The Beatles (111 page)

Perhaps. George Martin, however, always maintained that the effect at the end of “Rain” was his idea. “
The Beatles weren’t quite sure
what to do at that point,” he recalled. “
While they were out having a break
one evening, I lifted off a bit of John’s voice. [I] put it onto a bit of tape and turned it around and shoved it back in—slid it around until it was in the right position…. And I played it to John when they came back.”

There is probably some truth to both accounts because of the intense collaboration that paced the recording of the album. It’s entirely likely that John conjured the effect, and every bit as likely that Martin perfected it. What is indisputable is that the excitement was contagious. Everyone in the studio reveled in the process, running instrument and vocal tapes in myriad directions. They used it on “Taxman” and throughout George’s guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping.” There is even some reverse backing on “She Said She Said.” At some point, however, it had gotten out of hand. “
And that was awful
,” Martin recalled, “because everything we did after that was backwards. Every guitar solo was backwards, and they tried to think backwards in writing.”

Backward or forward, the work was producing amazing results. There was a sense of real adventure—and real accomplishment—in the studio. Ideas were ricocheting off the walls, the boys were playing way over their heads. “
We were really starting to find ourselves
in the studio,” Ringo observed. Some of the residual magic he attributed to drugs, which “were
kicking in a little more heavily,” but even with the added chemical stimulation, the Beatles’ focus remained razor-sharp. “We were really hard workers… we worked like dogs to get it right.”

While the Beatles thrived in the sanctuary of the studio, other events continued to build on their astounding legacy. A month or so after they began work on their next album, Capitol Records issued a self-styled Beatles album titled
Yesterday… and Today
that featured a hodgepodge of songs left off the American abridged versions of
Help!
and
Rubber Soul,
along with the singles “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” and three tracks raided from the
Revolver
sessions. It was an odious but common enough practice; Capitol had done it intermittently as a way of customizing the Beatles catalogue—getting an extra album or two out of a popular band by packaging leftovers and material in the vault under an innocuous title. And even though the Beatles complained about it, the royalty windfall from its sales served to mitigate their grievances.

At Capitol’s request, the Beatles were to supply a cover for the LP. Specifically, the label asked for a standard picture of the band, encouraging them to use something from an old Bob Freeman session, but the prospect of another posed portrait, like
Beatles for Sale
or even
Rubber Soul,
didn’t appeal to them at all. “
We [wanted] to do something different
,” John recalled. They had felt constrained by the boring composition of the previous covers and, as early as February, discussed several other options for
Revolver,
including the use of negative imagery and religious iconography. Now, with a smaller American release, it would give them a chance to test some of the more extreme ideas that had been kicking around.

Brian put them in touch with an Australian photographer named Bob Whitaker, who “
was a bit of a surrealist
,” according to John, and admired the imagery of Dalí disciple Merit Oppenheimer and German artist Hans Bellmer, author of the controversial book
Die Puppe,
which contained pictures of bizarrely dismembered toy dolls. Whitaker inveigled the Beatles with a concept that would depict how “
he, as an outsider
, viewed the world’s perception of the Fab Four.” Even though the album was called
Yesterday… and Today,
he proposed they subtitle it
A Somnambulant Adventure
so that they could place past and present within the context of mortality.

If this was all a bit of pseudophilosophical bullshit, it nonetheless appealed to the Beatles’ sense of the avant-garde, as well as to their pot-
indulged fantasies. Meanwhile, it would help put an end to the Beatles’ innocent image. “
We were supposed to be sort of angels
,” bemoaned John, who “wanted to show that we were aware of life.”

Even so, the Beatles didn’t know what to expect when, on March 25, they arrived at Whitaker’s rented studio on the Vale, in a fashionable area of Chelsea. The props they saw that day were mostly remnants collected from a butcher shop and doll factory: pungent sausage links, a grotesque pig’s head, joints of raw meat, white smocks, dismembered dolls with distorted faces, and numerous lifelike glass eyes. Working quickly to oblige the Beatles’ notoriously short attention span, Whitaker whipped through several outlandish setups. He photographed John, Paul, George, and Ringo holding a string of sausages in front of a young girl; John clutching a cardboard box, with the number 2,000,000 written on it, over Ringo’s head; George banging carpenter’s nails into John’s head. He then dressed the Beatles in the butcher’s smocks, positioned them on a bench, and arranged the meat on their laps, draping an extra joint carefully over John’s shoulder. The poses felt “
gross… and stupid
” at first. No one had any idea what the imagery was supposed to reflect. Eventually, however, the Beatles “got into it,” smirking like schoolboys when Whitaker placed four decapitated dolls in between each of them and handed them the heads.

The infamous “butcher cover” was delivered to Capitol the following week, where it quickly landed on the desk of label president Alan Livingston. Inundated by objections from his staff, he immediately called Brian Epstein and demanded an explanation. “
It’s their comment on war
,” he was told, an interpretation that was as facetious as it was unsupportable. Paul has admitted that “
we thought it was stunning
and shocking, but we didn’t see all the connotations.” Livingston doubted he could put out the cover, and Brian promised he would ask the Beatles to reconsider. The next day, however, he indignantly “came back and said: ‘
They absolutely insist
that’s what they want.’ ”

Over the years, Livingston had put his foot down when artists became unreasonable—there was no upside to placating their outlandish demands—but he couldn’t afford any kind of confrontation with a group like the Beatles. Going against all instincts, he ordered the cover into production and shipped out several hundred advance copies to his national sales force. “Word came back very fast that the dealers would not touch it,” Livingston recalled. “They would not put the album in their stores.”

Unfortunately for Capitol
, about half a million copies of the cover had already been printed, which forced the expensive process of unpacking
cartons of records and replacing the sleeve. Meanwhile, on June 14, the label’s press manager issued a letter stating that “
the album cover is being discarded
.” It included a disclaimer from Livingston: “The original cover, created in England, was intended as ‘Pop Art’ satire. However, a sampling of opinion in the United States indicates that the cover design is subject to misinterpretation. For this reason, and to avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to the Beatles’ image or reputation, Capitol has chosen to withdraw the LP and substitute a more generally acceptable design.”

The Beatles were predictably up in arms over the recall. It wasn’t the picture so much as the way Capitol had caved in to so-called public opinion that offended their sense of fair play. “
I especially pushed for it
to be an album cover, just to break the image,” John insisted. He was sick and tired of the Beatles’ constantly being held up as altar boys in contrast to the scruffy Rolling Stones. It wasn’t an accurate comparison—and it needed correcting. The butcher sleeve headed in the right direction. Paul agreed: “
We weren’t against a little shock
now and then; it was part of our make-up.”

But the Beatles knew the importance of picking their battles. Their recording contract was coming up for renewal, and instead of granting worldwide rights to EMI again, Brian wanted to negotiate directly with Capitol for the United States, where he was sure to get a substantial signing bonus and a larger royalty. In fact, he made no secret of the fact that he was already putting out feelers to other American labels. Nat Weiss had introduced Brian to Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, both of whom “he greatly respected.” They’d also visited Columbia and seen
Clive Davis, who “thought the Beatles had peaked
and wasn’t prepared to give them a large offer.” RCA salivated at the prospect of pairing them with Elvis, but when Rocco Laginestra tried to impress Brian by presenting a copy of
Chet Atkins Picks the Beatles,
any deal was as good as dead. (“They are cabbage salesmen, not record people,” he told Weiss.) There were still barrels of money to be made in America, that was for sure. Was it really worth jeopardizing that over the butcher cover? He put this to the Beatles, who clearly understood the implications, which is why they quietly agreed to substitute another Whitaker photograph—what John referred to as an “
awful-looking picture of us
looking just as deadbeat but supposed to be a happy-go-lucky foursome”—of the band posed alongside a steamer trunk.

There were, of course, other things the Beatles earmarked as worth fighting for. For one thing, they absolutely dreaded being dragged around the
British cinema circuit on another scattershot package tour. There was some sense, they agreed, to remaining barricaded behind dingy hotel-room doors when playing before a paying crowd of fifty thousand fans, but not for an audience of six or nine hundred. They agreed to appear at the annual
NME
poll-winners’ show, on May 1, but it was to be their last-ever British concert performance. That wasn’t the only setback. As late as December 1965, the Beatles were still turning up regularly for every lightweight TV and radio appearance. But since January, they’d refused all media requests aside from a live spot on
Top of the Pops
on June 16 (
Melody Maker
reported that they’d “
succumbed to pressure from fans
”). Recording occupied most all of their time; otherwise, the excuse they gave was lame: “
It was too much trouble
to go and fight our way through all the screaming hordes of people to mime the latest single.” The truth was, it was becoming harder to reproduce onstage the kind of effects-laden music they were creating in the studio. Foot pedals for guitars were still a few years off, there were no remote sound-mixing boards, no faders, no monitors. Their new songs, like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contained crucial sounds that could be made only in the studio. It’d take a pretty substantial horn section to pull off “Got to Get You into My Life.”

A
Melody Maker
poll reflected the residual impact this had on the Beatles’ popularity by a tabulation showing that 80 percent of respondents were greatly disappointed by the band’s dearth of personal appearances, with only slightly less declaring that Beatlemania had passed its peak. But the Beatles couldn’t have cared less. “
Musically, we’re only just starting
,” George told a reporter. “We’ve realized for ourselves that as far as recording is concerned most of the things that recording men have said were impossible for 39 years are in fact very possible.”

Brian had promised them
that he’d find an alternative method to publicize the “Paperback Writer”/“Rain”single, but EMI wasn’t helpful. Any shortcuts would be frowned upon, he was warned.

No one recalls who came up with the solution, but sometime in early May they decided to make amusing promotional films of both songs—lipsynced versions set to comical scenarios, not unlike those in
A Hard Day’s Night
—which would be sent out in place of live performances. The whole thing, shot in half a day (by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg), cost a mere couple of thousand pounds. Their old exi pal Klaus Voormann was hired to organize the whole affair in the lovely manicured gardens behind Chiswick House, in West London, and a new medium was miraculously born. “
I don’t think we even thought of
calling them ‘videos,’ ” Ringo speculated,
but videos indeed they were—the first of their kind, and eighteen years ahead of their explosion on the forefront of pop culture.

On June 16, 1966, Vic Lewis
, NEMS’ swashbuckling booking agent, took off from Heathrow Airport for the Far East, intent on making final arrangements for the Beatles’ upcoming visit to Tokyo and Manila in early July. Under normal circumstances, Brian Epstein would have tended to this himself. “
But by 1966
,” Tony Barrow writes in an unpublished memoir, “his alarming ill health and his time-consuming personal struggle with debilitating drugs, drink and sex problems led him to devote substantially less attention to the essential details of his artists’ management and concert promotion companies.”

As much as he tried to hide it, Brian was a physical and emotional mess. Manic depression had thrust its grip on his already volatile personality, accelerating the severe mood swings he experienced randomly throughout the day. “
And the drugs made things much worse
,” says Peter Brown. “The more the drugs took hold, the worse his condition became.” Drugs had become one of the central focuses of Brian’s life—
uppers and Tuinal
—mixed with plenty of alcohol. And now a new vice to grapple with: John “Diz” Gillespie, a slightly built, baby-faced aspiring actor from Ohio, in his mid-twenties, who had a prodigious capacity for meting out both love and violence. To a manic-depressive masochist, the combination hit the trifecta.