“If he’d been an ordinary manager, Shea Stadium couldn’t have happened,” Nat Weiss says. “None of it could have happened the way it did. It all only happened that way because it was Brian Epstein’s fantasy.”
FOURTEEN
“THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE LAST ONE EVER”
At the beginning, two boys in travel-creased shirts would stand in front of George Martin, playing the new song they had scribbled in an old school exercise book. Martin even then saw two personalities at war. A song would be John’s aggression held in check by Paul’s decorum; it would be Paul’s occasionally cloying sentiment cut back by John’s unmerciful cynicism. Yet Paul loved all-out rock ’n’ roll, just as John could be capable of brusque tenderness. Examples of total collaboration were rare. More often, one would write half a song and then come to the other for help with the chorus or “middle eight.” The formula was established that whoever had written most of the song took the lead vocal, the other providing harmony. That harmony derived its freshness and energy from the contest being waged within it.
Collaboration was dictated, in any case, by close confinement in tour buses, dressing rooms, and later, aircraft; the pressure of songwriting to order in spaces cleared among newspapers, teacups, and the debris of “the road.” From the early, simple yeah-yeah hits up to the Hard Day’s Night album the songs, whether by John or Paul, are chiefly redolent of a common life on the run. Nor was it still absolutely certain that Lennon-McCartney songs were what the public wanted. Their next, and fourth, album, Beatles for Sale, reverted largely to their old Liverpool and Hamburg stage repertoire: Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music”; Carl Perkins’s “Honey Don’t”; Little Richard’s “Kansas City”; Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love,” a track on which their fans first discovered their almost uncanny powers of mimicry. By covering the songs of these and many others of their rock and soul idols, and openly acknowledging their creative debt, they had reactivated several careers previously in the doldrums, notably Berry’s and Perkins’s, and Holly’s posthumous one. It was thanks to them also that knowing about pop history for the first time became cool.
The importance of George Martin cannot be overemphasized. First of all, he signed them. Second, he did not cheat them. Third, he did not adulterate them. It would have been easy for him, as all-powerful record producer, to insist that each release should carry a B side composed by himself. Martin happened to be of the rare breed who are content to use their talents in improving other people’s work. To Lennon and McCartney he was the editor that all creative promise strikes if it is lucky. He took the raw songs, he shaped and pruned and polished them and, with scarcely believable altruism, asked nothing for himself but his EMI salary and the satisfaction of seeing the songs come out right. As the songs grew more complex, so did Martin’s unsung, unsinging role.
Paul McCartney was, of the two, the more obviously natural musician. Much came from heredity, and the Jim Mac Jazz Band. He had an instinctive grasp of harmony, a gift of phrasing that raised the bass guitar in his hands to an agile, expressive lead instrument. Already proficient in guitar and drums, he was now taking formal piano lessons. Paul developed by following rules, a notion altogether repugnant to John Lennon. John’s music was, like his drawing, bereft of obedience and straight lines, but honest and powerful in a way that Paul’s never dared to be.
Innovators though they had become, they were still as wide open to outside influences and quick to absorb other people’s good ideas as they had been in far-off days when they’d sit in Paul’s front room copying Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins. They still looked as eagerly to America, where scores of new ensembles with round-collared suits and bangs now adopted Beatle-ish names (the Turtles, the Byrds, the Monkees) and used Beatle-ish harmonies and humor to claw back the Scouse-borrowed music of their native land. Even the new habit of calling the former groups “bands” came from John, George, Paul, and Ringo, who would often collectively sign themselves “The Beatles—a band,” like tuba and triangle players from some Yorkshire mining village or the Salvation Army. Many American bands went so far as to adopt Liverpool accents and use Liverpool phrases, despite blissful ignorance as to their meaning. One Monkees song, for instance, was to come out in the United States as “Randy Scouse Git” (hastily changed to “Alternate Title” for its British release).
But the most significant of Britain’s American converts to rock was Bob Dylan, formerly a folk-singing reincarnation of travelin’ man Woody Guthrie and chief standard-bearer for the emergent protest movement. Then, one fateful day, on his car radio, Dylan heard the Animals’ Newcastle-on-Tyne version of New Orleans’ “The House of the Rising Sun.” There and then Dylan abandoned acoustic protest songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” for electric-powered rock, thereby instantly turning the form into one without limitations of subject, expression, or length.
Dylan had also been an early convert to the Beatles, although at the time crediting them with rather more daring than they possessed. When they first met him he told them how blown away he’d been by the “druggy” line in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—“I get high, I get high!” John and Paul had to explain rather sheepishly that they’d actually sung “I can’t hide, I can’t hide!”
John, in particular, now waited for every new Dylan release, hungry for the next giant leap in experimentation it was bound to bring. He also kept a weather eye on the Beach Boys, whom Beatles records had prompted to abandon simple surfing chants for complex urban chorales, developing the harmonic genius of their leader, Brian Wilson. In 1965, too, there was a rising New York band, the Lovin’ Spoonful, whose lead singer/songwriter John Sebastian worryingly seemed to possess the humor of Lennon and the romanticism of McCartney inside one Beatle-shaggy head.
The soundtrack album for Help! brought the disparate characters of John and Paul, for the first time, into open contrast. On the one hand, there were unmistakably “John” songs, like “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” written under Bob Dylan’s influence: sardonic and world-weary, idylls of the morning after. On the other hand there was Paul’s solo performance of a ballad he had been playing around with for weeks under the provisional title of “Scrambled Eggs” but hadn’t liked to bring to the studio because he couldn’t believe its melody had never been used before. Now titled “Yesterday,” it was performed by Paul alone, accompanied by a classical string quartet and no other Beatle vocal or instrumental embellishment whatever. It was immediately covered by a leading British ballad singer, Matt Monro, the first of some two thousand recorded versions.
Rubber Soul, their second album that year, reflected a widening schism belied by the four Carnaby-look Beatles, still barely distinguishable from each other, in its modish fish-eye lens sleeve. Paul and John were by now leading separate—and, as it proved—mutually inimical lives. John’s was the dominant presence, through songs that were fragments of current autobiography—the boredom, in “Nowhere Man,” of sitting at home in his Tudor mansion; the edgy lust of “Norwegian Wood,” a description of infidelity in some London girl’s flat. From Paul came “Michelle,” a love song as sweet and untroubled as his affair with Jane and half its lyrics translated into French as if to impress the highbrow Asher family.
EMI’s Abbey Road studios, whatever other amenities they lacked, were an ideal hideaway. London’s northbound traffic sped in total indifference past the plain-fronted white house with its neat gravel driveway and high front steps. Only the doorman, eyeing the fan pickets posted respectively at the IN and OUT gateway, hinted at anything discordant with St. John’s Wood, acacia bushes, retired publishers, and Austrian au pair girls.
In the house’s rubber-silenced hinterland, Studio Two, that once strictly rationed Holy of Holies, was now consecrated almost exclusively to the Beatles’ use. George Martin likewise no longer looked in his diary to see whether or not he could fit in a session. When the source of EMI’s current three-million-pound profit felt an urge to record, Martin
and his engineer, Norman Smith, obeyed the peremptory summons.
Gone, too, was the producer’s old clock-watching authority. Studio Two at Abbey Road became in effect a rehearsal room where new Beatles songs took shape by methods increasingly prodigal of time and expense. Four-track recording, which had replaced two-track at Abbey Road in late 1963, altered the entire concept of an album session. Whereas Please Please Me had been blasted off in one thirteen-hour marathon, Rubber Soul grew over several weeks as a layering of rhythm, vocal, and instrumental tracks, any of which could be erased and rerecorded. Both John and Paul, in their different ways, embraced these new technical possibilities. Each built his own private studio where demo tapes could be produced as a guide to the final Abbey Road version. Both ran through George Martin’s domain as through a toy shop, alighting with rapture on this or that novelty of sound. They must have that on the track, they would say. Martin, the trained musician, Norman Smith, the trained engineer, would reply that it couldn’t work. Then they found it did work. Studio procedure was to be changed for all time by this whim of iron.
At a certain moment in each session Martin would leave John and Paul and cross the cable-strewn floor to George Harrison, waiting apart from the others, unsmiling with his Gretsch rehearsal guitar. George would then play to Martin whatever solo he had worked out for the song. If Martin did not like it he would lead George to the piano, tinkle a little phrase, and tell him to play that for his solo. Such was the origin of the guitar in “Michelle.” “I was,” Martin admits, “always rather beastly to George.”
In George the world’s ecstasy had as yet produced no answering lift of inspiration. He played lead guitar as he always had, earnestly, a little ponderously. He took his turn at lead singing in a voice whose thick Scouse seemed to mask an underlying embarrassment. Lately, goaded into action by John and Paul’s stupendous output, he, too, had begun to write songs by himself rather than in partnership with either of the other two and with titles unwittingly echoing his rather testy and impatient nature: “Don’t Bother Me”; “Think for Yourself.” Each new album, in fairness, featured a song by George—just one. He was also learning the Indian sitar, an instrument that Richard Lester had added for comic purposes to a scene in Help! “Norwegian Wood” was the first Beatles song to benefit from the wiry whining and wailing of George’s sitar.
As for Ringo, he sat patiently in a corner of the studio, waiting to be called to sing his song or drum as directed, whiling away hours when he was not needed in card games with Neil and Mal.
Their U.K. tour in the winter of 1965 included their last ever performance in Liverpool—though no one realized this at the time. They had intended to visit the Cavern Club and perform under its reeking stone arches, just for old time’s sake, but Brian talked them out of the idea for their own safety. John felt particularly enraged at being unable to move about as he pleased even in his home city. He longed to meet Bill Harry and his other art college cronies again at Ye Cracke and have a quiet pint or two under the mural of Wellington greeting Marshal Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo.
Had they made it to Mathew Street they would have found the Cavern still much the same as when they’d played there, even though it was now world famous as the club that broke the Beatles, and to play there was the objective of every band seeking to follow in their footsteps. There were still the same stone steps, the same reeking arches, the same mingled odors of cheese rind and sweat. Outside, Paddy Delaney the doorman still stood in his dinner jacket and cummerbund, often now greeting celebrities such as Rex Harrison and Lionel Bart as they disembarked from chauffeur-driven limousines.
The Beatles’ last Liverpool concert also was their last chance to revisit the Cavern. Its owner, Ray McFall, had gotten into financial difficulties and, a few weeks later, suddenly announced to Delaney that the bailiffs would be coming in the following morning. The members tried to prevent this by holding an all-night session, then blocking the steps with chairs and setting off all the fire extinguishers. Police sympathetically cleared the demonstrators, then escorted Delaney out in a guard of honor, his immaculate dinner jacket white with foam. The warehouse was demolished soon afterward, and the tunnels beneath, with all their Beatles echoes and memories, obliterated by a car park.
The Beatles’ European and world tour of summer 1966 brought them another, slightly more satisfactory homecoming. The concerts included one in Hamburg, though this time they had to play for only thirty inaudible minutes at the city’s Ernst March Halle sports arena rather than all night on the Reeperbahn. “Don’t try to listen to us,” John told the German support band. “We’re terrible these days.”
There were backstage reunions with old Hamburg friends like Bert Kampfaert and Bettina, the Star-Club barmaid whose friendly nails had raked so many pale young Liverpool backs. John even found his way to Jonhannasbollwerk to see Jim and Lilo Hawke at the Seaman’s Mission and eat a nostalgic plate of Frau Prill’s real English chips. To the disappointment of all four the visitors did not include Horst Fascher, the bouncer whose killer punch had protected them on so many blood-thirsty Star-Club nights, and was once again in a bit of trouble with the law. At their concert, the Beatles dedicated “Roll Over Beethoven” to him, remembering how he loved to step in as their ad hoc vocalist whenever John or Paul were too pissed.
There was also a reunion with Astrid Kirchherr, the woman who had so crucially helped to create the image that now obsessed the world. Astrid’s photographs of those tough-tender child rockers, sitting on the fairground traction engine, had appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the world without any credit—or fee—to her. “It was one of a bundle of prints I’d sent over to Liverpool,” Astrid says now. “Later on, when it turned up in the media, it was credited to UPI. I didn’t sue them; what would have been the point? To me, it was just a photograph of some friends.”
Astrid told the Beatles she’d now given up photography, thinking herself not good enough. She had taken a job in a female drag bar, dancing as required with the “men.” In her black-draped bedroom there was still a blow-up portrait of Stu Sutcliffe above her head. Candles burned night and day in memory of the fifth Beatle whom no one but his mother and sisters in Liverpool now seemed to remember.
The tour’s stop after Hamburg was Tokyo, via the polar route. Because of a typhoon warning their aircraft was forced to land in Anchorage, Alaska. Nat Weiss in New York was roused from sleep by Brian’s voice on the telephone, demanding with some petulance, “Who owns Alaska, Nat? And can you recommend a nice place to stay?”
Their two Tokyo concerts, at the Nippon Budo Kan (Martial Arts Hall), were, not surprisingly, the best organized of the Beatles’ performing career. The promoters explained to Brian that any riot would have brought dishonor upon themselves. Accordingly, the nine-thousand-strong audience had three thousand police to guard them. Backstage, the Beatles were provided with geisha girls, a perpetual tea ceremony, and a Japanese road manager for liaison. Between concerts, in the twenty-four-room Presidential Suite at the Tokyo Hilton, a private bazaar was spread, of radios, cameras, happi coats, and painting sets. The Beatles all bought inks and calligraphy brushes and, having nothing intelligible to watch on television, produced a garish mural on one huge sheet of paper that was later given to the Japanese fan club.
They expected something similar in the Philippines. They were charmed, as are all newcomers to Manila, by a miniature Texas set down among tropical islands, by the skyscrapers, specially earthquake-proofed, the shanties and juke boxes and brilliant jeep taxis, the jungle foliage reflected in a speed cop’s Harley-Davidson. After dark, as the bats bounced like shuttlecocks against the rim of Manila Bay, shotgun blasts at random bespoke Southeast Asia’s most uninhibited autocracy.
The Philippines in those days were still the fiefdom of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, a woman long celebrated for her vanity, her enormous wardrobe, and unscrupulous use of her husband’s absolute power. Herself a Beatles fan, Mrs. Marcos ha
d arranged a lavish garden party at Malacanang, the presidential palace, to introduce them to three hundred handpicked government officials and their families. The invitation delivered to Tony Barrow, however, gave no hint of these elaborate preparations: Even Brian saw no particular necessity to attend.
Manila’s English language newspapers next morning carried the banner headline “Beatles Snub President.” When a president happens also to be a military dictator, his wounded feelings naturally evince widespread sympathy. The concert promoters sympathized by refusing to pay Brian Epstein the Beatles’ concert fee. Other citizens sympathized by telephoning death threats to the British embassy.
Brian, horrified by the furor, did his best to make amends. He asked to appear on Manila television the following night to explain that no snub had been intended. The transmission was almost wiped out by heavy static that, coincidentally, vanished as soon as Brian’s apology came to an end.
Departure from Manila Airport on July 5 was accompanied by ugliness unenvisaged even outside Litherland Town Hall. Deprived of all police protection the Beatles party dashed for the aircraft through a concourse of jeering customs officers; they were jostled, even punched and kicked. The KLM flight for New Delhi took off only after lengthy negotiations between Brian and a Philippines income tax official who refused to let them go until they had paid seven thousand pounds.
En route back from New Delhi to London, exhausted, disillusioned, bruised physically as well as mentally, the Beatles told Brian that was it, they’d had enough. When this tour finally wound its way to an end, there would be no more.
Shout! Page 39