by Bob Spitz
By May of 1967, says Nat Weiss, “Brian wanted to get rid of Stigwood. He’d already begun proceedings; he had Lord Goodman”—Arnold Goodman, his personal solicitor—“working… to undo all of that.” None of this, of course, had the slightest impact on the Beatles. They still had no idea that Brian was even involved with partners, and had they known, they would have certainly disapproved. As it was, they were concentrating on their own album launch, keeping a close check on the progress of the troublesome Sgt. Pepper’s cover.
For the most part, permissions came smoothly and with expressions of great honor. There were, however, a few snags. Shirley Temple, now an ambassador to the United Nations, wanted to approve the cover first and, barring any objections, receive an autographed copy for her children. In a now-famous response, Mae West expressed her disturbance over an obvious contradiction. “What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?” she wondered. But the Beatles put together a flattering letter to her themselves, which charmed West into granting a release. Leo Gorcey, of the Bowery Boys, wrote back and said he’d be happy to appear on the cover—for a $500 fee. Unwilling to set a precedent, the Beatles refused, “so we had to airbrush him out,” Blake recalled. Otherwise, everyone agreed, and the Fates, it seemed, sided with the Beatles: not a single lawsuit would arise from the cover.
For Brian, a crueler fate was yet to come.
Chapter 32 The Summer of Love
[I]
In early April 1967 Paul had slipped in and out of the States to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of Jane Asher, who was touring there in the Bristol Old Vic’s production of Romeo and Juliet. It had been a whirlwind visit. The few days he spent in San Francisco—showing up at the Fillmore, getting stoned with the Jefferson Airplane, wandering unrecognized into head shops and boutiques—had been among the most carefree in recent months. To Paul, the lure of the Haight’s hedonistic hippie scene, entwined with the North Beach beat movement and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, underscored the connection between acid and creativity. The whimsy, self-expression, and romanticism struck him as “golden… far-out.” Then, in Denver, while shooting some amateur movie footage in a local park, “the idea tumbled together.”
Kesey, in 1964, had sploshed spectral ribbons of paint across a beat-up old school bus, loaded it up with like-minded characters, and set out on a now-legendary trip across America, dispensing LSD to the masses. They had filmed the whole riotous, mind-blowing odyssey—later immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—intending to make a documentary movie. Hearing about it again in San Francisco had triggered a childhood memory of Paul’s. During the late 1950s, northern councils sponsored “mystery tours” on which kids boarded a chaperoned bus whose ultimate destination was kept secret. “Everyone would spend time guessing where they were going, and this was part of the thrill,” he remembered. Couldn’t this be updated with a hip, groovy edge? What would happen if the Beatles cobbled the two ideas together? How cool would it be to comb the English countryside in their own private coach, stopping spontaneously in villages and towns to film inspired, nutty sequences? They could write little scenarios, provide an original soundtrack, control the project themselves. It was loaded with possibilities. Before long, he’d imagined it as a surreal sort of mystery tour—no, a magical mystery tour, to echo the spirit of the times.
Paul crystallized the idea on the flight back to London. Borrowing paper from a flight attendant, he began framing the project—sketching out dramatic segments and scenes, including the rough draft of a title song. By the time he returned to the studio, on April 20, it was all he could talk about.
Clearly his discussions with the Beatles had an edge of déjà vu. Not even a year earlier, he had worked hard to persuade them to undertake the identity of Sgt. Pepper’s band. Now Paul was worked up about another gimmick, and it was all they could do to stay focused. It especially rankled John, who was already exasperated by his partner’s slick enthusiasms. “I still felt every now and then that Brian would come in and say, ‘It’s time to record,’ or ‘Time to do this,’ ” John recalled. “And [now] Paul started doing that: ‘Now we’re going to make a movie. Now we’re going to make a record.’ ”
A feeling crept over John that Paul was somehow trying to dominate the Beatles, which, after all, had been his group. Paul had all but taken over the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions. He contributed so many suggestions for the arrangements, and so fast, so fluently, it was all John could do to keep up with him. It angered him that Paul had come up with the mystery tour concept; he grew peevish, jealous. Why hadn’t he thought of it first? And yet, admittedly, John “enjoyed the fish and chip quality of [it],” the idea that they’d go out “with a load of freaks” and make a low-budget, tongue-in-cheek film. And even if he hated the idea, he may have been distracted—or too fucked-up—to resist.
It would also help solve the dilemma of what to do with their next film project. It was no secret that after Help!, the Beatles had been unable to find a script that captured their fancy. All the ideas submitted were either variations on the Lovable Mop Tops formula, which they despised, or sappy Hollywood retreads. “We didn’t see any way of making a similar film of four jolly lads nipping around singing catchy little tunes,” said George. “It had to be something that had more meaning.”
A magical mystery tour, Paul argued, seemed like the perfect alternative. Because it would be mostly improvised and spontaneous, the Beatles wouldn’t have to learn lines. Nor would they truck off to out-of-the-way locations at ungodly early hours, or endure endless waiting on the set. “Nobody quite knows where they’re going. We can take ’em anywhere we want, man!” Paul declared. What’s more, they could plan and even direct it themselves.
Paul was convincing enough for the Beatles to finish and record a song or two for the project, right on the heels of their Sgt. Pepper’s session. Only four days after they tacked the gibberish and dog whistle onto the end of their forthcoming album, the Beatles headed back into the studio to lay down the basic rhythm track for “Magical Mystery Tour.”
According to a music journalist, “McCartney arrived at the studio with only three chords and the opening line of the lyric:” “Roll up! Roll up!—for the Magical Mystery Tour.” John and Paul had hit on what was, for them, the perfect bit of wordplay: a phrase that fired up listeners with the keen, romantic cry of circus troupes and carnival barkers rolling their riggings into town—and, a phrase that, to any fan with the slightest streak of hipness, served as a veiled invitation to roll up a joint. It was chock-full of feeble “references to drugs and to trips,” Paul recalled. The song was clearly intended as an overture to the mystery tour motif, just as “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” had kicked off an imaginary vaudeville show. But as a gimmick it was stale and sounded forced. Even the fanfare of trumpets felt tired—“the worst kind of musical cliché,” writes Tim Riley.
The Beatles worked on polishing “Magical Mystery Tour” over four days at Abbey Road, looping the track with extraneous traffic noise and sound effects from the studio’s audio library. When even that failed to lift it off the ground, they added background shouts and layered on echo. What had once provided punch, however, now sounded deliberate, if not heavy-handed. It took every ounce of their imagination to finally finish the song. When the Beatles returned to the studio on May 9, essentially to decide what to do next, it was clear they had run out of steam. The session deteriorated into a disorganized, loopy, seven-hour jam—perhaps due to boredom, perhaps to drugs—nevertheless, a condition that served to stall work on the project for several months.
Obviously, this frustrated Paul, who thrived on the energy crackling in the atmosphere. Even when the Beatles had no commitments, he seldom rested. At the slightest spark, he would flame into action. “We can do this. Then we can do that. And maybe if this falls into place, we can take it there and do…” If the rest of them wanted to get stoned and sleep in front of the telly, that was their problem. Fuck the dopeheads! Paul was bu
rsting at the seams with creative energy, and nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stand in his path.
Somehow he kept things moving long enough to launch yet another session in advance of his mystery tour and several other rapid-fire projects, including a full-length feature cartoon based on the song “Yellow Submarine” and a new single set for summer release. Part of the other Beatles’ cooperation may have rested on their curiosity about the studio. For only the second time in their record career, they decided to work outside of Abbey Road, detouring for a night to Olympic Sound, in nearby Barnes. The Stones worked there, as did dozens of the edgy, emerging British bands, where it was said that the studio manager, Keith Grant, ran things at a slam-bang pace. Fast was attractive to the Beatles, who were easily bored to begin with; add to that their exacting, exhaustive work on Sgt. Pepper’s, and a quickie sounded like a splendid proposition.
The Olympic song, itself, was a paste-up job. Based on a news item he’d seen about hippies—the Bay Area’s self-proclaimed “beautiful people”—John had been playing around with a lyric called “One of the Beautiful People” that scanned as too convoluted and long-winded on its own. It wasn’t going where he wanted it to—that is, until Paul tacked on the lick “baby, you’re a rich man” that had floated to the fore in his notebook. Suddenly, as with so many of their collaborations, the Lennon-McCartney team pulled a song out of the scrap heap—or, as John later dismissed it, “a combination of two separate pieces… put together and forced into one song”—the whole being spectacularly more than the sum of its parts. With “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” they had come up with a number whose imagery, if nothing else, captured the blatant hypocrisy of the burgeoning hippie scene.
Working at Olympic was a welcome liberation from the frustrations the Beatles faced during the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions. There was none of the ponderous, scientific, deliberate approach to sound recording that had paced their recent sessions. No eggheads padded through the control room in identical, starched lab coats, paging through engineering manuals and dog-eared rule books. No one had to be consulted before a piece of equipment or technique could be employed. Geoff Emerick, their trusty board man, had the touch—but he was an EMI drone, part of the system, whereas Keith Grant ran his own show from the board. At Olympic, his session felt like rock ’n roll.
After laying down the first few takes, several of the Stones showed up to root on the Beatles and lend a hand. Brian Jones tinkered with a spacy oboe effect, Mick Jagger sang a few lines of backup. The whole thing had the feel of an after-hours party. By the time the shindig reached its peak in the postmidnight hours, even John fed off the buzz and grew giddy, expressing his delight by tweaking bits of the lyric. There were numerous aborted takes owing to his frisky, even scandalous, improvisations. He took some wicked shots at Paul, Ringo, and Mick, according to one observer; otherwise, “everyone else was spared.”
Not quite everyone. An oblivious victim wasn’t mentioned by name, but no interpretation was necessary when John, grinning like a jackal, was unable “to resist singing, on some of the later choruses, ‘Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew.’ ”
Rueful of his decision to sell a controlling interest in NEMS, Brian still hadn’t told the boys that Robert Stigwood had taken over the day-to-day operations. “He knew he had to confront it,” says Peter Brown, “but he couldn’t find the right time—or right way.” No matter how he presented it, it would seem weak, perhaps even underhanded. Still, by not telling them, Brian was playing a dangerous game; sooner or later the Beatles would find out, at which point there was sure to be a dramatic confrontation. Moreover, they might feel betrayed by the apparent deception. Of course, Brian hoped to invalidate the Stigwood deal before the option came due, making the Beatles’ knowledge of it irrelevant. Still, should the strategy backfire, it could damage his relationship with the boys. And he knew it. Paul was already on Brian’s back about their intricate financial arrangements, wanting to know, well, everything. “He was a real pain in the ass,” Brown says. “He always thought he knew best. He was always second-guessing Brian’s decisions.”
Had he done more than second-guess, Paul might have stumbled into the darkest tunnel, which was the Beatles’ personal management contract with NEMS. It was up in October 1967, just a few short months off. After five years at the reins of the greatest show on earth, Brian watched as the date loomed near, and he was terrified—“positively sick”—of being sacked as the Beatles’ manager. Brian had certainly taken them to the toppermost of the poppermost, but now that they were there, how much more could he do for them? No dates needed to be booked. No record deals needed negotiating. What, if anything, did they expect from a manager?
As with everything, it came down to money. The Beatles were satisfied, for the most part, by the increases in their new EMI contract, although resentment festered over the remaining careless deals, especially the lopsided music publishing arrangement with Dick James, which was siphoning off hundreds of thousands of pounds, maybe millions, from their coffers. Paul felt strongly that he and John deserved more than a 20 percent share of their copyrights. Why had Brian allowed them to sign away the lion’s share of their rights? With so much leverage, why wasn’t he able to muscle James into a more equitable arrangement? Paul wasn’t the only one asking such questions—George wanted answers, too—but he was the most persistent.
Paul had heard vague rumors about an American accountant named Allen Klein, who had restructured the Rolling Stones’ Decca Records contract and won them a $1.25 million signing bonus. “What about us?” he demanded of Brian during a confrontation in a crowded elevator. What about us? It was the kind of question Brian dreaded most.
While the paranoia may have been irrational, his fear of Klein wasn’t. Brian had taken an immediate disliking to the American the moment he laid eyes on him. They had met in 1964, when Klein was managing Sam Cooke, and it was clear that this was a beast of a different nature. Brian may have liked hustlers, but he didn’t like hustlers, which Klein clearly was, a “fast-talking, dirty-mouthed man in his early-thirties, sloppily dressed and grossly overweight,” as Peter Brown described him in a 1983 memoir. He’d approached Brian on the premise of an opening spot for Cooke on the Beatles’ American tour, but once Klein got his foot in the door he cleverly turned the talk to the business of renegotiating the Beatles’ EMI contract. Brian, of course, was neither interested nor amused. This cheek—together with Klein’s “poaching” of Donovan and the Rolling Stones—earned Brian’s bitter enmity. It became Brian’s strategy to keep a good distance from such a potentially dangerous adversary, so much so that when Klein bumped into Brian and Nat Weiss at a Cyrkle gig in Palisades Park, Brian refused to shake hands.
No one in the inner circle felt even remotely that the Beatles would cut Brian loose. “At worst, they might have renegotiated his commission, reducing it from twenty-five percent to perhaps fifteen,” says Nat Weiss, a believer with particular insight, “and I told Brian this whenever he wrestled with the subject.” Nat says that deep down, even Brian believed they would ultimately keep him on—“It’s a matter of chemistry,” he’d admit—but that, too, would eventually give way to his destructive impulses.
Most days, he couldn’t drag himself out of bed before five o’clock in the evening, and often then it was only to stumble downstairs, “fucked-up and all hazy,” in pajamas for tea and toast. His personal secretary, Joanne Newfield, “felt that more and more he was having trouble coping.” Once, when a phone number he demanded wouldn’t go through as a result of Joanne’s mistake, “he just went wild,” she recalled, hurling a china teapot across the room and striking her. Another time, Joanne misdialed the Grosvenor House and barely dodged the airborne phone. Peter Brown also suffered countless humiliations at Brian’s hands. Following a vacation to Acapulco and Mexico City in late February, the two men settled in Brian’s usual thirty-fifth floor river-view suite at the Waldorf Towers in New York, where they planned to catch the last performance of Jane Ash
er’s American tour. “One night Peter had been sent out on an errand,” recalls Nat Weiss, “and when he came back it was clear he had overspent for something.” Brian was presented with a receipt and some change, but it seemed only to aggravate the situation. Suddenly he flung the change in Peter’s face and screamed, “You’re sacked! Go back to London—and go economy class!” Then it got extremely physical. Weiss recalls: “It was really very violent.” (Brown did go back to London, but he remained on the NEMS payroll, ever determined to foster Brian’s welfare.)
In an effort to reverse, or at least slow, his boss’s decline, Brown conspired with their friend John Pritchard, the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, to get Brian out of London on weekends, where the go-go lifestyle seemed to be consuming him. Paging through the listings in Country Life, they spotted one place in particular, “a rather grand farmhouse” in the next village from Pritchard’s, a few miles from Rushlake Green. Brown knew instantly that Brian would love it. Known as Kingsley Hill, it was a handsome, ivy-and-wisteria-covered structure, a few hundred years old, with a small garden and a pond on the property. At £30,000, it was quite reasonable, and Brown had predicted correctly—after one viewing, Brian bought it on the spot. But it did little good.
His drug abuse worse, he became “more irrational, more incoherent.” Concluded Robert Stigwood: “You can’t count on Brian anymore. He’s not in his right mind. The best thing we can do is just ignore him completely.”
“Stigwood had Brian written off as though he was dead,” says Nat Weiss. Even by Robert’s standards, however, it was a little premature.
[II]
May 19, 1967, was launch day: Brian from his quarters at the Priory, where he once again had retreated in yet another failed attempt to reach some equilibrium, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the London press.* No one had come within a mile of the Beatles since the beginning of the year—the Daily Mail complained they had “isolated themselves not only personally, but also musically”—so it was time to put some of the speculation to rest. To commemorate the occasion, a small but “grandiose” party was held at the Chapel Street town house, whose living room had been hastily rearranged to accommodate the handpicked guests. The invitation list was highly selective—a dozen top-tier journalists, a dozen photographers, half as many influential deejays, scattered among a few NEMS insiders and, of course, the Beatles.