It is often said that “if you can remember the sixties, you can’t have been there.” But to the vast majority of the decade’s survivors whose brains were unaddled by pot or Scotch and coke, it never felt quite so dreamily enchanted as it is portrayed in retrospect. The age of so-called love and peace saw the world almost as rife as today with natural disaster and human cruelty. As well as free rock festivals, kipper ties, fun furs, and white lipstick, it brought the Vietnam War, the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, cataclysmic race riots across America, famine in Bihar, and genocide in Biafra. Even as Britain “swung” with such apparent careless joy, it had to deal with horrors and tragedies like the Aberfan disaster, the Moors murders (to this day still unmatched for depraved child cruelty), and the opening shots of Northern Ireland’s later bloodbath. Being a sixties teenager had sunburst moments, certainly, but also involved long stretches of workaday dullness, unrelieved by modern diversions like mobile phones, text messaging, personal stereos, video games, or the Internet.
If we are honest we must accept the extent to which the heady new freedoms of youth in the sixties paved the way for the frightening, ungovernable world we see about us today. From the happy high of pot and pills and the cozy hallucinations of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band grew the drug menace that now saturates the most respectable, most rural communities, turns once bright and happy children into black-and-blue-punctured suicides, litters public thoroughfares and parks with the same foul stew of broken ampules and needles. From the sexual freedom granted to sixties boys and girls by the contraceptive pill came the long breakdown in the age-old, civilizing influence of the family, the freedom of sixties children’s children in their turn to thieve and vandalize without the slightest fear of parental retribution.
From the great discovery of sixties youth through the example of the Beatles—that, with a bit of cheek, you could get away with anything—evolved the whole ghastly panoply of modern contempt for convention and self-restraint that encompasses urban terrorism at one extreme and supermarket “shopping cart rage” at the other. Just as John Lennon realized he could get away with teasing his blue-blooded audience at the 1963 Royal Command performance, so the IRA realized they could get away with blowing up innocent women and children; so successive governments realized they could get away with allowing the national infrastructure to fall into decay; so the police found they could get away with abandoning whole communities; so hospitals found they could get away with ceasing to accord patients basic human dignity; so the legions of murderers, child molesters, muggers, and celebrity stalkers found they could become ever more arrogantly audacious in their predatory activities; so egotism, viciousness, and disregard for others grew to the point where bin Laden and his fanatics found they could get away with the vileness of September 11, 2001. If you seek to pinpoint the exact place in the twentieth century where civilization ceased moving steadily forward and began taking quantum leaps backward, there can be no other culprit but the sixties.
Yet, at the same time, one cannot gainsay the decade’s many positive, if illusory and short-lived, qualities: its vigor and optimism; its belief that idealism could move the grimmest, rockiest old mountains; its abounding creativity; its ready assimilation of the wildest originality and eccentricity; its childlike sense of discovering the whole world anew. Such are the echoes that sixties nostalgics, with or without memory, seek most avidly and find most abundantly in the music of the Beatles.
Weary though I may be of discussing the subject, heartsick as I am at the prospect of writing anything further about it (including this prologue), I cannot pretend that my interest has waned over two decades. For this is the greatest show business story ever told; one whose fascination only deepens as our collective obsession with the joys and horrors of celebrity grows. As a moral tale it is both utterly emblematic (be careful what you wish for lest your wish come true) and utterly unique. If it were presented as fiction, with its web of extraordinary accidents, conjunctions, and coincidences, no one would believe it. A modern Dickens or Tolstoy would be needed to create such a cast of characters, such a cavalcade of mold-shattering events, such a shading of comedy into tragedy, such a sweeping panorama of social evolution and transformation—though not even Dickens or Tolstoy had the nerve to make any of their heroes actually change the world.
From the moment the Beatles realized they need not fear being overtaken by Dave Clark and the “Tottenham Sound” there has been no dispute about their being the greatest pop act of all time. No matter how pop’s sound and look may develop, or regress, they remain the ideal, the exemplar, the summit to which all performers aspire, whether male or female, singular or plural; their name the ultimate turn-on in the language of promotion, huckstering, and hype. There is not a single hopefully seminal attraction of the past three decades, from seventies glamand snob-rockers, through punk, disco, and new romantics, to today’s zombie-strutting boy- and girl- and boy-girl “bands,” whose keepers have not staked their claim to greatness by announcing they have sold more singles or more albums than the Beatles, played to larger combined audiences than the Beatles, had more consecutive hits than the Beatles, stormed the charts more quickly than the Beatles, been mobbed at airports more hysterically than the Beatles, generated more obsessive media coverage than the Beatles. Perhaps the only group to have approached the worldwide stir they created were the Spice Girls in the middle and late nineties. The highest accolade Ginger, Scary, Posh, and Sporty received, or desired, was to be called “female Beatles.”
The truth is that in purely statistical terms many later performers can legitimately make one or another of these claims. The Beatles, after all, rose to fame in a music industry as different from the modern one as the Stone Age from Star Wars. Plenty of other acts have shifted more product, counted more heads on their tours, and certainly earned more money than the Beatles did. Plenty have mimicked their milestone moments—like U2’s simulation of their Apple rooftop concert. But none has ever been or could ever hope to be so much loved. Love was what took them to their unbeatable heights but also destroyed them; the terrible, mindless love that ultimately enwrapped them squeezed the vitality from them, like a giant boa constrictor. That is the power, above all, that endures in those recordings from long-ago Abbey Road in long-ago London. Play any Beatles song (except maybe “Revolution No. 9”) to any group of toddlers in any country and of whatever culture: They will instantly love it.
Britain thus far has produced only one equivalent object of mass adoration and fascination. From the early eighties to the late nineties, the beautiful, brave, batty Diana, Princess of Wales, rivaled the Beatles—at times even threatened to overtake them—as the world’s favorite icon; no longer pop stars as royalty but royalty as a pop star. In 1995, the reunion that millions had longed for since 1971 actually did happen. Their long-dormant Apple company announced plans to release the definitive film record of their career that their former roadie, Neil Aspinall, had been compiling for more than a quarter of a century, plus a collective text autobiography. Paul, George, and Ringo reconvened at Abbey Road under their old producer, now Sir George Martin, to provide instrumental and vocal backup to some Lennon vocal tracks unearthed by Yoko among his archives at the Dakota. But, although the headlines befitted a second Second Coming, they did not shout quite as loudly or last quite as long as they might normally have done. For this happened also to be the moment when Diana chose to give a television interview, exposing the sham of her supposed “fairy-tale” marriage to Britain’s future king. A changed world, indeed, when the Fab Four played second fiddle to a royal broadcast!
Now Dianamania flickers fitfully on and off like faulty neon while Beatlemania blazes stronger than ever. In 2001 an album was released titled simply 1, a collection of twenty-seven number-one Beatles singles from three decades earlier. It topped the album charts in Britain and America and around the world, selling twice as many copies as their concept masterpiece Sgt
. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and making them Billboard magazine’s best-selling act of the year above contemporary giants like Britney Spears and J-Lo.
A year later came perhaps the ultimate instance of nostalgia with and without memory as well as delicious full-circle irony. The Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations reached their climax with a marathon pop concert in the seldom seen rear grounds—actually, front garden—of Buckingham Palace, featuring every major British pop act of the past half-century, including Shirley Bassey and Atomic Kitten. Its twofold purpose was to celebrate Britain’s most consistently successful export over fifty years and demonstrate how switched-on and accessible the monarchy had become after its near-fatal bout with “the People’s Princess.”
For the almost-one-million-strong crowd that seethed down The Mall like some weird, blue-lit cornfield there was no contest as to the top of the night’s bill. One could almost see them on the giant TV monitors like black-and-white ghosts, swaggering in to collect their MBE medals in 1965 and, afterward, boasting of puffing joints in a palace washroom. It was bizarre to remember what national outrage greeted the award of even so modest an honor to grubby hit-paraders. Tonight, the stage thronged with pop musical knights, all of whom had received their dubbing without the smallest public controversy—Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Elton John, and, of course, Sir George Martin, the man who made Beatles music possible, today as beloved a national institution as a great statesman or philanthropist.
The whole night belonged to the old Fab Four as surely as it did to the new Fab Windsors. Here were Joe Cocker and his glorious throat-ripping cover version of “With a Little Help from My Friends” from Sgt. Pepper. Here was Eric Clapton, paying tribute to his friend George Harrison with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” from the White Album. And here, to close the show, was Sir Paul again, at yet another uncharted high-water mark of fame and national prestige. Here was the billionaire megastar showing what a simple working musician he is at heart as he provided backup piano and vocals for Clapton in the Harrison number. Here he was, leading a million born-again royalists in a mass version of “Hey Jude” whose “La-la-la-lalala-la” chorus rolled through the floodlit human seas, both with and without memory, as familiarly as their own heartbeat.
John Lennon was there too, in spirit, albeit more than likely turning a bit in his grave. The concert’s closing number—indeed, the backing track for the whole jubilee—was “All You Need Is Love,” a song even more achingly true of today’s world than that of 1967. But now John’s countercultural mantra had become an anthem of loyalty to tradition and the status quo, “God Save the Queen” in all but name: an alternative “Rule Britannia.”
The original Shout! ended in 1970, a year before the Beatles’ official breakup. There are thus more than three decades to be covered of their respective post-Beatles lives, a story fully as bizarre, if not as lighthearted, as their collective one. Also, since 1981 I have collected much new information about their life together, from both original and new sources and from researching subsequent books, particularly my biography of the Rolling Stones. Hence this revised edition in the fortieth year since Beatlemania descended on Britain.
How different a book would I write if I were starting out now? Some critics felt I gave too much credence to an explanation for Brian Epstein’s death never previously raised: that he was murdered by a contract killer in reprisal for the vast sums lost in America through his botched deals on Beatles merchandise. It was a line I could hardly ignore, faced as I was with a source who claimed not only to have heard a murder threat made against Epstein but also to have been informed by phone after the contract had been carried out. Significantly, none of the ex-Beatles ever regarded the theory as too far-fetched. Nor did Epstein’s own family, though in their case it may have been preferable to subsequent unsubstantiated claims that he died as a result of a sex game that went wrong. With hindsight, I think it more likely his death was by “misadventure,” as the coroner recorded.
I must also admit to having suppressed one crucial fact. After Epstein’s death two suicide notes were found shut away in his desk drawer at Chapel Street. They had apparently both been written some little time previously, either for attempts on his own life that he never carried through or as a way of getting attention from his long-suffering associates. Both his brother, Clive, and his mother, Queenie, begged me not to mention these notes. At one point I had both of them on the phone at once saying, “Please, Philip… please.” They were nice, decent people whom I had no wish to hurt. So I agreed.
Others felt that my judgments of Paul McCartney were too harsh, perhaps even motivated by personal dislike. In the Beatles subculture one inevitably finds oneself tagged either as a “John” person or a “Paul” person. I cannot pretend to be other than the former. Just the same, it was wrong of me—though it won me my initial access to Yoko—to say, as I did on an American TV news program, that “John was three-quarters of the Beatles.” I would not question McCartney’s huge talent or deny that, like all of them, he was far nicer than he ever needed to be.
Any writer would hope to have improved over a span of more than twenty years. Looking back from here at the original Shout! I see all too many examples of clumsiness and imprecision; indeed, my first instinct was to rewrite the whole book. But its various imperfections do not seem to have stopped people from enjoying it. Apart from updating and correcting, therefore, I’ve limited myself to toning down the more garish purple passages and sharpening what was too fuzzy before. I was also criticized for dwelling too little on the Beatles’ music and that, too, I have tried to rectify.
For all its faults, I do not think any other Beatles book has overtaken it. Peter Brown’s The Love You Make (1983) was marketed as the sensational revelations of a Beatles “insider,” yet proved curiously uninformative in a large number of areas. The late Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon was a jumble of the ordurous untruths and crass misunderstandings peculiar to that author, often contradicting itself ludicrously from one page to the next. Paul McCartney’s authorized biography, Many Years From Now, was exhaustively informative—but mainly about Paul. The three ex-Beatles’ collective “autobiography”—in fact just unedited transcripts of their interviews for the Anthology TV documentary—featured much fascinating reminiscence, especially from George, but was grossly slanted and selective (every first-generation Beatle wife, for instance, having been firmly airbrushed out of the narrative).
It is said that even the most fortunate journalist meets only one truly smashing story in his or her career. The main thing I have learned about biography writing is that it is even more a matter of pure luck. Lucky me to have lit on what the Beatles’ irreplaceable publicist, Derek Taylor, rightly called “the twentieth century’s greatest romance.”
PART ONE
WISHING
ONE
“HE WAS THE ONE I’D WAITED FOR”
John Lennon was born on October 9, 1940, during a brief respite in Nazi Germany’s bombing of Liverpool. All summer, after tea, people would switch on their radios at low volume, listening, not to the muted dance music but to the sky outside their open back doors. When the music cut off, before the first siren went, you knew that the bombers were returning.
Liverpool paid a heavy price for its naval shipyards, and for the miles of docks where convoys stood making ready to brave the North Atlantic. The city was Britain’s last loophole for overseas food supplies. Night after night, with geometric accuracy, explosions tore along the seaming of wharves and warehouses and black castle walls, and over the tramlines into streets of friendly red back-to-back houses, of pubs and missions and corner dairies with cowsheds behind. During the worst week so many ships lay sunk along the Mersey there was not a single berth free for incoming cargo. But on Lime Street the Empire theater carried on performances as usual. Sometimes the whole audience would crowd out into the foyer and look across the black acropolis of St. George’s Hall to a sky flashing white, then dark again as more bo
mbs pummeled the port and the river.
Mimi Stanley had always worried about her younger sister, Julia. She worried about her especially tonight with more Luftwaffe raids expected and Julia in labor in the Oxford Street maternity home. When news of the baby came by telephone Mimi set out on foot from the Stanley house on Newcastle Road. “I ran two miles. I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘It’s a boy, it’s a boy. He’s the one I’ve waited for.’”
She held John in her arms twenty minutes after he was born. His second name, Julia said—in honor of Britain’s inspirational prime minister, Winston Churchill—would be Winston. Just then a parachute-borne land mine fell directly outside the hospital. “But my sister stayed in bed,” Mimi said, “and they put the baby under the bed. They wanted me to go into the basement, but I wouldn’t. I ran all the way back to Newcastle Road to tell Father the news. ‘Get under shelter,’ the wardens were shouting. ‘Oh, be quiet,’ I told them. Father was there, and I said, ‘It’s a boy and he’s beautiful, he’s the best one of all.’ Father looked up and said, ‘Oh heck, he would be.’”
Mimi’s and Julia’s father was an official with the Glasgow and Liverpool Salvage Company. He was aboard the salvage tug that tried to raise the submarine Thetis from her deathbed in Liverpool Bay. He had five daughters and brought them up strictly, though he was often away from home salvaging ships. “We loved Father,” Mimi said, “but we liked it when he went away to sea and we girls could kick over the traces a bit. If ever there was a boy I had my eye on, I used to pray at night, ‘Please God, let no one be hurt but let there be a wreck.’”
Mimi was slender, brisk, and dark, with fine cheekbones like a Cherokee. Julia was slim, auburn-haired, more conventionally pretty. Both loved laughter, but Mimi insisted there should be sense in it. “Oh, Julia,” she would endlessly plead, “be serious.” Julia could never be serious about anything.
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