Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Paul chose a property in Cavendish Avenue, a quiet residential street in St John’s Wood, within walking distance of Lord’s Cricket Ground, Regent’s Park and, most importantly, the EMI studios on Abbey Road. ‘He wanted to be right above the shop,’ notes Tony Barrow. ‘He wanted to do that for the purposes of self-achievement, further climbing up the ladder. You can’t do that if you are stuck out in the country.’ Paul could also get into the West End easily from St John’s Wood, while his chosen neighbourhood retained a village-like atmosphere, community life focused around the shops on Circus Road, where Paul became a patron of the pub, Post Office, greengrocer, café and grocery store. To this day he pops into Panzer’s for his bagels and enjoys a drink at the Star on nearby Charlbert Street.

  As Tony Barrow correctly indicates, buying a house in this neighbourhood represented a further step up for Paul. Step one had been from Speke to a better class of council house on Forthlin Road; step two was lodging in Wimpole Street with the Ashers; step three saw him ensconcing himself among rich and distinguished neighbours living in grand mid-nineteenth-century houses built for the gentry. The Honourable David Astor, Editor of the Observer and son of Lord and Lady Astor - whose stately home, Clivedon House, had been used for the ‘Buckingham Palace’ scenes in Help! - was one such neighbour, as were the journalist Woodrow Wyatt, Labour MP Leo Abse and the actor Harry H. Corbett, star of Steptoe and Son. On the west side of the avenue, behind high brick walls and double gates, stood a series of large, detached mansions with raised ground-floor drawing rooms, kitchens below and servants’ quarters in the attics, very Upstairs Downstairs. There were stables in the back from the days when residents kept carriages. Most had since been converted into garages, and one or two neighbours ran a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. It was one of these properties, 7 Cavendish Avenue, that Paul bought for £40,000 ($61,200) in April 1965, then spent a small fortune having done up over the course of the next year. Paul referred to his new house simply as Cavendish. It is still his London home.

  As renovations were made to his new home, Paul remained in his garret in Wimpole Street, where was born the most successful song he or virtually any songwriter of his generation wrote, a song that would be covered by more than 3,000 artists and played millions of times on the radio, what Paul refers to as ‘possibly the smash of the century’. One morning in 1963 Paul awoke in his garret with a melody in his head that he assumed was a jazz standard, one of the songs his father used to play that had insinuated itself into his unconscious. Paul went straight to the piano. ‘I just fell out of bed, found out what key I had dreamed it in, and it seemed near G, and I played it,’ he told journalist Ray Coleman.

  I said to myself: I wonder what it is, you know. I just couldn’t figure it [all out], because I’d just woken up. And I got a couple of chords to it. I got the G, then I got the nice F sharp minor seventh, that was the big waaaahhhh. That led very naturally to the B which led very naturally to the E minor. It just kept sort of tumbling out with those chords. I thought: well this is very nice, but it’s a nick … [By which he meant that the melody was so perfect he couldn’t believe it had come to him in a dream.] There was no logic to it at all. And I’d never had that. And I’ve never had it since. This was the crazy thing about this song. It was fairly mystical when I think about it, because of the circumstances. It was the only song I ever dreamed!

  Paul played the tune for friends wherever he went, at the Georges V in Paris, backstage at concerts, to the extent that it became a joke within the band, George Harrison grumbling that anybody would think Paul was Ludwig van-bloody-Beethoven the way he went on about that tune. Paul was canvassing as many people as possible to see if it really was an original composition, and played the tune one evening at the home of the singer Alma Cogan. At this point there were no words. Alma’s mother came in and asked if anybody would like a snack of scrambled eggs. Paul began to play the tune over with new dummy lyrics, ‘Scrambled eggs/Oh my baby how I love your legs/oh scrambled eggs’, and this became the working title of the song: ‘Scrambled Eggs’.

  In May 1965 Paul and Jane took up a standing invitation from Bruce Welch of the Shadows to visit him at his holiday home in Portugal. The couple flew first to Lisbon, and were then chauffeur-driven the 160 miles south to the Algarve. Paul occupied himself during the long drive by fitting words to his new tune. The moment they got to the villa, Paul dashed for a guitar like somebody in need of the toilet. ‘He said straight away, “Have you got a guitar?” I could see he had been writing the lyrics on the way down; he had the paper in his hand as he arrived,’ recollects Welch. Although Paul had written reflective love songs before, notably ‘Things We Said Today’, the lyric to this new song was surprisingly mature for a man approaching his 23rd birthday, reflecting on a broken love affair.

  Why she had to go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.

  I said something wrong, now I long for yesterday.

  It was a song of confusion, defeat and regret, emotions one wouldn’t imagine Paul had much experience of, from what we know of his young life, and radically different to the upbeat songs that had made the Beatles popular. Here was a lachrymose ballad more suited to artists like Frank Sinatra or Ray Charles (both would cover it). Paul’s innately musical mind had somehow conjured a classic - a mark of genius - to which he’d finally put words. The words are not brilliant, but the lyric does resonate. Paul has suggested that the song related to the death of his mother, showing how deep that loss ran.

  When he got back to London, Paul performed ‘Yesterday’ for the band and George Martin at EMI where they were finishing the Help! soundtrack.

  Ringo said, ‘I can’t really put any drums on - it wouldn’t make sense.’ And John and George said, ‘There’s no point in having another guitar.’ So George Martin suggested, ‘Why don’t you just try it yourself and see how it works?’ I looked at the others: ‘Oops. You mean a solo record?’ They said, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t matter, there’s nothing we can add to it - do it.’

  Played solo on acoustic guitar, ‘Yesterday’ sounded a little like a Dylan song. What made ‘Yesterday’ distinctively Beatlesque was George Martin’s decision to orchestrate it with strings, not in the schmaltzy style of Mantovani, but using a string quartet to lend the song a classical elegance. Unable to read or write music, Paul’s contribution to creating the string accompaniment was limited to listening to what George did and making comments, though his comments didn’t lack perspicacity. Paul made it clear, for example, that he didn’t like the way the session musicians hired for the job - two violins, cello and viola - added vibrato. Paul insisted they play the notes precisely. A little vibrato crept in, but not enough to make the recording like Muzak (though ‘Yesterday’ would be used as that). Arranging this record was a turning point for George Martin in his relationship with the band, after which he made an increasingly significant, creative contribution. ‘It was on “Yesterday””, he said, ‘that I started to score their music.’ Partly as a result, Beatles’ records began to become more interesting. Paul knew they had done something special. He went out clubbing that night, running into a friend at the Ad Lib. ‘I just recorded this great song,’ he told Terry Doran (a car dealer friend of Brian Epstein’s, later referenced in ‘She’s Leaving Home’ as the ‘man from the motor trade’). ‘It’s so good!’ he told Terry, who thought Paul impossibly conceited.

  It was at the Ad Lib around this time that John and George had their first, life-changing acid trip, long before Paul tried the drug. John and Cynthia and George and his girlfriend Pattie Boyd had been to a dinner party at the home of their dentist. After dinner the dentist slipped the drug - then unrestricted and little understood - without warning into their coffee, insisting mysteriously that they stayed where they were. John and George suspected the dentist was trying to get them and the girls into an orgy. The dentist said no, admitting rather that he’d dosed them with LSD. John was furious. George didn’t even know what LSD was. Although it had been in existence sin
ce the 1940s, lysergic acid diethylamide was only beginning to be used recreationally, its powers as yet little understood. It would come to have a considerable effect on the Beatles’ music.

  Despite his warnings, the Beatles decided they would have to leave their dentist’s house. Their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann had formed a band with Paddy Chambers and Gibson Kemp, the drummer who replaced Ringo in the Hurricanes. Paddy, Klaus and Gibson were playing the Pickwick Club, and John, George and the girls wanted to see them. George drove them all in Pattie’s Mini, which seemed to be shrinking as they travelled across town. After watching Paddy, Klaus and Gibson at the Pickwick, the party moved on to the Ad Lib. ‘Suddenly I felt the most incredible feeling come over me,’ George recollected. ‘It was something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had in my whole life.’ To reach the Ad Lib the Beatles had to enter a door on Leicester Place, next to the Prince Charles Theatre, and take an elevator to the penthouse. There was a red light in the lift. As the lift rose, the light seemed to glow like fire. As George recalled, ‘it felt as though the elevator was on fire and we were going into Hell, but at the same time we were all in hysterics and crazy. Eventually we got out at the Ad Lib, on the top floor, and sat there, probably for hours and hours.’ Ritchie was there. He listened as his friends babbled about the fire in the lift. John noticed that their table was s - t - r - e - t - c - h - i - n - g. At dawn George drove Pattie, John and Cynthia home to Surrey very, very slowly.

  The boys couldn’t wait to tell Paul. John had always loved Alice in Wonderland and here was a drug that could send him down the rabbit hole any time he liked. He urged Paul to take LSD without delay. Paul’s reaction highlights an essential difference between him and his friend, one that would become more pronounced.

  I really was frightened of that kind of stuff because it’s what you are taught when you’re young. “Hey, watch out for them devil drugs.” So when acid came round we’d heard that you’re never the same. It alters your life and you never think the same again, and I think John was rather excited by that prospect. I was rather frightened by that prospect. I thought, Just what I need! Some funny little thing where I can never get back home again.

  So Paul declined LSD, and kept declining as John and George took more acid trips, growing closer as a result. They were in the LSD club now, and Paul wasn’t. It created a rift.

  At the end of June the Beatles went on a European tour, after which was the London première of Help! ‘It looks good but becomes too tiresome to entertain,’ as film critic Leslie Halliwell wrote succinctly. Although not as enjoyable as A Hard Day’s Night, Help! did well at the box office; the eponymous single was number one and the album, with its striking semaphore cover, would also top the charts. Buried on side two of the UK release, between ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ and the closing track ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’, was Paul’s ‘Yesterday’, which was a strange way to present such a great ballad, but then again the song sounded different to everything the Beatles had previously recorded.

  The stage début of ‘Yesterday’ took place in the unlikely setting of a TV variety show broadcast from Blackpool, the seaside resort north of Liverpool. Blackpool Night Out was an independent television programme presented by comedian brothers Mike and Bernie Winters, broad family entertainment featuring comics, dancers and singers. Televised live, the show was watched by millions of people across the country. So it was that the band took the stage at the Blackpool ABC on Sunday 1 August 1965 to promote Help! Halfway through their set, George announced that Paul was going to sing the next song alone. He made the introduction with a sarcastic reference to another popular TV show, Opportunity Knocks, in which neophyte acts tried to break into the big time by winning the votes of a television audience: ‘And so for Paul McCartney of Liverpool,’ George said, in impersonation of presenter Hughie Green, ‘Opportunity Knocks!’

  ‘Thank you, George,’ muttered his friend, now alone on stage with his acoustic guitar. A spotlight focused on Paul as he mimed to the EMI recording of ‘Yesterday’, a song so sad that the girls in the audience momentarily ceased screaming. At the end John led the other band members back on stage, handing Paul a joke bouquet of flowers that came apart in his hand. ‘Thank you, Ringo,’ Lennon said snidely to McCartney. ‘That was wonderful.’

  SHEA STADIUM

  From Blackpool to New York! The show the Beatles played two weeks later at the William A. Shea Municipal Stadium in New York City was nothing less than the first ever stadium pop concert.

  Hitherto, British pop bands worked their way up from clubs to dance halls before establishing themselves on a national circuit of cinemas and theatres. Some - the Hammersmith Odeon, the London Palladium - were larger and more prestigious than others, holding around 3,000 people, and occasionally bands played the Royal Albert Hall, which seated over 5,000, but few artists ever played anything larger. The Beatles, being unique, had played to bigger audiences in North America - 18,700 at the Hollywood Bowl; 20,000 at Empire Stadium in Vancouver, big arenas by modern standards - but no music act, British or American, had ever attempted to put on a show in a sports stadium. No act had the pulling power to fill so many seats and, technically speaking, it was impossible to amplify a band adequately in such a capacious venue.

  It was Sid Bernstein who had the chutzpah to make history. Having successfully booked the Beatles for two shows at Carnegie Hall on their first visit to the United States, the ebullient New York promoter realised he could have sold those seats many times over. He started talking to Brian Epstein about putting the boys on at Madison Square Garden in ’65. The Garden then held 17,000 people.17 When he did his sums, Sid saw that even this venue wasn’t large enough to accommodate all the New Yorkers who might want to see the boys perform. ‘I’m changing my mind. I’d like to do them at Shea Stadium,’ Sid told Brian over the telephone, referring to the home of the New York Mets.

  ‘How big is that?’ asked Epstein.

  ‘Fifty-five thousand seats,’ replied Sid. This meant that the Beatles could play to as many people in one night as they could over three weeks at Carnegie Hall. When Brian had digested the data, he expressed cautious excitement.

  ‘I don’t want an empty seat in the house, Sid.’

  ‘Brian, I’ll give you $10 for every empty seat.’

  Neither Sid nor Brian needed to worry. All 55,600 tickets - priced around $5.00, plus taxes - sold. Not only would the Beatles at Shea Stadium be the biggest show any act had played, it would be the Beatles’ highest-earning single engagement at $180,000, worth about $1.2 million in today’s money (or £802,352).

  Sunday 15 August 1965 was a beautiful late summer day. Fans started arriving early, girls dressed in light dresses, tanned from the long holidays, many accompanied by their parents. Gradually the layers of bleacher seats filled, the noise level escalating as thousands of girls decided to start screaming early. They carried on screaming through the sunny day, through all the support acts - a peculiar selection of singers, jazz bands, disco dancers and celebrity announcers - enjoying a collective and prolonged hysterical fit. Many got so worked up they fainted. Late in the afternoon the Beatles boarded a helicopter in Manhattan and were flown out to the gig, everybody crowding the windows to peer down at the horseshoe-shaped stadium. In the sulphurous gloaming, 55,000 fans looked up at the red, white and blue chopper hovering overhead and, realising the Beatles were on board, many took flash pictures ‘to create a momentary display of dazzling light that lit up the evening sky’, as Tony Barrow later wrote. When they landed, the boys were transported to the stadium in a Wells Fargo armoured truck.

  Around a quarter past nine, when the temperature had dropped and it was properly dark, Ed Sullivan, whose company was filming the show, sidled on stage to make the introduction. ‘Here are the Beatles!’ White noise. ‘Here they come.’ Louder noise. Unlike a modern stadium show, where the audience’s first view of the act is the moment they appear on stage, the Beatles ran out of the tunnel under the s
tands, as if they were about to play a baseball game, sprinting across the diamond to take their places on the stage. Another way in which this seminal stadium show was arranged more like a sports event than a rock concert, as we have become accustomed to, was that fans weren’t permitted to sit or stand in front of the stage. Everybody was seated back in the bleachers, though virtually the entire audience was on their feet now, screaming, many girls trying to scale the mesh fence penning them back while fatherly cops tried to persuade them to be sensible and get down.

  John, Paul, George and Ringo, wearing beige, army-style tunics with black trousers and Wells Fargo badges, looked happy and excited. Ever the professional, Paul paused to thank Mr Sullivan for his introduction, then joined the others in their usual short, frantic set, a set that looks puny and amateurish in such a vast space when viewed today on DVD, especially so in comparison to the thunderous stadium concerts Paul McCartney now plays. Each short song was prefaced with a few corny words of introduction. ‘We’d like to carry on with a song from Yesterday and Today,’ said George, for example, referring to the Capitol album of that name. ‘This one is a single as well, and it features Paul singing a very nice song called “Yesterday”.’ The sound was appalling, like listening to somebody singing down the telephone from Australia. Normally the Beatles used 30-watt Vox speakers on stage; for Shea they had special 100-watt speakers, but the music was essentially relayed via the PA system, as used for baseball announcements. Also, the acoustics in an open-air stadium are different to a theatre. Sound is blown about with the wind. And, of course, there were no Jumbo screens to help the fans see the performers. Despite all these shortcomings, almost everybody at Shea had a great time. Among the thousands straining to see and hear were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who went on to perfect the stadium rock tour with the Rolling Stones in the Eighties and Nineties. A bank of white lights were shining directly at Paul, making him sweat profusely on what was already a warm evening. The show was being filmed by cameramen standing directly in front of the stage. Nevertheless, all the Beatles had a ball, with John behaving much as he had back at the Kaiserkeller when he got over-excited: pulling faces, speaking in tongues and stopping short to comment on what he saw. ‘Ah! Look at ’er. Ah!’ he said as he watched cops chase a stray fan running across the diamond. By the time they came to the last song, John was playing the organ with his elbows and laughing his head off, George giggling along with him. Paul, ‘sweating cobs’ under the lights, as they say in northern England,18 remained focused, as if he had done it all before, though even he had to laugh at the end.