The Beatles (146 page)

Even though “Thingumybob” wasn’t an obvious pop hit, it brought a nice balance to Apple’s roster. George contributed the Jackie Lomax single, “Sour Milk Sea,” to flesh out the “First Four,” but the showcase of the label’s launch was strictly all Beatles. Despite the nicely conceived, eclectic mix of songs on the debut roster, neither Mary Hopkin, Jackie Lomax, nor the Black Dyke Mills Band could match the impact of “Hey Jude.” Its melody is a gorgeous collage of genuinely stirring rhythmic passages woven around an inlay of heartwarming emotions: hope, optimism, faith, strength, encouragement, affection. The lyric is loaded with empathy, and Paul’s soulful performance establishes a mood of haunting tenderness that swells at the top of each successive line.

As a three-minute song, “Hey Jude” is a tour de force. But while recording the song, something strange happened. Instead of cruising into the standard fade, as the last verse drew to an end, Paul locked onto the word
better
and, riding it up the register, launched a full-throttle chorale that transforms the buildup into an anthemlike extravaganza. Four minutes later, the Beatles are still going strong, with the vocals shrieking and
leaping about to the accompaniment of a thirty-six-piece orchestra. “
It wasn’t intended
to go on that long at the end,” Paul recalled in a memoir, “but I was having such fun ad-libbing.”

The feeling was contagious. “
It felt good recording it
,” Ringo recalled. The Beatles took it into Trident Studios, where sessions with James Taylor, Jackie Lomax, and Mary Hopkin were ongoing, and a party spirit spilled into the icy atmosphere. “We put it down a couple of times—trying to get it right—and it just clicked.” It was a dazzling, remarkable recording and, at seven minutes, eleven seconds, the longest pop single ever released. There were plenty of other songs that equaled “Hey Jude” in melody and inventiveness: “A Day in the Life,” with its forceful, orchestrated turbulence embroidered around a commentary of modern-day despair—one of the incomparable highlights of the Beatles’ career; the surrealistic “Strawberry Fields Forever” with its fathomless layers of riddles and wordplay; “Eleanor Rigby,” tragic and lushly dramatic, with its elaborate string quartet sawing through the suds. But nothing was as ravishing or instantly accessible as “Hey Jude,” and it enchanted listeners, who made it
the largest-selling Beatles record
of all time, with a reign of nine weeks at the top of the charts.

For Beatles fans everywhere, “Hey Jude” was further proof that the band was still in top form. Far from dwindling into caricature or esoterica, far from sounding tired or monotonous, they were pushing into exciting new dimensions, evolving but remaining accessible to their audience. But the fans wanted more—and soon. Too much time had passed between the ambrosial
Sgt. Pepper’s
and a serious follow-up. Even George Martin, usually tight-lipped on such matters, expressed his impatience with the Beatles’ progress, accusing them of taking “
all the time in the world
” when it came to the ongoing album sessions. They seemed unfocused to him, even undisciplined. Nor was there much cohesion.
Paul recorded “Mother Nature’s Son
” one night after the other Beatles had gone home, not even bothering to run through it for John, as had always been the custom; George’s “Not Guilty” was scrapped after more than a hundred futile takes; a discordant, impromptu number of John’s (cowritten, he said, with Magic Alex, although more likely Yoko) called “What’s the New Mary Jane”
so offended Paul that he refused
to play on it; George was absent when they recorded “I Will.” There was none of the camaraderie or team spirit that contributed to their earlier successes. During the bleakest days, engineers and technicians found themselves abruptly dismissed, told to
“go for a walk” or to “go have a cup of tea” while the Beatles attempted to resolve their differences.

Finally, on August 22, sensing that “
the whole thing was going down
,” Ringo threw his hands up and walked out, effectively quitting the group. The in-fighting had finally gotten to him. Everywhere he turned, he encountered the same crude, belligerent exchanges. The ongoing party that had been the Beatles’ recording sessions had turned cruel and forbidding. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” Ringo said upon reflection. “There was no magic, and the relationships were terrible.” Ringo had known all along that he wasn’t part of the Beatles’ exalted brain trust, but he was upset, he said, about the way he’d been treated, ignored until the band was ready for him to play. He told the others that he “felt like an outsider.” He felt unappreciated, “
unloved and out of it
.” He had bottomed out.

Convinced that he wouldn’t be missed, Ringo took his family to Sardinia for a vacation on Peter Sellers’s yacht. The band tried carrying on without him, recording a blistering version of “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” but it took all three of them to patch together a composite drum track that suffered from being too mannered. They sorely missed
Ringo’s “feel and soul
,” his intuitive fills, which established the beat and kept the rhythm in check. He never got much credit, but his drumming had become a kind of center of gravity for the songs, just as Ringo’s droll deadpan helped anchor the band. From the beginning, he’d been the missing piece of the puzzle, and it didn’t take long for the Beatles to appreciate his absence.

A week later a telegram arrived at Ringo’s Mediterranean beach retreat, begging him to return to the studio. Needing no further invitation, he reached Abbey Road on September 9, in time to participate in an uproarious remake of “Helter Skelter,” Paul’s attempt at making “
the most raucous
… loudest,” dirtiest-sounding track possible, which had originally run on for an epic twenty-seven minutes. The Beatles’ goal was to pare down the cacophony to a sleek four minutes. In a studio crowded with perfectionists, it was not an easy task. They threw everything they had at the mikes to make the song “louder and dirtier”—distortion, feedback, echo, tape hiss, howls. John attempted to play the saxophone in a duet with Mal Evans, equally unproficient on the trumpet. Paul’s savage vocal, with backup from John and George, kept the Vu meters redlined throughout the deafening onslaught. All the while, they kept pressing Ringo to “just beat the shit out of the drums, just kill them,” as he windmilled his arms around the kit. According to an engineer on the scene, he
“
drummed as if his life
depended on it.” After a particularly ferocious eighteenth take, Ringo flung his sticks across the room and shouted:
“I’ve got blisters on my fingers!”
which provided the perfect ending to such an imperfect song.

The Beatles’ goal, according to John
, had always been to put out a double album. He, George, and Paul had written “so much material” in India that to do otherwise would have meant scrapping too many good songs. Besides, over the four months in the studio, they’d added to their already impressive new repertoire with “Glass Onion,” “Birthday,” “Savoy Truffle,” “Martha My Dear,” “Helter Skelter,” “Cry Baby Cry,” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” There were also various versions of “Revolution” being considered. But hardly anyone aside from symphony orchestras and opera companies had ever released a two-record set. It was too expensive for a label to produce that much original material, let alone to pay writers’ royalties for so many songs. Bob Dylan had managed to pull it off on
Blonde on Blonde,
but he was a force to be reckoned with, an exception even to the exception.

In addition, George Martin had been dead set against a double album since the subject arose back in April. “
I thought we should probably have made
a very, very good single album, rather than a double,” he later recalled. Ringo also thought a double album was extravagant, preferring its release as two single records, while George viewed the thirty-one songs as being “
a bit heavy
,” the four sides “a mistake.”

But this was said in hindsight, with the ring of the cash registers still echoing and nothing at stake. But in October 1968, after five months of hard work on the emotionally charged project, there was a consensus among the Beatles that the complete set was “
definitely rocking
,” and they turned their attention to choosing a suitably rocking cover.

Like the records it contained, the breakthrough album cover was a masterpiece of Beatles ingenuity. Paul decided to revisit Robert Fraser, whose insight during the
Sgt. Pepper’s
concept proved particularly instrumental. Fraser, he knew, represented Richard Hamilton, the motivating force behind the pop art movement and no slouch when it came to audacious design. It was Hamilton who proposed calling the album “
something as utterly simple
” as
The Beatles
and packaging it in a “
prissy” all-white cover
, with nothing more than an embossed title. Hamilton also contributed the idea of including a squared-off poster in the form of a collage containing family photos of each of the Beatles. As a last, unique touch, Hamilton persuaded them to stamp a number on each album to create the impression of a limited edition. The Beatles liked it so much that
they forced EMI to retool its assembly line in order to print consecutive numbers on the covers.

The release of
The Beatles
—known forever afterward as the White Album—on November 22, 1968 (exactly five years after
With the Beatles
appeared), was regarded in most quarters as an international event, certainly “
the most important musical
event of the year,” as the
Times
(London) expressed it in a column that morning. Except for the news that Yoko had miscarried the night before, nothing upstaged its long-awaited appearance. The rush to buy the new record was so great and unprecedented that
EMI had considered rationing
its initial shipment of 250,000 copies so that supplies would be spread evenly among retailers until more could be pressed. Not surprisingly, the entire run was sold out within hours of its release, with those lucky enough to snag a precious copy scouring Richard Hamilton’s minimalist cover for clues, as if it might contain some hidden message in the absence of conventional design.

The press, most of which received copies early that morning by special messenger, responded with fitful delirium. “It isn’t revolutionary and won’t change the face of music, but… [i]t is beyond comparison,” argued the
Record Mirror’
s ambivalent critic. “Skill and sophistication abound,” declared
Newsweek
, “but so does a faltering sense of taste and purpose.” Nik Cohn, writing in the
New York Times,
called
The Beatles
“
boring beyond belief
” and denounced “more than half the songs [as] profound mediocrities,” while elsewhere in the newspaper’s pages, Richard Goldstein, who had infamously blasted the beloved
Sgt. Pepper’s,
hailed the White Album as “
a major success
,” proclaiming it “so vast in its scope, so intimate in its details, and so skillful in its approach that even the flaws add to its flavor.” There was such an extravagance of music on those four sides, so many sprawling themes and styles to sift through, so much energy and vigor in the grooves, that taken as a whole, the album stymied critics as to how it figured in the Beatles’ canon.
THE BRILLIANT, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY,
headlined
NME,
whose editor, the usually rapturous Alan Smith, described “Revolution No. 9” as “a pretentious piece of old codswallop… a piece of idiot immaturity and a blotch on their own unquestioned talent as well as the album. For most of the rest,” Smith concluded, “God Bless You, Beatles!”

Though the White Album was a somewhat controversial recording, it was nowhere as controversial as what was yet to come. Only one week later, on November 29, Apple released an experimental album by John and Yoko, a
composite of their recorded hijinks that first blissful night at Kenwood, called
Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins
. On the front and back covers John and Yoko posed stark naked. “
It was a bombshell
,” recalls Tony Bramwell, who responded to John’s request for help with the jacket photo. Bramwell had no idea what he was in for when he arrived at the Montagu Square flat on an afternoon in early November. “John intended to take the picture himself, but about all he could do with that camera was press the shutter. So I adjusted everything for him, worked out the lighting, showed him how to use the ‘delayed action’ feature, and then left.”

For John, the shock value of these dramatic shots of him and Yoko au naturel seemed worth the uneasiness it produced and “
the howl that went up
.” Nothing excited him as much as upsetting the status quo. He’d originally planned to issue the record as a solo vehicle for Yoko, accompanied by a nude shot of her on the cover “
because,” he said, “her work is naked
, basically simple and childlike and truthful.” But once they came up with the “two virgins” concept, he was determined to appear in it with her.

Their pose, arranged rather hastily by John, was a grainy, unglamourous image of them standing in front of an unmade platform bed, his arm draped protectively around Yoko’s shoulders. There is nothing erotic about the picture; neither of their bodies is particularly attractive or appealing. There is no come-on in their slack, trancelike stares, nor anything to suggest a postcoital lassitude. “
What we did purposely
is not to have a pretty photograph, not to have it lighted so that we looked sexy or good,” John insisted. “We used the straightest, most unflattering picture just to show that we were human.”