Sound Pictures

by Kenneth Womack

  While David and Jonathan had reached their nadir, George’s mainstay Matt Monro managed to find a new audience in 1967 via the North American adult-contemporary market. For years, Monro had been making inroads into that audience, but with rock ’n’ roll dominating the industry, he had begun to enjoy more regular success as a crooner on the adult contemporary charts. Back in March, his single “Where in the World” backed with “The Lady Smiles” had notched a number-eleven showing stateside, and Martin achieved similar results with Monro’s “What to Do” backed with “These Years,” which clocked in at number twenty-two the summer of 1967. Although Monro was hardly a chart-topping evergreen in the same league as the Beatles, he possessed a loyal audience, and in the highly competitive mid-1960s pop world, he was more than holding his own.

  Never straying too far from his origins as a producer of comedy records, George continued his work with Lance Percival, with whom he had recorded a top-forty novelty hit, the calypso-styled “Shame and Scandal in the Family,” back in October 1965. More recently, Percival had lent his talents as the voices of Paul and Ringo for Al Brodax’s Beatles cartoons. But Percival’s follow-up single, “The Maharajah of Brum” backed with “Taking the Maharajah Apart,” failed to chart. Produced by Martin with Vickers providing the arrangement, “The Maharajah of Brum” was cowritten by Percival and Martin. Based on Cat Stevens’s 1966 song “Matthew and Son,” Martin’s lyrics take aim at Birmingham, the West Midlands metropolis that locals and Londoners alike disparage as Brummagem. With Percival deploying a mock Indian accent—like Peter Sellers’s work in early Martin productions such as “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?”—“The Maharajah of Brum” offers an intentional skewering of mid-1960s pop’s infatuation with Indian music, a trend that found its origins in Harrison’s Eastern sensibilities. Had Martin grown tired of Harrison’s penchant for adorning his songs with Indian instrumentation? Or was he simply maligning the ersatz imitators who were following in the Beatle’s trailblazing wake?

  As George attended to AIR business during the Summer of Love, not to mention awaiting the birth of his first child with Judy, the Beatles made increasingly bizarre use of their time away from the studio. For Martin, the summer, and especially August, passed in a kind of blur. “After working during June on ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ and ‘All You Need Is Love,’” he later wrote, “we had the blessed relief of a break in Beatles recordings during July. ‘Relief’ because I could give a bit more time and energy to further drastic upheavals in my personal life. Our first child, Lucie, was born on 9 August. Judy was fine, and was back home within a week. Little Lucie, however, being slightly premature, had to remain in hospital for a while. So in August my time was spent rushing between St. Thomas’s and Abbey Road studios, where I was doing bits and bobs on ‘Your Mother Should Know.’ After a couple of weeks of this, we were allowed to take Lucie home.”32

  On the evening of Tuesday, August 22, George and the Beatles convened for the first time in nearly two months. With Abbey Road fully booked and McCartney aching to get back to work, they held the session at Chappell Recording Studios, a frequent haunt of Martin’s in the service of his AIR clientele. After its most recent incarnation on Bond Street had burned to the ground in a 1965 fire, Chappell reopened on Maddox Street in Central London. The owners spared no expense in building out the new facility and in so doing had created one of the city’s foremost state-of-the-art recording studios. With John Timperley sitting in the engineer’s chair and John Iles serving as tape operator, Martin supervised eight takes of McCartney’s “Your Mother Should Know,” a contestant for the Magical Mystery Tour project and, by many accounts, the runner-up to “All You Need Is Love” in the Lennon-McCartney sweepstakes for the Our World performance. The basic rhythm track for “Your Mother Should Know” featured Paul on piano with Ringo on drums. Before wrapping up for the evening, Paul recorded a pair of lead vocals. On Wednesday, George and the bandmates were back at Chappell to continue working. That same night, Brian made another rare appearance at a Beatles session, observing as George conducted playbacks of their recent, post-Pepper output. Before the night was out, the bandmates added backing vocals and rhythm guitar flourishes to accent the song’s choruses. From his place in the engineer’s seat, Timperley recalled that Epstein “came in to hear the playbacks looking extremely down and in a bad mood. He just stood at the back of the room listening, not saying much.”33

  With McCartney’s yen to get back into the studio momentarily quenched with the “Your Mother Should Know” sessions under their belt, Harrison wasted little time in continuing his quest for spiritual awakening, which he had begun through his study of Eastern music and philosophy. With John and Paul in tow, he attended a lecture given by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the Hyde Park Hilton on Thursday, August 24. At fifty years old, the maharishi had been on a journey of spiritual regeneration for much of his life. In 1945, he began a personal program of solitary meditation in the Himalayas, which lasted for more than a decade. When he literally came down from the mountain, the maharishi devoted himself to spreading traditional Indian teachings to the masses, a project that he started in 1957 with the founding of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, the crusade that would eventually bring him to London during the Summer of Love. His timing couldn’t have been better. Of particular interest to the Beatles was the maharishi’s development of an increasingly popular technique known as Transcendental Meditation. The maharishi urged his followers to engage in a pair of twenty-minute daily sessions in which they focus on their mantra, the simple phrase whose repetition promises to open new vistas of spirituality, inner calm, and human consciousness. Swept up in their latest euphoria, the Beatles trundled off to Euston Station on August 25, where they boarded the train for University College in Bangor, Wales, the site of the maharishi’s upcoming Transcendental Meditation seminar. The usual rock retinue was in tow, including Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan. Brian Epstein had been invited to attend the seminar by John, but the manager refused, having already decided to go out on the town with Peter Brown. In the wake of his father’s death in July, Brian’s mother, Queenie, had moved in with him at his Chapel Street home ten days earlier, and he was desperate to rejoin the London nightlife that had once been the staple of his existence.

  Years later, Martin would recall the last days of the Summer of Love with a certain wistfulness. Along with the Beatles, he had succeeded in weathering the post-Pepper malaise, not to mention the death of his father during the Our World whirlwind. Having finally been able to bring Lucie home from the hospital, George and Judy were eager to hide out for a while, to let the world roll on without them for a change. “I knew the boys were off to Wales, to meet up with the Maharishi,” he later wrote. “So it was with great joy that we found ourselves able to go to the country, with Lucie in our arms for the first time, that weekend, 25 August. It was a marvelous place, far from the madding crowd but not exactly overflowing with mod cons. We had no phone in our cottage.” It was precisely with this carefree mind-set that George and Judy stepped out for a Sunday morning drink in the village pub. As they strolled into the tavern, the room suddenly fell silent. “We knew straight away that something was wrong. The proprietor leaned over to me: ‘Your friend’s dead,’ he murmured.” As he realized the awful truth, that the barman was referring, impossible as it may have seemed, to Brian, George couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I couldn’t understand why he should be dead,” George later recalled. “He had been pretty much alive the last time I had seen him, and he was quite a young man. It was inexplicable.”34

  15

  “We’ve Fuckin’ Had It”

  * * *

  GEORGE WAS HEARTBROKEN. Brian Epstein, the man who was the architect of Beatlemania, who brought the Beatles to his doorstep back in 1962, was only thirty-two years old. The authorities shortly determined that Brian had died from an overdose of Carbitral, a barbiturate that he had taken to battle his insomnia. After George and Judy had absorbed the a
wful news, they made their way back to London, still stunned by their sadness and grief. “When Judy and I arrived back at our London flat,” George wrote, “there was a poignant reminder of Brian awaiting us. He had been delighted to hear of our daughter’s safe birth and with typical generosity had sent Judy a really huge bouquet of flowers. When he had received no reply from our flat, the messenger had simply left the flowers on the doorstep. Now, like Brian, they were dead.”1

  As with George, the Beatles were understandably shocked to learn of Brian’s death. Their exhilaration over their spiritual excursion to Wales in the maharishi’s company was quickly replaced by an overriding sense of shock. Newsreel footage from Bangor found John, like the other Beatles, in a state of disbelief. But in spite of his internal trauma, it was John—just as it had been during their second session with George back in September 1962, when he fought for the producer’s consideration of “Please Please Me”—who acted as the band’s spokesman. “We’ve only just heard,” John announced to the press pool, “and it’s hard to think of things to say. But he was just—he was a warm fellow, you know, and it’s terrible.” As he began to gather his thoughts, he cited the maharishi, who recommended the bandmates “not to get overwhelmed by grief. And whatever thoughts we have of Brian to keep them happy, because any thoughts we have of him will travel to him wherever he is.” John concluded his remarks by paying Brian the highest compliment that a Beatle could bestow upon anyone from among their inner circle: “We loved him,” said John. “He was one of us.”2

  Like many of Brian’s closest friends, George attended the funeral, which was held in Liverpool on Tuesday, August 29. But the Beatles had purposefully stayed away, realizing that their appearance would cause a media circus, which the Epstein family desperately wanted to avoid. Knowing that they couldn’t be present, Harrison presented Nat Weiss with a chrysanthemum, discreetly wrapped in newspaper, as a remembrance from the Beatles. He asked that Nat place the flower atop Brian’s coffin. Attending Brian’s internment at Long Lane Jewish Cemetery with NEMS executive Geoffrey Ellis, Weiss suddenly found himself in the horns of a dilemma. Knowing that flowers are verboten at Jewish funeral and burial services, Weiss made a last-second decision as he observed gravediggers shoveling dirt over the coffin. As Ellis later recalled, “Nat, who himself was Jewish, cast the newspaper package unopened onto Brian’s coffin, where it was swiftly covered by earth.” As for the burial service itself, the event had proven to be traumatic for the attendees, thunderstruck in their grief, as the attention-grabbing Rabbi Dr. Norman Solomon decried Brian, who had died just two days earlier, as “a symbol of the malaise of our generation.” At the time, many in Brian’s inner circle dismissed the official ruling that his death was the result of an accidental overdose. But George knew better, confident that his friend hadn’t committed suicide, which had been the prevailing rumor at the time. “I am still convinced that Brian did not intend to take his own life,” George wrote. “If he had, I think he would have done it with more of a flourish. As it was, he went out not with a bang but with a whimper. Brian was a showman. Had he designed his own death, it would not have been done in that timid, hole-in-the-corner way.”3

  The Beatles would finally get the opportunity to pay their respects to their fallen manager during a memorial service held on October 17 at the New London Synagogue, located at 33 Abbey Road, just a few doors down from the recording studio where they had made their name. It was the very place where the bandmates had made good on Brian’s boast, improbable as it seemed at the time, that they would be bigger than Elvis Presley. Martin still recalled that very first day, way back in February 1962, when he first met the Beatles’ manager: “I laughed at him, on first meeting, because what he played me on the demonstration tape was not very good,” George recalled. “I laughed, but his faith in them never wavered. He was in love with them. So was I.” For George, the memorial service proved to be even more devastating than the funeral back in August. Other present and former NEMS and AIR artists were on hand, including Cilla Black, Gerry Marsden, Billy J. Kramer, and members of the Fourmost. Rabbi Louis Jacobs officiated, lauding Brian for “encouraging young people to sing of love and peace rather than war and hatred.” Years later, George remembered seeing “the Beatles coming into the synagogue, their faces white and pinched still with shock. Out of respect for Brian, they were all wearing yarmulkes. They had all washed their hair for the occasion, and the little round caps kept slipping off, falling to the floor. Wendy Hanson [Brian’s former assistant], who was standing behind the Beatles, had to keep picking their yarmulkes up and fixing back on to their mop-tops. Somehow, that made me feel so sad, sadder than anything.”4

  But George also recognized Brian’s untimely death in terms of its larger implications for his professional life with the Beatles, as well as the bandmates’ capacity to endure as a working unit. “Brian’s death really was the end of an era,” the producer later wrote. “Sgt. Pepper had been our best work to date, the most thoughtful, among the best musically, and the most successful. Brian had steered them from the dark early days of struggle and hardship to this triumph.” At the same time, George could read the writing on the wall, having watched Brian’s slow collapse in the wake of the Jesus Christ tour and its attendant fallout. With the advent of Sgt. Pepper—possibly even beforehand, really—George had begun to glimpse a clear shift in the group’s calculus:

  One of the awful things is that, if Brian had lived, he would have lost the Beatles. He wouldn’t have survived as their manager. . . . They would probably have sought their own, younger, different people to look after their affairs. Brian, by his own design, had become too fragmented and the Beatles were too selfish to ever have someone like that. They wanted someone who did nothing else but the Beatles. Even more than that: by that time, Paul wanted someone who did nothing but Paul, John wanted someone exclusively, and so on. So it would have become an impossible situation. I cannot see that Brian could have retained managership of the Beatles. One hesitates to know how the future might have gone if Brian had not died.

  Clearly, George could sense the winds of change in the air. In many ways, Brian’s recent gambit with Robert Stigwood had been symptomatic of the loosening of his hold on “the boys.” In short order, the Beatles would buy out the Aussie entrepreneur and send him on his way. As for Martin, he understood, rather intuitively, how the bandmates were beginning to see the world, with McCartney and Lennon increasingly desirous of individual, even exclusive attention.5

  But as for Lennon, the founding Beatle’s own shock eventually gave way to a very different emotion, a feeling of fear over the Beatles’ capacity to survive in a post-Epstein world. “I knew that we were in trouble then,” he later recalled. “I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music and I was scared. I thought, ‘We’ve fuckin’ had it.’” As it happened, Paul was frightened, too. Before the bandmates had left the maharishi back in Wales, they had accepted the holy man’s invitation to visit his ashram for an extended retreat in India, where they would study Transcendental Meditation. But on September 1, McCartney gathered the other Beatles at his Cavendish Avenue home with a different objective in mind. During the meeting, he unveiled his plan for making the Magical Mystery Tour television film a reality. Paul’s outline for the movie entailed a circle representing sixty minutes of screen time, with eight pie-shaped segments apportioned into sketches and musical numbers:

  1. Commercial introduction. Get on the coach. Courier introduces.

  2. Coach people meet each other / (Song, Fool on the Hill)

  3. marathon—laboratory sequence.

  4. smiling face. LUNCH. Mangoes, tropical (magician)

  5. and 6: Dreams.

  7. Stripper & band.

  8. Song.

  END.

  Paul had previously unveiled his concept for filming a mystery tour back in April. But now he had a far different motive in mind, given the uncertainty that had plagued the band
in the wake of Brian’s death. “If the others clear off to India again now on another meditation trip,” he confided in Tony Barrow, “I think there’s a very real danger that we’ll never come back together again as a working group. On the other hand, if I can persuade them today that we should go straight into shooting this film, it could save the Beatles.”6

  McCartney had clearly succeeded in convincing his friends to postpone their plans for visiting the maharishi. In short order, they agreed to begin principal photography for the television movie during the week of September 11, which meant that they needed to begin compiling new material for the holiday-flavored lark—and fast. As it happened, Lennon had a new composition up his sleeve, a surreal, Lewis Carroll–inspired number called “I Am the Walrus.” From their places up in the control booth, Martin and Geoff Emerick found the concept of the Magical Mystery Tour project relatively difficult to grasp. “I tended to lay back on Magical Mystery Tour and let them have their head,” George later observed. “Some of the sounds weren’t very good. Some were brilliant, but some were bloody awful.” Emerick shared Martin’s misgivings, later remarking that “there was something lacking about Magical Mystery Tour. It wasn’t going to be another album, or another single, it was probably going to be a film. It was a funny period.” For his part, George, at least initially, had great difficulty in coming to grips with “I Am the Walrus.” To his mind, “It was organized chaos. I’m proud of that.” This was in contrast with the “disorganized chaos” that he had experienced during the summer, when the Beatles couldn’t seem to find their mettle.7

  Years later, Emerick would attribute Martin and the Beatles’ September 1967 malaise to Epstein’s untimely loss. “There was a pallor across the session that day—we were all distracted, thinking about Brian—but there was a song to be recorded, too.” The bandmates were out of sorts, to be certain, but so was Martin, who had counted Epstein as one of his closest friends during that era. When John finished debuting his strange new tune, “there was a moment of silence,” Geoff recalled, “then Lennon looked up at George Martin expectantly. ‘That one was called “I Am the Walrus,”’ John said. ‘So . . . what do you think?’” In Geoff’s memory, George looked “flummoxed” and, oddly for him, speechless. Eventually, the producer spoke up, saying, “Well, John, to be honest, I have only one question: What the hell do you expect me to do with that?”8