The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  “Sanks for ze music,” John said in parting, then bellowed: “Long live the King!”

  The next day the hungry pool of reporters covering the tour pounced on the story of the historic meeting, which had been press-managed—and largely fabricated to suit both managers—by Tony Barrow. Every journalist was supplied with a generous sampling of quotes from each of the Beatles, who fairly tripped over one another in the rush to praise their idol. Only in private would John admit what he really felt. “It was a load of rubbish,” he concluded. “It was just like meeting Englebert Humperdinck.”

  After the Beatles’ final performance—at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, on August 31, 1965—everyone was ready to head home.

  The pitch of the crowd in San Francisco was a bit too “wild,” even for the Beatles, who thought they had seen it all. Before the show, Wendy Hanson had been bitten by a fan who trampled on the hood of her car. Hearing about the incident made John “nervous.” Superstitious by nature, he took every chance event as an omen, and when he walked onstage to discover the guitars out of tune, it set off all kinds of alarms. Paul had much the same reaction when he saw “the dreadful crush of fans up against the stage.” A massive stampede of teenagers had broken through the barricades and surged forward, wave after wave attempting to vault the stage, only to be turned back by a detachment of stagehands. “Calm down!” Paul screamed at them. “Things are getting dangerous.” But to no avail. One kid leaped over the amplifiers and snatched the cap off John’s head before swan-diving into the audience. A security guard was knocked cold by a Coke bottle and more than two hundred fans fainted. Paul even stopped the show midway through so that police could rescue a pregnant woman who was being trampled. “At one point I glanced down and saw Joan Baez trying to pull kids to their feet and bring them around with smelling salts,” recalls Tony Barrow, who says he feared for his life. Eventually the Beatles had seen enough and bolted, leaving Ringo to deliver a fitting postmortem. “We survived,” he told an interviewer. “That’s the important thing, wouldn’t you say?”

  [IV]

  By the fall of 1965, the Beatles had drawn a deep collective breath. The luxury of six weeks off allowed each of the boys to catch up with his personal life and to step out of the all-consuming glare that had highlighted one of the most productive seasons of their career. In a reversal of the pattern that had governed their lives, the break gave them time to settle into new homes, see friends, and sleep. Beatlemania raged on without them. Help! kept them on the radio and in front of packed, delirious audiences, while Paul’s single of “Yesterday,” released only in America, captured the top spot on Bilboard’s Hot 100 for four weeks running, spawning a cascade of competent if uninspired covers by Marianne Faithfull, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, and Andy Williams. The only commotion during the rare hiatus was caused by Ringo Starr when, on September 13, Maureen gave birth to a boy—“a little smasher,” as Ringo dubbed him—at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital, whom they whimsically named Zak. “I won’t let Zak be a drummer!” Ringo vowed to reporters outside the delivery room, but whether he realized it or not, the matter was out of his hands, and if he didn’t realize it, most of the grinning press corps did.

  In the meantime, October 12 loomed as the kickoff for recording a new album at the Abbey Road studios. EMI insisted on the date so that there would be new Beatles product available for the coming holiday season. The only song ready was “Wait,” which they had completed while in the Bahamas and recorded for the Help! soundtrack. Otherwise, John and Paul “had to force themselves to come up with a dozen new songs” in a little more than two weeks, which seemed like an impossible feat, even for such naturals.

  One thing was certain: this record wasn’t going to sound like anything they’d ever done before. There was too much going on in the rock music scene, too much creativity in the air. Paul spoke for the others when he complained of “being bored by doing the same thing.” Lyrics like “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret” no longer seemed relevant. The Beatles had moved on emotionally, preoccupied with inner thoughts and feelings that gradually shaped their adult lives. “You can’t be singing 15-year-old songs at 20 because you don’t think 15-year-old thoughts at 20,” Paul explained. “We were expanding in all areas of our lives,” Ringo recalled, “opening up to a lot of different attitudes.” And they’d moved on artistically. “We were suddenly hearing sounds that we weren’t able to hear before,” George observed. They were all still influenced tremendously by American R&B—although gravitating toward Stax and Motown artists as opposed to Little Richard and Chuck Berry—but other forms and diverse sources that had constantly swirled around them finally began to coalesce. Certainly jazz patterns and country licks had always figured in Beatles songs, to say nothing of the music hall influence still prevalent in every aspect of their careers. It had taken time, however, for them to learn how to put it all together.

  As Paul well knew, in his capacity as a keen listener of pop radio, the summer of 1965 had already produced a rich vein of exceptional hit singles analogous for their offbeat originality and authentic voice. Dylan had started the ball rolling, not only with “Like a Rolling Stone” but also the Byrds’ cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which bounced the process into another lyrical dimension. The Animals were offering their bluesy melodrama, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” followed by the Who’s anthemic “My Generation,” Unit 4 + 2’s “Concrete and Clay,” and the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love.” One can only imagine the bruising body heat created by the Stones’ one-two punch of “The Last Time” and “Satisfaction.” By contrast, the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” seemed like the perfect pop confection to counterbalance the scorching imagery.

  The competition, such as it was, turned out to be all the incentive John and Paul needed. Throughout the beginning of October, the songs ripped off their guitars, one right after another, and each as different and revolutionary as the last. If anything, the short two-week schedule seemed to sharpen their focus on the task of transforming and shading the Beatles’ tone.

  In “Norwegian Wood,” which John had begun in February while skiing in St. Moritz, they gave a moody, vaguely Oriental voice to a furtive adult relationship. There was nothing predictable about “Norwegian Wood,” neither in its lyric—“a very bitter little story,” as George Martin referred to it—nor in its delivery. John claimed he based the narrative on an extramarital affair he was having—insiders say with the journalist Maureen Cleave—and that it was “my song completely,” meaning the entire composition. Decades later Paul would take issue with that account, raking it from top to bottom, beginning with the fanciful title, which he said was nothing more than an inside joke about the cheap pine walls in Peter Asher’s bedroom. “[John] had this first stanza,” Paul recalled, but really only the first line and nothing else, as far as he could remember, except perhaps the underlying tune. There was in fact no indication that John had anything more than a general idea of where they were headed. But no matter: once a song was begun, no conceit could stop their momentum. Everything just poured out, the character of the girl or “bird,” her rejection of the lover along with his due penance—“to sleep in the bath”—and the extreme revenge he exacts the next morning, after “this bird has flown.” The way Paul recollected it, they wrote most of the song together in a single afternoon, finishing it during a productive session at Weybridge.

  John’s house was also the scene for “Drive My Car,” which Paul called “one of the stickiest” they struggled through in the writing process. Paul had sketched out a rough outline for the song on his way there from London. When he arrived, the tune was already set in his head but “the lyrics were disastrous,” he admitted, “and I knew it.” Baby, you can buy me golden rings. John called it “crap” and dismissed it as “too soft.” Besides, it wouldn’t scan. And the longer they played with and reworked it, the more entrenched the phrase became, much like the “scrambled eggs” impasse with “Yesterday
.” Pass after pass turned up the same problem. When the lyric threatened to block the entire session, John and Paul discussed throwing in the towel. Instead, they went to have tea, still unresolved: a great sassy melody with nothing to hang on it. When they returned to the attic half an hour later, they took another swing at it and replaced the central theme with an idea John suggested: drive my car—perhaps, as Paul implied, to ply the old blues euphemism for sex, perhaps because it just sounded good. “Baby, you can drive my car.” An entire narrative flowed from it, rich with imagery and innuendo. It came alive in the studio, it just took off, with a flirtatious piano riff and a skintight backbeat, underscored by a soulful bass and guitar motif, “like the line from ‘Respect,’ by Otis Redding,” George recalled, which further emphasizes the song’s raunchy feel.

  In the days that followed, a set of songs evolved that grappled with a new form: the act of self-exploration and confessional lyrics. John felt especially compelled to explore through his music the emotional upheaval that was churning in his life. His dilemma basically focused on propriety: could he get away with writing emotionally charged lyrics streaked with imagery that revealed dark truths? How much did the Beatles’ fans want to know about intensely personal issues? And how much was he willing to share with them?

  To sidestep these questions, John initially resorted to third-person narratives, a tactic most prevalent in the seminal “Nowhere Man.” He’d begun it after a late drug-ridden night of clubhopping, arriving back at Kenwood higher than a kite. Collapsing on a couch in the attic, he said he “spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good,” until he finally gave up and dozed off. At some point John apparently blinked awake with a concept: “I thought of myself as a Nowhere Man sitting in this Nowhere Land,” after which the words and music came—“the whole damn thing”—in a rush. Paul showed up sometime later and helped polish off the rough edges, admittedly a bit uneasy over the blatant personal slant of the lyric. “I think… it was about the state of his marriage,” Paul surmised, aware that John had grown bored with Cynthia, frustrated by her timidity and aversion to drugs. A reflective, “dirge-like” song, “Nowhere Man” is steeped in dense harmonic pathos, the two voices intertwining, almost wearily so, around a tent pole of melancholy. The same can be said of “Girl,” John’s fantasy of “that girl—the one that a lot of us were looking for,” he opined—although it is more wistful than melancholy. One of the last songs recorded for the album, “Run for Your Life” was stripped to its essential acoustic core, with some help from George’s lovely guitar counterpoint as well as the control booth.

  No production tricks were necessary for “In My Life,” in which John even abandoned the coy third-person smoke screen for a straight biographical approach. It was the first time he consciously put the “literary part of [himself] into the lyric.” And unlike “Norwegian Wood,” nothing is jumbled by abstraction. As it was originally conceived, “In My Life” was a magnificent piece of songwriting, influenced by all the beloved sites from John’s Liverpool childhood: Menlove Avenue, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, the tram sheds (or bus depot). “I had a complete set of lyrics after struggling with a journalistic version of a trip from home to downtown on a bus naming every sight,” he recalled. But by the time he was finished, the structure bored him. It was too much of a travelogue, too nostalgic and sentimental. Practically none of it survived the makeover that followed. Once Paul took a crack at it, the places John identified were gone, replaced by two stanzas in which he only alluded to them and meditated on his past.

  The song that resulted is a standout among innumerable gems, not only on the album but among all Lennon-McCartney compositions. It would be hard to point to a more gorgeous melody, distinct and unforgettable; in the hours John and Paul spent shaping it, each chord, each stroke, added new layers of color. None of their lyrics are as restrained—or more poignant. Proudly, John claimed authorship of the song throughout his life, and “In My Life” certainly has his stamp on it; few songs reveal his romantic sensibility more clearly. But Paul has maintained that while the “original inspiration,” the “template,” was John’s, by the time they got done reworking it, “filling out the rest of the verses,” only “very few lines” remained. According to Paul, they rewrote all but the opening lines, with Paul alone “writing the whole melody” based on a Smokey Robinson motif, “with the minors and little harmonies” lifted from Miracles records.

  In fact, you can see their discrete fingerprints at various places in the material. Together, John and Paul polished off “The Word,” “You Won’t See Me,” and “What Goes On” in quick succession. “I’m Looking Through You” took its inspiration from Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher, which had scrabbled onto an uneasy plateau. “They were like two speeding trains,” observes John Dunbar, a scenemaker and fantastic character in the British underground, “running on opposite tracks. Paul liked having Jane on his arm—when it suited him. But you could see he was gradually losing patience.” And interest. Jane wasn’t marriage-minded—not yet, at least—and Paul didn’t “feel comfortable” settling down with her. Besides, there was definitely some friction as a result of their respective careers. “Jane’s star was rising,” says Tony Barrow, “and Paul didn’t like being upstaged.” She refused to take a supporting role to the Beatles. “There was a time when he might have preferred that she play the housewife role, and that was never going to happen. Jane loved acting and Jane loved Paul, but she wasn’t about to give one up for the other.” Paul admitted “being disillusioned over her commitment” to the theater and reacting petulantly: “I can see through your facade—I’m looking through you.”

  The tune brought John and Paul a step closer to finishing, but they were still a song or two short. The Beatles were determined to load up the album with an unheard-of fourteen cuts.* “It’s a question of value for money more than anything else,” Paul explained in a year-end wrap-up with the Herald Tribune. “We want to do what we would have liked when we were record-buyers ourselves.” It was a gracious gesture, but not without disadvantages. They were pretty much tapped out from the rigorous grind. Neither of the boys felt much like going back to the drawing board.

  But they had to. “D’you remember that French thing you used to do at Mitchell’s parties?” John asked Paul, referring to the all-night “bohemian” bashes they attended at the flat of Austin Mitchell, one of the tutors at the art college in Liverpool. Paul knew exactly what he was talking about: a precious, “rather French” instrumental he’d spun using a Chet Atkins–type fingerpicking technique. “Well, that’s a good tune. You should do something with that.”

  Indeed. Paul had been noodling with a lyric built around the name Michelle and thought it might match up with the melody. To give it the musical lilt that the name seemed to suggest, he decided to weave in a few French phrases as an accent. Michelle… ma belle. It so happened he was spending the weekend with his old Liverpool mate, Ivan Vaughan, whose wife, Janet, taught French at a primary school and, at his urging, she helped fill in the rest of the expressions. By the time he played it for John, the song was pretty much fleshed out but still lacked a middle eight. “I had been listening to Nina Simone [doing] ‘I Put a Spell on You,’ ” John recalled. “There was a line in it that went: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.” Changing the emphasis to love, he “add[ed] a little bluesy edge” to the mix and they’d bagged another one.

  They were almost ready—except for one not-so-minor detail. George Martin had been with EMI for fourteen years, ten of them as head of Parlophone, and after a feeble contract negotiation in 1963, he was still earning less than £70 a week. All his requests for a commission against sales were rejected out of hand—an outcome made all the more incredible considering his monumental effort in breaking seven or eight NEMS acts, to say nothing of the Beatles. “I was in the studio twenty-four hours a day,” Martin argued. “You know, you don’t [spend] thirty-seven weeks out of fifty-two at number one wi
thout working quite hard.”

  Even so, a commission was unheard-of. Producers and A&R men were company drones, ciphers, lacking any residual perks—not even a car or a negligible Christmas bonus. Martin, who not only brought in tens of millions of pounds, reversing EMI’s flat earnings, but was largely responsible for thrusting the label into the rock ’n roll era, surely deserved at least the same kind of compensation as company sales reps, a reward for his extraordinary success—or so he thought.

  EMI balked until the summer of 1964, when Martin notified the label that he would not be renewing his contract at the end of its current term. Len Wood attempted to broker a new deal, but each proposal he made was more preposterous, more arrogant—and ultimately more insulting—than the last. When, at their final meeting, Wood, sitting ramrod-stiff and imperious behind a polished yacht-size desk, proposed a deal by which Martin would be forced to reimburse EMI for departmental costs out of his profit, the producer yanked the plug. “Thank you, very much,” George informed him. “I’m leaving.”

  Martin decided to start an independent production company—a revolutionary concept, “a shock to the recording industry,” NME conceded—that would lease its staff’s services to the labels for a respectable fee against royalties. Not only that, but he was taking a couple of EMI’s young frontline producers, Ron Richards and John Burgess, as well as Decca’s Peter Sullivan, along with him. That gave them—or A.I.R. (Associated Independent Recording), as it was to be called—an artist base that included Adam Faith, Manfred Mann, Cilla Black, Tom Jones, Peter and Gordon, the Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Matt Monro, Freddy and the Dreamers, Billy J. Kramer, P. J. Proby, Lulu, the Fourmost, and, of course, the Beatles.