17
REAL LIFE IN CINEMASCOPE
I don’t want to know what it’s like to be dead.
To begin with, making records was something the Beatles did when they could find time. Their sessions at Abbey Road Studios with George Martin had to be slotted into the break-neck schedule of touring, filmmaking, television, and radio, and, like everything else, were arranged over their heads. “If it was time for a new single or album, I’d have to get in touch with Brian,” Martin remembers. “He’d look through his diary and say ‘I can give you May 19th and perhaps the evening of the 20th.’ I had to grab them whenever I could.”
Their producer in these early days was an all-powerful boss figure, combining the authority of the label head and the gravitas of a classically trained musician. From the raw material submitted to him, Martin chose the songs he considered worthwhile; he altered tempos, switched verses or choruses around, prescribed the ratio of vocal to instrumental. In short, he performed all the functions of a good editor, whose discreet structural amendments and corrections in grammar or punctuation help brilliant copy speak for itself the more eloquently.
The first Lennon-McCartney compositions to be recorded were submitted as combined efforts, invariably written in spare moments in hotels or dressing rooms and sung and played on acoustic guitars by both authors together while Martin sat on a bass-player’s stool, listening with elegant impassivity. By 1965, John and Paul had taken to working mainly apart, usually developing most of each new lyric and melody before turning to each other for criticism and advice. Their individual composing techniques, Martin remembers, were utterly different.
“Paul would think of a tune and then think ‘What words can I put to it?’ John tended to develop his melodies as the thing went along. Generally he built up a song on a structure of chords which he would ramble and find on his guitar until he had an interesting sequence. After that, the words were more important than anything else. They used to come out sometimes as a monotone, just one note punctuated by the rhythm of the words. He never set out to write a melody and put lyrics to it. He always thought of the structure, the harmonic content and the lyrics first, and the melody would then come out of that.
“However good the song was, John never seemed that confident about it. In all the time we worked together, I never heard him hype his own work in any way. After he’d played over something to me, his first question was always ‘What do you think?’ The second was ‘What shall we do with it?’ After a time, I realised that he was actually embarrassed by his own voice. Whenever we did a vocal, he always insisted on wearing cans [headphones] and told me to put lots of echo through them, so that he couldn’t hear what he really sounded like. When we got into slap-echo, like on Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” he loved that and his voice always went through the cans like that, though not onto the record. It was like an ointment for him. It smoothed out all the things in his voice that he didn’t like.
“But then, you see, John didn’t like much. It wasn’t just his voice; everything in his mind was much better than reality, always. And he was always somewhat disappointed with the results of what we did. In the beginning, I was in charge and no criticisms were voiced. But as he grew more powerful and more aware of what was going on, he grew more critical of everything. He was always searching for something he couldn’t quite grasp. His wonderful dreamland in there [inside his head] never really reached reality.”
In many ways, Martin remembers, John was more easygoing than the perfectionist, workaholic Paul. “If we were doing a song of Paul’s, he’d get hold of his guitar and tell George what he wanted him to play in the middle; he’d get on the drums and show Ringo what he wanted. And that used to irk the piss out of them sometimes, obviously. When John recorded a song, he let other people do what they were going to do: Paul would work out a bass line, maybe add a little bit here and there, and George would do his guitar solo, and Ringo would take care of the beat. John would be entirely focused on his part of things, and leave the others to get on with theirs. As long as the end result was up to standard, he’d be happy.
“Paul was his sounding-board, of course, and George had a huge amount of input, which, to my eternal regret, I didn’t sufficiently recognise at the time, but Ringo’s opinion was always important to John, just because he knew that with him there’d never be any bullshit. He’d often turn to Ringo and ask what he thought and if Ringo said, ‘That’s crap, John,’ he’d do something else.”
He took his role as rhythm guitarist with extreme seriousness, learning new chords as diligently as he ever had, sometimes even proudly announcing, “I’m playing a G minor seventh here, Paul!” But all other musical disciplines bored him. “George would work away like a Turkish carpet-maker at whatever it was, whether mending a car or constructing a song,” Martin says. “John couldn’t be bothered even to tune his guitar. He was a completely impractical man. And if there was someone around to do it for him, why not? That was his attitude.
“Remember that my focus was on the Beatles, not just on John, though inevitably how he was feeling dictated the general mood. He could get irritated by lots of things. Paul used to irritate him…and George often did as well. But in the studio generally we all got on like a house on fire. Because he and Paul were turning out such wonderful material. No matter what kind of pressure they were under as live performers, they always came up with a fresh idea; they were never content to use a cliché, but always gave me something slightly different. Each song was a jewel on its own, and I used to bless them for that.”
Paul McCartney remembers how, in those days, even the fiercest dispute with his collaborator seldom lasted long. “One of my great memories of John is from when we were having some argument. I was disagreeing and we were calling each other names. We let it settle for a second, and then he lowered his glasses and he said, ‘It’s only me…’ and then he put his glasses back on again. To me, that was John. Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade, the armour which I loved as well, like anyone else. It was a beautiful suit of armour. But it was wonderful when he let the visor down and you’d just see the John Lennon that he was frightened to reveal to the world.”
In a life otherwise plagued by intruders and distractions, recording sessions became the Beatles’ one precious oasis of privacy. As EMI’s greatest-ever moneymakers, they enjoyed privileged treatment at Abbey Road that the greatest names of the past, Caruso or Sinatra, had not. Studios One and Two, each large enough to house a symphony orchestra, were set aside for Martin and his sacred quartet in open-ended sessions that were as much about exploration and rehearsal as actual recording, and habitually continued far into the night. Gone were the technicians’ white coats and the forbidding force field around the control room; gone even was the formality of rolling tape for a take. Such were the gems to be picked up at every moment that tape rolled all the time.
Wives and girlfriends, it went without saying, were totally excluded. Even Brian himself looked in only occasionally and was careful to make his visits as brief and businesslike as possible. This followed an unhappy incident when he had appeared in the control room unexpectedly late one night while the Beatles were hard at work on the cable-strewn floor below. Unusually for the public Brian, he was slightly drunk and, still more unusually, accompanied by one of his gay friends.
This gratuitous reminder of the lifestyle he usually concealed from his boys would have been faux pas enough, but alcohol and a desire to impress his companion led to an even worse one. At the end of the take, he switched on the intercom and slurrily announced that something or other hadn’t sounded “quite right.” There was a horrible pause, then John’s voice came back with a line he had used before but which never failed to slice off its victim’s legs at the knees: “You look after your percentages, Brian. We’ll take care of the music.”
October and November of 1965 found the Beatles back at Abbey Road for the second UK album of their yearly quota, as usual timed to catc
h the Christmas market. However, the frenetic summer of touring, meeting Elvis, and joining the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire had left John and Paul almost no time to replenish the stock of songs used up by Help! Nor was it possible any longer to use rock and soul cover versions as a makeweight. They would have to write the whole album to order, and in double-quick time to make the December release date.
The competition out there had never looked more formidable. In Britain, half a dozen bands originally formed as ersatz Beatles with bangs and round-collared suits had proved themselves robust individualists and brought glory to other cities and suburbs once thought unmentionable—the Hollies, from Manchester; the Animals, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne; the Who, from Shepherds Bush in the west of London; the Kinks, from Muswell Hill in the north. Nor was exposure any longer as easy and assured as simply turning up at good old “Auntie” BBC. In mid-1964, a bold young entrepreneur had realized he could legally break the corporation’s government-enforced broadcasting monopoly by transmitting programs from a ship moored outside British territorial waters. There had since been a proliferation of such pirate radio stations, transmitting continuous pop record shows in Americanized formats with commercials, station IDs, and jingles. Besides their “old mate” Brian Matthew at the Beeb, a new Beatles track must tickle the fancies of seasick deejays unsteadily at anchor between the Thames Estuary and the Firth of Clyde.
At home, the main threat was posed by the five former R&B purists who ironically owed their first major chart success to John and Paul. Under the guidance of Brian Epstein’s former PR man Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones had achieved monster fame with a delinquent image as carefully crafted and as illusory as the Beatles’ one of blandness and cuddliness. Fired by Lennon and McCartney’s example, the Stones’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were now writing songs together and, in their darker, sourer way, showing an almost equally sure golden touch. In July 1965, they outraged the singles charts with “Satisfaction,” a title fraught with masturbatory innuendo though, in fact, it was a hymn of hate against the penalties of pop stardom, the ineffable boredom of adulation and luxury, that John endorsed with all his heart. But, gallingly, he was not the first to say it.
The Beatles’ American triumph brought still greater pressures and insecurities in its wake. Thanks to them, the land that had once been so fiercely resistant to British pop now wanted nothing else, provided it came in squads of four or five, with fringed faces, skimpy suits, and oddball limey accents. Musical Anglomania had reached such a height that any new American band took care to look and sound like as much like a British one as possible, filtering their own indigenous music through the sensibilities of Liverpudlians, Londoners, Mancunians, or Tynesiders. Some of these, in turn, bounced Beatle-influenced American music back to Britain, with added dividends of skill and invention that could make the most feted of their transatlantic exemplars feel like beginners again. The two John considered the most talented—and, therefore, worrying—both happened to have names also beginning with a B. The first were the Beatly misspelled Byrds, whose soaring, sighing voices and twangly electric twelve-string guitars owed as much to traditional American folk as to mid-Atlantic Merseybeat. The second were the Beach Boys, former exponents of the simplistic “surf” sound, who took Beatlish harmonies into new realms of echo and multitracking, as different from John, Paul, and George’s homely fusions as a cathedral from a beach hut.
But the greatest challenger, so far as John was concerned, took some time to show his full hand. In May 1965, Bob Dylan had visited London to appear at the Royal Albert Hall. He was still singing protest songs alone with acoustic guitar and suspended mouth organ, though his stylish Mod clothes and ever-enlarging curly pompadour hinted that the days of kinship with ragged-assed folk heroes were numbered.
Still warmly grateful for their initiation into pot, the Beatles hastened to Dylan’s suite at the Savoy Hotel, unusually taking their womenfolk along to share the reunion. However, the atmosphere proved markedly less cordial than at the Delmonico in New York the previous summer. John felt that on their home territory, it would have been more mannerly for Dylan to call on them; he in turn seemed cold and, in the new word, uptight, though this may not have been all his visitors’ fault. Since their previous encounter, he had graduated from marijuana to sniffing heroin, and during his London debut was to spend three days in a hospital, reportedly suffering from “a cold.”
To lighten the tension, Dylan summoned his friend the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who also happened to be staying at the Savoy. John had read Ginsberg’s verse epic Howl, intrigued by the echo of his own “Daily Howl” at Quarry Bank school. But the sight of the thirty-eight-year-old poet in person, bald, black-bearded, overtly gay, and strenuously clownish, proved rather disconcerting. When Ginsberg perched on the sofa arm beside him, John asked sarcastically why he didn’t get a bit closer. At this, Ginsberg flopped into his lap, gazed up at him, and asked if he’d ever read William Blake. “Never heard of him,” replied John; such a willful untruth that even his usually diffident spouse could not let it pass. “Oh John, stop lying,” Cynthia chided. “Of course you have.”
Ginsberg stayed on in London after the Dylan concert and, a couple of weeks later, invited John and George, with Cyn and Pattie, to his thirty-ninth-birthday party at a mutual friend’s flat in Fitzrovia. They arrived to find their host naked, with a pair of underpants decorating his bald head and a hotel “Do Not Disturb” sign dangling from his penis. Nervous of being photographed in such company, the two Beatles quickly made an excuse and left. Even Hamburg-hardened John seemed shocked. “You don’t do that in front of birds,” he was heard to complain.
Dylan, meanwhile, had returned to America to detonate his long-fizzing bombshell. That July, his audience at the Newport Folk Festival broke into scandalized cries of “Traitor!” when he took the stage backed by the electrified Paul Butterfield Band. Over the summer, he released two pop singles—“Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Like a Rolling Stone”—each a mold-shattering blend of verbal virtuosity and supercharged beat. He would later attribute his conversion to another British band, the Animals, and their cover of an old blues lament, “The House of the Rising Sun.” But John always begged to differ. “Dylan liked to say how much the Beatles learned from him,” Neil Aspinall remembered. “John used to mutter, ‘He learned a bit from us, too.’”
Despite the little time available, John and Paul were equally determined to make this sixth Beatles album a conclusive answer to Dylan and all the other rivals snapping at their heels. One innovation they discussed with George Martin (but would not employ until four years later) was leaving out the spaces between tracks, so that one song merged into another with only the briefest pause, like movements in a classical symphony. They also deliberately put behind them the small-group arsenal of guitar-bass-drums, which until now had served them as well on record as in live performance. In Abbey Road’s Studio One, under the long open staircase to the control room, there was a cabinet full of exotic instruments left behind by other musicians who had worked there down the decades. The four had always enjoyed rummaging through this miscellany of tambourines, sleigh bells, and Moroccan hand drums; now it became an ally in the fight to prove themselves top dogs again, as did Martin’s classical background and every possible resource of the studio itself. Implicitly, from the very start, this was not stuff intended to be played live onstage.
John was later to call the end result “the pot album,” implying that the whole thing had taken shape amid sage-scented clouds of the stuff. He certainly intended it to be that way, lighting up a joint as his Rolls left Weybridge for the nightly trip to Abbey Road, passing it to Ringo and George as each came aboard. Unfortunately, the billowing fumes in the Rolls’s heated interior tended to produce an effect inimical to “having a laugh”: often by the time they reached London, all three would be feeling thoroughly nauseous. Out of respect for Martin, they did not smoke in the studio but withdrew to toilets or unfr
equented stairwells like schoolboys skulking behind the bike sheds. As Ringo has since recalled, anything they tried to record under the influence always proved unusable: “It didn’t do for the Beatles to be too demented while making music.”
Eight of the eventual fourteen tracks were enough on their own to have put clear blue water between the Beatles and every home and foreign competitor, and reconfirm Lennon and McCartney as creators of the catchiest, classiest, edgiest pop around. “You Won’t See Me,” “I’m Looking Through You,” and “Wait” were grade-A, Paul-dominated productions in a steady line of ascent from “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” “Drive My Car” followed a tradition of novelty motoring songs, down to the “Beep-beep, yeah!” chorus and surprise punch line. John’s “Run for Your Life” (its opening line, “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man”) slipped unchallenged into a world not yet disturbed by feminism or concerns about domestic violence. Two songs by George (“Think for Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone”) and a token hillbilly vocal by Ringo (“What Goes On?”) reinforced the irresistible image of a foursome whose greatest joy still came from being together.
But the remaining seven songs were of an order so different, so vastly superior, it was hard to believe they sprang from the same musicians, the same studio, or moment in time. These owed nothing to any other current pop sound and fitted no known categories. In them, John’s and Paul’s individual creative voices first come clearly into counterpoint: one that of a matchlessly artful, perfectly focused commercial songwriter, the other torn between the impulses of a poet, journalist, autobiographer, satirist, sloganeer, nostalgic, and melancholic.
John Lennon: The Life Page 47