Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Some 1967 calendar entries punctuate an era as psychedelic pop culture took shape. McCartney attended a Jimi Hendrix show at the Bag O’Nails club on January 11 and went back into the studio the next day to add two trumpets, two oboes, two cors anglais (English horns), and a double bass to “Penny Lane.” The next night, McCartney took along Ringo to hear Hendrix again, and the following night at the Royal Albert Hall, a group of underground creatives who launched the alternative International Times newspaper with Barry Miles as editor, and the trendy UFO Club, held a “happening” featuring Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading their poetry aloud.6 Granada Television interviewed McCartney for a film called It’s So Far Out It’s Straight Down, narrated by Michael Parkinson, a sympathetic documentary on the emerging psychedelic scene that won huge TV ratings. The day after that, the Beatles recorded their first four takes of “A Day in the Life.”

  “Penny Lane” had every appearance of being finished when McCartney came into the studio on January 17 and requested another overdub: a piccolo trumpet, the kind he had recently heard on a BBC broadcast of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2.7 McCartney sang the melody; Martin wrote it down on a staff for a B-flat piccolo trumpet; and the English Chamber Orchestra’s Dave Mason played the session.

  That same morning, Lennon spotted a Daily Mail headline: “The Holes in Our Roads,” which read, “There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey.” That last detail didn’t make it into the song, but it didn’t have to: counting and apportioning potholes by population packed enough punch as a sublime bit of mindless bureaucracy, tedious task work tunneling into its own irrelevance. “If Blackburn is typical there are two million holes in Britain’s roads and 300,000 in London,” the article continued. Lennon noted:

  I was reading the paper one day and noticed two stories. I was writing “A Day in the Life” with the Daily Mail propped in front of me on the piano. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London in a car crash. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled.8

  Recalling his uncle George teaching him to read by going through the Liverpool Echo headlines, Lennon began drafting another song that gave him almost as much trouble as “Strawberry Fields Forever.” This new song’s ambition drove him into a sandpit. The verses came together, starting with a tribute to an Irish Swinging London dandy, Tara Browne, son of an Irish peer (Dominick Browne, House of Lords, who married Oonagh Guinness, heiress to the ale fortune). Tara Browne’s Lotus Elan sports car zipped through a red light at the intersection of Redcliffe Square and Redcliffe Gardens in South Kensington late on December 18, 1966, only to ram into a parked lorry. His date, a Swinging London model named Suki Potier, walked away unscathed. The coroner’s report appeared in the Daily Mail on the same day Lennon found the story about Blackburn potholes. McCartney later recanted this connection, saying, “The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together. It has been attributed to Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, which I don’t believe is the case, certainly as we were writing it, I was not attributing it to Tara in my head. In John’s head it might have been. . . . The ‘blew his mind’ was purely a drug reference, nothing to do with a car crash. In actual fact I think I spent more time with Tara than John did.”9

  A vast blank spot in the song, normally the stretch where a “middle eight” or a bridge might be fitted, seemed more than empty, a trailing question mark smack in the center of an otherwise beguiling setup. Ambitious problems sought ambitious solutions. McCartney brought in a fragment from another unfinished number, and they stitched it into Lennon’s middle in a completely different voice: a second storyteller. McCartney’s internal soliloquy traces the steps of a professional man caught up in the daily grind, unself-consciously marching about his duties, climbing aboard the morning bus without an original thought in his head or any worthwhile feelings in his gut. This internal diary entry parodies what editors routinely slice from even great writers’ journals (“Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”).

  Two days after the Daily Mail news item the Beatles recorded the song’s basic track with both these sections, and had their roadie, Mal Evans, count out the twenty-four bars in between, marked by a ringing alarm clock. Fixing one hole had only created another; they would have to figure that out later. Holes in the road became holes in a song as the work progressed. (Pasting up Lennon’s song may have given McCartney the idea for another song: “Fixing a Hole.”)

  On the last two days of January, the band headed down to Knole Park, at Sevenoaks in Kent, twenty miles outside London, for a promotional film shoot to support their next single, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” Swedish filmmaker Peter Goldman chose the site for its fifteenth-century house and golf course. Klaus Voormann, who had moved on from Paddy, Klaus and Kim to play bass for Manfred Mann, had recommended Goldman to the Beatles. Tony Bramwell, now Epstein’s publicist, produced the venture for Subafilms, one of two Beatle film companies that would eventually get folded into Apple Corps. The set included an old upright piano that the Beatles poured paint into and a tree where they did slow-motion jumps, a colorized echo of the “Can’t Buy Me Love” sequence that Dick Lester had shot three years earlier.

  The experimental nature of the clip, and all that “paint” getting applied to their “instrument,” attempted to do through film what the songs did with narrative. When Dick Clark showed the film to his American Bandstand audience, teenage faces fell. Mustaches erased the idea of “cute.” Instead of performers bothering to lip-sync to their latest single, the film screened like a sci-fi project gone awry. (Today, it looks like an earnest collegiate experiment.) During a break in the filming, Lennon stopped in at a Sevenoaks antiques shop and bought an 1843 poster describing a traveling circus straight out of Vincent Crummels’s theater troupe in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. The bill described daring feats, complete with waltzing horses.

  Work continued on other tracks as “A Day in the Life” progressed. After taking in the Cream Saville Theatre show on February 5, the Beatles jumped on horseback for the “Penny Lane” shoot. Final film sequences at Knole Park took place on February 7, and the next day they were back in the studio laying down “Good Morning Good Morning.” Next door to the Beatles at EMI, beginning in Studio 3, Pink Floyd, the UFO Club’s house band, were recording The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, with George Martin’s former engineer, Norman Smith, producing. These EMI rooms got scheduled tightly enough that the Beatles wandered to other studios popping up around town, like Regent Sound and the De Lane Lea. Their first session at Regent included the first three takes of “Fixing a Hole,” before returning to EMI for the orchestral session on February 10.

  McCartney’s song fragment wedged into “A Day in the Life,” but there were still some blanks to fill in. McCartney came up with the idea of filling the hole preceding his narrative with a “giant orchestral climax,” constructed as a twenty-four-bar bridge connecting Lennon’s detached narrator with McCartney’s everyman. Martin wrote down a score on manuscript paper with parts for individual musicians that included a “squiggly line,” indicating a continuous rising swell of sound. For this evening session, forty musicians gathered in the cavernous Studio 1, having been cajoled into evening dress, and Martin and McCartney took turns conducting. Snatches of this filmed event have leaked out over the years: it’s a full-fledged “performance” inside a recording studio, for the musicians themselves and invited guests, with the concertmaster wearing a gorilla’s paw on his bow hand, another participant sporting a clown nose, and many in funny hats. One bassoonist tied a balloon to his horn.

  Friends like Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull and the visiting Monkee, Mike Nesmith, were given 16mm cameras to shoot anything they liked, and they stayed after with Keith Ri
chards, and Simon and Marijke of the Dutch design group The Fool, to tape four takes of a giant collective “OMMMMMMMM,” the best idea for the song’s ending anybody had come up with so far.10 Now that all the holes were filled, how to bring it all to a close became the song’s final paradox.

  The “Day in the Life” sessions worked like a talisman on all the other tracks—its tonal departure serving as a counterexample to the rest of the material. Work continued on “Only a Northern Song” (which didn’t make Sgt. Pepper’s final cut), “Good Morning Good Morning,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” more “Fixing a Hole” overdubs, an experimental recording called “Anything,” eight takes of “Lovely Rita,” and rehearsals for “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” On February 20, Martin got a reluctant Geoff Emerick to toss calliope tapes of Sousa marches into the air and then edit them back together randomly for Lennon’s “Mr. Kite.”

  Then a new solution to “A Day in the Life” took shape: the original ending, friends humming “OMMMMMMMM,” lacked finality and resolve, and they searched for something more dramatic, like a gunshot or a cannon, which would provide the right climax to the song and album. On February 22, John, Paul, Ringo, Mal Evans, and George Martin raised ten hands to simultaneously strike at two pianos for a giant E-major chord, which Martin overdubbed three times, adding harmonium, to extend its length to the forty-three seconds it lasts, but you can still hear a chair squeak at 4:49 as they hold the keys down. It took nine takes to get the chord struck simultaneously to Martin’s satisfaction, and he enhanced the sound electronically to bleed every ounce from its decay. Then they repeated the orchestral buildup from the “bridge” as a kind of ear-fake: first this led to a new song; now it drove listeners off the edge.

  The preceding week’s “Lucy” rehearsals turned the song into Sgt. Pepper’s quickest session, recording in seven takes on March 1 with vocal overdubs on March 2. A Life magazine reporter visited the studio just after this, only to describe a transitional tedium. “We are light years away from anything tonight,” Martin told the reporter. “They know it is awful now, and they’re trying to straighten it out. It may be a week before they’re pleased, if ever.”11

  The “Lucy” session seemed to set off a new streak; the starts began gaining on all the fits. In short order, a brass section and Harrison’s lead guitar were added to the title track; “Getting Better” got seven takes on March 9, and “Within You Without You” began production on March 15, “She’s Leaving Home” on the 17th. Lennon told a BBC interviewer on March 20 that there would be “no more ‘She Loves You’s” before heading back into the studio to record lead and backing vocals onto “She’s Leaving Home.” Amid all this ensemble work, several important tape edits took shape: the audience sounds for the opening of the record were compiled from the orchestral session on February 10, and the Hollywood Bowl audience from 1965, for the transition between the opening song and “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

  Too busy to attend the annual Ivor Novello Awards on March 20, Lennon and McCartney granted a BBC radio interview to Brian Matthew about their winning songs, “Yellow Submarine” (best A-side single for 1966) and “Michelle” (most performed song of 1966). This interview contradicted many of McCartney’s post-1980 statements about “Yesterday,” recorded in 1965, which by this early date was already the runner-up to “Michelle” for most-performed song of 1966. Here McCartney acknowledged that Lennon came up with the title, and the conceptual hook, for “Yesterday.” Lennon complained about the string arrangement on the Andy Williams rendition.12

  A pivotal moment in the Sgt. Pepper sessions came as Lennon’s personal turmoil bled into his work; he could be so articulate about life’s illusions, many failed to see how lost in illusion he was himself most of the time. As they completed work on “Getting Better” and “Lovely Rita,” Lennon took ill at the microphone on March 21, and George Martin took him up to the roof for some air. He had mistakenly confused an amphetamine “upper” with an LSD tab and begun tripping in the middle of a take (too bad Matthew hadn’t shown up for that). Martin, oblivious to the drugs taking effect, came back down to continue work. Paul took him home that night to his house nearby. Bramwell remembers the incident: “John spent the night perched on the roof of Abbey Road tripping, staring at the frosty stars and waiting for the dawn. Eventually, Paul and George went up to get him down before he fell off. Paul took him home and, to help John out, he also dropped some acid to get on the same plane and stayed up all night, keeping him company.”13 As the critic Ian MacDonald notes in Revolution in the Head, this friendly gesture became a coming out for Paul, who had previously refused to take the drug.14

  Typically, they carried on as though nothing extraordinary had happened. Lennon returned to the studio by March 23 for the backup vocal session on “Getting Better” and lead vocal work for “Good Morning Good Morning,” on March 28 for organ, guitar, and harmonica overdubs on “Mr. Kite.” In that same session, McCartney tore the face off “Good Morning Good Morning” with a vitriolic Casino guitar solo that leapt up from deep inside the song’s withheld fears—another Lennon-McCartney collaboration that showed McCartney’s supernatural sympathy for his partner’s paranoia.

  Ringo still needed a track, so the next day Lennon and McCartney finished off writing “With a Little Help from My Friends” at McCartney’s house, as biographer Hunter Davies looked on. His is one of the few descriptions of a songwriting session on record, and it captures the ramshackle, free-association qualities of their songwriting method. Cynthia Lennon even makes some suggestions, which Lennon bats down:

  “How about,” said Paul, “Do you believe in a love at first sight.”

  John sang it over and accepted it. In singing it, he added the next line. “Yes, I’m certain it happens all the time”[sic] . . . “What’s a rhyme for time,” said John. “Yes I’m certain it happens all the time. It’s got to rhyme with that line.”

  “How about I just feel fine,” suggested Cyn.

  “No,” said John. “You never use the word ‘just.’ It’s meaningless. It’s a fill-in word.”15

  After a nostalgic visit to “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Tequila,” they called Ringo to tell him his song was finished, even though it still needed some fleshing out—they could do the rest as they recorded. The very next day, “With a Little Help from My Friends” got cut in eleven takes with the working title of “Bad Finger Boogie.”

  There were still tracks to be written, but the Sgt. Pepper concept had taken hold, and the album was far enough along that they needed to shoot an album cover. McCartney had drawn a draft of his idea for the pop artist Peter Blake, and Michael Cooper’s camera was booked for March 30 at Chelsea Manor studios. The Beatles got into highly stylized, brightly colored Victorian band costumes as Blake posed them in front of a giant mural of celebrities, some wax figures, some photographs, for an elaborate setup that anticipates a Photoshop digital software montage. They took more pictures sitting down together, one of which appeared in the album’s gatefold, then returned to the studio to finish “With a Little Help from My Friends,” overdubbing bass, tambourine, and backup vocals.

  Such lively work led to serendipitous connections, like the way “She’s Leaving Home” came about. Retracing Lennon’s newspaper grab for “A Day in the Life,” McCartney had found a story in the Daily Mail on February 27 about a runaway named Melanie Coe, and “She’s Leaving Home” sprang out of him. In a weird coincidence, McCartney had voted Melanie Coe a winner at age fourteen, on a 1963 Ready Steady Go! show, and awarded her an Elvis Presley album as a prize. He and Lennon remembered the name and fashioned the song around her. As one of the few topical songs the Beatles produced, “She’s Leaving Home” nearly treats the parents as the runaway’s victims in Lennon’s background rejoinders: “What did we do that was wrong?” But even here there’s an irony that quickens their resolve, before an odd narcissistic note: “We never thought of ourselves . . . Never a thought for ourselves.” Patting yourself on
the back for your own selflessness smacks of Aunt Mimi, floating on self-pity and oblivious to the protagonist’s reality.

  As the Sgt. Pepper sessions wound down, group discussions wandered to future ventures, and rock’s generational wars erupted anew. When they weren’t in the studio, the Beatles held business meetings with their tax advisor, Dr. Strach, to establish a new company. Strach advised them that their accumulated capital, more than £2 million, exposed them to a hefty tax hit. But if they reinvested this in a business, they could save and build toward a new entity. They rechristened their original company, the Beatles Ltd., as a new partnership, Beatles and Co., a collective that gave each band member 5 percent; and they created a new, as yet unnamed corporation, which would control the remaining 80 percent. Under this new arrangement, individual songwriting royalties would be paid directly to the authors of a particular song, but all money earned by the Beatles as a group would go directly into Beatles and Co., taxed at a less punishing corporate tax rate.

  Originally, Brian Epstein had big retail plans for the concern, according to Alistair Taylor: “One big idea was to set up a chain of shops designed only to sell cards; birthday cards, Christmas cards, anniversary cards. When the boys heard about that they all condemned the scheme as the most boring yet. Sure that they could come up with much better brainwaves, they began to get involved themselves.”16 At first, the new company housed itself in Epstein’s NEMS office. But while Epstein schemed about how to set up new revenue streams for his boys, he also wriggled out of day-to-day operations. Now a hub of Swinging London, his Saville Theatre shows became the place most rock fans could hope to spot a Beatle in the Epstein box: Lennon and Starr heard Chuck Berry and Del Shannon there on April 19. On April 24, all four Beatles caught Donovan’s show.

  On a whim, McCartney dashed off on April 5 to the States to surprise Jane Asher for her twenty-first birthday. On his way to Central City, Colorado, where Asher was appearing as Juliet, he visited a Beach Boys studio in L.A. for a session on a song called “Vegetable” (from the doomed Smile, the follow-up to Pet Sounds). Aboard the plane home, he sketched out ideas for a possible film concept and began writing a title track, “Magical Mystery Tour.” In his absence, Lennon “emerged from his fog long enough” to have his Rolls-Royce painted in swirls and flowery cartouches by The Fool, the Dutch design collective, Tony Bramwell reports. “If you really couldn’t do without a Rolls,” wrote the music scenester Simon Napier-Bell, “you could always have it painted in gaudy psychedelic colours. (A sign of disrespect for its status.)”17