by Peter Brown
John gave Partridge carte blanche with the budget. He had only two small requests: that the artwork of his fellow students at the Liverpool Art College be hung in the bedrooms, and that the music room incorporate the piano from Aunt Mimi’s house, which had a wood-cut front with green pleated silk fabric behind it. John said he would be away for two months, and Partridge asked what he should do if there were any questions. Should he consult with Cynthia?
John said, “Don’t ask Cynthia. You make the decisions.”
The following day John left for America. Cynthia held Julian in her arms at the front door and cried as he got into a limousine and disappeared down the drive. Then she went back into the house, where the decorators and contractors were to relegate her to a tiny servants’ apartment at the top of the house while the rest of the mansion was torn away from under her control and kept that way for nearly a year.
2
If you had to characterize the Beatles’ first tour of America, it would be a sound, a long, high-pitched wailing sound that assailed their ears from the time their plane touched ground in San Francisco on August 18 to the moment they left America four weeks later. It was the screams of hysterical girls at the airport and the whining of their rented Lockheed Electra; it was the wail of the police sirens and motorcycles that escorted them and the shrieking of girls waiting in hallways and the streets. Hoping to see a bit of America, all they got to see were the backseats of limousines, antiseptic hotel suites, institutionalized meals from room service shared with aggressive journalists or loud-mouthed disc jockeys, dank dressing rooms in the lockers of athletic stadiums.
As Neil Aspinall described it, “You were so tired you only wanted to get laid and go to bed. Nobody would have understood how awful it really was. No hotel really wanted you; the police wanted you out of town; you’d check into a hotel in the middle of the night, exhausted. On your back, all the time, were the local promoters, the owners of the stadium, the owners of the local athletic teams, the local sheriffs and their wives and kids, all of whom demanded autographs whenever they bloody wanted them.”
They brought with them only a skeleton crew. All American arrangements, from hotels to transportation, had been handled for them by their American booking agent, Norman Weiss at GAC. In addition to regulars Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, they brought Derek Taylor, whom Brian had hired away from his newspaper job to become his personal assistant and press representative.
The Beatles were playing only the largest stadiums in the country. In this way the promoters could meet Brian’s price for the boys and still keep ticket prices low, thus pleasing the fans and the Beatles. Brian was demanding between $25,000 and $50,000 as a cash advance for each appearance, plus upwards of 50 percent of the profits after that, depending on the size of the venue. Although his price was the highest ever quoted for a personal appearance at the time, promoters were clamoring for a shot at booking them. In the end, some of the arenas and promoters were chosen on the basis of the legendary “brown paper bag” money.
The tour turned into a catalog of the incredible. At their opening night concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, their limousine driver didn’t pull away from the stadium loading ramp quickly enough and the Beatles’ car was overrun by hysterical teenagers. The weight of the people began to crush the roof, with the Beatles inside. Only the quick action of the Cow Palace security forces extricated the boys in time. They were then put into the relative safety of an ambulance that was already occupied by several drunken sailors who had gotten into a brawl during the show. Later that night diehard fans kept vigil in sleeping bags and folding chairs in the street below the windows of the Hilton Hotel. The crowds surrounding the hotel wailed so loudly day and night that a woman guest was beaten and robbed while her cries for help went unheard in the din. On August 20 they performed at Convention Hall in Las Vegas, and on the twenty-first they were at Municipal Stadium in Seattle, where a girl climbed high over the stage on a beam to get a closer look at them and fell in a heap at Ringo’s feet. On the twenty-second they were at the Empire Stadium in Vancouver, Canada, and on August 23 there was a triumphant concert at the Hollywood Bowl, where the towels they used to wipe their bodies after the concert were cut up into square-inch souvenirs and mounted on certificates for sale. The twenty-sixth found them in Denver at the Red Rock Stadium, the twenty-seventh at the Gardens in Cincinnati, where Brian disappeared for a night and a day, sending the entourage into a state of high anxiety.
That was nothing compared to the night in Indianapolis Ringo disappeared and didn’t turn up until seconds before the concert at the State Fair Coliseum, a story told here for the first time. Ringo had been up for three days without any sleep, fueled by “purple hearts,” the amphetamine tablets that had replaced Prellys. Speed of every strength and formula was now a necessity for the boys and Brian to keep up with the rigorous schedule. A large supply of these pills was brought with them from England, while others were procured by Mal Evans on the black market, with the help of concert promoters in local towns. The Beatles were on a physical roller coaster, “wired” tight on speed, then buffeted by gallons of scotch and Coke to calm them down. This particular evening the speed got the best of Ringo, who told Neil he was slipping out of the hotel to kill himself. Neil didn’t take him very seriously, although he wasn’t sure what he meant by “kill myself.” He didn’t start to worry until the next morning and Ringo was still missing. By the time of that evening’s concert, they were frantic. Ringo arrived moments before the Beatles were supposed to go on stage, accompanied by two state troopers. It seemed Ringo hadn’t been out of the hotel fifteen minutes when these two young local troopers had picked him out on the street and offered to give him a lift. They gave the speeding drummer a tour of the city, and Ringo casually mentioned he had always wanted to see the Indianapolis auto racing track where the Indy 500 was run every year. The police happily drove him there. The track was officially closed, but the police didn’t have a hard time convincing the night watch-man to open the gates and let Ringo of the Beatles inside. Ringo spent much of the night driving the police car around the track to his heart’s content. At dawn, the troopers took him home with them, and one of their wives cooked him breakfast.
By the time Ringo took his place at his drum kit on stage, his legs were so weak from his seventy-two-hour binge, they went out from underneath him, and he was unable to use the drum pedals for his bass.
The fact that Ringo was too incapacitated to play went unnoticed by the fans, who couldn’t hear him anyway. The trials and tribulations of touring might have been made worthwhile by some artistic success, but it was with bitter irony that the Beatles realized their audiences screamed so loudly during their concerts that the music couldn’t be heard at all. From the second they were announced, all sound was drowned out by fist-biting, shrieking, crying teenagers. Unless the concert was recorded or broadcast live over a radio station as arranged by Brian, not a soul heard them live—not even the Beatles themselves, whose primitive monitors were too weak to compete with the crowd. This especially depressed John, who felt that he had indeed “sold out” and was nothing more than Brian’s puppet on the stage. For some of the concerts the Beatles didn’t even bother to sing. They mouthed the words and played the music as fast as they could, so they could get the hell off stage and out of the hail of flashbulbs and jellybeans. Often they were so disgusted, they managed to play fifteen songs in twenty-five minutes.
As the tour progressed the Beatles became aware of a ghoulish phenomenon. The deformed goblins and cripples of John’s schoolboy drawings had come to life to haunt them. Everywhere the Beatles turned they seemed to be surrounded by the unfortunate: children crippled by various horrible diseases, blind children, the retarded, the terminally ill. It was the crippled children who sat in the first five rows of every concert, so the Beatles looked out over a sea of wheelchairs. And it was inevitably the afflicted who got backstage passes. Desperate parents would present these children to the boys, a
nd one of John’s primary memories of touring was the twisted hands reaching out for him.
They could take little solace in the girls who were brought for them. The girls on the road consisted of either the professional groupie-cum-call-girl the promoter had arranged to drop by the boys’ hotel suite or, more usually, girls Neil and Mal had picked up for them. Supplying girls was one of Neil’s and Mal’s primary responsibilities on tour, and one that they both went about with great relish. Mal wasn’t above the “if you fuck me first I’ll introduce you to them” routine. The girls were screwed, blewed, and tattooed before Mal and Neil swept them out of the Beatles’ suite at dawn. The girls were escorted out the service entrance, each given an autographed picture—forged by Neil and Mal—and told to keep their mouths shut. Miraculously, for no reason anyone can explain, the girls kept their mouths shut. In America, at least, there were no “My Night with Paul” stories in the tabloids, nor were there paternity suits. It was no small wonder either, since it was not uncommon to find fifteen girls waiting on line in Neil’s and Mal’s rooms, passing the time by ironing the Beatles’ stage costumes.
3
On August 28 a small but auspicious event occurred at the Delmonico Hotel in New York that would grow to affect the consciousness of the world: Bob Dylan turned the Beatles on to marijuana for the first time in their lives.
Now, the Beatles did not become marijuana addicts immediately after that—it took at least six months for that transformation to occur—but smoking pot with Dylan gave getting high the Sanctification of the Hip. Before that they had spurned marijuana with a passion; as far as they were concerned, pot smokers were junkies, in the same category as heroin addicts. The pills the boys took were pharmaceutical, illegally obtained but not illegal to take. Shortly after their turn-on with Dylan they began to compose under marijuana’s spell. It didn’t show very much on the next album, most of which was already composed and recorded anyway, but you could almost smell the pungent smoke on the album that was to follow. There was no doubt about it; Dylan had given them a key that opened a door to a new dimension of pop music, and they took the youth of the world across the threshold with them.
John Lennon had long wanted to meet Bob Dylan but not as badly as he wanted to meet Elvis, however. For John, Elvis was a god who had achieved indescribable sanctity. Dylan was a contemporary, and to John just another competitor, although John was a little envious of Dylan’s gift for lyrics. It was only recently that John had begun to take special interest in his own lyrics. His first introspective, autobiographical song, “I’ll Cry Instead,” had been written for the soundtrack of A Hard Day’s Night but had never made it into the movie. The lyrics said, “I’ve got a chip on my shoulder that’s bigger than my feet/I can’t talk to people that I meet.”
That was certainly the case with Dylan. They were introduced by a mutual friend, writer Al Aronowitz, who was one of the first legitimate journalists to write about pop music. Aronowitz had befriended John the previous spring in England, while writing about him for the Saturday Evening Post. At that time John had told Aronowitz he wanted to meet Dylan, but only “on his own terms,” when John had become his “ego equal.” On that August 28, after playing the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, with the Beatles’ smiling faces on the cover of Life magazine, John was ready.
Aronowitz rode in from Woodstock with Dylan in a blue Ford station wagon driven by Victor Mamoudas, Dylan’s road manager and chum. They parked around the corner from the hotel, and Mamoudas, who’s tall, dark, and Sephardic, bombed Dylan and Aronowitz past the crowd of screaming kids into the relative safety of the hotel lobby. There they found themselves with a two-man police escort to accompany them up to the Beatles’ floor. When the elevator door opened Dylan and company were shocked to find still more police, plus a dozen people gaily chatting and drinking booze being served out of Derek Taylor’s room. Included in this group waiting to be admitted to the Beatles’ suite were various reporters, disc jockeys, and the singing groups The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary.
Dylan was whisked past these people into the Beatles’ private domain. Brian, Neil, Mal, and the Beatles had just finished a room-service dinner around the dining room table when Dylan appeared in the doorway. He was smaller than the boys had expected, with a hook nose and merry, twinkling eyes, like a Semitic St. Nick. After clumsy introductions officiated over by Brian, the embarrassed tension in the room was palpable. Brian moved the guests into the living room, trying to keep the evening afloat. He asked Dylan and his friends what they wanted to drink, and Dylan replied, “Cheap wine.”
Brian was embarrassed to admit that there was only champagne, French wines, scotch, and Coke in the suite, and Mal was dispatched to get Dylan’s favorite cheap wine. During the wait it was obliquely mentioned that some pills of speed were available, and Dylan and Aronowitz reacted strongly against the idea. Both of them were antichemical at the time, especially speed. In lieu of pills, Dylan suggested, perhaps they’d like to try something organic and green, grown out of Mother Earth’s sweet flowing breast.
Brian and the Beatles looked at each other apprehensively. “We’ve never smoked marijuana before,” Brian finally admitted.
Dylan looked disbelievingly from face to face. “But what about your song?” he asked. “The one about getting high?”
The Beatles were stupefied. “Which song?” John managed to ask.
Dylan said, “You know ...” and then he sang, “and when I touch you I get high, I get high, I get high ...”
John flushed with embarrassment. “Those aren’t the words,” he admitted. “The words are, ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide ...’”
Dylan couldn’t wait to initiate them. The preparations to secure the hotel suite took a half hour before Dylan was even allowed to produce the grass. The doors were closed and bolted, and towels from the bathroom were stuffed into every crevice and crack. The blinds were pulled tight and the drapes drawn against the Park Avenue traffic. Finally, a bemused Dylan was allowed to roll the first joint.
Dylan lit the joint, gave them instructions on how to smoke it, and passed it on to John. John took it from him but was too scared to try it himself and passed it on to Ringo, whom he called “my royal taster.” Ringo held onto the joint and finished it himself while Dylan and Aronowitz rolled half a dozen others.
Ringo started laughing first and set the others off. Like many novice pot smokers they found many trivial things funny. Dylan watched for several hours as the Beatles broke each other up, sometimes with something authentically funny, often at nothing more than a look or a word or a pause in the conversation. For a while they all laughed at Brian, who kept saying, “I’m so high I’m on the ceiling. I’m up on the ceiling ...” After the smoke had cleared out they allowed a room-service waiter to come in to clear the dining room and found everything he did reason to convulse them with laughter. Months later “Let’s have a laugh” became the code for “Let’s get stoned.”
Paul was overwhelmed with the momentousness of the occasion. “I’m thinking for the first time,” he said, “really thinking.” So certain was he of uttering gems of wisdom, he demanded that everything he said that evening be recorded for posterity. He had Mal Evans follow him around the hotel suite, writing down every thing he said.14
The evening was the start of a long, albeit intermittent, friendship with Dylan, and they made arrangements to see him again when they passed through New York at the end of their tour.
4
The cities flew by. Milwaukee, Chicago, Montreal, Jacksonville, Boston, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. On September 19, in an airplane over Houston, Texas, feeling like he was one hundred years old, Brian turned thirty. He was presented with cowboy guns and a holster as a gift. His birthday celebration had been only slightly marred when the Electra aircraft in which they were traveling was overrun by fans on the tarmac at Houston airport just before takeoff. A screaming horde of teenagers broke past security guards and actually managed to cli
mb on the wings of the plane and tried to break the pressurized plane windows with Coke bottles before the airport police could pull them off. It was no less distressing to learn in flight that back at the Houston hotel a chambermaid had been slashed with a knife by a frenzied fan demanding to know the Beatles’ room numbers.
When they said they could not go on, would not go on, they did one more date. The people of Kansas City, where the Beatles could not fit in an appearance, felt left out and multimillionaire Charles O. Finley, the owner of the Kansas City Athletics baseball team, promised the city fathers he would get the Beatles for them. Finley had been trying to contact Brian in England previous to the tour, and his requests for a meeting were denied, along with hundreds of other similar requests. In frustration, Finley flew to San Francisco, where through Norman Weiss’ intercession he was granted a personal audience with Brian. Finley started negotiations for the boys to play in Kansas City by offering the Beatles $100,000 cash, up front, plus any percentage Brian named. A $100,000 fee was unheard-of in 1964, even as a weekly payment in Las Vegas. Brian was impressed, but he still refused; the boys were too tired, he said, and there was no time. Finley persisted, and finally, at a cash price of $150,000 plus expenses—the largest fee ever paid for a performance of a single concert—the Beatles played Kansas City on their last free night in America. This concert held special irony for them, since the audience, like the others, hardly heard a note they produced. When they left town, the sheets on which they had slept in their hotel rooms were removed from the beds in front of witnesses and sold for $1,150 to representatives of Chicago radio station WBKB. The sheets yielded 6,000 one-inch swatches, which were sold at a dollar apiece. As far as can be ascertained, the pillowcases are still in a bank vault, estimated to have appreciated more than the price of gold.