The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  It also meant that the writing process would forgo the critical feedback—the suggestion of a phrase, a few bars, or a middle eight—that helped shape a Lennon-McCartney song in the past. One of the key ingredients unique to John and Paul’s partnership was their reliance on and trust in each other to fine-tune, or, as John described it, “just finish off the tail ends” of each composition. Even with songs that were written almost entirely by one person, some last-minute advice would polish it to perfection. That give-and-take had been instrumental to their success from the very beginning. But now, as Paul pointed out, “it meant that I’d hear some of the songs for the first time when [John] came to the studio, whereas in the past we checked them with each other.”

  Even though he no longer depended on it, Paul regretted the loss of John’s influence, blaming the intensifying emotional crisis in his partner’s life for the breach. Over a few weeks in May John’s affair with Yoko Ono had all but thrown his life into complete upheaval. After that first encounter John stumbled through the early days of summer in what he described as “my love cloud,” admitting, when it came to Yoko, he’d “never known love like this before.” It must have been as unnerving as it was exhilarating. He managed to fill those scattered weeks with mundane Apple business but became too distracted, too rocked by the constant clash of emotions. John later claimed that every time he was in Yoko’s company “my head would go off like I was on an acid trip.” One “sniff” of her potent mojo and he “was hooked,” he said, mixing drugs and metaphors in equal measure. “She was the ultimate trip.”

  For John, the very heat of this relationship only underscored his disaffection for Cynthia. Finally, on the afternoon of May 22, a situation developed that would speed things toward the end. Cynthia decided to return from her vacation in Greece a day earlier than anticipated and, during a stopover in Rome, attempted to call John so that he would expect her. It did not faze her that no one answered at Kenwood; John could be any number of places, possibly asleep or possibly stoned. But when Cynthia arrived at the house about four in the afternoon, she was surprised to find the lights ablaze and the door open. That was odd, she thought. Someone should have been around to greet her—the housekeeper or the gardener—but the place seemed deserted and “eerily silent.” With Jenny Boyd and Magic Alex trailing noisily behind, Cynthia wandered through the warren of neglected downstairs rooms, calling to John. Receiving no reply, she bounded into the sun-drenched breakfast room and stopped dead in the doorway. “John and Yoko, wearing nothing but matching purple dressing gowns, turned to look at me,” she recalled.* Curled comfortably into a scarlet-cushioned settee, John didn’t so much as bat an eye at his wife’s unexpected appearance. He calmly put down a mug of tea, stubbed out a cigarette, and said, “Oh, hi.”

  Struggling to maintain her composure, Cynthia began to babble uncontrollably about the trip back to England. “I had this great idea,” she rattled on. “We had breakfast in Greece, lunch in Rome, and Jenny and Alex thought it would be great if we all went out to dinner in London to carry on the whole holiday. Are you coming?”

  John, staring expressionlessly at her, replied: “No, thanks.”

  Panic-stricken, Cynthia held her ground, holding out hope for a last-minute compromise, something that might at least temporarily salvage their marriage. She’d always been willing in the past to ignore his infidelities. It was the ultimate act of love. For John, however, there was no going back. Finally a line had been drawn. “You bastard!” Cynthia cried, and darted out of the room.

  Cynthia spent the next few days “in complete shock,” camped out at Jenny Boyd’s flat. But one night in that desperate, wounded span, either out of anger or revenge, she slept with Magic Alex. “She knew it was a mistake the moment it happened,” says Peter Brown, “especially with Alex, whom she’d never trusted, nor even liked.” If Cynthia believed there was any chance of a reconciliation with John, this indiscretion ended it forever. Alex had John’s ear, and Cynthia knew it.

  Whatever her reasoning, Cynthia remained determined to see the marriage through. Convinced that John still needed her, she returned to Kenwood, mollified by his apparent denial that anything improper had occurred. “For a while, everything was wonderful,” she recalled. “We could speak more openly and honestly with each other, and there really was a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.”

  But the tunnel was short, and the light soon faded. Within weeks their life together had disintegrated into a revolving state of solicitude and withdrawal, resignation and despondence. Following a stretch when John became disturbingly incommunicative, Cynthia packed once again, escaping on still another vacation to Pesaro, Italy, with her mother, Julian, and a favorite aunt and uncle. It was there, returning at dawn after an uninhibited night “on the town,” that she encountered “a very agitated” Magic Alex, pacing along the sidewalk outside the Cruiser Hotel. Over breakfast, Alex confessed that he was there as John’s emissary, to demand a divorce on grounds of adultery. Embarrassed but unfaltering, Alex admitted that he’d agreed to be named corespondent and to testify in any proceedings.

  Cynthia may have been “absolutely devastated” by the slimy tactic, but she could not have been entirely unprepared for it. A few days earlier, while recuperating from a bout of tonsillitis, she’d opened an Italian newspaper to a picture of John and Yoko, arm in arm, attending the June 18 premiere of In His Own Write at London’s Old Vic. “I knew when I saw the picture that that was it,” Cynthia told Ray Coleman. John would never have taken Yoko public, she concluded, if he wasn’t ready to file for divorce. He knew the press would pounce all over their appearance together—and he was obviously prepared for the consequences. But he wasn’t prepared for the outcry.

  John had been planning for some time to step out in public with Yoko. The groundwork for it had already been laid at the Apple Tailoring launch party on May 22, at which she was introduced as his date. “They were like two nervous lovebirds,” says Alistair Taylor, recalling how Yoko clung coyly to John’s arm that evening as they paraded through the shop, “but it upset those of us who had known Cynthia from the beginning.” Most of the old Liverpool contingent avoided them out of embarrassment. If the other Beatles experienced any uneasiness with this development, they kept it to themselves; nothing, as far as it is known, was ever said about it for the record. What John did in his personal life, especially with other women, was John’s business; none of the Beatles made those kind of judgments about one another. Only Derek Taylor, whose “loyalty to and affection for Cynthia Lennon” were unconditional, had the courage to confront John about Yoko. A few days after the party, the two men had lunch at a Japanese restaurant in London, where Taylor, fearful of an imminent media backlash, was barely able to contain his outrage. Do you have any idea what you are doing? he wondered. “As your friend and press officer, it is my duty to inform you that despite my sealed lips anything you say will be taken down and blown up and broadcast to a waiting world. Not to mention Cyn, Julian, Mrs. Powell, and other loved ones.” John warned Derek to mind his own business, indicating that from now on things were going to be different in his life. “So that is it—you and Yoko?” Taylor wondered. “Yes,” John replied coolly. “That’s it.”

  The turning point occurred a month later at the Old Vic, where the press was lying in ambush. “Word had circulated through the channels that John’s marriage was over,” recalls Don Short, “and everyone was waiting for the chance to uncover it. This was it.” When John got out of his limo, clutching Yoko’s tiny hand, flashbulbs lit up the sky and an indignant outcry erupted, the hostility of which caught him by surprise. “Where’s your wife? Where’s Cynthia?” reporters shouted over one another. A look of panic crossed John’s face as he fought his way through the crowd. “Who is this?” they demanded. “What happened to your wife, John?”

  “I don’t know!” he blurted angrily, but it did nothing to staunch the controversy.

  If the press and fans were predictably outraged by Yoko�
��s appearance, public opinion was nothing compared with the difficulties it stirred at Apple. The Beatles were days away from beginning work on an important new album, and suddenly domestic issues, not music, had become the group’s primary focus. Naturally, everyone’s concern was for John’s immediate welfare. He had become homeless in the ensuing uproar, having moved out of Kenwood in order to be with Yoko, and needed a place to crash. But where? Hotels were out of the question because of the swarming press. Ringo’s old flat at Montagu Square, once the hideaway of Jimi Hendrix, was currently occupied by Cynthia’s hostile mother. Brian’s place in Chapel Street, as well as the country estate, had been sold. The prospects for a superstar were surprisingly small. Not surprisingly, Paul McCartney rushed in to provide John with instant refuge.

  “Paul, in his usual way, tried to be the nice guy and was open-minded about John’s weird choice,” says Brown. “He invited them to stay at [his house in] Cavendish Avenue for a while.” The day after Cynthia’s return, they moved into the second-floor guest bedroom and made themselves at home. “But the problem was that Yoko wasn’t a very warm person—not even able to say thank you in response to anything Paul did for them. And he went miles out of his way to make them feel welcome, being a nice guy. So that didn’t last very long.”

  Feeling unwanted—and fed up with what they perceived as Paul’s insincerity—John and Yoko moved into Peter Brown’s flat, which was in the midst of being repainted, then stayed with Neil Aspinall for a week until they brokered a solution: Cynthia could remain in Kenwood for the time being, as long as she agreed to take her mother with her. John and Yoko wanted the basement flat in Montagu Square for themselves. The place was perfect—centrally located, with a nifty escape hatch (Ringo had installed a rear window over the kitchen sink, which led into an unseen alleyway), and dark. The latter condition, as it happened, was most essential to their needs: wearied by itinerancy and the accumulation of tension around them, John and Yoko had begun a chilling dependence on heroin.

  Paul assumed that his hospitality would have a therapeutic effect on John and Yoko, that they would enjoy a carefree, homey stay and start off life together on the right romantic foot. Instead, they spent almost all their time at Cavendish camped out on his couch, watching television and staring vacantly into each other’s eyes—activities, that, according to Barry Miles, made “Paul [feel] uncomfortable.” Miles put much of the blame on “their drug use [which] made communication difficult,” but attributed it to smoking weed and “eating hash cookies that Yoko baked.”

  Paul, however, knew different. “[John] was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into,” he recalled, crediting it to a sinister liaison with the junkie art dealer Robert Fraser, who’d only recently gained his release from prison on a drug charge. It was Fraser, according to Paul, who introduced John to heroin before the Beatles left for India, and he’d begun sniffing it with Yoko soon after their return. The residual effects both troubled and “disappointed” Paul, as well as the other Beatles. Outwardly, the drug manifested itself, he said, in John’s “adversity and… craziness,” but the underlying influence had also crept insidiously into the songs.

  It was evident right off the bat, when on May 30, 1968, the Beatles began work on the new album. The first song they tackled was John’s indecisive but audacious, bluesy “Revolution,” which kicked things off in tantalizingly chaotic fashion. Eventually, three versions of the song would find its way into release, but the foundation of this track set the tone for the contradictory rhetoric that followed.

  “Revolution” may have sprung from the anger and disillusionment that fractured mainstream society in 1968, but it was written in the peaceful splendor of Rishikesh, which, as John later noted, wrapped a “ ‘God will save us’ feeling about it.” In the days just preceding the recording, however, the news was full of the student rebellion and subsequent strikes in Paris. John put little faith in the outcome of student violence. His vision was utopian; he didn’t believe in overthrowing governments; he wanted to revitalize them, to change the world peacefully by forcing blissful smiles onto the faces of bureaucrats and ideologues who wielded the power. The way to best serve that, said John, was through talk, through communication, by putting faith in the people. “I really thought that love would save us all.” But Paris was on his mind as he entered the studio.

  The Beatles recorded an initial eighteen takes of “Revolution” in a blistering ten-hour session that stretched from the afternoon of May 30 well into the night. In its original version, the song swung into a smoldering, bluesy groove that built gradually and coasted into a fade after about five minutes of upbeat jam. On the last take, however, the Beatles let it all hang out. There was more of an edge to John’s performance, which signaled the rest of the group to stay alert. They knew the score: anytime a vocal turned hot, there was magic to be mined. And John sounded torrid. He hit all the phrases with particularly sly accents. As the arrangement drew to the usual close, John shifted gears and all hell broke loose, punctuated by fractured chords and strings of shrill violent feedback, with mournful screams riding up over the runaway passage. If the additional six-minute free-form jam was meant to convey the sound of revolution, as he said, it succeeded, thanks to the tumultuous explosion of sound. The squall picked up speed from its own momentum, and the Beatles tore forward for ten minutes, until John shouted: “OK, I’ve had enough!”

  The first part, the blues, became known as “Revolution No. 1.” (The rest of it was lopped off and used as the groundwork for what would become the inscrutable blockbuster, “Revolution No. 9.”) Honest but conceptually clumsy, the song was never intended as a galvanizing anthem for the radical New Left. “He doesn’t really get off the fence in it,” Paul said much later. Clearly, John grappled with his position. The next day he took a pencil to it, trying to sharpen his central theme, rewriting the song right up until it was put on tape. Even then he appeared uncomfortable with the point of view. During rehearsals, a studio technician observed John struggling with the lyric—“hedging his bets,” as Paul described it—tweaking crucial phrases each pass he made through the verse. “He seemed to be particularly focused on one specific line, testing it again and again with alternative endings.” Perched atop a barstool, curled closely over his guitar, John sang, “When you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out,” following it with “… you can count me in.” Out… in… out… in… “I don’t think he was sure which way he felt about it at the time,” Paul recalled, and on the album version they covered all bases: singing “out” and “in.”

  Throughout each successive take, Yoko Ono sat “perversely” by John’s side. “It was fairly shocking,” recalls Alan Brown, a technical engineer who had begun working at Abbey Road only a few weeks earlier. Even though Brown was relatively new on the scene, he knew the golden rule: outsiders were prohibited from entering the studio when the Beatles were recording. The boys themselves never allowed visitors to watch them work. Never! Even Brian Epstein and Dick James had entered at their own risk and stayed only long enough to conduct some piece of vital business.

  Now, suddenly, Yoko had landed in the thick of things. She “just moved in,” according to George, who was not at all pleased. “John brought her into the control room… at the start of the ‘White Album’ sessions,” said Geoff Emerick. “He quickly introduced her to everyone and that was it. She was always by his side after that.”

  Yoko’s appearance in the studio functioned as a declaration of war. John knew the bombshell he’d drop by pulling such an aggressive stunt, and he seemed perfectly willing to light the fuse. The look on his face “dared the others” to say the wrong word. He almost longed for the opportunity to stage a showdown. Of course, at that very moment, someone should have stood up to him. Someone should have taken John aside and ordered him to get his act together. Someone should have demanded that Yoko leave the studio immediately. Someone should have laid down the law. Incredibly, however, no one did a thing
. The other Beatles pretended that nothing unusual had occurred. Inside, they seethed and cut one another tense glances, furious at the intrusion but reluctant to confront John.

  Why did they refuse to defend their sanctuary? Why did they shrink from such a petty schoolyard challenge? The Beatles, like everyone else, were caught in the undertow of John’s addiction. They were shaken and terrorized by his volcanic mood swings. He had become more irrational, more hostile toward his mates, erupting unpredictably and without provocation in violent rages. He was always on edge. Of course, the more explosive John became, the more careful the Beatles were to avoid setting him off and the harder they had to stretch to look the other way. During a rehearsal at George’s house, he swept a tape recorder off the table, sending their work scattering in every direction. Even Paul was unable to bring him under control with a well-placed comment. The emotional ups and downs were simply too difficult for them to fight.

  As John waded deeper into the junk, his bond with Yoko strengthened. There wasn’t anywhere he went that she didn’t follow. If John entered the control room to speak with George Martin, Yoko accompanied him. If he huddled with Paul regarding a song or arrangement, Yoko joined the discussion. Whenever Neil arrived to review personal group business, Yoko sat among them. Studio grunts watched in amazement as she followed John into the bathroom.

  What’s more, she refused to remain a spectator. From the very first session of the new album, Yoko made it clear that she intended to participate, hijacking John’s mike during the long “Revolution” jam and moaning or uttering some mumbo jumbo, like “you become naked.” The other Beatles had good reason to be pissed off. To them, this behavior violated their unwritten pact. They had put up with John’s hair-trigger tantrums, his drug “talk about fixes and monkeys,” his increasingly strange and fragmented songs, and his hallucinations. But by allowing Yoko Ono to interrupt their session, he had crossed the line. “[The studio] was where we were together, and that’s why we worked so well,” Ringo explained. “We were all trying to be cool and not mention it, but inside we were all feeling it and talking in corners.”