It was not long, however, before Beatlemania became the omnipresent, all-consuming force in their lives. They lived it every day, and so it started to seem almost normal, at which point they went back to experiencing the world within the same baseline levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction they had always been accustomed to. It’s a well-known phenomenon.
Additionally, the Beatles were now burdened with such tremendous pressure. Everyone wanted or expected something from them—an interview, an autograph, a photo, a chance to be seen with them or to bend their ear. Music industry bigwigs were always clamoring for a new record, a new film, another tour—and their schedule hardly ever let up. From about June 1962 until August 1966, they only had one extended vacation. “Everybody saw the effect of the Beatles, but nobody really ever worried about us as individuals, or thought, ‘I wonder how the boys are coping with it all?’ ” George Harrison later lamented. “It was a very one-sided love affair. The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give.”
The touring hassles the Beatles faced are well known. Their most agonizing stretch came in the summer of 1966. In July, while in Manila, the Beatles politely declined an invitation to a ritzy reception that the president’s wife, Imelda Marcos, had arranged to be held in their honor at the presidential palace. Had they better understood the political culture there, they would not have made such a foolish mistake. Marcos took revenge first by withdrawing security protection for the group, and then by having her gun-toting security goons intimidate and rough up the Beatles. Officials confiscated the Beatles’ earnings from their two concerts there (attended by 80,000), and when the group finally got out of Manila, they felt as if they were fleeing for the lives.
Later that month, Lennon’s infamous remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” provoked the wrath of religious zealots in the American South. When the quotation first appeared in a London newspaper in March 1966, Englanders scarcely seemed to notice. But when it was reprinted in the American teen magazine Datebook, it led to a frenzy of recriminations. Radio stations sponsored the mass burning of Beatles records, the Ku Klux Klan organized anti-Beatles protests, and death threats poured in to the Beatles’ London headquarters. The group was nearly forced to cancel its tour at the tune of $1 million. At a show in Memphis, someone chucked a lit firecracker onto the stage, which the Beatles momentarily mistook for a gunshot. Others threw debris and rotten fruit that splattered on the stage at their feet.
Another cause of worry, less often mentioned, was the threat that bad weather posed when they were scheduled to perform outdoors. After the Memphis disaster, the Beatles were meant to play in Cincinnati, but a heavy downpour earlier in the day had made it risky; the stage was still so soaking wet that the Beatles could have been electrocuted. Yet they feared that if they did not play, a riot might break out. They ended up postponing the gig until early the next afternoon. Then just as soon as they were done, they packed up their gear and flew 350 miles to St. Louis, where they encountered still more rain. This time, the group soldiered on and played beneath a flimsy tarpaulin. “After the gig, I remember us getting into a big, empty, steel-lined wagon, like a removal van,” McCartney said. “There was no furniture in there—nothing. We were sliding around trying to hold onto something, and at that moment everyone said ‘Oh, this bloody touring lark—I’ve had it up to here, man.’
“I finally agreed. I’d been trying to say, ‘Ah, touring’s good and it keeps us sharp. We need touring, and musicians need to play. Keep music live.’ I had held on to that attitude when there were doubts, but finally I agreed with them.”
When the Beatles played San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966, no one knew for sure that that would be their last-ever regular concert. But the Beatles surmised as much. McCartney asked press officer Tony Barrow to record the show for posterity, and in between songs, the Beatles took pictures of themselves with time-set cameras that they’d placed on their amplifiers. Flying out of town to Los Angeles, en route to London, Harrison told the others, “That’s it. I’m no longer a Beatle.”
In the ensuing years, whenever they were asked why they gave up touring, the Beatles usually gave the same answer: it was too stressful. The implication has always been that if going on the road had not become such an excruciating, moiling farce, they would have liked to continue. To get an idea of how seriously they took their craft, you need only to see a short clip from the Beatles at Shea Stadium, which shows Paul and George backstage before the big show, warming up their fingers with fretboard exercises, just like any professional musician would. But to what end? They knew going in that the audience’s high-decibel screaming was going to overwhelm their every note.
At the same time that touring was becoming nearly unbearable, the Beatles were increasingly finding satisfaction in Abbey Road Studios. For roughly the first three years of the Beatles’ recording career, producer George Martin said he felt a bit like a teacher with his pupils. The Beatles did whatever he asked of them, not because he was particularly officious, but because that’s just how things were done back then. Besides, the Beatles didn’t know anything about recording. Meanwhile, Martin did not attempt to make a big creative imprint upon their work. “They were four musicians—three guitarists and a drummer—and my role was to make sure they made a concise, commercial statement,” he explained. “I would make sure that the song ran for approximately two and a half minutes, that it was in the right key for their voices, and that it was tidy, with the right proportion and form.” He did a terrific job, but many other salaried producers probably could have gotten a comparable result.
The relationship between the Beatles and Martin began changing, however, in the mid-1960s. Several of the tracks on Help! exemplified the group’s new audacity, and Paul McCartney’s most famous song, “Yesterday,” was clearly a bellwether. Paul said that one morning when he was just twenty-two years old, he awoke with the melody playing in his head. Still foggy from his previous night’s sleep, he sat down and worked out the chords on a nearby piano. It sounded lovely, perhaps even flawless, but for a long time he was reticent to do anything with it for fear that he’d subconsciously lifted it from somewhere else. Then when he finally decided otherwise and recorded it, in June 1965, he had a new concern: it didn’t sound like a Beatles song. There was nothing for the rest of the group to do. As Paul strummed it on his guitar, however, it also seemed a bit spare.
Martin suggested they add a string quartet. That wasn’t quite a novel idea (a few other pop songs had featured strings), but it was still a daring one. At first, McCartney was leery of the suggestion, for fear that it might turn out schlocky, but Martin insisted that it could be scored in a restrained and tasteful manner. To further put young Paul at ease, Martin allowed him to oversee the whole arranging process. “[Paul] would say, ‘Can we have cello doing this bit?’ And I’d say ‘Sure, why not?’ or ‘No, that’s out of their range.’ . . . So it was kind of a collaborative experience.” Paul was also in the studio when the overdub was recorded and mixed into mono. Later on the rest of the group heard it, and they all agreed it sounded fabulous.
As the Beatles began experimenting with newer and more sophisticated aesthetics, Martin’s role was, on the one hand, greatly enhanced. His arranging work, technical knowhow, and salutary advice deeply impacted some of the Beatles’ finest songs. In another sense, however, Martin’s role was diminished by the group’s evolving artistry. Soon they began telling him what they wanted their songs to sound like—as when Paul recorded “Yesterday”—and he would oblige. Fortunately, the new dynamic didn’t pose many problems. “As I could see their talent growing, I could recognize that an idea coming from them was better than an idea coming from me,” Martin generously allowed. “In a sense, I made a sort of tactical withdrawal, recognizing that theirs was the greater talent.”
A few months later, the Beatles regrouped at Abbey Road t
o record Rubber Soul, their so-called transitional album. Critics said it was thematically richer and more sonically adventurous than anything the Beatles had yet attempted, and John and Paul agreed. “You don’t know us if you don’t know Rubber Soul,” Lennon told a young interviewer shortly after the album was released. “All our ideas are different now.” Paul echoed his partner: “If someone saw a picture of you taken two years ago and [they] said that was you, you’d say it was a load of rubbish and show them a new picture. That’s how we feel about the early stuff [compared to] Rubber Soul. . . . People have always wanted us to stay the same, but we can’t stay in a rut. No one else expects to hit a peak at 23 and never develop, so why should we? Rubber Soul for me is the beginning of my adult life.”
The title of the album was a punny and playful corruption of a term that they had heard from a skeptical African American musician who disparaged the Rolling Stones by saying they played “plastic soul”—by which he meant, he thought the Stones were just okay. Interesting, perhaps, but limited: a cheap knockoff of the real thing. Now the Beatles may have been trying to show how it was possible to appreciate Memphis soul, and incorporate elements of it into their work, without ever being called spurious.
In fact, the riff that propelled the very first song on the record, “Drive My Car,” was probably inspired by Otis Redding’s hit “Respect.” But the song also showed a glimpse of the Beatles’ new lyrical sophistication. Previously, John and Paul had almost always referred to women from a male narrator’s perspective. What’s more, their focus was on how she made him feel (and it was never that complicated: she made him feel happy or sad). In “Drive My Car,” the agency belongs to a woman. Right off the bat, she announces that she wants to become famous, “a star of the screen.” More immediately, though, she wants to get laid. (Presumably, she’s not offering someone a job as chauffeur.) She is also a modern woman, a bohemian, unlikely to be seduced by the clichés that were mainstays of the earliest Beatles songs. We know that because she stresses that her sexual invitation stands independent of the possibility of real romance (“and maybe I’ll love you,” she says). No doubt many misheard that crucial lyric, and the reason they discerned Paul to be singing “and baby I’ll love you” is because they were so steeped in the platitudinous idealizations of boy-girl relationships that dominated the mid-’60s pop universe. Now the Beatles were moving in the opposite direction. “Drive My Car” isn’t terribly poetic or profound, but it is subversive.
The next song on the record, “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” offers more tantalizing possibilities for interpretation. Lennon was the song’s primary author, and he later admitted it was about an affair he’d had, done in an intentionally elliptical (he said “gobbledegook”) style in order to spare his wife’s feelings. The story in the song begins with the narrator coming over to a woman’s flat. He “sits on her rug,” bides his time, drinks her wine, and soaks in the décor: the cozy wood-paneled walls. He expects that soon they’ll make love, but then comes a surprise: she brushes him off. When the narrator realizes they won’t be having sex (she says she has to work in the morning), he disappointedly crawls off to sleep in the bathtub. When he awakes, she’s gone. What happens next is not entirely clear, but in one plausible reading, he takes his revenge by setting her apartment on fire.
In another interpretation that Beatles fans have bruited about, however, the song describes a successful late-night hook-up. In this view, the outcome was never really in doubt, because the narrator was an obvious prize. (“I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me?”) Lennon was famous for his impish wordplay, and the phrase “Norwegian wood” sounds a lot like “knowing she would,” as in, “Isn’t it good, knowing she would [put out]?” In the last verse, when the guy says “I lit a fire,” he might have been referring to a cigarette (smoked with smug satisfaction, James Bond style?) or a joint (Lennon once called Rubber Soul “the pot album”). Some believe the song disguised an encounter that Lennon had had with Maureen Cleave, the journalist; more likely it was about Sonny Freeman, a German-born model who was married to the Beatles’ favorite photographer. In any case, fans were left to wonder: what is it about, really? It’s a question the Beatles would continue to put to their listeners throughout the rest of the decade.
Mature and autobiographical themes abound on Rubber Soul. Lennon also channels desperate romantic obsession (“Girl”), writes touchingly about his past (“In My Life”), and turns his gaze inward (on “Nowhere Man,” which reflected his stoned isolation in his Weybridge mansion). The group presages the counterculture’s celebration of “love” as a universal principle (“The Word”), while McCartney parodies French cabaret music (“Michelle”) and chronicles his relationship troubles with Jane Asher (“I’m Looking Through You” and “You Won’t See Me”). The Beatles also demonstrated their growing eclecticism on Rubber Soul. “Norwegian Wood” was the first pop song to make use of a sitar, the 800-year-old plucked string instrument that George Harrison had lately become intrigued with. The guitars at the end of “Girl” sound like Greek bouzoukis. On “In My Life,” George Martin contributed a baroque piano solo that he played on a keyboard at half-speed, then sped-up on playback, in order to create a quivery harpsichord effect.
The Beatles were not alone, of course, in pushing back the lyrical frontiers of pop music or experimenting with exotic sounds. The entire group admired and perhaps were even a bit intimidated by Bob Dylan, whose influence on Lennon was obvious. They had heard the Indian flavorings in hits by the Yardbirds (“Heart Full of Soul”) and the Kinks (“See My Friends”), and Harrison in particular was intrigued by the Byrds’ big jangle pop sound (“The Bells of Rhymney”). They saw the Animals capture the pathos of teenage life in a fuller way than most pop artists had attempted (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”), and they observed the Beach Boys moving away from formulaic surf ditties in order to explore slightly subtler soundscapes (“California Girls”). Nevertheless, when the Beatles ceased trying to be “cute”—that is, when they started conceiving of their albums as vehicles for mature artistic expression, and stopped worrying about how to turn on teenage girls—they had a galvanizing influence on the entire pop scene, and particularly upon the Rolling Stones.
Remember, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had already concluded that the first proper song they wrote together, “As Tears Go By,” was not fit for the Stones. They seemed awfully certain about it, too. Richards said that if they had brought that melancholy acoustic ballad to the rest of the band’s attention, they’d have been “laughed out of the goddamn room.” It would have been “Get out and don’t come back.” They only wrote it at Oldham’s insistence, and according to legend, he had been quite particular about what he wanted. He wanted “a song with brick walls around it, high windows and no sex.” It was perfect for Marianne Faithfull, the beautiful ingénue. But it was not a Stones number.
Lo and behold, four months after the Beatles released “Yesterday,” the Stones came out with “As Tears Go By.” Both songs consisted of only a vocalist, a quietly strummed guitar, and a string arrangement. And just as the Beatles had released “Yesterday” as a single in the US (but not in England), the Stones released “As Tears Go By” as a single in the US (but not in England). It was in fact the Stones’ “Christmas Disc” in America, and thanks to the heavy rotation it received on easy-listening stations it rose all the way to number six on the Billboard pop chart. So why didn’t the Stones put it out as an A-side in the UK? “Because we’d have had to go through all that dreadful business here about trying to copy the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday,’ ” Jagger moaned to a British journalist.
A few months after the Beatles released Rubber Soul, the Stones headed to Hollywood to record most of the songs for their next record, which they planned to call Could YOU Walk On The Water? but was released as Aftermath. Previously the Stones were known for getting in and out of the studio quickly. Now Oldham wanted everyone to know they were working with Beatle-like inte
nsity. He phoned all the way to London to boast about it to a Disc magazine journalist. The Stones had “completely isolated” themselves in the studio, he said. One marathon session had lasted for seventeen straight hours, from 11:00 a.m. until 4:00 a.m. Then the next day they were back at it, doing overdubs. Oldham added that the Stones had hired Phil Spector’s brilliant protégé, Jack Nitzsche, to assist with the recording, and he went on to spin a hilarious yarn about how the Stones were using a revolutionary new instrument, a Nitzschephone. “This is actually a child’s toy piano, which is projected through two separate amplifiers,” Oldham stated. “Jack is able to make it sound like any instrument you like; on some tracks it even sounds like a trombone.”
That last outrageous bit of mountebankery was no doubt inspired by the Beatles’ growing reputation for studio sophistication, which was reverberating across the English pop landscape. Suddenly everyone was talking about “production values,” which the Stones had not heretofore considered. Their goal in the studio had always been to project, as much as possible, the same rough mood and funky sound that they got while playing in the clubs. Now, however, the Stones realized that if they were to stay au courant, they would need to showcase some of the originality and subtlety that the rest of the pop world was exemplifying. And some were wondering whether they had it in them.
“Everything in the Rolling Stones’ garden is very nice at present,” a Melody Maker writer observed in January 1966. “But despite their height of appeal, they haven’t got the staying power of the Beatles. Because of changes in taste in popular music, the Stones cannot hope for lasting popularity. The very nature of their music precludes drastic change. . . . It is difficult to see or discover which direction they are travelling in. Where do they go from here?”
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