Shout! (51 page)

That the Beatles had not yet found out remained a hallucination with Brian, despite grins exchanged behind his back, and despite John Lennon’s occasional brutal puncturings of the masquerade. “What shall I call this book of mine?” he had wondered aloud after finishing
A Cellarful of Noise
. John, fixing him with a merciless eye, replied, “Queer Jew.”

Despite this underlying malaise the Beatles’ 1965 American tour seemed once more to confirm Brian’s power to take the Beatles beyond even their wildest dreams. On both their previous two tours they had
hoped to meet their idol Elvis Presley and thank him in person for his cordial welcoming telegram. But the visits had been too short and their schedule too insanely crowded for anything to be worked out. This time around it happened that when they hit the West Coast in August Elvis would be in Hollywood, shooting one of the three films he was obliged to make each year. All four entreated Brian to move heaven and earth, if necessary, to procure them an audience with the King.

A meeting was arranged between Brian and Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, at the Colonel’s permanent office at Paramount Studios, which was exotically furnished with mementoes of his personal symbol and totem, the elephant. The crafty old carnival huckster offered his pale young British visitor a lunch of pastrami sandwiches, little suspecting how many times his name had been taken in vain to spice up fictitious phone messages for Brian in Birkenhead pubs.

Colonel Parker being amenable to Elvis meeting the Beatles, their roadie Mal Evans was dispatched to finalize arrangements with Joe Esposito, Elvis’s road manager and head honcho of his protective bodyguard, the legendary Memphis Mafia. “Mal was a huge Elvis fan,” Esposito remembers. “He turned up at the studios all dressed up in a suit and tie. When Elvis said ‘Hi’ to him and shook his hand, Mal was a nervous wreck.

“We sent cars to fetch the Beatles and bring them to the house in Bel Air where Elvis was living. I rode over in one car with George and Ringo; in the other one were John, Paul, and Brian. It was all supposed to have been a secret, but the Colonel had tipped off one of the radio stations, and when we arrived there were hundreds of screaming kids outside.

“When we showed the Beatles into the living room Elvis was in his bathrobe and playing a bass guitar. All four of them were tongue-tied to meet him… even John could hardly speak. Finally Elvis said, ‘Well, if we’re just going to sit here looking at each other all night, I’m going to bed.’”

“That broke the ice a little bit and they started playing roulette together—all but for George, who got high as a kite on grass out beside the pool.”

The ’65 tour included the Beatles’ greatest performing triumph—one that still found Brian apparently center stage and in full control. It occurred on August 23, when a helicopter containing the Beatles, Brian,
and Tony Barrow tilted down through the New York twilight and the pilot pointed out Shea Stadium, though they could already hear the roar of it, and see the flashes of unnumbered cameras pointed hopefully into the sky.

Brian was there at the New York Mets’ baseball field, to witness the concert that, though it grossed $300,000, earned only $7,000 for its promoter, Sid Bernstein. He is there in the film that was made, standing near the stage, nodding his head in time a little jerkily, looking out to the bleachers at fifty-five thousand people—in seats kept cheap at his insistence—then back to the four figures for whom fifty-five thousand voices are screaming, with their military-style khaki tunics, their hot foreheads, and still unwearied smiles.

“If he’d been an ordinary manager, Shea Stadium couldn’t have happened,” Nat Weiss says. “None of it could have happened the way it did. It all only happened that way because it was Brian Epstein’s fantasy.”

FOURTEEN

“THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE LAST ONE EVER”

A
t the beginning, two boys in travel-creased shirts would stand in front of George Martin, playing the new song they had scribbled in an old school exercise book. Martin even then saw two personalities at war. A song would be John’s aggression held in check by Paul’s decorum; it would be Paul’s occasionally cloying sentiment cut back by John’s unmerciful cynicism. Yet Paul loved all-out rock ’n’ roll, just as John could be capable of brusque tenderness. Examples of total collaboration were rare. More often, one would write half a song and then come to the other for help with the chorus or “middle eight.” The formula was established that whoever had written most of the song took the lead vocal, the other providing harmony. That harmony derived its freshness and energy from the contest being waged within it.

Collaboration was dictated, in any case, by close confinement in tour buses, dressing rooms, and later, aircraft; the pressure of songwriting to order in spaces cleared among newspapers, teacups, and the debris of “the road.” From the early, simple yeah-yeah hits up to the
Hard Day’s Night
album the songs, whether by John or Paul, are chiefly redolent of a common life on the run. Nor was it still absolutely certain that Lennon-McCartney songs were what the public wanted. Their next, and fourth, album,
Beatles for Sale
, reverted largely to their old Liverpool and Hamburg stage repertoire: Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music”; Carl Perkins’s “Honey Don’t”; Little Richard’s “Kansas City”; Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love,” a track on which their fans first discovered their almost uncanny powers of mimicry. By covering the songs of these and many others of their rock and soul idols, and openly acknowledging their creative debt, they had reactivated several careers previously in the doldrums, notably Berry’s and Perkins’s, and Holly’s posthumous one. It was thanks to them also that knowing about pop history for the first time became cool.

The importance of George Martin cannot be overemphasized. First of all, he signed them. Second, he did not cheat them. Third, he did not
adulterate them. It would have been easy for him, as all-powerful record producer, to insist that each release should carry a B side composed by himself. Martin happened to be of the rare breed who are content to use their talents in improving other people’s work. To Lennon and McCartney he was the editor that all creative promise strikes if it is lucky. He took the raw songs, he shaped and pruned and polished them and, with scarcely believable altruism, asked nothing for himself but his EMI salary and the satisfaction of seeing the songs come out right. As the songs grew more complex, so did Martin’s unsung, unsinging role.

Paul McCartney was, of the two, the more obviously natural musician. Much came from heredity, and the Jim Mac Jazz Band. He had an instinctive grasp of harmony, a gift of phrasing that raised the bass guitar in his hands to an agile, expressive lead instrument. Already proficient in guitar and drums, he was now taking formal piano lessons. Paul developed by following rules, a notion altogether repugnant to John Lennon. John’s music was, like his drawing, bereft of obedience and straight lines, but honest and powerful in a way that Paul’s never dared to be.

Innovators though they had become, they were still as wide open to outside influences and quick to absorb other people’s good ideas as they had been in far-off days when they’d sit in Paul’s front room copying Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins. They still looked as eagerly to America, where scores of new ensembles with round-collared suits and bangs now adopted Beatle-ish names (the Turtles, the Byrds, the Monkees) and used Beatle-ish harmonies and humor to claw back the Scouse-borrowed music of their native land. Even the new habit of calling the former groups “bands” came from John, George, Paul, and Ringo, who would often collectively sign themselves “The Beatles—a band,” like tuba and triangle players from some Yorkshire mining village or the Salvation Army. Many American bands went so far as to adopt Liverpool accents and use Liverpool phrases, despite blissful ignorance as to their meaning. One Monkees song, for instance, was to come out in the United States as “Randy Scouse Git” (hastily changed to “Alternate Title” for its British release).

But the most significant of Britain’s American converts to rock was Bob Dylan, formerly a folk-singing reincarnation of travelin’ man Woody Guthrie and chief standard-bearer for the emergent protest movement. Then, one fateful day, on his car radio, Dylan heard the Animals’
Newcastle-on-Tyne version of New Orleans’ “The House of the Rising Sun.” There and then Dylan abandoned acoustic protest songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” for electric-powered rock, thereby instantly turning the form into one without limitations of subject, expression, or length.

Dylan had also been an early convert to the Beatles, although at the time crediting them with rather more daring than they possessed. When they first met him he told them how blown away he’d been by the “druggy” line in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—“I get high, I get high!” John and Paul had to explain rather sheepishly that they’d actually sung “I can’t hide, I can’t hide!”

John, in particular, now waited for every new Dylan release, hungry for the next giant leap in experimentation it was bound to bring. He also kept a weather eye on the Beach Boys, whom Beatles records had prompted to abandon simple surfing chants for complex urban chorales, developing the harmonic genius of their leader, Brian Wilson. In 1965, too, there was a rising New York band, the Lovin’ Spoonful, whose lead singer/songwriter John Sebastian worryingly seemed to possess the humor of Lennon and the romanticism of McCartney inside one Beatle-shaggy head.

The soundtrack album for
Help!
brought the disparate characters of John and Paul, for the first time, into open contrast. On the one hand, there were unmistakably “John” songs, like “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” written under Bob Dylan’s influence: sardonic and world-weary, idylls of the morning after. On the other hand there was Paul’s solo performance of a ballad he had been playing around with for weeks under the provisional title of “Scrambled Eggs” but hadn’t liked to bring to the studio because he couldn’t believe its melody had never been used before. Now titled “Yesterday,” it was performed by Paul alone, accompanied by a classical string quartet and no other Beatle vocal or instrumental embellishment whatever. It was immediately covered by a leading British ballad singer, Matt Monro, the first of some two thousand recorded versions.

Rubber Soul
, their second album that year, reflected a widening schism belied by the four Carnaby-look Beatles, still barely distinguishable from each other, in its modish fish-eye lens sleeve. Paul and John were by now leading separate—and, as it proved—mutually inimical lives. John’s was the dominant presence, through songs that were fragments
of current autobiography—the boredom, in “Nowhere Man,” of sitting at home in his Tudor mansion; the edgy lust of “Norwegian Wood,” a description of infidelity in some London girl’s flat. From Paul came “Michelle,” a love song as sweet and untroubled as his affair with Jane and half its lyrics translated into French as if to impress the highbrow Asher family.

EMI’s Abbey Road studios, whatever other amenities they lacked, were an ideal hideaway. London’s northbound traffic sped in total indifference past the plain-fronted white house with its neat gravel driveway and high front steps. Only the doorman, eyeing the fan pickets posted respectively at the
IN
and
OUT
gateway, hinted at anything discordant with St. John’s Wood, acacia bushes, retired publishers, and Austrian au pair girls.

In the house’s rubber-silenced hinterland, Studio Two, that once strictly rationed Holy of Holies, was now consecrated almost exclusively to the Beatles’ use. George Martin likewise no longer looked in his diary to see whether or not he could fit in a session. When the source of EMI’s current three-million-pound profit felt an urge to record, Martin and his engineer, Norman Smith, obeyed the peremptory summons.

Gone, too, was the producer’s old clock-watching authority. Studio Two at Abbey Road became in effect a rehearsal room where new Beatles songs took shape by methods increasingly prodigal of time and expense. Four-track recording, which had replaced two-track at Abbey Road in late 1963, altered the entire concept of an album session. Whereas
Please Please Me
had been blasted off in one thirteen-hour marathon,
Rubber Soul
grew over several weeks as a layering of rhythm, vocal, and instrumental tracks, any of which could be erased and rerecorded. Both John and Paul, in their different ways, embraced these new technical possibilities. Each built his own private studio where demo tapes could be produced as a guide to the final Abbey Road version. Both ran through George Martin’s domain as through a toy shop, alighting with rapture on this or that novelty of sound. They must have
that
on the track, they would say. Martin, the trained musician, Norman Smith, the trained engineer, would reply that it couldn’t work. Then they found it did work. Studio procedure was to be changed for all time by this whim of iron.

At a certain moment in each session Martin would leave John and Paul and cross the cable-strewn floor to George Harrison, waiting apart
from the others, unsmiling with his Gretsch rehearsal guitar. George would then play to Martin whatever solo he had worked out for the song. If Martin did not like it he would lead George to the piano, tinkle a little phrase, and tell him to play that for his solo. Such was the origin of the guitar in “Michelle.” “I was,” Martin admits, “always rather beastly to George.”

In George the world’s ecstasy had as yet produced no answering lift of inspiration. He played lead guitar as he always had, earnestly, a little ponderously. He took his turn at lead singing in a voice whose thick Scouse seemed to mask an underlying embarrassment. Lately, goaded into action by John and Paul’s stupendous output, he, too, had begun to write songs by himself rather than in partnership with either of the other two and with titles unwittingly echoing his rather testy and impatient nature: “Don’t Bother Me”; “Think for Yourself.” Each new album, in fairness, featured a song by George—just one. He was also learning the Indian sitar, an instrument that Richard Lester had added for comic purposes to a scene in
Help!
“Norwegian Wood” was the first Beatles song to benefit from the wiry whining and wailing of George’s sitar.