1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  * * *

  Back in June, when McCartney recorded “I’m Down,” he wrapped a take by uttering, “Plastic soul, man, plastic soul,” which is what the band had heard black guys call Mick Jagger. The phrase became the album title, twisted into a pun on tennis shoes. They recorded a blues track called “12 Bar Original” that recalled Tommy Tucker’s “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” ultimately held off the album. The LP’s soulful opening track almost never survived, either.

  McCartney arrived at a writing session at Lennon’s with an idea about “Golden Rings,” but it was a nonstarter. One of them wanted to throw in the towel, but the other kept pushing, “No, we can do it.” It fell into place when they changed the title to “Drive My Car,” a blues term for having sex. It turned into a little story about an actress who tells a guy he can be her limo driver. Proudly, he counters that he can do better than being her chauffeur, but she’s so sexy she talks him into it. Then, in the last verse, she admits that she doesn’t have a car.

  The key was getting a deep bass sound. Harrison listened to Otis Redding’s “Respect” and suggested that he and McCartney play something similar on bass and guitar at the same time.9 But Abbey Road Studios couldn’t get a bass sound as loud or as full as the black labels. Next time, the Beatles fumed, they’d record at Stax.

  “It needs cowbell,” Lennon said, like “In the Midnight Hour.” It was the first Beatles session to go past midnight, wrapping at 12:15 a.m.

  “Satisfaction” had challenged the Beatles’ supremacy—Stones manager Oldham called it “The National Anthem”10—by sweeping the masses onto the dance floor with its lyrics of sexual frustration. So Lennon fought back in “Day Tripper,” with his own dance riff about a “prick teaser,” and then gave the line to McCartney to sing as “big teaser.” Lennon joins in for the chorus, and they remake “Twist and Shout” for the instrumental break. The main riff itself was inspired by Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step,”11 just as it had been for “I Feel Fine,” recorded almost exactly a year earlier. Critic Dave Marsh said “Day Tripper” was the closest the Beatles had ever come to making a soul record, and Otis Redding put it in his set.

  Many of the Beatles’ songs chronicle the old-fashioned male’s frustrations with the modern, independent woman. McCartney wanted Jane Asher by his side constantly. Unfortunately for him, she was determined to pursue her acting career. Thus many of McCartney’s finest mid-’60s tracks rose out of their arguments. “[Songwriting] is often a good way to talk to someone or to work your own thoughts out. It saves you going to a psychiatrist, you allow yourself to say what you might not say in person.”12

  After he broke up with Asher, McCartney found a woman who truly would accompany him here, there, and everywhere, even onstage, Linda Eastman—and angst largely disappeared from his work in the 1970s.

  “You Won’t See Me” was written in the Asher house while she was out of town doing a play. “I’m Looking through You” was a disillusioned reprimand, as if McCartney weren’t himself fooling around on tour—he felt that as long as he wasn’t married, it wasn’t cheating. Except for “Yesterday,” McCartney’s songs of the era seldom take responsibility for the conflict.

  Still, the band needed more material, always more material. Racking his brain, Lennon remembered a melody McCartney used to play back in the old days. When Lennon was in art school, existentialists were trendy. When McCartney went to one of the art school parties, he saw a bohemian with goatee and striped shirt singing a French song. McCartney developed a parody where he would mumble words as if he were French, trying to be mysterious for the ladies. Lennon suggested McCartney put some words to that melody. So McCartney hired a friend to help him with the French lyrics, and for the phrasing in the bridge, he imitated Nina Simone in her recent cover of “I Put a Spell on You,” again per Lennon’s suggestion. “Michelle” won the Grammy for Song of the Year and was the forty-second most played song of the century, per BMI, even though it was never released as a single by the Beatles.

  * * *

  Rubber Soul was the last time Lennon’s persona on record was “normal” for many years. The next album would see him plunging into the lysergic vortex, followed by reinventions as a mystic, peace guru, radical, and junkie before staggering back toward the middle of the road circa 1973. But on October 18, he offered “In My Life,” which would go on to be a wedding (and funeral) standard.

  Remembering journalist Kenneth Alsop’s encouragement to write something like his books, Lennon imagined a bus trip from his old house into town. “I had Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, Tram Sheds—and it was the most boring sort of ‘What I Did On My Holidays Bus Trip’ song and it wasn’t working at all. I cannot do this! I cannot do this! But then I laid back and these lyrics started coming to me about the places I remember … And it was, I think, my first real major piece of work. Up till then it had all been sort of glib and throwaway. And that was the first time I consciously put my literary part of myself into the lyric.”13

  McCartney adapted Marv Tarplin’s guitar intro from “The Tracks of My Tears” for the beginning. They knew they needed something special for the instrumental, but didn’t know what, so they left an empty space when they recorded the rhythm track. Then producer George Martin had an inspiration. He overdubbed a keyboard part, as he had on many Beatles tracks, but this time he played it slower than normal, then sped up the recording to make it sound like a harpsichord. The group’s next phase of studio experimentation was beginning.

  Lennon’s “Girl” sings of a relationship with S/M overtures, with an aloof, dominating woman who believes pain leads to pleasure. “There is no such thing as the girl; she was a dream … It was about that girl—that turned out to be Yoko, in the end—the one that a lot of us were looking for.”14 Lennon made sharp intakes of breath into the mike to sound like he was either taking a hit from a joint or having sex. McCartney added a Zorba-like bit he had heard played on a bouzouki during a holiday in Greece.

  The band liked the “la la la”s the Beach Boys sing in “You’re So Good to Me” on the Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) album. So, for backing vocals, they had the idea to sing “dit dit dit”s, which soon morphed into “tit tit tit”s. They had already gotten “prick teaser” past Martin. This time, during the playback, Martin asked, “Was that ‘dit dit’ or ‘tit tit’ you were singing?”

  “Oh, ‘dit dit,’ George, but it does sound a bit like that, doesn’t it?”

  In the car, the Beatles broke down laughing. Martin had done comedy records for The Goon Show with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, so he probably knew anyway.

  “Run for Your Life” is the flip side of “Girl.” Now Lennon is the sadist, recycling the lyric from Presley’s “Baby Let’s Play House,” that he’d rather see his woman dead than with another man. Beyond the hypocrisy of an epic womanizer being jealous, there is the threatening tone already apparent in earlier tracks such as “No Reply” and “You Can’t Do That.” His book In His Own Write makes some jokes about domestic abuse: “Not even his wife’s battered face could raise a smile on poor Frank’s head … A few swift blows had clubbed her mercifully to the ground, dead.”15 Some years later, after Yoko Ono’s influence turned him into a feminist, Lennon proclaimed “Run for Your Life” his least favorite Beatles song and said he regretted writing it.

  * * *

  The meeting with the Byrds the August before had inspired Harrison to write his first classic, “If I Needed Someone.” He was heading toward marriage with Pattie Boyd, so the lyrics addressed all the women of the world, saying that had he met them earlier, it might have worked out, but now he was too much in love (but give me your number just in case). The band got down the rhythm track, highlighted by McCartney’s “drastically arpeggiated”16 bass, in one take, and then overdubbed the soaring harmonies and tambourine. Harrison sent an advance copy to the Byrds through publicist Derek Taylor, with a note: “This is for Jim [McGuinn],” Harrison told Taylor. “Tell Jim and David that ‘If I Needed Someone
’ is the riff from ‘The Bells of Rhymney’ and the drumming from ‘She Don’t Care about Time,’ or my impression of it.”17 The sound was so transcendent that Lennon adopted it for his own “Nowhere Man,” recorded a week later.

  The latter song had its roots in Lennon’s restlessness living in the suburb of Weybridge, outside London. “[It] won’t do at all. I’m just stopping at it, like a bus stop. Bankers and stockbrokers live there; they can add figures, and Weybridge is what they live in, and they think it’s the end, they really do. I think of it every day—me in my Hansel and Gretel house. I’ll take my time; I’ll get my real house when I know what I want. You see, there’s something else I’m going to do, something I must do, only I don’t know what it is. That’s why I go ’round painting and taping and drawing and writing and that, because it may be one of them. All I know is, this isn’t it for me.”18

  In his Hansel and Gretel house, Lennon spent five hours one morning trying to write a “song that was meaningful and good.”19 The deadline to get Rubber Soul out in time for Christmas sales was upon them. “Nothing would come. I was cheesed off and went for a lie-down, having given up.” Soon McCartney would be coming around to lend a hand. “Then I thought of myself as Nowhere Man sitting in his nowhere land.”20 The song “came, words and music, the whole damn thing, as I lay down … So letting it go is what the whole game is. You put your finger on it, it slips away, right? You know, you turn the lights on, and the cockroaches run away; you can never grasp them.”

  The Byrds’ McGuinn said that Dylan had shocked Lennon by pointing out that he had nothing to say. Lennon said, “For years on Beatles tours, Brian Epstein had stopped us from saying anything about Vietnam or the war. He wouldn’t allow questions about it.”21 The blindness of “Nowhere Man” echoes the deaf masses of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Sound of Silence.” (Also, Lennon really was practically blind without his glasses.) But unlike those fatalistic songs, Lennon exhorts the Nowhere Man to get out there and see what he’s been missing—the world is at his command, if he just realizes his power.

  Just as the Beatles chased more bass for their soul tracks, they tried to out-treble the Byrds for the folk-rock tracks “Nowhere Man” and “If I Needed Someone.” “They’re among the most treble-y guitars I’ve ever heard on record,” McCartney boasted.

  The engineer said, “Alright, I’ll put full treble on it,” and we said, “That’s not enough.” He said, “But that’s all I’ve got.” And we replied, “Well, put that through another lot of faders and put full treble up on that. And if that’s not enough we’ll go through another lot of faders.” They said, “We don’t do that,” and we would say, “Just try it … if it sounds crappy we’ll lose it, but it might just sound good.” You’d then find, “Oh, it worked,” and they were secretly glad because they had been the engineer who put three times the allowed value of treble on a song. I think they were quietly proud of those things.22

  Harrison and Lennon play in unison, as they did a year before on “I Feel Fine,” on their Sonic Blue Stratocasters. McCartney and Starr lock into one of their most supple drum and bass grooves. The instrumental climaxes with the sound of a bell, like an epiphany.

  * * *

  “In the beginning was the Word,” begins the Gospel of John in the New Testament. In Lennon and McCartney’s “The Word,” they sing that they have seen the light, and their mission is to spread love and sunshine. But there is an eerie, almost discordant edge to the church organ, as if they sense that messianic ambitions don’t come without risk. Lennon and Harrison’s future spiritual songs, “Imagine” and “My Sweet Lord,” would disturb psychotic Beatle stalkers Mark David Chapman and Michael Abram, turning the movie Help! tragically real.

  The band had been singing about love for years, but this was a new kind of love, agape, the nonromantic form that embraced all humanity, the precursor to “All You Need Is Love” and Lennon’s peace anthems. In a few years, Lennon would determine that being an antiwar activist was the best use of his power, moving in the opposite trajectory of Dylan, who escaped into seclusion with his family.

  For “The Word,” McCartney said, “we smoked a bit of pot, then we wrote out a multicolored lyric sheet, the first time we’d ever done that. We normally didn’t smoke when we were working. It got in the way of songwriting, because it would just cloud your mind up—‘Oh, shit, what are we doing?’ It’s better to be straight. But we did this multicolor thing.”23

  A year later, Yoko Ono came by McCartney’s house asking for song lyrics she could give to avant-garde composer John Cage, who collected manuscripts. McCartney didn’t have any, but he sent her on to Lennon, who gave her the colorful lyric sheet of the “The Word.” In a few years, she would become his partner in his antiwar efforts.

  * * *

  When interviewers asked Lennon about LSD in August, he said he didn’t know much about it. But by October he was trumpeting it in the title of “Day Tripper,” which he wanted to be the next single. The title was a pun on day-trippers who journey somewhere but come home the same night, in the sense both of a girl who wouldn’t commit full time to him in a relationship and of “weekend hippies,” people who maybe partied with psychedelics a little on the weekend but then went back to their conventional lives. Ten months after Dylan sang about the drug-centric counterculture in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the lifestyle was now established enough for Lennon to critique a woman’s commitment to it.

  But the other band members believed “We Can Work It Out” was a more commercial choice for the single. That song would stand as one of the last Beatles compositions to feature different parts written by each member of the songwriting team. It was predominantly McCartney’s piece, but Lennon wrote the bridge about life being too short to waste time fighting. Recording the piece took eleven hours, the longest time spent on a track to date. Harrison had the idea to do it like a German waltz. Lennon used a Salvation Army harmonium in his endless quest for new colors.

  Still, Lennon argued vehemently that “Day Tripper” be the A side. They compromised with a double-A-side single, though, as the others predicted, McCartney’s effort was more popular, making it to No. 1 in the United States while “Day Tripper” made No. 5. “We Can Work It Out” turned out to be the group’s fastest-selling hit since McCartney’s previous A side, “Can’t Buy Me Love.” It was also the last of the Beatles’ streak of six U.S. No. 1 singles in a row.

  “We Can Work It Out” was inspired by McCartney’s fights with Asher, with the singer imploring a woman to see it his way (though not offering to compromise), and it resonated with troubled couples everywhere. But the song was broad enough to hold numerous meanings. Some listeners applied it to the U.S. racial divide, some to the hope that the war in Vietnam could be averted.

  Now the band just needed an album cover. Robert Freedman photographed them at Lennon’s house in brown suede jackets, then later regrouped with the band so they could pick which shot to use. McCartney recalled, “Whilst projecting the slides on to an album-sized piece of white cardboard, Bob inadvertently tilted the card backwards. The effect was to stretch the perspective and elongate the faces. We excitedly asked him if it was possible to print the photo in this way.”24 Like the fish-eye lens cover of June’s Mr. Tambourine Man, the photo, stretching as it does like The Ad Lib’s table during Lennon and Harrison’s first acid trip, announced the onset of psychedelia, adding another layer to the pun of the album’s title.

  25

  Christmas Time Is Here

  A Charlie Brown Christmas brings a new honesty about psychotherapy while decrying consumerism; the Byrds hit No. 1 with words from Ecclesiastes; Rubber Soul inspires Brian Wilson to create the greatest rock album ever; Johnny Cash tangles with the Klan; and Stevie Wonder comes of age.

  As the cultural shifts in race relations, sexual mores, drug use, and patriotism shook the windows and rattled the walls, a heightened sense of mass anxiety was only natural. And as a new candor began to unfold, neurosis
became the common denominator in everything from John Lennon’s angst-ridden confessionals such as “I’m a Loser” and “Help!” to the troubled superheroes of Marvel Comics.

  In the April 1 edition of the Village Voice, Sally Kempton wrote that the “maladjusted adolescent Spider-Man” was “the only overtly neurotic superhero I have ever come across. Spider-Man has a terrible identity problem, a marked inferiority complex, and a fear of women. He is antisocial, castration-ridden, racked with Oedipal guilt, and accident-prone.”1 Spider-Man went to a psychiatrist—though, unfortunately, the shrink turned out to be the villain Mysterio in disguise.

  Freudian theories, such as subliminal effects on the subconscious, the Oedipus complex, and compensation, began making their way into the culture in the 1920s, through intellectuals and artists. By 1957, up to 14 percent of Americans had undergone some form of psychotherapy, particularly as it was used to try to help soldiers integrate back into civilian life.2 Many still feared that going to a “head shrinker” implied that one was crazy, but between 1950 and 1975, the number of psychologists increased eightfold.3

  Eternal patient Woody Allen made his screenwriting and acting debut in What’s New Pussycat? It was the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year, featuring Peter Sellers as a psychotic psychiatrist who boasts, “My father was Vienna’s most renowned gynecologist. He was a brilliant pervert … I use all kinds of unorthodox therapies. For example, I’ve had the greatest success shutting people in dark closets.”4

  Like Allen, Charlie Brown was also a frequent visitor to his psychiatrist, Lucy, as he was plagued by pantophobia, “the fear of everything.” In the 1960s, half the United States read Charles Schulz’s Peanuts newspaper comic strip every morning, and on April 9, 1965, the characters appeared on Time’s cover.