by Bob Spitz
He had company. Even before the latest round of headaches, Brian had felt threatened by the Beatles’ metamorphosis. He had vowed to maintain control over all aspects of their career. But this new direction saw them slipping further from his reach. At the beginning of the year—right after they’d settled into the studio—he had negotiated an extension of the Beatles’ contract with EMI. He thought his position would be strengthened by the generally favorable terms and increased royalty rates.* Even with a new deal in place, however, his insecurity mounted. Touring had sustained Brian. He loved the detailed work and traveling with the boys. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t bring up the subject of tours, as if to somehow keep the idea of it alive. “I know Brian was convinced they’d go out again,” recalls Tony Barrow. “He actually had dates penciled in—they’d start in Glasgow and do Brighton.” But Barrow knew better. John and George had been adamant; even the other two had no interest in playing to audiences. Ever.
Other circumstances indicated to Barrow that Brian had lost control over the Beatles’ press functions as well. It was becoming impossible to get any interview or photo session approved, even when it was impressed upon Brian that a prestigious publication had put in a request and was sending Lord So-and-so as its rep. There would be days, maybe weeks, of excuses, hedging, until Brian eventually lost patience and snapped: “Of course I’ve been to them. Don’t you realize? They’ve said no.”
When it came to the Beatles, the sad truth was that Brian’s role had been reduced to that of a figurehead. Distancing himself even further from the process, Brian moved out of NEMS and took a private, tucked-away office on Albemarle Street, out of which only he and Wendy Hanson operated. He also decided to sell a controlling interest in NEMS to a flashy operator named Robert Stigwood. Like Brian Epstein, Stigwood was among the small, pioneering band of gentleman British impresarios who, beginning in the mid-1960s, built empires by spreading the gospel of rock ’n roll. By 1965, he had already gained prominence as one of the first independent producers and gone broke in the process—twice, in fact, the second time, as Peter Brown points out, with “borrowed money from EMI, knowing he would never be able to pay it back.” Nat Weiss sized him up as “a real carnival promoter… a man who had two cents [to his name] but could run up a bill.” But Brian detected what other music insiders knew and respected, which is that Stigwood had qualities that, in the rock world, superseded fiscal responsibility: fabulous style and taste, not to mention an eagle eye for talent. “Robert seemed like the solution to our worries,” Peter Brown remembers. “Even though no one came out and said it, Brian was no longer paying attention and couldn’t adequately run the company as it was. Suddenly, here was this person who could not only run it effectively but improve on it in the process.”
To encourage a deal, Stigwood and his partner, financier David Shaw, whisked Brian off for what has been described as “a dirty weekend” in Paris, an expression that can only be taken to mean attractive young men and wanton sex. Stigwood had already prepared a proposal. “It was quite simple,” he recalled. “We’d be joint managing directors together, and he gave me an option… for six months. If I paid him half a million pounds [in that time], then the controlling shares… would be transferred to me and my company.” Half a million pounds seems a ridiculously small amount for a company that, just two years before, was valued at twenty times that. But that was then—when the novelty of Beatlemania was still thrilling, and before the drugs and depression tightened their grip. It wasn’t fun anymore. Without much ado, Brian made the deal that was presented to him in Paris, dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s that enabled Stigwood and Shaw to move into NEMS right away.
Only one small detail was overlooked: he neglected to tell the Beatles anything about the new arrangement.
Then again, Brian might have outlined the Stigwood deal on a billboard placed outside Abbey Road and the Beatles probably wouldn’t have noticed. They were up to their forelocks in recording, cranking out the remaining songs for what would become Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and oblivious to the outside world.
In a little over three weeks, they laid down the basic tracks for “Fixing a Hole,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” “Good Morning, Good Morning,” “Lovely Rita,” “Getting Better,” and “She’s Leaving Home,” all songs of which bits and pieces were written during various sessions. The recording staff had never experienced anything like it. Geoff Emerick, the chairman of the board, and Richard Lush, the tape operator, were kept dancing, trying to create the extraordinary effects that caromed around the Beatles’ heads. Hardly a note was left intact without dissecting and manipulating its abstract properties. Could a sound be distorted, looped, or played backward? How about speeding up the tape to play havoc with the vocals? (They accomplished just that on “When I’m Sixty-four,” satisfying Paul’s request to “sound younger… and be a teenager again.”) Or slowing it down? (On “Lucy in the Sky” the tape was delayed five cycles, which elevated the vocals, then cushioned with tape echo.) And what about orchestration? “She’s Leaving Home” gave itself over entirely to a string octet, a harp, and those gentle voices; there wasn’t a conventional rock instrument on deck. Nothing was sacred.
One of the most enterprising tracks was “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” The idea for it came the last week in January 1967 during a break in recording, while the Beatles were filming the promotional films for the “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” single. It was a clear, bitter cold day, and they were on their way to a restaurant, passing in front of an antiques shop in Sevenoaks, when a poster for an old-fashioned circus—Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal—caught John’s eye. Enchanted by circuses as a boy, dazzled by the animals and the costumes—even once flirting with quitting school and “joining up”—he disappeared inside the shop and scarfed up this trophy. It was advertised as “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite (late of Wells’s Circus)” and promised to be the “Grandest Night of the Season!” “It said the Hendersons would also be there,” John recalled. “There would be hoops and horses and someone going through a hogshead of real fire. Then there was Henry the Horse. The band would start at ten to six. All at Bishopsgate.” The next week Paul arrived at Weybridge for an afternoon’s work and saw the poster on John’s living-room wall. “Almost the whole song was written right off this poster,” he remembered. “We pretty much took it down word for word and then just made up some little bits and pieces to glue it together.”
Writing it, however, was a snap compared with bringing the song to life. John was explicit about the atmospherics: he wanted a “fairground sound,” something that toggled his memory of wandering through village fetes, where one could “smell the sawdust” and hear the crowd amid the background racket of the arcade. To George Martin, that conjured up the calliope, and he put out the call for a steam organ. It seemed like a reasonable order, but the cost of renting and programming one was enormous, he discovered, even when it came to his golden boys, the Beatles. Those within financial reason were automatic, not hand-cranked, which sounded fake. Existing recordings seemed like a good alternative, but those he could get his hands on proved useless. Hamstrung, they created their own backing track—“a pumping kind of sound,” Martin called it—with a harmonium, various organ overdubs, and a bass harmonica played by the ever-versatile Mal Evans. Over roughly a six-hour marathon, Paul played various keyboards, with Martin pumping the harmonium nonstop until he literally gave out, collapsing on the floor out of exhaustion.
Early session tapes reveal the fairground ambience beginning to take shape, with John contributing “oom-pahpahs” on yet another organ. Nevertheless, on playback it still lacked authenticity. Martin went back to the existing steam organ recordings—variations of John Philip Sousa marches—and transferred the lot of them to tape. “I selected two-minute segments of the taped music,” he recalled. Then he enlisted Emerick—“my co-conspirator,” as he referred to him—and issued bizarre instructions. “I
want you to cut that tape there up into sections that are roughly fifteen inches long…. Now, pick them all up and fling them into the air.” Geoff did what was asked of him, excited to hear what the randomness provided—“but, amazingly, they came back together in the same order.” So they cheated a bit, shuffling the samples, splicing pieces, even turning several upside-down to create a patchwork of one-second segments, and—voilà!—a fairgrounds sound materialized, almost uncannily so. More organ was added to lend a more circusy effect, and the backing track was complete. “John was thrilled to bits with it,” Martin recalled.
The album grew up and around them. A lot of the joyous mayhem is evident on “Lovely Rita,” which Paul had written during a nighttime walk while visiting his brother, Michael, on the Wirral. Its whimsical lyric invited an equally whimsical approach when it came to getting it on tape over a day or two in late February. In four takes, it was more or less intact. But John had one last trick up his sleeve: combs were distributed throughout Studio Two in lieu of instruments, after which Mal was dispatched to the loo for ample lengths of regulation-issue EMI toilet paper (each sheet was stamped PROPERTY OF EMI) to complete the kazoo orchestra. The honky-tonk piano solo, added as an afterthought by George Martin, lifted the exuberant spirit of the song from what John considered its otherwise “boring” subject.
During the recording, Martin’s fussy direction provided tremendous downtime during which the Beatles would either rehearse or muck about. Ordinarily John might have doodled in a sketchbook or huddled with Paul, but throughout the prolonged months of working on Sgt. Pepper, these languorous stretches were often serviced by drugs. All the Beatles smoked pot in vast quantities; they really enjoyed it. But John’s intake wasn’t so much recreational as it was therapeutic. In the studio, the Beatles’ regimen of drugs was fairly limited, although Paul has reported—quite surprisingly—that “the one hard drug used during the making of Sgt. Pepper was cocaine.” This amounted to a few lines before the sessions: “For Sgt. Pepper I used to have a bit of coke and then smoke some grass to balance it out.”
Had harder drugs further encroached, they might have seriously impeded the work, but even the buttoned-down Martin maintained that “looking back on it, Pepper would never have been formed in exactly that way if the boys hadn’t gotten into the drug scene.” The album wouldn’t have been “quite so flowery,” he believed, nor would it have been so intense without LSD. In fact, John told Jann Wenner, the Beatles never dropped acid in the studio. But John quickly corrected his memory, remembering an “accidental trip” toward the tail end of Sgt. Pepper’s. It happened on March 21, while they were overdubbing the lead and backing vocals on “Getting Better.” There was a lull between takes, during which John staunched the boredom with what he thought was a blast of amphetamine. “By mistake this night he had acid,” Paul recalled, “and he was on a trip.”
It hit John unexpectedly, which played on his paranoia. He felt disoriented, nauseous. Recording continued, but it failed to settle his nerves. “I suddenly got so scared on the mike,” he recalled. “I thought I was going cracked.” Unsteadily, he climbed the steep staircase to the control room and confronted his producer. “George, I’m not feeling too good,” he mumbled. “I’m not focusing on me.” One look told Martin that John was distressingly ill. His gaunt face was tightly cinched around the mouth. A hollow-eyed stare obliterated any concentration.
Martin may have exuded common sense, but he knew less than nothing about drugs. In his naïveté, he suggested John get some air—on the roof. Fifty feet above the concrete driveway, shivering in the biting air, the two men stood perched on the edge of the studio’s flat roof, staring at the stars. John hallucinated wildly. Breathlessly, he filled the night with talk of heavenly brilliance. The aimless gush of his comments surprised George Martin, who by now sensed that John was “wired”; he felt him “swaying gently against my arm… [and] resonating away like a human tuning fork.” Martin tried to comfort him but sensed the futility of it. Gradually, the paranoia passed. At some point George and Paul “came bursting on to the roof” when they found out where John was, but by that time he was safely out of danger—or at least nowhere near the ledge.
Everyone decided that it would be fruitless to go on. Nothing would be accomplished without John, and he was in no shape to continue. Reluctantly, Martin closed down their session for the night. John had no place to go. His driver wasn’t expected for several hours. Cynthia was fast asleep in Weybridge. Since Paul’s house was the closest—just around the corner, in fact—it seemed most sensible for the two men to go there to chill out.
Paul’s house held its own pitfalls. It demanded a degree of intimacy, which, for all their interaction, had disappeared from their relationship. No one said as much, but acid had driven a larger wedge between them. Paul felt it had intruded upon their careers as well as their extraordinary, productive friendship, whereas John no doubt relied on it to sharpen his self-expression. In some respect, LSD permeated every aspect of their lives, and it affected each of the partners in completely different ways. As they set off and bisected that now-famous zebra crossing outside the studio, John and Paul once again avoided saying anything that either of them might regret. Still, each no doubt felt the implication attached to Paul’s good deed. They may have been headed to the same destination, but it was clear to both men that they were on vastly different wavelengths.
Somewhere between Abbey Road and Cavendish Avenue, Paul reached a pivotal decision. “I thought, Maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with [John],” he recalled. Paul had avoided tripping with the other Beatles. He described himself as “a guy who wasn’t keen on getting that weird” because of “a disturbing element to it.” As a matter of fact, the prospect terrified him. He later attributed his abstinence to common sense; Paul had great reserves of self-control and an eye on posterity. Even with pot, which was consumed with relish, he felt the reins of responsibility. “I always knew I’d have to keep my shit very well together,” he explained. And acid put you squarely in the shit. But unlike the Preludin and pot quagmires the Beatles slogged through as a group, acid had alienated Paul from his mates. They couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t try it, or why, as they put it, he was “holding out.” What was the point? And why did he have to act so high-and-mighty about it? Wasn’t he comfortable letting go of it all in their presence? Didn’t he trust them? The peer pressure was unrelenting. John needled him endlessly about what a choirboy he’d become, while George, on another spiritual plane altogether, expressed his contempt wordlessly by distancing himself from Paul. From the outset, Paul felt the hostility.
It had become such an issue that late in 1966, against his better judgment, Paul succumbed to the pressure and dropped some acid in the company of Tara Browne. If he was unwilling to take the drug before, his reaction to it leaned more to ambivalence. Overall, he found it quite “spacy,” a “very, very deeply emotional experience,” ranging in sensations from godliness to depression. Most likely, Paul was too uptight to give it a fair ride.
Whatever the outcome, he’d been in no rush to continue the journey. But now, with John’s companionship—just the two of them, alone—it made the prospect more appealing. Deep down, Paul loved John in the way someone loved an elder brother. He knew all of John’s faults—many of which frustrated Paul’s ambition—but he still looked up to his partner, even courted his attention. John was a loose cannon, but he was the genuine article. His rough edges and fuck-all personality only underscored Paul’s pretensions, sparking a contrast that would haunt Paul for the rest of his life. Maybe sharing the experience would help bring them closer.
Into the night, stretching almost until dawn, the two most important songwriters of their generation hallucinated like madmen, staring inscrutably into each other’s eyes—“the eye contact thing we used to do,” Paul called it—and communing with the unknown. He imagined they “dissolve[d] into each other” and envisioned John as “a king, the absolute Emperor of E
ternity.” No doubt they’d both drilled deeply into their subconsciouses; a good deal of transference took place. Otherwise, there was a lot of laughter and reminiscing about the past. Nothing was mentioned about their dense tangle of differences. Except for a brief walk in the garden, they hardly budged for about five hours. Still, it was a powerful, emotionally tumultuous five hours, especially for Paul. “It was a very freaky experience,” he said, “and I was totally blown away.”
[III]
By the third week in April, the Beatles had reached the end of their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band odyssey. They had logged slightly more than five months in the studio, a staggering, unheard-of amount of time, completely without precedent in the annals of pop recording.* The interminable sessions especially worried their fans, who feared the Beatles’ long silence augured some untoward fate.
On the evening of April 21, the band showed up at Abbey Road for what was ostensibly a final salute to the sessions. They gathered in the control room above Studio Two, where George Martin and his engineers were busily remixing the final two songs. Aside from sequencing, there was nothing more for them to do, but the Beatles had insisted on one last laugh.
It had been predetermined that “A Day in the Life” would close the album. There was a finality to the song, effectively bringing the curtain down, that made perfect sense in its placement. But what to do about that climactic piano chord? It just hung there like a last pregnant gasp and, then… scratch, scratch, scratch… the tone arm slid rudely into the record’s run-out groove. How annoying! the Beatles grumbled. Wasn’t there something they could do to reduce the offensive noise? It remains a mystery who actually proposed filling the groove with gibberish, but the decision to do it was fervent and unanimous. Their reasoning behind it was basically this: if people were too stoned to get up and turn off the record, even if the needle swayed in the groove for a few stagnant hours, the nonsense talk would take on the form of a mantra. Perfect! As Geoff Emerick recalled: “They ran down to the studio floor and we recorded them twice—on each track of a two-track tape. They made funny noises, said random things; just nonsense.” Only a snippet was chosen—someone saying, “Couldn’t really be any other”—which was looped, repeated ad infinitum, and overlapped until it was meaningless. There was nothing artistic about it, it wasn’t even earthshaking—except that when listeners who looked for hidden messages in Beatles recordings played it backward, a voice clearly intoned: “We’ll fuck you like Superman, we’ll fuck you like Superman….”