1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  A Hard Day’s Night’s subtext is the generation gap, with McCartney’s jealous grandfather trying to sabotage the group. The second film (however unconsciously) heralds the hippies’ immersion in Indian culture. On the surface, its racist caricatures of Hindus as human sacrificers is pure xenophobia. The leader of the cult is even played by a white Australian, Leo McKern. But, as noted, it is the shoot that whetted Harrison’s interest in the sitar. And while the group filmed in the Bahamas, on Harrison’s twenty-second birthday a local swami named Vishnudevananda appeared and gave the Beatles copies of The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. Perhaps the yogi saw the giant statue of the Hindu goddess Kali rising out of the ocean while all the characters fought on the beach in the ridiculous climax.

  The yoga book would later inform the lyrics of Harrison’s “Within You, Without You”: “When man realizes that nothing is outside and everything is within himself, then he will be able to transcend the limitations of space and time. In Yoga, this stage is known as self-realization or God realization, where there is no difference between the knower, knowledge, and the known; and where the past and the future merge with the present—the eternal ‘now’ of the Hindus.”14 Eastern philosophy would become the tool Harrison relied on to help him cope with Beatlemania.

  * * *

  After the Byrds’ jaunt through the states in the second half of July, they flew to England for a string of dates on August 3–21. One of the Beatles’ old publicists, Derek Taylor, had taken on the job of breaking the Byrds in the United Kingdom after “Mr. Tambourine Man” made No. 1 there. He almost destroyed them when he dared hype them as “America’s answer to the Beatles,” because the Byrds were not tight musically and could not withstand the scrutiny; Michael Clarke had been drumming for only a year. They got a bad reception, but the Beatles befriended them.

  A year before, Roger McGuinn had been inspired to start playing Beatles songs to the folkies because he believed the Fabs were consciously “doing their version of the ’50s rock ’n’ roll rockabilly sound and the folk thing combined,” using folk harmonies and chord changes. But now he learned that “They didn’t know how to fingerpick and they didn’t play banjos or mandolins or anything. They weren’t coming from where I was coming from at all, which I’d given them credit for. I thought they knew all that stuff and were just being real slick about it. But it was just kind of an accident. It was a great accident.”15

  On August 13 the Beatles flew to New York for their third American tour. They taped their final Ed Sullivan appearance on the fourteenth, and then played the first rock concert in a sports arena, on Sunday, August 15, at Shea Stadium in Queens, home to the New York Mets baseball team and the New York Jets football team.

  Opening for them were soul saxophonist great King Curtis (who would play on Lennon’s solo Imagine album), Motown singer Brenda Holloway (who Dick Clark claimed had the most fantastic voice he’d ever heard),16 Cannibal and the Headhunters (an East LA Mexican American band whose hit “Land of a Thousand Dances” was later covered by Wilson Pickett), and the instrumental group Sounds Incorporated, whom the Beatles knew from their Hamburg days.

  The Beatles kicked in with “Twist and Shout,” and for the length of their twelve-song, thirty-minute set were unable to hear one another over the audience pandemonium, despite the hundred-watt amplifiers Vox had designed for the event. “Can you hear me?” Lennon called before “Dizzy Miss Lizzy.” “Hello?!”

  McCartney bounced up and down even more than Herman’s Hermits’ Peter Noone for “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and shrieked “I’m Down,” while Lennon cracked Harrison up by playing the keyboard with his elbow. Jagger, Richards, and their manager, Oldham, watched from behind the dugout as guards chased fans across the field. Also in attendance were McCartney’s and Starr’s future spouses, Linda Eastman and Barbara Bach, before they knew them. The sound quality was poor, so for the subsequent concert film, the Beatles secretly played some of the numbers live in the studio to overdub onto the footage.

  The $304,000 gross was the biggest in music history up until that time. The Beatles took $160,000 for themselves. The show’s sold out crowd of 55,600 would stand as the concert attendance record for eight years. Even at the end of the decade, the Stones and Led Zeppelin would play to arenas with only 18,000 capacities. It wouldn’t be until 1973 that Zeppelin broke the Beatles’ record, at Tampa Stadium with 56,800, at which point the era of stadium rock began. The promoter who organized the Shea event, Sid Bernstein, later claimed that Lennon told him in the 1970s, misty-eyed, “Sid, at Shea Stadium, I saw the top of the mountain.” Whether Lennon really did say that, it was the peak for the Beatles’ live career. Next year, when they returned to Shea on August 23, eleven thousand seats went unsold, perhaps due to the backlash over Lennon’s comment that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” After 1966 the Beatles would cease touring permanently.

  The Beatles had a five-day break in the Byrds’ hometown Los Angeles on August 23–27, during which time they rented Zsa Zsa Gabor’s home at 2850 Benedict Canyon Drive, a horseshoe-shaped mansion on stilts off Mulholland Drive. Joan Baez and the actresses Eleanor Bron (Help!) and Peggy Lipton (later on the TV show The Mod Squad) hung out there. Women tried to climb up the canyon to get in. When some fans rented a helicopter and circled above at three hundred feet, Beatles manager Epstein requested a no-fly zone over the house.

  Harrison recalled, “John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid, because we couldn’t relate to them any more … It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable: it was something that had to be experienced, because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think.”17

  In New York they had scored some acid-dosed sugar cubes wrapped in tinfoil. On August 24, Starr did one with Lennon and Harrison, but McCartney declined. Lennon said, “Paul felt very out of it ’cause we were all a bit cruel. It’s like, ‘We’re taking it and you’re not.’ … I think George was pretty heavy on it. We were probably both the most cracked. I think Paul’s a bit more stable than George and I. I don’t know about straight. Stable.”18

  The Byrds had just returned to town, so the Beatles invited them over to drop acid with them; McGuinn and Crosby were the only ones who came. McGuinn said, “It was like going to see the president or something. You had to go down in a limousine, and there were screaming girls on either side. Then the guards would open the gates, and you’d drive in to the estate and they’d close again, and everybody would be pressed up against the fence.”

  Girls who had managed to sneak in hid under tables and in the cupboards. One climbed in through the window while a tripping Starr tried to shoot pool with the wrong end of his pool cue. “Wrong end? So what fuckin’ difference does it make?”19

  The Beatles and the Byrds went into the master bathroom and sat in a large, sunken tub, passing around a guitar and playing each other their favorite songs. Both Lennon and McGuire picked “Be-Bop-a-Lula” as their favorite ’50s rocker.20 Crosby talked about how he had watched some of Indian virtuoso Ravi Shankar’s sessions at World Pacific Studios, where the Byrds’ manager had been an engineer.

  Then actor Peter Fonda, future star of the LSD movie The Trip, arrived. McGuinn and Fonda had become friends three years earlier when McGuinn was playing guitar for Bobby Darin in Vegas. It was trendy to talk about death on acid because of Leary’s conflation of the drug with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so Fonda mentioned, “I know what it’s like to be dead.” On his eleventh birthday he’d shot himself in the stomach but survived; a year earlier his mother had killed herself by slitting her own throat in a sanitarium.

  Lennon recalled, “We didn’t want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip, and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing (some from Playboy, I believe), and the whole thing was really beautiful and ‘Sixties.’ And this guy—who I really didn’t know, he hadn’t made Easy Rider or anything—kept coming over, wearing shades, saying ‘I know what i
t’s like to be dead,’ and we kept leaving him because he was so boring. It was scary, when you’re flying high: ‘Don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to know what it’s like to be dead!’”21

  Harrison said, “He was showing us his bullet wound. He was very uncool.”22

  On a cheerier note, McGuinn told Harrison how he discovered the Byrds’ signature twelve-string sound after seeing Harrison play the Rickenbacker in A Hard Day’s Night. Harrison was touched by the respect accorded to him by the LA group, as he was used to being in his bandmates’ shadow. The jangle pop style that the Beatles and the Byrds were developing together would be an integral part of the Beatles’ next album.

  * * *

  On the Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan appearance, Sullivan read a telegram that Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, had sent in Presley’s name congratulating them. But Presley put off meeting them for over a year. McCartney said, “We didn’t feel brushed off; we felt we deserved to be brushed off. After all, he was Elvis, and who were we to dare to want to meet him?”23

  Actually, Presley didn’t want to meet them because he knew he was in a slump. Though not even he realized it, he produced an album or two worth of good-to-classic songs every year through 1964. The problem was, the great songs were mixed in with crappy throwaways from his movies and slapped together with no rhyme or reason on weak soundtrack albums. The Beatles and Dylan were just now bringing cohesion to the album as an art form; Presley’s discography was the epitome of what not to do.

  Meanwhile, when he tried acting in an ambitious movie such as Wild in the Country, the film didn’t do well at the box office, whereas mindless fluff movies made him 1964’s highest-paid actor in Hollywood. So he tuned out on uppers and downers and phoned it in for three flicks a year. He became more interested in buying motorcycles or horses to ride with his entourage, the Memphis Mafia. Sometimes he’d send them out to buy every flashbulb in town so they could dump them into the swimming pool and shoot them with BB guns.

  He finally let the Colonel talk him into inviting the Fab Four to his mansion in Bel Air on August 27. It’s interesting to note the protocol of Beatle meetings in ’64 and ’65: Dylan and the Byrds came to them, but the Beatles called on Presley.

  En route, the Beatles got high in the backseat of their limo and started cracking up. At 11:00 p.m., they pulled up past the fans gathered at Presley’s gates and parked next to the King’s Rollses and Cadillacs. One of them reminded the others that they were going to see Presley, and they all piled out of the car laughing, trying to pretend they weren’t baked.

  Presley was just back in the States from shooting Paradise, Hawaiian Style, tan in his red shirt, black windbreaker, and gray pants. “Oh, there you are!” Lennon joked nonchalantly. Presley smiled and shook everyone’s hand and led them into his huge living room with thick white carpet, two pool tables, and a bar.

  Lennon and McCartney sat on Presley’s right on a crescent white couch, Harrison and Starr on his left. The managers and the Memphis Mafia watched in the background. The jukebox played “Mohair Sam,” Charlie Rich’s Elvis-style hit, along with singles by Cilla Black, Muddy Waters, Presley, and the Beatles. Elvis played along on bass, the amplifier next to his huge color TV. Presley had the first remote control the Beatles had ever seen.

  Lennon said in his Peter Sellers/Dr. Strangelove voice, “Zo, zis ees the famous Elvis.” Later, he admitted he was nervous as hell, as were all the Beatles, staring in silence at the man who’d inspired them to become musicians. Ten years before, after Presley was discovered by Howlin’ Wolf’s producer Sam Phillips, his “morally insane” pelvis had hammered away at puritan repression. When Lennon first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” he didn’t understand the words, but it made his hair stand on end. Harrison was thirteen and riding his bike when he heard the song come out a window, giving him a “rock and roll epiphany.”24 For McCartney, Presley was the first guy who not only sounded rock and roll but also looked it.

  Finally, Presley said, “If you damn guys are gonna sit here and stare at me all night I’m gonna go to bed.”

  That broke the ice, and Presley asked them about the recent Shea Stadium concert and how many hits they’d written. Lennon asked him if he was working on his next film, and Presley said, “Ah sure am. Ah play a country boy with a guitar who meets a few gals along the way, and ah sing a few songs.”25 The Beatles glanced at each other, and then Presley and his manager cackled and explained that any time they varied from that formula they lost money.

  But Lennon started into rough waters when he asked why Presley didn’t do rock anymore, like his old Sun records. Presley said his movie schedule was to blame, but that maybe he’d do another one.

  “Then we’ll buy it,” Lennon said tactlessly.

  Lennon noticed a lamp from last year’s presidential election that read “All the Way with LBJ.” According to journalist Chris Hutchins, who was there as a friend of both Presley’s and the Beatles’, Lennon started making some antiwar comments that annoyed Presley, who had served in the army.

  Priscilla came in, and Lennon started making eyes at her. Hutchins wrote, “Lennon was distracted by Priscilla’s shapely legs as she walked to the bar where I was savoring an orange juice. As far as I can recall, nobody drank alcohol that night. ‘You’ve made a big hit with Mr. Lennon,’ I told her. ‘Then that’s his first mistake,’ she replied. ‘Elvis is very jealous.’”26

  Presley quickly had his Mafia escort Priscilla out. McCartney later said, “I can’t blame him, although I don’t think any of us would have made a pass at her. That was definitely not on—Elvis’ wife, you know! That was unthinkable.”27

  Still, it was starting to seem like Lennon had some sort of Oedipal desire to kill (or at least seriously piss off) his rock-and-roll father. Always the diplomat, McCartney asked if they could play some music. Presley produced guitars for a jam session, apologizing to Starr for not having drums. Starr beat on the furniture as the group sang “I Feel Fine.”

  “Coming along quite promising on bass, Elvis,” McCartney said.

  Starr played pool with some of the Mafia. The Colonel and Beatles manager Epstein gambled at the roulette table. Harrison tried to find out if anyone had pot, but the Mafia were amphetamine-and-booze southerners, though Presley’s New Age hairdresser, Larry Geller, may have shared a joint with him out by the pool.

  There was some talk of the Beatles singing in Presley’s upcoming movie Paradise, Hawaiian Style. Then the group invited Presley to visit them the next day. Presley was politely noncommittal. On his way out, Lennon cried, “Long live the King!”28 The artists’ respective fans massed outside the gates chanted, “Elvis!” and “Beatles!” at each other.

  Presley didn’t show up at the Beatles’ place the next day, though some of his entourage visited. Perhaps regretting his gracelessness of the day before, Lennon asked them to tell Presley that “if it hadn’t been for him, I would have been nothing.”29 He said Presley was the only American they had wanted to meet. “Not that he wanted to meet us!”30 Lennon said Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin only tried to hang out with them because of the women.

  When the Mafia relayed Lennon’s message to Presley, he just smiled. Presley was notably more welcoming when singer Tom Jones visited him on his movie set. Presley told Jones he knew every song on Jones’s album and even sang them to him.31

  Ironically, the Beatles and Presley shared more interests than they knew. Urged on by his hairdresser Geller, for the last year and a half Presley had been devouring a whole raft of spiritual books, including the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Cosmic Consciousness, The Infinite Way, Beyond the Himalayas, The Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East, The Prophet, and The Impersonal Life.

  On March 5, driving back from Graceland to Hollywood to shoot possibly his worst movie, Harum Scarum, he expressed frustration to Geller in Amarillo that he had been studying for a year but had not had a religious experience. Then, outside Flagstaff, as Presley stared out the windshield in
awe, he saw the clouds form the face of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. “Why Stalin? Why Stalin? Of all people, what’s he doing up there?”

  He pulled the car over and ran out into the desert, followed by Geller. When Geller caught up to him, Presley was crying, “It’s God!” He hugged Geller joyfully. “I saw the face of Stalin and I thought to myself, Why Stalin? Is it a projection of something that’s inside of me? Is God trying to show me what he thinks of me? And then it happened! The face of Stalin turned right into the face of Jesus, and he smiled at me, and every fiber of my being felt it.”32

  One of Presley’s favorite books was Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, and during the filming of Harum Scarum, on March 17, he went to the Pacific Palisades, California, ashram of one of Yogananda’s disciples, Sri Daya Mata (originally Faye Wright). He joined her Self-Realization Fellowship and would often go there to read and meditate.

  He also read The Doors of Perception and made all the Memphis Mafia read Leary’s Psychedelic Experience. He tried LSD on December 28, with Priscilla, Geller, and entourage member Jerry Schilling. At one point, Priscilla sobbed and told Presley he didn’t really love her. But most of the trip was beautiful, as they looked at his tropical fish and the drops of dew on the lawn, though they never tried it again.33

  Presley’s Memphis Mafia did not respect his spiritual studies, and behind his back called Geller “the swami” or “Rasputin.” Presley tried to get Priscilla to read Autobiography of a Yogi, but it put her to sleep, in contrast to Harrison’s future wife, Pattie Boyd, who took him to his first Maharishi lecture. As Harrison delved deeper into Indian mysticism, his band members supported his exploration and eventually joined him on his trek to India three years later. It’s sad to think of how much more Presley and the Beatles could have had to talk about, had they only known they were both interested in spirituality.