1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (27 page)

Journalist Maureen Cleave, with whom Lennon was having an affair, asked him why he never used words with more than one syllable, so he included “insecure,” “independence,” “self-assured,” and “appreciate” in the lyrics.
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She still wasn’t impressed, which was probably one reason he liked her.

Lennon sings that when he was younger he never needed help, but now he’s changed his mind and opened up the doors. The part about being younger may have been inspired by the chorus of Dylan’s “My Back Pages.” And as for the “doors,” they could have been inspired by Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book
The Doors of Perception
, about his experiences with hallucinogens. The book takes its title from the line by poet William Blake “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.” Lennon wrote the song two weeks after his first acid trip. Perhaps when Lennon and Harrison recounted their LSD experience to friends, someone told them to check out Huxley’s book. While psychedelics and the literature about them were still largely unknown, McCartney’s good friend Barry Miles worked at Better Books, one of London’s countercultural hubs, where Ginsberg read that spring.

The group recorded “Help!” in a four-hour session at Abbey Road on April 13. The other Beatles encouraged Lennon to speed it up to make it more pop. McCartney added a countermelody; he and Harrison sang the lyrics a half beat before Lennon did. On the twelfth take, Harrison added the lead guitar arpeggios, and then overdubbed the descending guitar notes in the vein of Nashville’s Chet Atkins.
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Rolling Stone
later rated it the twenty-ninth greatest song of all time. It was a precursor to the stark honesty of Lennon’s solo album
Plastic Ono Band
. When Lennon recorded that album, in the midst of undergoing “primal scream” psychotherapy, he remarked that the lyric of “Help!” was still “as good now as it was then. It is no different, and it makes me feel secure to know that I was aware of myself then.”
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The genius of the group was that, at the height of Beatlemania, when they were the most successful band on earth, they let us in on their insecurities. While the lyrics were simple, they were no longer adolescent. Their music was now adult; they acted their age.

The song was so strangely confessional for its time that it’s surprising that it became one of the top five worldwide best sellers of the year. But it resonated because it mirrored the insecurity of the culture at large. To parents who had survived the Depression and World War II, America’s rampant consumerism represented security, but it left many of their children feeling empty as they began to question age-old assumptions about sex, patriotism, race, religion, and drugs. Soon the baby boomers would begin seeking out new cures to their anomie. “Help!” served as both Lennon’s and his generation’s theme song as they journeyed through the many self-help options the new global village offered, from pharmacology to psychotherapy, religion, meditation, and activist politics.

“Help!” resonated, too, because of the camaraderie implicit in the group’s performance. Wrote critic Dave Marsh, Lennon “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. Paul’s echoing harmonies, Ringo’s jaunty drums, the boom of George’s guitar speak to the heart of Lennon’s passion, and though they can’t cure the wound, at least they add a note of reassurance that he’s not alone with his pain. You can make some great music on that basis. And they did.”
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*   *   *

Help!
cost twice
as much to make as
A Hard Day’s Night
, and critics had high hopes for the film.
Night
had bowled them over, and the movie that director Richard Lester made afterward had just won the Cannes Palme d’Or, the grand prize at the world’s premiere film festival.

The Knack
 …
And How to Get It
(released June 3) was far more honest about Beatlemania than
A Hard Day’s Night
could afford to be, since the Beatles movies needed to uphold a wholesome image for the group’s young fans.
The Knack
, on the other hand, opens with a neurotic nerd (Michael Crawford) watching in awe as an endless stream of women wait to enter the apartment of the domineering rock star (Ray Brooks) who lives upstairs. Whenever a young lady leaves the rocker’s room after a tryst, he solemnly places a medallion around her neck and gives her a stamp for her stamp book, Lester’s metaphor for how “bagging a Beatle” was the ultimate validation for the proto-groupies.

The nerd asks the rock star to teach him “the knack” of seducing women—until they become rivals for the affections of a young lady (Rita Tushingham) just arrived in London from the hinterlands. The film was Lester’s take on the sexual revolution, symbolized by a surreal set piece in which the characters push a giant iron bed through the city while a Greek chorus of elders voices its disapproval.

With stunning black-and-white photography by David Watkins (who would go on to shoot
Help!
in color), haunting score by Bond composer John Barry, silent gags and frenzied Pop Art editing, it was a hit with the
New York Times
,
Newsweek
, and most reviewers, though the rock star’s misogyny dates it today for some. Ironically, it was based on a play written by a woman, Ann Jellicoe.

Unfortunately, such zest was not to be found in
Help!
because, as Lennon later explained, “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast … and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just all glazed eyes, giggling all the time. In our own world.”
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The screenplay that Charles Wood and Marc Behm came up with was not as witty as
A Hard Day’s Night
’s Oscar-nominated script by Alun Owen, and as weed replaced speed, the boys were not inspired to match the barrage of one-liners and asides that delighted in the first film. Now they were bored with the filming process, running off to sneak hits as often as possible. In fact,
Help!
’s quirky humor often arises from how the deadpan foursome can’t even be bothered to act. So while Bob Dylan’s gift of pot revolutionized the group’s music, it seems that pills were better for making classic films.

Richard Lester was thus forced to pad out the movie with the antics of other comedians. As Lennon commented, “It was like putting clams in a movie about frogs.”
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There are nice touches, such as the Beatles’ fantasy pad, in which each Beatle has his own section of a large one-room apartment in a different color. Harrison’s has grass on the floor, which a landscaper mows with a pair of chattering teeth. Starr’s has vending machines. Lennon’s bed is one of the more interesting ones in cinema: a sunken pit in the floor with steps leading down and a mini bookcase. The film inspired
The Monkees
TV show, which would later be credited with making hippies safe to parents. Lester’s zany Technicolor style was also emulated by the TV show
Batman
and the next generation of advertising.

A Hard Day’s Night
’s subtext is the generation gap, with McCartney’s jealous grandfather trying to sabotage the group. The second film (however unconsciously) heralds the hippies’ immersion in Indian culture. On the surface, its racist caricatures of Hindus as human sacrificers is pure xenophobia. The leader of the cult is even played by a white Australian, Leo McKern. But, as noted, it is the shoot that whetted Harrison’s interest in the sitar. And while the group filmed in the Bahamas, on Harrison’s twenty-second birthday a local swami named Vishnudevananda appeared and gave the Beatles copies of
The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga
. Perhaps the yogi saw the giant statue of the Hindu goddess Kali rising out of the ocean while all the characters fought on the beach in the ridiculous climax.

The yoga book would later inform the lyrics of Harrison’s “Within You, Without You”: “When man realizes that nothing is outside and everything is within himself, then he will be able to transcend the limitations of space and time. In Yoga, this stage is known as self-realization or God realization, where there is no difference between the knower, knowledge, and the known; and where the past and the future merge with the present—the eternal ‘now’ of the Hindus.”
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Eastern philosophy would become the tool Harrison relied on to help him cope with Beatlemania.

*   *   *

After the Byrds’ jaunt
through the states in the second half of July, they flew to England for a string of dates on August 3–21. One of the Beatles’ old publicists, Derek Taylor, had taken on the job of breaking the Byrds in the United Kingdom after “Mr. Tambourine Man” made No. 1 there. He almost destroyed them when he dared hype them as “America’s answer to the Beatles,” because the Byrds were not tight musically and could not withstand the scrutiny; Michael Clarke had been drumming for only a year. They got a bad reception, but the Beatles befriended them.

A year before, Roger McGuinn had been inspired to start playing Beatles songs to the folkies because he believed the Fabs were consciously “doing their version of the ’50s rock ’n’ roll rockabilly sound and the folk thing combined,” using folk harmonies and chord changes. But now he learned that “They didn’t know how to fingerpick and they didn’t play banjos or mandolins or anything. They weren’t coming from where I was coming from at all, which I’d given them credit for. I thought they knew all that stuff and were just being real slick about it. But it was just kind of an accident. It was a great accident.”
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On August 13 the Beatles flew to New York for their third American tour. They taped their final
Ed Sullivan
appearance on the fourteenth, and then played the first rock concert in a sports arena, on Sunday, August 15, at Shea Stadium in Queens, home to the New York Mets baseball team and the New York Jets football team.

Opening for them were soul saxophonist great King Curtis (who would play on Lennon’s solo
Imagine
album), Motown singer Brenda Holloway (who Dick Clark claimed had the most fantastic voice he’d ever heard),
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Cannibal and the Headhunters (an East LA Mexican American band whose hit “Land of a Thousand Dances” was later covered by Wilson Pickett), and the instrumental group Sounds Incorporated, whom the Beatles knew from their Hamburg days.

The Beatles kicked in with “Twist and Shout,” and for the length of their twelve-song, thirty-minute set were unable to hear one another over the audience pandemonium, despite the hundred-watt amplifiers Vox had designed for the event. “Can you hear me?” Lennon called before “Dizzy Miss Lizzy.” “Hello?!”

McCartney bounced up and down even more than Herman’s Hermits’ Peter Noone for “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and shrieked “I’m Down,” while Lennon cracked Harrison up by playing the keyboard with his elbow. Jagger, Richards, and their manager, Oldham, watched from behind the dugout as guards chased fans across the field. Also in attendance were McCartney’s and Starr’s future spouses, Linda Eastman and Barbara Bach, before they knew them. The sound quality was poor, so for the subsequent concert film, the Beatles secretly played some of the numbers live in the studio to overdub onto the footage.

The $304,000 gross was the biggest in music history up until that time. The Beatles took $160,000 for themselves. The show’s sold out crowd of 55,600 would stand as the concert attendance record for eight years. Even at the end of the decade, the Stones and Led Zeppelin would play to arenas with only 18,000 capacities. It wouldn’t be until 1973 that Zeppelin broke the Beatles’ record, at Tampa Stadium with 56,800, at which point the era of stadium rock began. The promoter who organized the Shea event, Sid Bernstein, later claimed that Lennon told him in the 1970s, misty-eyed, “Sid, at Shea Stadium, I saw the top of the mountain.” Whether Lennon really did say that, it
was
the peak for the Beatles’ live career. Next year, when they returned to Shea on August 23, eleven thousand seats went unsold, perhaps due to the backlash over Lennon’s comment that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” After 1966 the Beatles would cease touring permanently.

The Beatles had a five-day break in the Byrds’ hometown Los Angeles on August 23–27, during which time they rented Zsa Zsa Gabor’s home at 2850 Benedict Canyon Drive, a horseshoe-shaped mansion on stilts off Mulholland Drive. Joan Baez and the actresses Eleanor Bron (
Help!)
and Peggy Lipton (later on the TV show
The Mod Squad
) hung out there. Women tried to climb up the canyon to get in. When some fans rented a helicopter and circled above at three hundred feet, Beatles manager Epstein requested a no-fly zone over the house.

Harrison recalled, “John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid, because we couldn’t relate to them any more … It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable: it was something that had to be experienced, because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think.”
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In New York they had scored some acid-dosed sugar cubes wrapped in tinfoil. On August 24, Starr did one with Lennon and Harrison, but McCartney declined. Lennon said, “Paul felt very out of it ’cause we were all a bit cruel. It’s like, ‘We’re taking it and you’re not.’ … I think George was pretty heavy on it. We were probably both the most cracked. I think Paul’s a bit more stable than George and I. I don’t know about straight. Stable.”
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The Byrds had just returned to town, so the Beatles invited them over to drop acid with them; McGuinn and Crosby were the only ones who came. McGuinn said, “It was like going to see the president or something. You had to go down in a limousine, and there were screaming girls on either side. Then the guards would open the gates, and you’d drive in to the estate and they’d close again, and everybody would be pressed up against the fence.”