The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  The “Lady Madonna” sessions included “Hey Bulldog,” another pared-down rocker, as well as the music for “Across the Universe” and George’s Indian-style spiritual, “The Inner Light.” It was becoming increasingly clear that if the Beatles were to find their focus again, they had to play together, as opposed to piece together takes; they had to let ’er rip. For a while Paul endeavored to provide the necessary spark, but after eight days of cheerleading, the Beatles ran out of steam. “I think… we were all a bit exhausted, spiritually,” he recalled. “We’d been the Beatles, which was marvelous… but I think generally there was a feeling of: ‘Yeah, well, it’s great to be famous, it’s great to be rich—but what’s it all for?’ ” The music was the glue that had held it all together, but the music, like their individual lives, was moving in every direction at once. “So we were inquiring into all sorts of various things… and after we thought about it all, we went out to Rishikesh.”

  The plan was to spend three months, from February 15 through April 25, 1968, in Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh, India, to study Transcendental Meditation and self-realization at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram. The three wives—Cynthia, Pattie, and Maureen—would accompany the boys, as would Jane Asher, but as early as February, John schemed to have Yoko included in the entourage. “I was gonna take her,” he said later in an interview with Rolling Stone. It seemed like a good idea at the time to have her around, a convenient way to get to know her better. Ultimately, however, he “lost [his] nerve, because I was going to take [Cynthia] and Yoko, and I didn’t know how to work it.”

  The Maharishi’s ashram was a new concept in the Hindu spiritual world. Throughout the region of Uttar Pradesh, wizened holy men, called sadhus, sought enlightenment from the Bhagavad Gita in a setting of utter, natural simplicity, strolling barefoot beside the sacred Ganges or meditating in half-lit solitary caves. There were no organized activities other than total commitment to their spiritual pursuit. But the Maharishi’s retreat was unique: part temple, part commercial venture. Set within a fenced-in compound on a hillside overlooking the Ganges, the ashram resembled a Himalayan Club Med, with a central courtyard surrounded by six concrete lean-tos, called puri (Paul optimistically referred to them as “chalets”; Cynthia, “barracks”), where disciples redefined their place in the universe from a warren of tiny, unheated cells. There was a glass-walled dining area and a terraced lecture hall interconnected by gravel paths, a swimming pool, a heliport, even plans for an airfield, all at the nominal rate of $400 for the three-month stay.

  It was the answer to the Beatles’ prayers. “We were really getting away from everything,” John recalled—the craziness, the drugs, the fame, the inexorable grind. On February 16, after weeks of shuffling an unusually concentrated workload, he and George, along with their wives and Pattie’s sister Jenny, left the material world, crossed five time zones, and headed toward the plains in the dense valley between the Himalaya and Delhi. The overland journey from the airport—by taxi, Jeep, and donkey—covered 150 miles and took more than four hours. On a particularly forbidding stretch of road, the weary Beatles party looked out both sides of their car and saw only soft, treacherous cliffs, with no guardrail—and no conceivable access. It took them several minutes to realize that they’d have to continue on foot. “There [was] quite a heavy flow of water coming out of the Himalayas,” George remembered, “and we had to cross the river by a big swing suspension bridge” outfitted with a hand-lettered sign warning NO CAMELS OR ELEPHANTS. The Beatles had visited India before—stopping to shop on their way back from the Philippines—but they’d never experienced it from this side of the tracks. A colony of lepers begged on the banks of the Ganges, as dusky-faced monks waded, naked, into the murky current. Sacred cows lazed on the riverbed, monkeys leaped from tree to tree. As one wide-eyed Westerner wrote: “It was a collision of magnificence and wretchedness.”

  Paul and Ringo followed three days later, along with Neil Aspinall, arriving at the Academy of Transcendental Meditation, where they joined their friends and sixty other students waiting to channel their full potential.

  For the next ten days everyone wandered the six-acre retreat, spending long hours absorbed in quiet, thoughtful meditation and listening to the Maharishi’s twice-daily instructional lectures, fine-tuning the spiritual fork. A powerful camaraderie developed among the reverent group. After a communal breakfast, they saw one another only occasionally during the day. Meditation, at the Maharishi’s suggestion, should last for twelve-hour stretches, with short breaks, but once the Beatles got settled, the formula was markedly reversed, with twenty-minute segments of meditation aimed at breaking up the interplay. Instead, time was made for talking, reading, and lazing in the sun. The actress Mia Farrow, who had matriculated some weeks earlier, at the beginning of the term, recalled experiencing an initial regret at the boys’ noisy presence, feeling that it disrupted the commune’s focus. “Nevertheless,” she later wrote in her 1997 memoir, “with their cheerful chatter and guitars and singing, the new arrivals brought an element of ‘normalcy’ to the ashram—a sort of contemporary reality, which at first seemed jarringly out of place.”

  That is not to say that the Beatles did not take TM seriously. George, of course, had been an instant convert, devoting long, intensely pensive hours to the contemplative process even before leaving England, but John, more than anyone, threw himself wholeheartedly into the practice. “I was meditating about eight hours a day,” he recalled in a 1974 interview. Cynthia, who admitted being surprised by his discipline, said, “To John, nothing else mattered. He spent literally days in deep meditation.” As for the ashram itself, she thought “John and George were [finally] in their element. They threw themselves totally into the Maharishi’s teachings, were happy, relaxed and above all had found a peace of mind that had been denied them for so long.” Even Ringo, whose tolerance for introspection was considerably lower than his mates’, formed an impression that was more agreeable than expected. “It was pretty exciting,” he recalled years later. “We were in a very spiritual place.”

  Only Paul viewed this new enthusiasm with characteristic rationality. “It was quite nice,” he thought at the time, like “sitting in front of a nice coal fire that’s just sort of glowing.” Other times he would say, “It was almost magical.” There were instances when Paul allowed the magic to take control of him, like during a midafternoon meditation when he felt “like a feather over a warm hot-air pipe” during which he was “suspended” in midair. But more and more, he had “trouble keeping [his] mind clear,” he said, “because the minute you clear it, a thought comes in and says, ‘What are we gonna do about our next record?’ ”

  Paul couldn’t let it rest, not even in India, not even during afternoon sunbathing with the others on the banks of the Ganges. There was always a guitar within reach, always a few sheets of paper nearby on which to scribble the outline of a lyric or a few nascent lines. Paul wrote like mad in Rishikesh—but truth be told, so did John. (“Regardless of what I was supposed to be doing, I did write some of my best songs while I was there,” he recalled.) They threw themselves into their music and began meeting clandestinely in the afternoons in each other’s rooms—occasionally with Donovan, who showed up unexpectedly, in pursuit of Pattie’s sister—playing acoustic guitars and “having an illegal cigarette.” In all, they completed nearly forty compositions; John wrote “Julia,” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Jealous Guy” (originally entitled “I’m Just a Child of Nature”), “Across the Universe,” “Cry Baby Cry,” “Polythene Pam,” “Yer Blues,” and “I’m So Tired,” while Paul tackled “Rocky Raccoon,” “Wild Honey Pie,” “I Will,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” the latter an homage to his boyhood idol Chuck Berry.

  Often in the evenings the Maharishi led his young followers on excursions to Dehra Dun, the nearest village. There, in a series of dilapidated tents where local tailors sat cross-legged on mats operating anci
ent sewing machines, the Beatles had outfits made—the loose-fitting, gauzy shirts and wide pajama bottoms, along with saris, that were traditional Indian garb—or shopped for souvenirs. They explored the open-air markets and came to rely on two or three local cafés, including Nagoli’s, a restaurant that served perspiring beakers of “forbidden” wine. On one occasion, when a traveling cinema arrived in the village square, everyone trooped down from the meditation center along a dusty jungle path, swinging lanterns in the fading twilight. For some reason Paul had brought his guitar, and as they descended through the steep overgrowth, he serenaded the party with bits of a new song he’d been working on. “Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace…,” he sang gaily over the thrash of footsteps. The piece focused on a Yoruba phrase that he’d picked up from Jimmy Scott, a conga player and familiar figure on the London club scene. “Every time we met,” Paul recalled, “he’d say ‘Ob la di ob la da, life goes on, bra,’ ” and the expression stuck in his head.

  In India, songs came to the Beatles in the most mundane of ways. “Bungalow Bill” was written after two meditators, a middle-aged American woman and her teenage son, broke camp to go on safari—“to go shoot a few poor tigers,” as John facetiously put it—then returned to their puri, adjacent to the Maharishi’s, in order to commune with God. “Across the Universe” borrowed the expression of greeting that TM disciples exchanged when they encountered one another on one of the paths: Jai Guru Dev, or “long live Guru Dev,” in tribute to the Maharishi’s personal swami.

  For most of the prolonged stay, Prudence Farrow, Mia’s emotionally fragile younger sister, remained locked in her tiny room, meditating as if her life depended on it. She failed to appear for meals or even the nightly question-and-answer sessions with the Maharishi. “Prudence meditated and hibernated,” Ringo recalled. “We saw her twice in the two weeks I was there. Everyone would be banging on the door: ‘Are you still alive?’ ”

  Eventually, her meditation grew deeper and more extreme. “She went completely mental,” John recalled. “If she’d been in the West, they would have put her away.” Being as it was the East, however, they sent in the Beatles. George and John had been selected as Prudence’s “team buddies,” a designation comparable to court jesters, appointed to rescue her from a near-catatonic state. “One night when I was meditating, George and John came into my room with their guitars, singing ‘Ob la di ob la da,’ ” she told her sister, Mia, although it seems unlikely they’d play one of Paul’s songs. “Another time John, Paul, and George came in singing ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ the whole song!”

  How Prudence responded to the gesture is not recorded, except that the boys “got her out of the house.” And for John, the experience provided inspiration: using a finger-picking technique he learned from Donovan, the structure for “Dear Prudence” was in place before the night was out.

  By now, between them, Paul and John had written enough good songs for two or three albums. “I came up with calling the next album Umbrella,” Paul recalled, “an umbrella over the whole thing.” An umbrella! That was all George had to hear. “We’re not fucking here to do the next album,” he snarled at Paul, “we’re here to meditate!” But for Paul, the new repertoire emerging was already part of a masterful aural palette, the songs beginning to overlap and interweave. No doubt the body of an album was taking shape in his mind. He was satisfied with his own substantial output and thought several of John’s—notably “Across the Universe” and “Bungalow Bill”—were among his partner’s “great songs.”

  For Ringo, the urge to see his two children became overpowering, and after two weeks he and Maureen decided they’d had enough of the academy. Besides, Maureen had a phobia of the fist-size insects that taxied through their room, and Ringo, still tormented by childhood gastrointestinal problems, couldn’t handle the spicy curries used to season the food. What was an intense emotional experience to most of the Maharishi’s students was, from Ringo’s outlook, “very much like a holiday.” But like any good holiday, the time had come to bid it farewell.

  Ringo’s decision posed something of a public relations nightmare for the Maharishi. Since devoting themselves to his teachings, the Beatles had emerged as his unofficial ambassadors to the world; how would it look to the media, assembled outside the academy’s gates, when Ringo walked out early, with his suitcases? Almost immediately after announcing his departure, Ringo came under intense pressure to reconsider. Perceptive to a fault, the Maharishi must have also sensed he was losing his grip on Paul McCartney and Jane Asher. In Peter Brown’s estimation, “Paul and Jane were much too sophisticated for [the Maharishi’s] mystical gibberish.” Paul was obviously never as committed to TM in the way that John and George were, never one to expect “some huge spiritual lift-off.”

  After a month in Rishikesh, Paul was eyeing an exit strategy that had been in place before he’d left London, but he was concerned that George and John “might never come back.”

  “John took meditation very seriously,” Cynthia recalled. His approach to it brought with it a remarkable transformation; he seemed happier, certainly healthier, now that drugs and hard liquor were out of the picture. But Cynthia was beginning to suspect the Maharishi’s sweeping power over John: suspicion that there was some sort of mind control involved to wrest her husband away from his career. “He seemed very isolated and would spend days on end with the Maharishi, emerging bleary-eyed and not wanting to communicate with me or anyone…. He went so deeply within himself through meditation that he separated himself from everything.”

  It didn’t occur to Cynthia at the time that John was struggling to separate himself from her. He’d moved into a separate bedroom, hardly exchanging a word with her, even in private moments. Knowing that John despised confrontations with her, Cynthia chose to ignore the bad vibes. “Something had gone very wrong between John and me,” Cynthia concluded. “It was as if a brick wall had gone up between us.”

  It wasn’t brick, but paper: a flurry of postcards sent by Yoko Ono were arriving in India almost every day. John rose early and stole away to collect them at the postal drop near the dining hall—another glaring sign because, as Cynthia well knew, John hardly ever got up early. But the postcards were like catnip; he couldn’t resist getting the next one to see what kind of cosmic mischief Yoko had cooked up. “I’m a cloud,” she scrawled on one, “watch for me in the sky.” Others echoed her loopy instructional poems from Grapefruit. “I got so excited about her letters,” John recalled, “… and from India, I’d started thinking of her as a woman, not just an intellectual woman.” Yoko Ono, not the Maharishi, had taken control of John’s mind.

  Paul and Jane decamped on March 24, 1968, a month and a half ahead of schedule. John and George, convinced that enlightenment still lay within reach, pressed ahead in the next stages of their spiritual development on the path to perfection. Although deeply impressed with the strength and insight of the Maharishi’s wisdom, John continued to struggle with his own demons. He had certainly tried—tried hard—but the thicket in his skull was too thick to clear. Feeling miserable, John longed for a playmate (George had grown annoyingly introspective), someone to help him blow off a little steam. There are various accounts of the way Magic Alex Mardas appeared in India. Some say John “missed his company” and sent for him. Others maintain Alex came on his own “because he didn’t approve of the Beatles’ meditating, and he wanted John back.” No matter how he materialized or the real reason that he went, all agree that everything unraveled soon after Alex arrived.

  Alex didn’t share his benefactor’s passion for the idyllic ashram. He was “appalled” by the accommodations and quickly pegged the Maharishi as a controlling, holy hoax. It didn’t suit Alex’s scheme that someone could have more influence over John than he did, and from the outset he looked for a way to regain the upper hand. Somehow, during the course of long walks through the woods, John revealed to Alex that the Beatles intended to tithe a huge chunk of their income to the g
uru’s Swiss bank account. Shortly afterward Alex told the others that the Maharishi was, among other transgressions, supposedly having sex with one of his disciples, a young American nurse. The veracity of his claim has never been proved. In her memoir Mia Farrow intimates that the Maharishi might have come on to her, but then acknowledges she may have been disoriented and misinterpreted the “advance”: it may have been nothing more than the traditional embrace given by a holy man after meditation. The Maharishi, she said, had never shown anything but consideration and respect toward his guests. Paul, upon hearing the charges, also said: “I think it was completely untrue.” But George and John were crushed by the accusation. They’d put great faith in the Maharishi, given themselves over completely to his ministry. Faced with these circumstances, they were shaken—and angry. George was indignant. The Maharishi had become his spiritual mentor; thanks in no small part to his holiness, George had managed “to plug into the divine energy and raise [his] state of consciousness,” evolving in ways even he’d never imagined were possible. Now this threw everything into a spin. George and John went back and forth all night, arguing heatedly: was it true, or not? Throughout their soul-searching, Alex continued to pour it on, tossing in excoriating details to inflame their doubt. There was really no way the beleaguered guru could defend himself in this situation. The more Alex talked, the more guilty—and despicable—the Maharishi seemed. Eventually George’s faith buckled ever so slightly. “When George started thinking it might be true,” John said, “I thought, ‘Well, it must be true, because if George is doubting him, there must be something in it.’ ”