by Bob Spitz
The infamous “butcher cover” was delivered to Capitol the following week, where it quickly landed on the desk of label president Alan Livingston. Inundated by objections from his staff, he immediately called Brian Epstein and demanded an explanation. “It’s their comment on war,” he was told, an interpretation that was as facetious as it was unsupportable. Paul has admitted that “we thought it was stunning and shocking, but we didn’t see all the connotations.” Livingston doubted he could put out the cover, and Brian promised he would ask the Beatles to reconsider. The next day, however, he indignantly “came back and said: ‘They absolutely insist that’s what they want.’ ”
Over the years, Livingston had put his foot down when artists became unreasonable—there was no upside to placating their outlandish demands—but he couldn’t afford any kind of confrontation with a group like the Beatles. Going against all instincts, he ordered the cover into production and shipped out several hundred advance copies to his national sales force. “Word came back very fast that the dealers would not touch it,” Livingston recalled. “They would not put the album in their stores.”
Unfortunately for Capitol, about half a million copies of the cover had already been printed, which forced the expensive process of unpacking cartons of records and replacing the sleeve. Meanwhile, on June 14, the label’s press manager issued a letter stating that “the album cover is being discarded.” It included a disclaimer from Livingston: “The original cover, created in England, was intended as ‘Pop Art’ satire. However, a sampling of opinion in the United States indicates that the cover design is subject to misinterpretation. For this reason, and to avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to the Beatles’ image or reputation, Capitol has chosen to withdraw the LP and substitute a more generally acceptable design.”
The Beatles were predictably up in arms over the recall. It wasn’t the picture so much as the way Capitol had caved in to so-called public opinion that offended their sense of fair play. “I especially pushed for it to be an album cover, just to break the image,” John insisted. He was sick and tired of the Beatles’ constantly being held up as altar boys in contrast to the scruffy Rolling Stones. It wasn’t an accurate comparison—and it needed correcting. The butcher sleeve headed in the right direction. Paul agreed: “We weren’t against a little shock now and then; it was part of our make-up.”
But the Beatles knew the importance of picking their battles. Their recording contract was coming up for renewal, and instead of granting worldwide rights to EMI again, Brian wanted to negotiate directly with Capitol for the United States, where he was sure to get a substantial signing bonus and a larger royalty. In fact, he made no secret of the fact that he was already putting out feelers to other American labels. Nat Weiss had introduced Brian to Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, both of whom “he greatly respected.” They’d also visited Columbia and seen Clive Davis, who “thought the Beatles had peaked and wasn’t prepared to give them a large offer.” RCA salivated at the prospect of pairing them with Elvis, but when Rocco Laginestra tried to impress Brian by presenting a copy of Chet Atkins Picks the Beatles, any deal was as good as dead. (“They are cabbage salesmen, not record people,” he told Weiss.) There were still barrels of money to be made in America, that was for sure. Was it really worth jeopardizing that over the butcher cover? He put this to the Beatles, who clearly understood the implications, which is why they quietly agreed to substitute another Whitaker photograph—what John referred to as an “awful-looking picture of us looking just as deadbeat but supposed to be a happy-go-lucky foursome”—of the band posed alongside a steamer trunk.
There were, of course, other things the Beatles earmarked as worth fighting for. For one thing, they absolutely dreaded being dragged around the British cinema circuit on another scattershot package tour. There was some sense, they agreed, to remaining barricaded behind dingy hotel-room doors when playing before a paying crowd of fifty thousand fans, but not for an audience of six or nine hundred. They agreed to appear at the annual NME poll-winners’ show, on May 1, but it was to be their last-ever British concert performance. That wasn’t the only setback. As late as December 1965, the Beatles were still turning up regularly for every lightweight TV and radio appearance. But since January, they’d refused all media requests aside from a live spot on Top of the Pops on June 16 (Melody Maker reported that they’d “succumbed to pressure from fans”). Recording occupied most all of their time; otherwise, the excuse they gave was lame: “It was too much trouble to go and fight our way through all the screaming hordes of people to mime the latest single.” The truth was, it was becoming harder to reproduce onstage the kind of effects-laden music they were creating in the studio. Foot pedals for guitars were still a few years off, there were no remote sound-mixing boards, no faders, no monitors. Their new songs, like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contained crucial sounds that could be made only in the studio. It’d take a pretty substantial horn section to pull off “Got to Get You into My Life.”
A Melody Maker poll reflected the residual impact this had on the Beatles’ popularity by a tabulation showing that 80 percent of respondents were greatly disappointed by the band’s dearth of personal appearances, with only slightly less declaring that Beatlemania had passed its peak. But the Beatles couldn’t have cared less. “Musically, we’re only just starting,” George told a reporter. “We’ve realized for ourselves that as far as recording is concerned most of the things that recording men have said were impossible for 39 years are in fact very possible.”
Brian had promised them that he’d find an alternative method to publicize the “Paperback Writer”/“Rain”single, but EMI wasn’t helpful. Any shortcuts would be frowned upon, he was warned.
No one recalls who came up with the solution, but sometime in early May they decided to make amusing promotional films of both songs—lipsynced versions set to comical scenarios, not unlike those in A Hard Day’s Night—which would be sent out in place of live performances. The whole thing, shot in half a day (by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg), cost a mere couple of thousand pounds. Their old exi pal Klaus Voormann was hired to organize the whole affair in the lovely manicured gardens behind Chiswick House, in West London, and a new medium was miraculously born. “I don’t think we even thought of calling them ‘videos,’ ” Ringo speculated, but videos indeed they were—the first of their kind, and eighteen years ahead of their explosion on the forefront of pop culture.
[III]
On June 16, 1966, Vic Lewis, NEMS’ swashbuckling booking agent, took off from Heathrow Airport for the Far East, intent on making final arrangements for the Beatles’ upcoming visit to Tokyo and Manila in early July. Under normal circumstances, Brian Epstein would have tended to this himself. “But by 1966,” Tony Barrow writes in an unpublished memoir, “his alarming ill health and his time-consuming personal struggle with debilitating drugs, drink and sex problems led him to devote substantially less attention to the essential details of his artists’ management and concert promotion companies.”
As much as he tried to hide it, Brian was a physical and emotional mess. Manic depression had thrust its grip on his already volatile personality, accelerating the severe mood swings he experienced randomly throughout the day. “And the drugs made things much worse,” says Peter Brown. “The more the drugs took hold, the worse his condition became.” Drugs had become one of the central focuses of Brian’s life—uppers and Tuinal—mixed with plenty of alcohol. And now a new vice to grapple with: John “Diz” Gillespie, a slightly built, baby-faced aspiring actor from Ohio, in his mid-twenties, who had a prodigious capacity for meting out both love and violence. To a manic-depressive masochist, the combination hit the trifecta.
Diz, in Nat Weiss’s estimation, amounted to nothing more than “a garden-variety hustler.” Weiss first encountered the boy when the Beatles played Shea Stadium and claims he “knew exactly what he was” the moment he laid eyes on him. “Diz was a predator,�
�� he says, and what he wanted was money. For a while, Brian bankrolled his phantom acting career, signing Diz to an artist’s contract with NEMS and authorizing a modest weekly stipend. But when that didn’t pan out, there were arguments and violence. Fistfights were a common enough occurrence. Valuable antique vases would be heaved against the wall or mirrors shattered during late-night assaults. “I went over [to Brian’s flat] one morning and found the glass-top coffee table smashed to smithereens and five dozen tulips strewn all over,” Ken Partridge recalls. “Diz had beaten Brian up and stolen his records, although Brian rather enjoyed it in a funny sort of way.” In New York, Diz demanded three thousand dollars from Nat Weiss, ostensibly to buy a car, although the lawyer suspected that it was going for drugs. Weiss wrote him a check but warned: “If you show up again after I give it to you, I promise you I have friends who will deal with you.”
Threats meant nothing. Diz showed up—only in London next time, where he was received by the lovesick Brian as the “sweetest, most special plaything, the object of my dreams.” Almost immediately, however, they reverted to their old pattern, taking obscene handfuls of drugs and beating the shit out of each other. Peter Brown outlines an explosive incident in his book, The Love You Make, when Brian ordered Diz out of his house, at which point, he said, “Diz raced to the kitchen, grabbed the largest knife he could find, and held it to Brian’s jugular vein while extracting an additional sum of money from Brian’s wallet.”
By the end of May and the beginning of June, the Beatles were busy putting the finishing touches on their new album, which was perceived among them as defining “a new British sound,” if not a brilliant leap forward.
“Taxman” was finally behind them. The scathing satire, with the slurry, psychedelic edge, is the strongest of a record three George Harrison compositions that made the final cut, and an extraordinary contribution to the album’s aesthetic sensibility. Among the Beatles, true genius radiated from the Lennon and McCartney nexus, but “Taxman” is a huge achievement. It is wry, witty, caustic, and concentrated, with “sharp, incisive jolts of energy” that burst from the song’s offbeat “studio-verité” introduction: wandering notes, a cough, a false count. What a delightful surprise!
Like many topical lyrics, “Taxman” sprang from the anger and disillusionment that followed a meeting with Bryce Hammer, the Beatles’ accountants, weeks before the session began. “I had discovered I was paying a huge amount of money to the taxman,” complained George. Paul recalled George’s “righteous indignation” in those business meetings. “Well, I don’t want to pay tax,” he’d fume. “It’s not fair.”
George’s response would open the album. Everything is taxable according to his account: the street, your seat, the heat, and your feet. No matter what you do or how much you have—pay up and shut up. And it doesn’t stop there. After you are dead, he advises listeners, be sure “to declare the pennies on your eyes.” “Taxman” is as sly and critical as anything Dylan was writing. Of course, John had helped; he said he “threw in a few one-liners to help the song along.” And Paul doubled on guitars, playing looping bass lines and delivering the song’s signature savage guitar solo. But as far as first-rate songwriting went, with “Taxman” George had finally arrived.
Earlier that month “Eleanor Rigby” had been given the full symphonic treatment, courtesy of a lush arrangement by George Martin—and inspired by Bernard Herrmann’s score for Fahrenheit 451—that featured a double string quartet: four violins, two violas, and two cellos. This prompted Paul to lend a similar flourish to “For No One.” The song is an elegant ballad about a crumbling relationship built atop a descending bass line that he’d written in the bathroom of a Swiss chalet in March.
The Beatles let their hair down for one of the album’s final tracks. On “Yellow Submarine” they gave a blunt comic edge to a children’s song Paul had brought in by layering it with gentle wisecracks and sound effects from their boyhood iconography. Studio Two was in complete disarray as the four Beatles, along with Neil, Mal, and a full battalion of Abbey Road irregulars, ransacked the trap room, a small equipment closet just inside the door, where a trove of noisemaking effects was conveniently stashed. The vast wooden floor was suddenly littered with “chains, ship’s bells, hand bells from wartime, tap dancing mats, whistles, hooters, wind machines, thunderstorm machines”—every oddity they could lay their hands on. A cash register (the one eventually used to ring up Pink Floyd’s “Money”) was dragged out, along with several buckets, a set of bar glasses, even an old metal bath that was promptly filled with water.
“They had a whole crowd of people to do the effects,” recalled Geoff Emerick, who crisscrossed the studio like a jittery football player, attempting to properly mike the gadgets. Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, and Pattie Harrison were recruited to rattle and clink various hardware. The Beatles’ chauffeur, Alf Bicknell, swirled chains through the bath, engineers John Skinner and Terry Condon made whooshing noises. Ringo handled the vocals with his typical deadpan panache, and with George Martin at the controls, it was all very reminiscent of the goofy Spike Milligan sessions he’d produced in an earlier age. Everyone laughed and hooted as the tape captured the hijinks. At some point after hours of overdubs, Mal Evans strapped on a bass drum and, bashing away, led a conga line around the cluttered studio while the ensemble chanted the memorable refrain: “We all live in a yellow submarine….” It was party time in Studio Two.
Oddly enough, by the time the Beatles set out for a three-date concert tour of Germany on June 23, the LP still wasn’t titled. There were plenty of plausible candidates, however. Originally, everyone got behind calling it Abracadabra until Neil discovered another album with the same name. Lounging around a fifth-floor suite in the Bayerischer Hof in Munich, following a rather rusty opening concert at the Circus-Krone-Bau, other titles were proposed—and discarded: Pendulums; Fat Man and Bobby; and After Geography, Ringo’s send-up of the Stones’ recent album, Aftermath. George’s tape of the album, which blared in the background, didn’t inspire much. “Let’s just call it Rock ’n Roll Hits of ’66,” Paul suggested, getting prickly. “That’ll solve it.” But, of course, that only drew groans. John came up with Beatles on Safari, and Paul offered Magic Circle, which John tweaked and twisted into Four Sides of the Circle. Later, Revolver seemed to fall out of the sky. Paul put it up for consideration, and it was an immediate hit. Revolver.
It seemed fitting that the Beatles pondered album titles in Germany. Two days later they were due in Hamburg, scene of their emergence—officially—as the Beatles. It had been only four years since their last show at the Star-Club, four years since they went from being the amphetamine-stoked resident band in a Reeperbahn rathole to millionaire Members of the British Empire and a worldwide phenomenon. Four years: in that brief span they’d collected nineteen number one hits and six gold albums; they’d made two box-office smashes, become virtuosos, and played in front of more people than any other act in the history of show business.
The late-night train ride from Essen to Hamburg on June 25 was especially poignant. In the suite of smoky coach cars, Tony Barrow played host to several dozen press and members of the entourage who partied noisily until dawn. But up ahead, in a private compartment, the mood was warm, sentimental. There were only eight people in the luxurious velvet-draped car, the same one that had transported Queen Elizabeth and the royal party through Germany months before, and the significance was lost on no one. Throughout the five-hour journey, the little company cut appreciative glances at one another: the four Beatles, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, Brian Epstein, and Peter Brown. “We all knew each other from way back in Liverpool,” recalls Brown, “and we didn’t have to prove anything to each other. It was relaxing, fun. There was a lot of comfort, all of us sitting there like that, together, in peace.”
Essen had been neither comfortable nor peaceful. “At Essen, the brutality started to show itself,” Melody Maker’s Alan Walsh reported. “At each concert over-enthusiastic
fans were dragged outside and on several occasions were beaten-up by bouncers who apparently seemed to enjoy it.” Boys, thugs—not the usual gaggle of teenage girls—behaved like disembodied spirits, screaming, singing along, jerking their bodies back and forth, and fighting among themselves. Hordes of brutal-looking, jackbooted police, with loaded Lugers strapped to their hips, moved in with “huge, muzzled dogs at their heels,” trying to move the crowd back. And it got uglier outside.
Nevertheless, for the first few shows the Beatles played, the country cast its inimitable spell, with the sets a core of old up-tempo rockers powered by the atomic beat. It was almost as if they could hear Bruno Koschmider demanding: “Mach schau, mach schau!” and responded, as they had years earlier, with exaggerated body language.
Every one of them was looking forward to arriving in Hamburg. So much had changed since their stay there as penniless wannabes; they were “still just the boys,” as Paul insisted much later, but “[they’d] got famous in the meantime.” Bettina Derlin, the Star-Club’s buxom bartender, pushed through a cordon of police at Hamburg’s railway station to greet the Beatles’ train. What a blast from the past! John, who’d always fancied the girl, couldn’t get over her moxie. “How about Bettina being on the station [platform] at seven o’clock this morning!” he marveled when the touring party arrived at the Schloss Hotel in nearby Tremsbuttel later that day. But the procession of familiar faces didn’t stop there. “[A] lot of old ghosts materialized out of the woodwork,” George remembered (although there were several—the pimps and pill pushers—he admitted, who remained better off buried). The backstage area at Ernst-Merck-Halle, where the Beatles played two concerts, resembled an old school reunion. Bettina was there, this time with an old girlfriend of Paul’s in tow. Horst Fascher bared his lethal grin. Bert Kaempfert swept in with his family, and as the boys spotted him John broke into a creaky rendition of “Strangers in the Night.” It was old home night for the Beatles. But no “ghost” hit them as powerfully as when Astrid Kirchherr walked through the door.