by Bob Spitz
John and Paul had been writing steadily—together and apart—throughout their travels, with about eight songs in good enough shape to record right away. But it had not been a breeze, unlike the previous records. They’d struggled through what John described as “a lousy period,” a time when everything they came up with sounded trite, even flat. There were even hints that the album might have to be put off until the material was up to snuff; but before anyone panicked, they’d finally pounded out a few gems that had the earmarks of their very best work. “Basically,” Paul explained, they set out to re-create their “stage show, with some new songs” as a bridge to the creative territory they were exploring.
The Beatles’ drift away from the simplest pop forms, which had begun under Buddy Holly’s influence, had accelerated under Dylan’s. Even relatively recent hits like “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “P.S. I Love You” no longer played the predominant role in their prodigal repertoire. Like John, Paul needed something new. There was no challenge anymore to churning out fare-thee-well lyrics—“the moon and June stuff,” as Paul disdained it—in a neat two-and-a-half-minute frame. If anything, the seven months of constant travel and fame had given them more perspective on the structure of songwriting, confidently testing new chords and progressions, to say nothing of language, every time they buckled down. “We got more and more free to get into ourselves,” Paul explained. “And I think also John and I wanted to do something bluesy, a bit darker, more grown-up. Rather than just straight pop.”
This he said in describing the basis for “Baby’s in Black,” a pretentious, image-laden song that eventually made the cut, but it could serve as well for their entire approach. John’s and Paul’s fascination with Dylanesque touches—and to some extent the Stones’ foray into R&B—cast an edgy enthusiasm over their latest efforts. There is a definite bridge here to their later albums, discernible in songs such as “I’m a Loser,” whose melodic pattern would resonate exactly a year later in the ebb and flow of “Norwegian Wood.” The same with “No Reply,” with its painful scenes of rejection and humiliation. John called it his “version of ‘Silhouettes,’ ” the 1957 doo-wop hit by the Rays, which had been a staple on his turntable in Menlove Avenue. “I had that image of walking down the street and seeing [a girl] silhouetted on the window and not answering the phone,” he recalled. And while it reworked a long-established theme, its plaintiveness ran against the light current of familiar Beatles songs.
In this burst of daring songs that kicked off Beatles for Sale, along with the lush but anxiety-ridden “Every Little Thing,” John and Paul continued to grapple with the prospect of evolving without alienating. Experimentation and growth had become something of a professional obsession, but it would have been counterproductive, they realized, to do a complete about-face. Just as they’d felt initially that “From Me to You” was “too way out,” there was a suspicion that the audience “[wouldn’t] know quite what to make” of the intensely charged imagery, even though its authors considered it “cool.” They were still making a conscious effort not to deviate too much from the fold, to take creative baby steps as opposed to the proverbial flying leap.
The end of October was a particularly harried period when the Beatles most felt the squeeze. A number of the original songs were actually written on the spot—that is, in the studio—which broke every rule in the book. “No one was allowed to record like that,” recalls Tony Crane, of the Merseybeats. “Even when we had a song in the Top Five, we were given three hours at most to record an A-side, and if at the end of that time we still weren’t satisfied, it still went out as a single.” But the Beatles swept that old tradition right out the studio door. Paul and John had always loved improvising, but up until now it had been done at Paul’s house, in hotel rooms, in the back of vans. Now they took it a step further. “The ideas were there for a first verse, or a chorus,” Ringo explained, “but it could be changed by the writers as we were doing it, or if anyone had a good idea.”
Still, material for this album was at a premium. At a loss, they dredged up “I’ll Follow the Sun,” left over from the Forthlin Road period and four or five covers they’d “played live so often,” according to George, “that we only had to get a sound on them and do them.”
Through it all, John and Paul continued to write, with blocks of time devoted to working in their comfort zone: eyeball-to-eyeball. There was always a room available at Abbey Road studios where they could steal a few minutes to bash around ideas. There was also the tiny music salon below the Ashers’ flat, when it wasn’t booked for lessons. Otherwise, Paul ran his new forest green Aston Martin DB out to Kenwood, where John was spending most of his spare time since returning from the States, and they’d spread out in a little mess of an attic room overlooking the garden to “kick things around” for two or three hours.
Occasionally, when Paul was preoccupied, he arranged to be driven out to John’s in order to spend the travel time writing or just reading the newspaper. One day, just as the limo was turning into the driveway, Paul put down his paper and, more out of politeness than real interest, asked the chauffeur how he’d been. The driver gazed in his rearview mirror and shook his head. “Oh, working hard,” he replied with an emphatic huff, “working eight days a week.” A bell went off in Paul’s head. Eight days a week! “It was like a little blessing from the gods,” Paul recalled. No sooner had John answered his door than Paul dropped this little nugget into his hands. “Well, I’ve got the title,” he insisted, and blurted it out. John, normally as competitive as an insurance salesman, knew when to hop on the bus. They practically dashed upstairs and began spitting out lyrics, just “filling it in from the title,” as Paul remembered it. Bam, bam, bam.
Much later John dismissed “Eight Days a Week,” saying it “was never a good song,” but at the time they wrote it there was no hesitation as to whether it would fit into their recording plans. An obvious crowd-pleaser, “Eight Days a Week” contains all the drive and spunk of their previous hits, its exuberant spirit punctuated by explosive guitar fanfare, joyous handclaps, and an unforgettable hook—“a typical happy John-and-Paul song,” as Derek Johnson, writing in NME, described it. And each pop hit they offered carved out space for more radical exploration.
John and Paul had written “I Feel Fine” in the studio as one of the last songs for the new album. John had pinched the nifty guitar lick from the 1961 Bobby Parker single, “Watch Your Step,” which he admitted was one of his favorite records. “I told [the other Beatles] I’d write a song specially for the riff,” he explained to NME’s Chris Hutchins, and not more than a few hours later he and Paul had knocked it out.
Convinced it was “lousy,” they cut “I Feel Fine” almost as an afterthought and were delighted by the result: it “sounded like an ‘A’ side” from the very first playback. NME called “I Feel Fine” “a real gas… a happy-go-lucky mid-tempo swinger [with] a tremendous rhythm and a really catchy melody.” Hardly insightful (there was no one in Britain writing sophisticated pop criticism at the time), but at least it was headed in the right direction, hitting all the essential elements. One aspect the reviewer seized on—but couldn’t easily articulate—was the “startling, reverberating opening” for which there was no real precedent.
It was the result of a happy accident. The Beatles had finished recording a decent take of the song and were eager to hear the playback. “We were just about to walk away,” Paul remembered, “when John leaned his guitar against the amp.” It was an acoustic Gibson sunburst fitted with a pickup to give it a brighter sound. There wasn’t very much juice in the line, but the proximity of guitar and amp produced an electrical spike that sent distortion echoing through the studio.
For the Beatles, discovering feedback was like hitting a gusher. No one had ever considered using a sound effect before. Certainly they’d used handclaps and cowbells to enhance rhythm tracks, but nothing strictly technical, aside from double-tracking. “Can we have that on the record?” Paul remembered asking G
eorge Martin. No problem. They re-created the accident. Each time, they seemed to get more control over the sound: if they regulated the volume, the report would roar in key; cranking it up produced pure noise; by moving the guitar to and fro they could stretch the tone to their liking. They learned about electronics: how pickups function like microphones, the way distorting a frequency feeds it back into itself so that the same sound loops and spirals out of control. Lowering the volume requires pinpoint accuracy but produces a sharper, more resonant sound. Each new finding gave them incentive to tinker.
In a year, the Beatles would almost single-handedly reinvent the way music was recorded, but for now they were content to revel in their discovery. So much so that later that same session, while demo’ing a take of “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” they drowned George’s vocal under a torrent of tape delay, creating an eerie echo effect that makes it sound as if he were singing inside of a steel drum.
While John later boasted that “I Feel Fine” contained “the first feedback on any record,” there was nothing about its use that sent producers running to their consoles. The sound was already as familiar as tape hiss. What it lacked was the synthesis of imagination and experience—a way of weaving it into the densening web of a song, using each new color and shade to conceptualize the arrangement and engulf the listener in an unpredictable experience. In the fall of 1965 the Beatles eventually put it all together. Like everything else they’d done, it was the result of exploring the past and using those early pop influences to go their own way. As John described it, “We finally took over the studio.”
With the album all but spoken for, the “autumn tour” of Britain seemed like a vacation. Booked back in December, before all hell broke loose, the luxuries were few and the chaos next to nothing. There were no fifteen-thousand-seat arenas, no hotel stampedes, no planes to catch. It was a good old-fashioned string of one-nighters through the endless British countryside, stopping at cities whose names and landmarks were as familiar as the nightly set of songs. Bradford, Leicester, Birmingham, Ardwick… the Beatles had covered these lonely roads repeatedly on their way up the rock ’n roll food chain, when it was exciting just to blow into the next town. They knew every turnoff and railroad crossing, every road stop, which stores had fresh cheese sandwiches on the counter or hot tea ready, the distance between filling stations and B and Bs. In the rural corners of the country, where endless stretches of miles were as bleak and isolated as the Gulag, they recognized the shortcuts and detours, the points where the roads were too narrow to get around the flatbed carts filled with hay or produce that inched their way along.
Brighton, Exeter, Plymouth, Bournemouth… How many times over the years the Beatles had been to Bournemouth! Playing the Winter Gardens and the Gaumont Cinema again and again until, unconsciously, they sensed the pulse of the audience. That was their kind of crowd, a bunch of impetuous shit-kickers, harkening back to the wild scenes at Garston and Litherland. Small and rough, no doubt about it, but welcome.
[II]
The Beatles never questioned the way Brian conducted business. The boys were stars and millionaires: all their wildest dreams had come true. Even later, when they suspected the worst—that “all the deals were bad,” as George overstated it—there was no attempt to second-guess Brian’s authority. No one wanted to derail the runaway train.
As a result, the Beatles had no indication at this time of how badly they’d been fleeced. Not about the shameful royalty rate with EMI, nor about the bargain-basement fees they received on the British package tours. At some point John and Paul would grow heartsick over their publishing arrangement, discovering that they simply gave away 50 percent of their rights—millions of pounds—to Dick James Music, but that was still several years off. There was the early closed-circuit concert fiasco, the ridiculous payout from United Artists. They got ripped off right and left.
There was other carelessness. NEMS’ finances in America were particularly a mess. The proceeds from the last tour had been frozen by the Internal Revenue Service until it was satisfied that proper taxes were paid. That left the Beatles completely out-of-pocket for their five weeks of work. Moreover, during most of the tour Brian had effectively isolated himself from the outside world—there were strings of days when he simply disappeared—to the point that scores of producers and entrepreneurs bearing lucrative proposals, proposals the Beatles should have accepted, were unable to contact him. The number of important deals he let slip through his fingers is scandalous.
There was also the lingering suspicion that money was being squandered. The stories about the lifestyle Seltaeb’s Nicky Byrne led must have made it seem that way. He lived regally and traveled in fast, flashy company. When the Wall Street Journal piggybacked a piece on Byrne with the next wave of Beatles merchandising deals, it sounded a thunderclap in the offices on Argyll Street. Those deals, the Journal reported, were worth anywhere from $40 to $70 million. Simple arithmetic clued in Brian as to the enormity of his blunder. His deal with Seltaeb had been for a measly 10 percent of the profits.
In August, Brian managed to renegotiate the deal, bringing the Beatles’ cut up from 10 to 46 percent, but even that seemed insufficient. All Nicky Byrne was doing, it seemed, was issuing licenses—and reaping a fortune.
Offended, Brian decided to take matters into his own hands. Convinced that the operation was “a major ripoff” and that “Seltaeb was not accounting properly,” he summarily canceled Seltaeb’s authority to represent the Beatles abroad. He then instructed David Jacobs’s office in London to begin issuing its own licenses directly to American manufacturers and, thus, collect identical fees. As soon as American companies got wind of the conflicting agreements, all bets were off. J. C. Penney and Woolworth’s didn’t waste a moment canceling $78 million worth of orders, which triggered a lawsuit by Nicky Byrne against Brian and Walter Hofer, seeking $5,168,000 in damages.
It took nearly three years to settle the suit, untangling thirty-nine separate claims against NEMS and a $22 million claim for damages, which eventually broke Nicky Byrne and rent the merchandising deal asunder. “The reality is that the Beatles never saw a penny out of the merchandising,” says Nat Weiss, the avuncular divorce lawyer Brian befriended in New York who subsequently took over their American affairs. “Tens of millions of dollars went down the drain because of the way the whole thing was mishandled. Even after the judgment was vacated, you could smell the smoke from the ashes, that’s how badly they had been burned.”
Despite Brian’s fumbling, the whole of London moved to the beat of the swinging Beatles soundtrack. Almost everyone credited them with the new and buoyant spirit that now seemed to seep into all phases of ordinary city life. The semimythical concept of “Swinging London” had not quite emerged—in fact, the term wasn’t coined until April 1966*—but you could already feel its essence in the air. When Harold Wilson upset the Conservative political establishment and returned Labour to office for the first time since 1951, it signaled “a [new] kind of freedom around which hadn’t been there before.” Total dependence on American culture began losing ground to new, homegrown forms of expression that sparked a revolution in the arts and seemed to undermine traditional attitudes. This energy was already at work on the walls of London’s galleries, where British pop art was in its earliest stages of experimentation. Several recent graduates of the Royal College of Art—including Peter Blake, Richard Smith, and David Hockney—were being exhibited all over the place, with a legion of talented young painters beginning to prowl the trail they had blazed. Fashion had been transformed by the cheeky insolence of clothing designer John Stephen, whose boutique turned a seedy lane in Soho called Carnaby Street into “a Mecca for the Mods.” As one convert recalls: “I can remember going down Carnaby Street in 1964 and feeling like my humdrum life was being reoutfitted. I’d never seen anything quite like it. There were so many different things you could wear—red corduroy trousers, green corduroy trousers, flowery shirts, polka dots everywhere. Be
fore that, all we had were gray and brown.”
The airwaves were still governed by the BBC’s despotic monopoly over what was suitable for transmission, but beginning that Easter, a fleet of “pirate” radio ships moored offshore to the east of Essex or Kent, just outside the twelve-mile international-waters limit, and began broadcasting rock ’n roll on its own terms. Radio Caroline, and later Radio London, showcased the latest records, describing what was fashionable and delivering a new language, sprinkled with words like fab and gear and dig. British kids of every class could agree, in the abstract at least, that music cut through all the bullshit and eloquently expressed all the feelings—frustration, fear, rage, and passion—they’d suppressed for so long.
The Beatles managed to sit comfortably on the fringe of this cultural revolution, having already contributed quite substantially to it. It went without saying that they rejuvenated, if not reinvented, the local beat scene. Their clothes dominated teenage fashion with round-necked jackets and high-heeled boots. And they appeared daring and anarchic thanks to the cut of their long hair. “I can’t overpitch this,” writes journalist Nik Cohn in his treatise on fashion, Today There Are No Gentlemen, “the Beatles changed everything. Before them, all teenage life and, therefore, fashion, existed in spasms; after them, it was an entity, a separate society.”
But the more the Beatles bathed in the limelight, the less they seemed willing to make a defiant splash. Considering that they had already scraped through the turbulent club scene, resigned themselves to the indignities of Hamburg, trudged cross-country in a circuit of endless one-nighters, overcome the age-old prejudice against northerners, conquered America, and captured the hearts of “ordinary blokes,” it was all they could do to enjoy their fresh success. The Beatles weren’t interested in upheaval. They wanted to make records, not statements. There was too much at stake, too much fever and magic, to antagonize their largely mainstream audience, leaving the extreme rule-breaking to newcomers like the Stones and the Who, both of whom were willing to be outrageous and risk everything for maximum impact.