John Lennon: The Life (57 page)

Paul’s contributions represented a major leap forward on his own, very different, course: the euphoric “Good Day Sunshine,” the uncharacteristically vulnerable “For No One,” and the soul-influenced “Got to Get You Into My Life.” While ordering in still more extra instrumentalists (a French horn on “For No One,” a brass section on “Got to Get You Into My Life”) he also provided a track that showed how little the Beatles needed anyone but themselves. “Here, There and Everywhere,” a love note to Jane Asher, was recorded in almost a cappella style by voices as close-knit as the friends who once shared even their body warmth. Of all Beatles vocals, it remains the most intimate and sweet. Paul had first played it to John on a tape of rough song drafts by both of them, while they were sharing a hotel room on location for
Help!
“You know,” John told him, “I probably like that better than any of my songs on the tape.”

It was Paul’s idea to include the first Beatles number overtly for children, in the spot traditionally occupied by Ringo Starr. The theme for “Yellow Submarine” came one night as he drowsed in bed, and its words and music were almost complete by the time he got up next morning. The notion of a yellow submarine was quintessential comic-book Pop Art, although—as would quickly be noted—the term was also slang for Nembutal or Pentobarbital downers. The recording turned into a miniature
Goon Show
, with Pattie Harrison, Rolling Stone Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, George Martin, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, and sundry Abbey Road employees providing subaquatic sound effects and joining in the choruses. John blew bubbles in a bucket of water, shouted out commands from an imaginary conning tower (“Aye, aye, Mr. Captain, full speed ahead!”), and echoed Ringo’s vocal in a Neddy Seagood-ish shriek. When the tape stopped running, Mal strapped a bass drum on his chest and everyone danced round the studio behind him in a conga line.

From Paul, too, came a ballad that was as much a short story, the first of a trilogy that would take his talent to its zenith. The sub
ject matter, a solitary woman wistfully picking up celebratory rice in “a church where a wedding has been,” had no precedent in pop; if anything, it evoked the more melancholy reaches of Irish Catholic literature, particularly James Joyce’s
Dubliners
. The central figure in this tender hearted lament for “all the lonely people” received her baptism in a roundabout way. Paul decided on the Christian name Eleanor, so he thought, after the actress Eleanor Bron; then, on a visit to Bristol, where Jane was appearing in a play, he happened to see the surname “Rigby” above a shop front.

In fact, Eleanor Rigby was embedded in his subconscious—and, even more deeply, in John’s—thanks to a family gravestone in St. Peter’s churchyard, Woolton. As a small boy, John had seen its weather-stained inscription to the “beloved wife of Thomas Woods and granddaughter of the above, died 10th October, 1939, aged 44 years” countless times on his way to and from church or choir practice. Racked by childhood’s premature terror of the grave, he always found comfort in thinking she was not really dead and moldering under the ground but only, as her epitaph said, “Asleep.”

John claimed that while the song that would immortalize her was worked out between Paul’s grieving solo voice and a classical string octet, he and the other Beatles merely sat around “drinking tea.” However, both George and he were involved in the vocal harmonies, and all four had contributed to the lyric (Ringo coming up with the vision of Father McKenzie, who was originally to have been called McCartney, “darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there.”) Significantly, throughout all the creative disputes to come, John never rated Eleanor Rigby as other than a masterpiece, nor felt other than proud of his part in it, however peripheral. “It was Paul’s baby,” he would say. “But I helped with the education of the child.”

The track chosen to end the album—rightly, since it hardly seemed to belong there at all, but already to be leaping off into the future—was an all-John number, initially known only by the code name “Mark 1.” When he first played it to George Martin on acoustic guitar in his usual way, Martin was puzzled. The opening C major chord did not, as usual, form a threshold to some catchy sequence, but just went on, and on and on. With this strummed monotone came words that sounded like no John his producer had heard before: “Turn off
your mind, relax and float downstream…Lay down all thought, surrender to the void…Listen to the colour of your dreams…” They were, in fact, almost verbatim quotations from
The Psychedelic Experience
, which he had devoured in one gulp at the Indica Bookshop. Here now was a fifteen-line lyric encapsulating the LSD apostles’ creed that human existence was but a meaningless game, and the only way to salvation was “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

John’s sole guideline to Martin and the studio engineers, delivered with wonderful, dictatorial simplicity, was that he should sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from some Himalayan mountaintop. Their solution took the singing voice he so disliked into unprecedented realms of echo and distortion. The beginning of his vocal track was recorded on Abbey Road’s newly installed ADT (Automatic Double-Tracking) system; the rest was put through a Hammond organ’s Leslie speaker, whose rotating mechanism produced a wah-wah effect. The result was a flat, reedy, almost dehumanized tone, very much like that associated with mystics in holy trances. He loved it, of course—and instantly suggested a variation on the Leslie speaker technique whereby he would hang upside-down from the ceiling and slowly revolve while a fixed microphone picked up the erratic volume of his voice.

Although the track was John through and through, it owed a massive debt to Paul McCartney, still at this stage the most avant-garde Beatle as well as the one most dedicated to cultural self-advancement. The classical music learning curve, which for Paul began while living with Jane Asher’s family, had since progressed far beyond simple Beethoven or Brahms. He also knew about John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and their revolutionary conception of music as unpredictable sonic “events” rather than fixed patterns of notes. He knew about Pierre Schaffer’s musique concrète, which was created solely by the manipulation of electronically generated sound and thus removed any need for talent or training in the performer.

Paul had by now left the Ashers’ and, still resisting the call of the suburbs, had moved into a handsome town house in Cavendish Avenue, St. John’s Wood, just around the corner from Abbey Road. There, at the stimulus of Barry Miles and other arty underground
friends, he had tried out a seminal musique concrète technique with analog recording tape, in these days still mainly used on reel-to-reel machines. By joining the two ends of a tape and removing the machine’s erase mechanism, one created a loop that repeatedly superimposed the same track on itself, so turning the most commonplace sound into an unearthly cacophony.

The sense of Himalayan height and space, combined with acid-induced rapture and spiritual mass-awakening, that John sought for “Mark 1” was created by five tape loops playing simultaneously. Following Paul’s lead, John, George, Ringo, and Barry Miles all made their own loops at home by multiple rerecording of scraps of classical music, studio guitar outtakes, or even just laughter. The loop makers were stationed in studios all over the Abbey Road complex and, at a given signal, relayed their surreal sonic squibbles to George Martin’s mixing console. Such ad hoc commandeering and unorthodox use of EMI resources being strictly against company rules, there was a touch of Quarry Bank naughtiness about it all.

Playback produced exactly the sound picture John had imagined—that of hundreds of monks in robes as yellow as a submarine, beating and plucking on strange instruments and chanting of the joys of his mental Shangri-La. Typically, he was disappointed, saying he wished they’d used real monks instead. Typically, too, when choosing a title, he passed over all Leary’s mystic verbiage in favor of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a pet phrase of Ringo’s, sensing it was just right “to take the edge off those heavy philosophical lyrics.”

The album cover obviously needed to be something very special, an image as adventurous as the music it heralded, reaching into the same uncharted realms of Pop Art and psychedelia. The person who could have realized this to perfection, unfortunately, had died at twenty-one in a German girl’s arms and was buried in Liverpool alone with his name. But if Stu Sutcliffe was no longer around, a powerful echo of his era, and his talent, still was.

Klaus Voormann’s career as a Brian Epstein discovery had proved an unrewarding one. Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, the trio in which he played bass, had been signed to NEMS Enterprises by Brian in a burst of enthusiasm but, finding no success on record, had quickly fallen
apart. Rather than return to Hamburg, Klaus stayed on in London, not seeing his old Beatle mates as much as he would have liked for fear of looking like a sponger. He would soon join the highly successful Manfred Mann group, but at this point, with no music gig in prospect, he had serious thoughts of resuming his original career as an artist and designer. One day, out of the blue, John telephoned and invited him to do a cover for the new album, now scheduled for release in August.

The moment was serendipitous: six years earlier, at Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller club, Klaus had first plucked up courage to talk to John by showing him a design for an album cover. And, despite their long friendship—and the supposedly ego-softening power of acid—he found that prickly English boy-rocker could still readily resurface. “When John asked me to design the album, I hesitated for a moment before saying yes, I’d do it, and suddenly he gets very angry, very uptight: ‘What’s the matter? You don’t want to do it or what?’ He’s still the old, intimidating John.”

Klaus’s chaste black-and-white design seemed to belong on the wall of some avant-garde gallery rather than in the finger-hurried racks of a record store. Four Beatle heads, sketched in pen and ink, spilled forth a collage of photographic images through the mingling, seaweedy tangles of their hair. John’s face, at top right, had the almond eyes and long vertical nose of a Modigliani. The title,
Revolver
, was a sly Lennon pun, suggesting the action of a record on its turntable as well as a weapon that, for him, still belonged to the world of make-believe.

T
he world tour Brian had scheduled to begin in June 1966 was supposed to have eased the pressure on his boys. Their only European shows were three in West Germany. Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand were bypassed in favor of single-city visits to Japan and the Philippines. Following those hopefully unexacting appearances in Tokyo and Manila, they would have more than a month’s break before returning to the ever-reliable embrace of America.

Behind them they left a new single that was like an hors d’oeuvre for the banquet to come on
Revolver
. The undisputedly more commercial A-side was Paul’s “Paperback Writer,” a satire on pulp fiction and Fleet Street, finally making use of a phrase that the poet Royston Ellis had dropped into his and John’s consciousness in 1960. On the B-side, John’s “Rain” was a celebration of acid’s transfiguring power
at its most benign, when a wet leaf could appear to blaze brighter than gold and a raindrop coursing down a windowpane to reveal all the mystery of Creation. “Can you hear me?” the voice of the new apostle repeated over and over. “I can show you…” Multitrack harmonies and varispeed tempos created an effect both dense and liquid, as of a sonic tropical monsoon. For the fade-out, George Martin had the idea of playing John’s vocal opening backward. John loved the result, and from then on wanted everything played backward.

After such a creative surge, the thought of returning to a thirty-minute stage repertoire of dusty old hits was hardly bearable. And, what with putting the finishing touches to
Revolver
—and the certainty that no one out there would be listening anyway—the Beatles scarcely even bothered to rehearse before starting out on the road. During their opening concert, at Munich’s Circus-Krone-Bau, John, George, and Paul simultaneously forgot the opening of “I’m Down,” and had to stop and confer about it. Even after this, the usually meticulous Paul managed two further slipups in the lyric; then George mistakenly introduced “Yesterday” as a track from
Beatles for Sale
. Not since earliest Quarrymen days, and rarely even then, had they shown such blatant unprofessionalism.

The third West German concert took them back to Hamburg for the first time since January 1963 and provided a clearer-than-usual measure of how far they had risen since. The former illegal laborers, suspected arsonists, and police detainees now arrived at the city’s central station aboard a luxury train fitted with velvet drapes and marble bathtubs, which had been used to transport Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit a year before. The former all-night ravers at the Kaiserkeller and Star-Club now played just two shows of thirty minutes each in the 5,600-seat Ernst Mercke Halle, although, as if to keep up Reeperbahn tradition, police arrested forty-four spectators for violence.

Numerous old friends were granted instant dressing-room visas, among them Astrid Kirchherr; Bert Kaempfert, the Beatles’ first record producer (whose song “Strangers in the Night” had stopped “Paperback Writer” from reaching number one in the United Kingdom); and Bettina Derlien, the Star-Club barmaid who had always
known just how to help John when he was feeling down. After their second show, the four Beatles took a nostalgic midnight stroll through St. Pauli, John showing particular pleasure—as a less enraptured George would later recall—in spotting other familiar faces among the strippers, bouncers, gangsters, and cross-dressers from the still-thriving Bar Monika. There was no happier memory for him, nor ever would be, than that of blasting out simple rock ’n’ roll under crazy neon in this dangerous, sordid but also sheltering and tolerant place where, so unaccountably, he had once belonged.

For the first time, the support team traveling with the Beatles reflected the scale and scope of the journey. Besides Neil, Mal, and Tony Barrow, Brian had brought along Peter Brown, the ex-Liverpool record-shop manager who had become his most trusted lieutenant at NEMS Enterprises and closest friend outside it. Also in the party was Vic Lewis, an old-school London theatrical agent whose company had recently been acquired by NEMS, and who was about to join its board. These extra executive layers were meant to cushion pressure on the four, though, alas, the very opposite would happen.

From the moment they left West Germany, in Barrow’s words, “everything started to go pear-shaped.” A hurricane warning forced their Japan-bound flight to divert to Anchorage, Alaska, for a nine-hour stopover. When at long last they reached Tokyo, they found themselves the first pop group, possibly the first entertainers in any sphere, to receive death threats. The Nippon Budokan arena, where they had to give five shows, was normally a venue for Sumo wrestling and martial arts displays—in Japanese tradition regarded as religious rites as much as spectator sports. A group of extreme right-wing students had threatened vengeance for such defilement of hallowed ground with decadent Western music. From such cultural purists, this could only mean something very unpleasant with a long, curved sword.

It was later estimated that around thirty-five thousand police and security staff had been mobilized to guard the Beatles during their four-day stay in Tokyo. Paradoxically, Japanese Beatlemaniacs were the most peaceable they ever encountered. Five successive houses at the Budokan watched in almost complete stillness and silence,
with any sign of exuberance instantly photographed by the police who thronged the side aisles. Between performances, they were kept under virtual house arrest in the top-floor suite of the Tokyo Hilton. Despite the numerous guards on twenty-four-hour watch, John and Neil Aspinall managed their usual trick of sneaking out and hailing an ordinary cab for some incognito sightseeing. “We found a local market, and got out to have a look around,” Neil remembered. “But within a few minutes, the police turned up and sent us back to the hotel.”

So paranoid was security that even shopping in central Tokyo was banned; instead, the city’s leading stores sent selections of merchandise up to the Beatles’ suite. Among the cameras, electronic gadgets, and
happi
coats were some painting and calligraphy sets and blocks of superfine Japanese art paper. Having nothing else to do, the four set to work on a large communal painting. Barrow remembers how, as soon as John picked up a paintbrush, all his usual aggression and impatience seemed to melt away. “Never before or after did I see [him] concentrating with such contented determination on a nonessential project.” Interesting that the culture that provided this brief, unexpected respite from Beatle-slavery was Japan’s.

The Philippines, their next and final Far Eastern stop, were not a usual destination for traveling pop groups and had seemed like a brilliant territorial move on Brian’s part. Under the seemingly immovable dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos and his clotheshorse wife, Imelda, this was the most willingly Americanized nation in southeast Asia. Filipinos were renowned for their charm and friendliness and empathy with Western culture. The government-controlled press had whipped up feverish expectation over the Beatles’ visit, portraying it as yet another benefit of Marcos’s rule.

Before their departure from Tokyo, Brian had politely declined an invitation to the Beatles to call on President Marcos and the First Lady during their brief stay in Manila, explaining that they had only a brief rest-time between shows and it was now policy for them not to act as their country’s emissaries while on the road. None of the Beatles’ party appreciated that
no
is a word Asian dictators do not understand. On the morning after their arrival, before they were even
awake, a party of government officials arrived at their hotel with a fleet of limousines and motorcycle outriders. They were expected within the hour at Malancañang, the presidential palace-cum-for-tress. Sticking to his guns, Brian refused to let them be disturbed.

When the quartet finally surfaced a couple of hours later, they were able to watch live television coverage of the function they were supposed to be attending: not the private luncheon mentioned in Tokyo but a garden party hosted by Mrs. Marcos for four hundred children of government apparatchiks and senior military personnel.. Lingering close-ups were provided of the First Lady’s puzzled pout and the children’s disappointed faces as the wait grew increasingly hopeless.

The Beatles thus found themselves in the surreal position of being simultaneously VIP guests and pariahs. That evening, after giving two shows to a total of eighty thousand at Manila’s Rizal Memorial Stadium, they found all police and security cover withdrawn without explanation. Next morning, they awoke to outraged newspaper headlines that they had “snubbed the First Family,” and reprisals began in earnest. The Filipino promoter refused to hand over their share of the concert takings; government treasury officials threatened not to let them leave the country unless Brian paid a hefty cash sum in income tax. Their hotel joined in the attack, responding to room-service orders with trays of inedible food. Brian nobly took responsibility for the debacle, and went on Manila TV to explain that it had all been a misunderstanding, with no slight to the First Lady intended. As soon as he appeared onscreen, a blizzard of technical interference broke up the picture and drowned out his carefully rehearsed words. Mysteriously, as soon as his segment was over the interference ceased.

The party’s departure for home next day, July 4, was a meticulously orchestrated nightmare. At Manila International Airport, no porters were available to handle their luggage; then every escalator came to a synchronized stop, forcing them to struggle up flights of stairs with the bags in subtropical heat. In the departure area, they were jeered, jostled, and even kicked by airport staff and bystanders. Crossing the open tarmac to the plane, everyone was in real fear of
sniper fire from the heavily armed troops guarding the terminal. Moments before departure, Barrow, Brian, and Mal Evans were ordered off the aircraft again to sort out some nitpicking immigration point. Yet, amazingly, no Filipino customs official thought to search their luggage, which still contained most of the pot stash they had brought into the country with them.

Back in Britain, they played down the episode, though much could be read into John’s expert mimicry of airport officials screaming “You just ordinary passenger!” “I was very delicate, and moved every time they touched me,” he told journalists at Heathrow Airport. “I could have been kicked and not known…” Privately, he made a vow “never [to go] to any nuthouses again.” On a copy of the tour itinerary next to Manila he scrawled, “Nearly fucking killed by the Government…and it’s just another Beatle day…. George said ‘They should drop an H-Bomb on Manila’ and we all silently agreed.”

A
lready in 1966, an American public-relations disaster, for which John bore no individual blame, had been narrowly averted. In June, Capitol Records had issued an album entitled
“Yesterday”…And Today
, comprising tracks from
Rubber Soul
and
Help!
plus three from
Revolver
. Its cover, shot in London by Australian Robert Whitaker, plumbed levels of bad taste that Punk Rock, ten years later, would scarcely equal. Four smiling—nay, chortling—Beatles were shown in long white butchers’ coats, festooned with bloody joints of meat and naked, dismembered dolls. The outtakes were even more gruesome. One had George seemingly hammering nails into John’s head; in another, all four were joined to a woman by a string of sausages like an umbilical cord.

Though the original concept was Whitaker’s, they all willingly embraced it, as John later said, through “boredom and resentment” at having to do “another Beatle thing,” and to subvert their cuddly moptop image: “There we were, supposed to be sort of angels. I wanted to show that we were really aware of life.” The image was later interpreted as a deliberate one-fingered gesture to Capitol’s management, whom John in particular resented for issuing too
many such cobbled-together albums without their permission or approval. If such a gesture was intended, it was completely lost on Britain, where the picture appeared in advertisements for “Paperback Writer” and on the cover of the
Melody Maker
.

Capitol also noticed nothing amiss, put the cover into production as a “Pop Art experiment,” and had shipped a first pressing of 750,000 copies to record stores across America by the time alarm bells belatedly started ringing. Most of the albums were called back from the retailers before they could be displayed for sale, and a new cover picture was shot of the Beatles, grouped now very unsmilingly around an old-fashioned steamer trunk. Rather than manufacture a whole new cover, Capitol simply pasted this image over the existing “butcher” ones and shipped them back to their original consignees. Ever since then, memorabilia hounds have been carefully peeling the steamer trunk picture off
The Beatles—“Yesterday” and Today
, hoping to find the censored bloodbath underneath.

With American Beatle fans spared the sight of their darlings seeming to exult over decapitated and limbless babies, arrangements ran smoothly ahead for the seventeen-day tour, due to begin in Chicago on August 12 and as yet regarded by no one as the Beatles’ last ever. Recovered from their mauling in Manila, the four settled down to enjoy a summer that would enter British mythology rather like the long Edwardian picnic before World War I. That spring, America’s mass media had finally noticed the explosion of pop music, fashion, art, and design in London, which a small in-crowd had had almost to themselves for two years. In April,
Time
magazine had published a cover story on this new “style capital of Europe,” listing all the ways in which it was suddenly “swinging.” The result was to bring millions of young people pouring across the Atlantic to experience London’s boutiques, clubs, and alfresco fashion parades, and the ancient monuments, red buses, black taxis, and trotting Horse Guards that had, inexplicably, become their accessories. The very Union Jack was suddenly groovy: no longer a symbol of dusty imperial yesterdays, but a fashion statement flaunted by every young today-person on T-shirts, coffee mugs, or plastic shopping-bags.