The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Encouragement came from an array of trusted friends and sources. Lionel Bart remembers Paul turning up on his doorstep in late 1963 with the tune still fresh in his mind, wondering for all the world where he’d “pinched” it from. “He hummed it several times,” Bart says, “and I couldn’t place it. It sounded completely legitimate, wonderfully crafted.” Bart was unsurprised by its sweep or maturity. “I recognized that in anything he wrote there was a musical signature, the kind of signature you find with Cole Porter and George Gershwin. In that respect, Paul’s fingerprints were all over the score for ‘Yesterday,’ and I told him that night that he was onto something important.”

  Even with Bart’s blessing, Paul was still dubious. “This one, I was convinced, was just something I’d heard before,” he said, and continued seeking opinions in an attempt to prove it. But everywhere he turned, the trail went cold. No one recognized it, nor could they point to so much as a measure that resembled another song. Both John and George Martin pronounced it “original.” And British chanteuse Alma Cogan, Paul’s one-stop music source, expressed interest in recording it herself.

  Legend has it that while he was playing the song on Cogan’s piano, Alma’s mother swept through the parlor wondering if “anyone want[ed] some scrambled eggs.” Without missing a beat, Paul improvised a lyric for his new melody: “Scrambled eggs… oh my, baby, how I love your legs…” If his goal was to elicit laughter from the small audience, he was not disappointed—but it came at a cost. The words scanned the meter perfectly. Too perfectly, in fact: for more than a year he was unable to shake those awful lines.

  “Scrambled Eggs” became Paul’s nagging burden. Every day, every week, for a year and a half—without fail—he tinkered with it: massaging the chords, putting “the middle in it,” playing with the pulse. Rhyme schemes were tested and discarded in search of a word or two that would give the song its identity. Colloquial expressions were picked over for a hook, even old standbys like “let it be,” which was a favorite of his father’s, enjoyed a brief tenure. No good—the right phrase, the one that would unlock the song and provide the way in, eluded him. This was an anomaly: rhymes, phrases—these were things Paul rattled off in his sleep, as a reflex. He had a rare talent for turning an unforgettable phrase: “P.S. I Love You,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “Can’t Buy Me Love”… It didn’t figure that he’d go cold with a winner like this.

  Lennon and McCartney had put songs aside before and come back to them; others they’d abandoned altogether. But this one—this one was different. Paul knew the melody was exquisite; it enchanted him. Frustrated, he finally ran it by John, who had nothing to offer. John thought the song was “lovely,” but not in his jurisdiction. Besides, he’d heard it so often that he wanted nothing to do with it.

  Nothing was settled on May 27, 1965, when Paul and Jane left for a two-week vacation at guitarist Bruce Welch’s villa on the southeast coast of Portugal. The minute they touched down in Lisbon the words began to flow. It was a five-hour drive from the airport to the Gulf of Cádiz, along roads hewn from mountainous cliffs nearly the whole way. Brian had hired a chauffeured car for the trip, and the handsome young couple piled in the back, surrendering themselves to the dreadful drive south to Albufeira. “Jane was sleeping but I couldn’t,” Paul told a friend. The scenery was lackluster, monotonous, and before long he was at it again—running down “Scrambled Eggs,” picking it apart, covering old ground. But as the car edged around Grândola onto the barren E1, the stumbling blocks began to give way. “I remember mulling over the tune… and suddenly getting these little one-word openings to the verse.” Da-da-da… yes-ter-day… sud-den-ly… fun-il-ly… mer-il-ly…Somehow, the intimate drive with Jane had summoned up feelings of a different sort, of melancholy and solitude. Indecision had crept into the lyric’s emotional complexion. No sooner was the foundation in place than the rhymes began to connect, blend, and serve one another. “ ‘Yesterday’—that’s good,” he decided. “ ‘All my troubles seemed so far away.’ ”

  The minute they arrived in Albufeira, Paul put it to the test. Bruce Welch was waiting in the entrance to greet his guests and he remembered how eager Paul was to play the song for him. “He said straightaway, ‘Have you got a guitar?’ ” Welch recalled. “I could see he had been writing lyrics on the way [from the airport]; he had the paper in his hand as he arrived.” There was an old, abused Martin in the lounge, which Paul flipped upside down, enabling him to chord it with his right hand, then without hesitation, he strummed through the song.

  As soon as he was halfway through the verse, Welch realized how far behind the curve he’d just fallen. This wasn’t some three-chord rocker like the ones groups churned out over cigarettes and beer. From Elvis to the Shadows to the Beatles, the pop hits had always followed the same general form. It was easy to jump in almost anywhere and flog the big standard progressions that gave the music its intensity. Now, however, within a few sketchy lines, Paul had advanced the pop form with an inventiveness free of gimmickry, making it lyrical and vivid in ways he’d never imagined. “I didn’t know those passing chords he had put into the progression,” Welch admitted. But its sophisticated structure was the least of his fascination with it. It was the intangible quality of it that overwhelmed him and led Welch to say: “I knew it was magic.”

  The song was exactly right by the time he returned to London, on June 11. (Even so, Paul was demoralized by the tone of George Martin’s initial reaction to the lyric. “I objected to it actually,” Martin recalled, convinced that it would confuse anyone familiar with the Jerome Kern–Otto Harbach standard “Yesterdays.”) “We tried ways of doing it with John on organ but it sounded weird,” Paul recalled, “and in the end I was told to do it as a solo.” But listening to the playback, Martin had other ideas. “What about having a string accompaniment, you know, fairly tastefully done?” he asked. Paul cringed at the suggestion, conjuring up strains of “Mantovani” and similar “syrupy stuff.” That wasn’t at all his style, but he agreed to at least try a string quartet.

  “We spent an afternoon mapping it out,” Martin recalled, devising cello and violin lines to complement the melody. Actually, arranging it wasn’t that tough of a job. “Yesterday” lent itself majestically to the silken weft of strings, and the two men—Paul humming parts, searching for notes on the piano, with George Martin translating them into notation—created the quintessential “blue”-sounding accompaniment that underscores the record.*

  The entire string overdub took less than three hours to complete. Martin booked four musicians from the orchestra of Top of the Pops—session players he’d worked with on a regular basis—and walked them through the parts. After the first take, Paul pulled Martin aside and complained about the heavy shading of vibrato the string quartet had added to fatten the sound. “It sounded a little too gypsy-like for me,” Paul recalled. Normally, he took Martin’s opinions to heart, appreciating the producer’s vast musical training, but this time Paul stuck to his guns—every last shiver of vibrato had to go—convinced, and rightfully so, that the outcome “sounded stronger.”

  The only thing left to decide was the awkward question of billing. “Yesterday” may have evolved under the group banner, but it was by no means a Beatles record. Not only had Paul written it entirely himself, there wasn’t another member of the Beatles on it. The implications were clear. It would be difficult for EMI in good conscience to put it out as anything but a Paul McCartney single. That wouldn’t sit well at all with John, Martin knew, whose ego was in fragile enough shape without shifting more attention toward Paul. Still, Martin took that suggestion to Brian Epstein, arguing that the performance on “Yesterday” warranted a solo release. Brian, to his credit, wouldn’t hear of it. He was adamant: “No, whatever we do we are not splitting up the Beatles.”

  But in a way, the bubble was already beginning to burst.

  Chapter 28 Into the Cosmic Consciousness

  [I]

  The Beatles had undergone quit
e a change since their first trip to New York in early 1964, when they sprang up like clothespin cutouts on the stage of The Ed Sullivan Show. Outwardly, they remained the same lovable mop tops, their smiles as familiar and flashy as the grille on a late-model Jaguar, their extreme hairdos every bit as symbolic as the Queen’s crown. Privately, however, they were in transition. If, with Beatles for Sale, the band had reached the limits of the conventional three-minute song, then certainly Help! had spun them down paths into uncharted territory. Though they still cursed, drank, and fucked their way around the globe, there was something about the way they comported themselves that was sensible and precise. But the generation gap was widening, and with it came rising expectations and a feeling that they could no longer afford to play the charming but cheeky lads.

  To keep ahead of the curve, the Beatles had relied on pot, a magic key to unlocking inhibitions and abandon. That was fine for an appetizer, but everything—especially the music—was changing so fast, and with it, their impulse to experiment. Together, the Beatles had crept into a darkened box at the Albert Hall in May to catch Dylan’s riveting performance and left speechless, in awe. He seemed so intense, so emotionally out there, expressing himself at enormous risk. How did he manage to work from inside like that, to set himself free and arrive at that remarkable place? What enabled such a release?

  John and George found part of the answer quite by accident one night while they were at a dinner party at the Victorian flat of a prominent dentist on the Edgware Road. The evening had peculiar, almost sinister overtones that made them uneasy from the get-go. Both Beatles had heard stories about the dentist’s notorious dark side, about the kinky scenes that he staged and his appetite for orgies. Though that hadn’t stopped the boys from bringing along Cynthia and Pattie, their radar was tuned rather high from the moment they walked through the door.

  Nothing out of the ordinary cropped up until after dinner, when the Beatles prepared to leave. According to George, their gregarious host insisted they remain for coffee, during which he watched them soberly, silently, smiling, smoking, taking an inordinate interest in the girls. Afterward, he huddled in a corner, talking animatedly with John.

  “We’ve had LSD,” John finally revealed to George in a bone-dry voice. The acid had been slipped into their coffee on sugar cubes and might have been an after-dinner cordial, for all George knew.

  It meant nothing to George, who was determined to leave. “I seem to recall that I’d heard vaguely about it,” he remembered, “but I didn’t really know what it was, and we didn’t know we were taking it.” Virtually nothing had been written about the cryptically named drug; there was no buzz about it on the street. So little was known about LSD, in fact, that it wasn’t even illegal. This acid, however, had a distinguished provenance, having been supplied to the dentist by the manager of the Playboy Club, who, in turn, had gotten it from Michael Hollingshead, the man responsible for turning on Timothy Leary. Which meant that it was pure—and potent.

  John was livid. He had not come to dinner to be dosed by a virtual stranger. Mumbling good-byes, they grabbed the girls and bolted, speeding toward the Pickwick, a London nightclub, with the dentist in hot pursuit. For a few minutes everything was fine. They got seated and ordered drinks, squinting in the low light to identify the faces of other musicians who waved to get their attention. “Suddenly I felt the most incredible feeling come over me,” George remembered. “It was something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had in my whole life.” He was overcome with love—hot, feathery, dizzying love. The others must have felt it, too. John, especially, had a grotesque grin plastered across his face that looked as if it belonged on a marionette. Streaks of blazing light burrowed behind the rainbow rims of their eyelids, trembling; something had altered the tone of their bodies. The sensations held them captive. It is uncertain how long they sat there like that. No one recalls seeing the performance, but at some point they got up to leave and realized, in a panic, that the club was empty, the waiters busily placing chairs atop the barren tables.

  Someone—it is not certain who—mentioned the Ad Lib, which was within walking distance, just a few blocks north. That seemed to make sense—that is, until they got outside, where the gnarled skew of lights and jangly sounds bombarded them. If their eyes could be believed, the sky was velvet, opaque, the buildings rimmed with jewels. The act of walking became overlaid with intervals of clumsiness and the need to vent anxiety. Everyone was “cackling” like hyenas. Pattie Boyd, normally a picture of cool poise, came undone in the garish neon nightscape. She cowered, trapped in the glare of blinking lights and the sound of car horns swelling and roaring around Leicester Square. Even with the others’ reassuring companionship, the acid flung her into fitful emotional states that alternated between dread and agitation. Later, “half crazy,” she threatened to break a store window until George dragged her away. “We didn’t know what was going on and [thought] we were going crackers,” John explained. “It was insane going around London on it.”

  Beyond insane. A tiny red light in the elevator to the Ad Lib touched off a folie à quatre in which they imagined flames shooting up into the air-conditioned car. Said John, “We were all screaming, ‘aaaaaaagh,’ all hot and hysterical.” Ringo, who was waiting for them upstairs in the crowded discotheque, recalled how they tumbled out of the elevator, shouting: “The lift’s on fire!”

  The bizarre hallucinations continued until dawn, nightmare flashes interspersed with periods of sublime intimacy, laughter, and intense creativity; objects took on a fun-house distortion that exaggerated their appeal. John, enraptured by the experience, summed up the extremes by saying: “It was just terrifying—but it was fantastic.” It wasn’t anything like the fluttery highs they got from speed or pot. The LSD possessed an undeniable power—a spiritual power—that forced them to look inside themselves. Indeed, it seemed to offer everything John had been searching for in his music, writing, and art. And none of the Beatles was more receptive to LSD’s spiritual potential than George Harrison. From that very first trip, he felt “a light bulb” go on in his head that blazed the way to enlightenment. Years of misfit indifference to school and the alienation it generated had left him immature and callow. Even the cheeky facade that served as George’s personality in the Beatles collapsed behind the scenes in the auras of Lennon and McCartney, exposing the gawky, awestricken boy who used to trail behind his mentors in Liverpool. Having always competed for their favored attention, he had learned to fit in, not stand out. Feelings of inferiority persisted, reinforced in part by his age, John’s and Paul’s intimidating talent, and the lingering ambivalence of their companionship.

  It was this sense of alienation as much as his interest in music that made George so susceptible to guiding spirits. In the Bahamas during the filming of Help!, he heard the siren song of the sitar and came under the influence of Swami Vishnu-devananda, who introduced him to hatha yoga and Eastern religions. Later in life he would become vegetarian, consult an astrologer, and devote himself to Transcendental Meditation before embracing traditional Christianity. Like many others who flirted with mysticism, it gave him a sense of authority and confidence. But with LSD, George stepped out—and into the cosmic consciousness.

  “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream”: it would eventually become the mantra of every seeker of enlightenment for whom experimentation and self-discovery were the portals to the new age. But in July 1965, after their first unwitting trip, the two Beatles were too shook up by the experience to storm those precarious gates. There was “too much to sort out,” George said, too much of an emotional upheaval. It would take another six weeks before they got up the nerve to take a second trip. In the meantime, they spread the gospel, cornering anyone who would listen to the fantastic tale. There was a fish-story extravagance to the retelling of the Great Acid Experience. “Each time they recounted it,” says a Beatles intimate, “the hallucinations got wilder and more incredible. They introduced m
arvelous visions and rainbow-colored submarines and all kinds of crazy stuff.” Friends and musicians were held in thrall by the shifting pool of details, and some, no doubt, felt inclined, or even pressure, to dive into the deep end, including the one companion for whom it would have disastrous effects.

  [II]

  From the moment George and John sang the praises of LSD, Brian Epstein had made up his mind to take it. Friends remember that he had been trying for some time to find a buffer for his snowballing unhappiness. For all his outward poise, Brian seldom spent a waking moment without being medicated to some extent. Amphetamines had served him ably through the tension-filled days—a blast of speed to keep him up—followed by a capful of Seconals washed down by brandy before bedtime to ensure a soft landing. Even so, he took great pains to maintain a respectable front. Few people—not even the Beatles, at this point—were privy to his indulgence. At a party with “some kids” arranged by Nat Weiss, Brian chattered, clowned, danced, and played disc jockey—long after everyone had passed out. “The next morning, when we woke up, he’d be refreshed, making notes,” Weiss recalls. It wasn’t until sometime later that he discovered Brian’s secret. “He had suits made with little pockets on the inside, with pills tucked into each of them, which he popped like candy. And he told me that this was what kept him going.” Amphetamines and pot: he had a person come by the house each week to roll thin little joints that he’d stash in a cigarette case, behind the Dunhills.

  As the summer heated up and the demons became intolerable, Brian moved from the designer flat in William Mews to considerably more glamorous quarters in a Belgravia town house on Chapel Street that he decorated from top to bottom with the sleek white furniture that was all the rage that season. Together with his longtime Liverpool friend Peter Brown, who had moved to London in May to lend a hand around the office, Brian got everything situated and resumed a frantic social pace: drinking, carousing, dinner parties, anonymous sex, and nightly drug-taking until he passed out in the early hours of morning.