The Beatles (103 page)

And what a tragedy, too. The melody is gorgeous, with an effortless, natural flow that brings its evocative sound together. One chord doesn’t so much suggest the next as dictate the progression, leaving no other option lest it collapse like a sand castle in a puff of mediocrity. From the beginning, Paul felt “
it was all there
… like an egg being laid… not a crack or
a flaw in it.” The melody haunted him. “
It was fairly mystical
,” he explained. He couldn’t let go of it.

Encouragement came from an array of trusted friends and sources. Lionel Bart remembers Paul turning up on his doorstep in late 1963 with the tune still fresh in his mind, wondering for all the world where he’d “pinched” it from. “
He hummed it several times
,” Bart says, “and I couldn’t place it. It sounded completely legitimate, wonderfully crafted.” Bart was unsurprised by its sweep or maturity. “I recognized that in anything he wrote there was a musical signature, the kind of signature you find with Cole Porter and George Gershwin. In that respect, Paul’s fingerprints were all over the score for ‘Yesterday,’ and I told him that night that he was onto something important.”

Even with Bart’s blessing, Paul was still dubious. “
This one, I was convinced
, was just something I’d heard before,” he said, and continued seeking opinions in an attempt to prove it. But everywhere he turned, the trail went cold. No one recognized it, nor could they point to so much as a measure that resembled another song. Both John and George Martin pronounced it “original.” And British chanteuse Alma Cogan, Paul’s one-stop music source, expressed interest in recording it herself.

Legend has it that while he was playing the song on Cogan’s piano, Alma’s mother swept through the parlor wondering if “anyone want[ed] some scrambled eggs.” Without missing a beat, Paul improvised a lyric for his new melody: “Scrambled eggs… oh my, baby, how I love your legs…” If his goal was to elicit laughter from the small audience, he was not disappointed—but it came at a cost. The words scanned the meter perfectly. Too perfectly, in fact: for more than a year he was unable to shake those awful lines.

“Scrambled Eggs” became Paul’s nagging burden. Every day, every week, for a year and a half—without fail—he tinkered with it: massaging the chords, putting “the middle in it,” playing with the pulse. Rhyme schemes were tested and discarded in search of a word or two that would give the song its identity. Colloquial expressions were picked over for a hook, even old standbys like “let it be,” which was a favorite of his father’s, enjoyed a brief tenure. No good—the right phrase, the one that would unlock the song and provide the way in, eluded him. This was an anomaly: rhymes, phrases—these were things Paul rattled off in his sleep, as a reflex. He had a rare talent for turning an unforgettable phrase: “P.S. I Love You,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “Can’t Buy Me Love”… It didn’t figure that he’d go cold with a winner like this.

Lennon and McCartney had put songs aside before and come back to them; others they’d abandoned altogether. But this one—this one was different. Paul knew the melody was exquisite; it enchanted him. Frustrated, he finally ran it by John, who had nothing to offer. John thought the song was “lovely,” but not in his jurisdiction. Besides, he’d heard it so often that he wanted nothing to do with it.

Nothing was settled on May 27, 1965, when Paul and Jane left for a two-week vacation at guitarist Bruce Welch’s villa on the southeast coast of Portugal. The minute they touched down in Lisbon the words began to flow. It was a five-hour drive from the airport to the Gulf of Cádiz, along roads hewn from mountainous cliffs nearly the whole way. Brian had hired a chauffeured car for the trip, and the handsome young couple piled in the back, surrendering themselves to the dreadful drive south to Albufeira. “
Jane was sleeping
but I couldn’t,” Paul told a friend. The scenery was lackluster, monotonous, and before long he was at it again—running down “Scrambled Eggs,” picking it apart, covering old ground. But as the car edged around Grândola onto the barren E1, the stumbling blocks began to give way. “I remember mulling over the tune… and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse.”
Da-da-da… yes-ter-day… sud-den-ly… fun-il-ly… mer-il-ly…
Somehow, the intimate drive with Jane had summoned up feelings of a different sort, of melancholy and solitude. Indecision had crept into the lyric’s emotional complexion. No sooner was the foundation in place than the rhymes began to connect, blend, and serve one another. “ ‘Yesterday’—that’s good,” he decided. “ ‘All my troubles seemed so far away.’ ”

The minute they arrived in Albufeira, Paul put it to the test. Bruce Welch was waiting in the entrance to greet his guests and he remembered how eager Paul was to play the song for him. “
He said straightaway
, ‘Have you got a guitar?’ ” Welch recalled. “I could see he had been writing lyrics on the way [from the airport]; he had the paper in his hand as he arrived.” There was an old, abused Martin in the lounge, which Paul flipped upside down, enabling him to chord it with his right hand, then without hesitation, he strummed through the song.

As soon as he was halfway through the verse, Welch realized how far behind the curve he’d just fallen. This wasn’t some three-chord rocker like the ones groups churned out over cigarettes and beer. From Elvis to the Shadows to the Beatles, the pop hits had always followed the same general form. It was easy to jump in almost anywhere and flog the big standard progressions that gave the music its intensity. Now, however, within a few
sketchy lines, Paul had advanced the pop form with an inventiveness free of gimmickry, making it lyrical and vivid in ways he’d never imagined. “I didn’t know those passing chords he had put into the progression,” Welch admitted. But its sophisticated structure was the least of his fascination with it. It was the intangible quality of it that overwhelmed him and led Welch to say: “I knew it was magic.”

The song was
exactly right
by the time he returned to London, on June 11. (Even so, Paul was demoralized by the tone of George Martin’s initial reaction to the lyric. “
I objected to it
actually,” Martin recalled, convinced that it would confuse anyone familiar with the Jerome Kern–Otto Harbach standard “Yesterdays.”) “
We tried ways of doing it
with John on organ but it sounded weird,” Paul recalled, “and in the end I was told to do it as a solo.” But listening to the playback, Martin had other ideas. “
What about having a string accompaniment
, you know, fairly tastefully done?” he asked. Paul cringed at the suggestion, conjuring up strains of “
Mantovani
” and similar “
syrupy stuff
.” That wasn’t at all his style, but he agreed to at least try a string quartet.

“We spent an afternoon mapping it out,” Martin recalled, devising cello and violin lines to complement the melody. Actually, arranging it wasn’t that tough of a job. “Yesterday” lent itself majestically to the silken weft of strings, and the two men—Paul humming parts, searching for notes on the piano, with George Martin translating them into notation—created the quintessential “blue”-sounding accompaniment that underscores the record.
^*

The entire string overdub took less than three hours to complete. Martin booked four musicians from the orchestra of
Top of the Pops
—session players he’d worked with on a regular basis—and walked them through the parts. After the first take, Paul pulled Martin aside and complained about the heavy shading of vibrato the string quartet had added to fatten the sound. “
It sounded a little too gypsy-like
for me,” Paul recalled. Normally, he took Martin’s opinions to heart, appreciating the producer’s vast musical training, but this time Paul stuck to his guns—every last shiver of vibrato had to go—convinced, and rightfully so, that the outcome “sounded stronger.”

The only thing left to decide was the awkward question of billing.
“Yesterday” may have evolved under the group banner, but it was by no means a
Beatles
record. Not only had Paul written it entirely himself, there wasn’t another member of the Beatles on it. The implications were clear. It would be difficult for EMI in good conscience to put it out as anything but a Paul McCartney single. That wouldn’t sit well at all with John, Martin knew, whose ego was in fragile enough shape without shifting more attention toward Paul. Still, Martin took that suggestion to Brian Epstein, arguing that the performance on “Yesterday” warranted a solo release. Brian, to his credit, wouldn’t hear of it. He was adamant: “
No, whatever we do
we are not splitting up the Beatles.”

But in a way, the bubble was already beginning to burst.

Chapter 28
Into the Cosmic Consciousness

T
he Beatles had undergone quite a change since their first trip to New York in early 1964, when they sprang up like clothespin cutouts on the stage of
The Ed Sullivan Show.
Outwardly, they remained the same lovable mop tops, their smiles as familiar and flashy as the grille on a late-model Jaguar, their extreme hairdos every bit as symbolic as the Queen’s crown. Privately, however, they were in transition. If, with
Beatles for Sale,
the band had reached the limits of the conventional three-minute song, then certainly
Help!
had spun them down paths into uncharted territory. Though they still cursed, drank, and fucked their way around the globe, there was something about the way they comported themselves that was sensible and precise. But the generation gap was widening, and with it came rising expectations and a feeling that they could no longer afford to play the charming but cheeky lads.

To keep ahead of the curve, the Beatles had relied on pot, a magic key to unlocking inhibitions and abandon. That was fine for an appetizer, but everything—especially the music—was changing so fast, and with it, their impulse to experiment. Together, the Beatles had crept into a darkened box at the Albert Hall in May to catch Dylan’s riveting performance and left speechless, in awe. He seemed so intense, so emotionally
out there,
expressing himself at enormous risk. How did he manage to work from inside like that, to set himself free and arrive at that remarkable place? What enabled such a release?

John and George found part of the answer quite by accident one night while they were at a dinner party at the Victorian flat of a prominent dentist on the Edgware Road. The evening had peculiar, almost sinister overtones that made them uneasy from the get-go. Both Beatles had heard stories about the dentist’s notorious dark side, about the kinky scenes that
he staged and his appetite for orgies. Though that hadn’t stopped the boys from bringing along Cynthia and Pattie, their radar was tuned rather high from the moment they walked through the door.

Nothing out of the ordinary cropped up until after dinner, when the Beatles prepared to leave. According to George, their gregarious host insisted they remain for coffee, during which he watched them soberly, silently, smiling, smoking, taking an inordinate interest in the girls. Afterward, he huddled in a corner, talking animatedly with John.

“
We’ve had LSD
,” John finally revealed to George in a bone-dry voice. The acid had been slipped into their coffee on sugar cubes and might have been an after-dinner cordial, for all George knew.

It meant nothing to George, who was determined to leave. “I seem to recall that I’d heard vaguely about it,” he remembered, “but I didn’t really know what it was, and we didn’t know we were taking it.” Virtually nothing had been written about the cryptically named drug; there was no buzz about it on the street. So little was known about LSD, in fact, that it wasn’t even illegal.
This acid, however, had a distinguished provenance
, having been supplied to the dentist by the manager of the Playboy Club, who, in turn, had gotten it from Michael Hollingshead, the man responsible for turning on Timothy Leary. Which meant that it was pure—and potent.

John was livid. He had not come to dinner to be dosed by a virtual stranger. Mumbling good-byes, they grabbed the girls and bolted, speeding toward the Pickwick, a London nightclub, with the dentist in hot pursuit. For a few minutes everything was fine.
They got seated and ordered
drinks, squinting in the low light to identify the faces of other musicians who waved to get their attention. “
Suddenly I felt the most incredible feeling
come over me,” George remembered. “It was something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had in my whole life.” He was overcome with love—hot, feathery, dizzying love. The others must have felt it, too. John, especially, had a grotesque grin plastered across his face that looked as if it belonged on a marionette. Streaks of blazing light burrowed behind the rainbow rims of their eyelids, trembling; something had altered the tone of their bodies. The sensations held them captive. It is uncertain how long they sat there like that. No one recalls seeing the performance, but at some point they got up to leave and realized, in a panic, that the club was empty, the waiters busily placing chairs atop the barren tables.