Fab

by Howard Sounes

  After their last gruelling concert tour, the Beatles took time off to pursue independent projects. John went to Spain to act in Richard Lester’s film How I Won the War; Ringo kept him company. George travelled to India to study the sitar with his new friend, Ravi Shankar. Says the Indian musician, who was already an established star with an international reputation:When I met all the four Beatles for the first time, I found young handsome Paul very charming; Ringo very funny and warm; and John reserved and restrained. However, George and I clicked immediately. I was impressed by his genuine attraction for my music, as well as our ancient Vedic philosophy. Before meeting me, George had already heard my LP recordings and live concert and had used the sitar on ‘Norwegian Wood’. Being a classical musician, it did not appeal much to me at that time, but later on I felt more comfortable with it.

  With his band mates away, Paul decided to take a continental holiday, disguised as a nobody. Fooling around in the props department at Twickenham Film Studios, where the Beatles had filmed interiors for their first two movies, Paul had found that, by wearing a stick-on moustache, false glasses and an old coat, he could walk past even his fellow Beatles without being recognised. Jane was busy with her stage work - about to appear in The Winter’s Tale, followed by playing Juliet in Bristol-so Paul took off on his own, driving his Aston Martin to Lydd Airport on the Kent coast, an area which would come to play an important part in his life, putting the Aston on a cargo plane, and hopping over to France where, looking not unlike the moustachioed Alfred Jarry, he motored off into the countryside, shooting an extended home movie as he went.

  After a few days Paul reached Bordeaux, where he visited a discotheque in disguise only to be refused admission, something he had never previously experienced. ‘So I thought, Sod this, I might as well go back to the hotel and come as him!’ Paul later told Barry Miles. ‘So I came back as a normal Beatle, and was welcomed with open arms.’ The experience reminded Paul of the advantages of fame. Bob Dylan once remarked astutely that most musicians become pop stars because they want fame and money, but soon realise it’s the money they really want. McCartney was unusual in that he enjoyed his wealth and his fame. Having posed briefly as a nobody, he never wanted to be a nobody again. ‘It made me remember why we all wanted to get famous.’ Paul met up with Mal Evans and drove down to Spain, intending to meet John and Ringo, but they had already gone home, so Paul flew on to Nairobi, where he enjoyed a brief safari holiday with Jane.

  On the flight home to England Paul put his mind to what the Beatles might do next. Tired of touring, he thought it would be interesting to invent a persona for the band to inhabit, and make a special record in that persona that could almost serve as a substitute for live shows. In the first flush of flower power, bands with elaborate names had become commonplace: Big Brother and the Holding Company in the USA, for example, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band in England. Fiddling with airline sachets of salt and pepper on the plane home from Africa, Paul came up with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  Before plunging into the phantasmagoria of the Sgt. Pepper album, Paul worked with George Martin on a score for the movie The Family Way. In Paul’s mind there was no conflict between breaking new ground musically and making music, like this, to order. ‘If you are blessed with the ability to write music, you can turn your hand to various forms. I’ve always admired people for whom it’s a craft - the great songwriting partners of the past, such as Rodgers and Hammerstein,’ Paul has said of his reason for scoring The Family Way. The film was a Boulting Brothers production about a cinema projectionist (played by Hywell Bennett) who cannot consummate his marriage to his virgin bride (Hayley Mills) because he feels inhibited living at home with his parents. Audiences may have imagined they were in for a challenging kitchen-sink drama when they bought tickets in 1966 for a film about sex set in the urban north, but The Family Way was a stilted, old-fashioned picture depicting an England seemingly aeons behind swinging London.

  Thinking of his dad, and grandfather, and their love of traditional brass band music, Paul decided to create a brass band theme for the movie. As would subsequently be the case whenever Paul departed from straight pop music to ‘write’ for musicians who work from a score, he had to collaborate with an amanuensis, in this case George Martin, because Paul himself was unable to read or write music notation. The essential tune would always be Paul’s, but what he gave his amanuensis was often very brief, a simple phrase he would hum or play on the guitar or piano. It was for the other person to develop this idea into a score, with Paul making comments as the work progressed. George Martin had to pester Paul for the briefest scrap of a tune to start The Family Way. ‘I said, “If you don’t give me one, I’m going to write one of my own.” That did the trick. He gave me a sweet little fragment of a waltz tune … and with that I was able to complete the score.’ As a result Paul won an Ivor Novello Award for Best Instrumental Theme. It was his eleventh Ivor Novello, amazingly, and he was not yet 25.

  SHE’S LEAVING HOME

  Since setting up home together in Cavendish Avenue, a house they now inhabited as common-law husband and wife, Paul and Jane had become increasingly aware of their differences. Paul lived for his music and, after spending the afternoon writing upstairs in his music room, or round the corner at EMI on Abbey Road, he liked to go clubbing, often bringing a gang of musicians and other bohemians back to Cavendish late at night. Jane didn’t like clubs. She’d only ever had a polite interest in pop, and was not into drugs. She had her own circle of theatrical friends who didn’t mesh with Paul’s crowd. There were awkward evenings at Cavendish when Paul and Jane tried to mix their friends. The couple were most simpatico on those rare quiet evenings when neither had an engagement, Jane would cook and they’d sit together watching telly, as they did on 16 November 1966 when the BBC broadcast the drama Cathy Come Home, in which unemployment leads to a young mother losing her home and ultimately her child. Soft-hearted Jane asked Paul if they couldn’t do something to help people like Cathy, living as they did in their big house. They could give a girl a room. Paul said that if they took one in, they’d soon have others ringing up.

  On the inauspicious date of Friday 13 January 1967, Jane flew to the United States with the Bristol Old Vic for a four-and-a-half-month theatrical tour. Paul was not at Heathrow to see her off. ‘The trouble is I don’t think Jane really wanted to leave me,’ the star complained to a reporter from the Daily Sketch who called at Cavendish to ask what was going on. ‘She signed for the trip about mid-year when it seemed a good idea, but when it came to the crunch it didn’t seem such a good idea. Anyway she’s gone and I’m sitting by myself.’ Even if Paul had been a man who liked his own company, which he wasn’t, there was no way he was going to spend four and a half months alone. He was going to have his mates round, pick girls up, drink, take drugs, leave his clothes where he dropped them and the dishes unwashed. He was going to enjoy the bachelor life. ‘The thing is with Paul he was never a bachelor,’ says Tony Bramwell, with a touch of exaggeration, for there had been Hamburg, but even then Paul was engaged to Dot. ‘From when he became a Beatle he was with Jane, [so] he’d never had that existence of being free.’

  With Jane away, Paul also threw himself into work with the Beatles at Abbey Road, where many elements came together to enable the band to take another leap forward in their musical journey. Without concert commitments, the Beatles had limitless time to devote to their work now; their musical and intellectual ideas had expanded greatly; and, importantly, George Martin was increasingly involved as their arranger and enabler. At a time when other artists in Britain and the US were creating increasingly sophisticated music, not least the Beach Boys with their Pet Sounds album, the Beatles also felt pricked to show they were still number one. It was time to transmute from a grub-like pop act into a butterfly by recording the seminal rock album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  The band had started work before Jane’s departure, in late November 1966, cutting John�
��s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The John who returned from his film-making sabbatical in Spain looked radically different to the fat-faced Beatle of Help! Having had his hair cut short for How I Won the War, lost weight, and taken to wearing National Health Service ‘granny’ glasses, John had transformed himself into a professorial figure, one who was increasingly strung out on acid, his new song being a psychedelic look back on his Liverpool childhood, the tune named after the children’s home Strawberry Field (sic) which stood in walled grounds near Aunt Mimi’s Woolton house, a ‘secret garden’ he’d roamed around as a boy. Although Paul played the haunting keyboard introduction, on a mellotron programmed with flutes, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was unmistakably John’s song, maybe his greatest composition, his vocal sending a shiver down the spine as he sang the wise and penetrating lyric, ‘Living is easy with eyes closed/Misunderstanding all you see’. Like Dylan, Lennon had the knack of writing couplets, like this, that seem to contain an essential truth. Paul was rarely such a philosopher. He glides along the surface of life in his songs, as he did to some extent on the next number the Beatles recorded, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. Although this is one of Paul’s best songs, and one that deals with a profound subject, old age, Paul sidestepped the darker issues involved - ill-health, loneliness, regret and fear of death - to create a jaunty number featuring old-age pensioners whom one could imagine throwing their sticks away and dancing to that cottage on the Isle of Wight. Like so much of Paul McCartney’s work, ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ is therefore an attractive song with a facile lyric. The song may ask a challenging question - ‘Will you stand by me when I’m old?’ - but the listener has no doubt the answer will be a cheery, ‘Yes, of course I will, silly.’

  ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ both came out of the composers’ Liverpool childhood, Paul creating the latter as a boy at Forthlin Road, only now putting lyrics to the tune. He looked homeward again with ‘Penny Lane’, a song he’d had kicking around for a year or so before the Beatles set to work on it in December 1966. Although the previous comments apply regarding lyrics, with ‘Penny Lane’ having a typically sunny sentiment, this time the words are better. Recalling the view from the top deck of the No. 86 bus, as he used to travel from Mather Avenue to the Liverpool Institute, past the circular bus and tram stop at the corner of Smithdown Road and Penny Lane, Paul was writing about a place he knew intimately, and already viewed nostalgically. Here was the landscape of his Liverpool childhood laid out as in a pleasant dream; the buildings, streets, shops and everyday characters he had grown up with: Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs

  Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know.

  And all the people that come and go

  Stop and say hello.

  John used to get his hair cut in Bioletti’s, which still exists, under new ownership, opposite Lloyd’s Bank on the corner. Paul observed it all beautifully, a cheerfully ordinary English high street arrayed under ‘blue suburban skies’, a lovely, poetic phrase. As has often been observed, there is a hint of psychedelia in the banker in the rain without his mac, the fireman with a portrait of the Queen in his pocket, but these images could just as easily be explained away as everyday English eccentricity. Sex was here, too, as it is throughout the Beatles’ work. The phrase ‘finger pies’ is a reference to heavy petting.

  As with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, George Martin’s arrangement of ‘Penny Lane’ was immaculate, the producer working long hours with the boys to create the equivalent of classical tone-poems. ‘Penny Lane’ was brightened with a piccolo trumpet, which Paul requested after watching a performance of Bach’s second Brandenburg Concerto on television. George Martin hired the very trumpet player Paul had heard, David Mason, to play on ‘Penny Lane’. ‘Paul sat at the piano and played what he wanted on the track, Can I play this? Can I do that? And then George wrote it down,’ says Mason.

  We went on like that for about three hours until they got what they wanted, because Paul was quite limited in his chord sequences and things. I mean he wasn’t the greatest of pianists. He could play what he wanted to on the piano, and when he got what he thought it was going to sound like I played it a bit and then [he asked] Can he play it a bit higher? or Can you play so and so?

  Many rock musicians attempted to combine their music with classical instrumentation in the years ahead, often sounding pretentious. With George Martin’s help, the Beatles melded pop and classical forms successfully to create music that is natural, honest and enduringly pleasing, and whatever shortcomings we might identify in McCartney’s oeuvre there is no lovelier song in the Beatles’ canon than his ‘Penny Lane’.

  Like so many of his songs, Paul composed ‘Penny Lane’ on his little garret piano, which had been moved from Wimpole Street to the music room at Cavendish Avenue, and which, towards the end of 1966, was to be transformed by the trendy art group BEV. Comprising three young artists from the North of England - Douglas Binder, Dudley Edwards and David Vaughan - BEV was named from the first letters of their surnames. While sharing a London flat the men started painting their furniture in bright colours, inspired by the work of fairground artist FG Fowl. The furniture proved very popular. Macy’s became a US stockist and socialite Tara Browne commissioned the group to customise his Cobra sports car. ‘Tara, said: “You should meet my friend Paul. He’d probably like your work,”’ recalls Dudley Edwards. A meeting was arranged and, at Paul’s request, the group painted his piano with lightning bolts of red, yellow, blue and purple-creating one of the iconic musical instruments of the psychedelic era - returning the piano in time for Paul to complete Sgt. Pepper. McCartney paid them generously - their agreed fee plus a substantial tip - gainsaying what became an unwarranted reputation for meanness. As the story of McCartney’s life continues, we shall read numerous examples of the star being very generous with his money.

  When BEV broke up, Paul invited Dudley Edwards to come and stay with him at Cavendish. It was companionable having a young northern chap of his age around the house with Jane away. Also, like medieval princelings, each Beatle tended to maintain a court who served, flattered and amused them. Often these courtiers were given a small task to perform while they shared their Beatle’s privileged existence. In theory Dudley was at Cavendish to help decorate the house in the emerging hippie style, which was characterised by a combination of old, new and hand-made. Paul invested in many mod cons including a state-of-the-art kitchen, hi-fi, and expensive new colour television (which lured Aunt Ginny down from Merseyside to watch Wimbledon). The curtains were drawn by an electric motor, while the master bedroom had the luxury of an en suite bathroom with sunken tub. Paul was also buying antiques, including a huge clock, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, which hung in the dining room; a Victorian street lamp was erected in the front yard, contrasting with the geodesic contemplation dome in the back.

  Paul set Dudley Edwards to work painting tiny creatures into the pattern of the William Morris wallpaper that covered his dining room walls, creating a vast mural. ‘I started painting the mural in his dining room, but Paul didn’t seem that bothered about the mural being done,’ recalls Edwards.

  Paul would say, ‘Put your brush down, we’re going out shopping.’ That would be one minute and the next minute he’d say, ‘Put your brush down, we’re going to a night club.’ And the next thing, ‘Are you coming to the recording studio?’ I just accompanied him, went with him everywhere, basically enjoy[ing] ourselves.

  With Jane away, Paul and Dudley entertained a parade of women at the house, including the American singer Nico, who visited Cavendish when her mentor Andy Warhol was passing through town and stayed. This was Paul’s domestic scene, in early 1967, while he was recording Sgt. Pepper.

  In mid-January, the Beatles started work on their monumental track ‘A Day in the Life’, the inspiration for which is often attributed to the untimely death of Tara Browne. Paul was sufficiently close to the playboy heir to have invited him to Re
mbrandt in recent months. One night he and Tara decided to ride over to see Uncle Mike on a couple of mopeds. Paul came off his bike, split his lip and broke one of his front teeth. He would wear a cap afterwards to cover the broken tooth, and grew a moustache while the scar healed, helping start a trend. All four Beatles soon wore little moustaches. Not long after this incident, on 18 December 1966, Tara was killed when his Lotus hit a van in London. It was reading news reports of the death - GUINNESS HEIR DIES IN CAR CRASH; A BOY WHO HAD TOO MUCH-that is often said to have prompted Lennon to begin work on ‘A Day in the Life’, though Paul doesn’t recall a particular connection. The lyric was created in the cut-up style of William Burroughs, jumbling together scraps of newspaper articles, a compositional method John and Paul were a little sheepish about at first, according to BEV artist Douglas Binder who stumbled upon them doing a cut-up at Cavendish.

  I think it was John who said, ‘If our fans knew how we composed our lyrics and music they’d have a real shock.’ He was embarrassed about it at this time because it was done in a surrealistic manner of actually tearing bits of paper from the newspapers, or headlines from the newspapers, connecting them to make some lyrics …

  Although ‘A Day in the Life’ is primarily John’s song, Paul’s part was again significant. He played the evocative, dead-sounding piano and contributed the bridge:Woke up, fell out of bed,

  Dragged a comb across my head.

  Found my way downstairs and drank a cup

  And looking up, I noticed I was late.

  While being a relatively slight thing in itself, the bridge provides a nice, breezy contrast to John’s sombre verses (old boys from the Inny interpreting the line about going upstairs and having a smoke as Paul having a ciggie on the No. 86 bus to school).