The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  A sticky tension quickly developed in the studio. The Beatles barreled through forty hours of work on “Revolution,” trying to overlook the intrusion, but Yoko made herself difficult to ignore. Wherever they turned, she was in their face. On “Revolution No. 9,” which meandered on for days while John tinkered with sound effects, Paul remembered: “Yoko was there for the whole thing and she made decisions about which loops to use.” She listened to playbacks and critiqued their work. She instructed George Martin to discard takes that everyone else thought were acceptable. Even while the Beatles recorded “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Blackbird,” John and Yoko remained locked away in Studio Two, experimenting with more loops for “Revolution No. 9.”

  “Blackbird” was built on a lilting passage from a Bach bourrée that George and Colin Manley had taught Paul at Liverpool Institute. “I bastardized it,” he admits of his earnest recitation, “but it was the basis of how I wrote ‘Blackbird,’ the voicing of the notes… [with] the B string open and the bass G.” Its placement on the record may have suggested a group decision, but the song was anything but an all-out Beatles effort. George and Ringo weren’t even in the studio, having flown off to the States for a brief visit.

  It was only a matter of time before tensions boiled over. Paul tiptoed around John and Yoko like a guarded diplomat, but he was clearly disgusted. Wanting nothing more than to work on the music, Paul spent half the time at EMI deferring to the couple’s head games. Finally, the second week in June, he gave John a piece of his mind. Given their rivalry, the others must have been surprised that it took him so long. “I could hear them going at it in the hall,” recalls an EMI employee who had stopped in his tracks, “and it was terrifying. Paul was positively livid, accusing John of being reckless, childish, sabotaging the group.” But the more Paul fumed, it seemed, the less John responded. “It wasn’t making the least bit of an impression.”

  John thought he did his best to appease the others, but his hostility was impossible to contain. He decided that by ignoring Yoko, they’d insulted her. It infuriated him that the Beatles refused to welcome her as they would any other musician. “She came in and she would expect to perform with them, like you would with any group,” John argued. But when she tried to jam with them, “there would be a sort of coldness about it.” That was putting it mildly! Referring to the deep freeze toward Yoko that followed, he later said, “Why should she take that kind of shit from those people?”

  But Yoko only brought to the surface resentments that had been brewing among those people for the past year. John couldn’t stand Paul’s crowd-pleasing attitude, nor his insistence on doing things a certain way—his way. He was “fed up [with] being sideman for Paul.” The type of music he wanted to play was being obliterated by the kind of “cop out” material Paul was churning out for the masses. And Paul, of course, was tired of dealing with a drug addict who was more interested in staring blankly at the television set than in making records.

  Just when a showdown seemed inevitable, Paul left on a weeklong visit to the United States, where he planned to promote the Apple agenda at a Capitol Records sales conference. On June 21 he flew to Los Angeles with Ivan Vaughan and Tony Bramwell, while John and Yoko edited “Revolution No. 9” and launched the basic track for “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.” It would not be the last time that maintaining peace necessitated separating John and Paul from each other by different continents.

  [III]

  In Los Angeles, Paul issued a proclamation that took EMI by surprise. “From now on,” he told the stunned audience of adoring execs, “our records will be released on the Apple label.” That was news to the Capitol crew, who regarded the Beatles as their star attraction. Convinced of the Beatles’ Midas touch, the American label was eager to tap into the promising Apple pipeline.

  With Apple at their disposal, assuring them of financial success, the Beatles decided they no longer needed anyone else. In June they had Ron Kass notify EMI that henceforth they would be releasing their own records and expected the company to handle distribution. Sir Joe Lockwood was more annoyed than opposed. Recognizing the Beatles’ valuable association with EMI, he became a reluctant ally. He’d allow it for Europe, as long as the group’s Capitol identity remained intact. The American label depended heavily on the Beatles’ star power as a magnet to attract top talent, and EMI was not about to let them out of the Capitol contract without a fight. But Ron Kass held trump. “Finally, he just told EMI to forget it—that Apple intended to sign a distribution deal in America with another label, at which point they withdrew the demand and agreed to a worldwide arrangement.”

  In the age when any establishment intervention—“kneeling before the big men,” as John put it—was viewed as an affront, the appearance of sticking it to the old ruling class was a satisfying one. Paul certainly felt vindicated after his Capitol address. Despite the sobering message, he was still embraced by the audience, who besieged him for autographs and pictures throughout the short visit. The personal triumph was no less gratifying. During the convention, he’d acted like a businessman, not a rock star. When pressed for facts and figures, he had the right responses. Ron Kass may have worked the crowd, presenting the image of a label head that everyone required, but it was Paul who discussed the intricacies of the deals and the Beatles’ goals for Apple.

  Paul celebrated by retiring to a bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel, where, according to a pointless account in The Love You Make, he spent the remainder of the weekend ping-ponging between rooms while servicing two young women. The details of his escapade aren’t important, other than that it ended prematurely when a third woman appeared on the scene. Casually, very casually, Paul had invited Linda Eastman out to L.A. that week, promising nothing more than “I’m here if you show up.” He didn’t act surprised that she turned up as much as how cool and unfazed she was by the crazy scene. “The moment Linda arrived that was it, as far as other girls were concerned,” says Tony Bramwell, who was barricaded in an adjoining room, enjoying his own randy frolic. “Paul was drawn to her in a completely relaxed way. It was a mood I’d never seen him in before.”

  “[I’d] always found Linda a very fascinating woman,” Paul says now, upon reflection, but at the time, the vibe she gave off packed a powerful punch. She acted more “like a mate,” he thought, which paralleled John’s first take on Yoko. There was nothing coy about her, none of the wrestling that went on with the other “birds.” Nor was she hung up about drugs, rock ’n roll, or even her career, unlike Jane Asher. What he liked best about Linda, Paul recalls, was her take-it-as-it-comes attitude toward life. “We both played the field…. We both had quite a few relationships.” Linda appeared able to take the larking, to say nothing of his ego, in stride. When a very pretty TV star knocked on his hotel door to declare her undying love, Linda “seemed amused,” rather than intimidated. It was a relief from the proprieties that Jane required.

  Over the next day or two, Paul and Linda exchanged a wealth of personal information. “Her family was the most academic family on the planet,” Paul says, impressed by the firepower of their diplomas. “Her dad, Lee, got a scholarship to Harvard… and her brother, John, went to Stanford.” Even if Linda didn’t attend Smith, as was traditional for the Eastman women, the University of Arizona sounded to Paul like “a very good school.”

  Their brief encounter was too short to seal the deal. Afterward, stopping at JFK to drop off Linda on his way back to London, Paul intimated they would be seeing more of each other. But he made no promises. Jane still loomed large in his life, if not in his heart. They’d gone through so much together, and she was a lovely girl. But the demands of her work were ceaseless and Paul viewed them ungratefully. Once again she had left on what seemed like an open-ended tour, “abandoning him” for much of the summer. There were plenty of distractions; Paul had never restrained himself when it came to meaningless affairs. But he was getting tired of meaningless and envied John and Ringo their chil
dren.

  Julian, especially, had been on his mind. Paul “felt particularly sorry” for the boy, who was sandwiched between warring parents. Julian was “a fragile little kid” to begin with, wounded and insecure but touchingly luminous when Paul came to visit. How wonderful it would be, he thought, to give the boy’s spirits a lift.

  A week or two after returning, Paul decided to drive out to Kenwood to see Cynthia and Julian. This took some cheek—he wasn’t certain how John would interpret the gesture—but he decided it was the decent thing to do. Cynthia had been cut off very quickly from the Beatles’ family, a victim of what one insider called “the Law of the Husband.” “I thought it was a bit much for [her and Julian] suddenly to be personae non gratae and out of my life,” Paul recalled. Cynthia had been involved from the beginning, even before the Beatles odyssey, when he and Dot Rhone made up half of another fearless foursome. There was something heartbreakingly tragic about erasing her from the scene. Not waiting around for anyone’s approval, Paul jumped in his Aston Martin and drove out to Weybridge to “try to cheer them up.”

  The route from Cavendish Avenue to Kenwood took about an hour in all, during which Paul passed the time singing, improvising a lyric to serve as “a hopeful message for Julian”: “Hey Jools—don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better…” His voice glided over the tune, a poignant, wavering melody that draws the listener below its gentle surface like a lullaby. Nothing in his recent repertoire was as openly tender and genuinely stirring.

  Paul, being Paul, knew instantly he’d hit upon the pot of gold. The whole rainbow of magical musical elements had fallen right into place. Throughout his visit with Cynthia and Julian, the tune kept turning over in his head, and by the time he returned home he was ready to put on the finishing touches.

  Paul tied the song up neatly in one sitting, changing Jools to Jude, after one of the characters in Oklahoma!, whose name had the right ring. In his enthusiasm, he rushed to play “Hey Jude” for John and Yoko, who had arrived upstairs in his music room as it all came together. The couple, stoned and sullen, were not so easily impressed, but John later acknowledged the song as “one of [Paul’s] masterpieces.” His account, however, differs as to what the lyric really means. “He said it was written about Julian, my child,” John told Playboy in the days preceding his death, “[b]ut I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it, Yoko’s just come into the picture [and]… the words ‘go out and get her’—subconsciously he was saying, Go ahead, leave me.”

  Of course, to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a lullaby is just a lullaby. Whatever the case, “Hey Jude” was thrust into the queue of great material still waiting to be recorded. Unlike with the songs written in India, the Beatles held it aside, knowing it was destined to be a single. In fact, they had been looking for the perfect two sides to single out before the album was finished. John was holding out for “Revolution,” which he felt was more relevant for its political content and a statement the group needed to make. But “Revolution” had developed problems in the studio, and the group was still on the fence about making it the A-side.

  “Hey Jude,” on the other hand, sounded like an obvious choice. The Beatles began recording it on July 29, 1968, after receiving a last-minute polish by Paul and John. Instead of settling into Abbey Road, as was customary, they took it to Trident Studios, an independent, thoroughly modern eight-track facility in Soho, where George and Paul were simultaneously producing other Apple artists.

  The scenery, however, was the only thing that changed. Paul’s decision to instruct the other Beatles to play “Hey Jude” exactly how he wanted it to sound raised the resentments of the previous session to the boiling point. John clenched his teeth while George sizzled with anger. During the verses, George had answered every line by playing a riff mimicking Paul’s vocal. As a flourish, it was tired and weakened by overkill, but instead of finessing a potentially delicate situation, Paul, in his bone-dry schoolmaster voice, snapped, “No, George… You come in on the second chorus maybe….” He might have slapped George as well for all the hostility it created. Ron Richards, who observed countless Beatles sessions, notes that Paul was “oblivious to anyone else’s feelings in the studio.” He was determined to make the most exciting record possible, no matter what the emotional cost, “especially,” Richards says, “when it came to his own songs.”

  John was better equipped to deal with Paul’s business because of the impregnability of his own success, but for George it stung—and doubly so—from years of mistreatment and insecurity. He’d been spending mornings down the hall, producing “Sour Milk Sea,” a single he’d written for Jackie Lomax, and even had the structure for a new song, “Something,” pretty much down. And while it was no “Hey Jude,” the Beatles only days earlier had finished laying down a demo of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which is as close to brilliance as George ever got. No, George had come a long way since that evening he played “Raunchy” on the upper level of a Liverpool bus, and he’d had about all the bullshit he was going to take from Paul McCartney—and he told him that, in not so many words.

  This was becoming a familiar scene as the sessions for the album grew more complicated—and intense. Hardly a day went by when one of the Beatles—or more—wasn’t at one of the other’s throats. The pitch of antagonism in the studio ran about as high as a Yoko Ono vocal. Feelings were extremely raw and fragile owing to no small amount of outside stimuli. First and foremost there was Yoko’s unspeakable presence to deal with, along with John’s zombielike regard for her. No matter what they said over the years as a show of unity or to soothe injured feelings, Paul, George, and Ringo absolutely hated Yoko’s intrusion. It went against everything they had decided as a group, and it grew worse with each passing day. Each time Yoko walked through the door, she felt more entitled to be there and to offer unwanted opinions about the quality of the music. And those opinions, rattled off in a flat, terse delivery, grated like fingernails on a chalkboard. They weren’t intended to be constructive. A malevolent omnivore, Yoko lobbed critical bombs at the Beatles with an impudence that never lost its power to rankle. “Beatles do this…” “Beatles do that…” Every time she interrupted, it sent a chill through the studio that “made the other Beatles self-conscious and inhibited their musical spontaneity.” It was hard for them to work with the hostility she put out. “There was a definite vibe,” George recalled, “and that’s what bothered me. It was a weird vibe.”

  Later, the recording process became even more splintered. “I remember having three studios operating at the same time,” George recalled. “Paul was doing some overdubs in one. John was in another, and I was recording some horns… in a third.” It was impossible to produce the songs the same way as before. “For the first time, I had to split myself three ways,” George Martin said, “because at any one time we were recording in different studios.” Instead of supervising the sessions, “looking after what both the engineer and the artist were doing” and maintaining “control over what the finished product sounded like,” he merely bounced between rooms, trying to keep everything from dissolving into chaos.

  With the focus running in such contrary directions, friction was inevitable. Tempers flared whenever one of the Beatles didn’t get his way or disapproved of one of the other’s favorite songs. Paul, especially, fumed over what he perceived to be John’s obsession with “Revolution No. 9,” a self-indulgent concoction that evoked his earlier home tapes, and was “dead set against putting such a mess on a Beatles album.” Similarly, John made no secret that he always felt “hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving” the rest of the band. In an interview later on, he singled out “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” to make his point, saying, “[Paul] even recorded it by himself in another room.” By the time John heard the song, it was already a finished track: “Him drumming, him playing the piano, him singing.”

  George was equally expressive, often repeating, almost verbatim, previous complaints.
Publicly he would always deny envying John’s and Paul’s success, but he felt ignored by them, dismissed as a lightweight, relegated to sloppy seconds. His discontent burned hotter after the Beatles recorded “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” on August 16. They ran through fourteen takes in a dusk-to-dawn session, none of which had the right feel for George. Listening to the playback, it seemed that “there was such a lack of enthusiasm,” that John and Paul were just going through the motions. “They weren’t taking it seriously,” he recalled, “and I don’t think they were even playing on it,” or, at least, playing up to speed. Even George Martin noticed how during George’s song, “the others would join in, a little more reluctantly than they used to.” It didn’t seem fair, considering the classic it was destined to become. Couldn’t they admit he’d written a “pretty good” song? What did he have to do to get their attention?

  To his credit, George’s form of rebellion was entirely creative.

  Two weeks later, on his way to the studio from Sussex, scheduled to give the song another shot, he was explaining to Eric Clapton how something radical was needed to light a fire under the Beatles. “We were in George’s car, driving in London,” Clapton remembered, “and he said, ‘Do you want to come and play on this record?’ ” It was an astonishing invitation. The Beatles had used plenty of session musicians on other albums, but no one capable of upstaging them, certainly never a rock ’n roll virtuoso on the level of Eric Clapton. Clapton hesitated, unsure of what to do. He knew the other Beatles “wouldn’t like it,” but George brushed aside his reservations. “It’s nothing to do with them,” he insisted. “It’s my song, and I’d like you to play on it.”