, that concludes with ‘‘all good children go to Heaven,’’ the Beatles were busy including that very phrase on ‘‘You Never Give Me Your

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Money’’ from Abbey Road. But given that Abbey Road wasn’t released until September 1969, Manson couldn’t possibly have heard the song. Furthermore, since the Beatles didn’t record the track until July 1969, a month before the horrific murders, they weren’t quoting Manson’s Family either. An act of impure serendipity had linked a band that sang about love with a man who preached murder and destruction. From that moment when Manson shared a jail cell with Alvin ‘‘Creepy’’ Karpis, he had the Beatles in his sights. ‘‘From the beginning, Charlie believed the Beatles music carried an important message to us,’’ recalled Family associate Paul Watkins.69 But, according to Mark Paytress in Mojo magazine, that message had grown more ambiguous by 1969: During 1967, many people rallied around the Beatles’ flower power anthem, ‘‘All You Need Is Love.’’ By late 1968, though, the message had become confused—and decidedly combative. The White Album, the most thrilling and bewildering in the Beatles’ catalogue, was as coarse and ambiguous as Sgt. Pepper had been lustrous and celebratory. Love had changed nothing. Neither acid nor the Maharishi had the answer. In fact, with riots and assassins seizing the headlines, the world had grown uglier still since the Summer of Love.70 Instead of an ashram, Manson found a desert hideaway in an abandoned ranch. He gathered a largely female following and (like the Maharishi) gave his own lectures about shedding the ego in order to reach a higher plane. While deriding the middle-class domesticity his followers had escaped from, Manson offered them an alternate worldview. He said he gained a fresh perspective upon hearing The Beatles at a friend’s house in Topeka Canyon. Manson heard the record as an epic tale of a race war, where blacks would rise up against the white world to kill all whites—except Manson and his dutiful followers. For example, ‘‘Piggies’’ was an attack on the straight world. Manson apparently liked the line that piggies were in need of a damn good whacking. The words ‘‘pig,’’ ‘‘piggy,’’ and ‘‘pigs’’ were written in the victim’s blood on the walls of Sharon Tate’s residence, as well as the homes of the LaBianca family and Gary Hinman. ‘‘I Will’’ was a plea for Manson to make his own album (‘‘And when at last I find you/Your song will fill the air/Sing it loud so I can hear you’’). Manson would point to ‘‘Honey Pie’’ as the one tune that indicated that the Beatles were looking for Christ, and it was he—and he’d been found in Hollywood. On ‘‘Revolution 9,’’ he thought the Beatles were telling him to lead the charge, to rise up in this apocalyptic war. Manson essentially saw the Beatles as four angels from the New Testament’s Book of Revelations telling his Family of followers to leave the desert to escape the holocaust. But it was McCartney’s ‘‘Helter Skelter’’ that provided the main key to the struggle. When the black man rose up against the white establishment and murdered the entire white race

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(bringing on the helter skelter), Manson and his crew would escape the carnage by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit. It’s not surprising that Charles Manson heard the beginnings of a race war on The Beatles, especially since the album owes as much to black music as With The Beatles did in 1963. In fact, the music heard here, in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, does emulate black discontent rather than the romantic hopes heard in the Beatle cover versions of ‘‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’’ or ‘‘Please Mr. Postman.’’ The anger buried within the black sound tapped on The Beatles would ultimately find its own distinct voice in 2004. A DJ named Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) had taken samples from The Beatles and mixed them with the work of rap artist Jay Z’s The Black Album (2003). Jay Z was born Shawn Corey Carter in the New York projects a year after The Beatles was first released. Besides being one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists, Jay Z was also the former CEO of DefJam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records. He went on to co-own the 40/40 Club and the New Jersey Nets NBA basketball team. Yet even though he was one of the most successful rap artists in America, after his acclaimed 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt, Jay Z decided that he’d had enough of the business in 2003 and wished to retire. His farewell album was called The Black Album. The ‘‘Intro’’ told listeners that his time had come to quit. From there, the album became an angry and defiant memoir, not unlike John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, which summed up his career while reassessing it. On ‘‘December 4th,’’ he even featured his mother Gloria Carter describing giving birth to Jay, after which, he raps about his parent’s divorce and how he soon took to the streets. When his mother bought him a boom box, to help deter him from a criminal life, Jay Z’s love of music began. In 2004, shortly after the release of The Black Album, Jay Z put out an a cappella version of the album to allow for DJ remixes and mash-ups, which is how the album came to the attention of Danger Mouse. ‘‘I had seen that there were these a cappella Jay-Z records,’’ Danger Mouse explained. ‘‘I was listening to the Beatles later that day, and it hit me like a wave. I was like, ‘Wait a minute—I can do this.’’’71 It wasn’t the first time he’d sampled the Beatles either. When Danger Mouse was taking a college class on the History of Rock, the instructor told him how the Beatles had assembled ‘‘A Day in the Life’’ from two disparate pieces. ‘‘So I remixed ‘A Day in the Life’ with a song by Jemini The Gifted One, who was one of my favorite rappers at the time,’’ Danger Mouse recalled. ‘‘And that was the weird remix I had on my mixtape: Jemini’s Funk Soul Sensation instrumental mixed with the Beatles.’’72 Although sampling had always been a huge part of hip-hop culture since the mid-seventies, the idea of using one album as a sole source of sampling was totally unique. Without seeking permission from the surviving Beatles, Danger Mouse first burned a sample mix for a few friends, but within a month more than a million downloads had been made from that one copy on the Internet. The Grey Album

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became a hybrid record that simultaneously darkened the Beatles’ sound while providing lighter shadings to Jay Z’s angry confessions. All through The Grey Album Danger Mouse doesn’t attempt to match the beat and rhythm of both records as he does find the right sound to accompany Jay Z’s voice and lyrics. But sometimes he finds the right Beatles’ song. In ‘‘Encore,’’ where Jay Z speaks out to fans who want more than he’s already given, Danger Mouse samples the melody of Lennon’s bitter ‘‘Glass Onion,’’ underscoring Jay Z’s declarations with John shouting, ‘‘Oh yeah!’’ The video for ‘‘Encore,’’ seen on YouTube, features footage from the TV special scene in A Hard Day’s Night. As the Beatles take the stage, with a worried Victor Spinetti surveying the monitors in the control room, Jay Z takes the stage to join the group. As the Beatles perform the samples from ‘‘Glass Onion,’’ the video shows a simulation of images unassociated with the Beatles: Ringo doing some record scratching, as Lennon break-dances in front of a chorus of dance girls. During the pensive ‘‘What More Can I Say,’’ where Jay Z laments his monumental career in rap, Danger Mouse samples the appropriate ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’’ To fit the angry sniping of ‘‘99 Problems,’’ Danger Mouse turns to ‘‘Helter Skelter,’’ with all its historical associations, to provide vividly searing textures to embroider the song. Besides introducing the hip-hop crowd to the Beatles’ music, The Grey Album also redefines the White Album for a contemporary audience by discovering its R&B underpinnings—underpinnings that were cured in the resentment of the dashed hopes of the sixties. While Entertainment Weekly hailed the CD as the Best Album of the year, EMI was less fond of it and launched lawsuits. Since Danger Mouse didn’t get permission from EMI to sample the Beatles, their lawyers immediately sent him a cease-and-desist letter for distribution, reproduction, and public performance of the album. But in the age of music file downloading, The Grey Album was alive and well online. Furthermore, in February 2004, to protest EMI’s actions, more than 300 Web sites and blogs staged a 24-hour online protest called ‘‘Grey Tuesday’’ where 150 sites offered the album free for downloads. Today the bootleg is still available to download, despite continuous legal threats. But Jay Z ultimately ended his short-lived retirement. In late 2006, turning his back on The Black Album, he stormed back with the hit CD Kingdom Come. In the first week of release, he was back selling 680,000 copies. While his denunciation of a ruthless business and a duplicitous culture continues to breathe life over the World Wide Web through Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, Kingdom Come reinstated his desire to be back in the game, top of the heap, happily plugging his highest-selling album in a one-week period. About a month after Charles Manson became forever linked to the Beatles’ story, clues of another sinister happening were just beginning to brew elsewhere in America. One early fall night in Detroit, a caller had

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phoned radio station WKNR-FM to talk to DJ Russ Gibb about the possibility that Paul McCartney was actually dead. Not only was McCartney deceased, he insisted, but he’d apparently been dead for some time. There was even an imposter performing in his place. The caller had apparently heard a clue on the track ‘‘Revolution 9’’ from The Beatles. As obsessive as Charles Manson, but without any of his nihilistic impulses, he claimed that if you played the ‘‘Number 9’’ recitation backward on the turntable, you’d hear the words, ‘‘Turn me on, dead man.’’ When the host did likewise on his turntable—for all listeners to hear—he discovered that the caller was indeed correct. From there, fans across the country began scanning different songs for clues that Paul had actually died years earlier. When the Beatles decided to retire from the road, they sought to dream a new life for themselves assuming that their fans would accept promo films and albums rather than concert appearances. What they didn’t realize was that as the Beatles had their utopian dream, so did their many fans. In their absence, fans began imagining whom the Beatles now were and what they had become. To explain their disappearance, fans were prone to believing that the group left the stage because of some horrible tragedy. If the Beatles had been the answer to the trauma and grief caused by the Kennedy assassination, perhaps they too had been the victims of sudden death. And maybe like Kennedy, they thought, there was a conspiracy to cover it up. The story went that McCartney had an argument with Lennon during the recording of Sgt. Pepper. He stormed out of the Abbey Road studios and drove off, ultimately wrapping his car around a tree and killing himself. The surviving Beatles, apparently worried that their franchise would be in jeopardy, hired an imposter to play Paul. The surgically reborn McCartney turned out to be a young orphan from Edinburgh named William Campbell. The search for clues pretty soon brought forth ‘‘evidence,’’ all of which was collected by WKNR’s Dan Carlisle and John Small. Along with Gibb, they sensed a real publicity coup. First, they produced a special broadcast that gathered all the ‘‘proof’’ of McCartney’s demise. If you listened to the end of ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ for example, you could hear Lennon saying, ‘‘I buried Paul.’’ (If you truly listened you heard ‘‘cranberry sauce.’’) The Sgt. Pepper cover, in particular, was riddled with clues. Since Paul is the walrus in ‘‘I Am the Walrus,’’ he has to be dead because the walrus is Greek for corpse. The cover of their just-released album Abbey Road would yield particular symbols of McCartney’s death. From there, it turned into an international obsession. What didn’t get asked in all this hysteria was why would the Beatles go to such great lengths to deceive their fans? The utopian revolution, partly built on the backs of the Beatles and their music, had only existed in the mind. When it didn’t find fruition in the real world, the hope for a culture built on pleasure and inclusion had turned instead to anger, despair, and fragmentation. Since Paul’s ‘‘death’’ came after a series of assassinations, the public

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trust in idealism had been largely shattered. ‘‘A lot of us, because of Vietnam and the so-called establishment, were ready, willing and able to believe just about any sort of conspiracy,’’ explained Tim Harper, one of the first people to publish a story in the Drake University newspaper about the McCartney death.73 An even larger question remained though as to why Paul became the subject of this conspiracy theory? ‘‘There was no Beatle whose combination of traits both real and perceived, personal and popular, positioned him better as designated corpse than Paul McCartney,’’ thought Devin McKinney in Magic Circles. ‘‘John was too loud. George was too quiet. Ringo was too human. Paul was perfect—perfectly beautiful, so beautiful he was not quite real. Beautiful enough for the death to have a tragic dimension, unreal enough for it to function as pure myth and magic. Like his generation and its great social experiment, he was an infant in a grown body, both flesh and spirit, an ethereal presence circling the earth in a radiant membrane of evanescent purity. What had once made Paul a god among humans now placed him squarely on his back upon the altar of myth.’’74 Paul was also the cute Beatle. If Lennon represented the pleasure principle of the Beatles, McCartney was the group’s sole source of the possibilities offered by pleasure. He embraced the world around him and didn’t perceive it as suspiciously as Lennon, or even George Harrison. But because of their skepticism, Lennon and Harrison also represented the reality principle of the Beatles (which is perhaps why they became such likely targets for assassins). Paul had represented the Impossible Dream of what the Beatles could actually be. Unlike Lennon, his music had the expressed purpose of not questioning reality, but of making reality somehow bearable, or perhaps a happier burden to carry. So he would never be a target of some deranged fan’s wrath. But when the Beatles’ dream had died after 1966, it made sense to some listeners that the impossible dreamer, Paul, should likely be gone as well. As McCartney was trying to insist that he was alive and well and not William Campbell, the real death of Apple soon followed. After all the money they had handed out to aspiring artists and charlatans, they were now going broke. Apple’s demise was a further reflection of the dissolution of the group itself. In its wake, Harrison grew more introspective and spiritual. He didn’t want to deal with the disorganized business practices. Lennon certainly had no real interest in being a businessman. McCartney, though, wanted an efficient business (as his current McCartney Productions Ltd. is today), but he grew disenchanted at losing money and bills that weren’t getting paid. When the Beatles couldn’t agree on Apple as a group, it became clear that they no longer had a common purpose as a group. ‘‘You could see why Apple fell apart even then,’’ Philip Norman, the author of Shout! The True Story of the Beatles, explained. ‘‘There were all these incoherent, greedy people walking in and thinking just because they were

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wearing caftans and bells that that made everything all right. That was the terrible lesson of Apple, because it was supposed to be for a utopian kind of youth. But the youth kept on being what they have always been—a younger version of older people who have the same mixture of good and bad qualities.’’75 After Apple, the last battle that would do them in would be the fight over their publishing rights. For now, Lennon was seeking solace in his relationship with Yoko, creating controversy with the nude cover of their solo work, Two Virgins. Harrison took refuge in Eastern philosophy and visited Bob Dylan in Woodstock where he was recording with the Band in another great stab at utopianism. Ringo was considering an acting career after having a small role in the Peter Sellers’ picture The Magic Christian. But McCartney began to consider that the isolationism enforced on the band had done them great damage. He knew that they had to get back to what they once were before. Once again, as he did with Magical Mystery Tour, he thought of a film. Only this time, it would capture the group rehearsing songs for a possible tour, or maybe a television special. Whatever form it took, he wanted the Beatles to once again attain the level of desire and commitment they showed back in 1963 when they first recorded ‘‘There’s a Place.’’ But what McCartney failed to see, as he started to plan what would become the Let It Be fiasco, was that where once there was a place, now it was gone.

CHAPTER 8

Come Together To deal with history means to abandon oneself to chaos and yet to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task. . .and perhaps also a tragic one. Hermann Hesse, Magister Ludi The reality of the Beatles’ world by 1969 was pretty far removed from the aspirations they had years earlier to seek the artificial paradise of Nowhere Land. Just before the release of The Beatles in late November 1968, Harrison had put out Wonderwall Music, the first solo Beatle album, and it had little relationship to anything Beatle sounding. Made up of instrumental musical vignettes of Hindustani compositions (‘‘Microbes,’’ ‘‘Tabla and Pakava’’), abstract rock (‘‘Party Seacombe’’), and genre parody (‘‘Cowboy Music’’), Wonderwall Music is a fascinating collage of genre experimentation. While the film was pretty opaque as a narrative, Harrison’s music was thrillingly diverse. Harrison wasn’t able to sight-read, so he hummed his ideas to transcriber John Barnham. Since Barnham had a classical background in London, even assisting Ravi Shankar with his score for a TV production of Alice in Wonderland, he could take Harrison’s musical fragments and shape them into passages to fit the scenes in the movie. On November 11, the day before the Yellow Submarine film opened in the United States, Lennon and Ono released Unfinished Music No. 1—Two Virgins, their first solo work, which caused a huge row because they were both stark naked on the front and back cover. As for the music, well, for two sides you get ambient electronic music, giggling, whispering, and whistling. Two Virgins was also far removed from anything heard by the Beatles, but unlike Harrison’s Wonderwall, it was more of an event than an artistic

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statement. In fact, in the States, Capitol wouldn’t release the record due to the cover. So, wrapped in a brown paper bag, Two Virgins was issued by Tetragrammaton Records, a company funded by comedian Bill Cosby that released albums as radically diverse as Deep Purple and Pat Boone. Before Christmas, Lennon and Ono went off to take part in the Rolling Stones’ TV special, The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, a musical jamboree featuring Jethro Tull, the Who, Taj Mahal, Marianne Faithfull, and, of course, the Stones. Setting up a circus atmosphere with Big Tent performers, the Rolling Stones provided an opportunity for a number of musical possibilities. John and Yoko played with the Dirty Mac, a one-off group put together especially for the show. The band featured Keith Richards and Eric Clapton on guitars, Mitch Mitchell (from the Jimi Hendrix Experience) on drums, Lennon on rhythm, and Yoko using her voice to shriek and moan. By Christmas, while Harrison was happily relaxing with Dylan and the Band, he got the call that something was up in England with the Beatles. McCartney had been very aware that the band was growing apart. He sensed that all wounds could be healed if he could come up with an idea to reconnect them with their fans. McCartney knew that when they faced a live audience, they were united as a common front. The tangible contact with their fans, despite the drawback of the screaming crowds, provided a chance for them to create their best music. Earlier in the year, McCartney was already considering the possibility of the Beatles performing in public again. In fact, there were tentative plans to play two shows at the Roundhouse in North London in December 1968 that never panned out. The Beatles needed that contact to exist again as a group, otherwise their individual differences emerged more strongly. Most importantly, McCartney saw that the band’s isolation had heightened the growing tension between himself and Lennon. ‘‘John couldn’t stand Paul’s crowd-pleasing attitude, nor his insistence on doing things a certain way—his way,’’ wrote biographer Bob Spitz in The Beatles. ‘‘And Paul, of course, was tired of dealing with a drug addict who was more interested in staring blankly at the television set than in making records.’’1 Partly in reaction to the huge gulf growing between them, McCartney put out the call that the Beatles were about to embark on a whole new concept. In short, he was going to save the band. The project, originally titled Get Back, was to highlight the Beatles getting back to the roots of their art and remaking their career by producing a TV special. Even the concept of the future album cover, where they would recreate the portrait from their debut album Please Please Me, was to suggest that the group had come full circle. In the plan, the Beatles would meet at Twickenham Film Studios to rehearse the songs for the TV special with an ultimate live concert album as the final outcome. But what McCartney hadn’t realized is that the group he assembled was not the same band that first eagerly strolled into Abbey Road in 1962. The Beatles had become so divided and disenchanted that the strain was obvious even in the music

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they created. But if McCartney wanted to get back, Lennon and Harrison wanted to get away. ‘‘George wanted them to be more like The Band; Paul wanted them to go out gigging; John wanted to be with Yoko; Ringo wanted to go home,’’ wrote Patrick Humphries in his Mojo magazine review of Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt’s 1999 book Get Back: The Beatles’ Let it Be Disaster.2 George Martin wasn’t directly involved in the rehearsals, so engineer Glyn Johns took charge of the recordings. The sessions themselves began in the cold confines of Twickenham on January 2, 1969. Since they were doing new songs for this proposed TV special, they didn’t do any multitrack recording. Everything was live from the floor—including the bickering. By the time it was over, Get Back had evolved into Let It Be, a documentary film directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Rather than presenting the youthful, brash arrogance of their Hamburg years, Let It Be revealed the Beatles’ warts. The tensions brought on by mass success, their drug use, and their growing differences were no longer disguised. They weren’t projecting an image of the carefree rebels they played in A Hard Day’s Night. The group instead seemed worn down by fame and barely tolerant of each other. ‘‘With the Beatles it got less grouplike,’’ Lennon explained. ‘‘We stopped touring and we’d only get together for recordings, so therefore the recording session was the thing we almost rehearsed in as well. So all the playing was in the recording session.’’3 Out of this haphazard procedure, power struggles emerged. In the film, the more McCartney took charge, the more Harrison grew impatient of being told what and when he should play. During the early portion of the sessions at Twickenham, he briefly quit the group after a row with McCartney during a rehearsal of ‘‘Two of Us.’’ It’s clear from the Let It Be film that with Brian Epstein dead, the group was essentially rudderless. ‘‘For McCartney, this was to be a vehicle for reconnecting with his fans,’’ wrote musicologist Walter Everett. ‘‘For Lennon, it was a decision supporting an aesthetic statement that all of his art need not be complex, that most of the profound ideas and feelings could be best expressed directly, without a lot of bullshit. For McCartney, psychedelia had been a Day-Glo breeze; for his partner, it was another perspective on the puzzle of himself. But both yearned for the simple innocence of youth.’’4 In order to find that ‘‘simple innocence of youth,’’ they rehearsed new and old songs, including chestnuts like ‘‘Save the Last Dance For Me’’ and ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes.’’ They revisited ‘‘You Really Got a Hold on Me,’’ ‘‘Rock and Roll Music,’’ and ‘‘Kansas City.’’ Where in the beginning, these songs provided a road map to their future, they were now simply tunes that echoed the Beatles’ past. They were performed too without a whisper of surprise, or even the desire and hunger they once exhibited. By the time McCartney would record his own ‘‘The Long and Winding Road,’’ a wistful summation of the Beatles’ career, the ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah’’ that ended the song wasn’t the exuberant cry of exhilaration heard at the end of ‘‘She Loves You.’’ It was

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now an exhausted gasp, more a sign of resignation in which the singer is forced to finally admit that the Beatles’ dream was passing. In theory, McCartney’s plan to bring the group closer to their fans made sense, but he lacked the ability to be direct with them. Paul’s tactic was to be more evasive (hence the Sgt. Pepper disguise) than straight. He tried to keep the artifice of the Beatles alive, just when John Lennon was growing more interested in dismantling it. So when Lennon offered up more personal harrowing songs like ‘‘Cold Turkey,’’ about the agony of his heroin addiction, McCartney refused to consider it. Besides, ‘‘Cold Turkey’’ only served to remind Paul that John’s songs were now drawn from a new well: the one he and Yoko were tending. But even before Yoko came into the picture, Lennon and McCartney weren’t channeling their differences into the music, as they once had in songs like ‘‘We Can Work It Out.’’ Their compositions were now strong polar opposites. ‘‘Lennon had privately suffered over ‘Hello Goodbye’ supplanting ‘I Am the Walrus’ as an A-side, and in late 1969 he must have been seeing the Beatles as the vehicle for the fluffy and meaningless ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,’ not the politically and socially important ‘Give Peace a Chance’ or such verismo confessions as ‘Cold Turkey,’’’ wrote Walter Everett. ‘‘So John asked for a divorce from Paul, ‘just like from Cynthia,’ and McCartney waited until the moment was right to make peace with himself.’’5 While Yoko had worked her way into the group dynamic, ultimately escalating the tensions between the songwriting partners, she played off the eroding relationship between Lennon and McCartney in order to win over John. But McCartney, not wanting to enrage Lennon, decided to walk delicately around his partner—and took out his frustrations on everybody else. He began to dominate the sessions as if he alone were the sum total of the band’s parts. But Harrison, in particular, balked at McCartney’s bossiness, especially on that day when he quit. When the TV special was canned in order to get George back, he returned with a young black keyboard artist named Billy Preston, who had played with Little Richard. Preston seemed to provide the salve to ease the friction and bring some civility to the recording atmosphere. But once they moved the sessions from the cold sterile environment of Twickenham to the EMI studio, the Beatles concentrated only on the album and the documentary film. To make things more manageable, Lennon suggested that McCartney take control of the film and he would supervise the recording. His idea was to present the Beatles without George Martin’s studio wizardry. But where McCartney saw that approach as a method for the band to get back to their early roots, Lennon perceived it as a way to reveal that the Beatles were a sham all along—hiding behind Martin’s mixing board. So the group recorded endless takes of songs until they got them right (which they seldom did). But the sessions did end triumphantly with the Beatles once again mounting a stage on the rooftop of Saville Row on January 30, 1969 to play their

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first concert since Candlestick Park in August 1966. The idea to perform on the roof had come from engineer/producer Glyn Johns. While the band, Johns, and Lindsay-Hogg were having lunch, Ringo told everyone that there was a great roof on the building. Johns suggested that they might reach the whole of the West End of London from that rooftop and hence was born the rooftop concert. The Beatles had gone from the dark clubs of Hamburg, to the dank basement of the Cavern, ultimately to go to, what John Lennon once called, the toppermost of the poppermost. Having arrived there, they were splintered and broken. But here on the Saville Row roof, they literally reached the top again. ‘‘In the studio things had been tense,’’ technical engineer Dave Harries recalled. ‘‘But they liked the idea of performing to a public, and the tensions melted away.’’6 Their music filled the air around London as the bustling crowd below looked to the sky wondering where this magical sound was coming from. Having once again found, even at a slight distance, their adversary and muse—the audience—the Beatles had once again found themselves. ‘‘John [hurled] himself into the performance like a rock Paganini,’’ described Albert Goldman, ‘‘his long hair blowing back in the breeze, his noodly body, hugged by a brown fur jacket, bending at knees, waist and neck like a serpent, as he wrestled with his guitar and shouted the words of the songs into the mike.’’ 7 The bitter feelings between them had momentarily subsided as the group discovered each other again through the passionate sounds they created together. The jabbing notes from their instruments reached out into the air, to each other, but also to the gathering crowd in the streets. Steve Devine was a 16-year-old schoolboy who was playing hooky that day, just as Lennon and McCartney often did in their adolescence to write songs. As Devine and his friend came by off Oxford Street, he recognized these familiar sounds. Devine couldn’t see the group but he knew that the music was inescapably the Beatles’. ‘‘We were dead excited, so [we] just stood in the road and watched chaos happen!’’ Devine remembered. ‘‘It was only the old city gents who were annoyed these hooligans were disrupting London.’’8 Once again, the band was reminded of how far they and their audience had come together. And for the first time, there were no screams to drown out their music—now it was they who were drowning out the everyday bustle in the street. The Beatles were basking in their final triumph until the police arrived, not to protect them (as in the past), but to shut them down. Seizing on the irony, Lennon had recognized that history had folded in on the band that he once started over a decade earlier. The rooftop concert had succeeded, at least in spirit to bringing the group back to their beginnings. As they finished the last notes of ‘‘Get Back,’’ Lennon gave the crowd gathered in front of him one last, wistful glance. And with his wry humor intact, he added, ‘‘I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves— and I hope we passed the audition.’’ Then they walked off the stage forever.

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The songs that would make up the Let It Be album were a motley collection. Unadorned by the production standards the group had achieved in the past, Let It Be was sloppy rather than polished, erratic rather than passionate. The album went through many permutations before it finally became Let It Be. The first version Glyn Johns prepared in March 1969 was a rough mix that included many of the songs that would ultimately end up on the final release. By 1969 the Beatles felt a need to move on, so they showed little interest in the project. But Johns was still asked to prepare a final remixed version of what was then still titled Get Back. He first went into the Olympic Sound Studios in April and May to prepare the final master tape. That album, which contained covers like ‘‘Save the Last Dance For Me’’ and an instrumental called ‘‘Rocker,’’ was set for release on July 1969. The film’s distributors though wanted the record pushed back to September to coincide with the planned TV special and the Let It Be documentary. But since the Beatles were now working on their new record, Abbey Road, and hardly paying attention to the trials of Get Back, they wanted their new record out in the fall instead. So the project was further moved back to December. That month, Johns put together another version of the album excluding McCartney’s quaint ‘‘Teddy Boy,’’ which McCartney was rerecording to include on his solo record, McCartney. He added Harrison’s ‘‘I Me Mine’’ and Lennon’s ‘‘Across the Universe’’ from his original 1968 recording. But the Beatles still weren’t happy with a record that revealed them (stripped of production artifice) as a profoundly disconsolate group. In March 1970, Phil Spector would eventually be hired (without McCartney’s permission) to produce the dormant tapes. The album would finally be released, along with the film, on May 8, 1970, after the Beatles had finally broken up. Ironically, for all his efforts, Glyn Johns never got paid for his hard work on the record. To give the record a spirit of spontaneity in the studio, Spector left in random comments, jokes, and remarks that would segue between songs. So Let It Be opens with a typical Lennon malapropism, ‘‘ ‘I Dig a Pigmy’ by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids. . .Phase One, in which Doris gets her oats.’’ While his little joke was in reference to his own ‘‘Dig a Pony,’’ Spector uses it to lead into McCartney’s ‘‘Two of Us,’’ his homage to the Everly Brothers. ‘‘Two of Us,’’ sung by Lennon and McCartney playing acoustic guitars, recounts the way Linda Eastman helped McCartney relax traveling incognito after they met in the fall of 1968. They would sometimes go on trips to nowhere in particular and she would just let Paul find his own way around. All of this was in complete contrast to the controlling manner of the Beatles’ tours when they were trapped by their inflexible schedules. On one of their jaunts, McCartney wrote the song. Yet given the affectionate reminiscing in the performance, many have assumed that the tune says something about John and Paul’s earlier relationship. ‘‘Two of Us’’ was recorded in the formal setting of the Apple studios. When they were first

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rehearsing this number at Twickenham, Harrison and McCartney got into their famous row depicted in the Let It Be film. ‘‘Dig a Pony,’’ which is from the rooftop concert, begins with a false start due to Ringo having to sneeze. Written by Lennon in the studio and originally titled ‘‘Con a Lowry’’ (after the organ), ‘‘Dig a Pony’’ is a parody of a traditional blues boast like Willie Dixon’s ‘‘Back Door Man,’’ while the chorus was part of an unfinished composition for Yoko called ‘‘All I Want is You.’’ Although Lennon dismissed ‘‘Dig a Pony’’ in later years as garbage, it’s basically a song noted more for Lennon’s gift for wordplay, than his musical prowess. The utopian anthem ‘‘Across the Universe,’’ which dates back to the ‘‘Lady Madonna’’ session (and was originally written in 1967), is one of Lennon’s most lyrical and elliptical ballads. Far superior to the unreleased ‘‘Child of Nature,’’ ‘‘Across the Universe’’ was written at Kenwood in bed after he’d had an argument with Cynthia. When his wife went to sleep, Lennon kept hearing soothing words that poured like endless rain out of a stream of angry emotions. The lyrics took into account the sorrow of his life, but they also revealed his unassailable connection to the larger world—and it made his pain insignificant by comparison. ‘‘Nothing’s going to change my world,’’ he declares. ‘‘Across the Universe’’ is the opposite of solipsism where the singer finds his true essence by recognizing the larger world before him. He composed the song on piano the next morning. The influence of the first meeting in Bangor with the Maharishi is felt in the mantra Jai guru deva om (Victory to God divine) heard before the chorus. The syllable om is significant here because it is considered the cosmic sound of the universe chanted by monks during meditation. Unfortunately, Phil Spector took the liturgical side of the song a little too literally and bathed the track in soaring strings and heavenly choirs. (The production on this track no doubt served as the template for dozens of songs by the Electric Light Orchestra in the seventies.) After ‘‘Across the Universe’’ was recorded in February 1968, Lennon first allowed it to appear on a charity record for the World Wildlife Fund where it was adorned more delicately with a children’s chorus. George Harrison’s ‘‘I Me Mine’’ touches some of the same territory as ‘‘Across the Universe,’’ where he is trying to assess his place in the grander scheme of life. But unlike Lennon, who allows himself to be transported by the cascading emotions surging in him, Harrison chooses to gripe. While he may be singing about surrendering the power of the ego to achieve enlightenment, the song comes across more as an ego trip. The waltz melody is infectious, though, and Johann Strauss II’s Kaiserwalzer, an extract of which Harrison heard as background music for a BBC2 TV documentary Europa: The Titled and the Unentitled, inspired it. In the film, as Harrison rehearsed the song at Twickenham, Lennon and Ono, getting into the spirit, began to waltz around the studio. ‘‘I Me Mine’’ would also be the title of his heftily priced 1979 limited edition memoir.

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‘‘Dig It’’ is a group improvisation that began as a Lennon song called ‘‘Can You Dig it?’’ The version here is a brief excerpt from a longer jam that ran well over six minutes. Now barely under a minute, ‘‘Dig It’’ is a mock church sermon featuring Billy Preston’s gospel organ pulsing through it like a hot wire. Lennon jumps from mentioning the FBI, the CIA, to the BBC and BB King. Matt Busby was the head of the soccer team Manchester United (and he retired shortly after the Beatles recorded the song). Lennon ends ‘‘Dig It’’ with a falsetto saying, ‘‘That was ‘Can You Dig It’ by Georgie Wood, and now we’d like to do ‘Hark, The Angels Come.’’’ It’s also a dig at the next tune: McCartney’s ‘‘Let it Be.’’ If ‘‘Dig It’’ is gospel parody, ‘‘Let it Be’’ is the real thing. At a time when McCartney was feeling the most despair about the future of the Beatles, this song came out of that angst. It began with a dream that McCartney had a year earlier of his mother advising him that the problems he was enduring within the group would turn out to be alright. As Lennon invoked his mother ‘‘Julia’’ on The Beatles to announce his love for Yoko, McCartney invokes his mother to transcend his anguish over the group that was crumbling before him. ‘‘Let it Be’’ has some of the same emotional layering of ‘‘Hey Jude’’ (which is why it also became a hit single). Not unlike Lennon’s ‘‘Across the Universe,’’ McCartney compares the smallness of his anguish to the larger world before him and finds in its light a means to resolving his grief. While Lennon felt ‘‘Let it Be’’ was Paul’s ‘‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’’ it’s also a gospel hymn not unlike the Band’s ‘‘The Weight,’’ which is an allegory about the unloading of burden. For Gladys Knight of the Pips, who would cover ‘‘Let it Be,’’ it was her quintessential Beatles’ song. ‘‘I must have worn the grooves off of ‘Let it Be,’’’ she recalled to Mojo magazine. ‘‘I’d get up in the morning playing it, cook to it, clean up to it. [It] was a song that touched my spirit and that’s why I decided to cover it.’’9 ‘‘Maggie Mae’’ is a fragment of a traditional English folk song that was first performed by the Quarry Men at the Cavern Club in 1957. Recorded in the Apple studio sessions, ‘‘Maggie Mae’’ has a barroom lilt similar to Procol Harum’s ‘‘Mabel’’ from their 1967 debut LP. As with ‘‘Mabel,’’ ‘‘Maggie Mae’’ has a throwaway quality, a spot of fun meant to clear the head before getting down to business. ‘‘I’ve Got a Feeling,’’ which was recorded during the rooftop concert, is a bluesy McCartney tune done in the exaggerated R&B style he used in ‘‘I’m Down’’ and ‘‘Lady Madonna.’’ Made up of two unfinished songs, ‘‘I’ve Got a Feeling’’ is a more ribald version of ‘‘Maybe I’m Amazed,’’ about McCartney’s love for Linda. Lennon’s ‘‘Everybody’s Had a Hard Year,’’ from an unfinished track in 1968, is added to provide dire comments on that year’s trials while McCartney pines for love. ‘‘One After 909’’ is one of the very first Lennon and McCartney rock compositions dating back to 1957. They first tried recording it in March 1963 while they were doing ‘‘From Me to You,’’ but the arrangement was in disarray when Harrison flubbed his guitar solo and

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McCartney improvised a bass line that fell apart. The original studio version remained unreleased until Anthology 1. Influenced by Chuck Berry’s ‘‘Maybelline’’ and ‘‘You Can’t Catch Me,’’ it most certainly has its roots in Elvis Presley’s version of Junior Parker’s ‘‘Mystery Train’’ and Johnny Cash’s ‘‘Train of Love.’’ Unlike ‘‘Mystery Train,’’ though, where the singer is on the train, in ‘‘One After 909,’’ he is trying to meet his girl at the station and all she has told him is that she’ll be on the one after 909. But not only is she not there, the location is even wrong. Lennon and McCartney concentrate on the anger of being rejected rather than crying over a lost abandoned love. Lennon was essentially trying to compose a song in the spirit of skiffle classics about trains like ‘‘Cumberland Gap’’ and ‘‘Rock Island Line,’’ which Lonnie Donegan had recorded. The title comes from the fact that, at that time, Lennon lived at 9 Newcastle Road and his birthday was the 9th of October. ‘‘The Long and Winding Road,’’ which McCartney wrote as a tribute to Ray Charles, has a spirit of finality about it. And its melancholy comes from McCartney’s recognition that he’s on a road that doesn’t end and is going for a door he can never reach. His dejected ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah’’ at the end tells you that ‘‘The Long and Winding Road’’ is a dispirited farewell to his hopes that the Beatles will go on. Unfortunately, Phil Spector decided, without consulting McCartney, to overstate the sentiments by dubbing strings and a female choir over the basic track. McCartney was naturally appalled by this addition—but he wasn’t alone. ‘‘I’d always tried very hard to maintain a kind of classical style that was very clean, whereas I felt the version that was released was very much laden down by the choirs and the scoring,’’ George Martin remarked. 10 Since Paul was performing on the piano, Lennon took over the bass. Unfortunately, Lennon’s clumsiness on the instrument seemed to be mocking his partner’s sentimental gestures, which hampers the sublime delicacy of the track. Former Beatle drummer Pete Best once remembered Lennon pulling a similar stunt during a performance of ‘‘Over the Rainbow’’ back in 1962. ‘‘John would play seriously for a while as Paul gave his emotional all to the song,’’ Best recalled. ‘‘Then John would suddenly pull a grotesque face [or] produce a series of weird sounds from his guitar that intruded into the melody like sore thumbs. Again Paul would not be too pleased and John would gaze around the stage in all innocence.’’11 If Lennon’s bass work falls apart on ‘‘The Long and Winding Road,’’ he plays a solid dobro on Harrison’s ‘‘For You Blue.’’ ‘‘For You Blue’’ is a pleasant 12-bar blues number written by Harrison for his wife, Pattie. During the bridge, Lennon shows such exuberance that Harrison yells out a spirited ‘‘Go Johnny Go!’’ (However, Harrison overstates Lennon’s prowess when he says, ‘‘Elmore James has got nothing on this baby,’’ shortly thereafter.) The album—and the film—concludes with the rooftop performance of ‘‘Get Back.’’ Written by McCartney, initially as a darker version that implicated British MP Enoch Powell for his speech against the

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immigration of Pakistanis to London, the song instead became a tall tale about a guy named JoJo and a transgendered character named Loretta Martin—except that we find out nothing more than the advice that she has to get back. While Lennon thought it was nothing more than a potboiler rewrite of ‘‘Lady Madonna,’’ ‘‘Get Back’’ has some of the storytelling vivacity of ‘‘Rocky Raccoon.’’ Along with ‘‘Let it Be,’’ ‘‘Get Back’’ was released as a single backed by Lennon’s overlooked R&B number ‘‘Don’t Let Me Down,’’ which was performed on the rooftop. ‘‘Don’t Let Me Down’’ is obviously written for Yoko and Lennon pours all the complexity of his divided soul into this track. Like many of his early love songs, such as ‘‘Not a Second Time’’ or ‘‘If I Fell,’’ Lennon reveals his deep need for unconditional love while simultaneously expressing his dread about it not being fulfilled. For years, the muddy mix of Let It Be had been a stone in McCartney’s shoe. But in November 2003, he would get his revenge on Spector’s soupy, sluggish production work by cleaning up the recordings and stripping away his adornments. Let It Be. . .Naked presented the songs in their original form, but properly mixed. He also dispensed with the chatter between the tracks and removed the song fragments like ‘‘Dig It’’ and ‘‘Maggie Mae.’’ In their place, he included Lennon’s superior ‘‘Don’t Let Me Down.’’ The beginning of the end of the Beatles began with a short letter Lennon had sent to EMI Chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood in late January 1969. ‘‘Dear Sir Joe,’’ it began, ‘‘I’ve asked Allen Klein to look after my things.’’ The note was scribbled on a pad from the Dorchester Hotel in London right after he met Klein for the first time. While Lennon’s wish was to see the Beatles’ financial chaos from Apple and their pending contract with EMI settled favorably, McCartney wasn’t as impressed with the aggressive and slovenly accountant. After Brian Epstein’s death, the Beatles unquestionably needed someone to manage their affairs, but Allen Klein was the antiEpstein. Where Epstein was urbane, Klein was crude. Epstein had a cordial respect for the executives he dealt with and Klein enjoyed bullying them. About the only thing Klein and Epstein did have in common was that they were both Jewish. Klein though had grown up in poverty in Newark, New Jersey during the thirties and spent his childhood in an orphanage because his father couldn’t afford to raise him and his two siblings. In his adult years, Klein took evening classes in order to qualify as an accountant. His first client was singer Bobby Darin. He later got involved in the publishing end of the music business helping the Shirelles gain control of their catalog and later representing both Sam Cooke and Bobby Vinton. Klein had dreamed of representing the Beatles long before the opportunity presented itself. In fact, during the sixties, he represented just about every British Invasion act except the Fab Four. His chief appeal was collecting unpaid royalties for artists from stingy record companies. But Klein didn’t just politely request payment. He would threaten to audit their accounts and then report through the media how they stiffed their artists. Despite his uncouth methods, Klein

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was often right. In 1965, he renegotiated a $1.25 million royalty advance for the Rolling Stones with Decca Records. When Epstein died in 1967, Brian’s brother Clive through NEMS handled the Beatles’ business affairs, while Paul was artistically guiding the band. Over the years, the group had been losing money through poorly negotiated deals that Brian had made. As the group then began to bicker more frequently, they were also less enthusiastic about McCartney being in charge. When Lennon discovered Klein, he thought he’d met a soul mate. He identified with Klein’s toughness and the fact that he had lost also his mother. But McCartney was coming close to marrying Linda. Her father, Lee Eastman, was the head partner of the law firm Eastman & Eastman and Paul was leaning toward having them represent the Beatles’ affairs. Besides being his in-laws, McCartney found the Eastman family as cordial as Brian Epstein. But the rest of the group backed Lennon in seeing a conflict of interest by having Lee Eastman represent them. They were fearful that Eastman would take better care of Paul than the rest of the Beatles. Klein though was able to secure support from the other three by promising to take a commission on any increased business at Apple. If Apple continued to lose money, he would be paid nothing. On February 3, 1969, Klein was given control of the Beatles’ financial affairs against the wishes of McCartney. The next day, McCartney made his displeasure known by appointing Eastman & Eastman as general counsel to Apple Records. In May, the other Beatles formally announced Klein as their business manager—but McCartney still wouldn’t sign on. Klein renegotiated the band’s EMI contract that granted them the highest royalties ever paid to a popular artist: 69 cents per $6–7 album. To secure this amount, Klein agreed to allow EMI hereafter to repackage any Beatles’ music into compilation albums. He was also responsible for bringing in Phil Spector to salvage the Let It Be album (much to the chagrin of McCartney). Klein did a massive clean up of Apple by slashing expenditures and canceling payouts and charge accounts that were draining the company’s assets. He also saved Lennon and McCartney’s Northern Songs from being bought out by ATV, the company that had been taking over the ownership of their song copyrights. But Klein had unscrupulous business habits that almost always ended up in lawsuits. (Klein would ultimately serve two years in jail in 1979 for tax evasion.) As a result, McCartney continued to distrust him. He would eventually be forced to sue the other Beatles to sever himself from Klein. While that nasty bit of business ultimately led to the Beatles’ divorce, there were first a couple of weddings. A week after Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman on March 12, 1969, John Lennon would tie the knot with Yoko Ono at the Rock of Gibraltar. Their marriage would take place simultaneous with a peace campaign they developed through the idea of having bed-ins. Inspired by

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Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who protested the Vietnam War by appearing naked in institutions like the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Treasury, Yoko saw the bed-ins not only as equally dynamic but as a strategic move to alter the press image of Lennon and Ono. ‘‘No better device could have been found for exorcising the nasty image of John and Yoko as drug crazed adulterers than the image of saintly white-clad peace gurus, exhibiting themselves without a trace of prurience in their marital bed,’’ wrote Albert Goldman. 12 To celebrate their new image, Lennon wrote ‘‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’’ as a folk tale to recount the details of his troubled attempts to marry her. Lennon had quickly decided to get hitched to Yoko on March 14, 1969 when he and Yoko were driving to Poole in Dorset to visit his Aunt Mimi. It was also coincidently two days after Paul and Linda wed at a registry office. In the song, Lennon casts the couple rather masochistically as victims of the press, fans, and the burden of their fame. Lennon, who had once declared the Beatles more popular than Jesus, was now identifying with him both in his looks and in his claim that everyone was out to crucify him. Their difficulties, in truth, were based on things less lofty than their celebrity status. When they were turned aside at Southampton dock, it was because they were trying to get into France without their passports. When they got to Paris, it was in a chartered executive jet rather than a scheduled airliner because Lennon discovered they couldn’t marry on a cross-Channel ferry. Apple assistant Peter Brown told Lennon that they could do it in Gibraltar because it was a British protectorate. The duo finally tied the knot on March 20 at the British Consulate where the registrar, Cecil Wheeler, performed the 10-minute service. In less than an hour, they took off for Amsterdam where they had the Presidential Palace at the Hilton booked for their honeymoon. But rather than spend those hours consummating their marriage, they invited the international press for seven days to their bedroom during their bed-in to announce their peace activism. From there, they headed to Vienna to eat rich chocolate cake and see the TV premiere of Yoko’s conceptual film, Rape, a 77-minute documentary about an unsuspecting young woman (Eva Majlata) who gets pursued through the London streets by Ono’s cameraman (Nic Knowland). On April 1, they arrived back in London to a warm welcome and a press conference. ‘‘The Ballad of John and Yoko,’’ despite its self-aggrandizing qualities, is a propulsive rock ’n’ roll number which, ironically, features only the two newlyweds—John and Paul—playing on the track. With McCartney on bass, drums, piano, and maracas, Lennon took over on acoustic and lead electric guitar. Released as a single that spring, it was backed by George Harrison’s ‘‘Old Brown Shoe,’’ his second B-side. One of Harrison’s best (yet largely unacknowledged) songs, ‘‘Old Brown Shoe’’ is a captivating boogie number about his continually transforming spiritual beliefs—and stepping out of his ‘‘old brown shoe’’ of being a Beatle. As a lively piece of rock, ‘‘Old Brown

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Shoe’’ truly steps out in style. McCartney’s inventive bass work, which dances nimbly throughout the track, is some of his best playing since ‘‘Hey Bulldog.’’ After the failed experiment of Let It Be, the Beatles gathered for one last album, Abbey Road (1969), which was a richly textured summation of their illustrious career. However, as lovely as the record was, its magic was more self-consciously derived since there was little alchemy left in the band’s relationship. In fact, when McCartney approached George Martin about producing the album, he would only do it if they would let him produce it the way he always had in the past. Martin wasn’t interested in any repeat of the casual sloppiness of Let It Be. Originally titled Everest, after a brand of British cigarettes, they changed the title when the band refused to fly to the Himalayas for a photo shoot. The title became Abbey Road, something McCartney came up with, because the Beatles were ending their recording career right where it all started. It would also be the only Beatles’ album recorded on an eight-track machine. Abbey Road had a simple concept. Side one was a wide selection of rock songs with styles ranging from Chuck Berry to Booker T. & the MG’s. Side two resembled an orchestral medley that featured both songs and song fragments in a theme and variations arrangement. The reason for the split was due to Lennon preferring a rock album, where McCartney wanted to try something more symphonic. George Martin decided to compromise and do both. ‘‘Come Together’’ is grooving swamp rock with a nod to Chuck Berry and composed by Lennon originally as a campaign song for LSD guru Timothy Leary. Leary had decided to run for governor of California in 1969 against the current governor (and future president) Ronald Reagan. Leary and his wife Rosemary had met Lennon and Yoko in Montreal at their bed-in where they had recorded ‘‘Give Peace a Chance.’’ When Lennon had asked Leary if there was anything he could do to help the campaign, Leary said that he’d love to get a song that he could use in commercials. His campaign slogan was ‘‘come together, join the party’’ which was inspired by a saying in the I Ching. (The party section referred to both the political and the life celebration.) Lennon improvised some lyrics that began as ‘‘Come together right now/Don’t come tomorrow/Don’t come alone/ Come together right now over me/All I can tell you is you gotta be free,’’ and afterward handed the demo tape over to Leary. But unknown to the candidate, while he was having his song played on the radio in California, Lennon was in England revamping it for himself. Leary’s campaign finally ended in December 1969 when he was arrested for possessing marijuana and subsequently jailed. Leary heard the Abbey Road album while in jail and was stunned to hear his campaign song redone as ‘‘Come Together.’’ He wrote the Beatle a letter saying how disappointed he was at being abandoned by Lennon. The witty scribe wrote back comparing himself to a tailor and called Leary a customer who ordered a suit and never returned to pick it up—so he sold it to someone else.

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While the final version was invented in the studio, the hideously prescient ‘‘shoot me’’ refrain was from a discarded song called ‘‘Watching Rainbows.’’ However, Lennon’s reference to ‘‘old flat top’’ came from Chuck Berry’s ‘‘You Can’t Catch Me.’’ This led to a lawsuit brought against Lennon by Morris Levy, who owned the copyright through his company, Big Seven Music. The plagiarism issue was finally settled in October 1973. Lennon was ordered by the court to record Chuck Berry’s ‘‘You Can’t Catch Me,’’ plus two other Big Seven Music songs which Lennon chose to be Lee Dorsey’s ‘‘Ya Ya’’ and Berry’s ‘‘Sweet Little Sixteen.’’ He included them on his Rock ’N’ Roll album in 1975. ‘‘Come Together’’ meanwhile was released as a single in October 1969. But for the first time, the A-side of the single went to George Harrison for his startlingly evocative ‘‘Something,’’ which he wrote for Pattie. Inspired by the opening line of James Taylor’s ‘‘Something in the Way She Moves,’’ which was recorded for Taylor’s debut album on Apple in the summer of 1968, Harrison had been working on the song since the early summer with the hope of including it on The Beatles. But the tune wasn’t yet in its final form when the group finished the track listing. ‘‘Something’’ is a culmination of Harrison’s previous love songs—from ‘‘Don’t Bother Me’’ to ‘‘Long, Long, Long’’—that attempted to resolve his conflict between the love found in spiritual perfection and the love borne of the flesh. Harrison finds a perfect delicate balance that reveals his uncertainties along with his strongest desires. Like McCartney with ‘‘The Long and Winding Road,’’ Harrison had Ray Charles in mind for the tune. It would eventually become the second most covered Beatles’ song after ‘‘Yesterday’’—and Ray Charles did record it. ‘‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’’ dates back before the Let It Be sessions (and maybe McCartney should have let it be). This vaudevillian number is a cloying, macabre tale of a medical student named Maxwell Edison, who uses a silver hammer first to kill his girlfriend, then a lecturer and finally a judge. McCartney thought of ‘‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’’ as something of an analogy for how things can go wrong out of the blue. But the song, with its nihilistic subtext, is as coy as Harrison’s ‘‘Piggies.’’ The flagrant reference to ‘‘pataphysical’’ is McCartney evasively name-dropping Alfred Jarry, the Parisian dramatist, who developed this branch of metaphysics in his absurdist plays. The only characteristic thing of interest here is the use of the moog synthesizer, which Harrison discovered in the EMI building. Without a manual to figure it out, he fiddled with it until he could make it work. After introducing it on ‘‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,’’ he went on to include it on ‘‘Here Comes the Sun.’’ Harrison would indulge his interest in the moog on an album of synthesizer noodling called Electronic Sounds (1969). ‘‘Oh! Darling’’ is a stronger McCartney effort drawing on his love of fifties’ doo-wop R&B and performing with the passionate precision he demonstrated in ‘‘Long Tall Sally’’ and ‘‘I’m Down.’’ Lennon always thought McCartney should have let him sing it since he thought the song

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was more in his style. But ‘‘Oh! Darling’’ is placed firmly in the Little Richard tradition where Paul McCartney is its chief caretaker. Ringo’s genial children’s song ‘‘Octopus’s Garden’’ also draws lovingly from fifties’ R&B (and it comes complete with a happily crooned doo-wop chorus). ‘‘Octopus’s Garden’’ was Ringo’s second composition released on a Beatles’ album and it was inspired by a boating trip he took in Sardinia after his angry departure during The Beatles sessions. The ship captain had told Ringo about how octopi travel along the seabed to pick up stones and shiny objects in order to build their gardens. The captain’s story so picked up Ringo’s sagging spirits, brought on by those frustrating days in the studio, that he was inspired to write a song about an octopus’s life at the bottom of the sea. As in ‘‘Yellow Submarine,’’ Ringo brings a playfully unassuming spirit to ‘‘Octopus’s Garden.’’ His shy demeanor, invoking a lost puppy dog, brings out an aching sadness in the song’s happy sentiments. If ‘‘Oh! Darling’’ and ‘‘Octopus’s Garden’’ drew on fifties’ R&B styles, ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’’ brought those styles up-to-date to the Stax-Volt Memphis funk sound. Not surprisingly, Booker T. & the MG’s did an instrumental cover of the track on their 1970 Abbey Road tribute record, McLemore Avenue, which was named for the street where Stax was located. (They covered 13 Abbey Road songs.) Composed by Lennon for Yoko, ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy) is an epic tune about romantic obsession that is long in length but minimal in words. The BBC television’s public affairs show 24 Hours used Lennon’s lyrics as an example of some of pop’s banalities. But rather than being banal, Lennon was paring down his predilection for wordplay in order to express more simply his most basic feelings. Rather than diffuse those emotions with an abundance of lyrics, Lennon draws on fundamental blues forms that cut to the chase. Featuring one of Lennon’s most intensely soulful vocals, ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’’ also has some extraordinarily funky interplay between Ringo’s percussive swagger and McCartney’s walking bass lines. The song is actually an edit of two different performances. One was done during the Let It Be sessions in February 1969 with Billy Preston on keyboards and would later be wed to a performance recorded during the Abbey Road sessions. The repeated guitar riff ending that builds like the mantra conclusion of ‘‘Hey Jude’’ is accompanied by the white noise of the moog synthesizer that roars underneath like an army of Hoover vacuum cleaners. As it continues to build, threatening to overtake Harrison’s guitar, the tune abruptly stops. Songwriter and producer David Gates was totally astonished by the sudden ending describing the effect as ‘‘jolting us into embarrassed awareness that we’ve let a mere recording carry us away.’’13 That ending, however, was more serendipitous than planned. The engineer, Alan Parsons, was looking for a way to conclude the song when Lennon just ordered the tape cut with no fade or resolution. Co-engineer Geoff Emerick, who had returned to the fold to help record Abbey Road, cut it. In 1986,

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Elvis Costello would pay tribute to ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’’ by writing his own version for his Blood and Chocolate album. In ‘‘I Want You,’’ which features an equally minimal arrangement, Costello isn’t professing his undying love for the woman. Instead, his tune is a powerful, bloodcurdling screed about sexual jealousy. In one line, he quotes Dionne Warwick’s ‘‘Say a Little Prayer For You’’ as a prelude to murder. Costello looks at the shadier aspects of possessive love. If Lennon sees his symbiotic link to Yoko as intently romantic, Costello locates the troubling gothic creepiness beneath an obsessive courtship. Out of the dark corners of ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’’ comes Harrison’s brightly sanguine ‘‘Here Comes the Sun,’’ which he wrote in Eric Clapton’s garden when the Beatles’ business woes were at their worst. For Harrison, ‘‘Here Comes the Sun’’ was like playing hooky from school. The peace of the garden setting on that lovely sunny day comes shimmering through in the ballad. Of all of Lennon’s utopian prayers, ‘‘Because’’ is his most lilting. As in ‘‘Across the Universe,’’ Lennon expresses his need to connect to the larger world around him. ‘‘He surprises the listener by extending the circle from the universal ‘all’ not to the first-person ‘me’ but to the second-person ‘you,’’’ explained musicologist Walter Everett. ‘‘This statement, about the universality of love, has a fully mystical quality only slightly less strongly suggested by the spiritual reactions to the world, the wind, and the sky in the three verses.’’14 Everett also considers the strong impact of the circular world in Lennon’s ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping,’’ as well as in his later, ‘‘Watching the Wheels.’’ But ‘‘Because’’ is also not typical of Lennon songs (especially after the powerful, but emotionally suffocating ‘‘I Want You [She’s So Heavy]’’), this exquisite track features a three-part harmony vocal performance between himself and George and Paul. After Martin twice overdubbed their voices, ‘‘Because’’ suddenly gave the impression of having nine singers harmonizing. ‘‘I was very surprised when he allowed it to be done in that way,’’ Martin recalled. ‘‘Again the three of them were terribly good at harmonizing, anyway, and when we actually did the vocal backings, there was George, John and Paul singing as a trio.’’15 ‘‘Because’’ grew out of Lennon overhearing Yoko playing the First Movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor on the piano. When he asked her to play the chords backward, he got the melody for ‘‘Because.’’ The song begins with the classical sound of Martin’s harpsichord leading us into the kind of cascading vocal harmonies that would make the Beach Boys weep with envy. John Frusciante, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, first heard the song when he was 13 and was captivated by it because, in all its beauty, it had a way of also collapsing time. ‘‘The combination of the 600-year-old harpsichord, the four-year-old Moog, the 40-year-old electric guitar (and bass) and the three-part vocal harmonization—something which began in the 1300s—make this recording a joining of many points of the past as well as the future, where the distances between

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all these times cease to exist,’’ Frusciante explained.16 After paying irreverent tribute to the mad composer through Chuck Berry’s ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven,’’ the Beatles, in ‘‘Because,’’ pay homage more earnestly. As for George Harrison, who sang ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven,’’ ‘‘Because’’ was his favorite track on the record because it had a simplicity that was matched by a difficult harmony vocal. ‘‘You Never Give Me Your Money,’’ which begins the symphonic medley, is McCartney’s response to the Beatles’ business troubles. But in typical fashion of the composer, he imagines himself back in simpler, better days while the music reflects the unrequited longings he can’t satisfy. In the end, he abandons hope and hops into a car to share his new life with Linda. ‘‘You Never Give Me Your Money’’ in many ways musically mirrors Lennon’s ‘‘Happiness is a Warm Gun.’’ Like ‘‘Happiness,’’ the song is broken into three distinct sections that shift seamlessly into one another. McCartney starts the song in a chamber style on piano to lament how his fellow Beatles are legally ganging up on him. He then shifts into double time swing to proclaim the frustration of now being left with nowhere to go. But he soon realizes, when all is said and done, that the magic feeling of being free and having anywhere to go will soon be upon him. Harrison comes in with a similar guitar arpeggio from ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’’ to underscore McCartney’s sentiment. By the end of the track, McCartney sings the childhood rhyme, ‘‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, all good children go to Heaven,’’ to celebrate his return to a childhood innocence as he escapes the clamor of the Beatles. (As mentioned earlier, however, it is rather eerie that the Manson Family had etched that same rhyme in blood on the door of one of their murder scenes.) As Harrison’s guitar fades into the background, the sound of crickets and the gentle quiet of nature introduce Lennon’s ‘‘Sun King.’’ The soft blues guitar strums a melody that has a faint resemblance to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘‘Albatross.’’ When Lennon’s voice introduces the arrival of the Sun King, he carries over the fragile harmonies of ‘‘Because.’’ The original title was ‘‘Here Comes the Sun King’’ until Harrison’s ‘‘Here Comes the Sun’’ posed possible confusion. ‘‘Sun King’’ is all about atmosphere more than anything significant. It successfully conveys a romantic spirit, especially heard in the faux Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish phrases that complete the song. Ringo’s abrupt drum fill breaks the enchanted mood leading us into the macabre world of Lennon’s ‘‘Mean Mr. Mustard.’’ Written in India, Lennon based the song on a newspaper story about a miser who hid his cash to prevent people from forcing him to spend it. Equally inspired by the absurd limericks of Edward Lear, ‘‘Mean Mr. Mustard’’ was originally planned for The Beatles but never went beyond the acoustic demo that Lennon recorded back in 1968. In the demo, Mr. Mustard had a sister named Shirley, but Lennon changed it to Pam so that he could segue into ‘‘Polythene Pam.’’ ‘‘Polythene Pam’’ is based on two people. Pat Hodgett (now Dawson), who was a Beatles’ fan from back in the early Cavern Club days, used to consume

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large amounts of polythene and earned the nickname, Polythene Pat. But most of the tune, which is about dressing in polythene bags, came from the girlfriend of England’s beat poet, Royston Ellis. Back in August 1963, Ellis and Stephanie had invited Lennon back to their attic flat after a Beatles’ show. Minus the jackboots and kilts, she engaged (according to Lennon) in a night of rowdy sex with him while inside a polythene bag (which I guess could be considered a precursor to Yoko Ono’s bagism). Brief as it is (1:12), ‘‘Polythene Pam’’ is a punchy bit of rock ’n’ roll where each band member calls out to the other in a spirit of generosity as if feeling the indelible pull of what brought the Beatles together before they were so torn apart. ‘‘Polythene Pam’’ crashes right into McCartney’s ‘‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,’’ which he wrote about Diane Ashley, a fan who literally climbed into his home in St. John’s Wood through the partially opened bathroom window. She then opened the front door to let in her friends. These fans were affectionately named ‘‘Apple Scruffs’’ and would be commemorated in a tribute song by George Harrison on All Things Must Pass. Ashley and her friends took some clothes, photographs, and photo negatives. Ironically, Ashley got herself a job at Apple, even becoming McCartney’s dog walker. One of the items McCartney wanted back, though, was a photo of himself in a thirties frame. But Mike Pinder, the mellotron player of the Moody Blues, claimed that the inspiration for the track was something that happened to his band. According to Pinder, a groupie had climbed into flautist Ray Thomas’s bathroom window and spent the night with him. The next day, both Thomas and Pinder told McCartney the story and immediately he started inventing the song on the spot.17 Whichever tale provided the inspiration, ‘‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’’ is a pleasant and lively bit of McCartney pop that crackles with excitement. (In its earlier version, heard on Anthology 3, it is mistakenly conceived as a blues dirge.) After this quick run of song fragments, a bit of silence precedes McCartney’s calming ‘‘Golden Slumbers.’’ In 1968, while visiting his father in Cheshire, McCartney stumbled upon a music book called The Pleasant Comedy of Old Fortunatus (1600) that belonged to his half sister Ruth. Within it was a poem by Thomas Dekker, an Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, called ‘‘Golden Slumbers.’’ The poem read: Golden slumbers kiss your eyes; smiles awake you when you rise. Sleep pretty wantons do not cry, and I will sing you a lullaby. Rock them, rock them, lullaby. Since McCartney couldn’t read the musical notation, he invented his own. ‘‘Golden Slumbers,’’ which begins like an intimate prayer, restates his hope

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to get back home. But when McCartney gets to the chorus, his voice shifts from an expression of longing to aggression. It’s as if he no longer believes that these golden slumbers will bring any rest to the weary. Although McCartney seems to be singing to someone else, when the song shifts into ‘‘Carry That Weight’’ it’s clear he’s singing to himself. Written as an adjunct to ‘‘Golden Slumbers,’’ ‘‘Carry That Weight’’ is sung in group harmony with the full weight hanging on their voices as if they are collectively rowing a huge barge. Of all the songs on Abbey Road, ‘‘Carry That Weight’’ (which reprises ‘‘You Never Give Me Your Money’’) recognizes that the Beatles will have to live out their future carrying the weight of what their career brought them. ‘‘No matter what they do separately after this, [McCartney] correctly guesses, it’ll never match what they did together,’’ wrote Ian MacDonald in Revolution in the Head. ‘‘The world will always hark back to their glory days as a foursome and they’ll carry the weight of their achievement as the Beatles for the rest of their individual careers.’’18 McCartney conceived ‘‘The End’’ in the spirit of Shakespeare’s concluding lines from ‘‘All’s Well That Ends Well’’: All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown; Whate’er the course, the end is the renown. Since ‘‘The End’’ concludes both the album and the Beatles’ career, all four members have a solo spot in the song—including Ringo’s only other drum solo besides ‘‘Birthday.’’ ‘‘The End’’ kicks off as a rocking instrumental until the final fuzz tone of a guitar leads into McCartney’s piano. As a fond farewell to their fans, he sings, ‘‘And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make.’’ While there wasn’t much love between the Beatles anymore, they never violated the love they had for their music. But just as the album ends majestically, after a few seconds of silence, a small wry tribute called ‘‘Her Majesty’’ appears. Basically a music hall song, in the same spirit as ‘‘Maggie Mae,’’ it was originally placed between ‘‘Mean Mr. Mustard’’ and ‘‘Polythene Pam.’’ But McCartney thought it sounded out of place and asked engineer John Kurlander to throw it away. Kurlander, though, was reluctant to toss it and placed it instead at the end of the album tape and separated it with some leader. Afterward, Kurlander forgot all about it. Then during the group’s listening session to the finished album, ‘‘Her Majesty’’ popped up after a period of silence following ‘‘The End.’’ McCartney liked its new, yet quite accidental, placement. To surprise the listener, the song wasn’t listed on the original album cover. Abbey Road was an instant commercial success when it was released in September 1969. It shot up to #1 for 11 weeks on the U.K. charts. Most critics realizing that this was likely the final Beatles’ album also gave the record quite generous reviews. ‘‘Abbey Road was John Lennon at his best, and Paul McCartney at his best, and George Harrison suddenly reaching a best that

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no one had ever imagined,’’ wrote biographer Philip Norman. ‘‘It was John’s anarchy, straight and honed. It was Paul’s sentimentality with the brake applied.’’19 Culture critic Albert Goldman was also quite taken with the symmetrical design of the medley of songs on side two. ‘‘The medley tracked very smoothly and soared off like a kite sustained by a powerful updraft of show-biz nostalgia,’’ he wrote.20 The medley was McCartney’s idea to try to create an extended work as others from Frank Zappa to the Who had done. Since he and Lennon had so many unfinished tracks from the Let It Be rehearsals, McCartney began considering stringing them together. It was George Martin, though, who started telling him about conceiving the album in symphonic terms where they could take fragments of unfinished songs and embroider them within overall texture of the album. Some songs, he thought, could serve as counterpoint to other tracks. Thinking in those terms, McCartney was able to conceive the suite that became most of side two of Abbey Road. By getting the individual members of the Beatles to cooperate in providing bits of songs along with complete ones, Martin felt he was able to recreate the spirit of collaboration in the band that had gone absent on The Beatles and Let It Be. ‘‘I was trying to make a symphony out of pop music,’’ George Martin told Rolling Stone in 1976. ‘‘I was trying to get Paul to write stuff that we could then bring in on counterpoint. . .bring some form into the thing.’’21 Lennon, of course, resisted the idea. He wanted a straight rock album because he disliked the idea of a pop opera with no true connecting links. He saw the concept as essentially preserving the myth of the Beatles. ‘‘So Abbey Road was a compromise,’’ Martin explained. ‘‘Side One was a collection of individual songs.’’22 Yet as enjoyable as the results are, there is still something slightly impersonal and safe about Abbey Road. ‘‘You get an image of an album and it all gels and fits together, but I can’t do that with this one,’’ Harrison suggested. ‘‘It’s a bit like somebody else’s record. It doesn’t feel as though it’s us, even though we spent hours doing it.’’23 Despite the beauty of its sound, perhaps what seemed so unlike the Beatles on Abbey Road was the content of the songs. ‘‘Much of the poetic text of the medley deals with selfishness and self-gratification,’’ Walter Everett asserted.24 The Beatles were no longer singing visionary songs that aspired to Nowhere Land; now their songs were largely about what Steve Turner called ‘‘the ordinariness of their concerns.’’25 In The Gospel according to the Beatles, Turner illuminates quite perceptively the dramatic change heard on Abbey Road. ‘‘The visionary euphoria of 1965 through 1967 had disappeared, and in its place were worries about money, privacy, home, business, and girlfriends,’’ he wrote. ‘‘The sentiments of ‘Love Me Do’ were restated in ‘I Want You,’ but the difference was that ‘I Want You’ was desperate and dependent and didn’t mention the word ‘love.’ The relationships that had once been meant to make John feel so good were now merely to prevent his feeling so bad.’’26 The cover of Abbey Road, taken by Iain MacMillan, had them simply

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crossing Abbey Road. Besides the many ‘‘clues’’ to Paul’s ‘‘death’’ cited on the cover, the only death inherent in its image was the death of the Beatles. Here they’re seen at a crossroad, between the recording studio and the outside world, heading into the seventies apart and as individuals. Abbey Road was literally and figuratively seen as the end of the sixties. Given that symbolic weight, Abbey Road would have the creepy concurrence of having its cover photographed on August 8, 1969—the same day the Manson Family massacred Sharon Tate and company on Cielo Drive.

EPILOGUE

Dreams Within a Dream Cold reality triumphs over art’s beautiful dreams. Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn On America’s Independence Day 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released their new single ‘‘Give Peace a Chance.’’ Recorded at their bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal back in May, ‘‘Give Peace a Chance’’ was Lennon’s new utopian stand. All you had to do was chant give peace a chance and—presto—we’d all have a better world. As much as the song would become an enduring anthem in the years to follow, ‘‘Give Peace a Chance’’ was pretty unimaginative sloganeering. From a man who had such a vividly witty and lyrical imagination, he suddenly made ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ seem as poetically dense as Walt Whitman. Yet as his utopian ideals grew more explicit, the real world wasn’t providing much in the way of peace. In September 1969, the Plastic Ono Band headed back to Canada to play the Toronto Peace Festival at Varsity Stadium. The band consisted of Eric Clapton, Alan White on drums, Klaus Voorman on bass, and Lennon and Ono. Since Lennon and Clapton were still junkies, they were both sick on the flight over. Lennon was also nervous playing his first live show since the Beatles’ rooftop concert. But this time, the eager fans were right in front of him. First, he couldn’t remember the lyrics to any of the old rock ’n’ roll songs they decided to perform. Given their new identities as pacifists for peace, it was more than a little odd that they had the Toronto motorcycle gang, the Vagabonds, escort the group to the stadium. Suffering from nerves, Lennon finally demanded some cocaine to get him through. Since the co-organizer John Brower wasn’t prepared to do any drug running, he had

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to appeal to a doctor in the audience. The other artists on the bill were a stunning array of rock icons—past and present—including Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Alice Cooper, Chicago, Fats Domino, and Gene Vincent. Vincent, in particular, was excited that Lennon was coming. After all, the Beatles had played with him in Hamburg. ‘‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’’ was one of Lennon and McCartney’s favorite songs. Vincent even opened the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert in 1965. But Vincent was no longer the rock legend he was in the late fifties. Back in 1960, while he was touring England, Vincent and songwriter Sharon Sheeley were badly injured in a high-speed traffic accident. Vincent broke his ribs, collarbone, and damaged his leg. Sheeley also sustained a broken pelvis. Rock legend Eddie Cochran, who was Sheeley’s fiance´ as well as Vincent’s tourmate, was killed in the accident. By 1969, Vincent was pretty disheveled, but eager to reunite with Lennon. ‘‘It was kind of sad,’’ remembered Larry Leblanc who was then a young Toronto journalist. ‘‘As John was trying to move gently past him, Gene was saying, ‘Hey John, remember Hamburg?’ John was really polite but he didn’t want to stop. He put his arm around Gene and said, ‘Hi, Gene, nice to see ya,’ and kept moving. The whole exchange took maybe 20 seconds.’’ 1 The Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival was one of Gene Vincent’s last shows. He would die on October 12, 1971 from a ruptured stomach ulcer while visiting his father in California. The Plastic Ono Band belted through a number of rock classics like ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes,’’ ‘‘Money,’’ and ‘‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie.’’ They ripped into Lennon’s own ‘‘Yer Blues’’ and his latest single, ‘‘Cold Turkey.’’ Their short set was completed with ‘‘Give Peace a Chance.’’ Then Yoko followed by entering a bag and unleashed her 20-minute abstract number, ‘‘Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mommy’s Only Looking For Her Hand in the Snow),’’ on the largely mainstream rock audience. As enthusiastic as they were to see Lennon, they were less than enthused with Ono’s avant-gardism. ‘‘I remember at the show that people were throwing bottles at Yoko Ono,’’ Little Richard recalled. ‘‘They were throwing everything at her. Finally she had to run off the stage. They would have beat her to death up there.’’ 2 When Lennon and Ono returned from Toronto on September 20, just prior to the release of Abbey Road, John was called to a group meeting to sign their new contract with EMI. Although Abbey Road seemed likely to be the last Beatles’ record, McCartney still held out for group unity. But John announced at the meeting that he was quitting the band although it was kept secret from the public at Allen Klein’s request so the group could still reap the benefits of the new record deal. In October, Yoko, who was pregnant with John’s baby, had miscarried. By Christmas, they released the Wedding Album, which contained their wedding license, a piece of plastic wedding cake, a big poster photo of the wedding, some Lennon sketches, and a record featuring one side of Lennon and Ono taking turns shouting each other’s names and the other side being

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a news conference. In January 1970, Lennon began writing the anthem ‘‘Instant Karma,’’ which addressed his belief in the immediate retaliation of paying for the wrongs we’ve done in this world. After composing the song at the piano, he called George Harrison, Klaus Voorman, and Alan White in to record it. Not happy with the session, producer Phil Spector arrived to beef up the sound and it was released as the next Plastic Ono Band single. ‘‘Instant Karma’’ was vintage Lennon. Unlike ‘‘Give Peace a Chance,’’ ‘‘Instant Karma’’ had passionate gospel urgency. The imperative tone of the song though may have also been due to Lennon’s desire to check into a rehab clinic to kick his heroin habit before it finally licked him. While Lennon was resisting junk, McCartney was ruminating over the garbage during the fall meeting at EMI. At his farm in Scotland with Linda, McCartney was falling into depression, drinking, staying in bed all day, and growing a huge beard. But he quickly rallied and decided to begin recording some tracks for his own solo record. On April 10, the promotion copies of McCartney went out complete with an insert that featured an ‘‘interview’’ Paul did with himself to ward off the press from intruding into his current issues with the band. Among the 41 questions included on it was the question of whether this new album was the start of a new solo career. His answer was cryptic: ‘‘Time will tell.’’ But the press at London’s Daily Mirror immediately jumped on the story. The next day they were declaring that Paul was quitting the Beatles and that they were finished. McCartney then had to confirm from his farm in Scotland that he was indeed leaving the group and setting up his own company, Paul McCartney Productions. The release date of McCartney was set for April 17, but that was going to coincide with the issuing of the sound track album for Let It Be and Ringo’s first solo record, a collection of old standards called Sentimental Journey. Ringo was asked by John and George to visit Paul and request that he change the set date of his album. When Ringo arrived at his door, McCartney went berserk on the drummer. ‘‘We’re all talking peace and love,’’ said McCartney at the time, notably taking a shot at Lennon. ‘‘But really, we’re not feeling peaceful at all.’’3 The toll on McCartney was evident since it was he who wanted to keep the band together. ‘‘This is real life we’ve got here, not some dream,’’ McCartney said later in the seventies while he was touring with his new group Wings. ‘‘So it was very difficult after the Beatles, to come to terms with anything. You just felt like you’d lost the best job in the world, the best mates in the world, and it was very difficult.’’4 But there was a dream, and for McCartney, it was shattered. By New Year’s Eve, he would launch a lawsuit against his former mates. Back in August, he was attempting to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership on the grounds that his artistic and financial freedom was being jeopardized. Since he couldn’t get agreement from the other Beatles, he filed suit in the London High Court demanding the end of the Beatles & Co. By March 1971, the judge would rule in favor of McCartney when it was revealed that Allen

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Klein was as scrupulously unethical as McCartney had once feared. Klein had taken $500,000 more than he was entitled from the deal the group had recently signed. The group was then officially dissolved. But the issues, on a personal level, were hardly resolved, nor would they really ever be. ‘‘I don’t miss being a Beatle any more,’’ Ringo lamented. ‘‘You can’t get those days back. It’s no good living in the past.’’5 So the individual Beatles moved on into the future and turned their backs on the past. It was a significant ending marked by the final release of the film Let It Be, which premiered in London on May 13, 1970. But as we would all discover, endings are never quite so simple. The stage that the Beatles had once built was so huge and sturdy that many bands, from U2 to Oasis, would desperately try to mount it. Others wished to tear it down and forget that the standards they set ever existed. Initially, that impulse came from the individual Beatles themselves. The British music magazine, Melody Maker, ran a series of letters from Lennon and McCartney in the early seventies where they bitterly assailed each other for comments made in interviews. They even attacked each other in songs. On McCartney’s second solo record, Ram (1971), he attacked Lennon and Ono’s left-leaning political posturing. Later that year, Lennon would answer back with the vitriolic ‘‘How Do You Sleep?’’ on his Imagine album. While Lennon sings in the title track about a better world with no borders, wars, or religion, he still continued his bloody conflict with Paul McCartney. Besides suggesting that ‘‘those freaks was right when they said you were dead,’’ he claims that all Paul ever did was ‘‘Yesterday.’’ According to the song, McCartney was nothing more than a boring straight who lived with people who considered him King. Worse, Lennon called McCartney’s music muzak to his ears. As petulant as their squabbles were, critic Jon Landau saw it as symptomatic of the fragility both men felt apart from each other. ‘‘The idea of a group as a unit with an identity of its own has become increasingly passe´ as groups become less and less stable,’’ wrote Landau in Rolling Stone in 1971. ‘‘They seldom stay together long enough to achieve such an identity. But the Beatles were obviously a true group and history is now proving that it was greater than the sum of their parts. Collectively, the Beatles had a way of maximizing each of their individual strengths and minimizing each of their individual flaws.’’6 Their battles became an outgrowth of the knowledge that each wasn’t as self-sufficient as they might have thought. Paul soon created a new band called Wings, while John worked primarily with Yoko and session musicians. Both men carried on regardless through the seventies making solo work— good and bad—that refuted and reflected their Beatle past. George Harrison and Ringo Starr meanwhile stepped out of the group’s shadow. Ringo quickly followed up Sentimental Journey in October 1970 with the casual Beaucoups of Blues, a country record that plays off the happy-go-lucky

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everyman he portrayed in the song ‘‘Act Naturally.’’ ‘‘All his loser’s charisma is on display: confident, vulnerable, the perfect example of why so many teenyboppers wanted to take Ringo home, rather than John or Paul,’’ wrote Paul Trynka recently in Mojo.7 Harrison had earned the mantel of ‘‘the quiet one’’ during his years in the Beatles, but there was nothing quiet about his sprawling three-record set All Things Must Pass. Released in November 1970, Harrison had gathered all the material he‘d been storing up in the Beatles and finally let it all out. The result was a deeply personal, uneven work that added up to a man finally finding reconciliation in his spiritual devotion to God and his love of making music. While Harrison was new to providing group leadership, he gathered familiar faces like Ringo Starr, Klaus Voorman, and Billy Preston around him to find a focal point for his band. He added the members of Delaney & Bonnie’s group (some of whom would the next year be part of Eric Clapton’s Derek & the Dominoes). Harrison also brought in Gary Brooker of Procol Harum on piano and former Traffic guitarist Dave Mason. George Harrison had an epic band to match the epic size of his record. To provide a bigger band sound, he hired Phil Spector to handle the production. Some of the best work included the pretty ‘‘I’d Have You Anytime,’’ which he cowrote with Bob Dylan, the equally lovely Dylan composition, ‘‘If Not For You,’’ the portentous ‘‘Beware of Darkness,’’ and a gorgeously spacious track about spiritual acquiescence called ‘‘The Ballad of Sir. Frankie Crisp (Let it Roll).’’ The title track was first written and recorded for The Beatles as an early warning that the group’s demise was near and not as tragic as some may suspect. His big hit was ‘‘My Sweet Lord,’’ which crowned his total acceptance of God through the Hare Krishna movement, which he supported. However, ‘‘My Sweet Lord’’ subconsciously borrowed the melody from the Chiffons’ 1963 hit ‘‘He’s So Fine’’ (something both Phil Spector and George Harrison, of all people, should have recognized). Harrison ended up in 1976 being sued by Bright Tunes Music (the copyright owners) and he was ordered to pay $587,000. The Chiffons also recorded ‘‘My Sweet Lord’’ in 1975 to ride on the coat tails of the notoriety generated by the lawsuit. As the Beatles got on with their individual lives and work, others tried to fill the gap they left. One tragic case was an Apple band called Badfinger, who through the early seventies were pitched as the new heir to the Beatles. But their legacy ended in despair and death. Originally a Swansea, Wales band called the Iveys, they came to the attention of Beatle roadie Mal Evans who was a friend of the band manager Bill Collins. Since the Beatles were just signing acts to Apple, Mal convinced the Fab Four that the Iveys were worth the bother. Lead guitarist Pete Ham and rhythm guitarist Tom Evans sang with ringing harmonies that strongly evoked Lennon and McCartney, and when Evans played them an Iveys’ demo tape, the whole studio took notice. ‘‘It was their uncanny resemblance to the young Beatles that had made everyone sit up and listen,’’ recalled Apple employee Richard DiLello.

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‘‘But it was no conscious aping of their benefactors that had produced that similarity of sound.’’8 The Iveys had inherited the yearning spirit of the Beatles rather than being a facsimile of the band. Their first single was the Beatlesque ‘‘Maybe Tomorrow,’’ which made the Top 10 in Europe and Japan in 1968. Due to its success, the Beatles were interested in grooming the band, but weren’t impressed by their name. Apple associate Neil Aspinall thought of Bad Penny, after Humphrey Lyttleton’s ‘‘Bad Penny Blues’’ which had inspired ‘‘Lady Madonna.’’ Badfinger was taken from ‘‘Bad Finger Boogie,’’ the original title of ‘‘With a Little Help From My Friends’’ (because Lennon had composed the melody using his middle finger when he had hurt his forefinger). But Apple was just starting to collapse as Badfinger entered the arena. With the Beatles barely on speaking terms, it appeared that nobody was talking to Badfinger. As Ringo was about to star in The Magic Christian (1970) with Peter Sellers, McCartney was asked to contribute some songs. He had already written and recorded a demo to include in the film called ‘‘Come and Get It,’’ but at the same time, Badfinger was expressing their frustrations in the press about not getting a chance with Apple. McCartney apparently read their complaints. He came to them with ‘‘Come and Get It,’’ telling them that they could record the song providing they do record it without changing the arrangement. He also offered them the opportunity to write some of their own stuff for the film since he was too busy to compose any new material himself. Paul still produced the track—he even added piano—and it was a Top 10 hit on both sides of the ocean. With new sessions pending in early 1970, Mal Evans began producing their new album, No Dice, but Geoff Emerick eventually took over the controls. Their first single off the album was the punchy ‘‘No Matter What,’’ which went to #8 on the Billboard chart. Ironically, it was the aching ‘‘Without You’’ that would become the bigger hit—just not the version recorded by Badfinger. American pop singer Harry Nilsson decided to do the song for his 1972 Nilsson Schmilsson album. Where Badfinger is tentative, almost uncertain of the latent romantic despair in the composition, Nilsson found the core of the song’s strength and his soaring light tenor turned it into a classic, lovesick ballad. Nevertheless, No Dice was a hit that caused critic Mike Saunders at Rolling Stone to exclaim that it was ‘‘as if John, Paul, George and Ringo had been reincarnated.’’9 Badfinger might have found their niche in the solo Beatles’ inner circle, but it wasn’t always ideal. ‘‘We weren’t preoccupied with sounding like the Beatles, so it got to be a bit of a pain because people were asking all the time questions like, ‘What’s John really like?’ and ‘Is Paul a nice guy?’ ’’ said guitarist Joey Molland. ‘‘We got really fed up with it. I mean, we loved the Beatles but we didn’t want to talk about them all day.’’10 But they did continue to hang out with them. Badfinger performed on Lennon’s Imagine album, did Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, and

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would perform as part of George’s benefit concert for the victims of Bangladesh in the summer of 1971. But while in the United States a year earlier, Badfinger signed a business management contract with Stan Polley. While Bill Collins would stay on as manager, Polley (who had managed both Lou Christie and Al Kooper) became their financial overseer. Polley had them touring relentlessly with little time to devote to recording their new album, Straight Up, which George Harrison began producing. One song, ‘‘Day After Day,’’ where Harrison played a pining slide guitar alongside Pete Ham, gave the group their third hit single. Harrison might have even finished the album but he had to work on both the concert for Bangladesh and the subsequent film and sound track album. The producer reins were then handed to Todd Rundgren who finished the record and helped spawn the album’s second hit single, ‘‘Baby Blue.’’ In 1972, Badfinger was under contract to release one more album for Apple, now closing down its operations. Simultaneous to that, however, allegations about Polley’s mismanagement of finances for Lou Christie were coming to the fore. But Badfinger never questioned Polley’s business affairs. During the recording of their last Apple record, Ass, Polley negotiated a $3 million deal with Warner Brothers that included an album from the group every six months for the next six years. It appeared as if golden days were ahead, but their Warners’ albums, Badfinger and Wish You Were Here, were commercially unsuccessful. The band continued to tour and attract sellout crowds; however, it soon became clear that Polley was coming under suspicion from Warner Brothers when he refused to cooperate in communicating the status of an escrow account of advance funds. According to the contract, Polley was to keep $100,000 in safekeeping in a mutually accessible account for both Warners and the band to access. But Polley never told the label about the account’s whereabouts and he ignored legal warnings to cough up the information. On December 10, 1974, when the group was about to submit their next album, Head First, to Warners, the label instead issued a lawsuit against both Polley and Badfinger. Legal action prevented any other advance funds to the band and they also withdrew distribution of Wish You Were Here. In winter 1975, the group was in turmoil with no money coming in from anywhere. All their monies earned from touring, recording, and publishing were tied up in Polley’s holding companies. Panic began to set in. Pete Ham and his girlfriend were expecting a child and running out of cash. Nobody would book Badfinger because of the restrictive contracts they had with Polley who was now up to his eyebrows in litigation. Although Ham tried endlessly to reach Polley, he’d never return the call. In total despair, Ham hanged himself in his garage on April 25, 1975. In his suicide note, he wrote that he loved his girlfriend and that ‘‘Stan Polley is a soulless bastard. I will take him with me.’’ With Ham’s death, Badfinger dissolved. The surviving members would do session work until the early eighties when

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Tom Evans and guitarist Joey Molland created separate touring bands that both used the group name. It caused huge rows between them until November 19, 1983 when Evans and Molland had a massive fight on the phone over past income owed from royalties. After the call, Evans followed Pete Ham’s example and also hung himself in his back garden. The surviving group members would attempt to keep the name Badfinger alive, especially playing golden oldies package tours, but by 1990, Badfinger was officially dead. What made Badfinger such a shadow version of the Beatles was not just the mellifluous pop sound they created but also the spiritual bond between Pete Ham and Tom Evans—the Lennon/McCartney of the group. ‘‘When Pete died, his other half was gone,’’ said Evan’s widow Marianne. ‘‘He felt lost and lonely. Many times he said, ‘I want to be there, where he is.’’’11 The bond they created together had carried the seeds of the Beatles’ utopian dream into the dark tragic conclusion that ended the Apple era. Once the financial problems of the label were finally settled in 1985, Badfinger’s royalties resumed just not soon enough to save Pete Ham and Tom Evans. Another shadow Beatles project was a Canadian progressive rock group called Klaatu. Formed in 1973 by John Woloschuk, Dee Long, and Terry Draper, they named their group after the extraterrestrial hero in Robert Wise’s 1951 science fiction classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the summer of 1976, Capitol Records, through their affiliate label Daffodil, released a record called 3:47 EST. With a colorful image of a grinning cherubic sun on the cover, the record had scant information on the group itself. The music might have fit the canon of seventies’ progressive rock, but with the use of the mellotron, backward tape effects, and baroque horn arrangements, the record sounded eerily like the Fab Four. At first, the record received scant notice. But in 1977, Steve Smith, a reporter for the Providence Sunday Journal, wrote a piece that confirmed that Klaatu was indeed the Beatles, who had secretly gotten back into the studio in 1974. (One hint may well be that Ringo Starr had featured himself as Klaatu on the cover of his November 1974 record Goodnight Vienna.) Like the conspiracy theorists who thought Paul was dead, Smith found ‘‘clues’’ on songs like ‘‘Sub Rosa Subway.’’ This mildly diverting number had a distinct McCartney sound (perhaps proving, once and for all, that Paul was truly alive), but the track also resembled something from McCartney’s Venus and Mars rather than anything by the Beatles. There was also the rumor that if you played ‘‘Sub Rosa Subway’’ backward, you heard ‘‘It’s us, it’s us, it’s the Beatles.’’ For those who had been clamoring for a Beatles’ record, the rumor struck with the same force as Paul’s demise. But, in truth, Klaatu were merely three guys from the Toronto suburbs who decided to keep their identities anonymous so that the music would sell the group and not their cleverly concealed image. But their reluctance to go public only seemed to substantiate what many people thought. As a result, Klaatu sold over a million albums. But

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after the news finally came out that they weren’t the Beatles, the group suffered the anger and resentment of betrayed fans. As their album sales quickly dwindled, Klaatu would finally put their ship to port in 1981. Since Badfinger and Klaatu hardly satisfied the public’s hunger for the Beatles to reunite, promoters started seizing on that desire themselves by going to the original members. Offering them huge sums of money for benefit concerts became the norm. On April 24, 1976, comedian Lorne Michaels came onto his new variety show, Saturday Night Live, to announce that he would pay the Beatles $3,000.00 if they would perform once on the show together. That evening, McCartney had stopped by to visit Lennon and Ono in their home at the Dakota in New York. While watching the show, they both toyed with the idea of going down and taking Michaels up on the offer. But they were too tired to bother. George Harrison though pulled off an inspired gag when he showed up on the set of Saturday Night Live later in November to haggle Michaels for his portion of the loot since he actually did show up to play. The individual Beatles though resisted all offers to reunite. Sometimes they would individually play on each other’s records. Ringo would show up on John and George’s solo records. All three Beatles played and contributed individual songs to Ringo! in 1973. As McCartney was busy touring and recording with Wings, Lennon and Ono split briefly in 1974 with John leaving to Los Angeles for his ‘‘lost weekend’’ of partying and recording. He returned to Yoko in 1975 to have a child and retire from the music industry and become a househusband. Ringo would record, tour, and star in movies (just as he promised he would in ‘‘Act Naturally’’). Harrison would be at the height of his talent organizing and performing in the concert for Bangladesh but would reach the depths of frustration with his Dark Horse tour in 1974 when he lost his voice and faced hostile crowds who didn’t want to hear Ravi Shankar’s Indian music. Burdened by being a Beatle, Harrison told one crowd, while pointing at Ravi’s sitar, ‘‘I’d die for this.’’ Then looking at his guitar added, ‘‘But not for that.’’ By 1977, a whole new generation of musicians would emerge who would care less about the Beatles. When the punk scene exploded in England, they felt a great need to diminish the impact of the Fab Four because the world the Beatles left behind was not the harmonious place promised in their music. It wasn’t just the Clash telling us that ‘‘phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust’’ on their 1980 apocalyptic anthem ‘‘London Calling.’’ Punk DJ Don Letts, who was a massive Beatles memorabilia collector, recalled in 1975 seeing his Beatles music biting the dust. ‘‘At one time in my life I was the second largest collector of Beatles memorabilia in this country!’’ he recalls today. ‘‘It wasn’t until punk rock came along that I looked at all this shit I had. I was being interviewed about my Beatles collection and the punk thing was just on the bubble in mid-’75 and as I’m doing the interview I’m thinking, What is all this bullshit? I stopped the interview and the next day

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I swapped the whole lot for an American car. I stupidly got rid of a lot of great music that I was listening to because of the Year Zero of punk rock.’’12 Punk became the defiant ‘‘No!’’ to the Beatles’ affirmative ‘‘Yes!’’ Both cultural statements had power and both had responded to the political climate around them. The Beatles took England and the world beyond the dreary commonplace, where punk music, which was mired in the rubble of poverty and a commonplace grown complacent and cynical, rubbed the world’s noses in it. In 1978, the Sex Pistols, one British punk group patterned like the antiBeatles, toured the American Deep South. Their manager, Malcolm McLaren, who was unquestionably the anti-Brian Epstein, booked them in redneck bars almost certain to cause trouble. The Sex Pistols cut a swath of furor across the Bible belt. Their tour was burdened already by infighting and poor planning when they set out to deliberately stir hostility and violence. You could hear the warning in their 1977 single ‘‘God Save the Queen’’ when they promised no future for any England dreaming. Their bass player, Sid Vicious, who was addicted to heroin, would hammer one audience member across the head with his guitar. While suffering withdrawals on another evening, he’d even attack his own bodyguard. On January 1978, it would all fall apart in the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, the same city where the Beatles ended their concert career. The Sex Pistols faced a nasty audience throwing a variety of projectiles at the band with lead singer Johnny Rotten leaning into his mike as if fighting off a hailstorm. They did one encore: appropriately Iggy & the Stooges’ ‘‘No Fun’’—and disappeared. The band would ostensibly break up that night. It was a year after Elvis Presley was found dead that the Sex Pistols stormed America. Two years later, in 1979, Neil Young would commemorate both in his song ‘‘Hey Hey, My My (Out of the Black).’’ But just as Neil Young appraised the current state of rock, John Lennon decided to come out of retirement to add a different perspective. He wanted to return to the studio to record an album with his wife that would celebrate their current relationship. He’d been away for five years helping raise his son, Sean, and was now ready to face his audience once again. Castigating Neil Young in an interview for proposing that it’s better to burn out than to fade away, Lennon sought to prove him wrong. That is, until an unknown figure named Mark David Chapman stepped out of a New York shadow. Had John Lennon been killed in a car accident, suffered a heart attack, died of cancer, or simply passed away from old age, it would have been tragic but somehow comprehensible. But when Mark David Chapman shot him dead in front of his home on December 8, 1980, the cruel irony of events rippled back to our first discovery of the Beatles. For Chapman wasn’t just an aimless loner like Lee Harvey Oswald, he had been a Beatles’ fan. His intent to commit murder grew from his love of the Beatles, not simply hatred

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borne out of alienation. Nothing had really prepared us for Chapman’s actions—not even Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville. In Altman’s country music jamboree, a fragile singer (Ronnee Blakley) is shot dead by an angry loner as she performs on stage. The idea of assassinating a pop star seemed preposterous to many at the time. But even in Nashville, the killing could be explained as the outcome of a sick mind. He had no vested interest in the star, or the music, but only in the act that would forever define him. Although those elements existed in Chapman, he was also much more. If the Beatles opened a door to Nowhere Land, Mark Chapman retreated into his own fantasy world. In his teens, he considered the Beatles his heroes, smoking grass as they did, and dropping acid, too. Lennon had been his favorite Beatle until 1966 when John made his Jesus remark. As popular as Lennon was with Chapman, nobody in Chapman’s eyes was more popular than Jesus Christ. For years, he would struggle with Lennon’s blasphemy. In the seventies, when Chapman read about John’s affluent life in New York, he perceived it as a betrayal of the Beatles’ egalitarian principles. In his mind, how could a millionaire preach about peace and love? How could a man sing about having no possessions (‘‘Imagine’’) and own yachts, country estates, and farms? Lennon had evolved from being a hero into a false prophet. Worse, Chapman saw Lennon, the man who put on those who obsessed about the Beatles in ‘‘Glass Onion,’’ as laughing at him. He was laughing at all those who had built their lives around the Beatles’ music. So Chapman wanted to make him pay. For solace, he turned to J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel A Catcher in the Rye. Salinger’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is an intelligent and sensitive prep school boy who gets expelled and spends the day in New York observing the ugliness of the world around him, a world that he deplores for its hypocrisy and phoniness. He imagines himself as a catcher in the rye, poised at the edge of a cliff, and protecting children from going over—saving their lives and their innocence. Chapman declared that A Catcher in the Rye was his statement. Armed with both the book and his gun, he went to the Dakota to stalk his former hero. In the weeks before the murder, Chapman had listened to ‘‘God’’ on Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. Hearing him sing about not believing in God—or even believing in the Beatles—enraged and certified Chapman’s desire to kill Lennon. The morning of the shooting, Chapman departed from his hotel and spent the day outside the entrance to the Dakota. At the dinner hour, he caught Lennon and Ono about to leave to the Record Plant Studios to work on Yoko’s new single, ‘‘Walking on Thin Ice.’’ Chapman first shook hands with Lennon and then asked him to sign a copy of his new Double Fantasy album. Photographer Paul Goresh was present to capture a shot of Lennon signing what would become his death warrant. Instead of leaving, Chapman hung around until the evening. Shortly after 10 p.m., Lennon and Ono returned from the studio. As they walked toward the front archway of the Dakota, Chapman took out his .38 revolver and fired five

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shots into Lennon’s back and shoulder. One bullet had pierced John’s aorta causing severe blood loss. John Lennon was declared dead at 11:15 p.m. The news of Lennon’s murder spread rapidly throughout the evening. Radio stations across the dial played Beatles’ music that was only interrupted by reports and interviews. Lennon’s violent death had provided some uncanny parallels. The Beatles had arrived in New York in 1964 to rekindle the utopian spirit of a nation grieving the assassination of their idealistic president. Now in New York City, the assassination of one of the Beatles sent sixties’ idealists into total despair. Many liberals saw Reagan’s election a month earlier as a nail in the coffin of the reformist spirit of the sixties. Now, one month later, part of that very spirit was literally snuffed out. More than that, the horror of Lennon’s murder had now been intrinsically tied to what was so enduringly pleasurable about the Beatles. A few days after his death, I went to a memorial rally at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square for a candlelight vigil. As people sang songs and heard Beatles’ stories recounted by local radio DJ John Donabie and British pop and blues singer Long John Baldry, we shivered in the cold and shared our grief. Most of the evening was a blur, but I remember exactly when the shock gave way to tears. As the Public Address system began to play Lennon’s ‘‘A Day in the Life,’’ the crowd began to sing along. But it wasn’t the words of the song, so choice for the occasion, that put me in touch with the genuine sense of loss I felt. For me, it was the moment toward the end of the song when Lennon’s wailing voice, an instrument of great anguish and great joy, pierced the night air. I tried to hum along, but the joy I experienced hearing the soft yearning contained within its sound turned to unfathomable sadness. A volley of uncontrollable sobs convulsed through me. I wept not just for Lennon but for all the friendships I’d formed because of the Fab Four’s music. Pleasure and pain were now permanently linked in my experience of the Beatles. As fans tried to cope with the loss of John Lennon, the surviving Beatles had a more difficult time. When reporters surrounded McCartney, he looked shellshocked, so he defensively tried to cover his anguish by responding flippantly to the gathered scribes that Lennon’s death was ‘‘a drag.’’ George Harrison merely retreated into his garden home. Ringo Starr had rushed to New York to comfort Yoko and Sean. But it would be well over a year before they could each respond musically to the horror of what took place. Harrison’s ‘‘All Those Years Ago’’ was the first attempt and although Ringo and Paul were present on the track, it came as an awful disappointment. Recorded in May 1981 for his Somewhere in England album, the song had an inappropriately jaunty melody that could have been mistaken for ‘‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’’ The lyrics weren’t much better. In the final verse, Harrison goes from chastising those who don’t believe in God to condemning people who thought Lennon was ‘‘weird.’’ In other words, if people believed in God, Lennon would still be alive today. In April 1982, McCartney finally responded more forthrightly with his tender and plaintive ballad, ‘‘Here Today.’’ Included on his

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Tug of War album, which was produced by George Martin, ‘‘Here Today’’ is an elegant tribute that resists any temptation to be maudlin. But McCartney also takes refuge in the arrangement, as if to provide protection from the troubled emotions that Lennon’s death stirs in him. He reportedly wrote the song at a time when he was considering what the Beatles’ breakup did to their relationship. Although it turned them into enemies, he knew they weren’t really enemies. The polar dynamic of the two men had always created tension, which in the Beatles they used to provide the emotional pull of their best songs. But apart, that tension was only exacerbated. ‘‘The dissolution of the Beatles reveals that their compromises had always been psychological first, and musical second, and that without each other they both drift naturally to their own emotional-musical extreme,’’ wrote critic Jon Landau.13 In ‘‘Here Today,’’ McCartney nobly tries to reach out to Lennon from that emotionalmusical extreme, but that position also provides distance for him. If we were to interpret, say, ‘‘The Long and Winding Road’’ as a song about his feelings for Lennon, it would be more stirring than ‘‘Here Today.’’ Within the wistfulness of ‘‘The Long and Winding Road’’ is a more naked acceptance that their dream is over. The best song about the death of John Lennon didn’t come from any Beatle, it came instead from a fellow New Yorker: Paul Simon. On his 1983 criminally underrated album Hearts and Bones, Simon concluded the record with a song called ‘‘The Late Great Johnny Ace’’ that did more to capture the irresolvable underpinnings of Lennon’s murder than any other tune. Perhaps because Simon was also one part of a musical partnership that was fraught with unresolved bickering, he understood the nuances at work within this tragic event. Hearts and Bones was originally supposed to be a reunion record for Simon and Garfunkel, to follow up their concert together in Central Park in 1981. But, as usual, creative tensions erupted between them while they were in the studio. Garfunkel wasn’t comfortable with the intimate nature of Simon’s songs, and Simon wasn’t happy with Garfunkel’s vocals. When they abandoned the project, Simon erased his partner’s voice from the completed tracks and started reworking the songs for a solo album. ‘‘The Late Great Johnny Ace’’ recounts the story of R&B legend Johnny Ace. Ace was born John Marshall Alexander Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, and was the son of a preacher. He became Johnny Ace when he signed to Duke Records in 1952. ‘‘My Song’’ was his first big R&B hit (covered by Aretha Franklin in 1968), but in 1954 he came upon a haunting blues ballad that would come to define his life and his death. Like most R&B love songs, ‘‘Pledging My Love’’ was a plea, a promise of pure devotion, where always and forever, the singer will be true to his lover. Ace’s performance isn’t just heartfelt; its certainty leaves no room for doubt. ‘‘Pledging My Love’’ is as intimate as a love letter, yet its promise weighs as heavy as the world itself. One night, shortly after releasing the song, Ace was on tour with Big Mama Thornton (‘‘Hound Dog’’). During a break between sets, Ace took some PCP

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(angel dust) and started playing around with a loaded pistol. After having aimed it at his girlfriend and attempted to shoot her friend, he turned the gun on himself and it went off, killing him instantly. Within weeks, ‘‘Pledging My Love’’ went to #1—quite literally—with a bullet. His funeral on January 2, 1955, in Memphis, was attended by close to 5,000 people. Paul Simon begins his song with a hesitant melody in which he reminisces back to when he first heard the announcement on the radio that Johnny Ace was dead. Although he feels sad, he acknowledges that he wasn’t such a fan. Nevertheless, he sends away for a photograph of the late R&B star which is signed to him by the label: ‘‘From the late, great Johnny Ace.’’ Simon then jumps ahead in time to 1964 to when he lived in London and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones ruled the airwaves. He has discovered the love of a woman and a whole new sound of music. But just as he basks in the joy of remembering the innocent thrill of that time, he leaps forward in the song to the cold December evening when a stranger in the street tells him that John Lennon had died. The slow, halting melody that opened the song now returns as Simon and the stranger head to a bar. They decide to close the place by playing songs that they dedicate to the late, great Johnny Ace. Philip Glass adds a mournful string coda to complete the song and seal the memories contained on it. While Lennon never discussed the music of Johnny Ace, or any familiarity with ‘‘Pledging My Love,’’ it’s clear why Paul Simon considers it. Besides the play on the word Johnny (which connects both men), ‘‘Pledging My Love’’ had contained the same seeds of promise that many of us heard in ‘‘There’s a Place’’ or ‘‘Please Please Me.’’ Simon may admit in the song that he wasn’t a Johnny Ace fan, but it was the first record he ever bought. And he responds to the covenant that Ace’s song offers him—just as we responded to the Beatles’ promise to us. Johnny Ace’s demise, though, had turned ‘‘Pledging My Love’’ into an alluring death letter, an eerily beautiful tune that laid bare the fragile guarantees of pleasure. As love and death intertwined as equal partners that take Simon into the heady sixties, the cost of those groovy times gets exacted on that cold December night in 1980. When the singer and the stranger perform songs in the bar for the late, great Johnny Ace, they are not just paying tribute to the man who was shot dead in front of the Dakota or the R&B legend who shot himself dead in an unwitting game of Russian Roulette, they are performing for the ambiguous vow those artists offered that made Simon’s own music possible. Paul Simon first performed ‘‘The Late, Great Johnny Ace’’ during that reunion concert with Art Garfunkel in Central Park. Near the conclusion of the song, though, a fan rushed to the stage and threatened Simon. As Simon jumped back, security led the assailant away. While departing, he yelled to Simon, ‘‘I gotta talk to you, I gotta talk to you.’’ A year later on Late Night with David Letterman, Simon discussed the incident with Letterman. When he was asked to perform the tune, Simon borrowed an acoustic

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guitar and played it from his seat. But before he could finish it, Letterman cut to a commercial. Simon didn’t play it again until 2000 as part of his You’re the One tour. But this time, he began by performing ‘‘Pledging My Love’’ before leading into ‘‘The Late, Great Johnny Ace.’’ With time having passed since Johnny Ace’s death, as well as Lennon’s murder, audiences now respectfully sat and listened. With the possibilities of a Beatles reunion now hopelessly dashed, fans consoled themselves with various TV movies about Lennon’s life, his love affair with Yoko, and compilation albums. While most of the films were forgettable, obviously exploiting the loss of Lennon, Iain Softley’s 1994 Backbeat was a memorable exception. Chronicling the early days of the Beatles in Hamburg, Softley chose to examine the relationship between Lennon (Ian Hart) and Stuart Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff). Based on the book The Real Life Story Behind Backbeat—Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle by Alan Clayson and Pauline Sutcliffe, Backbeat illuminates the backstory of their beginnings with the hindsight we have today of what their future would bring. But it does that without any self-consciousness or pandering to the grief people still felt about the loss of Lennon. A Liverpudlian actor, Hart easily captures the charisma of Lennon’s Scouser personality even though he lacks much of John’s chiseled handsomeness. Dorff brings out Sutcliffe’s bohemian soul, too, which allows him both to embrace the German existentialists and to comfortably maintain his love of rock ’n’ roll. Sheryl Lee, who was an unsettling, haunting presence playing Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks, is a sculpted vision of adolescent sensuality as Astrid Kirchherr. It’s easy to imagine Stuart—and John—falling in love with her. She’s a dream of the freedom that both Lennon and Sutcliffe, in their own different ways, seek to find. Backbeat tries to illustrate how the first Beatles’ partnership was actually Lennon and Sutcliffe, before it became clear that only Lennon and McCartney could make the band famous. The film pares off the couples—including Sutcliffe and Kirchherr—to explore the inner dynamics of both love and art. While Backbeat isn’t always faithful to the true story (in order to be deferential to Lennon, they have him singing all the rock songs, including ‘‘Long Tall Sally,’’ which only McCartney ever sang), the film does enhance a moment before the entire world changed—when the birth of one artistic explosion (the Beatles) had answered the death of another artist (Sutcliffe). The music of the Beatles was provided by a motley collection of nineties’ rockers from the ‘‘grunge’’ school—Dave Pirner (Soul Asylum) and Greg Dulli (the Afghan Whigs) provided the vocals for Lennon and McCartney; Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and Don Fleming (Gumball) played guitars; Mike Mills (R.E.M.) performed on bass; and Dave Grohl (Nirvana) was behind the drum kit. Just as Backbeat was providing a vivid glimpse of the Beatles’ past, the surviving members were about to take a walk of their own down memory

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lane. Back in 1984, EMI engineer John Barrett was hired to collate the complete Beatles’ catalog in the archives. When he saw the wealth of alternative takes and unreleased recordings, the surviving group members were approached about putting together an album. Simultaneously, a documentary film was being considered for television that would tell their version of the Beatles’ story. When Apple was collapsing in chaos in 1969, McCartney had told road manager Neil Aspinall to collect as much of the Beatles’ film footage as he could find at large in the world. Besides checking their own library, he put out calls to television stations for newsreel material. Within the year, Aspinall had gathered enough film to assemble a 90-minute documentary. He sent the group a copy but they were too busy dealing with the headache of breaking up to bother with it. The footage sat on the shelf until 1989. By then, the legal dust had settled between the Beatles and Apple, so the idea came up once again to do this chronicle. At first, he thought of calling it The Long and Winding Road, but after someone made a remark to Aspinall comparing his archiving procedure to assembling an anthology, the project became known as The Beatles Anthology. While creating this epic study of their career, they decided to abandon the conventional narrator and instead use portions of interviews—new and old— to provide the story. The absence of John Lennon meant that they would have to rely significantly on old footage and audio interviews in order to get his voice in the mix. The series, which included numerous rare and familiar film clips, press conferences, and concert footage, was shown over three nights on ABC television beginning Sunday, November 19, 1995. Eventually, a 10-hour expanded version was issued on VHS and DVD. While the full scope of the series provided the Beatles’ story through their eyes and brought back their enormous social and cultural impact, it was hampered somewhat by its revisionist tendencies. There were no alternate views—even from the Beatle women—to broaden the documentary’s viewpoint. Without the presence of objective voices, the more troubling aspects of their history either get evaded or treated nostalgically. For instance, by the time we get to the period of The Beatles and Let It Be, if you didn’t know better, you’d think their problems were only the result of a few tiny misunderstandings. Yet The Beatles Anthology, especially in its full epic form, clearly affirms their musical and cultural status. It’s astonishing to watch a group of extremely talented men not only survive the cyclone of Beatlemania but still produce that great music. And when they finally broke up, the group members still had yet to reach the age of 30. When the surviving Beatles began going through their old recordings, they decided to produce three double-CDs to chronicle unreleased demos, alternate takes, and unreleased songs. Most of it was of historical rather than artistic importance—with the exception of the exhilarating 1964 cover of Little Willie John’s ‘‘Leave My Kitten Alone,’’ which was left off Beatles for Sale, and the acoustic take of Harrison’s ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps,’’

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which lends a more poignant tone to the tune. But the Beatles were also toying with the idea of doing some new recordings. But without John, they could hardly consider anything they did as the Beatles. Fortunately, Yoko had a solution. When McCartney extended an olive branch to Ono by wishing her a Happy New Year in 1994, it led to further conversations. When they met later that month at McCartney’s induction of Lennon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he informed her of the Anthology project. In order to help John become part of a possible new recording session with his former mates, she gave McCartney tape demos of five songs he had recorded at the Dakota, ‘‘Free as a Bird,’’ ‘‘Real Love,’’ ‘‘Grow Old With Me,’’ ‘‘Now and Then,’’ and ‘‘All For Love.’’ The most obvious track to begin working on was ‘‘Free as a Bird,’’ which Lennon had written in response to his victory of getting his green card—as well his freedom from his EMI contract that tied him to the past. But McCartney saw the opportunity to recast the song as a lament for the lost dream of the Beatles—that is, his lost partnership with Lennon. In the bridge, where McCartney deliberately borrows the melody and lyric from the Shangri-Las’ 1964 masterpiece of heartbreak, ‘‘Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand),’’ he ties together his anguish for Lennon and the love they both shared of the girl group sound. The track concludes with the strumming of a ukulele, part of the George Formby music hall tradition that helped influence the Beatles’ music, and it rides underneath a snippet of tape (played backward) of Lennon. His comment, when played properly, says ‘‘turned out nice again’’ which is a George Formby catchphrase. But heard in the song, Lennon appears to say ‘‘made by John Lennon.’’ Once again, unwitting meanings get derived from innocent production techniques. ‘‘Free as a Bird,’’ which is produced by Jeff Lynne, the cofounder of Electric Light Orchestra and the Traveling Wilburys, is given a thick sonic texture that tries to hide the tape hiss on Lennon’s cassette (making the song sound more like ELO than the Beatles). While Lennon’s voice has a sleepy dreariness to it, the harmonies provided by McCartney and Harrison bring a lilting effervescence to the track. Lynne took on the production duties because George Martin’s hearing had been jeopardized by both age and years of listening to rock. The music video shot for ‘‘Free as a Bird’’ is more evocative than the song. Directed by Joe Pytka (Space Jam), the video gives us—literally—a bird’s eye view of the Beatles’ life. Beginning with the bird flying through a room filled with childhood photos of the individual Beatles, Ringo’s drum fill hits just as it takes flight out of the house and into the Nowhere Land of Beatles’ songs. As the creature flies over the crammed rooftops of Liverpool, where below working-class gents crowd the street and shuffle off to work, the Beatles are inserted into the action having been sourced from other footage. (In this case, the footage from their ‘‘Penny Lane’’ promotional film.) The bird (inspired by ‘‘this bird has flown’’ from ‘‘Norwegian Wood’’) traces their history—literally and figuratively— through their songs. We get references to ‘‘Paperback Writer,’’ the

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gravestone of ‘‘Eleanor Rigby,’’ the orphanage of ‘‘Strawberry Fields,’’ the car crash of ‘‘A Day in the Life,’’ the pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray in ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ while the Beatles, lifted from images in different stages of their career, dart through the streets becoming observers of their own past. By including so many hidden, and not-so-hidden, references to Beatles’ songs, Pytka cleverly invokes the obsessions of Beatles’ fans scanning their music for clues to their meaning. ‘‘Free as a Bird’’ would win the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It was the Beatles’ 34th Top 10 single in America. Although the group never found a way to complete ‘‘Grow Old With Me,’’ ‘‘Now and Then,’’ or ‘‘All For Love,’’ they did tackle ‘‘Real Love.’’ ‘‘Real Love,’’ which was a largely complete piano demo, evolved out of a number of song sketches called ‘‘Girls and Boys’’ and ‘‘Real Life.’’ It originated as a tune from an unfinished stage work Lennon was devising called The Ballad of John and Yoko in 1977 which went through six different takes. The Beatles’ version derives from Lennon’s seventh take. ‘‘Real Love,’’ like ‘‘Free as a Bird,’’ has really nothing to do with the Beatles, but more with his feelings for Yoko. He even opens the song by defining his Beatle years as ‘‘little plans and schemes’’ that ultimately led him to her— and real love. Unlike ‘‘Free as a Bird,’’ which the band enjoyed because they could add something new to the unfinished demo, ‘‘Real Love’’ was largely complete. But it also expresses a sentiment that puts the surviving Beatles in the position of being anonymous sidemen in his song because it celebrates more his partnership with Yoko. And yet, ‘‘Real Love,’’ in its purest harmonies, couldn’t be more Beatle-like in its utopian aspirations. ‘‘The song distilled the purest sense of Beatles—the whole new world so many thought they believed they were living in when the Beatles ruled their lives, if they ever really did,’’ wrote Greil Marcus in his essay ‘‘Nostalgia.’’ ‘‘This is where nostalgia takes you, into never-never land.’’14 It indeed takes you to Nowhere Land. ‘‘Free as a Bird’’ and ‘‘Real Love’’ didn’t grow from the organic collaborative spirit of the Beatles. But the songs were attempts to recreate the nostalgia for the artificial paradise of Nowhere Land. Marcus concluded his piece with a question about where nostalgia actually takes you when a failed utopian spirit leads to murder as it did with John Lennon. ‘‘And if nostalgia is about deep feeling, what is it you’re truly nostalgic for, the music or the death?’’15 Music and death; pleasure and pain; hope and sorrow would make up the contours of a dual-sided coin in the storied history of the Beatles. Then, almost 20 years after Lennon’s murder, we were once again confronted by that duality. On December 30, 1999, at 3 a.m., Michael Abram, a Liverpool resident, broke into George Harrison’s home in Friar Park by breaking a window using a miniature statue of George and the Dragon. Olivia Harrison, his wife, was awoken by the sound of the shattering glass and thought it was a fallen chandelier until she actually heard the intruder. While she alerted the

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staff on their intercom, George awoke and went to investigate. After Harrison spotted Abram’s shadowy figure in the kitchen, the intruder, who was armed with both a knife and spear, started threatening Harrison by lunging at him and stabbing him in his upper body. As Olivia arrived to help her husband, Harrison jumped Abram to protect his wife. Abram then lunged at Olivia and she struck him with a poker. Olivia quickly followed with their table lamp that had a heavy brass base. She knocked Abram off-balance and he then collapsed on the stairs. As the paramedics and police arrived around 3:30 a.m., they found George on the floor holding a towel to his chest while his wife was comforting him. Olivia had minor wounds to her forehead and wrists, but George had been stabbed 10 times leaving him with a punctured right lung and a huge loss of blood. Meanwhile Abram was treated at John Radcliffe Hospital before the police took him into custody and booked him for breaking and entering and attempted murder. Abram hadn’t been the first stalker who had broken into one of Harrison’s homes. A couple days before Christmas Day 1999, Cristin Keleher, a 27-year-old girl broke into his unoccupied estate on Lower Nahiku Road in Maui, Hawaii. She believed that she had a psychic connection with the former Beatle that, in her mind, gave her permission to make herself at home. She relaxed, had a pizza, called her mother in New Jersey, and did her laundry. Harrison’s sister-in-law, Linda Tuckfield, got in touch with the caretaker who contacted the police and they eventually apprehended Keleher. The girl seemed confused that, given her ‘‘connection’’ with Harrison, she’d find herself arrested. At her trial, she pleaded not guilty to firstdegree burglary and fourth-degree theft. She would ultimately be remanded. The Oxford Crown Court, on the other hand, had declared Michael Abram a paranoid schizophrenic. Abram had said that he attacked Harrison because he thought that George had possessed him. He also believed that the Beatles were all witches. Abram had spent a number of weeks traveling down to Oxfordshire to find out where Harrison lived—even begging a cleric to give him the geography of the area. He saw himself much like Mark David Chapman: a man on a mission from God. In November 2000, Abram was cleared of attempted murder on the grounds of insanity but was ordered to be detained at a secure hospital with no time restriction. A year later, on December 1, 2001, George Harrison died of cancer at the age of 58. He had been diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998 but was in remission prior to the attack. Many believed that Abram’s assault had weakened his immune system. ‘‘Of all the songwriting Beatles, Harrison was the one with the most coherent belief system,’’ wrote critic Ian MacDonald after Harrison’s death.16 While not as prolifically gifted as Lennon and McCartney, Harrison proved to be the one most unaffected by the fame of being a Beatle. Having existed in the shadow of his former partners, he was able to emerge in the post-Beatles’ years as solidly himself, not ex-Beatle George. Whether he was producing quirky and fascinating films like The Lonely Passion of

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Judith Hearne or Withnail & I, Harrison was able to maintain his privacy and dignity while still using his influence as a former Fab to help projects that he liked. So when he was attacked, it hurt differently than Lennon. The moment Lennon was killed, in pop culture terms, people experienced symbolically the death of a utopian dream; but when Harrison died, a real man who had lived many dreams had passed away. As the curtain closed on the Beatles and their unparalleled career, the artistic legacy they left behind was unassailable. Their impact was so strong that it not only continued to shadow those who emerged in their wake, it begged the question as to whether something like the Beatles could ever be possible again. ‘‘It’s not a great disaster,’’ Lennon once remarked shortly after the Beatles’ breakup. ‘‘People keep talking about it as if it’s the end of the earth. It’s only a rock group that split up. It’s nothing important. You have all the old records there if you want to reminisce. You have all this great music.’’17 Of course, we do. It was indeed their music that took us to that ephemeral world that was part of their dream. ‘‘There’s a Place’’ was one song, among many, that spoke of an inclusive community where one could find a sense of self, a truth to be shared in common experience. Today in just about every country around the globe, people still listen to the Beatles’ music and easily quote their lyrics. Yet while the music continues to live on in the global village they helped design, the dream they once offered to us in a time of grand possibilities is only truly alive in our imagination. It’s in that life of the imagination, too, where many people have tried to find new ways to tell their story. Eric Idle of Monty Python, along with Lorne Michaels, created the mock TV documentary The Rutles: All You Need is Cash (1978), where the Beatles are satirized as the Pre-Fab Four known as the Rutles. Idle affectionately parodies the Beatles’ rise to fame by turning their success into absurd mockery. (Director Rob Reiner, in 1984, obviously used The Rutles as his working model for This is Spinal Tap.) If Idle sets out to debunk the mythology of the Beatles, it’s not to diminish the impact of their dream. The Rutles: All You Need is Cash gently mocks our obsession with the band. So does Mark Shipper in his 1978 novel Paperback Writer: The Life and Times of the Beatles: The Spurious Chronicle of Their Rise to Stardom, Their Triumphs & Disasters, Plus the Amazing Story of Their Ultimate Reunion. Shipper wrote his book at the height of the public cry for a Beatles’ reunion—so he provided one. But in doing that, he also chronicled their rise to stardom as a rumor that somebody might have started in a bar. Shipper takes you down those crooked roads of exaggeration and speculation. He knocks on the door of celebrity obsession and leads you, to paraphrase Lennon, to where nothing is real. But Paperback Writer doesn’t set out to incite in the reader the disillusioned vindictiveness of a Mark David Chapman. Shipper is actually poking more fun at fans for not letting the Beatles pass into their cultural memory.

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Like The Rutles, Paperback Writer plays games with the story we thought we knew. In Shipper’s tale, Brian Epstein is a plumber who just happened to discover the Beatles in the Cavern Club while fixing a toilet—only then did he become their manager. When McCartney recorded ‘‘Yesterday,’’ the Beatles briefly considered letting him release it as a solo single (since the other Beatles weren’t on it). Shipper even has Paul release a solo album before the group exists. A Hard Day’s Night is the group’s only movie— and it’s a drama with no music in it. (Time magazine also pans it.) Help! is no longer their follow-up film and the music on the record isn’t even their own. Apparently bankrupt of new ideas, they simply cover popular songs from the first era of rock ’n’ roll. George quits the Beatles in 1966, after John’s comments about Jesus, because (as a Christian) he is offended. Lennon, meanwhile, claims that he said the Beatles were ‘‘taller’’ than Jesus, not more popular. All through Paperback Writer, Shipper plays shell games with our recollections. But the book fails in delivering its climatic punch line. When the Beatles do reunite to do an album called Get Back in 1979 for CBS Records, the selection of songs are such obvious parodies that they don’t ring true as Beatles’ music. Up until then, Shipper cleverly toys with our remembered responses to the Beatles, keeping everything within the realm of absurd believability. But, by the end, the book becomes absurd banality rather than smartly satiric. (There is one good joke though: the Beatles end up as the opening act for Peter Frampton.) Whenever anyone debunks the Beatles, affectionately or with intended malice, their utopian spirit is always at the heart of it. Given that the world in the wake of the band is not the one hoped for in ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ it’s still tempting to perhaps ask whether the dream was worth having and sharing to begin with. To answer that question, musician Larry Kirwan, lead singer of the New York-based Irish rock group, Black 47, wrote a riveting novel called Liverpool Fantasy that imagines England without the emergence of the Beatles. Besides playing music, Kirwan has written and produced several plays that have been performed in both Europe and the United States, but most of them have dealt with Irish history and politics. Liverpool Fantasy is a dystopian look at life without the Beatles that doesn’t spare the reader or ridicule the dream. In Liverpool Fantasy, Kirwan asks what might have happened had the Beatles split up before their thunderbolt ‘‘Please Please Me’’ had hit the airwaves and broke them in England. In the novel, Brian Epstein and George Martin believe that the band’s cover of the quiet ballad ‘‘Till There Was You’’ will do better. While Lennon balks at the suggestion, McCartney is happy to go along (after all, he sings it). At which point, Lennon storms out of the studio taking George and Ringo with him. The Beatles are no more. Kirwan then cuts to 1987 where the picture of England isn’t an artistic renaissance, but a fascist state where the National Front, bearing the slogans of the ultraright Enoch Powell, have struck a coalition with the Tories. Unemployment is high. Racism is

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pervasive. And the Beatles never happened. John Lennon is now a bitter alcoholic on the dole having watched his adolescent dreams come to nothing. His son Julian, angered by his father’s emptiness, adopts the fascist dream as his own and joins the National Front. George Harrison ends up a Jesuit priest who found his spiritual beliefs earlier in life. Without his defining moment in the Beatles, he dispenses empty homilies without hope that things will ever change. The priest’s collar hangs around his neck like a noose. Ringo lives off the earnings of his wife Maureen’s hairdressing salons. Only Paul became a musical success, but he’s hardly happy about it. Living in Las Vegas, under the name Paul Montana (a cute play on an early pseudonym, Paul Ramone), McCartney is the one experiencing his ‘‘fat Elvis’’ period rather than Lennon. Divorced and now remarried to an attractive trailer park sharpie, Paul is haunted by nightmares of what might have been. He’s not alone. Back in Liverpool, Lennon has to live with the curse that the promise of ‘‘Please Please Me’’ was never fulfilled and that thoughts of pleasing aren’t in anyone’s vocabulary. Liverpool Fantasy is a brilliantly astute and stinging black comedy that tells us whatever dark shadow was ultimately cast by the Beatles’ utopian spirit, their music created a vision of life that changed the way we see the world. Kirwan makes his characters aware of that possibility even though they never get to experience it. They know that their music would have made a different world than the one they are living in. When McCartney comes back to the dismal streets of Liverpool, the home he abandoned for fame in America, he seeks to reunite with Lennon, Harrison, and Starr to begin again where they once left off. But Kirwan is no sentimentalist. What makes the emotional core of his book so resonant and so true is that he doesn’t cheapen the Beatles’ lives by redeeming them from past mistakes. Liverpool Fantasy is about how you learn to live with those mistakes—and maybe even in spite of them. Yet instead of the violent, hopeless streets of Liverpool drawn by the Beatles’ absence in history in Liverpool Fantasy, the reality of Liverpool today is almost entirely because of the Beatles. In June 2008, McCartney staged a concert at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium for 30,000 people to celebrate Liverpool becoming the European Capital of Culture. Meanwhile in Iceland, Yoko Ono helped unveil the Imagine Peace Tower in Reykjavik. The tower is a tall beam of light that emanates from a wishing well which bears the words ‘‘imagine peace’’ in 24 languages. Each year, the tower will be lit from October 9 (Lennon’s birthday) to December 8 (his death). Liverpool Fantasy is a reminder that the alchemy of collaboration brings forth worthwhile fruit. ‘‘Critics make a lot of the ability of the artist to say no to so many things (and artists do), but they tend to overlook the power of saying yes,’’ critic Dave Marsh wrote in The Beatles’ Second Album. ‘‘They miss the defiance in it and the daring.’’18 The Beatles’ ‘‘yes’’ was then a defiant statement and it still is today, especially in a world that’s grown too comfortable with the limitations offered by saying ‘‘no.’’ As a group, they are now part of

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history, but they still continue to make history through the continued discovery of their timeless music. ‘‘Chances are because the Beatles reclaimed the promise that pop songs could work as both disruption and epiphany—you might not hear rock & roll as the force of revolution and revelation that it has been heard as for these last few decades,’’ explained Mikal Gilmore in Night Beat.19 That force they exerted was only possible because of the powerful magnetism of four very distinct individuals who found a common purpose. ‘‘[The Beatles] still exert this astonishing power,’’ McCartney admits today. ‘‘They’re like a magnetic force. The more all four of us tried to pull away from them, the harder they pulled us back. And they still do.’’20 Yet despite that pull, the Beatles resisted a reunion of the group because they knew that finding Nowhere Land is not like returning home again. ‘‘What happened was great in its time, but whenever you try to recapture something that existed before, you’re walking on dangerous ground, like when you go back to a place that you loved as a child and you find it’s been rebuilt,’’ said George Martin six years after the band broke up.21 The story of the Beatles and the quest for an artificial paradise was the best kind of cultural fairy tale. ‘‘[It’s] something that begins with great promise [but] bitterly shatters, and everyone who cared about it has to somehow find a way to preserve its best elements for themselves—and go on,’’ wrote critic Anthony DeCurtis. 22 That summarizes the Beatles’ utopian dream, and probably its aftermath as well as anyone could. Greil Marcus once wrote of a lasting image of the Beatles that he couldn’t shake. It was the final frame of Help! where the smiling face of John Lennon seemed to be, in Marcus’s mind, ‘‘smiling over a whole generation.’’23 But Marcus felt just as much pain in that smile as joy because, as he puts it, ‘‘things could never be so simple.’’24 What he acknowledged was seeing their utopian spirit present in Lennon’s smile. Within it was an added trace of Nowhere Land, a place where the pleasure of that smile could indeed be shared, where a human being could also feel a special part of it. ‘‘The Beatles’ promise came alive,’’ Marcus explained, ‘‘and in that utopia, since utopia means ‘no where,’ it also faded beyond reach.’’25 But as quickly as it fades beyond reach, we discover that it always comes back in a song.

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NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Lester Bangs, ‘‘The British Invasion,’’ in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Jim Miller (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press Book, 1980), 169. 2. Ibid. 3. Philip Norman, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 314. 4. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 83. 5. McKinney, Magic Circles, 87. 6. Mikal Gilmore, Night Beat (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 29. 7. Robert Everett-Green, ‘‘The Boss Is Still Boss,’’ (Toronto) Globe and Mail, October 16, 2007, R2. 8. Tommy Lee Jones, ‘‘Close & Personal,’’ Uncut, February 2008, 108. 9. Ozzy Osborne, ‘‘The Uncut 100,’’ Uncut, September 2005, 90. 10. Donovan, interview with Anthony DeCurtis, ‘‘Donovan’s Calling: Forty Years in Search of the Muse,’’ Try for the Sun: The Journey of Donovan, CD box set booklet (Sony Music, 2003). 11. Michael Kamen, ‘‘The Beatles’ Revolution,’’ ABC Television, November 10, 2000. 12. Gene Pitney, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 313. 13. Dawn Eden and Simon Moran, ‘‘Roll Up, Roll Up. . .,’’ Mojo, June 1999, 18. 14. Vit Wagner, ‘‘A Hard Day’s Delight,’’ Toronto Star, Sunday December 17, 2006, C3. 15. Eden and Moran, ‘‘Roll Up, Roll Up. . .,’’ 19. 16. Ann Hood, ‘‘Now I Need a Place to Hide Away,’’ New York Times, February 26, 2006, 11.

282 17. 18. 19. 20.

Notes Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Dave Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album (New York: Rodale Press, 2007), 171.

PROLOGUE 1. John Lennon, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 192. 2. Ian McEwen, The Innocent (New York: Doubleday, 1990). 3. Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 145. 4. Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head (London: Pimlico, 2005), 27. 5. Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 156. 6. Greil Marcus, ‘‘Life and Life Only,’’ Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–92 (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 167. 7. John Lennon, quoted in David Pritchard and Alan Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History (Canada: Stoddart Publishing, 1998), 303. 8. John Lennon, quoted in Steve Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 96. 9. Albert Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988), 123. 10. Ibid., 375. 11. Keith Richards, quoted in Tim Riley, Tell Me Why (New York: De Capo Press, 2002), 410. 12. Giles Martin, CD booklet, Love (Apple, 2006). 13. Ibid. 14. George Martin, Love album track notes, November 21, 2006, www .norwegianwood.org. 15. Ibid. CHAPTER 1 1. Paul McCartney, quoted in Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), 122. 2. Paul McCartney, quoted in John Blaney, Lennon and McCartney Together Alone (London: Jawbone Press, 2007), 240. 3. Paul McCartney, interview by Jim Irvin, ‘‘Little Sir Echo,’’ Mojo, November 1999, 90. 4. Paul McCartney, interview with Jon Wilde, ‘‘Mac to Where He Once Belonged,’’ Uncut, October 2005, 94. 5. Bob Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2005), 15. 6. Hal Hinson, Review of The Dressmaker. Reprinted in Produced and Abandoned: The National Society of Film Critics Write On the Best Films You’ve Never Seen (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1990), 132. 7. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 25.

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8. McKinney, Magic Circles, 14. 9. Ibid. 10. George Harrison, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 201. 11. Paul McCartney, interview with Jon Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ Uncut, July 2004, 47. 12. Ibid., 50. 13. Gilmore, Night Beat, 26. 14. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 41. 15. Jimmy Page, ‘‘The Guv’nors,’’ Mojo, August 2004, 66. 16. Sam Leach, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 7, 8. 17. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 12. 18. Paul McCartney, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 19. 19. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 135. 20. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 21. 21. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 64, 65. 22. Julia Baird, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 5. 23. McKinney, Magic Circles, 21, 22. 24. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, 39. 25. Riley, Tell Me Why, 10. 26. Steve Turner, A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Song (London: Carlton Books, 2005), 68. 27. Paul McCartney, interview with Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ 48. 28. McKinney, Magic Circles, 230. 29. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 190. 30. Ben Gerson, Review of John Lennon’s album Imagine, October 28, 1971. The Rolling Stone Record Review Volume II (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974), 8. 31. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 68. 32. Walter Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14. 33. Al Kooper, quoted in Dave Marsh, ‘‘Nice Country, We’ll Take It,’’ Mojo, September 2004, 57, 60. 34. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 63. 35. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 41. 36. Jonathan Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America (New York: Harmony Books, 2007), 83. 37. McKinney, Magic Circles, 31. 38. Allan Williams, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 42, 43. 39. Ibid. 40. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 46. 41. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 46. 42. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 46. 43. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 46. 44. George Harrison, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 51.

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45. Klaus Voorman, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 45, 46. 46. Ibid. 47. Astrid Kirchherr, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 47. 48. Ibid., 47, 48. 49. Astrid Kirchherr, quoted in Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 74. 50. Bill Harry, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 59. 51. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 109. 52. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 59. 53. Brian Epstein, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 81. 54. Alistair Taylor, quoted in Johnny Black, ‘‘A Tale of Two Cities,’’ The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2004), 29. 55. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 122. 56. Astrid Kirchherr, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 91. CHAPTER 2 1. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 281. 2. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 110. 3. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 3. 4. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 180. 5. McKinney, Magic Circles, 44. 6. Riley, Tell Me Why, 17. 7. George Martin, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 193. 8. Riley, Tell Me Why, 25. 9. Ringo Starr, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 80. 10. Phil Collins, ‘‘Phil’s Fab Epiphany,’’ Mojo, December 2002, 32. 11. Starr, The Beatles Anthology, 36. 12. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 72. 13. George Martin, quoted in Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions (New York: Harmony Press, 1988), 7. 14. Paul McCartney, Ibid. 15. Paul McCartney, quoted in Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, 83. 16. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 57. 17. Ibid., 59, 60. 18. Paul McCartney, quoted in Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, 38, 91. 19. Delbert McClinton, quoted in Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 23. 20. Paul McCartney, quoted in Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, 91. 21. Starr, The Beatles Anthology, 76.

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22. Ringo Starr, interview by Patrick Humphries, ‘‘Stop and Smell the Roses,’’ Mojo, August 1998, 144. 23. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, 127. 24. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 61. 25. Paul McCartney, quoted in Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, 38. 26. While The Beatles Live! At the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, 1962 has been available for many years on both LP and CD, on a variety of bootleg labels, lawyers for Apple Corps Ltd. sued a company called Fuego Entertainment Inc. in March 2008 from re-releasing the material. While the surviving Beatles’ lawyers claim that the new CD, which was to include some songs unreleased on previous releases (including McCartney singing Hank Williams’ ‘‘Lovesick Blues’’), were taped without the consent of the band. 27. Pauline Kael, Review of The Blue Angel. 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991), 85. 28. McKinney, Magic Circles, 38. 29. Paul McCartney, interview with Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ 52. 30. Paul McCartney, quoted in Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 21. 31. John Lennon, interview with David Sheff, The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, ed. G. Barry Colson (New York: Playboy Press, 1981), 142, 143. 32. Paul McCartney, quoted in Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, 91. 33. Ibid. 34. Riley, Tell Me Why, 47. 35. Norman Smith, quoted in Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions (Toronto: Doubleday Canada Ltd, 1988), 23. 36. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 64. In the early years of the Beatles’ recordings, they were mixed in both stereo and mono. Mono was the preferred mix for singles, but stereo was becoming a prominent format because of the emergence of the LP. In the case of ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ mixed on February 23, 1962, the mono mix differs from the stereo. Using different takes of the song, the mono version is from a note perfect version. As for the stereo mix, it’s from a less-than-perfect recording. Lennon flubs a line toward the end of the take leaving him chuckling slightly as he sings, ‘‘Come on,’’ on the next line. 37. Roy Orbison, quoted in Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 22. 38. See MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 64, 65. 39. Paul McCartney, quoted in Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 18. 40. Riley, Tell Me Why, 49, 50. 41. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 68. 42. See Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 20. 43. John Robertson [Peter Doggett], The Art and Music of John Lennon (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991), 17. 44. Paul McCartney, quoted in Richard Younger, ‘‘No Direction Home,’’ Mojo, December 1995, 96. 45. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 309. 46. Arthur Alexander, quoted in Younger, ‘‘No Direction Home,’’ 97. 47. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 73. 48. Vivian Mackay, ‘‘Girl Power to the People,’’ Uncut, October 2005, 126.

286

Notes

49. Greil Marcus, ‘‘The Girl Groups,’’ The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Jim Miller (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press Book, 1980), 160. 50. Ibid., 161. 51. Greil Marcus, ‘‘Refried Beatles,’’ Rolling Stone, July 15, 1976, 80. 52. Riley, Tell Me Why, 55. 53. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 172. 54. Billy J. Kramer, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 116. 55. When the North American ‘‘1962–1966’’ and ‘‘1967–1970’’ Beatles best of collection was released in the early seventies, EMI used this photo as the cover of the ‘‘1962–1966’’ cover, plus an imitative photo from the same location and vantage point from a 1969 session. 56. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 140. 57. George Martin, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 125. 58. Ibid. 59. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 33. 60. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 159. 61. Ibid. 62. George Martin, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 107. 63. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 34. 64. Collins, ‘‘Phil’s Fab Epiphany,’’ 32. 65. Robbie McIntosh, ‘‘The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,’’ Mojo, June 1996, 92. 66. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 69. 67. Ibid., 70. 68. Bill Wyman, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 171. 69. Keith Richards, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 170. 70. Yoko Ono, ‘‘In the Beginning,’’ Mojo, July 2002, 154. 71. George Martin, ‘‘Martin Remembers,’’ Rolling Stone, July 15, 1976, 20. 72. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 46, 47. 73. William Mann, ‘‘What Songs the Beatles Sang. . .,’’ The Times (London), December 23, 1963. Reprinted in June Skinner Sawyers, ed., Read the Beatles (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 46. 74. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 74. 75. Marsh, ‘‘Nice Country, We’ll Take It,’’ 60. 76. Marcus, ‘‘Refried Beatles,’’ 80. 77. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 34. CHAPTER 3 1. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 14, 15. 2. Hunter Davies, The Beatles: The Authorized Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 192.

Notes

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3. Stephen James, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 130. 4. Dave Dexter Jr., quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 134. 5. Paul White, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 141. 6. Martin Goldsmith, The Beatles Come to America (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004). Reprinted in Sawyers, Read the Beatles, 44. 7. Ibid. 8. Greil Marcus, ‘‘The Beatles,’’ in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Jim Miller (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press Book, 1980), 181. 9. George Harrison, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 147. 10. In Canada, the mood was equally dark and forlorn on November 22, 1963. My ninth birthday was the next day after Kennedy was assassinated. Since my entire neighborhood of West Rouge, Ontario, was in mourning, my party was cancelled. I didn’t get around to celebrating it until 2006. 11. Marsh, ‘‘Nice Country, We’ll Take It,’’ 56, 60. 12. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 158. 13. Ibid. 14. McKinney, Magic Circles, 54, 56. 15. Alice Cooper, ‘‘The Mojo Hall of Fame 100,’’ Mojo, November 2003, 106. 16. Alice Cooper, ‘‘American Excess,’’ Mojo, December 2005, 48. 17. Dee Snider, ‘‘I Read the News Today, Oh Boy. . .,’’ Uncut, October 2005, 53. 18. Geoffrey O’Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life (New York: Counterpoint Press, 2004), 149. 19. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 88. 20. Paul McCartney, quoted in Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles Live! (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 172. 21. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 156. 22. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 58. 23. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 60. 24. Carl Perkins, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 167, 168. 25. Carl Perkins, Interviewed by Max Decharne, ‘‘Grand Theft Auto,’’ Mojo, September 2004, 59. 26. Greil Marcus, ‘‘Rock Films,’’ in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Jim Miller (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press Book, 1980), 390. 27. Walter Shenson, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 162. 28. Richard Lester, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 162. 29. Marcus, ‘‘Rock Films,’’ 393. 30. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 47. 31. Ibid. 32. Riley, Tell Me Why, 33.

288

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33. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 111. 34. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 169. 35. Ibid. 36. Martin, ‘‘Martin Remembers,’’ 20. 37. Roger McGuinn, Interviewed by Sid Griffin, ‘‘Rock Was Dead Before the Beatles,’’ Mojo, September 2004, 61. 38. David Crosby, Interviewed by Griffin, ‘‘Rock Was Dead Before the Beatles,’’ 61. 39. Andrew Sarris, ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night,’’ Village Voice, August 27, 1964. Reprinted in Sawyers, Read the Beatles, 56. 40. Bosley Crowther, quoted in Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 511. 41. McKinney, Magic Circles, 74. 42. Bangs, ‘‘The British Invasion,’’ 173. 43. Pauline Kael, Review of Having a Wild Weekend. 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991), 321. 44. O’Brien, Sonata for Jukebox, 150. 45. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 533. 46. John Lennon, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 173. 47. Ibid. 48. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 143. 49. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 143. 50. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 143. 51. Bob Rogers, quoted in Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 171. 52. Jim Oram, quoted in Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 171. 53. Ibid. 54. Ronnie Spector, ‘‘Speak Easy,’’ Mojo, June 1999, 11. 55. Martin, The Beatles Anthology, 153. 56. Larry Kane, ‘‘No Sleep ’Til Jacksonville,’’ Mojo, September 2004, 63. 57. Ibid., 62. 58. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 150. 59. Ibid., 155. 60. Bob Dylan, quote from Anthony Scaduto’s biography Dylan. ‘‘Revolution in His Head,’’ Mojo, February 2005, 66. 61. McKinney, Magic Circles, 104. 62. Kane, ‘‘No Sleep ’Til Jacksonville,’’ 66. 63. Ibid. 64. Larry Kane, Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles’ 1964 Tour That Changed the World (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2003). Reprinted in Sawyers, Read the Beatles, 71. 65. Starr, The Beatles Anthology, 153. 66. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 157. 67. Ibid. CHAPTER 4 1. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 60. 2. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, 253.

Notes

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3. Ibid., 271. 4. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 64. 5. John Lennon, Interviewed by Jann Wenner, Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), 29. 6. McKinney, Magic Circles, 39. 7. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 553. 8. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 146. 9. Richard Lester, ‘‘Remastered Version of Help! unveiled,’’ (Toronto) Globe and Mail, Wednesday, September 26, 2007, R4. 10. McKinney, Magic Circles, 72. 11. Victor Spinetti, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 187, 188. 12. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 171. 13. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 177, 178. 14. Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made (New York: De Capo Press, 1999), 185. 15. Marcus, ‘‘Refried Beatles,’’ 82. 16. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 173. 17. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 82. 18. Paul McCartney, ‘‘The Mojo Interview,’’ Mojo, September 2005, 44. 19. George Harrison, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 226. 20. George Harrison, quoted in Keith Badman, ‘‘Long Live Ze King,’’ in The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: DK Books, 2004), 174. 21. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 191. 22. Paul McCartney, quoted in Badman, ‘‘Long Live Ze King,’’ 174. 23. Ibid. 24. Gary Graff, ‘‘Stax-Volt,’’ in MusicHound R&B: The Essential Album Guide (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1998), 538. 25. Jon Landau, ‘‘Otis Redding,’’ in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Jim Miller (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press Book, 1980), 211. 26. See MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 171, 172. 27. Marcus, ‘‘The Beatles,’’ 188. 28. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 193. 29. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 186. 30. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 106. 31. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 193. 32. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 88. 33. See Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 585. 34. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 90. 35. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 186. 36. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 193. 37. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, 324. 38. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 96. 39. McKinney, Magic Circles, 165. 40. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 97.

290

Notes

41. Riley, Tell Me Why, 168. 42. Ibid., 169. 43. See Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, 318. 44. Nancy Sinatra, ‘‘The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 62. 45. Gilmore, Night Beat, 29. CHAPTER 5 1. Brian Wilson, Foreword, The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2004), 8. 2. Greil Marcus, Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (New York: Albert A. Knopf, 1979), 256. 3. Jim Miller, ‘‘The Beach Boys,’’ in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, ed. Jim Miller (New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press Book, 1980), 162. 4. Brian Wilson, Liner notes, CD of remastered Pet Sounds (Capitol Records, 1999), 5. 5. Ibid., 18. 6. Paul McCartney, quoted in David Leaf, Liner notes for CD box set, Good Vibrations: Thirty Years of the Beach Boys (Capitol, 1993), 36. 7. Ibid. 8. Marcus, Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, 288. 9. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 102. 10. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, 45. Robertson, The Art and Music of John Lennon, 54. 11. George Martin, quoted in Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 605. 12. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 102. 13. McKinney, Magic Circles, 87. 14. Robert Whitaker, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 205, 206. 15. McKinney, Magic Circles, 151. 16. Maureen Cleave, ‘‘How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This,’’ London Evening Standard, March 4, 1966. Reprinted in Sawyers, Read the Beatles, 88. 17. Paul McCartney, interview with Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ 51. 18. Maureen Cleave, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 218. 19. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 226. 20. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 205. 21. Ibid. 22. Starr, The Beatles Anthology, 225. 23. McKinney, Magic Circles, 78. 24. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 54. 25. McKinney, Magic Circles, 175. 26. Geoff Emerick, The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2003), 66. 27. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, 31. 28. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 206.

Notes

291

29. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 122. 30. Lennon, The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 118, 119. 31. See McKinney, Magic Circles, 138. 32. Geoff Emerick, ‘‘Microphone Fiends,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 75. 33. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 190. 34. Ibid., 189, 190. 35. McKinney, Magic Circles, 111, 115. 36. Ashley Kahn, ‘‘Within You, Without You,’’ Mojo, January 2002. 37. Lamont Dozier, quoted in Johnny Black, ‘‘The 100 Greatest Songs of All Time,’’ Mojo, August 2000, 84. 38. Brian Wilson, ‘‘The 100 Greatest Singles of All Time,’’ Mojo, August 1997, 66. 39. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 11. 40. Brendan Benson, ‘‘Timeless Melody,’’ Mojo, May 2003, 73. 41. Emmylou Harris, ‘‘The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 78. 42. Emerick, ‘‘Microphone Fiends,’’ 75. 43. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 116. 44. George Martin, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 209, 210. 45. Emerick, ‘‘Microphone Fiends,’’ 75. 46. Geoff Emerick, quoted in Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions, 72. 47. Klaus Voorman, ‘‘Painted from Memory,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 77. 48. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 255. 49. McKinney, Magic Circles, 174. 50. Elvis Costello, quoted in Paul Du Noyer, ‘‘The Elvis Costello Interview,’’ Mojo, June 1996, 50. 51. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 120. 52. Martin Carr, ‘‘The 100 Greatest Singles of All Time,’’ Mojo, August 1997, 85. 53. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 256. CHAPTER 6 1. Robbie Robertson, ‘‘The 50 Best Albums of 2005,’’ Mojo, January 2006, 63. 2. Phil Ochs, interview in Broadside (October 1965), quoted in Clinton Heylin, Dylan: Behind the Shades (New York: Viking, 1991). 3. Keith Butler, quoted in Andy Gill, ‘‘The Loudest Heckle in History,’’ Mojo, March 1999, 23. 4. Robbie Robertson, quoted in Greil Marcus, The Old, Weird America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), xiv. 5. Ibid. 6. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 18. 7. George Martin, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 247. 8. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 121. 9. Starr, The Beatles Anthology, 242. 10. Julian Lennon, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 238. 11. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 124. 12. McKinney, Magic Circles, 187, 188.

292

Notes

13. George Martin, Love CD, Track by track notes (Apple, November 21, 2006). 14. Geoff Emerick, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 238. 15. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 644. 16. See Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 131. 17. Ibid. 18. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 258. 19. Richard Goldstein, ‘‘We Still Need the Beatles, but. . .,’’ New York Times, June 18, 1967. 20. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 230. 21. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, 269. 22. Red Robinson, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 246. 23. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 118. 24. McKinney, Magic Circles, 186. 25. Ibid., 189. 26. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 242. 27. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 252. 28. Ibid. 29. Goldstein, ‘‘We Still Need the Beatles, but. . .’’ 30. Ibid. 31. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 253. 32. McKinney, Magic Circles, 183. 33. Gilmore, Night Beat, 31. 34. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 697. 35. Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book (New York: Poseidon Press, 1989), 68, 69. 36. Dan Sullivan, ‘‘Mothers of Invention at the Garrick,’’ New York Times, May 25, 1967. 37. Frank Zappa, quoted in Kurt Loder, Bat Chain Puller (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 38. Neil Slaven, Electric Don Quixote (London: Omnibus Press, 1996). 39. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, 236. 40. Pauline Kael, ‘‘Metamorphosis of the Beatles,’’ in Going Steady (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1970), 188, 189. 41. Nik Cohen, Rock from the Beginning (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), 239. 42. Frank Zappa, quoted in Slaven, Electric Don Quixote. 43. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 18. 44. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, 94. 45. Dave Marsh, ‘‘Are You Hung Up?’’ Rock and Roll Confidential, 1993. 46. Kelly Fisher Lowe, The Words and Music of Frank Zappa (Westport, CT: Praeger Books, 2006), 55. 47. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 672. 48. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 19. 49. Rollo May, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (New York: Delta Books, 1972), 56.

Notes

293

50. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 259. 51. Pattie Boyd, Wonderful Tonight (New York: Random House, 2007), 105. 52. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 259. 53. Boyd, Wonderful Tonight, 96. 54. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 261. 55. Neil Aspinall, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 262. 56. McCartney, The Beatles Anthology, 260. 57. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 263. 58. Starr, The Beatles Anthology, 265. 59. John Lennon, interviewed by Jann Wenner, Lennon Remembers: The Rolling Stone Interviews (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971), 52. CHAPTER 7 1. John Lennon, quoted in Susan Lydon, ‘‘New Thing for Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour,’’ Rolling Stone, December 14, 1967. 2. On Frank Zappa’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970), he includes a rather sharp riposte to Lennon’s ‘‘All You Need Is Love’’ in a song called ‘‘Oh No.’’ 3. Rod Argent, ‘‘The Making of ‘Time of the Season’ by the Zombies,’’ Uncut, December 2007, 36. 4. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 285. 5. Jonathan Cott, ‘‘Mystery Tour Shot Down,’’ Rolling Stone, February 10, 1968. 6. Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, 365, 366. 7. See MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 271. 8. Jon Landau, It’s Too Late to Stop Now: A Rock and Roll Journal (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), 52. 9. The information on the Maharishi’s 1968 New York press conference is thanks to William Kloman, ‘‘The Maharishi Meets the Press,’’ Rolling Stone magazine, March 9, 1968. 10. Paul Saltzman, quoted in Mark Paytress, ‘‘A Passage to India,’’ in The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: DK Press, 2004), 299. 11. Mike Love, quoted in Paytress, ‘‘A Passage to India,’’ 300. 12. Paul Saltzman, quoted in Paytress, ‘‘A Passage to India,’’ 300. 13. Paytress, ‘‘A Passage to India,’’ 298. 14. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 154. 15. Alistair Taylor, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 273. 16. Paul McCartney, interview with Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ 51. 17. Starr, The Beatles Anthology, 312. 18. Harrison, The Beatles Anthology, 312. 19. Paul McCartney, interview with Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ 51. 20. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 154. 21. Alistair Taylor, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 273. 22. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 23. 23. Ibid.

294

Notes

24. Ibid. 25. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 299. 26. Ibid. 27. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: The Quarry Men through Rubber Soul, 15. 28. Jon Weiner, Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (New York: Random House, 1984). Reprinted in Sawyers, Read the Beatles, 138. 29. Ibid. 30. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 297. 31. Paul McCartney, quoted in Black, ‘‘The 100 Greatest Songs of All Time,’’ 82. 32. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, 192. 33. McKinney, Magic Circles, 262, 263. 34. George Martin, quoted in Paul Du Noyer, ‘‘Ten Questions for George Martin,’’ Mojo, March 1998, 27. 35. Boyd, Wonderful Tonight, 117. 36. Donovan, ‘‘The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 81. 37. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 152. 38. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 313, 314. 39. George Martin, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 263. 40. Geoff Emerick, w/Howard Massey, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 248. 41. Shaun Ryder, ‘‘The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 62. 42. Ibid. 43. See Turner, A Hard Day’s Write. 44. McKinney, Magic Circles, 229. 45. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 157. 46. Marcus, ‘‘The Beatles,’’ 189. 47. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 160. 48. Ibid., 161. 49. Starr, The Beatles Anthology, 306. 50. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 162. 51. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 281. 52. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 301. 53. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 311. 54. David Sheff, All We Are Saying (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 190, 191. 55. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 166. 56. Paul McCartney, quoted in Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ 54. 57. Andy Partridge, ‘‘Timeless Melody,’’ Mojo, May 2003, 73. 58. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 297. 59. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, 167. 60. John Lennon, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 267. 61. Paul Leary, ‘‘The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 69. 62. George Martin, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 263. 63. McKinney, Magic Circles, 225. 64. Ibid.

Notes

295

65. Turner, A Hard Day’s Write, 149. 66. John Lennon, quoted in Mark Paytress, ‘‘Family Misfortunes,’’ in The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: DK Publishing, 2004), 392. 67. Donovan, quoted in DeCurtis, ‘‘Donovan’s Calling: Forty Years in Search of the Muse.’’ 68. Greil Marcus, ‘‘Flashback: The Music Playing Outside Bill Clinton’s Oxford Dorm Room,’’ in Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 38. 69. Paul Watkins, quoted in Paytress, ‘‘Family Misfortunes,’’ 392. 70. Paytress, ‘‘Family Misfortunes,’’ 392. 71. Danger Mouse, quoted in Renee Graham, ‘‘Jay-Z, The Beatles Meet in ‘Grey’ Area,’’ Boston Globe, February 10, 2004. 72. Danger Mouse, ‘‘The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 95. 73. Tim Harper, quoted in Merrell Noden, ‘‘Dead Man Walking,’’ in The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: DK Publishing, 2004), 400. 74. McKinney, Magic Circles, 324, 325. 75. Philip Norman, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 283. CHAPTER 8 1. Spitz, The Beatles: A Biography, 779. 2. Patrick Humphries, ‘‘Review of Get Back: The Beatles’ Let it Be Disaster,’’ Mojo, March 1999, 116. 3. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 322. 4. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, 213. 5. Ibid., 215. 6. Dave Harries, ‘‘I Hope We Passed the Audition,’’ Mojo, February 1999, 21. 7. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 326. 8. Steve Devine, ‘‘I Hope We Passed the Audition,’’ Mojo, February 1999, 21. 9. Gladys Knight, ‘‘Timeless Melody,’’ Mojo, May 2003, 73. 10. George Martin, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 307. 11. Pete Best, with Patrick Doncaster, Beatle! The Pete Best Story (New York: Dell, 1985), 120. 12. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 345. 13. David Gates, ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy),’’ Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 14. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, 260. 15. George Martin, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 290. 16. John Frusciante, ‘‘The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs,’’ Mojo, July 2006, 66. 17. See The Classic Artists Series: The Moody Blues (DVD, UK, 2006). 18. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, 356. 19. Philip Norman, Shout! The True Story of the Beatles (London: Elm Tree Press, 1981), 381. 20. Goldman, The Lives of John Lennon, 354. 21. Martin, ‘‘Martin Remembers,’’ 87.

296

Notes

22. Ibid. 23. George Harrison, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 291. 24. Everett, The Beatles as Musicians: Revolver through the Anthology, 271. 25. Turner, The Gospel according to the Beatles, 171. 26. Ibid. EPILOGUE 1. Larry Lablanc, quoted in Paul McGrath, ‘‘This Bird Has Flown,’’ The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: DK Publishing, 2004), 395. 2. Little Richard, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 286. 3. Jim Irvin, ‘‘ . . .And in the End,’’ in The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: DK Publishing, 2004), 414. 4. Paul McCartney, quoted in Pritchard and Lysaght, The Beatles: An Oral History, 308. 5. Ringo Starr, quoted in Peter Doggett, ‘‘Fight to the Finish,’’ in The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: DK Publishing, 2004), 423. 6. Jon Landau, Review of Paul McCartney’s Ram, Rolling Stone, July 8, 1971. 7. Paul Trynka, ‘‘When 1 Becomes 4,’’ in The Beatles: 10 Years That Shook the World (London: DK Publishing, 2004), 429. 8. Richard DiLello, quoted in Paul Du Noyer, ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night,’’ Mojo, April 1998. 9. Mike Saunders, Review of Badfinger’s No Dice, Rolling Stone, December 2, 1970. 10. Joey Molland, quoted in Du Noyer, ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night.’’ 11. Marianne Evans, quoted in Du Noyer, ‘‘A Hard Day’s Night.’’ 12. Don Letts, ‘‘Punk File #5: The Secret History,’’ Mojo, June 2006, 78. 13. Jon Landau, Review of Paul McCartney’s Ram, Rolling Stone, July 8, 1971. 14. Greil Marcus, ‘‘Nostalgia,’’ in Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 109. 15. Ibid. 16. MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, xiii. 17. Lennon, The Beatles Anthology, 352, 353. 18. Marsh, The Beatles’ Second Album, 166. 19. Gilmore, Night Beat, 42, 43. 20. Paul McCartney, interview with Wilde, ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ 61. 21. Martin, ‘‘Martin Remembers,’’ 87. 22. Anthony DeCurtis, ‘‘Crossing the Line: The Beatles in My Life.’’ Reprinted in Sawyers, Read the Beatles, 307. 23. Marcus, ‘‘Refried Beatles,’’ 84. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.

INDEX Abbey Road: and Manson (Charles) Family murders, 229–30; recording of, xxxv, 248–54; release date, 241; success of, 254–56 Abbey Road Studios: concert, 4–5; recording, 211 Abram, Michael, 274–75 acid album, 142. See also LSD ‘‘Across the Universe,’’ 197, 222, 241, 242, 251 Across the Universe (film), xxiii–xxiv ‘‘Act Naturally,’’ 113, 219 adultery, 122 Aftermath, 133–34 ‘‘Ain’t She Sweet,’’ 25 Albany Cinema at Maghull, 26 Albert, Marsha, 71–72 albums: covers, xiii, 51, 137–38, 151, 174, 228, 255–56, 286 n.55; debut, xxxi–xxxii. See also specific albums Alexander, Arthur, 46–47 ‘‘All For Love,’’ 273 ‘‘All I Want Is You,’’ 242 ‘‘All I’ve Got to Do,’’ 56–57 ‘‘All My Loving,’’ xiii, 57–58, 73–74, 113, 127 All Things Must Pass, xxxv, 197, 253, 261, 262–63 ‘‘All Those Years Ago,’’ 268 ‘‘All Together Now,’’ 200–201 ‘‘All You Need Is Love,’’ xxxiv, xliv, 124, 189–90

American Bandstand television show, 165 American Bible belt, xv, 139, 266 American folk music revival, 159–60 amphetamines, 89 ‘‘And I Love Her,’’ 87 ‘‘And Your Bird Can Sing,’’ 148 Anfield stadium (Liverpool), 278 animated pictures, 199 ‘‘Anna (Go To Him),’’ 46–47 ‘‘Annus Mirabilis,’’ 43 ‘‘Another Girl,’’ 112–13 Anthology 1, 19, 243–44 Anthology 2, 193 Anthology 3, 216, 253 anti-war movement, 174–75, 181–82, 204, 206 ‘‘Any Time at All,’’ 57, 87, 127 Apple Corps: collapse of, 234–35, 263, 272; under Klein’s direction, 246; recording studios, 241; as startup, xxxv, 202–4, 218 Apple Foundation for the Arts, 202–3, 234–35 ‘‘The Art of Dying,’’ 197 Asher, Jane, 57–58; career moves, 120; cultured background of, 149–50; farewell to, 218; McCartney’s frustrations with, 113, 123, 125; 21st birthday, 188 Ashley, Diane, 253

298 ashram, 197–99 ashram creativity, 211 Ashton, William. See Kramer, Billy J. ‘‘Ask Me Why,’’ 42–43 Ass, 263 At the Drop of a Hat, 33 Australian tour, 95–96 auto accident, 172 automatic double tracking (ADT), 217 Axton, Mae, xxx Babbs, Thurman H., Rev., 139 ‘‘Baby Blue,’’ 263 ‘‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man,’’ 190–91 ‘‘Baby’s in Black,’’ 105 Bach, Barbara, 116 ‘‘Back in the U.S.S.R.,’’ 211, 212–13 Backbeat, xxvi, 271 backward taping, 135 ‘‘Bad Boy,’’ 115–16 Badfinger (album), 263 Badfinger (rock group), 261–64 Bag O’Nails club, 218 Bailey, Pearl, 97 ‘‘Ballad of a Thin Man,’’ 221 ‘‘The Ballad of John and Yoko,’’ 247 The Ballad of John and Yoko, 274 ‘‘The Ballad of Sir Frankie Crisp (Let it Roll),’’ 261 Bambi Kino (Hamburg lodging), 22 Bangladesh benefit concert, 263, 265 Bangs, Lester, 91 bass guitar as lead melodic instrument, 133 basso-bombastico strut, 124 BBC summer television special, 189–90 ‘‘Be-Bop-A-Lula,’’ 12 Beach Boys, 130–34 Beatlefests, xxii–xxiii Beatlemania! 13, 65, 82 Beatlemania: about, xiv, xix, 23; beginnings of, 52; drawbacks of, 98, 102, 108, 138, 141; gender lines within, 69; international scope of, 70; reverence for, 177; setting for, 66–67; waning of, 116, 152

Index The Beatles, xxxv, 10, 94, 222, 227, 231 Beatles’ 1, xxi The Beatles Anthology, 272 Beatles’ Apple Records, 188–89 The Beatles Come to America (Goldsmith), 70 The Beatles First U.S. Visit (documentary), 78 Beatles for Sale, 19, 102–3, 107–8, 121–22 The Beatles Live! 40 The Beatles Live at the Hollywood Bowl, 39 The Beatles Live! At the Star Club in Hamburg, Germany, 285 n.26 Beatles (musical group): after the breakup, xvii, xxxv–xliv; airplay in Canada, xiii; archives, catalog of, 272; compared with Mothers of Invention, 179–80; early years, about, xxix–xxxv; with Epstein, 194; in India, 197–99; inspiration for name, 16; in the Liverpool musical mixing pot, 15–16; name change, 20; persona change, 167; Presley on, 118; response to Lennon’s death, 268–69; Rolling Stones rivalry, 61–62; rumor of Klaatu as Beatles, 264; vision of, xx. See also Quarry Men The Beatles Past Masters, 81 The Beatles’ Revolution, xxi The Beatles’ Second Album, 49, 79, 80 Beatles tribute bands, xxiii Beatles VI, 115–16 Beaucoups of Blues, 260–61 ‘‘Because,’’ xxxviii–xxxix, 72, 252 bed-ins, 246–47 Behm, Marc, 110 ‘‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,’’ 99, 170 Berkeley Barb, 206 Bernstein, Sid, 69, 116 Berry, Chuck, 59–60 ‘‘Besame Mucho,’’ 22, 32 The Best of the Beach Boys, 133 Best, Pete, 18, 21, 34, 35

Index betrayal of fans, xix, 161–63, 267 ‘‘Beware of Darkness,’’ 261 Beyond the Fringe, 33 Bible belt, xv, 139, 266 The Big Beat Scene, 20 ‘‘Birthday,’’ 221 The Black Album, 231 black machismo, 124 ‘‘Blackbird,’’ 212, 218–19 The Blackboard Jungle, xxix, 11 Blonde on Blonde, 160 ‘‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’’ 160 ‘‘Blue Jay Way,’’ 193–94 Blue Meanies, 200, 201, 202 ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes,’’ 238 bomb threats, 96 Booker T. & the MG’s, 119, 250 Boorstin, Daniel J., xxix Boston Garden riot, 100 bouncers, abusiveness, 138 boundaries between high and low culture, 179 Boyd, Pattie, 89, 184–85 ‘‘Boys,’’ 47–48 Bramwell, Tony, 164, 165 brawl on Harrison’s 21st birthday, 53 breast cancer deaths, 2, 4, 12 Brill Building, 18, 47 British Embassy party, 77 British Invasion, 18 Brodax, Al, 199 Brown, Richard ‘‘Rabbit,’’ 188 Browne, Tara, 172, 173 Buckley, William F., 207 Budokan Hall (Tokyo), xv, 138 Burton, Brian. See Danger Mouse bus trips, 188–89 Busch Stadium concert, 140–41 busts of the Beatles’ heads, 185 butcher cover, 137–38 Butler, Keith, 162, 163 buzz saw drone, 102, 150 Byrds, 88–89, 127 ‘‘Can You Take Me Back,’’ 2, 225 Canadian releases, 55 Canadian top hits, 68–69 cancellations, 140

299 Candlestick Park, 141–42 candy pelting, 76–77, 95 ‘‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’’ 78–79, 87, 101–2 Capitol Records: Beatles releases in U.S., 71, 72, 264; changes to Help! (soundtrack), 112; as EMI affiliate, 33; marketing approach, 137; as obstacle, 67, 69; outlook on rock music, 133; refusal from, 42; refusal to release Two Virgins, 237 Capitol Records Canada, 68, 82 Carnegie Hall concerts, 69, 77–78 ‘‘Carnival of Light,’’ 225 ‘‘Carry That Weight,’’ 254 Carter, Shawn Corey. See Jay Z Casbah Club, 18 Cavern Club: Beatles at, 24; Harrison’s performances at, 2–3; last appearance at, 56; Quarry Men at, 13–14; replica in Japan, xxv Centennial Hall (Darwin, Australia), 95 ‘‘Chains,’’ 47–48 Channel, Bruce, 36–37 Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, 3–4, 219 Chapman, Mark David (Lennon’s assassin), xix, 214, 266–68 ‘‘cheerful pessimism,’’ 5–6 ‘‘Child of Nature,’’ 222 Christgau, Robert, 205–6 Christian catechism, criticism of, 125 CHUM radio (Toronto), xiv, 68 Cincinnati concert, 140 Cirque du Soleil Beatles tribute, xxxix–xliv Civil, Alan, 148–49 Civil Rights movement, 119, 139, 159, 218 Clark, Dick, 165 Clash, 38–39 Cleave, Maureen, 122, 139 Cleveland concert, 100 close-miking, 144 cocaine, 257–58 Cochran, Eddie, 12, 20 ‘‘Cold Turkey,’’ 217, 239

300 A Collection of Beatles’ Oldies (But Goldies), 115–16 Collins, Phil, 34 ‘‘Come and Get It,’’ 262 ‘‘Come Go With Me,’’ 11 ‘‘Come On, Come On,’’ 222 ‘‘Come Together,’’ 248 Come Together: John Lennon in His Time, 205 comedy albums, 33–34 community vision, xxxiii–xxxiv ‘‘Concentration Moon,’’ 181 concert filming, 116 concert-to-studio shift, 130 ‘‘The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,’’ 216 Convention Hall (Atlantic City), 99 Cookies, 47–48 Cooper, Alice, 75 copycatting by contemporaries, 178 copyrights, 246, 249, 261 Costello, Elvis, 251 counterculture: criticism from, 205; dawning of, 176; gone awry, 228–29; splintering of, xvii, 227 Coward, Noel, 30 Cox, Maureen, 109 Crawdaddy, 177 Crickets, 16 Crosby, David, 88–89 Crosley Field concert, 140 crutches, tossing, 95 ‘‘Cry Baby Cry,’’ 2, 225 ‘‘Cry For a Shadow,’’ 25 cultural shift, 67 ‘‘Cumberland Gap,’’ 10–11 Czechoslovakia: invasion of, 211; protests, xliv Daffodil (Capitol Records affiliate), 264 Daily Express, 89 Daily Mirror, 53, 259 Dakotas, 49 Danger Mouse, 231 dangers. See violence toward celebrities Dark Horse tour, 265

Index Dave Clark Five, 90–91, 137 Davies, Hunter, 168 ‘‘Day After Day,’’ 263 ‘‘A Day in the Life,’’ 172–73, 226, 231 ‘‘Day Tripper,’’ 118–19 Days of Future Past, 178 ‘‘Dear Prudence,’’ 213 death threats, xv, 97, 109, 138, 139–40 deaths: from breast cancer, 2, 4, 12; of Eddie Cochran, 20; of Epstein, xxxv, 186–87, 194; of Harrison, xii, xxxviii, 2; of Harrison’s mother, 4; Jeanne Dixon’s prediction, 99; of Johnny Ace, 269–70; of Lennon, xii, xxxvii–xxxviii, 42, 266; of Lennon’s mother, 12–13, 59; of Linda McCartney, 2; of Martin’s father, 190; of McCartney’s mother, 12, 114–15; of Orbison, 42; of Presley, 39, 266; rumors of, xxxv, 232–34, 255–56; of Shannon, 88; of Sutcliffe, 19, 29 Decca Records, 27, 42 Devananda, Vishnu, Swami, 110 ‘‘Devil in Her Heart,’’ 62–63 Dexter, Dave, Jr., 67, 68, 71 ‘‘Did Everyone Pay Their Dues?’’ 206 ‘‘Dig a Pony,’’ 242 ‘‘Dig It,’’ 243, 245 disastrous performances, 81–82 Dixon, Jeanne, 99 ‘‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy,’’ xv, 115 ‘‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’’ 49 Donays, 62–63 Donegan, Anthony Lonnie, 10–11 Donovan, 229 ‘‘Don’t Bother Me,’’ 58, 249 ‘‘Don’t Let Me Down,’’ 245 ‘‘Don’t Pass Me By,’’ 219–20 ‘‘Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mommy’s Only Looking For Her Hand in the Snow),’’ 258 Dorchester Hotel, 78 Double Fantasy, 125, 145 double meanings in songwriting, 41 double-tracking voices, 62 ‘‘Dr. Robert,’’ 149 dress style, 27

Index The Dressmaker, 6–7 ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ 114, 122, 123 drugs: amphetamines, 89; Beatles use of, xvii, xlii–xliii; Benzedrine inhalers, 20; cocaine, 257–58; distorted perspective from, 121; from ‘‘Dr. Robert’’ Freymann, 149; Epstein’s overdose death, xxxv; in Haight-Ashbury, 181; in Hamburg, 21; heroin, xvii, 217, 222, 239; Leary’s use of, 248; LSD. See LSD; marijuana use, xvii, 98–99, 102, 109, 136; Presley’s use of, 118; during production, 122, 124, 142; Zappa’s intolerance of, 179 Duchess of Argyll, 66 Dunning, George, 200 Duophonic sound, 71 Durden, Tommy, xxx Dylan, Bob, 98–99, 160–64; current issues awareness, 193; influence of, 104, 221; Lennon denouncing, xxxvii; safety concerns, 159 ‘‘Earth Angel,’’ xxix Earwigs, 75 Eastman, Linda, 116, 126, 218, 246. See also McCartney, Linda Ed Sullivan introduction, 116 The Ed Sullivan Show, xiii, xviii, 69, 72, 73–74, 199 ‘‘Eight Days a Week,’’ 106 ‘‘Eleanor Rigby,’’ 143–45 Electric Don Quixote (Slaven), 180, 181 Electronic Sounds, 249 Ellis, Royston, 20, 253 Emerick, Geoff, 142, 144, 149, 150 EMI Records, xxxi–xxxii, 32–33, 246, 258 EMI Studio, 239 Empire Stadium concert (Vancouver, B.C.), 97–98 Epstein, Brian: and Beatles at the Cavern Club, 2–3; drug overdose death, xxxv, 186–87, 194; introduction to the Beatles, 25–26;

301 Lennon’s vacation with, 52–53; as manager, 26–28 Ernst Mercke Hall (Hamburg), 138 Evening Standard, 139 Everett, Walter: on Abbey Road, 255; on ‘‘Across the Universe,’’ 251; on cover for Sgt. Pepper, 174; on diminishing output, 103; on ‘‘Hey Jude,’’ 208; on ‘‘P.S. I Love You,’’ 38; on ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ xxxiii; on Zappa, 181 Everly Brothers, 16–18, 41–42 ‘‘Every Little Thing,’’ 107 ‘‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,’’ 222 ‘‘Everybody’s Had a Hard Year,’’ 243 ‘‘Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,’’ 107 Exciters, 96–97 exhaustion from work, 102–3 existentialism, 23 extended play (EP), 79 Fab Four, 152 fainting girls, 116 ‘‘Falling in Love Again,’’ 50 falsetto voices, 18 The Family Way, 152 fans: problems with, 76–78, 96–98; violence against, 138; in wheelchairs, 95–96 fatigue from work, 102–3 films: about Lennon, 271; of Beatles, 272; Beatles songs in, xxiii–xxiv. See also specific films ‘‘Fixing a Hole,’’ 169 Flaming Pie, 88 Florida hurricane hazards, 99 ‘‘flower power,’’ 180 ‘‘Flying,’’ 193 Fonda, Peter, 174 ‘‘The Fool on the Hill,’’ 192–93 ‘‘For No One,’’ 148–49 ‘‘For You Blue,’’ 244 freak culture, 179 Freak Out! 179 ‘‘Free as a Bird,’’ 273, 274 ‘‘Friends to Go,’’ 4

302 ‘‘From a Window,’’ 104 ‘‘From Me to You,’’ 51–52 Frost, David, 197 Frusciante, John, 251 Furnier, Vincent. See Cooper, Alice Gaumont Cinema, 58 gender lines in Beatlemania, 69 generational cultural evolution, 8–9 Gentle, Johnny, 17, 20 Georgie Fame concert, 218 German audiences, 21 ‘‘Get Back,’’ 240, 244–45 Get Back album, 237, 241 Get Back: The Beatles’ Let it Be Disaster, 238 ‘‘Getting Better,’’ 168–69 Gilmore, Mikal, 128, 177 ‘‘Girl,’’ 121, 125 The Girl Can’t Help It, 221 girl group bands, 47–48 ‘‘Give Me Love,’’ 217 Give My Regards to Broad Street, 144 ‘‘Give Peace a Chance,’’ 124, 189, 239, 248, 257 ‘‘Glass Onion,’’ 213–14, 232 ‘‘Go Now,’’ 178 ‘‘God,’’ xxxvi–xxxvii Godrich, Nigel, 3 ‘‘Golden Slumbers,’’ 253–54 Goldman, Albert, xxxvi; on Abbey Road, 255; on ‘‘Any Time at All,’’ 87; on audition at Decca Records, 27–28; on Ed Sullivan Show, 74; on ‘‘Help!’’ (song), 111; on ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping,’’ 145; on Lennon– McCartney interaction, 175–76; on Lennon’s bisexuality, 52; on Lennon’s public image, 247; on Liverpool homecoming, 24; on popularity compared with Jesus Christ, 139; on Rubber Soul, 121; on Sgt. Pepper image, 155; on ‘‘Taxman,’’ 143; on ‘‘Think for Yourself,’’ 124 Goldman, Peter, 164 Goldsmith, Martin, 70 Goldstein, Richard, 176–77

Index ‘‘Good Day Sunshine,’’ 148 ‘‘Good Morning, Good Morning,’’ 172 ‘‘Good Night,’’ 220, 227 Goodnight Vienna, 264 Goon Show, 33 The Gospel according to the Beatles, 19, 75 ‘‘Got to Get You into My Life,’’ 149 Gould, Jonathan, 21 Graham Bond Quartet, 45–46 Great Pop Prom concert, 61 The Grey Album, 231–32 ‘‘Grow Old With Me,’’ 273 Guthrie, Woody, 159, 160 Haight-Ashbury, 177, 184–85 hair styles, 27 Haley, Bill, xxxv–xliv, 11 Hamburg music scene, 20–23, 28–29, 138 Hamilton, Richard, 228 Handley, Tommy, 33 ‘‘Happiness,’’ 217 ‘‘Happiness is a Warm Gun,’’ 211, 217, 218 A Hard Day’s Night, 83–86, 88–89, 91–92, 102–3, 126–27 A Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead, 89–90 A Hard Day’s Write, 56, 126 harmonicas, 36 harmonium, 170 Harrison, George: after the breakup, 235, 238; All Things Must Pass, xxxv, 261; Cirque du Soleil Beatles tribute and, xxxix; death of, xii, xxxviii, 2; and Eastern religion, 170–71; introduction to Lennon, 12; ‘‘Love You To,’’ 145–46; on LSD in San Francisco, 184–85; and McCartney’s bossiness, 239; on Saturday Night Live, 265; songwriting with McCartney, 5; trip to India, 152 Harry, Bill, 23, 26 Having a Wild Weekend, 91–93, 137 Hawks, 161 Head, 153

Index Headquarters, 153 ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ xxx–xxxi Hearts and Bones, 269 heavy metal, 108 ‘‘Hela, hey, aloha,’’ 191, 192 Helen Shapiro tour, 51 ‘‘Hello Goodbye,’’ 191–92 Hells Angels dropping in, 203 Helm, Levon, 161 Help! (film and soundtrack), xv, 109–10, 112, 116 ‘‘Help!’’ (song), 110–11 ‘‘Helter Skelter,’’ 220, 223–24, 230 ‘‘Her Majesty,’’ 254 Herald Tribune, 74 ‘‘Here Comes the Sun,’’ 249, 251 ‘‘Here, There and Everywhere,’’ 146 ‘‘Here Today,’’ 268–69 heroin, 217, 222, 239 Hesse, Herman, 236 ‘‘Hey Baby,’’ 36–37 ‘‘Hey Bulldog,’’ 201 ‘‘Hey Jude,’’ 205, 207–9 Hillman, Chris, 89 Hinduism, 185–86 Hindustani music, 170–71, 197, 236 Hinson, Hal, 6 hip shaking, xxix hippie culture, 179 hit #1: Abbey Road, 254–55; ‘‘From Me to You,’’ 52; Help! (film and soundtrack), 112; ‘‘Lady Madonna,’’ 196; ‘‘Last Train to Clarksville,’’ 153; ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ 42; ‘‘Pledging My Love,’’ 270; Rubber Soul, 130; ‘‘Those Were the Days,’’ 203; ‘‘Yesterday,’’ 115 hit #4, 146 Hitchcock, Robyn, 163 Hoffman, Abbie, 174, 205 ‘‘Hold Me Tight,’’ 60 Holly, Buddy, 12, 14, 16–18 homosexuality, Epstein’s, 27, 52–53, 112 ‘‘Honey Don’t,’’ 106 ‘‘Honey Pie,’’ 224–25, 230 Hopkin, Mary, 203 ‘‘How Do You Do It?’’ 35–36

303 ‘‘How Do You Sleep?’’ 260 How I Won the War, 152 ‘‘I Am the Walrus,’’ 99, 191 ‘‘I Call Your Name,’’ 80 ‘‘I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,’’ 107 ‘‘I Feel Fine,’’ 101–2 ‘‘I Just Want to Make Love to You,’’ 70–71 ‘‘I Lost My Little Girl,’’ 13 ‘‘I Me Mine,’’ 241, 242 ‘‘I Need You,’’ 112 ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There,’’ 44–46 ‘‘I Should Have Known Better,’’ 86 ‘‘I Wanna Be Your Man,’’ 60, 61, 62 I Wanna Hold Your Hand (film), 75–76 ‘‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’’: inadequacy of, 86–87; public response on WWDC radio, 72; success of, 70, 74, 93 ‘‘I Want to Tell You,’’ 149 ‘‘I Want You,’’ 255 ‘‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy),’’ 250, 251, 252 ‘‘I Will,’’ 2, 212, 220, 230 ‘‘I’d Have You Anytime,’’ 261 ‘‘If I Fell,’’ 86, 245 ‘‘If I Needed Someone,’’ 127 ‘‘If Not For You,’’ 261 ‘‘If You Got Trouble,’’ 113 ‘‘I’ll Be Back,’’ 88 ‘‘I’ll Cry Instead,’’ 88, 128 ‘‘I’ll Follow the Sun,’’ 103, 105 ‘‘I’ll Get You,’’ 55 ‘‘I’m a Loser,’’ 104, 105 ‘‘I’m Down,’’ 111–12, 114–15 ‘‘I’m Happy Just to Dance With You,’’ 87 ‘‘I’m Looking Through You,’’ 125–26 ‘‘I’m Only Sleeping,’’ 145, 251 ‘‘I’m So Tired,’’ 145, 218 Imagine, 222, 260, 262 Imagine Peace Tower (Reykjavik), 278 In His Own Write (Lennon), 86 ‘‘In My Life,’’ 126 ‘‘In My Room,’’ xxxii–xxxiii In Search of the Lost Chord, 178

304 ‘‘In Spite of All the Danger,’’ 5, 14–15 India: Beatles interest in, 109, 185–86; Beatles’ trip, 197–99; Eastern thought, 110; Harrison’s trip, 152; instruments of, 123, 150, 171; music of, 265 ‘‘The Indian Giver,’’ 110 Indra Club shows, 22 influence on other music groups, 102 ‘‘The Inner Light,’’ 197 innocents in Hamburg, 21–22 ‘‘Instant Karma,’’ 124, 259 invasion of America, 93–94 ‘‘Isn’t It a Pity,’’ 208 ‘‘It Won’t Be Long,’’ xiii, 56, 113, 126–27 ‘‘It’s All Too Much,’’ 201 ‘‘It’s Only Love,’’ 113 It’s That Man Again, 33 ‘‘I’ve Got a Feeling,’’ 243 ‘‘I’ve Just Seen a Face,’’ 114 ‘‘I’ve Lost My Little Girl,’’ 80 Jacaranda, 20 The Jack Johnson Show, xxx Jagger, Mick, 60–61, 134 James, Carroll, 72 Janov, Arthur, xxxv–xxxvi Jarry, Alfred, 249 Jay Z, 231, 232 ‘‘Jealous Guy,’’ 222 ‘‘Jenny Wren,’’ 219 Jesus Christ, popularity compared, xv, 139–40 Jesus Christ Superstar, 163 John Wesley Harding, 193 Johns, Glyn, 241 Jones, Mickey, 161 ‘‘Julia,’’ 220, 243 Kael, Pauline, 93, 180 Kaempfert, Bert, 24, 27 Kahn, Ashley, 146 Kaiserkeller shows, 22–23 Kane, Larry, 97, 99 ‘‘Kansas City,’’ 238 ‘‘Kansas City/Hey Hey Hey,’’ 105–6 Kennedy Airport arrival, 72–73

Index Kennedy assassination, 65, 73, 287 n.10 Kent State University shootings, 181 Kesey, Ken, 188–89 Khayyam, Omar, 1 King Features, 199 Kingdom Come, 232 Kirchherr, Astrid, 23, 138 Kirwan, Larry, 277–78 Klaatu, 264 Klein, Allen: as Beatles’ manager, 53, 245–46; excessive compensation, 259–60 Kramer, Billy J., 49 Ku Klux Klan, 139 Labor government economic policies, 67 LaBour, Fred, xxxv ‘‘Lady Madonna,’’ 196–97 Laliberte, Guy, xxxix Landau, Jon, 205, 260 Larkin, Philip, 43 ‘‘Last Train to Clarksville,’’ 153 ‘‘The Late Great Johnny Ace,’’ 269–70 Late Night with David Letterman, 270–71 lawsuits: Beatles vs. Fuego Entertainment Inc., 285 n.26; McCartney vs. Beatles, 259–60; for plagiarism, 249, 261 ‘‘Lazyitis,’’ 215 Leander, Mike, 170 Leary, Timothy, 135, 136, 150, 248 ‘‘Leave My Kitten Alone,’’ 107, 272–73 Lee, Arthur, 74 left-handed challenges, 11 Lennon, John: adultery, 122; after the breakup, xxxv–xxxviii, 152, 235, 238; birth of son, 52, 265; as book author, 86; brawl on Harrison’s 21st birthday, 53; cocaine use, 257–58; divorce, 204, 239; on Epstein’s death, 187; as harmonica player, 36; ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ xxix–xxx, xxxi; heroin use, xvii, 217, 222, 239; influences on, 16–18; interaction

Index with McCartney, 11–12, 16–18, 208; introduction to Harrison, 12; Jesus Christ, popularity compared, xv, 139–40; letters from Sutcliffe, 138; letters to Melody Maker, 260; on LSD, 150, 168–69, 175–76, 183–84, 222; on Manson murders, 228; marriage of, 246–47; maternal influences, 58; murder of, xii, xxxvii–xxxviii, 42, 76; psychotherapy, xxxv–xxxvi; relationship with Sutcliffe, 271; split from Ono, 265; on U.S. tours, 67; vacation with Epstein, 52–53; Wolfe, Tom, 116 Lennon, Julian, xlii–xliii, 52, 168 Lennon, Sean, 266 Lester, Richard, 83–84, 85, 109, 116 ‘‘Let it Be,’’ 243 Let it Be (film or soundtrack), 235, 238, 241, 248, 259, 260 Let it Be. . .Naked, 245 Life With the Lions, 226 ‘‘Like a Rolling Stone,’’ 163 Litherland Town Hall, 23 ‘‘Little Child,’’ 58 Liverpool: Beatles homecoming, 23–24; as European Capital of Culture, 278; history of, 5–7; as musical mixing pot, 15–16 Liverpool Fantasy, 277–78 The Lives of John Lennon, 24, 27–28, 52–53, 74, 124 Livingston, Alan, 71 L’Olympia concerts (Paris), 69 London Pavilion Cinema movie premier, 88 The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 275–76 ‘‘The Long and Winding Road,’’ 238, 244, 249, 269 ‘‘Long, Long, Long,’’ 224, 249 Long Tall Sally, 79–80 Look Back in Anger, 10 Love, xxxix–xliv, 216 Love (band), 74 ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ xxi, 36, 37 Love Songs, 39

305 Love You Live, 39 ‘‘Love You To,’’ 145–46 ‘‘Lovely Rita,’’ 171 ‘‘Lovesick Blues,’’ 285 n.26 Lovin’ Spoonful, 75 LSD: Harrison’s use, 184–85; Lennon’s use, 135–36, 147–48, 150, 175–76, 183–84; ‘‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’’ xlii–xliii, 168–69; McCartney’s use, 183–84; during production, xvii, 142; as scam promoted by the CIA, 181 ‘‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’’ xlii–xliii, 168–69 d-lysergic acid diethylamide. See LSD MacDonald, Ian: on ‘‘A Day in the Life,’’ 173; on ‘‘Anna,’’ 47; on cultural shift, 67; on ‘‘Glass Onion,’’ 214; on hippie vulnerability, 181; on ‘‘If I Fell,’’ 87; on Lennon’s impatience, 120; on LSD, 184; on ‘‘P.S. I Love You,’’ 38; on sixties revolution, xxxiii; on ‘‘Yes it Is,’’ 109 Mackay, Vivian, 47 Madison Square Gardens, 195 ‘‘Maggie Mae,’’ 243, 245 The Magic Christian, 235, 262 Magic Circles. See McKinney, Devin Magical Mystery Tour, 189, 192–94 Mann, William, 63 Mansfield, Jayne, 98 Manson (Charles) Family murders, xxxv, 209–10, 223–24, 228–31, 252 Maple Leaf Gardens concert, xiv, xv Marcos, Imelda, xv, 138–39 Marcus, Greil: on Beatles philosophy, xxxiv; on fans’ reaction, 72; on girl group bands, 47; on ‘‘I’m Down,’’ 112; ‘‘Money (That’s What I Want),’’ 64; on ‘‘Real Love,’’ 274; on Ringo Starr, 48; on seduction, 121 Mardas, Alex ‘‘Magic,’’ 198, 202–3 marijuana use: with Dylan, 98–99; Leary’s use of, 248; during production, xvii, 102, 109, 122, 124, 136

306 Marnham, Leonard, xxxi Marsh, Dave: on the Beatles, 74, 141; on ‘‘Help!’’ (song), 111; on Long Tall Sally, 80; on ‘‘You Can’t Do That,’’ 79 ‘‘Martha My Dear,’’ 218, 224 Martin, George: Abbey Road, 248, 255; audition at EMI Records, 32–33; Beatles releases in U.S., 67–68; Cirque du Soleil Beatles tribute, xxxix, xl, xli–xlii, xliii, xliv; contributions to BBC summer television special, 190; ‘‘Eleanor Rigby,’’ 144; on harmonium, 170; on ‘‘Hey Jude,’’ 208; ‘‘How Do You Do It?’’ 35–36; ‘‘I Saw Her Standing There,’’ 45; on Lennon–McCartney interaction, 17; ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ 37; piano solo in Beatles’ music, 126; ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ 41–42; Please Please Me, 43–44; and studio music evolution, 142; on sustained notes, 87–88; ‘‘A Taste of Honey,’’ 50; on tour fatigue, 166 Martin, Giles, xxxix, xl, xli–xlii, xliii Mascaro, Juan, 197 ‘‘Masters of War,’’ 162 ‘‘Matchbox,’’ 80–81, 106–7 maternal influences: Harrison’s mother, 4; Lennon’s mother, 6–7, 12–13, 14, 41, 58, 109; McCartney’s mother, 12 ‘‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,’’ 239, 249 ‘‘Maybe I’m Amazed,’’ 243 ‘‘Maybe Tomorrow,’’ 262 Maysles, David and Albert, 78 MBE (Member of the British Empire) medals, 118 McCartney, xxxiv, 241, 259 McCartney, Jim, 9, 11, 58, 165 McCartney, Linda, 2. See also Eastman, Linda McCartney, Paul: after the breakup, 152, 235, 238; death rumors, xxxv, 232–34, 255–56; in disguise, 166; Give My Regards to Broad Street, 144; influences on, 16–18; interaction with Harrison, 239;

Index interaction with Lennon, 11–12, 16–18, 116, 208; letters to Melody Maker, 260; LSD use, 172–73, 183–84; marriage of, 246; paternal influences, 58; on Sgt. Pepper, 177; yearning for past, 1–2 McCartney Productions Ltd., 234 McClinton, Delbert, 36–37 McEwen, Ian, xxxi McGrath, John, 6 McGuinn, Roger, 88–89 McKinney, Devin: on audience connections, 74; on Beatles beginnings, 8, 15, 101; on Beatles in Hamburg, 21; on Beatles success, 31, 141; on ‘‘Eleanor Rigby,’’ 144; on A Hard Day’s Night, 90; on ‘‘In My Life,’’ 126; on Lennon–McCartney interaction, 17; on Sgt. Pepper, 175, 177; on studio process changes, 169; on wordplay, 99 McLemore Avenue, 250 ‘‘Mean Mr. Mustard,’’ 252 Medley, Phil, 50 Meet The Beatles, 71 Melly, George, 66 Melody Maker, 260 Memphis concert, 140 Merry Pranksters, 188 Mersey Beat, 23, 26 Merseyside. See Liverpool ‘‘Michelle,’’ 124–25 The Michigan Daily, xxxv microphone placement, 149 military service, 9 Mills, Heather, 2 Minoff, Lee, 200 Mirage (Las Vegas), xxxix ‘‘Misery,’’ 46 Mississippi Summer Project, 94 Mojo, 37, 146 ‘‘Money (That’s What I Want),’’ 63–64 Monkees, 152–53, 154 mono mixes, 71, 285 n.36 Monterey Pop Festival, 176, 184 Moody Blues, 178 moog synthesizers, 249

Index More, Thomas, xxxiii Morganfield, McKinley. See Muddy Waters ‘‘Mother,’’ 221 ‘‘Mother Nature’s Son,’’ 222 Mothers of Invention, 179–81 movie trailers, 89–90 ‘‘Mr. Moonlight,’’ 103, 105 Muddy Waters, 70–71 Mukherjee, Bharti, 159 ‘‘My Bonnie,’’ 25 ‘‘My Sweet Lord,’’ 261 ‘‘mystery tours,’’ 189 mysticism, 229 Nathan Phillips Square memorial rally, 268 New Left Review, 206 New Musical Express, 51–52 New Year’s Eve concert, 40–41 New York Post, 195 New York Times, 74, 89, 176–77 New Zealand, 96 Newsweek on the Beatles, 74 Nicol, Jimmy, 94–95, 168 Night Beat (Gilmore), 177 ‘‘The Night Before,’’ 112 ‘‘Nights in White Satin,’’ 178 ‘‘1977,’’ 39 1997 Grammy Award, 274 Nixon, Richard, Presley’s meeting with, 118 No Dice, 262 ‘‘No Reply,’’ 103–4 nonviolent activism, 204 North End Music Store (NEMS), 25 Northern Songs, 42, 246 ‘‘Norwegian Wood,’’ 99, 104, 122–23 ‘‘Not a Second Time,’’ 63, 245 ‘‘Not Guilty,’’ 212 ‘‘Now and Then,’’ 273 Nowhere Land, xxxiii, xxxiv, 6 ‘‘Nowhere Man,’’ 123–24 ‘‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,’’ 212, 214 objects thrown at Beatles, 76–77, 95, 97, 100 O’Brien, Geoffrey, 75, 94

307 O’Brien, Jim, 6 occultism, 184 Ochs, Phil, 129, 161 ‘‘Octopus’s Garden,’’ 250 O’Donnell, Lucy, 168 Odyssey and Oracle, 178 ‘‘Oh! Darling,’’ 249–50 ‘‘Old Brown Shoe,’’ 247–48 Oldham, Andrew Loog, 60–61 Olympia concert, 84 Olympic Sound Studios, 241 ‘‘One After 909,’’ 243–44 1-2-3-4 count, 143 ‘‘Only a Northern Song,’’ 200 Ono, Yoko: as collaborator, 126; films of, 247; in group dynamic, 239; introduction to Lennon, 43, 154; Lennon’s anticipation, 125, 218; letters to Lennon, 198; marriage of, 246–47; miscarriage, 258; in recording studio, 211–12; as soul mate, 220–21; split from Lennon, 265 oral sex, 41 Oram, Jim, 96 Orbison, Roy, 41, 42 Orton, Joe, 116 Osborne, John, 10 Our World, 189–90 The Outsider, 10 Owen, Alun, 84 Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal, 170 Paglia, Camille, 257 ‘‘Paperback Writer,’’ 134, 164 Paperback Writer (novel), 276–77 Parlophone, 33 paternal influences, 9, 11, 58, 165 Paul McCartney Productions, 259 peace-and-music festival, xxxiv ‘‘Penny Lane,’’ 126, 156–58, 164–65 ‘‘Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ 164 Pepperland, 200 Perkins, Carl, 81 Pet Sounds, 132 Petty, Tom, 74–75 Philadelphia Convention Center, 99

308 Philippines tour, xv, 138–39 Phillips, Percy, 14 Phillips, Tom, 177 photos: of Beatles, xiii, 23, 65, 121, 137, 165, 286 n.55; of Harrison, 3–4. See also record covers piano/harp hybrid, 165 ‘‘Piggies,’’ 211, 219, 230 plagiarism, 249 Plastic Ono Band, xxxvi, 221, 231 Plastic Ono Band, 257 ‘‘Please Mr. Postman,’’ xiii–xiv, 60, 65, 231 ‘‘Please Please Me,’’ xv, 41, 285 n.36 Please Please Me (album), xxxi–xxxii, 37, 44, 51, 55 police violence, 176, 181–82 political party influences, 8–9 Polydor Records, 24, 26, 27 ‘‘Polythene Pam,’’ 252–53 Pop Go the Beatles, 56 pot album, 142 Powell, Cynthia, 49 Power, Duffy, 45–46 power struggles, 238 prana (Hindu belief), 170 presidential level security, 99 Presley, Elvis: death of, 39, 266; ‘‘Heartbreak Hotel,’’ xxx–xxxi; hip shaking, xxix; influence of, 16; meeting with, 116–18 press encounters, 72–73 Preston, Billy, xxxvi, xxxvii, 239 Privilege, 163 Procol Harum concert, 218 Profumo scandal, 66, 78 prostitutes, 99 protests: Allen Ginsburg at, 191; in the American South, 139; bed-ins as, 246–47; of Capitol Records marketing, 137; Dylan, Bob, 160; against MBE medals, 118 ‘‘P.S. I Love You,’’ 38 The Psychedelic Experience (Leary), 136, 150 publishing rights, 235 Punk Revolution, 38–39 punk rock, 265–66

Index Quarry Bank School assignments, 191 Quarry Men: debut at Cavern Club, 13–14; formation of, 11; members of, 14, 18; name change, 20 question and answer dynamic, 62 racism, 96–97 radio, benefits of, xxx Radio Luxembourg, xxx ‘‘Rain,’’ 134–35, 164 Ram, 260 Ramparts, 206 random sound saturation, 150 Rape (film), 247 RCA Records, xxx–xxxi The Real Frank Zappa Book, 179 ‘‘Real Love,’’ 273, 274 record-burnings, 139 record covers: albums, xiii, 51, 137–38, 151, 174, 228, 255–56, 286 n.55; singles, 165 record sales, 70 recording studios: Abbey Road Studios, 211; Apple Corps, 241; Beatles first recordings, 14; discord in, 212; EMI Studio, 239; at McCartney’s house, 19; Olympic Sound Studios, 241; for Polydor Records, 24–25; Trident Studios, 211; Twickenham Film Studios, 237, 238, 239 red light district of Hamburg, 21 Reeperbahn (red light district of Hamburg), 21 ‘‘Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand),’’ 273 reverb echoes, 71 ‘‘Revolution,’’ 204–5 ‘‘Revolution 1,’’ 205, 224 ‘‘Revolution 1 & 9,’’ 211 ‘‘Revolution 9,’’ 2, 212, 226–27, 230 Revolution in the Head. See MacDonald, Ian Revolver, xv, 142–43, 149, 151, 152 Richards, Keith, xxxviii riding in an open car, 97

Index Riley, Tim: on Beatles success, 31; on ‘‘If I Fell,’’ 87; on Ringo Starr, 34; Tell Me Why, 16; on ‘‘Wait,’’ 127 Ringo! 265 Robinson, Red, 174–75 rock and roll movies, 82–83 ‘‘Rock and Roll Music,’’ 103, 238 ‘‘Rock Around the Clock,’’ xxix, 11 ‘‘Rock Island Line,’’ 10 Rock ’N’ Roll album, 249 rock ’n’ roll lifeline, 165 ‘‘Rocker,’’ 241 ‘‘Rocky Raccoon,’’ 219, 224 role reversal, 122 ‘‘Roll Over Beethoven,’’ 59–60, 65, 76, 252 Rolling Stone magazine, xxxvi, 205 Rolling Stones, 60–62; Aftermath, 133–34; Beatles rivalry, 61–62; beginnings of, 39; compared with Beatles, 70–71; ‘‘Street Fighting Man,’’ 206; Their Satanic Majesties Request, 178; on violence toward celebrities, xxxviii The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, 237 rooftop concerts, 240 Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, 22 Roundhouse club, 225 Rowe, Dick, 42 ‘‘Royal Flush,’’ 153 royalty payment problems, 68 Rubber Soul, xv, 114, 120–22, 124–25, 128, 130, 142–43 Rubin, Jerry, 205 Run Devil Run, 3 ‘‘Run For Your Life,’’ 128 Russell, Bert, 50 The Rutles: All You Need is Cash, 276 Salvation Army brass band, 155 Sarris, Andrew, 89, 91 Satellite. See Stax Records Saturday Night Live, 265 ‘‘Save the Last Dance For Me,’’ 238, 241 Saville Row, 239–40 ‘‘Savoy Truffle,’’ 211, 225

309 Scheer, Robert, 181–82 Schweighardt, Ray, 238 scotch, 89 Scott, Jimmy, 214 screaming females, 75 Sebastian, John, 75 seduction, 121 segregation/integration, 16, 96–97 self-protection, 141 Sentimental Journey, xxxv, 259 Seventh Sojourn, 178 sex off camera, 89 Sex Pistols, 38–39, 266 sexual behavior as class leveler, 66 sexual behavior on tour, 96 sexual innuendos, 44–46, 217 ‘‘Sexy Sadie,’’ 212, 223 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, xxxv, 11, 133, 166–75, 176–78 Shankar, Ravi, 152, 265 Shannon, Del, 68 ‘‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,’’ 253 ‘‘She Loves You,’’ xiv, xxi, 238; as Canadian #1 hit, 68; composing of, 54–55, 113; on Ed Sullivan Show, 74; as U.K. top hit, 70 Shea Stadium concert, 116 Shenson, Walter, 83–84, 86, 88 Sheridan, Tony, 24–25, 27 ‘‘She’s a Woman,’’ 102 ‘‘She’s Leaving Home,’’ 169–70 Shirelles, 47–48, 129 Short, Don, 53 Simon, Paul, 269 sitar, 123, 152 skiffle, 10–11 Slaven, Neil, 180, 181 ‘‘Slow Down,’’ 81 Smith, Mike, 27, 28 Smith, Norman, 42, 142 Smith, Steve, 264 Snider, Dee, 75 Softley, Ian, 271 Some Girls, 39 ‘‘Something,’’ 112, 249 Something New, 81

310 Somewhere in England, 268 Sonata for Jukebox, 75, 94 ‘‘The Song We Were Singing,’’ 88 sound pictures, 226 Soviet invasion, protest of, xliv Speakeasy concert, 218 Spector, Phil, 241, 246 Spector, Ronnie, 96 Spiritual Regeneration Movement Foundation, 185–86 Spitz, Bob: on Beatlemania, 177; on The Beatles, 10; on Harrison, 171; on rock shows, 94; on ‘‘Ticket to Ride,’’ 108 Star Club, 28–29, 39–40, 138 Starkey, Richard. See Starr, Ringo Starr, Ringo: after the breakup, xxxvi, 152, 235, 238; as Beatles’ drummer, 34–35; Beaucoups of Blues, 260–61; collapse of, 94; on cover of Klaatu album, 264; in Hamburg music scene, 22; The Magic Christian, 235, 262; marriages of, 109, 116; Sentimental Journey, xxxv, 259 Stax Records, 119 stereo mixes, 285 n.36 Straight Up, 263 ‘‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’’ 99, 155, 156, 164–66 ‘‘Street Fighting Man,’’ 206–7 Strummer, Joe, 38–39 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 207 studio music evolution, 142 ‘‘Sub Rosa Subway,’’ 264 suicides, 263–64, 269–70 Sulpy, Doug, 238 Summer of Love, 159 ‘‘Sun King,’’ 252 Sunday Journal (Providence), 264 sustained notes, 87–88 Sutcliffe, Stuart, 18–19; on album cover, 174; death of, 29; departure from Beatles, 24; as Kirchherr’s lover, 23, 27; letters to Lennon, 138; relationship with Lennon, 271 Swan Records, 68 ‘‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’’ 249

Index ‘‘Talkin’ World War III Blues,’’ 163 tape loops, 150 ‘‘A Taste of Honey,’’ 49–50 Tate, Sharon, xxxv tax shelters, 202 ‘‘Taxman,’’ 143 Taylor, Derek, 99 Taylor, Ted ‘‘King Size,’’ 40 ‘‘Teddy Boy,’’ 241 Teddy Boys (teds), 9–10 television appearances, 39 ‘‘Tell Me What You See,’’ 114 ‘‘Tell Me Why,’’ 87 Tell Me Why (book), 16, 31, 34, 127 Tetragrammaton Records, 237 ‘‘Thank You Girl,’’ 52 ‘‘That’ll Be the Day,’’ 14 Their Satanic Majesties Request, 178 ‘‘There’s a Place,’’ xxxii, xxxiv, 50 These Boots Are Made for Walking, 128 ‘‘Things We Said Today,’’ 2, 88 ‘‘Think for Yourself,’’ 124 ‘‘This Boy,’’ 72, 108 ‘‘Those Were the Days,’’ 203 3:47 EST, 264 Tibetan Book of the Dead, 136, 150 ‘‘Ticket to Ride,’’ 108 ‘‘Till There Was You,’’ 58–59, 74 ‘‘Time of the Season,’’ 178 The Times, 63 ‘‘The Times They Are a-Changin’,’’ 160 Tin Pan Alley, 47, 152 ‘‘tit, tit, tit,’’ 125 toilet seat as stage prop, 40 Tommy, 163 ‘‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’’ 149, 150, 151–52 Top 10: ‘‘Free as a Bird,’’ 274; With the Beatles, 65Beatles songs, 98; The Best of the Beach Boys, 133; ‘‘Do You Want to Know a Secret?’’ 49; ‘‘From Me to You,’’ 52; ‘‘Love Me Do,’’ 42; ‘‘Maybe Tomorrow,’’ 262; Rubber Soul, 130; ‘‘She Loves You,’’ 55 Top 20 hits, 90–91

Index Top 40 hits (U.S.), 68 Top 50 CHUM Chart, 68 Toronto Peace Festival, 257 Toronto press conference, xxxiv, xxxv Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival, 258 tour ending, 142 Transcendental Meditation, 185–86, 194–99 Transglobal Music, 67–68 Trident Studios, 211 ‘‘Tuesday Afternoon,’’ 178 Tug of War, 268–69 Turner, Steve: on Abbey Road, 255; on backward taping, 135; on The Beatles, 227; on ‘‘Drive My Car,’’ 122; on ‘‘Glass Onion,’’ 214; The Gospel according to the Beatles, 19; on ‘‘I’m a Loser,’’ 104; on ‘‘It Won’t Be Long,’’ 56; on ‘‘It’s Only Love,’’ 113; on Lennon’s lyrics, 126; on meshing sensibilities, 168; on naming of the Beatles, 16; on ‘‘Piggies,’’ 219; on Presley, 31; on Rubber Soul, 121–22; on screaming females, 75; on Sgt. Pepper, 175; on ‘‘You Won’t See Me,’’ 123 ‘‘12-Bar Original,’’ 193 12-hour Beatles marathon, xxiii ‘‘Twenty Flight Rock,’’ 12 24 Hours, 250 Twickenham Film Studios, 237, 238, 239 ‘‘Twist and Shout,’’ 50–51 Twist and Shout album, 55 Twisted Sister, 75 ‘‘Two of Us,’’ 238, 241 Two Virgins, 226, 235, 236–37 two-way communication, 130 U.K. top hits, 70 Unfinished Music No. 1—Two Virgins, 236–37 United Artists, 83, 199 U.S. top hits, 70 U.S. tour, 94–95 utopia, Beatles’ vision, xxxiv, xxxix, 229 Utopia (More), xxxiii

311 vacations: in Spain, 52–53; in Switzerland, 122 Vagabonds (motorcycle escorts), 257 Variety Club luncheon toast, 78 Varsity Stadium concert, 257 Vee-Jay, 68 Venus and Mars, 264 Vertical Man, 37 Victorian circus poster, 170 Village Voice, 89, 177, 195, 205–6 Vincent, Gene: ‘‘Ain’t She Sweet,’’ 25; ‘‘Be-Bop-A-Lula,’’ 12; at Toronto Peace Festival, 258 violence against fans, 138 violence toward celebrities, xix; against Harrison, xii, xxxviii, 274–75; Lennon’s murder, xii, xxxvii–xxxviii, 76, 266; in the Philippines, 138–39; against Ringo Starr, 99–100; at the Rolling Stones concert, 78; self-protection, 141; stalking, 76; against Sutcliffe, 24 violence worldwide, xxxviii Voorman, Klaus, xxxvi, 23, 151, 165 ‘‘Wait,’’ 126–27 Waller, Gordon, 70 Walsh, Joe, 74 WAQY radio, 139 Warner Brothers, 263 Washington Coliseum concert, 76–77 Washington, D.C. concerts, 69 Washington Post, 74 ‘‘Watching Rainbows,’’ 249 ‘‘Watching the Wheels,’’ 145, 251 ‘‘We Can Work it Out,’’ 120 Wedding Album, 226, 258–59 Weiner, Jon, 205 Wenner, Jenn, xxxvi We’re Only in It for the Money, 180–81, 182–83 ‘‘What Goes On,’’ 125 ‘‘What would you do if I sang out of tune?’’ 168 ‘‘What You’re Doing,’’ 107 ‘‘What’s the New Mary Jane?’’ 216 wheelchairs, fans in, 95–96

312 ‘‘When I Get Home,’’ 88, 126–27 ‘‘When I’m 64,’’ 171 ‘‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps,’’ xliii–xliv, 216–17, 220, 272–73 Whitaker, Robert, 137 White Album, 210 White, Andy, 37, 38 White, Paul, 68–69 ‘‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’’ 212, 220 ‘‘Wild Honey Pie,’’ 215 Williams, Allan, 20–21 Williams, Paul, 177 Wilson, Brian, xxxii–xxxiii, 130–34 Wilson, Colin, 10 Wilson, Harold (Prime Minister), 78 Wings, 259, 260, 265 Winter Gardens Theatre concert, 71 Wish You Were Here, 263 ‘‘With a Little Help From My Friends,’’ 167 With the Beatles, 56, 59–60, 65, 71 ‘‘Within You Without You,’’ 149, 170–71 Withnail & I, 275–76 Wolfe, Tom, 70 Wonderwall, 197 Wonderwall Music, 236 Wooler, Bob, 24 ‘‘The Word,’’ 124, 127, 189–90 wordplay, 56 ‘‘Words of Love,’’ 106 ‘‘Working Class Hero,’’ 222 World War II, influence of, 6–7, 8, 21 World Wildlife Fund, 242

Index WWDC radio, 71–72 Wynne, David, 185 ‘‘Ya Ya,’’ 249 ‘‘yeah, yeah, yeah,’’ xiii, 54, 152, 238, 244 ‘‘Yellow Submarine,’’ 146–47 Yellow Submarine (film), 201–2, 236 The Yellow Submarine Songbook, 201 ‘‘Yer Blues,’’ 211, 218, 221 ‘‘Yes it Is,’’ 108–9 ‘‘Yesterday,’’ 1–2, 114, 115 Yesterday. . .and Today, 137–38 Yogi, Mahesh, Maharishi, 110, 185–86, 192, 194–99 ‘‘You Can’t Catch Me,’’ 249 ‘‘You Can’t Do That,’’ 79, 88, 128 ‘‘You Like Me Too Much,’’ 113–14, 127 ‘‘You Never Give Me Your Money,’’ 229–30, 252 ‘‘You Really Got a Hold on Me,’’ 60, 238 ‘‘You Won’t See Me,’’ 123 Young, Neil, 266 ‘‘Your Mother Should Know,’’ 194, 224 ‘‘You’re Going to Lose That Girl,’’ 113 ‘‘You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,’’ 112 ‘‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,’’ 231 Zappa, Frank, 96, 153, 178–83 Zapple (Apple Corps subsidiary), 203 Zimmerman, Robert. See Dylan, Bob Zombies, 178

About the Author KEVIN COURRIER is a writer/broadcaster and film critic at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC Radio). He worked for eight years as cohost of the interview program ‘‘On the Arts’’ for CJRT-FM in Toronto during the eighties. Courrier also contributed movie reviews to Boxoffice magazine in Los Angeles until 2007. He has written about film and popular culture for The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. Courrier is the author of four other published books, Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion, with Susan Green (1997), which is now in its second edition; Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa (2002), which won the Finalist Prize for Best Biography at the 2003 Independent Publisher’s Awards; Randy Newman’s American Dreams (2005), which also won Finalist Prize for Best Biography at the 2006 Independent Publisher’s Awards; and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica (2007). Courrier teaches part-time film courses through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto.