The Beatles (128 page)

By midday a conspicuous absence had left Brian disconsolate. Paul was either late or missing in action. Few guests dared mention his absence, but it stood out in galling contrast. A grand piano had been rolled into the freshly painted living room, earmarked for his attention: a place of honor. It was a Liverpool tradition to have a group sing-along at such an event. Paul, at the old gang’s request, always played the dutiful accompanist, but about 3:00 he phoned to say that Jane needed a lift home from Heathrow. Sorry, hated to do this, he claimed too matter-of-factly, but they wouldn’t be able to attend.

That was all Brian needed. Leave it to Paul to get under his skin. “
Wasn’t that always the case
,” he groused. Paul, forever nosy and second-guessing business decisions, always set Brian’s teeth on edge, but this went straight to his heart. Everything about his absence seemed personal, like a slap in the face. Brian’s mood grew darker and more irrational; his drinking got heavier. It wasn’t long before the hand-wringing began. “
Paul… didn’t… come
,” Brian muttered, trying to express his disappointment. His face unbearably wounded, ashen, his eyes filled with tears, he kept repeating it to anyone who would listen. “This day of all days… he should have come.” Derek Taylor tried to console him, but Brian spun away, bending forlornly over the piano like a spurned lover. “
This was to have been for Paul
,” he sighed in a quivering voice. “Especially for tonight, but he can’t come. The only one.”

It sucked the life right out of the party, until John and George stepped in to assure him of their love. Their affectionate hugs and the psychedelic fireworks that followed combined to rescue the evening from certain meltdown.

Sgt. Pepper
played on in the background. It was the Summer of Love.

For all their bluff confidence, the Beatles anguished over public and critical reaction as the release of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
drew near. “
I was downright scared
,” George Martin admitted, “but not half as worried as the Beatles.” The so-called failure of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” was still too fresh in everyone’s mind. Even though the single had sold well—over 2 million copies worldwide—its chart shortfall was regarded as an omen.

But their worries were groundless. The album’s release on June 1 caused an extraordinary sensation, with critics lobbing paragraphs of unprecedented praise. In the
Sunday Times
review, Derek Jewel called
Sgt. Pepper’s
“
remarkable
” and “a
tremendous advance
even in the increasingly adventurous progress of the Beatles.” William Mann went even further in
The Times
daily column: “
Any of these songs
is more genuinely creative than anything currently to be heard on pop radio stations,” he wrote, “but in relation to what other groups have been doing lately
Sgt. Pepper
[sic] is chiefly significant as constructive criticism, a sort of pop music master class examining trends and correcting or tidying up inconsistencies and undisciplined work.” Wilfrid Mellers, writing in the
New Statesman,
crawled out on a limb to label their music as “art—and art of an increasingly subtle kind.” Where once the critics had described the Beatles and their music in terms befitting cartoon characters, now they scrambled to place them in the pantheon of beloved composers and poets. Since
Revolver,
it seemed, critics had approached the music more seriously, actually analyzing its content instead of treating it like a fad. The fans, too—“
They think for themselves
, and I don’t think we can be accused of underestimating the intelligence of our fans,” observed George—were quick to recognize breakthroughs in the Beatles’ musical evolution. “
Over the last four years
Lennon and McCartney have developed into the greatest songwriting team of this century,” wrote a follower from Isleworth. “Some of the tracks on the LP are pure poetry and unbelievably advanced in conception.” Another, from Llandudno in Wales, complimented “She’s Leaving Home” as “one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard.” No ordinary fan but just as effusive in his praise, composer Ned Rorem called it “
equal to any song
that Schubert ever wrote.”

Richard Goldstein, known for his scorched-earth criticism, refused to be swayed by the overwhelming groundswell that followed the album
right around the globe. Writing in the
New York Times,
he considered
Sgt. Pepper’s
a soft and messy piece of work, a self-conscious record, contrived, and was willing to say what no other critic dared: “
Unfortunately, there is no apparent
thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtaposition of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related.” (A few months later John concurred, saying: “When you get down to it, it was nothing more than an album called
Sgt. Pepper’s
with the tracks stuck together.”) The Beatles’ usual innovative clarity had shifted sharply out of focus, he argued, owing to their “obsession with production…. There is nothing beautiful on
Sgt. Pepper,
” he concluded. “Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about.”

For all the ink spilled over the album, branding it a cultural and artistic watershed—
Time
gushed that it represented “
a historic departure
in the progress of music—any music”—one thing was certain:
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
was a runaway bestseller, topping the pace of all previous Beatles albums with
a staggering 2,500,000 copies
sold in the first three months of its release. For most fans the music had finally become accessible; less yeah-yeah-yeah, more sophistication and cross-rhythms. You could hear it played on practically any station in the world, at practically any time of the day. Deejays considered it the “
second renaissance
of rock ’n roll,” and the Beatles its chief architects. Their old friend Murray the K, who played
Sgt. Pepper’s
ad nauseam, until management ordered him to back off, marveled at the way some songs made him realize “
they had the pulse
of the country,” while others demonstrated that “the Beatles were completely in tune with life.”

That tune had a somewhat familiar ring to it: a whole new type of Beatlemania had broken out, not powered by screams and swoons as before, but rather a kind of reverence in which every note they played or breath they took was analyzed and dissected for greater meaning. Coincidentally or not, overzealous fans—“
the nutters
,” as Paul referred to them—unscrambled the letters in the title of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to spell LSD; they concluded that “Fixing a Hole” was a veiled reference to heroin and that Harry the Horse (a character in “Mr. Kite”) was a pusher. Pundits extrapolated arcane significance in practically every word—every
effect
—of “A Day in the Life.” Essayists and critics devoted columns—
lectures
—to the band’s cultural significance. Hard-core journalists referred to the Beatles as “
missionaries
.” Others called them “
messengers from beyond
rock ’n roll,” “
progenitors of a Pop
avant-garde,” avatars. Timothy Leary called them “evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new human species.”

Paul politely disagreed. “
The Beatles weren’t the leaders
of the generation,” he said later, with some distance, “but the spokesmen.”

Certainly Paul fancied himself in this role. “
Even when the others weren’t
speaking to the press, you could always depend on Paul,” says Tony Barrow. “He couldn’t resist the opportunity to represent the band in the spotlight. He loved the role; it fed his considerable ego.”

He’d pontificate at the drop of a hat, firing off slickly polished sound bites with the cadence of a talk-show personality. “
Paul needs an audience
,” George Martin once observed to great understatement. While Paul considered John “
the cock who crowed
the loudest,” referring, one presumes, to his partner’s combative snipes and outbursts, he was more a natural raconteur, a great embellisher; charm oozed from Paul McCartney when in the presence of an attentive ear. On June 19 Paul opened his door to a pair of ITN News reporters, who detoured from what seemed like a standard interview about music into an inquisition about his drug-taking. They were sitting, chatting casually in his garden, when the primary newscaster popped the question. “Paul, how often have you taken LSD?”

There was a hesitation that seemed to last an eternity but ate up no more than a few seconds of airtime, during which Paul thought, “Well,
I’m either going to bluff
this, or I’m going to tell him the truth.” So he answered honestly: “
About four times
.” He added that LSD had changed his life—“After I took it, it opened my eyes,” he boasted—and made him “a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.”

The minute it was out of his mouth, Paul must have realized his mistake, because he immediately began to backpedal. “I would like to make it perfectly clear that I do not advocate LSD,” he hedged. “I don’t want kids running to take it when they hear that I have.” An admission of this nature from a personality of his stature might have an adverse effect on young fans, to say nothing of their parents. In Paul’s cockeyed logic, that meant the
reporters
had a responsibility not to show the footage. “It’s
you
who’ve got the responsibility!” Paul insisted. “You’ve got the responsibility not to spread this now. You know, I’m quite prepared to keep it as a very private thing if you will, too. If you shut up about it, I will.”

But it was too late. The comments, which were broadcast the next day, unleashed a shitstorm of protest, from government bigwigs to the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham, who seemed less peeved about the dangers of drug-taking than Paul’s claim that LSD could give rise to “a religious experience.” The tabloids feasted, condemning the Beatles in a united, if shrill and self-righteous, voice. For days, weeks, stories appeared in which politicos expressed their outrage that one of the Beatles had dabbled in drugs. They were shocked—
shocked!
—to learn about the scandalous behavior of no less than an M.B.E. “
The press had a field day
,” George recalled.

Paul’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Only a few weeks earlier Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been busted in Sussex for possession of hash, pot, and amphetamines; Paul’s art dealer, Robert Fraser, who was arrested along with them, was caught palming twenty-four jacks of heroin. On the same day that
Sgt. Pepper’s
was released, John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the founder of
International Times
and a social mate of Paul’s, was sentenced to nine months in jail for possession of pot. And Brian Jones was nabbed in a drug sweep while his bandmates faced arraignment.

“
No one knew why Paul
didn’t keep his mouth shut,” says Alistair Taylor, voicing an opinion shared by the other three Beatles. They were especially annoyed that he’d focused attention on something they’d been so scrupulously careful to keep private. Acid, which might have been commonplace around Britain’s wealthy pop underground, hadn’t yet attracted widespread attention among the masses, not even among die-hard rock enthusiasts. “
We weren’t actually telling anybody
about LSD, bar the people who knew us,” Ringo recalled, “and [then] Paul decided to come out and tell people.” George also considered it a breach of group etiquette, explaining: “
I thought Paul should
have been quiet about it—I wish he hadn’t said anything, because it made everything messy.”

Messy—and annoying, considering that for a year and a half John, George, and Ringo had been unable to persuade Paul to join them in dropping acid, “and then,” as George fumed, “one day he’s on the television talking all about it.” It was all over the media: Paul McCartney, the Beatles’ acid authority! For John, it was another instance of Paul’s stealing his thunder.

In his haste to head off another imbroglio, Brian stood up to the press, choosing to defend Paul’s rash comments by adding his own voice to the fanfare, admitting that he, too, had taken LSD and saw nothing wrong with it. A few days later he even repeated the remarks in an interview with
Melody Maker,
foolishly minimizing the risks of taking acid, adding: “
I think LSD helped
me to know myself better, and I think it helped me to become less bad tempered.” This was clearly not what the press and Beatles fans had bargained for.

Then, just as quickly as the uproar started, it stopped dead in its tracks, thanks to an event that spun the drug business into the shadows and restored the Beatles’ reputations as beloved minstrel spirits.
Several months earlier the BBC1
television channel had approached Brian about helping out with a project the network had planned for June 25 to test its new Early Bird communication satellites. Via a live broadcast, they intended, for the first time, to link thirty-one television networks around the globe. An estimated 300 million people could conceivably watch the same show. Called
Our World,
it was designed to allow each of the participating countries a five-minute segment in which to feature material or an act that represented its culture. And, of course, what could be more British than the Beatles?