The Beatles (138 page)

While it didn’t bring fame, as Yoko had hoped, something almost as attractive materialized from the Judson Church show: an invitation to participate in a symposium in London called “Destruction in Art,” organized by movers and shakers in the avant-garde scene there. Thanks to Tony’s resilient advance work, she arrived trailing a paper storm of frothy reviews, many of them written to order by her dutifully calculating husband.
Her performance at “Destruction in Art,” on September 28, 1966, already a hotbed of expectation, caused a minor sensation. Appearing before a packed crowd of enthusiasts, Yoko performed both her “Cut” and “bag” pieces, finishing with a number in which she instructed the audience to shout out the first words that came to mind for a period of five minutes.

The London papers were nearly as enthusiastic as the boosters at the symposium, which saluted her pieces with prolonged worshipful applause. The art critic for the
Financial Times
called
Yoko’s performance “uplifting
,” and a reviewer for the
Daily Telegraph
called her performance an “elevated conclusion” to an otherwise “dreadful” symposium. Barry Miles, partner with Peter Asher and John Dunbar in the recently opened Indica Bookshop, had seen the performance that night and invited Yoko to showcase an exhibit entirely of her choosing in the basement gallery. The offer, as Miles presented it, was too good to pass up, and it paid off in spades when John Lennon walked in the door.

Yoko was drawn both to John and to the girth of his bankbook, which could endow her career. Many newcomers to her London entourage recall Yoko and Tony actively seeking a well-situated backer for their projects. “A Beatle,” several remember, and according to a close friend: “
She said, half-laughingly
, ‘I’d like to marry John Lennon.’ ”

John was genuinely intrigued by the odd combination of exoticism and absurdity that Yoko projected, but admitted being “intimidated” by her as well. The way she carried herself, as though nothing could derail her from her mission, was for John the most powerful turn-on. One of his strongest impressions from the start was not of Yoko’s work, which he considered “
far out
,” but of her loose, liberated manner, which made him realize
she was “somebody that you could go
and get pissed with, and to have exactly the same relationship as any mate in Liverpool.” It “bowled me over,” he acknowledged. He’d never known a woman so much like himself.

Apple was still in its critical infancy and required whatever part of John’s attention he could muster. In January 1968 the Beatles opened offices at 95 Wigmore Street, an eight-story high-rise around the corner from EMI, and began staffing it with friends and cronies. The old Liverpool gang
(Derek Taylor referred to them as “the old courtiers”)—Peter Brown, Geoffrey Ellis, Alistair Taylor, Terry Doran, and Tony Bramwell—were brought over from NEMS; Derek Taylor agreed to return as Apple’s press officer; and Peter Asher, Jane’s talented brother, launched an A&R department dedicated to recording new talent. John was also collaborating on a short play based on material from his two books,
In His Own Write
and
A Spaniard in the Works,
that no less an august temple than Britain’s National Theatre planned to stage in June. And to top it off, before the Beatles left for India, they intended to squeeze in a session to record a new single.

The session, which began on February 3 and meandered over the next eight days, actually produced four sides, the most memorable being “Lady Madonna,” which was earmarked from the start as the group’s next—and final Parlophone—single. Paul had written it almost entirely himself, as “
a tribute to women
,” he said, although his images of women collide and contradict one another faster than the chitter-chatter of a Greek chorus. Nevertheless, the song returned the Beatles to a more straightforward rock ’n roll structure than they had practiced in the past few years, “
not outright rock
,” according to Paul (Ringo referred to it as “
rockswing
”), “but it’s that kind of thing.”
The opening barrelhouse piano
riff was lifted, Paul has since admitted, from Humphrey Lyttelton’s “Bad Penny Blues,” a minor hit released in 1956 and produced by none other than George Martin. The vocal, however, took its origins from a different source. “
[The song] reminded me
of Fats Domino,” Paul explained, “so I started singing a Fats Domino impression. It took my voice to a very odd place.” Odd, yet familiar to early rock ’n roll fans. Gone were the obliqueness and wearisome effects of the previous two albums. Gone, too, were the umpteen overdubs that made the Beatles’ songs impossible to duplicate in concert. “Lady Madonna,” for all its power, was basically recorded in a day—the old-fashioned way—with a chorus of saxophones added as an afterthought later in the week.

The “Lady Madonna” sessions included “Hey Bulldog,” another pared-down rocker, as well as the music for “Across the Universe” and George’s Indian-style spiritual, “The Inner Light.” It was becoming increasingly clear that if the Beatles were to find their focus again, they had to play together, as opposed to piece together takes; they had to let ’er rip. For a while Paul endeavored to provide the necessary spark, but after eight days of cheerleading, the Beatles ran out of steam. “
I think… we were all
a bit exhausted, spiritually,” he recalled. “We’d been the Beatles, which was marvelous… but I think generally there was a feeling of: ‘Yeah, well, it’s great to be famous, it’s great to be rich—but what’s it all for?’ ” The music
was the glue that had held it all together, but the music, like their individual lives, was moving in every direction at once. “So we were inquiring into all sorts of various things… and after we thought about it all, we went out to Rishikesh.”

The plan was to spend three months, from February 15 through April 25, 1968, in Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh, India, to study Transcendental Meditation and self-realization at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram. The three wives—Cynthia, Pattie, and Maureen—would accompany the boys, as would Jane Asher, but as early as February, John schemed to have Yoko included in the entourage. “
I was gonna take her
,” he said later in an interview with
Rolling Stone
. It seemed like a good idea at the time to have her around, a convenient way to get to know her better. Ultimately, however, he “lost [his] nerve, because I was going to take [Cynthia] and Yoko, and I didn’t know how to work it.”

The Maharishi’s ashram was a new concept in the Hindu spiritual world. Throughout the region of Uttar Pradesh, wizened holy men, called
sadhus,
sought enlightenment from the Bhagavad Gita in a setting of utter, natural simplicity, strolling barefoot beside the sacred Ganges or meditating in half-lit solitary caves. There were no organized activities other than total commitment to their spiritual pursuit. But the Maharishi’s retreat was unique: part temple, part commercial venture. Set within a fenced-in compound on a hillside overlooking the Ganges, the ashram resembled a Himalayan Club Med, with a central courtyard surrounded by six concrete lean-tos, called
puri
(Paul optimistically referred to them as “chalets”; Cynthia, “
barracks
”), where disciples redefined their place in the universe from a warren of tiny, unheated cells. There was a glass-walled dining area and a terraced lecture hall interconnected by gravel paths, a swimming pool, a heliport, even plans for an airfield, all at the
nominal rate of $400
for the three-month stay.

It was the answer to the Beatles’ prayers. “
We were really getting away
from everything,” John recalled—the craziness, the drugs, the fame, the inexorable grind. On February 16, after weeks of shuffling an unusually concentrated workload, he and George, along with their wives and Pattie’s sister Jenny, left the material world, crossed five time zones, and headed toward the plains in the dense valley between the Himalaya and Delhi. The overland journey from the airport—by taxi, Jeep, and donkey—covered 150 miles and took more than four hours. On a particularly forbidding stretch of road, the weary Beatles party looked out both sides of their car and saw only soft, treacherous cliffs, with no guardrail—and no conceivable
access. It took them several minutes to realize that they’d have to continue on foot. “
There [was] quite a heavy flow
of water coming out of the Himalayas,” George remembered, “and we had to cross the river by a big swing suspension bridge” outfitted with a hand-lettered sign warning
NO CAMELS OR ELEPHANTS
. The Beatles had visited India before—stopping to shop on their way back from the Philippines—but they’d never experienced it from this side of the tracks. A colony of lepers begged on the banks of the Ganges, as dusky-faced monks waded, naked, into the murky current. Sacred cows lazed on the riverbed, monkeys leaped from tree to tree. As one wide-eyed Westerner wrote: “
It was a collision
of magnificence and wretchedness.”

Paul and Ringo followed three days later, along with Neil Aspinall, arriving at the Academy of Transcendental Meditation, where they joined their friends and sixty other students waiting to channel their full potential.

For the next ten days everyone wandered the six-acre retreat, spending long hours absorbed in quiet, thoughtful meditation and listening to the Maharishi’s twice-daily instructional lectures, fine-tuning the spiritual fork. A powerful camaraderie developed among the reverent group. After a communal breakfast, they saw one another only occasionally during the day.
Meditation, at the Maharishi’s suggestion, should last for
twelve-hour stretches, with short breaks, but once the Beatles got settled, the formula was markedly reversed, with twenty-minute segments of meditation aimed at breaking up the interplay. Instead, time was made for talking, reading, and lazing in the sun. The actress Mia Farrow, who had matriculated some weeks earlier, at the beginning of the term, recalled experiencing an initial regret at the boys’ noisy presence, feeling that it disrupted the commune’s focus. “
Nevertheless,” she later wrote
in her 1997 memoir, “with their cheerful chatter and guitars and singing, the new arrivals brought an element of ‘normalcy’ to the ashram—a sort of contemporary reality, which at first seemed jarringly out of place.”

That is not to say that the Beatles did not take TM seriously. George, of course, had been an instant convert, devoting long, intensely pensive hours to the contemplative process even before leaving England, but John, more than anyone, threw himself wholeheartedly into the practice. “
I was meditating about eight hours
a day,” he recalled in a 1974 interview. Cynthia, who admitted being surprised by his discipline, said, “
To John, nothing else mattered
. He spent literally days in deep meditation.” As for the ashram itself, she thought “John and George were [finally] in their element. They threw themselves totally into the Maharishi’s teachings,
were happy, relaxed and above all had found a peace of mind that had been denied them for so long.” Even Ringo, whose tolerance for introspection was considerably lower than his mates’, formed an impression that was more agreeable than expected. “
It was pretty exciting
,” he recalled years later. “We were in a very spiritual place.”

Only Paul viewed this new enthusiasm with characteristic rationality. “
It was quite nice
,” he thought at the time, like “sitting in front of a nice coal fire that’s just sort of glowing.” Other times he would say, “
It was almost magical
.” There were instances when Paul allowed the magic to take control of him, like during a midafternoon meditation when he felt “
like a feather over
a warm hot-air pipe” during which he was “suspended” in midair. But more and more, he had “trouble keeping [his] mind clear,” he said, “because the minute you clear it, a thought comes in and says, ‘What are we gonna do about our next record?’ ”

Paul couldn’t let it rest, not even in India, not even during afternoon sunbathing with the others on the banks of the Ganges. There was always a guitar within reach, always a few sheets of paper nearby on which to scribble the outline of a lyric or a few nascent lines. Paul wrote like mad in Rishikesh—but truth be told, so did John. (“
Regardless of what
I was supposed to be doing, I did write some of my best songs while I was there,” he recalled.) They threw themselves into their music and began meeting clandestinely in the afternoons in each other’s rooms—occasionally with Donovan, who showed up unexpectedly, in pursuit of Pattie’s sister—playing acoustic guitars and “having an illegal cigarette.” In all, they completed nearly forty compositions; John wrote “Julia,” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Jealous Guy” (originally entitled “I’m Just a Child of Nature”), “Across the Universe,” “Cry Baby Cry,” “Polythene Pam,” “Yer Blues,” and “I’m So Tired,” while Paul tackled “Rocky Raccoon,” “Wild Honey Pie,” “I Will,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” the latter
an homage to his boyhood idol
Chuck Berry.

Often in the evenings the Maharishi led his young followers on excursions to Dehra Dun, the nearest village.
There, in a series of dilapidated tents
where local tailors sat cross-legged on mats operating ancient sewing machines, the Beatles had outfits made—the loose-fitting, gauzy shirts and wide pajama bottoms, along with saris, that were traditional Indian garb—or shopped for souvenirs. They explored the open-air markets and came to rely on two or three local cafés, including Nagoli’s, a restaurant that served perspiring beakers of “forbidden” wine. On one occasion,
when a traveling cinema arrived in the village square, everyone trooped down from the meditation center along a dusty jungle path, swinging lanterns in the fading twilight. For some reason Paul had brought his guitar, and as they descended through the steep overgrowth, he serenaded the party with bits of a new song he’d been working on. “
Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace…,
” he sang gaily over the thrash of footsteps. The piece focused on a Yoruba phrase that he’d picked up from Jimmy Scott, a conga player and familiar figure on the London club scene. “
Every time we met
,” Paul recalled, “he’d say ‘Ob la di ob la da, life goes on, bra,’ ” and the expression stuck in his head.