Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Still more interesting are the twin passages of ad libertum orchestral music, coming before Paul’s bridge, then again after the last verse, building to the climax. These bold musical passages were Paul’s idea, working in the same uncompromising spirit of composition as Germany’s Karlheinz Stockhausen. McCartney and Lennon were both now familiar with the leading ‘serious’ composers of their age-the likes of Berio, Cage and Stockhausen - some of whom they had met or had contact with in other ways (Paul struck up a correspondence with Stockhausen). These composers had stretched the boundaries of ‘classical’ music in the twentieth century, creating works seemingly as far removed from Beethoven, say, as rock ’n’ roll would seem to differ from their own music, though of course ‘music is music’ as another avant-garde composer, Alban Berg, has remarked. Rock ’n’ roll songs are shorter and simpler than symphonies, but they are made up of the same notes and not necessarily less affecting. In the spirit of these innovators, Paul put a radical suggestion to George Martin as to how they might fill 24 bars in the middle and end of ‘A Day in the Life’, though his initial instructions were impractical. ‘He said, “I want a symphony orchestra to freak out,”’ recalls Martin, who said the musicians wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Instead, he wrote a musical shriek for 41 musicians, playing their instruments from the lowest to highest note.

  The recording of this remarkable passage of music was organised as a happening, and filmed for posterity. The Beatles came to the session in what was becoming identifiable as flower power costume (whimsical, colourful and foppish), while George Martin and his orchestra were requested to wear evening dress. The studio was lit with coloured light-bulbs, the Beatles passing out masks and other items of fancy dress, which many of the session players obligingly wore. One elderly violinist performed wearing a gorilla paw; another wore what looked like a penis nose. The Beatles invited their friends, partners and fellow celebrities to take part, including the singer Donovan, a particular mate of Paul’s, and members of the Rolling Stones and the Monkees, the American band recently created in emulation of the Beatles for a TV show. It showed how confident and essentially good-natured the Beatles were that they were friendly towards the absurd Monkees, then making their first visit to the U K. Monkee Mike Nesmith recalls being invited to the ‘A Day in the Life’ session as if they were equals: ‘It was festive and crowded with people well known in the music scene and business of the time. Because it was a working session there was a certain understanding that there had to be work done, and that we were all part of it.’ After Paul had conducted his apocalyptic ascending chord, the celebrities were asked to emit a final, punctuating hummm, later replaced by a crashing E chord, played by Paul and others simultaneously on keyboards, the sound allowed to reverberate on the record until the needle lifted. Thus Paul became a composer of serious orchestral music, at the cutting edge of what was happening in the twentieth century, decades before his more self-conscious and conservative forays into ‘classical’ composition with his Liverpool Oratorio and other works.

  By the standards of the day, Sgt. Pepper took a long time to record: five months including mixing. Considering the exceptional quality of the work it now seems to have been achieved quickly, and Paul still found time to do other things. In January, Dudley Edwards asked if the Beatles would contribute music for a rave he was helping stage at the Roundhouse, a disused train shed in North London, an event the hippies were calling The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave. Working with his fellow Beatles, Paul created a 13-minute sound collage the band called Carnival of Light, made up of tape loops and extemporaneous screams and shouts. Paul handed the experimental tape to Dudley. The star was displeased when organisers at the rave allowed the tape to run on past the section he’d intended to be heard, with the result that the crowd was treated, in addition to Carnival of Light, to a demo of ‘Fixing a Hole,’ one of the new songs on Pepper, that also happened to be on the spool. ‘He was quite angry about that,’ recalls Dudley. ‘It wasn’t intentional. I was busy trying to do the light show, so was Doug[las Binder]. I don’t know who was left with the responsibility of playing the tape, but anyway it got an airing - I think Paul forgave us in the end.’

  Paul also continued to give thought to the Beatles’ next film, one they were contracted to make. Having considered making an anti-war picture, as discussed with Bertrand Russell and Len Deighton, but which John had effectively now done as a solo project, and having turned down producer Walter Shenson’s suggestion that the Beatles remake The Three Musketeers, the band commissioned an original script from the fashionable playwright Joe Orton, whose hit farce Loot Paul had enjoyed. Orton was riding high on the success of his second play, Entertaining Mr Sloane, in January 1967 when he was summoned to Brian Epstein’s newly acquired townhouse in Chapel Street, Belgravia, a ritzy address near Buckingham Palace. The playwright found Paul in the drawing room listening to an advance pressing of ‘Penny Lane’. Orton thought Paul’s new moustache gave him the look of a turn-of-the-century anarchist. Over supper, McCartney said that while he generally only got ‘a sore arse’ from going to the theatre (a dig at Jane), Loot held his attention. This and the fact that Orton confessed to a fondness for smoking grass served to break the ice. ‘Well, I’d like you to do the film,’ Paul told the playwright. ‘There’s only one thing we’ve got to fix up.’

  ‘You mean the bread? ’ asked Orton. He requested and received thrice his usual fee and shortly thereafter turned in a typically outrageous script, Up Against It, in which the Beatles would commit adultery and murder and be caught in drag in flagrante. It was rejected.

  Although it seems obvious now that the double A-side ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/‘Penny Lane’ was a masterpiece, the best single the Beatles ever released, it was their first single since ‘Please Please Me’ to fail to reach number one in Britain, kept off the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck, an old Larry Parnes act, crooning ‘Release Me’.25 Perhaps the new Beatles were too arty for their fans. The band was clearly drifting away from the eager-to-please light entertainers of yore. The accompanying promotional film for the new double A-side showed the boys as hirsute hippies, John dramatically changed from mop-top to whiskery intellectual. At least Paul smiled from under his anarchist moustache; John increasingly wore the remote expression of the heavy drug user.

  ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ did not feature on Sgt. Pepper in the UK or the USA, where Capitol Records used the same track listings for the first time. If they had included those two songs on the album, Pepper would have been even more impressive, and George Martin considers the failure to do so ‘the biggest mistake of my professional career’. What would they have left off, though, to make room? Perhaps George’s India-inspired ‘Within You Without You’, which was interesting, but didn’t quite fit. Apart from ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and ‘Fixing a Hole’, Paul’s other contributions to the album were ‘Getting Better’ and ‘Lovely Rita’, the latter a slight work inspired by the experience of being given a parking ticket outside EMI Studios by a traffic warden named Meta Davis. That might have been dropped in favour of ‘Penny Lane’. A reformatted Sgt. Pepper along these lines is very attractive.

  Although a concept album of sorts, only the second track, ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, sung by Ringo as Billy Shears, developed the narrative set up in the opening song, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. It was when Neil Aspinall suggested that the boys should reprise this tune on Side Two that the album became a song cycle of sorts, though never a full-blown one like the Who’s Tommy (1969). It was really the way Sgt. Pepper was packaged and presented that gave the impression of a cohesive work of art.

  Paul claims credit for coming up with the concept of the album sleeve, in which the Beatles stand with cut-outs of their heroes in an ornamental garden, the work realised by their artist friends Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth. Originally the cover was to be a design by the hippy art group the Fool, of whom more later. �
�Robert [Fraser] pulled out this cover that the Fool had done - looked like a psychedelic Disney,’ recalls Jann Haworth. ‘He just showed it to us and said, “I don’t like this, and I think Paul really isn’t happy about it, I think really you should do it.”’ Husband and wife proceeded to build a three-dimensional stage set - something Jann’s set designer father did for his living - Jann overseeing the planting of an ornamental garden in the foreground, red flowers spelling out BEATLES, while Peter concentrated on creating the crowd of heroes, using blown-up, tinted photographs of famous people, only some of whom the band suggested. ‘Basically they chose about a third of the heads,’ recalls Jann. ‘It wasn’t a big enough crowd.’ So the artists came up with the rest. Paul’s choices included Fred Astaire and William Burroughs. John’s wish list included Jesus and Hitler, both ruled out by EMI.

  The pictures were assembled in Michael Cooper’s photographic studio in Chelsea, the Beatles themselves dressing up in pseudo-military uniform, made from shiny fabrics in Day-Glo colours. Paul wore his MBE. To the band’s right were arranged Madame Tussaud’s waxworks of themselves at the time of Beatlemania, while in front of the band was a bass drum upon which the album title had been painted in fairground lettering. Paul later hung the drum skin on his drawing room wall. Finally, the assemblage was photographed by Michael Cooper. Produced in a full-colour gatefold sleeve with, for the first time in pop, the album lyrics printed on the reverse, and a cardboard insert of souvenirs designed by Peter and Jann, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a complete artwork, ambitious and stylishly realised. If one has a criticism of the music, Pepper can seem over-rich, like an over-egged cake. Individually the elements are brilliant, but other Beatles albums are, to these ears at least, more enjoyable.

  Four days later Paul flew to the USA to visit Jane Asher, taking with him a tape of rough mixes of the new songs. Accompanied by Mal Evans, he stopped off in San Francisco first, where he decided to check out the local music scene. Jefferson Airplane were working on songs for their new LP Surrealistic Pillow at the Fillmore theatre when Mal announced that Paul wanted to say hello. ‘We were sitting there playing at the old Fillmore, in comes this guy Mal, suit and tie, and we’re all hippied out,’ recalls Marty Balin, who’d last seen the Beatles as a member of the audience at Candlestick Park, subsequently becoming one of the leading lights of the San Francisco music scene. ‘“Master Paul McCartney would like to meet with you.” Just like that. “Oh well, send him in!” We didn’t know if this guy was real or a joke. So he went out and in comes Paul.’ Part of Paul’s reason for visiting San Francisco was to check out the psychedelic scene, which had started here, spreading across the States to England. It was in the Bay Area that bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead first used LSD, and other mind-altering substances, the drugs cooked up by their friends and dispensed freely at concerts. Wild new music, fashions and art resulted. To Balin’s eyes, the visiting Paul McCartney looked very square. The musicians showed Paul around the trippy Haight-Ashbury district - he took pictures - then invited him back to their house. ‘Well, what’s new with the Beatles?’ Balin asked. In reply, Paul took a tape from his pocket and played ‘A Day in the Life’. Not so square. ‘Holy Christ! This is amazing. I totally, literally did not know what to say, except “Fuckin’ great!” I just couldn’t believe it …’ Having reduced his American friend to a jibbering wreck, Paul replaced the tape nonchalantly in his pocket and sauntered on his way.

  Paul and Jane were reunited in Denver, where the Bristol Old Vic company was currently on tour, Paul arriving in time to help Jane celebrate her 21st birthday. They spent the next few days together in the Rockies, walking in countryside thick with snow. Paul then left, allowing Jane to complete her tour, travelling with Mal in Frank Sinatra’s private jet to LA where he met Brian Wilson, who was so overwhelmed by the Sgt. Pepper tape that he abandoned the new Beach Boys album Smile. Paul then flew home, coming up with a new movie idea as he travelled back across the Atlantic. Having looked for a suitable film for the band for months, Paul had the idea of getting the boys into a charabanc-of the type that traditionally took working-class Liverpudlians on day-trip holidays to the seaside, little jaunts described in advance as ‘mystery tours’, but which almost invariably turned out to be a run up to Blackpool - and make a film of the Beatles’ own Magical Mystery Tour, ‘a crazy roly-poly Sixties’ film’ as Paul would describe it. He jotted the concept down in the form of a pie chart on the plane.

  LINDA EASTMAN

  Paul returned to England at a time when the forces of law and order were starting to crack down on the drug culture, with one officer in particular, Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher of Scotland Yard, targeting pop stars and their associates. In February 1967, police raided Keith Richards’s country home, Redlands, in Sussex, where the Rolling Stone was hosting a weekend LSD party. Detectives found Marianne Faithfull, who’d left John Dunbar for Mick Jagger, naked and wrapped in a fur rug. She’d just taken a bath, having come down from an Acid trip, and didn’t have a change of clothes. Jagger was charged with possession of speed (having said Marianne’s pills were his), Richards with allowing his home to be used for the smoking of marijuana, and Fraser with possession of heroin. Marianne wasn’t charged.

  While the Redlands trio awaited trial, DS Pilcher raided Brian Jones’s London flat, busting him and his friend Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, the extravagantly named son of the French painter Balthus. Brian and Prince Stash, as he was known for short, were taken down to Kensington Police Station in a blaze of publicity and charged with possession of cocaine and cannabis, Jones charged additionally with possession of cocaine and methedrine.26 They went from the police station to the new high-rise Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, where the Stones’ new American manager Allen Klein was staying, but the hotel management made it clear that Jones and de Rola were not welcome, which is when Prince Stash took a call from Paul McCartney, whom he knew slightly.

  Prince Stash explained to Paul that he and Brian couldn’t stay at the Hilton, and couldn’t go back to Brian’s flat because of the press. Brian had other places he could go, but Stash, a foreigner, didn’t know what to do. ‘I’m sending my car and driver right now. You’re packing your bags and moving into my house, and if they want to bust you again they’ll have to bust me as well,’ Paul said. So Prince Stash joined Paul and Dudley at Cavendish Avenue, running movies on Paul’s 16mm projector, taking drugs and entertaining what Stash describes as harems of girls, including an Eskimo named Iggy, while Beatles fans camped outside, periodically bursting in through the gates ‘like sort of cattle breaking through a fence’. They’d steal Paul’s laundry and empty his ashtrays - ‘Did he smoke this?’ - before being ejected.

  One night in May 1967 Paul, Dudley and Stash got into Paul’s Radford Mini and drove to the Bag o’ Nails, a trendy club behind Liberty’s department store. In years gone by the club had a seedy reputation, a place to meet working girls in an area frequented by prostitutes, but it was now a premier hangout. The Beatles patronised the Bag o’ Nails partly because it stayed open late, going there after recording in the studio to get a drink and a steak sandwich, chat to friends and listen to live music. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were on stage when Paul, Dudley and Prince Stash walked in that spring evening. The club was already full of people Paul knew, including Tony Bramwell and Peter Brown from NEMS. Peter introduced Paul to an attractive young American photographer named Linda Eastman, who was in town shooting pictures of musicians for a book. When Dudley came back from the bar, he found Paul and Linda engrossed in conversation.

  Paul suggested they all go round to the Speakeasy where Procol Harum were performing their trippy new song ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, Paul hearing it there for the first time. Dudley paired up with the singer Lulu and Paul asked everybody back to his place. Half an hour later Linda found herself inside the mansion home of one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Cavendish was not the biggest house in London, but it was a hands
ome residence with exquisite details that attracted the sharp eye. As Linda remarked: ‘I was impressed to see his Magrittes.’ Memories are hazy as to whether Linda stayed that night. Prince Stash and Dudley can’t recall. It didn’t seem important at the time. ‘You just think, it’s yet another girl, and yet another night. I didn’t know if it was going to be just another one night stand,’ says Dudley, ‘although he did seem to like her a lot.’

  Linda, who becomes one of the most important characters in our story, was born on 24 September 1941 in New York City, the second child of the wealthy Lee and Louise Eastman. She had an older brother, John, and two younger sisters, Laura and Louise. Dad had worked his way up from a poor immigrant background in the Bronx - where he was born Leopold Epstein in 1910, son of Russian-Jewish parents - via Harvard Law School, to establishing his own law firm. He married well, to Louise Lindner, daughter of a prominent Jewish family from Cleveland. Louise attended synagogue and was proud of being Jewish, but Lee decided it would be better for the children if they adopted gentile ways. Shortly before their first child was born, the Epsteins changed their surname to Eastman; there was no connection with the photographic firm Eastman Kodak, as is often suggested, the name being chosen simply to seem less Jewish. ‘Lee’s famous expression was, “Think Yiddish, look British,”’ says his stepson Philip Sprayregen. ‘If someone asked him flat out if he was Jewish, he would admit that he was, but he would never volunteer that information, and I would say that he was probably glad when people thought otherwise.’ Judaism played little part in Linda’s young life and she grew to be a tall strawberry blonde, as if inhabiting the WASP name Daddy had chosen. She was never a true beauty. Hers was a long face that could appear handsome or plain, but Linda possessed a good, full figure, and a flirtatious manner that attracted men.