by Bob Spitz
Recalls Dunbar, “When he came in, it was like the parting of the Red Sea. Everyone who was there, some of the staff and a few friends, just stepped aside and gave him space.” Apparently convinced that John was a potential collector with deep pockets, Dunbar was “flittering around like crazy,” and John went stiff from the star treatment. Protectively, he buried himself in the exhibition’s attractive catalogue. “… mirror to see your behind… sky T.V…. eternal time clock… bag wear… Painting to hammer a nail… Painting to let the light go through… Crying machine…” “Is this stuff for real?” he wanted to know. The descriptions sounded like a put-on. “Danger box: machine that you will never come back the same from (we cannot guarantee your safety in its use)… Underwear to make you high, for women, description upon request…” “I wasn’t quite sure what it was about. I knew there was some sort of con game going on somewhere.” Then one of the exhibits caught his eye and he moved in for a closer look. On a shelf, he stared at several nails atop a Plexiglas stand and, next to that, an apple—it looked real, as far as he could tell, and quite ordinary—with a little table card that said: APPLE. “This is a joke, this is pretty funny,” he thought. “I was beginning to see the humor of it.” When he asked Dunbar for the price of the apple, he was told: £200. Oh-ho! Definitely a joke. The dry, almost inadvertent sense of humor appealed to John, who was encouraged to see the rest of the show in the downstairs gallery.
There, John’s mood brightened. All sorts of contraptions, connected by gangplanks, beams, and ladders, were spread across the brightly lit basement, where a few “scruffy people” were putting the finishing touches on the installation. As he stood there, taking it all in, Dunbar excused himself to confer with the staff. When he returned, a slip of a young Asian woman was by his side, prim, in a black leotard and pale as porridge. In her tension of small bones, she resembled a serious small-faced animal. “Hey, man,” Dunbar said, “allow me to introduce Yoko Ono.”
Yoko Ono: was that a put-on, too? She had amazing presence, John thought; he could feel it surge through the room. There was something about her, something strange and exceptional, that was overpowering. John glanced around shyly, buying time to recover his composure. “Well, what’s the event?” he wondered, obviously flustered.
Instead of answering, this little sphinxlike woman merely handed him a card, which John turned over in his hands a few times. There was nothing on it except a single word: BREATHE. “You mean, like this?” John asked, panting like a winded terrier. That was it, yes, that’s what she’d intended. Yes… breathe. John liked that; it was part of the joke.
Increasingly, Yoko relaxed as John responded—perfectly—to her approach. Too many people dismissed her work as outrageous, beyond weird; they got angry instead of locating the humor in it. But this guy—Yoko claimed, hard as it seems to believe, that she neither knew John’s name nor recognized him—seemed to get what she was about, or at least he was willing to play along, which was just as favorable.
Leading him to a ladder, she suggested that he climb to the top to view a ceiling painting. “It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it,” he recalled. What did she expect him to make of that? “You take a magnifying glass and you look at it,” Yoko explained, motioning him toward the rungs. John wasn’t so sure he wanted to play anymore. He dreaded climbing the ladder and confronting some cynical witticism, some goof. Still, Yoko coaxed him upward, and with mounting trepidation, he held the magnifying glass up to the canvas and squinted. A smile spread instantly across John’s face. Painted on the canvas was a single word: YES.
As soon as he’d climbed down, John asked to see more. There was a piece of plasterboard, a wall, that was painted eggshell white. A small sign invited visitors to hammer a nail into its surface. Trouble was, the show’s opening was still a night off and Yoko understandably wanted it to remain unspoiled. “I argued strongly in favor of Lennon’s hammering in the first nail,” Dunbar remembers. “He had a lot of loot—chances are, he would buy the damn thing.” Yoko’s eyes flashed anger. Why let this guy ruin her pristine exhibit? She pulled Dunbar aside and they huddled for several minutes, going at it like cats and dogs. In all likelihood, Dunbar identified John and enticed her with a potential sale, because she eventually relented and said, “Okay, you can hammer a nail in for five shillings.” That was all John needed to hear. Grinning, he responded, “I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings if you let me hammer in an imaginary nail.” Beautiful: pure Lennon. And Yoko loved it. “My God,” she thought, “he’s playing the same game I’m playing.”
During the weeks after meeting Yoko, John spent more time than ever locked behind the door of his music room on the top floor of Kenwood. His drug-taking and depression dragged on ceaselessly, without regard for days or nights. Time passed in a vague blur, during which he leafed through magazines or one of the handsome volumes of impressionist art that were stacked next to the couch, rarely picking up a guitar other than to move it out of the way. Occasionally Terry Doran turned up and managed to coax John to the Scotch or the Bag o’ Nails, but their outings routinely ended back at the house, to refuel. “John was a fun drug-taker—serious fun,” Doran recalls. “We’d come home late from a nightclub… and go up to his attic and dose ourselves silly.”
With no new songs in the hopper and nothing to inspire him, John rarely involved himself with music. Surprisingly, the Beatles seemed content to forfeit the robust Christmas sales platform that had, for several years running, been their exclusive province. The spotlight that season fell instead on Cream, the “first high-voltage superblues group,” who had emerged from a crowded pack of newcomers to dazzle audiences with their formidable accompaniment. Along with Jimi Hendrix, who was competing for that share of the rock, their virtuoso lineup—Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker—expanded and transformed the dynamics of rock, with inventive, heavily syncopated riffs and ferocious jams. (NEMS was booking Cream and Hendrix with what seemed like a vengeance across the U.K.) Everywhere around them were other alluring acts pushing boldly into the Beatles’ firmament: the Easybeats, the Spencer Davis Group, Brian Auger and the Trinity, the Move, Donovan, the Four Tops—the Monkees. If the proliferation of bands didn’t ruffle the Beatles, then surely popular response did. “Show business will vibrate with the sensational news that the Beatles have been outvoted by the Beach Boys as the World’s Outstanding Vocal Group,” NME announced in its annual poll results. (“We’re all four fans of the Beach Boys,” Ringo confessed, “… maybe we voted for them.”) More irritating, perhaps, was the report that John had ceded his Best British Vocal Personality crown to Cliff Richard.
Normally, the Beatles would have ignored such nonsense, but with the fitful shape of their career and contract renewal in play, they grew sensitive to the pessimism imparted by the mercurial media. They still felt compelled to deny rumors that jealousy had driven a wedge between them (“This idea of jealousy is in other people’s brain,” Ringo insisted. “We all work for each other’s success.”), that they were splitting up (pure “rubbish,” according to Paul), or that, despite earlier reports, they were planning to tour again in the spring. They also expressed “outrage” about a front-page “exclusive” in the Sunday Telegraph that they were dismissing Brian Epstein and that “two of the Beatles had approached an American”—Allen Klein, who represented the Rolling Stones—“concerning their future management.” From every perspective, it seemed as though the Beatles were in free fall.
“I think we were itching to get going,” Paul recalled of the days leading up to the session. The Beatles always thrived in the studio. But unlike their previous sessions, Paul hadn’t written anything with John to prepare for it. There had been no time, little if any communication between them. As far as anyone knew, they were coming in cold.
Of course, John had “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the drawing board. On the evening of November 24—a blustery Thursday—the Beatles, all of whom now sported ident
ical handlebar mustaches, regrouped in Studio Two, the enormous, slightly down-at-the-heels room that had functioned so often as their creative laboratory. John, who appeared spidery and gaunt, wasted no time previewing his song for Martin on an acoustic guitar. This version of it, sung so haltingly and in a voice barely above a hush, was dramatic indeed in the stillness of the studio, and so was John’s determination to convey what he felt, to honor the starry images of his Woolton childhood. Martin listened—sitting erect, arms folded across his chest, legs crossed—as impassively as possible, but his ears burned with excitement. “It was absolutely lovely,” he raved, convinced that the song was a masterpiece. “I was spellbound. I was in love.” There was a poignancy, an intimacy that he hadn’t expected to hear. “He had broken through into different territory, to a place I did not recognize from his past songs…. It was dreamlike without being fey, weird without being pretentious.” The gently eloquent delivery, accented in acid-tinged shades of surreal, fragmented imagery, produced a stunning accomplishment. Martin cursed himself for not running a tape.
It was exactly the springboard the Beatles needed. “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which took over forty-five hours to record, spanning nearly a month, sparked an explosively productive period during which Paul and John collaborated on nine of the twelve songs that eventually made the cut. Not every song, of course, warranted their equal contribution. As had been the case since before Help!, writing had become more of an individual process—Ringo estimated the apportionment at “about 80% separately written songs”—with the respective partner brought in at the last minute to provide a middle eight or a polish. But they continued, as always, to influence each other.
Coincidentally or not, Paul also seized on Woolton as inspiration for his next song. John’s fond reference to Strawberry Field must have touched off a flashback that mixed nostalgia and personal mythology in a dreamlike style. George Martin credited the “coincidence” more to the wages of “creative rivalry,” but whatever the moving spirit—Paul would only say that John and he “were often answering each other’s songs”—it didn’t take him long to single out Penny Lane, the terminal where Paul changed buses on his route from Allerton to visit any of his more centrally located Liverpool friends. “John and I would often meet at Penny Lane” on their way to center city or a gig, he recalled. And while the bus shelter “in the middle of the roundabout” at Smithdown Place wasn’t the most scenic spot, its euphonious name struck the perfect note. Penny Lane: Paul incorporated all the associations he had with it—Bioletti’s barber shop, with its photo spread of haircuts in the window; the British Legionnaire who sold poppies for a shilling; the fire station; St. Barnabus Church, where, for a short time, he was a choirboy. The song took form in a brief two-hour burst. Most of it came in his new upstairs music room, at a small upright piano “painted in an exploding psychedelic rainbow” pattern and positioned just beneath the picture window so that it overlooked the front yard onto Cavendish Avenue. The first two verses, which “practically wrote themselves,” set a true-to-life scene, with the whole drama of the neighborhood unfolding, as it might at the beginning of a 1940s movie or “more like a play,” as Paul has said. An entire cast of characters leap into action “beneath the blue suburban skies,” much as they do in “Eleanor Rigby.” From the beginning, however, Paul’s intent was to look at Penny Lane in a special way. “The lyrics were all based on real things,” he recalled, but distorted, “a little more surreal… twisting it to a slightly more artsy angle” to incorporate “all the trippy little ideas that we were trying to get into.”
Paul’s experiments with the recording of it, however, showcase little of the hallucinatory effects that range throughout “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The style of “Penny Lane” is beautifully structured, saturated in rhythmic cadences, rambling like a no. 16 bus to the tram sheds. Paul narrates the action with bluff familiarity, becoming someone who has committed a childhood scene to memory and yearns to share it with a visitor as a way, perhaps, of making it come alive again.
The result was all the Beatles could have wished. To Brian’s insistence that they release a single early in 1967 came back assurances that they had a killer in the can—three songs that George Martin considered “a small collection of gems”: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” and the durable “When I’m Sixty-four,” a “rooty-tooty variety style” song, according to Paul, that he had written when he was sixteen and that the Beatles performed at the Cavern during punch-ups and power failures. “I decided to give [Brian] a super-strong combination,” Martin said, “a double-punch that could not fail, an unbeatable linking of two all-time great songs: ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane.’ ”
But fail it did. Not, as a matter of fact, in a commercial sense; the single, which was released on February 17, 1967, sold upward of 2.5 million copies. But it broke what Martin called “the roll”—the Beatles’ unprecedented achievement of twelve straight number one singles—failing to hit the top spot on the British charts. The outcome was so unexpected, so astounding, that the immediate cause was eclipsed by the end result. In fact, the Beatles’ single outsold its competitor—“Release Me,” by Englebert Humperdinck—by almost two to one. But in the curious mathematics of the pop charts, sales figures of the double-sided hit were being counted separately, as two singles, so that one side canceled out the other, giving Humperdinck firm grasp of the top spot.
The Beatles, to their credit, seemed amused by the curious turn of events, and only George went on to say that it was “a bit of a shock being Number Two.” Neither Paul nor John gave it much thought. The concept of A- and B-sides, and even singles, was, in Ringo’s words, “an old trap” they’d do best to avoid. This time around, the Beatles’ sensitive ears had heard rock ’n roll in a different way. “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” reveled in the possibilities of complexity and sophistication. The band’s progress on this single, their experimentation with overdubs and exotic instruments, was unlike anything ever produced, and it affected different listeners in as many different ways. It was clear from initial reviews that there was no middle ground. The sinuous melodies and rhythmic devices puzzled NME’s Derek Johnson. “Quite honestly,” he admitted, “I don’t know what to make of it.” On the other side of the world, however, there was nothing but enthusiasm for the record. The critics at Time cast their usual reservations to the wind, lavishing extravagant praise on the single, which they considered nothing short of an artistic breakthrough. From the earliest singles right through to the present, they wrote, “the Beatles have developed into the single most creative force in pop music. Wherever they go, the pack follows. And where they have gone in recent months, not even their most ardent supporters would ever have dreamed of. They have bridged the heretofore impassable gap between rock and classical, mixing elements of Bach, Oriental and electronic music with vintage twang to achieve the most compellingly original sounds ever heard in pop music.”
No matter how “artistic” or “complex” the songs, when played they became instantly hummable melodies. Every so often—unavoidably—a recognizable riff or backbeat would cut through the atmospheric production to remind people that beneath this new psychedelic guise and ultrahip pretension, the Beatles remained rock ’n rollers at heart. But being a rock ’n roller no longer meant what it had. “The people who have bought our records in the past must realize that we couldn’t go on making the same type forever,” John explained. “We must change, and I believe those people know this.”
If they didn’t, they were about to find out.
Chapter 31 A Very Freaky Experience
[I]
Though die-hard Beatles fans anticipated something exceptional from their heroes, no one, not even other musicians, was prepared for the sound of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The music sounded unlike anything the Beatles had ever done before. Even the structure of the album was unconventional: it was conceptual, a kaleidoscope of interconnectin
g songs without the standard three-second break between tracks.
What to make of it? Especially considering the tumultuous state of popular music at the time. As EMI and Capitol prepared to release the latest Beatles opus, competing forces vied for the ears of the disenchanted—and divided—young audience. Top 40 pop, like its consumer base, had been rocked by tremors of social and cultural upheaval. A good portion of its listeners—specifically, those teenagers affected by the outburst of creative energy that embraced poetry, drugs, anti-establishment politics, and a general alternative lifestyle—no longer related to the bloodless, derivative pop music that was passed off as rock ’n roll. It didn’t speak to their groovy new way of life; it no longer resonated. Radio stations continued to play the slickly polished toe-tappers and ballads that dominated the charts, but a darker, more sensual strain of music—turned-on music, for want of a better term (“cheerful music for dope smokers,” as one critic called it), and very early acid rock—began to creep onto playlists. It was music for “serious” rock fans, and it raised the level of artistry that fans expected from the records they bought.