Shout! (53 page)

As to which Beatle had proposed the bloody joints and limbless dolls, there was never any serious doubt. The banned cover, a bitterly resentful John Lennon said, was “as relevant as Vietnam.” His tone, people noticed, was neither cheeky nor funny.

Meanwhile, John’s “bigger than Jesus” remark continued to be denounced from pulpits across the world. Both the Spanish and South African governments issued official condemnations, though the latter, still ostracized for its racial policies, did not carry excessive moral weight. The Pope added his disapproval via the Vatican newspaper
L’Osservatore Romano
, which declared that “some subjects must not be dealt with profanely, even in the world of beatniks.”

Though debilitated with hives as well as groggy from a bout of flu,
Brian flew to New York ahead of the tour party in an attempt to calm, at least, the American furor. Nat Weiss remembers how his anxiety and distress when he got off the plane were not just about the huge sum of tour earnings at stake. “He really cared most about the possibility that the Beatles would suffer abuse—that they might even be in danger,” Weiss says. “The first question he asked me was: ‘What will it cost to cancel the tour?’ I said: ‘A million dollars.’ He said: ‘I’ll pay it. I’ll pay it out of my own pocket, because if anything were to happen to any one of them, I’d never forgive myself.’”

Using all his powers of diplomacy, Brian assured the American press that John had intended no sacrilege, but only wished to express concern at the decline in spiritual values. It was announced that when the Beatles arrived on August 12, John himself would formally apologize. He did so at a press conference in Chicago, pale and nervous—for the hate mail that he had been receiving had badly shaken him. “I’m sorry I opened my mouth,” he said. “I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ, or antireligion. I wouldn’t knock it. I didn’t mean we were greater or better.”

So began the tour destined to be the worst, if not yet officially last, of all. To add to the general unease, a famous American clairvoyant had predicted that three of the four Beatles would die soon in an air crash. Though the prophecy was later retracted, it cast a lingering tremor over the constant shuttle flights. Mal Evans was convinced he would not survive the tour, and spent one journey between concerts composing a last letter to his wife, Lil, and his new baby daughter, Julie.

All four Beatles became conscious for the first time of a threat that had worried Brian since the American tours began—that some night, in some huge, oval human sea, someone might be hiding with a high-velocity rifle. In each big-city stadium, grinding out the numbers they could no longer hear, they felt themselves endangered now by something other than dangerous adoration. At Memphis, their first concert south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the backstage fear was as palpable as sweat. On television earlier that day a portly wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had promised that if they went onstage, the Klan would fully justify its name as a terror organization. Instead of jelly beans, rubbish began to land on the stage. Halfway through the performance, a firecracker exploded. Brian, for one hideous moment, thought it was a rifle shot.

Almost every major venue along the tour route seemed to bring its
own peculiar curse. In Washington, D.C., the Beatles had to play in competition with a race riot a few blocks away. At the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium scores of innocent fans were manhandled by security staff and attacked by baton-wielding police. In Cincinnati, the concert promoter tried to economize by building a stage with no roof or canopy. Just before the Beatles went out to play a downpour of rain began. They could not have gone ahead without serious risk of electrocution. “The whole audience—thirty-five thousand screaming kids—had to be turned away,” Nat Weiss says. “They all got passes for a show the next day but, for a while, it really looked ugly out there. All the Beatles were frightened. Paul, I know, was physically sick.”

The final concert of the tour was on August 29 at Candlestick Park, San Francisco. “Brian told me it was the end in San Francisco,” Nat Weiss says. “He was dejected. ‘This is it,’ he told me, ‘this is the last one ever.’”

The day was to be even more terrible than Brian anticipated. For some months past he had been living with an American youth, but the relationship had proved too stormy, and physically violent, even for Brian’s taste. Unlike previous partners, the youth proved recalcitrant when shown the door and had threatened to tell the whole story to the Beatles unless given a substantial sweetener. Through Nat Weiss, Brian had paid him three thousand dollars in exchange for a promise to stay off this present tour, when one single further word of bad publicity would have been disastrous.

By the time the tour party reached Los Angeles, however, Brian had started to hanker for his former lover again. Against Weiss’s pleas, he was brought to L.A., put up in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and invited to the Beverly Hills house where Brian and Weiss were based.

On August 29, after the Beatles had left for San Francisco, the two returned to the house to discover that both their briefcases had been stolen. Weiss’s merely contained business papers, but Brian’s was a compendium of drugs, homosexual correspondence, and pornographic pictures, plus a hefty sum in cash skimmed off the tour’s concert receipts, which he had intended to share among the Beatles as a bonus. While the money was of little consequence, the briefcase’s other contents put a lethal blackmail weapon into any ill-wisher’s hands. Brian was so convulsed with terror and dread that he dared not even leave the house.

So, to his lasting remorse, he missed the Beatles’ last live concert. He never forgave himself for not being at Candlestick Park, on that night of all nights, to watch over the four boys in his charge.

Britain, that summer of 1966, had little cause to feel pleased with itself or the world. The year, barely half-expended, could already chalk up the varying torments of a general election and a national shipping strike. The pound ailed; inflation kept briskly on the ascent. The reelected Wilson government stood revealed, not as dynamic or purposeful but merely another set of politicians, with the usual capacity to bungle and vacillate. Rhodesia, having seceded from British rule a year earlier, still thumbed a derisive nose at her fuming mother country across the world. From still further afield came noises that penetrated even the age-old British indifference to what was still vaguely thought of as the Orient. America began bombing the North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. A war hitherto faint and far-flung ceased to happen comfortably out of earshot.

There was, however, bright sunshine. The British, as they had in the past forgotten pestilence, famine, the Great War, Hitler’s bombs, and the Suez Crisis, now just as easily forgot Mr. Wilson, Vietnam, and the pay freeze under the influence of weeks of unbroken summer. So 1966 was to pass into popular remembrance: not for crises, both present and promised, but for blue skies, soft breezes, and for two events—the only two—that fortified that ephemeral happiness.

On July 30, England won the World Football [Soccer] Cup, audaciously snatching the vital goal in the last seconds of the final against Germany. Old wartime animosities doubtless assisted the fervor with which, on another hot summer evening, the victorious team was welcomed home to London. Footballers looked like pop singers now; they grew their hair, wore trendy clothes, and received the approbation of great men. For Harold Wilson, naturally, was there, puffing his pipe as smugly as if England’s winning goal had originated in a cabinet memorandum.

The second, even more potent source of national esteem owed its origin to America’s
Time
magazine, which had only recently gotten around to noticing the Swinging London phenonemon that, in fact, had peaked more than a year earlier. On April 13,
Time
had devoted its cover and a breathless twelve-page report to London as “the Style Capital of Europe,” a judgment with which other American mainstream magazines like
Life
and the
Saturday Evening Post
were quick to agree. As a result, London was experiencing an influx of American visitors unknown since World War II. Hitherto, crossing the Atlantic had always been prohibitively expensive, creating Britain’s image of the American tourist as a cigar-chewing plutocrat with a guidebook. But now a coincidental drop in transatlantic air fares allowed thousands—millions—of American students, even schoolchildren, to come across under their own steam and experience the staid old capital’s new short-skirted, strange-scented wonders. Almost without exception, the first question these visitors asked on touching down at Heathrow was “Where can I find the Beatles?”

On August 5, an album appeared in the record shops that, were it not for the fact that approximately one million copies had been ordered in advance, might have seemed to stand little chance of being noticed on the shelves. Its cover, amid its rivals’ Carnaby colors, was plain black and white: a collage of photo fragments spiraling through what looked like palm fronds but proved on close inspection to be hair, encircling four silhouetted faces so instantly recognizable, it was not thought necessary to print their collective name. Who else in the world would announce themselves in graphics reflecting the smartest magazines? Who would call a record album simply
Revolver
, investing even that commonplace pun with the sleekness of some newly minted avant garde? Who but the Beatles would have confidence colossal enough to be so chastely down-beat?

Revolver
was not presented in the usual patchwork album style but as a continuous, cohesive performance, as if they had chosen Abbey Road’s Studio Two as a substitute stage. There was, first of all, to underline this, some stagey coughing and throat clearing. Then came “Taxman,” not a love song but a bitter satire written as well as lead sung by a chronically bitter George Harrison, railing against the huge portion of the Beatles’ earnings due in income tax under jolly Mr. Wilson. There was “Eleanor Rigby,” sung by Paul alone with a string octet, a song more like a short story, evoking Paul’s Irish Catholic roots, about a lonely woman picking up other people’s wedding rice. There was John’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” answering back Paul’s sentimental conscience with a paean to unrepentant apathy. There was the contrast of George’s sitar-squibbly “Love You To” and the stunning, simple charm of Paul’s latest Jane idyll, “Here, There and Everywhere.” There was “Yellow Submarine,” a song for children (as it seemed) perfectly suited to Ringo’s happy drone, accompanied
by slurpings and gurglings, ringing ships’ bells, a subaqueous brass band, and commands from the bridge in a John Lennon funny voice; and then John’s nonfunny voice, in “She Said She Said,” among graffiti-like guitar phrases, saying “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

On side two, to glorify the weather, there was “Good Day Sunshine.” There was “And Your Bird Can Sing,” more lucid Lennon nonsense, and Paul’s pretty, self-pitying “For No One.” There was “Doctor Robert,” the first of many in-jokes and concealed references to be planted in Beatles music: a sly dig at one of the upmarket medical men who kept them supplied with pills. There was George’s “I Want to Tell You,” with its wonderful message to pampered, unharassed, and fully employed 1966 teenagers that it was still okay to feel flat and dissatisfied (or “hung up”) the way George did; and then Paul’s “Got to Get You into My Life,” a soul song as neat and brassy and rousing as ever came out of Memphis or Chicago.

The Beatles, in fact, were not the first to nail down Swinging London in sound. Four months earlier, the Rolling Stones’
Aftermath
album had created very much the same King’s Road and Carnaby Street feel, thanks mainly to the multi-instrumental talent of Brian Jones, whose intuitive sitar playing made George by contrast sound as though his fingers were all thumbs. But no one looked to the Stones to catch the zeitgeist, whereas for the Beatles it was now almost a duty to be in step with the nation’s destiny. Thus
Revolver
became the perfect aural snapshot of Britain’s greatest triumph since 1940, a moment that would be still unequaled and revisited as often as its soundtrack was replayed half a century later.

If they were not quite the first to distill the present, they made up for it by prophesying the future soon to dawn. It was there on
Revolver
’s seemingly aberrant closing track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a Ringo saying transmuted by John into a weird mélange of backward-played tapes, his once exuberant lead voice flattened to near tunelessness. “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream / Lay down all thought, surrender to the void / Or play the game Existence to the end. Of the beginning.” Like England World Cup victories, the days of “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” were over for good and all.

The four who stopped running, who stood still at last in 1966 looking curiously about them, were beings such as the modern world had never
seen. Only in ancient times, when boy emperors and pharaohs were clothed, even fed, with pure gold, had very young men commanded an equivalent adoration, fascination, and constant, expectant scrutiny. Nor could anyone suppose that to be thus—to have such youth and wealth, such clothes and cars and servants and women, made for any state other than inconceivable happiness. For no one since the boy pharaohs, since the fatally pampered boy Caesars, had known, as the Beatles now knew, how it felt to have felt everything, done everything, tasted everything, had a surfeit of everything; to live on that blinding, deadening, numbing surfeit that made each, on bad days, think he was aging at twice the usual rate.

It was as little comprehensible that to command such fame as the Beatles might not be enough; that each, in the stupendous collective adoration, felt himself to be overlooked as an individual; that each on his own should long to test the reality, or otherwise, of his independent existence.

John Lennon seemed the most determined—and best qualified—to make an individual career. That autumn, with Neil Aspinall, he detached himself from the other three to appear in a new film,
How I Won the War
, directed by the now extremely fashionable and financable Richard Lester. It had been clear to Lester, even in the harmless knockabout of the two Beatles films, that John had serious possibilities as a screen actor. This view was confirmed when
How I Won the War
went on release and John’s portrayal of Private Gripweed was singled out for critical praise. “I told him then he could do anything he wanted in films,” Richard Lester says. “But he wasn’t interested. It came too easily to him. He despised it.”