by Tim Riley
But what should have been a huge victory for the antiwar effort turned into a renewed struggle for America’s soul—a struggle that has adopted various metaphors ever since. Every step toward peace brought a new wave of violence. Pro-war factions argued that dissent, as in Jane Fonda’s visit to Hanoi, meant sympathy for the Communist North Vietcong. Numerous American cities had suffered three successive summers of urban riots, shaking civil rights optimism to its core: as far back as early 1967, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had expanded his antiviolence rhetoric to include war resistance and economic justice, to widespread disdain. The Black Panthers, an Oakland splinter group determined to arm itself in self-defense, suffered a brutal FBI raid on April 6, 1968, which left one member, Bobby Hutton, dead. On April 15, the Spring Mobilization against the Vietnam War began across major universities, and the following week, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), formed eight years earlier at the University of Michigan, occupied five buildings at Columbia University, including the president’s office, for a week. All this tumult turned the Beatles into political figures by fiat.
Most sixties clichés about flower power and long hair distort the many internal conflicts within leftist youth culture. In America, inner-city uprisings had become an annual nightmare. Fueled by the kerosene of prejudice and poverty, the race riots that burned through Watts in Los Angeles, in 1965, also visited Cleveland (Ohio), Waukegan (Illinois), Benton Harbor (Michigan), and Atlanta (Georgia), among other places, in 1966. The 1967 Summer of Love, a privileged catchphrase that blacks regarded with contempt, added Roxbury (Massachusetts), Tampa (Florida), Buffalo (New York), Newark and Plainfield (New Jersey), Cairo (Illinois), Durham (North Carolina), Memphis (Tennessee), Cambridge (Maryland), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), and Minneapolis (Minnesota) to the list. Then, just when people thought fear had reached its pitch, Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin’s bullets on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was organizing striking garbage workers. Two months later, after winning the California presidential primary, the left’s most promising antiwar candidate, Robert Kennedy, fell to bullets that seemed anything but random.
The antiwar movement that later gathered in Chicago to protest the Democratic National Convention, in August 1968, hoped to turn these traumas into peaceful planks. Mayor Richard J. Daley’s police clubbed down even such modest aspirations. And in the perverted logic of the times, peace-loving, nonviolent defiance to a cynical war fueled support for Republican candidate Richard Nixon’s slim victory that fall. Once Johnson stepped aside, Nixon’s vague centrism, aimed at a “silent majority,” rallied battered Republicans, who feared a long season in the wilderness after Barry Goldwater’s 1964 meltdown. The Democratic candidate, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, refused to take an antiwar stand, forfeiting votes from younger McCarthy and Kennedy supporters—and you still had to be twenty-one to vote.
The Beatles’ meditational retreat to the pilgrimage center of Rishikesh in Uttarakhand, at the foothills of the Himalayas, in February and March coincided with McCarthy’s primary surge and Johnson’s withdrawal, and posed new challenges for rock music’s relevance. Just as the Black Panthers tilted more toward violent positions after Dr. King died, so, too, did radical voices begin dominating antiwar movement debates once Nixon got elected and the Vietnam saga stretched out indefinitely. Well before the Kent State killings of four students in May 1970, the tipping point for sixties protest came when peaceful demonstrations, no matter how principled and popular, proved less and less effective as political dissent.
Self-involved Americans still view these ruptures in civic law and order as symptoms of a cultural breakdown, which, at the time, made rock the music of transgression. Long hair signaled contempt for the system that waged war so brutally and systematically punished dissent. Authorities successfully patronized campus peace rallies as longhairs running wild. (Some “hippies” actually cut their hair to campaign for McCarthy so they couldn’t be so easily disparaged.) These student rebellions, largely confined to America between 1964 and 1967, then mushroomed into a global phenomenon. In Europe, student protests in Paris unraveled into general worker strikes, freezing France’s economy with unprecedented force. “What had started as protests against the Vietnam War expanded to something far wider,” remembered the activist and author Tariq Ali. “The talk was of revolution. Everything about modern capitalist society was suddenly called into question.”2 Even in Czechoslovakia, a presumed Kremlin puppet state, President Alexander Dubcˇek encouraged a free press, and for one surreal summer, anti-Soviet sentiment seemed as if it might actually defy Moscow’s grip. This would have been unthinkable just months before. “Be realistic—demand the impossible,” went the cry from the Paris streets that May.
Demonstrations broke out everywhere, even in Mick Jagger’s “sleepy London town.” Citing Her Majesty’s support for America’s war policies, actress Vanessa Redgrave joined ten thousand anti-Vietnam demonstrators in Trafalgar Square on March 17, which turned into a riot when some broke off and headed toward the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square to deliver a protest letter. Redgrave joined in chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, we will fight and we will win!” The protestors met with armed police barricading the embassy, and trouble broke out: two hundred people were arrested, eighty-six injured. The Foreign Office reported that one hundred members of the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), “experts in methods of riot against the police,” had instigated the violence in London. Such propaganda had already reached the level of establishment cant, which blamed the violence on the demonstrators instead of the police, who were usually the only armed people in the area. Jagger attended this march, and spun from it the Rolling Stones’ next single, “Street Fighting Man,” which appeared in August.
Hey! Think the time is right for a palace revolution
But where I live the game to play is compromise solution
Leftists, however, were already skeptical about Jagger’s commitment to sweeping radical change, and with Rolling Stones’ branded credit cards and a knighthood (in 2003), he would earn their skepticism in bulk. But at the time, antiwar activists favored his “Street Fighting Man” stance even though its ambivalence rivaled Lennon’s “Revolution,” as we’ll see. (The following year, in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Jagger sang: “I went down to the Chelsea drugstore/To get my fair share of abuse,” as if he had been victimized by the cops as much as anybody and had foreseen the futility of protest, which was disingenuous at best.) When the BBC banned “Street Fighting Man,” Jagger submitted his handwritten lyrics to Tariq Ali to publish in Black Dwarf, one of the many new leftish broadsheets.
Had the Beatles released Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” in the summer of 1968, they would have been laughed offstage. And there’s no possibility of Lennon’s rabidly noncommittal “Revolution” coming at any moment before May 1968, when he wrote it. Mass media’s radio, TV, film, newspapers, and magazines, which had largely been brought to life by the Beatles’ intense early fame, morphed into a daily swish of information, and a new layer of tension grew between how skillfully the Beatles tickled this new media beast and how their music reacted to world events. When “All You Need Is Love” assumed the finale of the Yellow Submarine film, which premiered that agonizing summer of 1968, it cozied right into that cartoon’s alternative world, a children’s project that traded in cultural relevance for fanciful colors. When they left for Rishikesh, the Beatles’ biggest problem was fixing their career after Magical Mystery Tour. The world they would return to had slipped a few gears. So had Lennon’s home life.
As a measure of their resolve, they had come back to the studio in the new year after a barrage of bad notices. Critics from all quarters had savaged the film from the Christmas 1967 holidays: London’s Daily Express called it “blatant rubbish,” the Los Angeles Times announced the “Beatles bomb,” and the American NBC network even canceled its option—Americans had to wait to see Magical Mystery T
our on the art-house and campus circuit. BBC radio, convinced of its own authority despite the ineptitude of “censoring” “A Day in the Life,” struck “I Am the Walrus” from its airwaves for “indecent lyrics”—the term “knickers” being roughly analogous to American “panties.” The band’s reputation plummeted. Originally, they had moved forward with Magical Mystery Tour to stave off creative inertia by keeping themselves busy in the wake of Epstein’s death. But in retrospect, this can be seen to have only forestalled the larger questions left by his absence.
Now, in early 1968, they dashed off a few songs, and filmed a brief cameo for Yellow Submarine, before heading off to India, the trip they had delayed from the previous autumn. They acted as if these Magical Mystery Tour critics were simply balmy. In fact, they settled right back into a productive mode that produced both their next single (“Lady Madonna”) and three more tracks: Harrison’s “The Inner Light” (started at Bombay sessions during his work on the Wonderwall film sound track), and Lennon’s “Hey Bulldog” and “Across the Universe,” which he donated to the World Wildlife Fund.
“Madonna” had a curling McCartney piano lick that tipped its hat to trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton’s jazz instrumental “Bad Penny Blues,” from 1956 (an early Joe Meek production). McCartney’s groove crossed the dapper Lyttelton with the more ribald Fats Domino, and the oblique lyric sidestepped the music-hall mannerisms of “When I’m Sixty-four.” At the last of these sessions, on February 11, the promo shoot for a “Lady Madonna” film got sidetracked when Lennon showed up with a new number: “Hey Bulldog.” Of these four tracks, Lennon thought the least of “Bulldog,” and it quickly joined the Yellow Submarine slush pile (and eventually got cut from the final edit, although not the sound track). This last February session also marked the first time Lennon brought a new Japanese girlfriend, Yoko Ono, to the studio.
At first, the short, meekish Japanese woman seemed like just another eccentric Lennon dalliance. George Harrison remembers that Lennon “had just started his relationship with Yoko before we went out to India.”3 And Lennon later admitted his mind was a jumble once he started his new fling: “Yoko and me, we met around then. I was going to take her [to India]. I lost my nerve because I was going to take my ex-wife and Yoko, and I didn’t know how to work it. So I didn’t quite do it.”4 Indecision prevailed, so he took Cynthia, hopping back on the marital seesaw to try to make things work. He also sprang a seat for Alex Mardas, the eccentric electronics wizard John Dunbar had introduced him to.
Ambivalent about his future and the Beatles’, increasingly uncomfortable at home, Lennon felt his rock-star lifestyle spiraling downward. There were signs that he’d wearied of this treadmill, and saw Rishikesh as a respite, similar to his trip to Spain in 1966. Like an alcoholic begging for one more chance, he promised Cynthia to reform his bad habits and become a better husband and father, and together they looked to meditation as a marital retreat. But he had trouble sustaining these pledges. Cynthia’s memoirs detail a detached, distant husband and father, who swung from optimistic devotion to testy reproach. At the beginning of the year, the Daily Mail ran a small item about Lennon’s father, Alfred Lennon, who had been inexplicably invited into the Lennons’ home for a stay. But it didn’t last long.5
Lennon’s mood swings find testimony in several contemporary reports. Shortly before the trip to India, he spent the weekend with Derek Taylor, former Epstein press agent and Apple publicist, and his family at their country house. There were five children—“They seemed incredibly happy and contented,” Cynthia remembered. Lennon returned and put his arms around his wife: “Let’s have loads more kids, Cyn, and be really happy.”6 At this, Cynthia broke down, as if some part of her knew Lennon was all talk. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Cyn, what you crying for?” he asked. She could only “blurt out” that she couldn’t bring herself to see a bright future for the family, no matter how badly she wished for it: “I was so disturbed by John’s outburst that I even suggested that Yoko Ono was the woman for him.”7
Insight like that caught Cynthia between dread and hope, but she steadied herself amid the countervailing storms, revealing why Lennon was attracted to her in the first place. “I always felt that he expected a great deal more of me,” she wrote. “I really wasn’t on his wavelength as much as he would have liked. He needed more encouragements and support for his way-out ideas.”8 Dot, their housekeeper, reported that Ono had been to the house “on numerous occasions” asking for Lennon when he was away. After a time, Cynthia calmed herself, and tried to think of the trip to India as a chance to repair the marriage, get some quiet romantic time alone away from Julian, and work on their fading intimacy. Cynthia’s mother, Lil, moved back into Kenwood to look after Julian. John and Cynthia joined George and Pattie, Pattie’s sister Jenny, and Magic Alex at the Maharishi’s ashram. “We would be meditating for many hours each day, there was no place for a child,” Cynthia reasoned.9
But with Lennon, the only thing worse than delving into drugs was sobering up enough to pin his hopes on Transcendental Meditation, as if that might save his marriage. “We can make it work, Cyn,” he told his wife. “When we’re in India we’ll have time for us and everything will be fine.”10 Others who were close to him recognized his sudden attachment to the Maharishi as a transparent substitution father figure he sought while grieving Epstein’s loss.
In one galling, signature move, Ono had turned up at a Beatles travel meeting in London, afterward hopping right into Lennon’s limo behind his wife. After they dropped Ono off, Lennon waved off Cynthia’s protests. It’s doubtful that he and Yoko were still platonic “friends” by this point, but Lennon stuck to his story. Mysterious postcards began arriving at Kenwood, with Yoko Ono slogans on the back, beseeching Lennon to “Watch for me, I’m a cloud in the sky,” phrases that resembled the instructional koans in Grapefruit.
These postcards followed Lennon to India, where he plunged into meditation, received private tutorials from the master, and moved out of his bedroom with Cynthia for private quarters after two weeks. Cynthia later learned that he was stealing off to the local post office each morning, or getting Magic Alex to go, to snare those missives in advance of the regular mail. Soon after, Cynthia discovered a typewritten letter Yoko had sent John that hinted at more. But Lennon kept brushing her suspicions off, even as he admitted that Ono had been sending him many letters and postcards: “She’s crackers, just a weirdo artist who wants me to sponsor her. Another nutter wanting money for all that avant-garde bullshit. It’s not important.”11 Cynthia wanted desperately to believe him.
As Lennon promised to keep his marriage intact while sneaking around with his new lover, an American journalist, Lewis Lapham, prepared for a trip to India to cover the Beatles for the Saturday Evening Post. Eastern mysticism had ballooned into a trend, and the Maharishi became one of its figureheads. The same magazine editors who had covered Swinging London now sent young reporters like Lapham after this story as a lifestyle feature.
Lapham began by visiting the Beach Boys in California, who all spoke fondly of the Maharishi and his recent presentation at the Felt Forum. Brian Wilson’s mother was about to undergo her “initiation,” while his control freak of a father, Murry, considered following lead singer Mike Love to the Maharishi’s ashram. “If my dad goes to India,” Wilson told Lapham, “I’ll know that the Maharishi has done his job.”12
Arriving in Rishikesh, Lapham met John O’Shea outside the Maharishi’s ashram. O’Shea was AWOL from Norwalk, Connecticut, “recently mustered out of the United States Marine Corps. . . . Together with other Americans, he was living in the farmyard with a peep of chickens.” Like other locals who watched as celebrities flocked to the compound, O’Shea told Lapham that the Maharishi was in fact a “mountebank,” pushing a commercial product, “like learning to play the piano in six easy weeks.”13
For a spiritual teacher, the Maharishi had a knack for manipulating journalists. At first, minions told Lapham the holy guru w
as far too busy for interviews. The very next day, the Maharishi welcomed the young reporter as if he were a “plenipotentiary sent by the American State Department.” Lapham found the kindly old man small and frail. Unlike the sweet, giggly troll portrayed by the media, he spotted “a vaguely troubled expression in his eyes.” Lapham noted another aspect to the Maharishi’s Beatle appeal: “His voice had a musical resonance in it, and it was his way of ending his sentences on a rising note of near hysteria that suggested the twittering of birds.”14
Along with other musicians, like Donovan, and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, the retreat attracted Hollywood glamour in Mia Farrow and her sister, Prudence. Mia, at twenty-three, had just extracted herself from a whirlwind marriage to Frank Sinatra. “We were a reverent, drab group of fifty or so men and women of various nationalities, ages, and professions,” she writes in her memoirs. “Maharishi suggested that we meditate for twelve hours of the day, taking short breaks as we needed. . . . When we encountered one another along the gravel paths or beneath the trees, we exchanged other-worldly smiles and the Sanskrit salutation ‘Jai Guru dev.’ ” (Lennon had already used this mantra as the refrain for “Across the Universe.”)
Farrow remembers Lennon expressing the typical frustrations with long exposure to quietude: “Whenever I meditate,” he told her, “there’s a big brass band in me head.”15 The overall mood was serene, but Farrow describes “several frightening, emotional eruptions,” enough to prompt the Maharishi to assign “team buddies” to help them look out for one another. It’s not hard to imagine Lennon among other heavy drug users, all detoxing simultaneously. Prudence Farrow’s buddies were George and John, and “they took their responsibility seriously. Every morning and most afternoons they met in Prudy’s room, where they discussed their respective lives, the meaning of existence, and who Maharishi really was.”16 “Dear Prudence” grew out of this friendship.
