Whether or not due to their shared acid experience, John and George found an empathy on this album that they never had before, although its first expression was hardly in the realm of the mystical. For all four Beatles, the thrill of acquiring real wealth had been marred by the discovery of top-rate British income tax, which, under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, could reach 97.5 percent. Brian Epstein’s attempts to hive off some of their earnings into an offshore fund in the Bahamas had lately ended in disaster, obliging each to pay a hefty capital sum in back tax and interest. The result was George’s song “Taxman,” a hymn of hate breathing John’s influence—and input—in its vision of new taxes on streets, on shoe leather, even on the old penny pieces traditionally placed on the eyelids of corpses laid out in northern front parlors. John actually named the guilty man, that benign, pipe-smoking distributor of showbiz awards, crooning the name “Mister Wilson” and, for good measure, his Tory opponent “Mister Heath,” in the place usually occupied by “Shang-a-lang” or “Bop-shoowop.”
Paul’s contributions represented a major leap forward on his own, very different, course: the euphoric “Good Day Sunshine,” the uncharacteristically vulnerable “For No One,” and the soul-influenced “Got to Get You Into My Life.” While ordering in still more extra instrumentalists (a French horn on “For No One,” a brass section on “Got to Get You Into My Life”) he also provided a track that showed how little the Beatles needed anyone but themselves. “Here, There and Everywhere,” a love note to Jane Asher, was recorded in almost a cappella style by voices as close-knit as the friends who once shared even their body warmth. Of all Beatles vocals, it remains the most intimate and sweet. Paul had first played it to John on a tape of rough song drafts by both of them, while they were sharing a hotel room on location for Help! “You know,” John told him, “I probably like that better than any of my songs on the tape.”
It was Paul’s idea to include the first Beatles number overtly for children, in the spot traditionally occupied by Ringo Starr. The theme for “Yellow Submarine” came one night as he drowsed in bed, and its words and music were almost complete by the time he got up next morning. The notion of a yellow submarine was quintessential comic-book Pop Art, although—as would quickly be noted—the term was also slang for Nembutal or Pentobarbital downers. The recording turned into a miniature Goon Show, with Pattie Harrison, Rolling Stone Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, George Martin, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, and sundry Abbey Road employees providing subaquatic sound effects and joining in the choruses. John blew bubbles in a bucket of water, shouted out commands from an imaginary conning tower (“Aye, aye, Mr. Captain, full speed ahead!”), and echoed Ringo’s vocal in a Neddy Seagood-ish shriek. When the tape stopped running, Mal strapped a bass drum on his chest and everyone danced round the studio behind him in a conga line.
From Paul, too, came a ballad that was as much a short story, the first of a trilogy that would take his talent to its zenith. The subject matter, a solitary woman wistfully picking up celebratory rice in “a church where a wedding has been,” had no precedent in pop; if anything, it evoked the more melancholy reaches of Irish Catholic literature, particularly James Joyce’s Dubliners. The central figure in this tender hearted lament for “all the lonely people” received her baptism in a roundabout way. Paul decided on the Christian name Eleanor, so he thought, after the actress Eleanor Bron; then, on a visit to Bristol, where Jane was appearing in a play, he happened to see the surname “Rigby” above a shop front.
In fact, Eleanor Rigby was embedded in his subconscious—and, even more deeply, in John’s—thanks to a family gravestone in St. Peter’s churchyard, Woolton. As a small boy, John had seen its weather-stained inscription to the “beloved wife of Thomas Woods and granddaughter of the above, died 10th October, 1939, aged 44 years” countless times on his way to and from church or choir practice. Racked by childhood’s premature terror of the grave, he always found comfort in thinking she was not really dead and moldering under the ground but only, as her epitaph said, “Asleep.”
John claimed that while the song that would immortalize her was worked out between Paul’s grieving solo voice and a classical string octet, he and the other Beatles merely sat around “drinking tea.” However, both George and he were involved in the vocal harmonies, and all four had contributed to the lyric (Ringo coming up with the vision of Father McKenzie, who was originally to have been called McCartney, “darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there.”) Significantly, throughout all the creative disputes to come, John never rated Eleanor Rigby as other than a masterpiece, nor felt other than proud of his part in it, however peripheral. “It was Paul’s baby,” he would say. “But I helped with the education of the child.”
The track chosen to end the album—rightly, since it hardly seemed to belong there at all, but already to be leaping off into the future—was an all-John number, initially known only by the code name “Mark 1.” When he first played it to George Martin on acoustic guitar in his usual way, Martin was puzzled. The opening C major chord did not, as usual, form a threshold to some catchy sequence, but just went on, and on and on. With this strummed monotone came words that sounded like no John his producer had heard before: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream…Lay down all thought, surrender to the void…Listen to the colour of your dreams…” They were, in fact, almost verbatim quotations from The Psychedelic Experience, which he had devoured in one gulp at the Indica Bookshop. Here now was a fifteen-line lyric encapsulating the LSD apostles’ creed that human existence was but a meaningless game, and the only way to salvation was “turn on, tune in and drop out.”
John’s sole guideline to Martin and the studio engineers, delivered with wonderful, dictatorial simplicity, was that he should sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from some Himalayan mountaintop. Their solution took the singing voice he so disliked into unprecedented realms of echo and distortion. The beginning of his vocal track was recorded on Abbey Road’s newly installed ADT (Automatic Double-Tracking) system; the rest was put through a Hammond organ’s Leslie speaker, whose rotating mechanism produced a wah-wah effect. The result was a flat, reedy, almost dehumanized tone, very much like that associated with mystics in holy trances. He loved it, of course—and instantly suggested a variation on the Leslie speaker technique whereby he would hang upside-down from the ceiling and slowly revolve while a fixed microphone picked up the erratic volume of his voice.
Although the track was John through and through, it owed a massive debt to Paul McCartney, still at this stage the most avant-garde Beatle as well as the one most dedicated to cultural self-advancement. The classical music learning curve, which for Paul began while living with Jane Asher’s family, had since progressed far beyond simple Beethoven or Brahms. He also knew about John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and their revolutionary conception of music as unpredictable sonic “events” rather than fixed patterns of notes. He knew about Pierre Schaffer’s musique concrète, which was created solely by the manipulation of electronically generated sound and thus removed any need for talent or training in the performer.
Paul had by now left the Ashers’ and, still resisting the call of the suburbs, had moved into a handsome town house in Cavendish Avenue, St. John’s Wood, just around the corner from Abbey Road. There, at the stimulus of Barry Miles and other arty underground friends, he had tried out a seminal musique concrète technique with analog recording tape, in these days still mainly used on reel-to-reel machines. By joining the two ends of a tape and removing the machine’s erase mechanism, one created a loop that repeatedly superimposed the same track on itself, so turning the most commonplace sound into an unearthly cacophony.
The sense of Himalayan height and space, combined with acid-induced rapture and spiritual mass-awakening, that John sought for “Mark 1” was created by five tape loops playing simultaneously. Following Paul’s lead, John, George, Ringo, and Barry Miles all made their own loops at home by multiple rerecording o
f scraps of classical music, studio guitar outtakes, or even just laughter. The loop makers were stationed in studios all over the Abbey Road complex and, at a given signal, relayed their surreal sonic squibbles to George Martin’s mixing console. Such ad hoc commandeering and unorthodox use of EMI resources being strictly against company rules, there was a touch of Quarry Bank naughtiness about it all.
Playback produced exactly the sound picture John had imagined—that of hundreds of monks in robes as yellow as a submarine, beating and plucking on strange instruments and chanting of the joys of his mental Shangri-La. Typically, he was disappointed, saying he wished they’d used real monks instead. Typically, too, when choosing a title, he passed over all Leary’s mystic verbiage in favor of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a pet phrase of Ringo’s, sensing it was just right “to take the edge off those heavy philosophical lyrics.”
The album cover obviously needed to be something very special, an image as adventurous as the music it heralded, reaching into the same uncharted realms of Pop Art and psychedelia. The person who could have realized this to perfection, unfortunately, had died at twenty-one in a German girl’s arms and was buried in Liverpool alone with his name. But if Stu Sutcliffe was no longer around, a powerful echo of his era, and his talent, still was.
Klaus Voormann’s career as a Brian Epstein discovery had proved an unrewarding one. Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, the trio in which he played bass, had been signed to NEMS Enterprises by Brian in a burst of enthusiasm but, finding no success on record, had quickly fallen apart. Rather than return to Hamburg, Klaus stayed on in London, not seeing his old Beatle mates as much as he would have liked for fear of looking like a sponger. He would soon join the highly successful Manfred Mann group, but at this point, with no music gig in prospect, he had serious thoughts of resuming his original career as an artist and designer. One day, out of the blue, John telephoned and invited him to do a cover for the new album, now scheduled for release in August.
The moment was serendipitous: six years earlier, at Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller club, Klaus had first plucked up courage to talk to John by showing him a design for an album cover. And, despite their long friendship—and the supposedly ego-softening power of acid—he found that prickly English boy-rocker could still readily resurface. “When John asked me to design the album, I hesitated for a moment before saying yes, I’d do it, and suddenly he gets very angry, very uptight: ‘What’s the matter? You don’t want to do it or what?’ He’s still the old, intimidating John.”
Klaus’s chaste black-and-white design seemed to belong on the wall of some avant-garde gallery rather than in the finger-hurried racks of a record store. Four Beatle heads, sketched in pen and ink, spilled forth a collage of photographic images through the mingling, seaweedy tangles of their hair. John’s face, at top right, had the almond eyes and long vertical nose of a Modigliani. The title, Revolver, was a sly Lennon pun, suggesting the action of a record on its turntable as well as a weapon that, for him, still belonged to the world of make-believe.
18
A MOST RELIGIOUS FELLOW
You might as well paint a target on me.
The world tour Brian had scheduled to begin in June 1966 was supposed to have eased the pressure on his boys. Their only European shows were three in West Germany. Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand were bypassed in favor of single-city visits to Japan and the Philippines. Following those hopefully unexacting appearances in Tokyo and Manila, they would have more than a month’s break before returning to the ever-reliable embrace of America.
Behind them they left a new single that was like an hors d’oeuvre for the banquet to come on Revolver. The undisputedly more commercial A-side was Paul’s “Paperback Writer,” a satire on pulp fiction and Fleet Street, finally making use of a phrase that the poet Royston Ellis had dropped into his and John’s consciousness in 1960. On the B-side, John’s “Rain” was a celebration of acid’s transfiguring power at its most benign, when a wet leaf could appear to blaze brighter than gold and a raindrop coursing down a windowpane to reveal all the mystery of Creation. “Can you hear me?” the voice of the new apostle repeated over and over. “I can show you…” Multitrack harmonies and varispeed tempos created an effect both dense and liquid, as of a sonic tropical monsoon. For the fade-out, George Martin had the idea of playing John’s vocal opening backward. John loved the result, and from then on wanted everything played backward.
After such a creative surge, the thought of returning to a thirty-minute stage repertoire of dusty old hits was hardly bearable. And, what with putting the finishing touches to Revolver—and the certainty that no one out there would be listening anyway—the Beatles scarcely even bothered to rehearse before starting out on the road. During their opening concert, at Munich’s Circus-Krone-Bau, John, George, and Paul simultaneously forgot the opening of “I’m Down,” and had to stop and confer about it. Even after this, the usually meticulous Paul managed two further slipups in the lyric; then George mistakenly introduced “Yesterday” as a track from Beatles for Sale. Not since earliest Quarrymen days, and rarely even then, had they shown such blatant unprofessionalism.
The third West German concert took them back to Hamburg for the first time since January 1963 and provided a clearer-than-usual measure of how far they had risen since. The former illegal laborers, suspected arsonists, and police detainees now arrived at the city’s central station aboard a luxury train fitted with velvet drapes and marble bathtubs, which had been used to transport Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit a year before. The former all-night ravers at the Kaiserkeller and Star-Club now played just two shows of thirty minutes each in the 5,600-seat Ernst Mercke Halle, although, as if to keep up Reeperbahn tradition, police arrested forty-four spectators for violence.
Numerous old friends were granted instant dressing-room visas, among them Astrid Kirchherr; Bert Kaempfert, the Beatles’ first record producer (whose song “Strangers in the Night” had stopped “Paperback Writer” from reaching number one in the United Kingdom); and Bettina Derlien, the Star-Club barmaid who had always known just how to help John when he was feeling down. After their second show, the four Beatles took a nostalgic midnight stroll through St. Pauli, John showing particular pleasure—as a less enraptured George would later recall—in spotting other familiar faces among the strippers, bouncers, gangsters, and cross-dressers from the still-thriving Bar Monika. There was no happier memory for him, nor ever would be, than that of blasting out simple rock ’n’ roll under crazy neon in this dangerous, sordid but also sheltering and tolerant place where, so unaccountably, he had once belonged.
For the first time, the support team traveling with the Beatles reflected the scale and scope of the journey. Besides Neil, Mal, and Tony Barrow, Brian had brought along Peter Brown, the ex-Liverpool record-shop manager who had become his most trusted lieutenant at NEMS Enterprises and closest friend outside it. Also in the party was Vic Lewis, an old-school London theatrical agent whose company had recently been acquired by NEMS, and who was about to join its board. These extra executive layers were meant to cushion pressure on the four, though, alas, the very opposite would happen.
From the moment they left West Germany, in Barrow’s words, “everything started to go pear-shaped.” A hurricane warning forced their Japan-bound flight to divert to Anchorage, Alaska, for a nine-hour stopover. When at long last they reached Tokyo, they found themselves the first pop group, possibly the first entertainers in any sphere, to receive death threats. The Nippon Budokan arena, where they had to give five shows, was normally a venue for Sumo wrestling and martial arts displays—in Japanese tradition regarded as religious rites as much as spectator sports. A group of extreme right-wing students had threatened vengeance for such defilement of hallowed ground with decadent Western music. From such cultural purists, this could only mean something very unpleasant with a long, curved sword.
It was later estimated that around thirty-five thousand police and security staff had been mobilized to
guard the Beatles during their four-day stay in Tokyo. Paradoxically, Japanese Beatlemaniacs were the most peaceable they ever encountered. Five successive houses at the Budokan watched in almost complete stillness and silence, with any sign of exuberance instantly photographed by the police who thronged the side aisles. Between performances, they were kept under virtual house arrest in the top-floor suite of the Tokyo Hilton. Despite the numerous guards on twenty-four-hour watch, John and Neil Aspinall managed their usual trick of sneaking out and hailing an ordinary cab for some incognito sightseeing. “We found a local market, and got out to have a look around,” Neil remembered. “But within a few minutes, the police turned up and sent us back to the hotel.”
So paranoid was security that even shopping in central Tokyo was banned; instead, the city’s leading stores sent selections of merchandise up to the Beatles’ suite. Among the cameras, electronic gadgets, and happi coats were some painting and calligraphy sets and blocks of superfine Japanese art paper. Having nothing else to do, the four set to work on a large communal painting. Barrow remembers how, as soon as John picked up a paintbrush, all his usual aggression and impatience seemed to melt away. “Never before or after did I see [him] concentrating with such contented determination on a nonessential project.” Interesting that the culture that provided this brief, unexpected respite from Beatle-slavery was Japan’s.
John Lennon: The Life Page 50