by Tim Riley
Writing and recording “Strawberry Fields Forever” transformed Lennon’s creative arc: it hinted at the depths of his late-Beatles themes, staked out territory for his early solo career, and transformed the Beatles from performing moptops into studio hermits, from coming-of-age youths into nostalgic adults. Although psychedelic numbers like “Rain,” “Dr. Robert,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” were influenced by the keening harmonies and ringing guitars of the Byrds, Lennon never sounded as if he were trading one style for another; as before with Chuck Berry, imitation only delivered him to a new level of originality. “Strawberry Fields Forever” expanded the hallucinogenic drone of “Rain” into layered colors that shifted when lit by his vocal inflections. The lyrical freedom of his free-form verse produced a supernatural calm. Tracks like “A Day in the Life” (his next song), “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “I Am the Walrus” would soon spring from this same aesthetic impulse as his wordplay blossomed alongside his chord changes.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” became Lennon’s first glimpse of life beyond his group, and part of the recording’s ironic pull lies in how the Beatles drape a group sensibility around Lennon’s abstract psyche, something only the most intimate of musical friends could do. Cued to the music’s new reach, they all grew mustaches for the avant-garde video shoot, a prelude to the coming beards and shoulder-length manes. But the song’s difficult birth took place in the wake of a global media assault, Ku Klux Klan death threats, and a disintegrating marriage and songwriting partnership. As most of Lennon’s primary relationships began to crumble, his muse brought him a song that would redefine his life both aesthetically and personally in a single stroke.
Chapter 15
In a Play
Historical vantage tells us that by late 1966, Lennon’s mental state plumbed dangerous new levels of concern in every area except his music: with his marriage a sham, only fatherly obligations to his son kept him around, out of guilt and a vague sense of duty. As sessions began in November, Lennon walked around in an increasingly isolated haze, driven from Kenwood to sessions to clubs and back, downing amphetamines to wake up, smoking marijuana casually throughout the day, drinking heavily, and confusing his LSD tabs with all his other bedside pills.
This lifestyle clawed at his insides even as his Sgt. Pepper material challenged new technical hurdles. Cynthia Lennon crystallized Lennon’s profound dependence on his band with a knowing quote: “They seem to need you less than you need them.”1 This comment hints at an inner resolve, and an understanding of Lennon’s character, that rarely gets emphasized; as ironic outsider, Cynthia had the only clear-eyed take on Lennon’s group motivations.
Set aside the psychic wiring of childhood abandonment, multiple personal losses, and his battle-ax auntie, and consider Lennon’s professional dilemma: What does the world’s most famous rock star do after he creates a pop masterpiece like Revolver—and nobody notices? Even worse: instead, people target you as a religious criminal?
This melancholy forms the giant subtext to Pepper’s peculiar menagerie of sounds and characters. The album’s gradual inanition, summarized by “A Day in the Life,” has no release valve, such as Revolver’s “Yellow Submarine.” The Lennon wordplay in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (“newspaper taxis” and “kaleidoscope eyes”) makes for a sophisticated sense of psychedelia as a giant mural painted in uplifting colors, but it has no metaphorical sophistication, no undertow of feeling or layered suggestion. The world grasped on to the song’s acronym “LSD” without stopping to consider how even if intentional (which Lennon studiously denied), it featured one of his weaker subtexts. “Lucy” floats as pure fantasy, and although Lennon won the Lennon-McCartney argument on Sgt. Pepper’s sequence (“A Day in the Life” his giant trump card), the balance of power within the band had already shifted. Lennon dropped his Beatle reins without a fight. In the ongoing war over the band’s identity, Lennon folded his material into McCartney’s concept with ease, trouncing him aesthetically while ceding political influence. With McCartney’s blistering guitar lead on Lennon’s “Good Morning Good Morning,” his confidence swelled from cowriter to coproducer, lead conceptualist, and ultimately guitarist and drummer. As Cynthia’s quote suggests, Lennon leaned on McCartney even more than he leaned on his wife.
On the business front, Brian Epstein’s five-year management contract, dating from 1962, appeared on the horizon for renewal. His relationship with the band had cooled ever since their decision at Candlestick Park to stop touring. Instead of supporting them aesthetically, Epstein took this turn as a rebuke. NEMS Enterprises had reorganized itself twice over the past two years: in 1965, Epstein had taken over the Vic Lewis Agency, to handle Donovan (“Mellow Yellow”) and Petula Clark (“Downtown”), and brought Vic Lewis on board as NEMS director. More recently, he had begun socializing with Robert Stigwood (dubbing him “Stiggie”), who had made an offer on NEMS that tempted Epstein. He turned down Stigwood’s buyout the way he had rejected innumerable offers from both sides of the Atlantic. But with Stigwood, inexplicably, Epstein agreed instead to a merger, giving him the title of “co-managing” directorship and the reins for day-to-day business. This made everybody apoplectic, especially the Beatles once they got wind of it. Paul McCartney described their reaction to the critic Greil Marcus in 2000: “We said, ‘In fact, if you do, if you somehow manage to pull this off, we can promise you one thing. We will record God Save the Queen for every single record we make from now on and we’ll sing it out of tune. That’s a promise. So if this guy buys us, that’s what he’s buying.’ ”2
To placate his boys, Epstein stayed on as manager of the Beatles but handed responsibility for most of his other acts to Stigwood. Alistair Taylor, Epstein’s longtime friend, couldn’t believe Epstein had sold himself so short. This self-destructive move came long before Epstein slid into paranoia and emotional despair during the recording and release of Sgt. Pepper. Like a lover who breaks things off because he fears the partner will do so first, the loss of his precious Beatles sent him into a self-recriminating fog.
It’s difficult to account for Lennon’s productivity during the Sgt. Pepper sessions, when his cloistered existence entered new realms of detachment. Show-business buffers gave him the freedom to use drugs in nearly any context. Music became his lifeline—he seems to have stayed “sober” for studio work on his tracks, while almost everything else, including his relationships within the band, became a wash. This created a thin working foundation, and the cost in personal relationships became very high. For the first time in the Beatles’ schedule, Lennon disappeared from not just some McCartney tracks but also most of Harrison’s. Those who blame Yoko Ono for “breaking up the Beatles” have yet to explain Lennon’s withdrawal before the romantic involvement even began.
As casual use of marijuana spread, horror stories attached to cocaine and heroin seemed like so much ranting from elders, one more unendurable lecture. To this innocent, pre-Altamont culture, drugs promised inner growth, an expansion of consciousness, the seeking out of hitherto-untapped worlds, and all the naïve talk that fueled “Tomorrow Never Knows” and even “Got to Get You into My Life” (“Maybe I could see another kind of mind there”). The slow decline from “soft” hallucinogens to “hard” narcotics, the bottoming out and fatalities of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison were all yet to come in the rock world; they have since become hoary show-biz clichés.
But in early 1967, there were no 12-step rehabs or family interventions, and treatment centers were focused on drying out (with methods like pill-induced “sleep cures”) rather than laying the foundation for long-term recovery. Epstein frequented the Priory Clinic, in Putney, a glorified country club, which specialized in fat-wallet elites and entertainers. He’d become a regular visitor, using the clinic as a place to escape and get his strength back before more bingeing. But an increasing paranoia—and a continuing stream of blackmail threats threatening to expose his homosexuality—made his trips more frequent
as his role in Beatle affairs diminished.
As the counterculture ascended the mainstream during 1967’s Summer of Love, rock stars remained defiant: ambitious and corrupt vice squads began clashing with celebrities over small amounts of cannabis, which had begun with the celebrity busts of Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and art dealer Robert Fraser at the home of Keith Richards—Redlands in Richmond—in February. To most observers, however, marijuana presented only the mildest of social problems; making examples out of high-profile cases would do little to sway the behavioral tides. Picking on musicians for grass seemed the height of overdoing it.
In this atmosphere, the politics within the Beatles began to shift. Adolescent gamesmanship persisted in how Lennon and Harrison taunted McCartney to take LSD (Ringo had already partaken in 1966).3 This drug-taking got folded into Lennon’s jealousy of his songwriting partner’s lingering bachelorhood: McCartney had a long-term girlfriend, Jane Asher, who he said had an “open” understanding about the “rules of the road,” a bachelor pad close to the studio, and no kids to worry about. Of course, McCartney’s setup had pitfalls Lennon overlooked: Asher traveled frequently for her own international acting career, and McCartney’s entitled celebrity attitude tested the already strained long-distance relationship. Lennon couldn’t help but envy his partner’s romantic “arrangement,” betraying a bad conscience even though he acted like a single man himself.
This rarefied celebrity privilege baffles most mortals: with access to the most beautiful groupies, the best drugs, and exalted status at the trendiest nightclubs, Lennon’s inner life roared with emptiness, where adoring looks from his son only made him feel helplessly inadequate. Perhaps this is why Lennon’s connection to his muse became all-important, a microscope to his subconscious: “Strawberry Fields Forever” maps his emotional state with Freudian particularity, right down to the Woolton site where he discovered live summer music, the dark well of feeling that he brought to songs like “If I Fell,” “I’m a Loser,” and “Help!” The other three Beatles knew Lennon’s private life toyed with disaster, and they watched as only best friends can. As musicians, the most support they could offer encouraged his gifts and strove to hit the marks set by his songs. The worse Lennon’s depression got, the sharper his songwriting skills became, almost as if they were his only reliable connection with his world and peers.
For the first six months of 1967, the Beatles released only one single (“Penny Lane”/“Strawberry Fields Forever” in February, a world in itself), did scant interviews, and secluded themselves in the studio. In the slowed time of the classic rock era, especially considering that the pop norm had been two albums a year surrounded by singles every two or three months, this stretched out into endless weeks and then months. Rumors spread to every teen’s bedroom that they were finished, working on a record they might never complete, for an audience that had outgrown them. Withdrawing from their audience this way, the Beatles took a giant leap at great risk: to resign from live performance struck almost everybody in their circle (except perhaps Martin) as decidedly daft, and certainly temporary. Epstein opposed it with all his might and hoped some time off might persuade them otherwise. This insistence probably worked against him. That a rock band as successful as the Beatles could “retire” from the stage posited new realms of pretension. The coincidence of their material demanding more and more studio time only confirmed their decision to stop touring: the more they worked, the more their ensemble rewarded them. The “canned” audience sounds greeting their retreat from the stage heighten this irony.
For Epstein, the former retailer, this seemed unbearable. He saw himself as a promoter and worried frantically if his boys were not touring and charming everybody in public. He had few doubts about their recording skills; he simply fretted selfishly that they might have outgrown him. He carried on making deals: Al Brodax, the executive producer of the popular American ABC Saturday-morning cartoons, solved the problem of fulfilling their feature film contract: why not simply animate Beatle songs for the big screen? Since they had rejected all scripts for a 1966 film project, and were clearly not inclined to rehash any Dick Lester comedies, Brodax got the nod. The Revolver song “Yellow Submarine” morphed into a children’s cartoon feature.
Also during this period, Epstein began divesting himself of NEMS and transferring control over to Robert Stigwood. Weathering competing streams of guilt, envy, self-pity, and pride, Epstein exiled himself. Another manager might have kept diversifying beyond the trendy new Saville Theatre he opened in London’s West End. Having discovered and nourished the world’s greatest entertainment, Epstein could afford to sit back, book other acts, and let the tide recede from four years of backbreaking work. But his own drug dependencies worked their corrosive effect: he saw himself as ostracized from the Beatles’ ongoing aesthetic progress, and responded like a spurned lover. Lennon sent Epstein a card at the Priory in July 1967, which read: “I love you . . . I really do.”4
While ominous, Beatle politics served the music, making Sgt. Pepper at once a glow-in-the-dark bauble and a message about the messengers. For a lark, the Beatles decisively renounced their teen image once and for all, adopting fictive characters to announce a new phase. The splashy Victorian band costumes, the epitome of “square,” only sharpened their hip new looks the way ties and suits had once put quotes around their Hamburg leather expressions. The album’s tour through celebrity, its trick mirrors and death curves, became an all-consuming metaphor for life itself: as hippies and psychedelic hard rock entered the scene, the Beatles had a grip on it all before the Summer of Love party even began. And the music transcends its era well enough to serve as a defining statement. Sgt. Pepper recreates its era while commenting on our own. Addressing their audience from the mists of their own fame, the Beatles put quotes around the very idea of their previous “act” as moptops, of all rock acts posing for their fans, of all show-biz acts of all time and all audiences hungry for myth. Like fame, its strategy is seduction, but the punch line is abrupt. Without “A Day in the Life,” the whole fantastical world might just float away.
The start of the Sgt. Pepper sessions in late November 1966 pulled the Beatles into an evening-to-early-morning schedule that swung between haphazard and obsessive. Most sessions began around 7 P.M. and went well past midnight, some until 3 A.M. Lennon either hit a club or three before arriving home at Kenwood near dawn or brought tapes home to work on, rose after lunch, then held songwriting sessions with McCartney or chilled in his TV patio, playing the “Nowhere Man” off his own kitchen. Here’s how Cynthia describes him: “John took LSD regularly. He was hungry for new experiences and never afraid to experiment. . . . [He] threw himself into it with abandon, convinced that this was the way to greater enlightenment, creativity and happiness.” Even worse, Lennon began bringing people home with him, a “ragged assortment” from clubs. “He’d pile in with anyone he’d picked up during the evening, whether he knew them or not. They were all high and littered our house for hours, sometimes days on end. . . . John was an essentially private man, but under the influence of drugs he was vulnerable to anyone and everyone who wanted to take advantage of him.”5
After the stop-and-start December sessions on “Strawberry Fields Forever,” McCartney brought in “Penny Lane,” his answer song, in December 1967. In the middle of “Penny Lane,” the Beatles taped a wildly improbable jam with avant-garde atmospherics, and submitted the tape to the Carnival of Light Rave, scheduled for the Roundhouse in Kilburn on successive Saturday evenings, January 28 and February 4. The posters plastered around London for the event proclaimed: “Music composed by Paul McCartney and Delta Music Plus.”
This day’s attempt lasted thirteen minutes and forty-eight seconds—among their longest takes to date—a single-track basic take and various overdubs that included drums and church organ, a wildly distorted lead guitar, gargling into their microphones, and John and Paul screaming random non sequiturs like “Barcelona!” and “Are you all right?” They passed
along the tape through contacts at the Indica gallery and bookstore, but not much more is known about the session.
During the Beatles’ recording seclusion, former Animals bassist Chas Chandler brought a young black guitarist over from New York, aghast that nobody in America had signed him up as the next big thing. Word among musicians spread quickly. A quiet-spoken figure in person, who seemed modest beyond all reason, Jimi Hendrix had huge hands that stroked and caressed unimaginable sounds out of his Fender Stratocaster. To start with, he played it upside down as a left-hander, reversing its strings so his patterns were hard to follow, even for another leftie like McCartney. His playing had such sheer charisma that his stage garb—headbands, bell-bottoms, a long Afro, and wild, luminous psychedelic scarves—seemed secondary to his guitar heroics. Hendrix began playing around London clubs in late 1966 with a bassist and drummer that Chandler recruited, and quickly demolished all known standards for virtuosity. Some Ready Steady Go! and Top of the Pops appearances turned heads, and soon his club shows were dotted with rock gods. Even Eric Clapton, who had left the Yardbirds to form a new hard-rock trio, Cream, called him a genius.
All four Beatles heard Hendrix at Epstein’s Saville Theatre during the Sgt. Pepper sessions. Like everybody else, Hendrix was a huge Beatle fan, and he fiddled with garage-rock yarns like “Wild Thing” and “Hey Joe” until they rang out like phone calls from rock’s future. He also specialized in Dylan, both radioactive chariots like “Like a Rolling Stone” and sitcoms like “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” Unlike Lennon, Hendrix invested all his creative energy in his playing—it was as if he cultivated all the pique and turmoil of “Tomorrow Never Knows” down to the amazing variables alive in six amplified strings. And he hadn’t even made his first record.
