by Bob Spitz
What Grevatt mistook for seriousness, however, was a malaise that deepened with every passing day. George was fed up with the grim, chaotic life of the Beatles. In discussions with friends, he talked of feeling “wasted” and virtually “imprisoned” by the constraints of Beatlemania. The touring and its effluvia had beat him up, physically and emotionally. “It had been four years of legging around in a screaming mania,” he grumbled. Endless performances—“about 1,400 live shows,” by George’s count—had left him bored and dispirited. It was all he could do to get up for the thirty-minute appearance.
“Nobody was listening at the shows,” complained Ringo, who said he “was fed up playing” in such a haphazard manner. Bashing along to “She’s a Woman” and “I Feel Fine” day in and day out wasn’t his idea of drumming. It was impossible for him to hear what the others were doing onstage, forcing him to play to their body language. There was no percentage in it. Conditions were so pitiful that during many songs Ringo’s drums would slide around the platform, requiring him to get up and move them back into place. Ringo had always been a sport; he’d always done whatever was asked of him, whatever was best for the band. He’d played the role that was required of him—the role of a lifetime. But his heart wasn’t in it anymore.
And to John, the whole scene was a dreadful experience. “I didn’t want to tour again,” he said, “especially after having been accused of crucifying Jesus… and having to stand with the Klan outside and firecrackers going on inside.” Creatively, physically, emotionally, he had had it with playing those kinds of gigs. Beatlemania represented everything he detested—the phoniness of the band’s image, their lack of progress as musicians, the degree to which he’d sold out. He felt “the music was dead” long before the Beatles ever hit the States, which meant that he felt dead for more time than was tolerable for anyone with his instincts. “I couldn’t take any more,” he said.
A series of accidents, incompetences, and circumstances, including a pair of back-to-back dates in Cincinnati and St. Louis, underscored the Beatles’ distaste for the road. Cincinnati was a disaster. It rained before showtime as the Beatles arrived at Crosley Field, but with a ballpark full of sodden fans determined to see their idols, the boys seemed inclined to appear. A canvas canopy hung over the stage. “They’d brought in the electricity,” George recalled, “but the stage was soaking and we would have been electrocuted.” “It was really scary,” recalls Nat Weiss. “The crowd kept screaming, ‘We want the Beatles!’ and Paul grew so upset at the prospect of going out there that he got sick. The strain was too great. And he threw up in the dressing room.” Eventually, Brian called off the show—“the only gig we ever missed,” George pointed out—but managed to reorganize the schedule so that they could play at noon the next day before flying out to do an evening show in Missouri.
Meanwhile, the weather followed them to St. Louis, where a gleaming new Busch Stadium wilted under a stinging drizzle. Only “a couple bits of corrugated iron” were propped above the bandstand positioned over second base, and the slipshod setup reminded Paul of “a mud hut in the middle of somewhere.” “There were sparks flying all over the place,” according to Ed Freeman, who handled sound for the tour. “I remember that every time Paul bumped into the mike, which was almost every beat, there were sparks.” Mal had rigged an outlet with a waterproof power cord and instructed Freeman “to pull it whenever the first person on stage collapsed from any electric shock.”
After the show, during a frantic and extremely narrow escape in the airless container of a chrome-paneled truck, all the damage and indignities finally caught up with the Beatles. “We were sliding around trying to hold onto something,” Paul recalled, “and at that moment everyone” decided they’d had enough of touring. There was no point in pretending anymore—performing had become too much of a liability. Even Paul admitted he’d had enough; the touring, to him, “had become spiritually rather empty.” The Beatles would make more than enough money from continued record sales, as well as other projects that came through the pipeline. Besides, attendance at the shows had been falling off steadily. Only two or three concerts on the American tour had been sellouts, and though no one ever mentioned as much, several promoters failed to make back their investment. It seemed useless to wait until the Beatles—live and in person—became a disposable commodity. It was easier to walk away before anyone took notice.
“We didn’t make a formal announcement that we were going to stop touring,” Ringo recalled. Nevertheless, the matter was settled between them. The August 29 concert in San Francisco would be their last. There would be no more Beatles shows, no more participation in the tumult of Beatlemania. From now on, they would exist solely in the studio as a band that made records.
It’s uncertain if any of them brought Brian in on the decision. Convinced that he’d try to talk them out of it, increasingly distrustful of his ripening psychosis, they most likely kept its finality among themselves, at least for the time being.
By Los Angeles, still reeling from the Philippines fiasco and subsequent Jesus uproar, Brian was a bundle of raw nerves. On August 27 Nat Weiss arrived in their pink-tinged bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and immediately sensed another personality shift, this time into rapture. “Good news,” Brian said, beaming with an unnatural intensity, “Diz is here, in L.A.” Protesting, Nat warned Brian away from the hustler, but any concern was waved off. “No, no,” Brian insisted. “He’s different—he’s so sweet. You’ll see.”
It didn’t take long for Weiss’s worst fears to materialize. Diz and Brian spent the day sunning themselves by the pool. At some point late that afternoon, Brian unloaded a bombshell. “I have an important announcement,” he said, fluttering his hands like a magician. “Tomorrow night is the Beatles’ last concert ever, and I want the two of you to be my guest.” All kinds of arrangements were discussed about flying everyone to San Francisco for the farewell show, then Diz excused himself for another engagement. “[Brian and I] went out to dinner,” Nat recalls, “and when we came back, our briefcases were gone.” Along with Diz.
There have been various accounts concerning the contents of those briefcases. Nat says: “I didn’t have anything in mine. Brian had about ten thousand dollars in cash along with papers and a bottle of Seconal.” By Peter Brown’s calculation, however, the missing cash amounted to $20,000 in addition to “half a dozen or so billets-doux containing explicit references to [Brian’s] conquests, along with Polaroid photographs of his young friends.”
Brian forbade Nat from reporting Diz to the police, arguing that it would lead to a scandal. For a modicum of cash—no more, really, than he might drop on a hand of baccarat—and whatever else was in those briefcases, he’d spare the Beatles any more unwarranted publicity. But while the Beatles flew north, Brian remained in L.A. and sank into “a suicidal depression” that scoured new depths of self-loathing.
The Beatles gave their farewell performance at Candlestick Park the next night, with Brian Epstein nowhere to be seen.
Candlestick Park was a notoriously windswept arena, with its outfield facing out onto San Francisco Bay, but that Monday night, on August 29, gusts whipped through the stands with an almost biblical vengeance. Banners strung around the stadium flapped ferociously against the squall and drafts picked up great clouds of dust and blew them volcanically across the infield. “It was not the sort of night you’d like to turn out for an outdoor concert,” notes Tony Barrow, and, indeed, the stands were only half filled, with 25,000 die-hard Beatles fans huddled against the squall.
Their anticipation, however, rivaled baseball crowds twice the size. Fans recalled “being jolted from head to toe” by the prospect that the Beatles would appear. Mimi Fariña, who sat behind the third-base dugout with her sister, Joan Baez, described the fan response as “sounding like clouds bursting.” There was an air of exhilarating suspense, she recalled. “Things were popping.”
The performance itself was nothing extraordinary. The Beatles sang elev
en songs—the same eleven “totally familiar studio recorded versions” they’d been singing for four years, with one or two exceptions—using precisely the same patter, the same tired jokes. (Thirty years later Tony Barrow listened to a tape of the NME concert at Wembley Stadium, one of the Beatles’ earliest concerts, followed by a recording of Candlestick Park, and was surprised to discover that “John and Paul say exactly the same thing between songs four years apart.”) It was one of their shortest shows, seconds shy of thirty minutes, and “perhaps the least inspired,” recalls Barrow. “The boys were very tired indeed and couldn’t wait to get that last show over.” John, who referred to it afterward as “a puppet show,” had nothing left in his tank. He didn’t hesitate for a moment when it came to leading the charge off the field and disappearing with the others into a waiting armored truck. A great release washed over him as the van kicked up dust speeding toward the right-field bullpen, toward the end of Beatlemania—toward liberation, at last.
George also sighed and settled into the momentous finale. “I was thinking, ‘This is going to be such a relief—not to have to go through this madness anymore,’ ” he recalled. There was an air of subtle, rarefied elation to it that he expressed as their plane took off for Los Angeles. Sinking into the seat next to Tony Barrow, George closed his eyes, smiled, and said: “Right—that’s it. I’m not a Beatle anymore.”
[III]
Not being a Beatle anymore brought the Beatles no instant peace. Instead of the kind of quiet interlude they had hoped for, the whole world took up their case, talking obsessively about the Beatles and pondering their future. Were they finished? “Is Beatlemania Dead?” Time wondered. Derek Taylor, writing in Melody Maker, could only speculate about their uncertain future. He’d visited with the Beatles during their recent stay in Los Angeles, where he’d found a similar position press-managing the Byrds, but even after a playful night spent passing joints back and forth, he’d come no closer to resolving their murky agenda. Still, their “impact… and mythology,” the Sunday Times said, was too potent to diminish the boys’ overall importance. “In a business where today’s smash-hit is tomorrow’s stinker, the Beatle sound will almost certainly survive as the echo of an era.” Certainly Revolver had defied all predictions and won vast popular acclaim. It sold millions of units while giving fans and musicians alike something extraordinary to shoot for.
In July, Dick Lester approached John about taking a minor role in his new movie, a satirical antiwar comedy called How I Won the War. John not only agreed but promised to cut his famous hair to a length befitting a proper English soldier. It was by no means the first time John had acted. From the moment he slung on a guitar, greased his hair back like Elvis, or decked himself out in black leather and high-heeled boots, John had been playing various parts that appealed to his sense of character. Even as one of the Beatles, he’d assumed an exaggerated role, playing to the crowd and mugging for the cameras. “It makes perfect sense,” Paul said of his collaborator’s sideline. “He’s really only ever wanted to be James Dean or Marlon Brando.”
But working as a supporting actor proved excruciatingly boring. In Germany and then southern Spain, where most of the action was filmed, John spent much of the time “hanging around,” waiting for his scenes to be called. “He loathed the endless waiting in the desert,” according to Ray Coleman, “… and learning lines, however short, drained his patience.” Several weeks lapsed as John bumped from location to location, struggling to occupy himself against stretches of insufferable downtime. At first, long strolls with Cynthia along the sun-drenched Gulf of Almería proved distracting, but the charm wore off soon enough. “It was pretty damn boring to me,” John recalled. “I didn’t find it at all very fulfilling.”
Between the rigors of acting and confronting the unknown, John withdrew deeper into himself, smoking fistfuls of Spanish dope and languishing on the beach, shielded from the stargazers by his war-torn acoustic guitar. Music would provide for him. It always had. Nothing offered the kind of comfort as the sanctuary of a song. “He used to sit cross-legged on the beach or on the bed, working out a melody,” recalled Michael Crawford, who costarred in the film and shared a beach house with John in Spain. It was there, Crawford said, “I heard him playing the same bar over and over again until he got the right sequence.” Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see…The tune had a dreamy, languid feel to it, “conjuring up a hazy impressionistic dream-world,” as George Martin later described it. Crawford, hearing the song at irregular intervals, was struck by its enigmatic beauty—the interplay of pot and nostalgic detail that John labored over in the lyric—and suggested leaving it alone. “Really, it’s good,” he told John. “I wouldn’t mess with it.”
“Strawberry Fields Forever” allowed John to wrestle with a confessional song as confused and dramatic as his emotions. “[It] was psychoanalysis set to music,” he reasoned later, after having spent years on the therapist’s couch. For years he had been sugarcoating his imagery, reluctant, except in a few notable cases, to reveal himself personally in a song. It was easy, with Paul as his sidekick, to keep the lyrics unspecific and upbeat. But with Rubber Soul and Revolver, John had turned a corner on his craft. He finally sensed the true scope of his potential—a gift he’d suspected all along—and realized that to make the leap to great songwriting, he would have to open up his heart.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” lifted everything onto the next level. For inspiration, John took himself back to Woolton, the scene of his favorite childhood escapades, where he spent blissful summer mornings in the company of Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan, and Pete Shotton playing in Calderstones Park. Strawberry Field wasn’t a patch of land but, as John pointed out, the name of “an old Victorian house converted for Salvation Army orphans,” near the entrance to the park. “It [provided] an escape for John,” Paul remembered, musing on his own memories of the place. “There was a wall you could bunk over and it had a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in.” Aunt Mimi told Albert Goldman: “There was something about the place that always fascinated John. He could see it from his window, and he loved going to the garden party they had each year. He used to hear the Salvation Army band, and he would pull me along, saying, ‘Hurry up, Mimi—we’re going to be late.’ ”
All these memories came flooding back as John amused himself in Spain, sifting through the scrapbook of his less-than-idyllic childhood. “I took the name”—Strawberry Fields*—“as an image,” John explained, and he used it as inspiration to express his seriously conflicted feelings about growing up and self-awareness. Instead of rhymes and wordplay, John poured strings of surreal images into the verses to bring his emotional world alive.
During September 1966 Paul was also abroad, in France. For a change of scenery, Paul, who loved to drive, decided to take the sightseer’s route from Paris through the Loire Valley, stopping off at the grand châteaux of Chambord and Chenonceaux that bordered the country roads, before heading west to Bordeaux. His intention had been to “travel incognito, disguised so that he would not be recognized,” or at least appearing as inconspicuous as any young man could while crisscrossing rural France in a sleek dark green Aston Martin DB5. It would be an ideal opportunity, he thought, “to ease the pressure… [a]nd retaste anonymity.” Slicking his hair back with Vaseline and gluing a stage-prop Vandyke to his chin, Paul managed to walk freely around the quaint ancient villages, browsing in the little shops and dining al fresco at neighborhood cafés, at home in a world from which the Beatles had been excluded. Freed from the glare of megacelebrity, he settled into a blissful routine. A few hours each day were spent essentially cloistered in a hotel room, writing furiously in a journal and “thinking all sorts of artistic thoughts.” In the late afternoons, with sun bathing the streets in soft, even light, Paul shot reel after reel of 8 mm film, experimenting with quirky, whimsical images: a cross leaning in a cemetery, horizons tilting at crazy angles, a Ferris wheel in full spin
, a gendarme directing traffic. Movies had such seductive energy; Paul found them a particularly exhilarating way of expressing himself. The whole experience brought him back down to earth: “I was a lonely little poet on the road with my car.”
But once up in the air again, Paul McCartney, lonely little poet, changed back into Superbeatle. He met Mal Evans in Bordeaux, then flew off to Kenya for a two-week safari. On the plane ride home from Nairobi, on November 19, Paul began formulating an idea for a new Beatles album. Less about music, it was more a premise: if he could disguise himself on vacation and travel about unnoticed, then why not all the Beatles? They hated being the Fab Four, a nickname that had become synonymous with the trappings of Beatlemania. “I thought, ‘Let’s not be ourselves. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know.’ ” They could “put some distance between the Beatles and the public,” take on the personae of another, fictional band.
Paul and Mal kicked around the idea during the in-flight meal. At first they played with names for a band, mimicking the variety of groups that were just coming into vogue: the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Lothar and the Hand People. Mal, distracted, picked up the little corrugated packets of paper marked “S” and “P,” asking Paul what the initials stood for. “Salt and Pepper,” he responded. “Sergeant Pepper.”
By the time the plane touched down at Heathrow, the entire concept was in place.