Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  During the scramble to finish the movie songs before the Beatles hit the road, Epstein got a June call from Buckingham Palace. The Beatles would be listed as recipients of MBE—Member of the British Empire—awards from the queen, he learned. This was as much a matter of economics as it was of status and celebrity fawning: the award was not for culture but for trade. As much as politicians had promised an upswing in Britain’s economy, everybody knew it was the pop-music exports that had made Britain flush, that the tourist money fueling Swinging London filled its coffers. In weathering the subsequent storm of protest from retired military types, the royals were nothing if not pragmatic.

  Recording had been compressed, but Help!’s sound track bested Beatles for Sale from six months earlier; they were learning to keep the aesthetic ideas afloat amid torrents of activity. Lennon’s title song and “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” posed a new threat with sturdy finesse, but in numbers like “The Night Before,” “Another Girl,” and Harrison’s “I Need You,” boy still meets, finds another, or loses girl; the musical wheels spun unattached to substantive gears. Their ensemble, increasingly nimble yet determined, gave this material flair beyond its ambition. Only “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” fit inside the larger arc of Lennon confessionals, the male anxiety shifting beneath “If I Fell,” “I’m a Loser,” and “Norwegian Wood” and not as piercing. This resignation signaled a new Lennon mode, a disquiet that would seep into “I’m Only Sleeping” and “I’m So Tired.”

  Paradoxically, much of the band’s work in this dense season was upstaged by McCartney’s lone “Yesterday,” which echoed inside the idea of a Tin Pan Alley classic. The song was so pure, and so credulous, it sounded as if it had sprung from the Hollywood musical forever looping in McCartney’s mind, the imaginary rock ’n’ roll past he kept inventing as he went along. He walked around for months with the melody and the dummy words “Scrambled egg,” certain he had heard it somewhere before, running it by older London show-biz pros, like Oliver!’s Lionel Bart, to make sure he wasn’t unconsciously cribbing it. When he finally sat down and played it for the others, incorporating Lennon’s three-syllable “Yesterday” for the title phrase, they threw up their hands: it was simply not a band number.11 Martin suggested strings, but McCartney blanched. So Martin scored it for the more highfalutin string quartet atop McCartney’s solo acoustic guitar. The finished product was placed on Help!’s sound track, but it sat outside that box on both stage and album. In America, it became a single and dominated the autumn charts with four weeks at number one, for their biggest seller since “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

  Here was a superbly ironic punch line to the season’s forward momentum. Was “Yesterday” even a rock ’n’ roll number? In Lennon’s ongoing quandaries about such McCartney swill, it created new tension in the partnership. Lennon could not help admiring it, or enjoying the profits he would share in its extraordinary publishing returns. But it was never a song Lennon would have written on his own, and if the Beatles had to put it on a record, there was no place for him to so much as harmonize alongside his songwriting partner. For the album, Lennon made sure to follow it up with “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” to conclude Help!’s side two, as if reiterating all the arguments about the band’s priorities since the Decca audition. This slammed the sound track shut with a reliable Larry Williams number as touring season swallowed them up again.

  To top The Ed Sullivan Show from the previous year, Epstein took promoter Sid Bernstein’s bait, leapfrogged Madison Square Garden, and booked Shea Stadium. Fifty-six thousand fans stilled for the Beatle helicopter as it settled on the New York baseball field on August 15. “A hush fell over the crowd, it was this mind-numbing moment, like watching the Gods descend from the sky,” recalls critic Richard Meltzer, who attended both Shea shows, in 1965 and 1966.12 From there, they went through Toronto, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco by the end of that same month.

  Reporter Larry Kane, who rejoined them on this tour, reported that fans crowded onto the runway in Houston while the propellers were still running. “Not only did they swarm the tarmac but when the engines of the planes were finally turned off,” Kane says, “some of the older fans managed to climb onto the wings with lit cigarettes in their hands waving to the entourage inside.” There were many such close calls.13

  As Help! hit theaters at the end of July, Epstein met with Walt Disney to discuss the possibility of the Beatles performing songs for the upcoming animated film of The Jungle Book. Later, John Lennon nixed the idea; Disney wound up using laconic Scouser accents for the film’s four shaggy-haired vultures. On August 14, they taped another Ed Sullivan Show appearance before a live studio audience at Studio 50 in New York: “I Feel Fine,” “I’m Down,” “Act Naturally,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Yesterday,” and “Help!” The tour whooshed by in a blur of mad dashes and isolated hotel rooms.

  After a six-week break beginning September 1, the Beatles hit the EMI studios on October 12, flush with new material, determined to hold their own atop the summer’s pop avalanche. Curiously, stronger songs reduced studio takes. They began with five attempts of Lennon’s “Run For Your Life” on October 12 and then “This Bird Has Flown,” which featured George on sitar. The next day came “Drive My Car,” in four takes. October 16 brought three more takes of “Day Tripper” and some vocal overdubs to finish the track; then they started Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone.” On the 18th, more work followed on “Someone,” with lead and backing vocals and Ringo on tambourine. Then came Lennon’s “In My Life,” in three takes the same session. Few of their songs for Help! had emerged so quickly.

  And on October 26, the Beatles reported to Buckingham Palace to receive their MBE awards.

  At a press conference after the ceremony, reporters crowded around Lennon to ask what he thought of the uproar the awards had caused. A Canadian politician had said he no longer wanted his MBE because it “put him on the same level with vulgar nincompoops.” A rash of air force squadron leaders had returned their medals, claiming the MBE had been debased. John replied that most of the complainers had earned their medals “for killing people. I’d say we deserved ours more. Wouldn’t you?”14

  The veterans who returned their awards in protest seemed to miss the point: the Beatles had revived Britain’s economy, restored its sense of self-confidence, and turned its postwar socialist experiment into an inarguable success. And in a 1982 interview with Lennon biographer Ray Coleman, former British prime minister Harold Wilson justified the award in similarly practical terms: “I saw the Beatles as having a transforming effect on the minds of youth, mostly for the good. It kept a lot of kids off the streets.” Even beyond that, Wilson noted, “They introduced many, many young people to music, which in itself was a good thing.”15

  Posing for the world’s cameras, the Beatles put on their best grins, as if oddly touched that the ruling class seemed to care. By this point, they knew the royals were sponging off of their celebrity, but Lennon opted not to rattle anybody’s jewelry with his quotes. Rumors swirled that they had snuck off to have a joint in the royal loo. The rumors became enshrouded in the official myth long after the Beatles admitted only to tobacco nerves.

  Where the royal honors stirred controversy, history measures them as a blip in the ongoing story—nothing like the blips to come. The Beatles headed back to work, and again the schedule reveals an increasing studio efficiency: fewer basic tracks (for foundation) and more layers onto the crowded four-track equipment. Recording continued with “We Can Work It Out,” vocals on October 29, and November began with rhythmic tracks for “Michelle.” “What Goes On” got revived for Ringo from March 5, 1963, on November 4, and the evening session tracked a twelve-bar blues with George Martin on harmonium, one of the few takes from these sessions that got held (until 1995’s Anthology). The following days brought remakes of McCartney’s “I’m Looking Through You,” Harrison’s “Think for Yourself” (called “Won’t
Be There with You”), the 1965 Christmas message (in which “Yesterday” turned to derision), Lennon’s “The Word,” a second remake of “I’m Looking Through You” with a new rhythm track, and a final thirteen-hour marathon finish with the vocal splendor of “You Won’t See Me,” “Girl,” more work on “Wait,” and vocal overdubs for “I’m Looking Through You.” Martin sequenced the album’s songs on November 16, and sent Rubber Soul off to be mastered and ready in shops by the first week in December.

  Recorded almost one year after Beatles for Sale, under almost exactly the same conditions, Rubber Soul has no hint of the previous record’s fatigue. A Hard Day’s Night was the band’s first all-original sequence; Rubber Soul came close to this formula, adding two tracks from George Harrison, a Buck Owens knockoff from Ringo, and a startling leap forward in both theme and tone. “We were just getting better, technically, and musically, that’s all,” Lennon later concluded. “Finally we took over the studio. In the early days, we had to take what we were given, we didn’t know how you can get more bass. We were learning the technique on Rubber Soul. We were more precise about making the album, that’s all, and [we] took over the cover and everything.”16 Having conquered the rock ’n’ roll ideal, they leaned back into the beat and delivered an adult record—dance was secondary on this album in a way it had never been before. This was not music you made sense of by making out or moving along with it; it was all shadows and subtext, an experiment in suggestion and elliptical gestures that was at once nervy and guarded, extroverted yet discreet.

  In America, the Help! sound track appeared in September, followed by Rubber Soul barely three months and a creative light-year later. By October, the charts had shifted dramatically toward social protest (“Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire), sleek yet hook-laden piffle (“Hang On Sloopy” by the McCoys, cowritten by Bert Berns, who’d written “Twist and Shout”), and romance (“Yesterday”). November brought the Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud” and the Supremes’ “I Hear a Symphony”; December saw the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and the Dave Clark Five’s “Over and Over.” The year’s commercial blockbusters were Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” two incendiary bombs followed by a lullabye, images that defined these acts for years to come. In reality, the Beatles would have had a fifth U.S. number one that year if “Day Tripper” had been included on Capitol’s resequence of Rubber Soul; the track swarmed the British Christmas season as the perfect holiday single but had to wait for the new year to dominate American radio. For Americans, the geographic delay wound up dispersing the musical energy away from the band’s best work rather than in favor of it.

  Dylan’s overt influence on Rubber Soul skirted imitation. Ever since “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” a new psychological acuity had risen up in Lennon’s love songs, making them at once particular and universal. His romantic insecurities were unique, but of the stripe almost every young couple could identify with. “Norwegian Wood” posed the lover’s mind as a maze; it caught the exotic, bohemian mood of an emerging London chic and detailed an off-kilter affair as doubt tipping toward the existential. Boy gets girl in this song, but under the most confounding of emotional circumstances. “What tryst is worth this kind of emotional hangover?” Lennon seemed to ask.

  McCartney’s standout track was not “Michelle” (a cousin to “And I Love Her” and “Yesterday” with fancier chords and French lyrics), but “You Won’t See Me,” which was unbearably chipper on the surface and leaked nagging hesitation from every luminous harmony: boy loses girl but wonders if he ever really had her to begin with. The bummer lyric gets joined to incandescent vocals to express the gap between love and great sex, reaching toward a closeness sex alone can’t deliver. The production was a marvel: the vocal work hints at breakthroughs like “Paperback Writer,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” “Nowhere Man,” and Abbey Road’s “Because.” Brian Wilson and the Byrds had goaded the Beatles into proving that no matter what kind of harmonies were happening elsewhere in pop, they were a peerless, muscular choir, leaning into every nuance, relishing every finely honed detail, competing with their meticulous ensemble for attention. As each verse comes around, the backup vocals increase their intensity, both in mood and in upper descants, until the entire track gains a momentum more emotional than rhythmic. The very idea of singing while playing many of these songs now became daunting—such studio musicianship became impractical, not to say irrelevant, onstage (they never attempted this track live). As early as the elaborate vocal harmonies attached to “You Won’t See Me,” the argument to stop touring began as an outgrowth of their musical sophistication.

  Rubber Soul’s restrained musical confidence brought new momentum to the London scene. The Beatles had long since graduated into cultural symbol, a beast that wasn’t nearly big enough to absorb and reflect all the desires its audience projected onto it. Pots of money flowed in and around pop, and Britain, almost in spite of itself, began to seem trendy. Even the Union Jack, long a totem of an empire’s oppression, flipped into status symbol. London itself graduated into pop’s new center, an international jet-setter’s hub, not least because it seemed a source of magic and poetry. “London is the most swinging city in the world at the moment,” Diana Vreeland proclaimed in Vogue; and to Americans, the weirdest thing about her self-evident proclamation was its utter lack of irony.

  As the media glare descended, this larger pop moment embraced music, fashion, design, film, architecture, and all things mod (a term derived from modern-jazz buffs in the late 1950s). Any town that sprouted a brand this fetching must be hip by association—and once again Liverpool got the shirk. Teen desire erupted through Mary Quant’s outfits; and once clothing shops flourished all down Carnaby Street, they spread to Mayfair, Chelsea, and Kensington. Models and actresses like Pattie Boyd and Jane Asher turned into Beatle girlfriends and then part of “ideal young couples.” Roger Miller followed up “King of the Road” with “England Swings” at the end of 1965 for a giant reversal of cultural salutes: this country crossover act topped UK charts by genuflecting to pop’s new center.

  A Geoffrey Dickinson cover collage trumpeted Time magazine’s “Swinging London” issue in April 1966. By this point, Quant’s jersey minidresses, with their sleek zipper lines and casual flair, had been distributed stateside by JC Penney since 1963. Quant added PVC (polyvinyl chloride) to her palette of threads, creating go-go outfits that shone like raincoats, bright colors topped by enormous sunglasses. Twiggy (aka Lesley Hornby) became an international supermodel wearing op-art miniskirts, suggesting art worn around town. With her reverse-Beatle bob, a babe who cropped her hair like a boy, Twiggy practically invented Quant instead of the other way around. Time had spotted a trend, but it was already cresting: within another year the international pop “scene” torch would pass to San Francisco.

  The faded suede jackets the Beatles wore in Robert Freeman’s Rubber Soul shot fed Swinging London’s international elan, and they gazed down from its cover like cool avatars, musicians who were too hip not to set fashion trends. The collarless jackets in which Epstein outfitted them back in 1963 now seemed like portents, the idea that even young men could go spiffy at no cost to their machismo. Characters like the “Norwegian Wood” couple, with her fancy furniture and liberated attitude, became the ideal of hipsters everywhere.

  Like 1962’s “The Twist,” Swinging London became a social metaphor for everything groovy, sexy, and fun. In cultural terms, to swing meant celebrating the tension between modernity and tradition in every facet of life. As Andrew Loog Oldham, now managing the Rolling Stones, had already discovered, fashion had a head start on pop, so as trendy shops opened with irresistible names like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, the movement fed on itself. In this new frame, Christine Keeler’s 1963 nude portrait looked prophetic. This new cult of British youth paraded through new magazines like Queen and Petticoat, expressing pleasure in the very idea of getting and spending,
consumption itself, which helped turn all things British into desirable exports.

  Pop’s new relationship between viewer and subject leapt across mediums—Help! had whispers of this, especially in its flimsy Bond pretext. Michael Caine’s portrayal of Alfie Elkins, the cad who befriends the camera / audience throughout Alfie, became a signature piece of self-conscious cinema. Antonioni’s Blow-Up portrayed a fashion photographer based on David Bailey (played by David Hemmings), with models Veruschka and Peggy Moffitt (and the Yardbirds in a club scene) playing themselves. In an early sequence that doesn’t hold up, Hemmings’s character has a wan orgasm during a fashion shoot. It’s all about the vain, empty obsessions of the beautiful people. Cued off the cynical exhaustion in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the entire charade has the feel of empty-headed sleaze, but everybody looked fabulous. The industry scarecrow Alun Owen had George Harrison slice up in A Hard Day’s Night was replaced by figures with style and menace. On television, Honor Blackman and then Diana Rigg conveyed a cool, detached and faintly ironic heat for their Avengers counterpart, Patrick Macnee, wearing black leather catsuits and jackboots alongside his bowler hats and tight jackets. (The series neatly overlapped the Beatles career, 1961–69).

  As if making up for lost time, broadcast entrepreneurs seized on a loophole in the BBC’s media monopoly. Three pirate radio stations began broadcasting from offshore, pumping out fare more closely aligned to the charts: Radio Caroline, Swinging Radio England, and Wonderful Radio London. (Americans would get a taste of Radio London as parodied on The Who Sell Out in 1967.) These “underground” stations disrupted everyday British imaginations to stoke the increasingly surreal atmosphere. In July 1966, Britain even won the World Cup. In every aspect—economy, fashion, music, international status—the Beatles headed up a resurgence of British cool that was quite unlike anything its subjects had ever experienced before, or have experienced since.