by David Browne
Before he knew it, Starr, joined by Apple’s Neil Aspinall, was on a plane to Nashville by way of Atlanta. Drake wasn’t joking about efficiency. By the time Starr arrived in Nashville on June 22, Drake had already selected a group of songs for him. One by one, the songwriters appeared at Starr’s hotel room to help him learn the material. Arriving at Music City Studio two days later, his hair and beard newly trimmed as if to prepare for more conservative surroundings, Starr found himself in a very different world than the one he’d left behind. Joining Drake in the control room was Scotty Moore, Presley’s original guitar player. The studio musicians gathered around him, a formidable lineup that included guitarists Jerry Reed and Charlie Daniels, were seasoned, no-nonsense, and hardly in awe of Starr’s presence. “You couldn’t ignore that this was a Beatle,” recalled Daniels. “But the guys were not so overwhelmed, by any stretch of the imagination. They were used to working with stars. It was, ‘Hi, Ringo, we’re happy to have you in town—now let’s work.’”
Even when work began, no one was certain that an Englishman slipping into the role of downbeat redneck would make sense. During his first cracks at tackling the songs, Starr was visibly unnerved at the sight of Drake, an army of Nashville studio pros, and a chorus of backup singers waiting on him to complete a vocal. But gradually Starr warmed up, laughing at his own stumbles and putting everyone at ease. By the end of the third day, Nashville’s assembly-line system had worked once more, resulting in fifteen finished songs.
Some of them, like “Without Her” and “Waiting,” were soapy, overbaked weepers that perhaps intentionally buried Starr’s voice. But Drake wisely chose blue-ribbon honky-tonk songs like “I’d Be Talking All the Time” and “Beaucoups of Blues” that cannily played into Starr’s happyloser persona. The musicianship, from Reed’s speedy picking on “$15 Draw” to the airtight clip-clop beat that drove “Fastest Growing Heartache in the West,” was no joke, and the album featured a genuine moment of anti-Vietnam solemnity. “Silent Homecoming” detailed the arrival of a soldier returning home in a coffin. “Proudly he had served his country/In a war he didn’t seem to understand,” Starr sang, making a more profound political comment in song than any of his former bandmates had yet managed.
Throughout the three days, few of the musicians knew what to make of Starr’s presence in the country capitol. Most had little interaction with him, and Starr declined to speak with a Rolling Stone reporter covering the sessions, only answering a few questions from the young son of one of the musicians. No one dared ask him about the Beatles, and the request to cover “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was ignored. “Ringo wasn’t the top country singer I’ve ever heard,” recalled Daniels. “I have to be honest—I’m a fan of Marty Robbins. But it was an admirable thing to do.”
Throughout, Starr remained his affable, unpretentious self. During a break, he and the musicians gathered in an empty lot next door for a quick photo to grace the in-progress album’s artwork. “He was like one of the guys,” said Ben Keith, a local picker recruited to play dobro and steel guitar, “except he had an English accent.” In anticipation of a possible invasion of press or Beatle fans, three plainclothes cops guarded the studio. Their presence proved unnecessary: No one unexpected or dangerous appeared at Music City the entire time Starr was there.
Arthur and Vivian Janov began working their way around the large, unfurnished room at their Primal Scream Institute on Sunset Boulevard. The patients who needed immediate help and were in palpable psychic pain were the Janovs’ first priority. One by one, the Janovs approached the eighteen or so reclining on pillows or sitting on the soft rugs that had replaced the couches and office furniture once in the room. The Janovs wanted the space to be comfortable and comforting—particularly for two of the patients in the room, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
On the other side of the country from Nashville, Lennon was having an atypical summer of his own. Several times a week, he and Ono would leave their rental house on a side street in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air and drive to the Institute. To the surprise of the other patients, they readily settled into the group sessions, which lasted two to three hours each and cost a more than affordable fifty dollars a session. Lennon and Ono’s most intensive conversations, though, occurred in the Janovs’ private office, a small, dimly lit room with padded-wall soundproofing for optimum privacy. “The whole thing,” Arthur Janov recalled, “was to facilitate a return to the past.”
With only Janov at his side (Ono would have her own separate sessions with Vivian Janov), Lennon openly spoke of his personal history. According to Janov, Lennon neither screamed nor curled up in a depressed fetal position. He would sometimes cry but mainly talked—about the Beatles, the sad life of Brian Epstein, and the songs he’d begun writing for an album he’d decided to make on his own. The conversations sometimes continued at the Bel Air home. “I went into a big discourse about religion,” Janov recalled of one conversation there, “and he said, ‘Well, God is a concept by which we measure our pain.’ He would take all these complicated things we were talking about and put them into very simple terms, which was his genius.”
Since Ono was more skeptical of primal scream, her individual sessions with Vivian Janov weren’t as freewheeling. “She came from a very different background,” Vivian Janov said. But during their personal time together, Janov came to realize Ono wanted to use the therapy to repair problems with her and Lennon’s relationship. “They both were in some kind of turmoil over their marriage,” she recalled. “That may have motivated her. She wanted to mend whatever was happening between them.”
The Lennons had planned on staying four months, through the end of August, but the trip was ultimately curtailed. The reasons were never clear. Janov felt Lennon thought the FBI, at Nixon’s request, was monitoring him and attempting to drive him out of the country. Vivian Janov felt he and Ono simply missed home. The fact that the Janovs filmed most of their group primal sessions may have been a factor. Arthur Janov maintained the sessions with Lennon and Ono were never filmed, but that Lennon may have heard they were, and the mere thought of leaked footage was enough to send the couple scurrying back to London. “He probably went to a group where we were filming,” Janov admitted, “but I made damn sure that no film ever got out. And believe me, if I had film I could have been a multimillionaire.”
By late July, they were gone. As a way to acknowledge Janov’s role in helping him reconnect with buried feelings and emotions, Lennon left behind a gift: a songbook of all his Beatle lyrics, each annotated with notes and cartoons. He was leaving another part of himself behind.
Before they returned to England, Lennon and Ono swung up to San Francisco. There, with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone, they finally saw Let It Be. The movie had premiered in the middle of May in New York, then a week later in London and Liverpool. None of the Beatles attended any of the openings, leaving reporters to resort to gawking at actress Joan Collins, writer and comic Spike Milligan (co-creator of The Goon Show, the revered Monty Python precursor), Apple singer Mary Hopkin, and McCartney’s former girlfriend Jane Asher—hardly an A-list of British celebrities. A special train hired to escort the Beatles to the Liverpool event arrived empty.
Lennon’s private premiere amounted to a daytime showing at a local theater in San Francisco. What he and the general public saw was a fairly unblemished chronicle of four men struggling to connect and work together after the thrill had gone. Even in that regard, though, Let It Be was a letdown. The movie’s dramatic highlight was a mildly testy exchange between McCartney and Harrison, as the former attempted to show the latter how to play a new song. “I’ll play, you know, whatever you want me to play,” Harrison said, his voice dipped in barely controlled irritation. “Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.” Otherwise, Let It Be was largely tedious: footage of the band rehearsing, attempting to rehearse, or killing time between rehearsals. Bashing out their new material in
best Cavern Club style reduced sublime songs like “Across the Universe” to clunky thuds. In the course of six short years, the ebullient Beatles of A Hard Day’s Night had been replaced by four grumpier, scruffier men who seemed to be existing in four different worlds. In a strange way, the film’s very dullness was the point: Other than McCartney, who was happy to ham it up for the camera, the others looked disinterested in being Beatles.
Lennon later told Wenner he felt “sad” watching the film. The incessant focus on McCartney and his band-leading ways—and the much smaller amount of footage devoted to Ono—irritated Lennon as well. In another sign that something had ended, the theater was almost empty.
During the first half of the summer, McCartney was at war with the other Beatles on two different, equally frustrating fronts. First were the pop charts. On June 6, McCartney overtook Déjà vu to become the best-selling album in America; Let It Be was stuck at number 2. But what satisfaction McCartney took from those numbers didn’t last. The following week, Let It Be leapt over McCartney to commandeer the number 1 spot, where it remained for four straight weeks.
As a movie, Let It Be was a muddle, and its accompanying album, especially coming after the vacuum-packed cohesion of Abbey Road, was a bit of a mess. It promised spontaneity but delivered it only half the time, in the relatively raw performance of “I Got a Feeling” and off-the-cuff bits of folk songs like “Maggie Mae.” In contrast, the violins and horns Spector had added not only to “The Long and Winding Road” but “I Me Mine” truly did sound as if they’d been inserted at a later date. The applause at the conclusion of “Get Back,” along with Lennon’s instantly famous quip (“I hope we’ve passed the audition”), were grafted onto a studio version of the song. Starting with a cover that featured separate shots of each Beatle, the album felt stitched together with very apparent thread.
Yet for all its blemishes, Let It Be was still remarkable. It was impossible to dismiss an album that featured McCartney’s “Let It Be” and “Get Back,” Lennon’s “Across the Universe,” and Harrison’s English-manor country blues, “For You Blue.” In the movie, “Two of Us” was seen and heard in a coarse electric version dominated by one of McCartney’s more camera-hogging performances. The album version, framed around acoustic guitars and a gentler give-and-take between Lennon and McCartney, was a lovely, touching eulogy. Performances like that were the album’s secret weapon. Far more than anything they’d done since the pre-Sgt. Pepper days, Let It Be captured the sound of the Beatles playing and interacting together as a band. And in another swipe McCartney couldn’t have appreciated, Spector’s choir on “The Long and Winding Road” actually enhanced the emotions in the song in a way that the stripped-down version hadn’t.
McCartney boasted two first-rate, fully realized songs: “Maybe I’m Amazed,” an expression of love and devotion that showcased both McCartney’s most earnest singing and his prowess as a lead guitarist, and “Every Night,” an adult lullaby that again demonstrated McCartney’s innate musicality. But arriving in tandem with his jarring news to the world, the album’s whimsy and offhandedness felt off-putting, even perverse. With its goofy half-songs, instrumentals, and handmade feel, the album was so slight it made “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” the Abbey Road trifle so detested by Lennon, seem like heavy metal. The record’s very lightheartedness felt like an affront to Beatle fans everywhere: He “left” the Beatles to bang around on drums, sing along with Linda, and try to convince fans that the trivial, cloying “Junk” should have been included on the White Album?
The second combat front opened up after both albums were battling it out in stores. Two months earlier, McCartney had done the rest of the band a favor by articulating what no one else wanted to make public: The Beatles were no longer the Beatles. Yet the way in which he’d let the world in on it left a bad taste in the mouths of Harrison, Lennon, Starr, and their friends and partners. “They never expected it to be in the paper,” Chris O’Dell recalled. “Things were not good, but did Paul say, ‘I did an interview in the paper tomorrow?’ No. They were pissed off. It changed the complexion of things a lot.”
The aftershock continued in the interactions between their now separate and warring business teams. In June, John Eastman, part of McCartney’s legal team, sent a letter to Allen Klein informing Klein he’d contacted a tax advisor “for an opinion on the suggested dissolution of the partnership. It would be helpful if you too could secure an opinion.” Revealing how personal things were becoming, Eastman added, with veiled sarcasm, “I suggest that you put your fertile mind to work on all the aspects.”
Klein despised Eastman—a trim, officious, upper-crust type—as much as Eastman disliked him. Among other things, Klein hadn’t been pleased when Eastman reportedly ordered strips of black tape placed over Klein’s address on the back cover of every press review copy of McCartney. (Eastman would neither confirm nor deny the reports.) Klein didn’t respond to Eastman’s June letter, but he made his feelings known in other ways. Shortly after noon on July 29, Apple’s Peter Brown phoned Klein, saying, as he recalled in a later court affidavit, that McCartney “should have some regular monthly payment from the Beatles in order to meet the expenses which he would now be paying himself rather than through Beatles and Co.” (Beatles and Co. was now the official name of their business organization.) The requested amount was 1,500 pounds a month. Since EMI royalties would have to go through ABKCO before they were distributed to Apple and then the Beatles, Klein denied McCartney’s request.
Even within McCartney’s own company, money matters were muddy. In 1968, he’d produced one of Apple’s few non-Beatle hits, Welsh singer Mary Hopkin’s modern-vaudeville pop song “Those Were the Days.” The single had been massive, selling millions of copies around the world. But now Apple wanted $135,575—McCartney’s fee as a producer—deducted from the funds it owed the Beatles “for individual record royalties.” The other Beatles were now being financially punished for one of McCartney’s outside assignments.
As Charles Manson stared at him, an “X” mark freshly carved into his forehead with a razor blade (the infamous swastika came later), Vincent Bugliosi prepared to tell the world why Manson had convinced some of his followers to kill. Bugliosi knew some in the legal community would think the sad-eyed deputy district attorney of Los Angeles County was crazy. But now, in the Hall of Justice on the morning of July 24, the first day of the State of California vs. Charles Manson and six of his followers, Bugliosi knew the time had arrived to tell the world that the Beatles indirectly had something to do with it.
Rumors about the connection between Manson and the Beatles had first circulated in February, when an unnamed source in the District Attorney’s office told the Los Angeles Times that prosecutors in the case were examining a possible link between the killers and the White Album. The story spread when it was picked up by the New York Post the following day. As laid out by the source—not Bugliosi, who denied talking to anyone in the media before the trial had begun—the idea seemed too fantastical to be true. Manson envisioned a coming war between blacks and whites in which only Manson and his followers would survive. The best way to inaugurate the war was to slaughter a bunch of white people in Los Angeles and make it appear as if African Americans had committed the crimes.
The story only grew stranger as it continued. To Manson, the entire tale was laid out in the White Album. He interpreted “Honey Pie” (which beckoned someone to “sail across the ocean”) as the Beatles’ message to him. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” was a communiqué to blacks telling them to prepare to rise up and fight; “Blackbird” supposedly served the same purpose. The war itself would be called “Helter Skelter,” another song on the record; the battle was laid out in the chaotic noise of “Revolution 9.” In another supposed sign of his bond with the Beatles, Manson claimed he’d renamed Susan Atkins “Sadie” long before the album’s “Sexy Sadie.” On it went—all of it, according to Bugliosi’s theory, culminating in the grisly murders the previous August
of eight-months-pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, hairdresser Jay Sebring, writer Wojiciech Frykowski, teenager Steven Parent, and supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary.
When the Times and Post stories emerged, the prevailing feeling was disbelief; Rolling Stone ran a skeptical commentary on the reports. But Bugliosi was convinced after two Family members, Brooks Poston and Paul Watkins, told him separately about Manson’s consuming obsession with the album.
In the valleys and canyons of Los Angeles, Manson’s ties with rock and roll were well known; he’d spooked plenty in the music community. Two years earlier, he and members of the Family had crashed at the home of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson; Wilson went so far as to oversee demos of Manson singing his own songs. One of them, “Cease to Exist” (retitled “Never Learn Not to Love” by Wilson), wound up on a Beach Boys album. Returning to his apartment one day, Danny Kortchmar, James Taylor’s lead guitarist, found his place ransacked, guitars and equipment gone. Later, Kortchmar heard the Family may have been responsible; Manson, he heard, dispatched members of his flock to rob musicians’ homes so Manson would have the gear necessary to fulfill his fantasy of being a rock star. Manson had also been angry with record producer Terry Melcher, who’d expressed interest in recording an album of Manson’s songs until he saw the dark side of the diminutive cult leader. Melcher had previously lived at the Cielo Drive house where the Tate murders were committed.
Near Neil Young’s home in Topanga Canyon, everyone knew about Manson. While staying in the house of David Briggs, Young’s friend and producer, Nils Lofgren heard the stories about Manson’s crew and saw the weapons Briggs and his friends were storing in case they came by. One day, Lofgren and Bobby Morse, one of Briggs’ roommates, went to Briggs’ home to pick up something for a session. “Oh, no, it’s that crazy bitch,” Morse said, gesturing at a girl in front of the house, standing beside a car with a flat tire. The girl asked to see another of their roommates. “He’s not here,” Morse said curtly. “You gotta get out of here.” They quickly replaced her tire, but when the girl insisted on staying, Morse told her she couldn’t. “They’re bad people,” Morse told Lofgren after she left, “and we don’t want ’em here.” Months later, when Manson and Family members were arrested on charges of murder, Lofgren recognized the girl as one of the accomplices.