by Peter Brown
Three years later, five million shares of Northern Songs were being offered on the stock market. In the flotation John and Paul each retained 15 percent of the stock, which was valued at $640,000 at the time. NEMS retained 7.5 percent, and in an act of largesse, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were given 1.6 percent between them. Dick James and his business partner, Charles Silver, were left with 37.5 percent, valued at $1,687,000.
Ironically, although this flotation realized some capital for John and Paul—most of which they used to pay past taxes—George and Ringo, due to their own tax problems, were still in financial straits. Not that you would have known it from their spending.
Ringo became a father for the first time when his son Zak was born, and his apparent contentment seemed complete. In preparation for the baby’s birth, Ringo moved out of his compact ground-floor flat on Montague Square18 and bought a £37,000 house in Weybridge, just down the road from John’s house. Sunny Heights, as it was called, was immediately renovated to the tune of £40,000. Ringo asked Ken Partridge to decorate it for him, but Brian insisted Partridge was already too busy, so the Starrs got another decorator to indulge them in their creative whims. Ringo spent money on the house like a poor man who had just won the Irish Sweepstakes, which in a way he had. For serious construction, Ringo simply formed his own construction company and changed the house as he pleased: a wall there, an extra room here. At the back of the house, which he had landscaped in cascading terraces and ponds, he built a semicircular wall that alone cost him £10,000.19 Later came a whole new wing, with an extra living room, a third guest room, a workroom for his video and audio equipment, a screening room, and a pool-room with a pool table flown in from the United States expressly for him.20
The rest of the house was decorated with the same disregard for cost. The chocolate brown Wilton carpet in the main living room was woven to order in one piece, because Ringo didn’t like the way seams looked, an extravagance that embarrassed even him at the time. The house was outfitted with six TVs; intraroom stereo systems; over twenty telephones, two to a room, including a hot line to Brian’s office; plus every imaginable kind of space-age, remote-control electronic gadget on the market. He bought cameras of every size and description and frantically began to take pictures, like a tourist on vacation in some enchanted land.
George was a bit more practical about his life. He finally proposed to Pattie Boyd on Christmas day of 1965, while driving to a holiday dinner in London. They were married on January 21, 1966, with Paul McCartney in attendance. This was a very happy time for George, the happiest he would know for some years. He was in love and still not too oppressed by John and Paul. He and Pattie were a much-admired young couple. Pattie turned out to be one of the most delightful young women in London. Under her glamorous, high-fashion veneer, she was a warm, caring girl with good sense and good taste. Her modeling career skyrocketed because of her marriage to George, but she turned down almost all work so she could be with him. She occupied her time decorating the bungalow he had bought for her in the country. The house was done in a low-key, eclectic style that was very much a reflection of the handsome newlyweds who lived in it. For all the money John and Ringo spent on their homes, George and Pattie’s was perhaps the most admired of all.
chapter Eleven
What will I do if they stop touring?
What will be left for me?
-Brian Epstein
1
In terms of clout, the Beatles practically owned EMI’s Abbey Road studios. In just the last two years they had recorded at Abbey Road nineteen gold records, of which eighteen had been number one on most major record charts. When the Beatles said they wanted to record, it was like the sound of some distant giant cash register ringing for EMI, and the studios were cleared for them. Every whim of theirs was catered to, like the royalty they had become, and when Ringo complained of the roughness of the toilet paper in the EMI john, it made headlines in several daily papers.21 The Beatles spent most of that winter and spring in the Abbey Road studios, producing their two most important albums to date, Rubber Soul and Revolver.
These two albums were the first of the minor masterpieces the group would produce. Beatleologist Nicholas Schaffner describes this point in their musical progress as the moment in the movie The Wizard of Oz when everything goes from black-and-white to color. Here the simplistic love songs begin to wane, replaced with a dazzling spectrum of subjects and curios, from the banal to the ephemeral. The very sound of the music was strikingly different: richer, more melodious, haunting. Now, instead of producing an album that was just a disconnected hodgepodge of hit songs (which could be blithely juggled by Capitol Records in America from album to album),22 the albums had a sense of collective identity, a mood and a sound linking them.
Yet at the time Rubber Soul was something of a critical disappointment. Although it was in the top ten on the album charts for over seven months—four of them in the number-one position—it was a puzzlement to all the confused kids expecting to hear more juvenile “yeah, yeah, yeah” songs. It was the best of the many challenges the Beatles posed to their fans: to keep up. Little could the fans have known that this new musical approach was directly attributable to the Beatles’ now habitual use of marijuana. It was in John’s songs, seemingly filtered through a haze of marijuana smoke, that the change was most obvious. It was the elegiac “Norwegian Wood” that first made us stop what we were doing to listen to the music. It was on this album that his introspection came to full bloom. “In My Life” was John’s first certifiable piece of genius, an autobiographical voyage. This small deceptively simple song is as superb in its economy as it is in the poignant images it conjures up. John sang it in his sweetest, most hypnotic voice. “There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed./Some forever, not for better;/Some have gone and some remain./All these places had their moments/with lovers and friends I still can recall./Some are dead and some are living,/In my life I’ve loved them all.”
Naturally, it was Paul who had the biggest commercial success on Rubber Soul, called “Michelle.” This was another of Paul’s saccharine love songs, this time in which he self-consciously lapsed into a French refrain.
It was at the end of the Rubber Soul sessions that the Beatles’ preliminary LSD experiments began on a fairly regular basis. Again the music changed distinctively, this time with a hard-edged, electric sound. “Paperback Writer,” with its throbbing chorus written by Paul, was a forewarning of more to come. In John’s audiodelic “Rain,” augmented by George’s Indian instrumentation, the first of the many “backward” tapes were used. This simple trick of playing a recording backward through a tape deck and rerecording it had never been considered before as a serious musical technique. John first discovered he liked this slightly unearthly sound when he was tripping one night. He was working late at Kenwood in his little studio at the top of the house, when he put a rough version of “Rain” on the recorder backward. There are scores of backward snippets of words and music on subsequent Beatles albums.
The whimsically trippy “Yellow Submarine,” with Ringo’s atonal vocals, also came out of these sessions, as did “Eleanor Rigby,” Paul’s eerily compelling portrait of desolately lonely people. The Revolver album also contained, in England, John’s drug-dispensing “Dr. Robert,” written about a real New York physician who gave “vitamin” shots to the rich and famous, and Paul’s pretty “For No One,” another effective McCartney tear-jerker. George was allowed two songs on the Revolver album, the comparatively undistinguished “Love You Too” and “I Want to Tell You,” but he was afforded a plum spot in America, where his song “Taxman” was a huge success. This was, for George, an unusually articulate and justified complaint against the English tax system.
Revolver closed with a harbinger of things to come. Other songs on the album had been influenced by LSD, but John’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” is the first bona fide, all-out acid trip. Originally titled “The Void,” its inspiration came f
rom the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which John was reading while tripping. John wanted very badly to record the song with a chorus of a thousand chanting Tibetan monks, whom he had no doubt heard singing inside his head.
The Beatles are always second-guessed as not being originators of ideas but, rather, astute followers. Certainly they didn’t invent LSD or marijuana, and they weren’t the first to take them; but they always managed to be in the forefront of a trend and then popularize it on an international level, until they became associated with the phenomenon itself. Certainly the San Francisco based acid-rock bands did more to proselytize LSD than the Beatles, but it was the Beatles who translated the LSD experience and all that went with it—clothing, grooming, the sexual revolution—into a commercial message. The Rubber Soul and Revolver albums were the early examples of the Beatles’ power to lead. A potent and potentially deadly demonstration of this power was soon to come.
2
With the World exploding and fragmenting around them into the seeds of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, when London was the best place on earth and they were the best people to be, they had to do the one thing they wanted to do the least; they had to leave. It was summer and it was written in the gospel according to Brian that in summer they went out on tour. Nearsightedly, perhaps selfishly, Brian saw no reason to alter this yearly ritual he enjoyed so much, although it was obvious that touring was no longer necessary for the boys’ commercial or financial success. It was perhaps the first major indication that Brian was losing his perspective of what the Beatles had become. They didn’t need the money, certainly, and they didn’t need the aggravation. As far as the Beatles themselves were concerned, their music was so complicated it could no longer be reproduced live on stage.
Yet all the machinery was in motion, and inexorably the familiar entourage was assembled for a June 23 departure for Munich, Essen, and Hamburg, Germany, on the first leg of a world tour. This time Brian insisted that I join them to deal with the Beatles’ administrative and personal problems. I was reluctant to leave the London office for so long and wasn’t looking forward to the grueling world travel in the summertime, but Brian’s behavior and attentiveness had become more erratic in recent months, and I knew I might be needed.
Hamburg was chosen as a stop purely for the sake of nostalgia. We traveled by plane and private train, the Beatles talking excitedly the entire time about old times on the Reeperbahn. But like much of the rest of the world, Hamburg had lost its charm for them. They could no longer walk the streets unrecognized, gaping at the sex shops and the window-ledge hookers. There were no night-long bacchanals, watching the dawn come up over the Herberstrasse rooftops. The bars and clubs where they once played—only a short four years before—were closed; the Star Club was shuttered up with boards. What had once been tempting and exotic in the night was tawdry and tired in the light. Astrid Kirchner, the beautiful young photographer and girlfriend of Stu Sutcliffe, who so dramatically affected the Beades’ appearance, was now a barmaid in a transvestite bar. She had never been paid a cent for the now world-famous photographs she took of the boys in leather and cowboy hats, nor was she in any way recompensed for her famous haircut, which began a revolution in men’s grooming. In her small apartment she kept one room shrouded in black velvet where she burned candles underneath a haunting photograph she took of an ethereal Stu Sutcliffe.23
From Hamburg we flew over the North Pole, en route to Tokyo, only to be grounded in Anchorage in the middle of the night by a typhoon raging in the China Sea. It was freezing cold and snowing heavily, and Brian and the Beatles were quite upset at having to be put up in emergency accommodations in a small hotel, as if the typhoon were a personal offense. Brian was claustrophobic and irritable in his small room and decided to ring Nat Weiss in New York City, three time zones and 8,000 miles away. He woke Nat out of a deep sleep, demanding, “Who owns Alaska, Nat?” and “Do you know the name of a good bar?”
We didn’t arrive in Tokyo until dawn of the following day, already exhausted, although the major part of our trip was now just beginning. We were looking forward to some relaxation and sightseeing in Tokyo, yet the moment we deplaned we learned there was an ugly surprise waiting for us. A small, officious but polite police commissioner in a business suit ushered us into a VIP lounge and explained that a kamikaze squad of right-wing militant students, who objected to the Western “perversion” of Japanese culture, had vowed that the Beatles would never leave Japan alive. The students were particularly enraged because the Beatles were scheduled for three nights of concerts at the Budokan, which was also a national shrine to dead war heroes. The commissioner explained that the threats from the student fanatics were not to be taken lightly; they would kill the Beatles if they had the chance, and it was almost certain they would make some sort of an attempt. The Japanese government didn’t want to be caught in the middle of an embarrassing international incident, such as having one of the beloved mop-tops murdered in their fair land, and they had dispatched several thousand armed troops to back up the police escort.
Despite all the dangerous episodes and narrow escapes the Beatles had been through, none of them had been as intimidating as this. A cordon of police led us to the passenger luggage area where the well-meaning Japanese promoters had supplied us with two 1950’s limousines to bring us to our hotel. Unfortunately, the Beatles’ car was an attention-drawing white, while Brian’s was an embarrassing pink. There must have been ten thousand fans lining the road on the route into town, who couldn’t miss us coming in our bright cars, with a motorcycle escort and police cars in front and behind us. Neither could we miss the chanting students who joined the fans, with signs that read “Beatles Go Home.”
The Tokyo Hilton was turned into an armed camp. The entire top floor of the hotel had been cordoned off with army troops, and the elevators were fixed to stop only on the floor below, where a round-the-clock gun-toting platoon screened admission to the penthouse via a single staircase. The Beatles were ensconced in the Presidential Suite, which had six or seven rooms, and Brian and I were in the smaller but equally grand Imperial Suite at the other end of the hall. Once we had checked in to the hotel, the authorities informed us that for security purposes the Beatles were never to leave their hotel suite, except to go to the Budokan for performances. Instead of seeing Japan, Japan was to be brought to them. Disgruntled at what seemed to them to be undue precautions, the Beatles sat around their suite, dressed in ceremonial silk kimonos, and like four young Roman emperors had the riches of the country paraded before them. The directors of the biggest companies in Japan personally came to the hotel to display their wares, and within hours the boys had spent tens of thousands of pounds on cameras, clothing, watches, jewelry, and other trinkets. Sushi chefs appeared in the suite with trays of fish to be carved up for them, and Geisha girls appeared for back rubs and other physical delights.
Late morning of the second day Brian and I were busy tending to last-minute details of the boys’ Budokan concert when the nattily-dressed police commissioner appeared at the door. This time he was no longer bowing. He was most annoyed because Paul had snuck out of his suite that morning and had roamed around Tokyo with Mal Evans for several hours, all the while being trailed by undercover security agents. Paul awoke that morning absolutely claustrophobic and couldn’t face another day locked up inside, so he and Mal donned fake moustaches and wide-brimmed hats from their collection of disguises and slipped out the service entrance of the hotel. The security agents allowed them a few hours of freedom before they were put under custody and driven back to the hotel in a police car. The police commissioner warned Brian that if any of the Beatles breached security again, all the protection would be called off in the blink of an eye, and the Beatles would be left to their own defenses against the militant students. When the commissioner left the room, Brian’s reaction was, “They wouldn’t dare.”
Brian was probably right, although I’m glad we never had to find out. The boys behaved until showtime, wh
en we were whisked to the Budokan along a route that had been closed off to the rush-hour traffic, throwing Tokyo into a gridlock such as they had never experienced before. Army sharpshooters were stationed all along the route, as well as in the orchestra and balconies of the Budokan. The eeriest part of it was the politeness of the Japanese audience. There were one or two screamers, but for the most part the teenaged boys and girls sat politely in their seats and applauded enthusiastically after each number. It was one of the few concerts during which the boys could hear themselves play.
It was without any regrets that we left Japan and moved on to the next stop on the tour, the Philippine Islands. Manila, with its warm sun and exotic scenery, promised to be a welcome change of mood from the tension of the big city of Tokyo. The Beatles were especially popular with the Filipino people and had easily sold out two concerts at the Araneta Coliseum. Indeed, one of the largest airport crowds ever, over 50,000 people, turned out to cheer our arrival. An army escort led our entourage through the crowds into limousines supplied courtesy of the local concert promoter.
Then a most peculiar thing happened, which is revealed here in its entirety for the first time; instead of being taken to the hotel, we were driven to a pier and put on a boat, which took us a mile or two out to sea before returning again. This was neither a reception nor a government ritual but an opportunity to separate us from our luggage for a half hour or so. It was very disconcerting to all of us, for we all knew that the Beatles now traveled with several pounds of marijuana in their equipment cases. Usually, these cases were searched only perfunctorily at customs, if at all, and generally were given the same treatment as diplomatic pouches. We were returned to the pier and handed our luggage, with no explanations offered nor questions asked. We suspected that the drugs had been found and that the government officials were keeping quiet about it as an accommodation. It was assumed that nobody wanted to become involved in an international incident, yet that was exactly what happened.
