The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Richard Goldstein, known for his scorched-earth criticism, refused to be swayed by the overwhelming groundswell that followed the album right around the globe. Writing in the New York Times, he considered Sgt. Pepper’s a soft and messy piece of work, a self-conscious record, contrived, and was willing to say what no other critic dared: “Unfortunately, there is no apparent thematic development in the placing of cuts, except for the effective juxtaposition of opposing musical styles. At best, the songs are only vaguely related.” (A few months later John concurred, saying: “When you get down to it, it was nothing more than an album called Sgt. Pepper’s with the tracks stuck together.”) The Beatles’ usual innovative clarity had shifted sharply out of focus, he argued, owing to their “obsession with production…. There is nothing beautiful on Sgt. Pepper,” he concluded. “Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about.”

  For all the ink spilled over the album, branding it a cultural and artistic watershed—Time gushed that it represented “a historic departure in the progress of music—any music”—one thing was certain: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a runaway bestseller, topping the pace of all previous Beatles albums with a staggering 2,500,000 copies sold in the first three months of its release. For most fans the music had finally become accessible; less yeah-yeah-yeah, more sophistication and cross-rhythms. You could hear it played on practically any station in the world, at practically any time of the day. Deejays considered it the “second renaissance of rock ’n roll,” and the Beatles its chief architects. Their old friend Murray the K, who played Sgt. Pepper’s ad nauseam, until management ordered him to back off, marveled at the way some songs made him realize “they had the pulse of the country,” while others demonstrated that “the Beatles were completely in tune with life.”

  That tune had a somewhat familiar ring to it: a whole new type of Beatlemania had broken out, not powered by screams and swoons as before, but rather a kind of reverence in which every note they played or breath they took was analyzed and dissected for greater meaning. Coincidentally or not, overzealous fans—“the nutters,” as Paul referred to them—unscrambled the letters in the title of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to spell LSD; they concluded that “Fixing a Hole” was a veiled reference to heroin and that Harry the Horse (a character in “Mr. Kite”) was a pusher. Pundits extrapolated arcane significance in practically every word—every effect—of “A Day in the Life.” Essayists and critics devoted columns—lectures—to the band’s cultural significance. Hard-core journalists referred to the Beatles as “missionaries.” Others called them “messengers from beyond rock ’n roll,” “progenitors of a Pop avant-garde,” avatars. Timothy Leary called them “evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new human species.”

  Paul politely disagreed. “The Beatles weren’t the leaders of the generation,” he said later, with some distance, “but the spokesmen.”

  Certainly Paul fancied himself in this role. “Even when the others weren’t speaking to the press, you could always depend on Paul,” says Tony Barrow. “He couldn’t resist the opportunity to represent the band in the spotlight. He loved the role; it fed his considerable ego.”

  He’d pontificate at the drop of a hat, firing off slickly polished sound bites with the cadence of a talk-show personality. “Paul needs an audience,” George Martin once observed to great understatement. While Paul considered John “the cock who crowed the loudest,” referring, one presumes, to his partner’s combative snipes and outbursts, he was more a natural raconteur, a great embellisher; charm oozed from Paul McCartney when in the presence of an attentive ear. On June 19 Paul opened his door to a pair of ITN News reporters, who detoured from what seemed like a standard interview about music into an inquisition about his drug-taking. They were sitting, chatting casually in his garden, when the primary newscaster popped the question. “Paul, how often have you taken LSD?”

  There was a hesitation that seemed to last an eternity but ate up no more than a few seconds of airtime, during which Paul thought, “Well, I’m either going to bluff this, or I’m going to tell him the truth.” So he answered honestly: “About four times.” He added that LSD had changed his life—“After I took it, it opened my eyes,” he boasted—and made him “a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.”

  The minute it was out of his mouth, Paul must have realized his mistake, because he immediately began to backpedal. “I would like to make it perfectly clear that I do not advocate LSD,” he hedged. “I don’t want kids running to take it when they hear that I have.” An admission of this nature from a personality of his stature might have an adverse effect on young fans, to say nothing of their parents. In Paul’s cockeyed logic, that meant the reporters had a responsibility not to show the footage. “It’s you who’ve got the responsibility!” Paul insisted. “You’ve got the responsibility not to spread this now. You know, I’m quite prepared to keep it as a very private thing if you will, too. If you shut up about it, I will.”

  But it was too late. The comments, which were broadcast the next day, unleashed a shitstorm of protest, from government bigwigs to the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham, who seemed less peeved about the dangers of drug-taking than Paul’s claim that LSD could give rise to “a religious experience.” The tabloids feasted, condemning the Beatles in a united, if shrill and self-righteous, voice. For days, weeks, stories appeared in which politicos expressed their outrage that one of the Beatles had dabbled in drugs. They were shocked—shocked!—to learn about the scandalous behavior of no less than an M.B.E. “The press had a field day,” George recalled.

  Paul’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Only a few weeks earlier Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been busted in Sussex for possession of hash, pot, and amphetamines; Paul’s art dealer, Robert Fraser, who was arrested along with them, was caught palming twenty-four jacks of heroin. On the same day that Sgt. Pepper’s was released, John “Hoppy” Hopkins, the founder of International Times and a social mate of Paul’s, was sentenced to nine months in jail for possession of pot. And Brian Jones was nabbed in a drug sweep while his bandmates faced arraignment.

  “No one knew why Paul didn’t keep his mouth shut,” says Alistair Taylor, voicing an opinion shared by the other three Beatles. They were especially annoyed that he’d focused attention on something they’d been so scrupulously careful to keep private. Acid, which might have been commonplace around Britain’s wealthy pop underground, hadn’t yet attracted widespread attention among the masses, not even among die-hard rock enthusiasts. “We weren’t actually telling anybody about LSD, bar the people who knew us,” Ringo recalled, “and [then] Paul decided to come out and tell people.” George also considered it a breach of group etiquette, explaining: “I thought Paul should have been quiet about it—I wish he hadn’t said anything, because it made everything messy.”

  Messy—and annoying, considering that for a year and a half John, George, and Ringo had been unable to persuade Paul to join them in dropping acid, “and then,” as George fumed, “one day he’s on the television talking all about it.” It was all over the media: Paul McCartney, the Beatles’ acid authority! For John, it was another instance of Paul’s stealing his thunder.

  In his haste to head off another imbroglio, Brian stood up to the press, choosing to defend Paul’s rash comments by adding his own voice to the fanfare, admitting that he, too, had taken LSD and saw nothing wrong with it. A few days later he even repeated the remarks in an interview with Melody Maker, foolishly minimizing the risks of taking acid, adding: “I think LSD helped me to know myself better, and I think it helped me to become less bad tempered.” This was clearly not what the press and Beatles fans had bargained for.

  Then, just as quickly as the uproar started, it stopped dead in its tracks, thanks to an event that spun the drug business into the shadows and restored the Beatles’ reputations as beloved minstrel spirits. Several months earlier the BBC1 television channel had approached Brian
about helping out with a project the network had planned for June 25 to test its new Early Bird communication satellites. Via a live broadcast, they intended, for the first time, to link thirty-one television networks around the globe. An estimated 300 million people could conceivably watch the same show. Called Our World, it was designed to allow each of the participating countries a five-minute segment in which to feature material or an act that represented its culture. And, of course, what could be more British than the Beatles?

  It’s not as hard to figure out why Brian volunteered the Beatles as it is why they agreed to cooperate. They’d just finished five months of intensive work on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and were earnestly preoccupied with its promotion. What’s more, they were expected to contribute a song for the broadcast. It stood to reason that, because of complicated special effects, they could not perform anything from the new album. And an ancient yeah-yeah-yeah song was out of the question; they’d moved well beyond that image as a band. That meant writing something new for the program, which seemed like a crushing task.

  Surprisingly, they didn’t balk. Paul had been working on a song anyway—“Hello Goodbye”—that he put up for consideration. At the same time, John brought in “All You Need Is Love,” which, according to George Martin, “seemed to fit with the overall concept of the program.” The show’s producers had issued only one instruction: “keep it simple so that viewers across the globe will understand.” Tony Barrow recalled how John sat at the piano and previewed the song slowly, playing it in an almost dirgelike fashion for his mates, after which George leaned toward Paul and muttered: “Well, it’s certainly repetitive.” The Beatles demo’ed John’s song at Olympic Sound and thus made a unanimous decision.

  As the broadcast drew near, however, they realized that performing it live, without a safety net, was far too risky. Since the Beatles’ first few hurried recording sessions at the beginning of their career, they’d become used to taking their sweet time in the studio, overdubbing and correcting mistakes, stretching vocals, massaging guitar licks, tweaking everything with electronics. Nothing was left to chance anymore. The Beatles hadn’t performed as a band in almost a year. There was no telling how they’d sound au naturel. “We must do some preparation for this,” George Martin told them. “We can’t just go in front of 350 million people without some work.”

  A backing track would provide an insurance policy. But, unexpectedly, it was rejected by the show’s organizers. The idea of the live satellite broadcast, they reminded Martin, was to demonstrate how spontaneous performances were transmitted around the globe. A backing track violated the spirit of the event. But Martin knew what he couldn’t dare say: that the Beatles worked casually, by trial and error, often bumping about until he provided firm direction. They weren’t prima donnas, but they were in the neighborhood, and thanks to drugs, there was unpredictability to consider. Martin strongly defended using a prerecorded track and urged NEMS to “make it a strict condition upon which the group’s appearance would depend,” which a designated liaison eventually did. Ordinarily this kind of tactic might have produced a standoff at the BBC, but as time had grown short and the Beatles were already featured prominently in ads for the show, the producers had no choice but to accept.

  The recording, as one might expect, grew progressively more complex, with layers of atmospheric and experimental sounds ladled over an otherwise languid rhythm track, the mongrel construction made impossibly more convoluted by stitching a few bars of “La Marseillaise” onto the opening. A harpsichord drifted in and out between plinks on a banjo, pulls on a string bass, bows across a violin (played by George Harrison, of all people), and other oddball effects. Just to make sure no stone was left unturned, a thirteen-piece orchestra filed in one night to weave samples of one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, “Greensleeves,” and “In the Mood” into the fade. So much for spontaneity. Five days and fifty-eight takes later, a “basic” track was approved.

  What had once promised viewers a glimpse of the Beatles during a standard recording session had evolved into a production of epic proportions. Once they’d committed themselves to appearing, once they’d gotten involved, it became necessary to stage a spectacular event befitting their spectacular mystique. Heaven forbid the public perceive the Beatles’ recording session as merely routine! That wouldn’t do. So, on the eve of the broadcast, Tony Bramwell was dispatched to the London club circuit with instructions to hunt down famous friends willing to “drop in” on the session. At the Scotch of St. James, Bramwell drafted Eric Clapton; Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull at the Bag o’ Nails; Keith Moon and Graham Nash at the Speakeasy; Gary Leeds, one of the Walker Brothers, at the Cromwellian. “Everyone I asked jumped at the chance,” he recalls. “In fact, most called it a night early, in order to put together a wardrobe.”

  “By 7pm [on June 25], the studio appeared to be in chaos,” Tony Barrow reported. Studio One, the big hangarlike facility at Abbey Road, was crammed with “flower-waving crowds of Beautiful People,” who were oblivious to the battalion of sound technicians and camera operators struggling to put the final touches on the historic transmission. One can only imagine the difficulty they had in adjusting the contrast for the cameras: to complement the carnival atmosphere, the guests were dressed to the nines in flamboyant, brightly colored costumes that clashed with the inflated latex globes and vivid balloons floating above the fixtures. Giant displays of exotic flowers radiated against the garish backdrop. The Beatles themselves gave off a fuzzy flush in their Technicolor garb: Paul, looking debonair in a double-breasted white sport coat draped over a shirt he had hand-colored the night before; George, decked out in an orange paisley jacket whose design and texture resembled an Aubusson carpet; Ringo, swathed cosmically in a silk, suede, and fake-fur outfit designed by the Fool that looked left over from the Crusades. “It was so bloody heavy,” he recalled. “I had all this beading on, and it weighed a ton.” Only John, doleful and glassy-eyed, turned up in a smart-looking banker’s dark pin-striped suit that seemed as outrageous for its elegance as for its posting on John Lennon.

  In all the turmoil, between miscues and mischief, the Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” to the world without a hint of disorganization. They sat perched on barstools placed directly in front of the guests, appearing as cool as only the Beatles could look under such hothouse circumstances. John, Paul, and George seemed impervious to the do-or-die situation, synching their voices beautifully, perfectly, to the backing track. The prerecorded music no longer mattered—if it ever did. Remembered chiefly for its stripped-down, monotonous chorus, the song’s verses were nevertheless quite a mouthful for John, who spit them out on camera as though they were child’s play. “There’snothin-youcandothatcan’tbedone…” It sounded effortless, done in one Hail Mary take, much the way he’d fired off “Twist and Shout” four and a half years earlier: rock-steady and right on. For all the technical effects John had come to rely on for vocal support, none were needed to show off his extraordinary range that night. It was all right there, in the pocket, just where it had always been.

  John relaxed visibly as the song cruised into its extended fade. “La Marseillaise” drew a ceremonial reprise, giving way to “In the Mood” and “Greensleeves,” as planned. But John, who had tinkered in rehearsal with a fragment of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” suddenly chimed in with a few bars of an old standby that no one—probably not even John—had anticipated. At a juncture in the action, he sang out: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah…,” in an inspired bit of self-parody: perfect!

  It touched off a festive reaction in the studio. Balloons and confetti rained down from the ceiling, as five men draped in sandwich boards proclaiming “All You Need Is Love” in four languages paraded across the floor in front of the grinning Beatles. Mike McCartney launched a series of cue cards, instructing viewers to “Smile” and “Laf Now.” Another, scrawled hastily by his cousin Anne Danher, brandished the mysterious communiqué: �
�Come back, Milly! All is forgiven!”—a message to Paul’s aunt, on vacation in Australia, who, it was feared, might not return to Liverpool.

  With the kind of exposure the song had received, the Beatles were left with little choice other than to release “All You Need Is Love” as a single. Most of the work had already been done. A few overdubs were added to polish the track; Ringo contributed an introductory drum roll, and John, never satisfied with the way he sounded, insisted on patching his splendid vocal. Otherwise, it was ready to be remixed and mastered the next day, and it was shipped a week later as the Beatles’ fifteenth single.

  Curiously, no single was ever released from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles had already given that album everything they had and decided that, once again, it was time for them to move on.