1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (42 page)

Dylan played “4th Time Around” for Lennon in a hotel and asked the Beatle what he thought about it. Lennon said he didn’t like it. Still, Dylan played it to all of London at the Royal Albert Hall the final night of his ’66 world tour. Lennon later admitted to interviewers that it made him very paranoid,
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and he ceased writing Dylan-inspired songs. It seemed ironic for Dylan to complain, considering he had appropriated melodies from other sources for “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Hard Rain,” “Don’t Think Twice,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “It Ain’t Me Babe,” and “She Belongs to Me,” to name just a few.

On the surface, Lennon’s short and abstract lyrics were the antithesis of Dylan’s, but the American had freed him up to express alienation and ennui in a way that hadn’t been done before. And Dylan convinced him he didn’t need to separate the part of his brain that composed pop songs from the one that wrote the subversive wordplay of his books, and the two sides began to meld.

“Norwegian Wood” itself concerns an extramarital affair in the apartment of a young lady who owns nothing on which the singer can sit, just the ’60s version of Ikea, the “Norwegian wood” of the title. Peter Asher, who lived down the hall from McCartney in the Asher household, “had his room done out in wood; a lot of people were decorating their places in wood … But it’s not as good a title, Cheap Pine, baby,” McCartney said.
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In the song, the woman tells the singer she has to go to work in the morning. He ends up sleeping in the bathtub. Then, when he wakes up, she’s gone, so he lights a fire. McCartney elaborated that the female in the song “led him on, then said, ‘You’d better sleep in the bath.’ In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn’t the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn’t, it meant I burned the fucking place down.”
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*   *   *

Back in June,
when McCartney recorded “I’m Down,” he wrapped a take by uttering, “Plastic soul, man, plastic soul,” which is what the band had heard black guys call Mick Jagger. The phrase became the album title, twisted into a pun on tennis shoes. They recorded a blues track called “12 Bar Original” that recalled Tommy Tucker’s “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” ultimately held off the album. The LP’s soulful opening track almost never survived, either.

McCartney arrived at a writing session at Lennon’s with an idea about “Golden Rings,” but it was a nonstarter. One of them wanted to throw in the towel, but the other kept pushing, “No, we can do it.” It fell into place when they changed the title to “Drive My Car,” a blues term for having sex. It turned into a little story about an actress who tells a guy he can be her limo driver. Proudly, he counters that he can do better than being her chauffeur, but she’s so sexy she talks him into it. Then, in the last verse, she admits that she doesn’t have a car.

The key was getting a deep bass sound. Harrison listened to Otis Redding’s “Respect” and suggested that he and McCartney play something similar on bass and guitar at the same time.
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But Abbey Road Studios couldn’t get a bass sound as loud or as full as the black labels. Next time, the Beatles fumed, they’d record at Stax.

“It needs cowbell,” Lennon said, like “In the Midnight Hour.” It was the first Beatles session to go past midnight, wrapping at 12:15 a.m.

“Satisfaction” had challenged the Beatles’ supremacy—Stones manager Oldham called it “The National Anthem”
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—by sweeping the masses onto the dance floor with its lyrics of sexual frustration. So Lennon fought back in “Day Tripper,” with his own dance riff about a “prick teaser,” and then gave the line to McCartney to sing as “big teaser.” Lennon joins in for the chorus, and they remake “Twist and Shout” for the instrumental break. The main riff itself was inspired by Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step,”
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just as it had been for “I Feel Fine,” recorded almost exactly a year earlier. Critic Dave Marsh said “Day Tripper” was the closest the Beatles had ever come to making a soul record, and Otis Redding put it in his set.

Many of the Beatles’ songs chronicle the old-fashioned male’s frustrations with the modern, independent woman. McCartney wanted Jane Asher by his side constantly. Unfortunately for him, she was determined to pursue her acting career. Thus many of McCartney’s finest mid-’60s tracks rose out of their arguments. “[Songwriting] is often a good way to talk to someone or to work your own thoughts out. It saves you going to a psychiatrist, you allow yourself to say what you might not say in person.”
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After he broke up with Asher, McCartney found a woman who truly would accompany him here, there, and everywhere, even onstage, Linda Eastman—and angst largely disappeared from his work in the 1970s.

“You Won’t See Me” was written in the Asher house while she was out of town doing a play. “I’m Looking through You” was a disillusioned reprimand, as if McCartney weren’t himself fooling around on tour—he felt that as long as he wasn’t married, it wasn’t cheating. Except for “Yesterday,” McCartney’s songs of the era seldom take responsibility for the conflict.

Still, the band needed more material, always more material. Racking his brain, Lennon remembered a melody McCartney used to play back in the old days. When Lennon was in art school, existentialists were trendy. When McCartney went to one of the art school parties, he saw a bohemian with goatee and striped shirt singing a French song. McCartney developed a parody where he would mumble words as if he were French, trying to be mysterious for the ladies. Lennon suggested McCartney put some words to that melody. So McCartney hired a friend to help him with the French lyrics, and for the phrasing in the bridge, he imitated Nina Simone in her recent cover of “I Put a Spell on You,” again per Lennon’s suggestion. “Michelle” won the Grammy for Song of the Year and was the forty-second most played song of the century, per BMI, even though it was never released as a single by the Beatles.

*   *   *

Rubber Soul
was
the last time Lennon’s persona on record was “normal” for many years. The next album would see him plunging into the lysergic vortex, followed by reinventions as a mystic, peace guru, radical, and junkie before staggering back toward the middle of the road circa 1973. But on October 18, he offered “In My Life,” which would go on to be a wedding (and funeral) standard.

Remembering journalist Kenneth Alsop’s encouragement to write something like his books, Lennon imagined a bus trip from his old house into town. “I had Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Tram Sheds—and it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holidays Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all. I can
not
do this! I cannot do this! But then I laid back and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember … And it was, I think, my first real major piece of work. Up till then it had all been sort of glib and throwaway. And that was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric.”
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McCartney adapted Marv Tarplin’s guitar intro from “The Tracks of My Tears” for the beginning. They knew they needed something special for the instrumental, but didn’t know what, so they left an empty space when they recorded the rhythm track. Then producer George Martin had an inspiration. He overdubbed a keyboard part, as he had on many Beatles tracks, but this time he played it slower than normal, then sped up the recording to make it sound like a harpsichord. The group’s next phase of studio experimentation was beginning.

Lennon’s “Girl” sings of a relationship with S/M overtures, with an aloof, dominating woman who believes pain leads to pleasure. “There is no such thing as the girl; she was a dream … It was about that girl—that turned out to be Yoko, in the end—the one that a lot of us were looking for.”
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Lennon made sharp intakes of breath into the mike to sound like he was either taking a hit from a joint or having sex. McCartney added a Zorba-like bit he had heard played on a bouzouki during a holiday in Greece.

The band liked the “la la la”s the Beach Boys sing in “You’re So Good to Me” on the
Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!)
album. So, for backing vocals, they had the idea to sing “dit dit dit”s, which soon morphed into “tit tit tit”s. They had already gotten “prick teaser” past Martin. This time, during the playback, Martin asked, “Was that ‘dit dit’ or ‘tit tit’ you were singing?”

“Oh, ‘dit dit,’ George, but it does sound a bit like that, doesn’t it?”

In the car, the Beatles broke down laughing. Martin had done comedy records for
The Goon Show
with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, so he probably knew anyway.

“Run for Your Life” is the flip side of “Girl.” Now Lennon is the sadist, recycling the lyric from Presley’s “Baby Let’s Play House,” that he’d rather see his woman dead than with another man. Beyond the hypocrisy of an epic womanizer being jealous, there is the threatening tone already apparent in earlier tracks such as “No Reply” and “You Can’t Do That.” His book
In His Own Write
makes some jokes about domestic abuse: “Not even his wife’s battered face could raise a smile on poor Frank’s head … A few swift blows had clubbed her mercifully to the ground, dead.”
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Some years later, after Yoko Ono’s influence turned him into a feminist, Lennon proclaimed “Run for Your Life” his least favorite Beatles song and said he regretted writing it.

*   *   *

The meeting with the Byrds
the August before had inspired Harrison to write his first classic, “If I Needed Someone.” He was heading toward marriage with Pattie Boyd, so the lyrics addressed all the women of the world, saying that had he met them earlier, it might have worked out, but now he was too much in love (but give me your number just in case). The band got down the rhythm track, highlighted by McCartney’s “drastically arpeggiated”
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bass, in one take, and then overdubbed the soaring harmonies and tambourine. Harrison sent an advance copy to the Byrds through publicist Derek Taylor, with a note: “This is for Jim [McGuinn],” Harrison told Taylor. “Tell Jim and David that ‘If I Needed Someone’ is the riff from ‘The Bells of Rhymney’ and the drumming from ‘She Don’t Care about Time,’ or my impression of it.”
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The sound was so transcendent that Lennon adopted it for his own “Nowhere Man,” recorded a week later.

The latter song had its roots in Lennon’s restlessness living in the suburb of Weybridge, outside London. “[It] won’t do at all. I’m just stopping at it, like a bus stop. Bankers and stockbrokers live there; they can add figures, and Weybridge is what they live in, and they think it’s the end, they really do. I think of it every day—me in my Hansel and Gretel house. I’ll take my time; I’ll get my real house when I know what I want. You see, there’s something else I’m going to do, something I must do, only I don’t know what it is. That’s why I go ’round painting and taping and drawing and writing and that, because it may be one of them. All I know is, this isn’t it for me.”
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In his Hansel and Gretel house, Lennon spent five hours one morning trying to write a “song that was meaningful and good.”
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The deadline to get
Rubber Soul
out in time for Christmas sales was upon them. “Nothing would come. I was cheesed off and went for a lie-down, having given up.” Soon McCartney would be coming around to lend a hand. “Then I thought of myself as Nowhere Man sitting in his nowhere land.”
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The song “came, words and music, the
whole
damn thing, as I lay down … So letting it
go
is what the whole game is. You put your finger on it, it slips away, right? You know, you turn the lights on, and the cockroaches run away; you can never grasp them.”

The Byrds’ McGuinn said that Dylan had shocked Lennon by pointing out that he had nothing to say. Lennon said, “For years on Beatles tours, Brian Epstein had stopped us from saying anything about Vietnam or the war. He wouldn’t allow questions about it.”
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The blindness of “Nowhere Man” echoes the deaf masses of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Sound of Silence.” (Also, Lennon really was practically blind without his glasses.) But unlike those fatalistic songs, Lennon exhorts the Nowhere Man to get out there and see what he’s been missing—the world is at his command, if he just realizes his power.

Just as the Beatles chased more bass for their soul tracks, they tried to out-treble the Byrds for the folk-rock tracks “Nowhere Man” and “If I Needed Someone.” “They’re among the most treble-y guitars I’ve ever heard on record,” McCartney boasted.

The engineer said, “Alright, I’ll put full treble on it,” and we said, “That’s not enough.” He said, “But that’s all I’ve got.” And we replied, “Well, put that through another lot of faders and put full treble up on that. And if that’s not enough we’ll go through another lot of faders.” They said, “We don’t do that,” and we would say, “Just try it … if it sounds crappy we’ll lose it, but it might just sound good.” You’d then find, “Oh, it worked,” and they were secretly glad because they had been the engineer who put three times the allowed value of treble on a song. I think they were quietly proud of those things.
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Harrison and Lennon play in unison, as they did a year before on “I Feel Fine,” on their Sonic Blue Stratocasters. McCartney and Starr lock into one of their most supple drum and bass grooves. The instrumental climaxes with the sound of a bell, like an epiphany.

*   *   *

“In the beginning
was the Word,” begins the Gospel of John in the New Testament. In Lennon and McCartney’s “The Word,” they sing that they have seen the light, and their mission is to spread love and sunshine. But there is an eerie, almost discordant edge to the church organ, as if they sense that messianic ambitions don’t come without risk. Lennon and Harrison’s future spiritual songs, “Imagine” and “My Sweet Lord,” would disturb psychotic Beatle stalkers Mark David Chapman and Michael Abram, turning the movie
Help!
tragically real.