The Beatles (108 page)

In the days that followed, a set of songs evolved that grappled with a new form: the act of self-exploration and confessional lyrics. John felt especially compelled to explore through his music the emotional upheaval that was churning in his life. His dilemma basically focused on propriety: could he get away with writing emotionally charged lyrics streaked with imagery that revealed dark truths? How much did the Beatles’ fans want to know about intensely personal issues? And how much was he willing to share with them?

To sidestep these questions, John initially resorted to third-person narratives, a tactic most prevalent in the seminal “Nowhere Man.” He’d begun it after a late drug-ridden night of clubhopping, arriving back at Kenwood higher than a kite. Collapsing on a couch in the attic, he said he “
spent five hours that morning
trying to write a song that was meaningful and good,” until he finally gave up and dozed off. At some point John apparently blinked awake with a concept: “
I thought of myself
as a Nowhere Man sitting in this Nowhere Land,” after which the words and music came—“the whole damn thing”—in a rush. Paul showed up sometime later and helped polish off the rough edges, admittedly a bit uneasy over the blatant personal slant of the lyric. “
I think… it was about the state
of
his marriage,” Paul surmised, aware that John had grown bored with Cynthia, frustrated by her timidity and aversion to drugs. A reflective, “dirge-like” song, “Nowhere Man” is steeped in dense harmonic pathos, the two voices intertwining, almost wearily so, around a tent pole of melancholy. The same can be said of “Girl,” John’s fantasy of “
that
girl—the one
that a lot of us were looking for,” he opined—although it is more wistful than melancholy. One of the last songs recorded for the album, “Run for Your Life” was stripped to its essential acoustic core, with some help from George’s lovely guitar counterpoint as well as the control booth.

No production tricks were necessary for “In My Life,” in which John even abandoned the coy third-person smoke screen for a straight biographical approach. It was the first time he consciously put the “literary part of [himself] into the lyric.” And unlike “Norwegian Wood,” nothing is jumbled by abstraction. As it was originally conceived, “In My Life” was a magnificent piece of songwriting, influenced by all the beloved sites from John’s Liverpool childhood: Menlove Avenue, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, the tram sheds (or bus depot). “
I had a complete set
of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic version of a trip from home to downtown on a bus naming every sight,” he recalled.
But by the time he was finished
, the structure bored him. It was too much of a travelogue, too nostalgic and sentimental. Practically none of it survived the makeover that followed. Once Paul took a crack at it, the places John identified were gone, replaced by two stanzas in which he only alluded to them and meditated on his past.

The song that resulted is a standout among innumerable gems, not only on the album but among all Lennon-McCartney compositions. It would be hard to point to a more gorgeous melody, distinct and unforgettable; in the hours John and Paul spent shaping it, each chord, each stroke, added new layers of color. None of their lyrics are as restrained—or more poignant. Proudly, John claimed authorship of the song throughout his life, and “In My Life” certainly has his stamp on it; few songs reveal his romantic sensibility more clearly. But Paul has maintained that while the “original inspiration,” the “template,” was John’s, by the time they got done reworking it, “
filling out the rest
of the verses,” only “very few lines” remained. According to Paul, they rewrote all but the opening lines, with Paul alone “writing the whole melody” based on a Smokey Robinson motif, “with the minors and little harmonies” lifted from Miracles records.

In fact, you can see their discrete fingerprints at various places in the material. Together, John and Paul polished off “The Word,” “You Won’t
See Me,” and “What Goes On” in quick succession. “I’m Looking Through You” took its inspiration from Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher, which had scrabbled onto an uneasy plateau. “They were like
two speeding trains
,” observes John Dunbar, a scenemaker and fantastic character in the British underground, “running on opposite tracks. Paul liked having Jane on his arm—when it suited him. But you could see he was gradually losing patience.” And interest. Jane wasn’t marriage-minded—not yet, at least—and Paul didn’t “
feel comfortable
” settling down with her. Besides, there was definitely some friction as a result of their respective careers. “
Jane’s star was rising
,” says Tony Barrow, “and Paul didn’t like being upstaged.” She refused to take a supporting role to the Beatles. “There was a time when he might have preferred that she play the housewife role, and that was never going to happen. Jane loved acting and Jane loved Paul, but she wasn’t about to give one up for the other.” Paul admitted “
being disillusioned
over her commitment” to the theater and reacting petulantly: “I can see through your facade—I’m looking through you.”

The tune brought John and Paul a step closer to finishing, but they were still a song or two short. The Beatles were determined to load up the album with an unheard-of fourteen cuts.
^*
“
It’s a question of value
for money more than anything else,” Paul explained in a year-end wrap-up with the
Herald Tribune.
“We want to do what
we
would have liked when we were record-buyers ourselves.” It was a gracious gesture, but not without disadvantages. They were pretty much tapped out from the rigorous grind. Neither of the boys felt much like going back to the drawing board.

But they had to. “
D’you remember that French
thing you used to do at Mitchell’s parties?” John asked Paul, referring to the all-night “bohemian” bashes they attended at the flat of Austin Mitchell, one of the tutors at the art college in Liverpool. Paul knew exactly what he was talking about: a precious, “rather French” instrumental he’d spun using a
Chet Atkins–type
fingerpicking technique. “Well, that’s a good tune. You should do something with that.”

Indeed. Paul had been noodling with a lyric built around the name Michelle and thought it might match up with the melody. To give it the musical lilt that the name seemed to suggest, he decided to weave in a few French phrases as an accent.
Michelle… ma belle.
It so happened he was spending the weekend with his old Liverpool mate, Ivan Vaughan, whose
wife, Janet, taught French at a primary school and, at his urging, she helped fill in the rest of the expressions. By the time he played it for John, the song was pretty much fleshed out but still lacked a middle eight. “
I had been listening to Nina
Simone [doing] ‘I Put a Spell on You,’ ” John recalled. “There was a line in it that went: ‘I love
you,
I love
you,
I love
you.
” Changing the emphasis to
love,
he “add[ed] a little bluesy edge” to the mix and they’d bagged another one.

They were almost ready—except for one not-so-minor detail. George Martin had been with EMI for fourteen years, ten of them as head of Parlophone, and after a feeble contract negotiation in 1963, he was still earning less than £70 a week. All his requests for a commission against sales were rejected out of hand—an outcome made all the more incredible considering his monumental effort in breaking seven or eight NEMS acts, to say nothing of the Beatles. “
I was in the studio
twenty-four hours a day,” Martin argued. “You know, you don’t [spend] thirty-seven weeks out of fifty-two at number one without working quite hard.”

Even so, a commission was unheard-of. Producers and A&R men were company drones, ciphers, lacking any residual perks—not even a car or a negligible Christmas bonus. Martin, who not only brought in tens of millions of pounds, reversing EMI’s flat earnings, but was largely responsible for thrusting the label into the rock ’n roll era, surely deserved at least the same kind of compensation as company sales reps, a reward for his extraordinary success—or so he thought.

EMI balked until the summer of 1964, when Martin notified the label that he would not be renewing his contract at the end of its current term. Len Wood attempted to broker a new deal, but each proposal he made was more preposterous, more arrogant—and ultimately more insulting—than the last. When, at their final meeting, Wood, sitting ramrod-stiff and imperious behind a polished yacht-size desk, proposed a deal by which Martin would be forced to reimburse EMI for departmental costs out of his profit, the producer yanked the plug. “
Thank you, very much
,” George informed him. “I’m leaving.”

Martin decided to start an independent production company—a revolutionary concept, “
a shock to the recording
industry,”
NME
conceded—that would lease its staff’s services to the labels for a respectable fee against royalties. Not only that, but he was taking a couple of EMI’s young frontline producers, Ron Richards and John Burgess, as well as Decca’s Peter Sullivan, along with him. That gave them—or A.I.R. (Associated Independent
Recording), as it was to be called—an artist base that included Adam Faith, Manfred Mann, Cilla Black, Tom Jones, Peter and Gordon, the Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Matt Monro, Freddy and the Dreamers, Billy J. Kramer, P. J. Proby, Lulu, the Fourmost, and, of course, the Beatles.

Without waiting for the details of Martin’s future role to be sorted out, the Beatles began working on the new album, entering a period during which their efforts together once again produced a groundbreaking style that would change the course of popular music. “
For the first time we began to think
of albums as art on their own, as complete entities,” Martin explained. That sounded suspiciously highfalutin, as unnecessary floss for rock ’n roll, but in no way did it seem to hamstring the recording process. In the sessions that followed, the Beatles, along with their faithful producer, struck a groove that had never been mined before, in which the sound, the way a song was approached and recorded, played as important a part as the music itself. The composition turned more experimental. “
The studio itself was full
of instruments: pedal harmoniums, tack pianos, a celeste, and a Hammond organ,” George remembered. “That’s why we used all those different sounds on our records—because they were
there.
”

Harrison had already become fascinated, if not yet proficient, with the sitar, an Indian lute popularized by Wendy Hanson’s friend Ravi Shankar, and he worked out a subtle arrangement that helped dramatize “Norwegian Wood.” In retrospect, it seems like a minor piece of musical construction, adding a string accompaniment, but that sitar managed to turn more than one head inside out. As far as Ringo was concerned, it was “
a mind-blower
,” a change of direction, if not a reshaping of the band’s attitude. “We were all open to anything when George introduced the sitar,” he said. From then on, “you could walk in with anything as long as it was going to make a musical note.”

Such experiments were hastened by Martin. “
He’d come up with amazing technical things
, slowing down the piano and things like that,” John recalled. “
They were incredibly inquisitive
about the recording process,” Martin recalled. “They wanted to know what they could do that people hadn’t [already] done.” A guideline was immediately established: no idea, however vague or outlandish, was too risky or off-limits. Martin knew better than to dismiss their penchant for experimentation. For every trial concept that crashed and burned, there were four that not only took off but soared.

When it came to musical terminology, however, they couldn’t speak the language. Not only didn’t any of the Beatles have formal training, none could read a note. To stem the lack of communication, they developed a rapport with the eloquent Martin that facilitated discussions about music free of theory-loaded jargon. “Give it some color here,” they might suggest. “Make it punchier.” On one number, “In My Life,” which required an instrumental bridge between the verses, John’s instruction got whittled down to “play it like Bach.” Exchanges like that galvanized Martin, who took up each of their abstract ideas as a challenge.

Play it like Bach.
That one especially intrigued him. They needed to fill about twelve bars with a piano solo that would lend the song a classical feel. Martin felt he could swing it. Not a pianist by training, he could still manage a fairly decent passage that would approximate “
something baroque-sounding
,” as John expressed it. “I quickly wrote out a Bach two-part invention [for piano],” he recalled, “ but it was too fast for me to play. So I lowered the speed of the tape to half speed… and then speeded it up [on playback],” an engineering trick that allowed him to simulate an Elizabethan-style harpsichord. Another time, he wove a few sheets of newspaper through the strings of the piano “to make it sound different.” He wrote the middle figure of “Michelle” as well, taking the song’s basic chord structure and inverting it as an instrumental that he played in a duet with John against George’s guitar solo. Martin called these departures “
just manipulations of the resources
we had at the time,” but that would be akin to playing Hamlet just by putting on the clothes. Resources take resourceful people to manipulate them, and the Beatles, with George Martin’s able assistance, injected originality and daring into the mix that hinted at the great artistic recordings to come.

“
This was the departure record
,” Ringo said. By any name, it was a masterpiece. The Beatles had already settled on a concept for the cover: it would be a fashionable photograph of the band from among those taken by Bob Freeman in the garden of John’s house in Weybridge. They’d worn new suede outfits for the occasion along with a new look: mannered, self-assured, candid. Freeman had shot more than a dozen rolls of film at the session, necessitating a consultation with the Beatles in order to choose the right photo. Everyone assembled in the parlor of a London flat one night to view the proof sheets that Freeman had converted to slides. “
Whilst projecting [them]
onto an album-sized piece of white cardboard, Bob inadvertently tilted the card backwards,” Paul remembered. “The effect was
to stretch the perspective and elongate the faces.” What a groovy effect! It reminded them of hallucinations during an acid trip, where everything was out of whack. Was it possible to print the photo that way? they wondered. Freeman’s response—a resounding “yes!”—triggered some discussion about an American blues artist’s reaction to the Rolling Stones. “
Well, you know they’re good
,” he’d commented, “but it’s plastic soul.”
Plastic soul!
What a hoot, they thought. It had a clever ring to it, and it was irreverent. A potential album title? Very close. But Freeman’s elasticized photo stretched the phrase in another direction, which everyone felt hit the mark. The name of the album, they agreed, would be
Rubber Soul.