The news so devastated Brian that his whole body erupted in a painful case of hives. Suffering from total exhaustion he fled to a hotel in Port-meirion, the Welsh resort where he had always found a measure of relaxation and quiet. He had barely settled down there when Nat Weiss telephoned from New York to tell him that Beatles albums were being ritually burned in Nashville, Tennessee.
The previous February, in one of her regular Beatles reports for the London Evening Standard, Maureen Cleave had asked John his views, if any, on organized religion. His response gave little hint of a past life in the choir of St. Peter’s Church, Woolton. “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink…we’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.” He had nothing against Jesus, he went on, but the disciples were “thick.” “They’re the ones that ruin it for me.”
In Britain, the remark passed unchallenged—indeed, unnoticed. Such was not the case five months later when, on the eve of the Beatles’ American tour, Maureen Cleave’s interview with John was reprinted by a teenage magazine, Datebook. What in the Evening Standard piece had been merely an aside was headlined on Datebook’s cover: a stray ad-lib transformed to vaunting sacrilege. John Lennon was claiming that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus Christ.”
In cheerily godless Britain with its enfeebled Protestant Church—already reeling under the mockeries of young satirists like Peter Cook and Alan Bennett—the remark had seemed no more than flippant and rather foolish. But to the core of old-fashioned, literal-minded Christianity that runs through America, it was no more or less than outright blasphemy. In fundamentalist southern states even the most avid female Beatles fans had no doubt as to whom they owed greater loyalty. The Tennessee radio station that invited shocked and disillusioned teenagers to cast their Beatles albums onto public bonfires was just one of hundreds originating similar protests throughout the country. One outraged community installed rubbish bins labeled “Place Beatle Trash Here”; another brought in a tree-crushing machine to pulp the offending vinyl. Pastor Thurmond Babbs of Cleveland, Ohio, threatened to excommunicate any of his flock who attended a Beatles concert on the approaching tour. Their music was banned on thirty-five radio stations, from Ogdenburg, New York, to Salt Lake City, Utah.
The outcry added further fuel to what was already extreme disenchantment with the British Invasion of pop bands who had followed the Beatles’ triumphal path across the Atlantic. Now, the product being offered to America’s youth was no longer innocent and charming Hamlet bangs, pixie boots, and deft one-liners. It had become a seemingly unstoppable procession of shaggy-headed and unsmiling yahoos who seemed to compete with each other in the tunelessness of their music and the mayhem of their performance. It was The Who, led by their anarchic, windmill-armed leader Pete Townshend, who ended each set by smashing his guitar to smithereens as though urging his audience to do the same to the concert hall. It was a new three-man band named Cream, the first ever to lose the definite article, whose drummer, Ginger Baker, delighted in firing off sticks like guided missiles to hit watching police or security men. Above all, it was the Rolling Stones, whose shaggy hair was popularly supposed to be teeming with vermin, whose lyrics had to be bleeped on television, and whose recent U.S. smash, “Satisfaction,” was apparently a hymn to the joys of playing with yourself.
Worse even than that was the new mood growing up among America’s own young music makers, the singers and groups whom the Beatles had galvanized into new energy and experimentation barely two years earlier. Under the leadership of Bob Dylan American pop had ceased to be about high schools, drive-ins, and junior proms and become as much a medium of protest and ridicule as acoustic folk had ever been, but now reaching an infinitely wider audience. The hitherto unchallenged war in Vietnam, racial intolerance, white suburban snobbery, urban decay, even the prospect of impending nuclear destruction, all now found their way into the charts in songs that sold by the billion. Until this moment, every type of American mass culture had reassured its citizens that their country was infallibly the good guy. Now the mocking voices of Dylan, Joan Baez, the Byrds, and a hundred other insurrectionists broke the news that it had become the bad guy, not in folkies’ harsh monotone but in seductive commercial hooks and harmonies, set about by electric pianos, wistful flutes, and zithery twelve-string guitars.
The Beatles were not in any sense political or subversive. But there was no doubt that they had changed, radically and disconcertingly, from the instant charmers on the Ed Sullivan Show. The single they released early in 1966—unconnected to any album, and a double A side—bore the unmistakable stamp of Bob Dylan, and many others besides. Paul’s contribution was “Paperback Writer,” a vague satire against hack journalism and the mass media, set about by Pete Townshendesque guitar chords and intricate harmonies with more than a nod toward the Beach Boys. “Rain” was by John, echoing the Byrds as they had sounded in their smash cover version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but with his own special air of being pressured and persecuted almost beyond endurance: “When the rain comes, you run and hide your head…you might as well be dead…” Its closing babble of gibberish was added late at night in his private studio, by drunkenly running the vocal chorus backward.
As usual, advance orders took “Rain/Paperback Writer” instantly to number one in Britain and America. Only after 1 million copies had been taken home and played did some little uncertainty arise. “Paperback Writer,” which received the most radio play, frankly mystified American fans with its allusions to a man named Lear and the Daily Mail. A suspicion formed, even if no one dared yet to say it, that the Beatles were not infallible.
A further bloody mess of controversy was just around the corner. To promote their American tour Capitol had issued a compilation album of songs from Help! and Rubber Soul, plus three from the new British album still awaiting release. The title of this hybrid, reflecting its most lyrical McCartney contribution, was The Beatles—Yesterday and Today. Any promise of gentle nostalgia was dispelled by a full-color sleeve on which the Beatles, wearing white butchers’ overalls, nursed dismembered and decapitated toy dolls and brandished bloody joints of meat.
The “butcher sleeve,” as it became known, was the Beatles’ own art-directing concept. Sean O’Mahony, editor of their fan club magazine, had been present at the photographic session and had covered his eyes in dismay when the props were brought in. Such was their power by then that Brian’s misgivings were overruled. The gruesome tableau appeared first in England, on the cover of Disc magazine. Capitol Records, cowed by their former lack of prescience, agreed that it would probably be a winner. Seven hundred and fifty thousand sleeves had been printed before the first calls came in from disk jockeys almost retching over their advance copies. The sleeve was then axed, together with all the promotional material, at a cost of two hundred thousand dollars. A special staff spent one weekend extracting each of the 750,000 discs from its butcher sleeve and inserting it into one hastily improvised round a picture of the Beatles leaning on a cabin trunk. In many cases, to save trouble, the new sleeve was simply pasted over the old.
As to which Beatle had proposed the bloody joints and limbless dolls, there was never any serious doubt. The banned cover, a bitterly resentful John Lennon said, was “as relevant as Vietnam.” His tone, people noticed, was neither cheeky nor funny.
Meanwhile, John’s “bigger than Jesus” remark continued to be denounced from pulpits across the world. Both the Spanish and South African governments issued official condemnations, though the latter, still ostracized for its racial policies, did not carry excessive moral weight. The Pope added his disapproval via the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, which declared that “some subjects must not be dealt with profanely, even in the world of beatniks.”
Though debilitated with hives as well as groggy from a bout of flu, Brian flew to New York ahead of the tour party in an attempt to calm, at least, the American furor. Nat Weiss remembers how his
anxiety and distress when he got off the plane were not just about the huge sum of tour earnings at stake. “He really cared most about the possibility that the Beatles would suffer abuse—that they might even be in danger,” Weiss says. “The first question he asked me was: ‘What will it cost to cancel the tour?’ I said: ‘A million dollars.’ He said: ‘I’ll pay it. I’ll pay it out of my own pocket, because if anything were to happen to any one of them, I’d never forgive myself.’”
Using all his powers of diplomacy, Brian assured the American press that John had intended no sacrilege, but only wished to express concern at the decline in spiritual values. It was announced that when the Beatles arrived on August 12, John himself would formally apologize. He did so at a press conference in Chicago, pale and nervous—for the hate mail that he had been receiving had badly shaken him. “I’m sorry I opened my mouth,” he said. “I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ, or antireligion. I wouldn’t knock it. I didn’t mean we were greater or better.”
So began the tour destined to be the worst, if not yet officially last, of all. To add to the general unease, a famous American clairvoyant had predicted that three of the four Beatles would die soon in an air crash. Though the prophecy was later retracted, it cast a lingering tremor over the constant shuttle flights. Mal Evans was convinced he would not survive the tour, and spent one journey between concerts composing a last letter to his wife, Lil, and his new baby daughter, Julie.
All four Beatles became conscious for the first time of a threat that had worried Brian since the American tours began—that some night, in some huge, oval human sea, someone might be hiding with a high-velocity rifle. In each big-city stadium, grinding out the numbers they could no longer hear, they felt themselves endangered now by something other than dangerous adoration. At Memphis, their first concert south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the backstage fear was as palpable as sweat. On television earlier that day a portly wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had promised that if they went onstage, the Klan would fully justify its name as a terror organization. Instead of jelly beans, rubbish began to land on the stage. Halfway through the performance, a firecracker exploded. Brian, for one hideous moment, thought it was a rifle shot.
Almost every major venue along the tour route seemed to bring its own peculiar curse. In Washington, D.C., the Beatles had to play in competition with a race riot a few blocks away. At the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium scores of innocent fans were manhandled by security staff and attacked by baton-wielding police. In Cincinnati, the concert promoter tried to economize by building a stage with no roof or canopy. Just before the Beatles went out to play a downpour of rain began. They could not have gone ahead without serious risk of electrocution. “The whole audience—thirty-five thousand screaming kids—had to be turned away,” Nat Weiss says. “They all got passes for a show the next day but, for a while, it really looked ugly out there. All the Beatles were frightened. Paul, I know, was physically sick.”
The final concert of the tour was on August 29 at Candlestick Park, San Francisco. “Brian told me it was the end in San Francisco,” Nat Weiss says. “He was dejected. ‘This is it,’ he told me, ‘this is the last one ever.’”
The day was to be even more terrible than Brian anticipated. For some months past he had been living with an American youth, but the relationship had proved too stormy, and physically violent, even for Brian’s taste. Unlike previous partners, the youth proved recalcitrant when shown the door and had threatened to tell the whole story to the Beatles unless given a substantial sweetener. Through Nat Weiss, Brian had paid him three thousand dollars in exchange for a promise to stay off this present tour, when one single further word of bad publicity would have been disastrous.
By the time the tour party reached Los Angeles, however, Brian had started to hanker for his former lover again. Against Weiss’s pleas, he was brought to L.A., put up in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and invited to the Beverly Hills house where Brian and Weiss were based.
On August 29, after the Beatles had left for San Francisco, the two returned to the house to discover that both their briefcases had been stolen. Weiss’s merely contained business papers, but Brian’s was a compendium of drugs, homosexual correspondence, and pornographic pictures, plus a hefty sum in cash skimmed off the tour’s concert receipts, which he had intended to share among the Beatles as a bonus. While the money was of little consequence, the briefcase’s other contents put a lethal blackmail weapon into any ill-wisher’s hands. Brian was so convulsed with terror and dread that he dared not even leave the house.
So, to his lasting remorse, he missed the Beatles’ last live concert. He never forgave himself for not being at Candlestick Park, on that night of all nights, to watch over the four boys in his charge.
Britain, that summer of 1966, had little cause to feel pleased with itself or the world. The year, barely half-expended, could already chalk up the varying torments of a general election and a national shipping strike. The pound ailed; inflation kept briskly on the ascent. The reelected Wilson government stood revealed, not as dynamic or purposeful but merely another set of politicians, with the usual capacity to bungle and vacillate. Rhodesia, having seceded from British rule a year earlier, still thumbed a derisive nose at her fuming mother country across the world. From still further afield came noises that penetrated even the age-old British indifference to what was still vaguely thought of as the Orient. America began bombing the North Vietnamese cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. A war hitherto faint and far-flung ceased to happen comfortably out of earshot.
There was, however, bright sunshine. The British, as they had in the past forgotten pestilence, famine, the Great War, Hitler’s bombs, and the Suez Crisis, now just as easily forgot Mr. Wilson, Vietnam, and the pay freeze under the influence of weeks of unbroken summer. So 1966 was to pass into popular remembrance: not for crises, both present and promised, but for blue skies, soft breezes, and for two events—the only two—that fortified that ephemeral happiness.
On July 30, England won the World Football [Soccer] Cup, audaciously snatching the vital goal in the last seconds of the final against Germany. Old wartime animosities doubtless assisted the fervor with which, on another hot summer evening, the victorious team was welcomed home to London. Footballers looked like pop singers now; they grew their hair, wore trendy clothes, and received the approbation of great men. For Harold Wilson, naturally, was there, puffing his pipe as smugly as if England’s winning goal had originated in a cabinet memorandum.
The second, even more potent source of national esteem owed its origin to America’s Time magazine, which had only recently gotten around to noticing the Swinging London phenonemon that, in fact, had peaked more than a year earlier. On April 13, Time had devoted its cover and a breathless twelve-page report to London as “the Style Capital of Europe,” a judgment with which other American mainstream magazines like Life and the Saturday Evening Post were quick to agree. As a result, London was experiencing an influx of American visitors unknown since World War II. Hitherto, crossing the Atlantic had always been prohibitively expensive, creating Britain’s image of the American tourist as a cigar-chewing plutocrat with a guidebook. But now a coincidental drop in transatlantic air fares allowed thousands—millions—of American students, even schoolchildren, to come across under their own steam and experience the staid old capital’s new short-skirted, strange-scented wonders. Almost without exception, the first question these visitors asked on touching down at Heathrow was “Where can I find the Beatles?”
On August 5, an album appeared in the record shops that, were it not for the fact that approximately one million copies had been ordered in advance, might have seemed to stand little chance of being noticed on the shelves. Its cover, amid its rivals’ Carnaby colors, was plain black and white: a collage of photo fragments spiraling through what looked like palm fronds but proved on close inspection to be hair, encircling four silhouetted faces so instantly recognizable, it was not thought necessary to print their collect
ive name. Who else in the world would announce themselves in graphics reflecting the smartest magazines? Who would call a record album simply Revolver, investing even that commonplace pun with the sleekness of some newly minted avant garde? Who but the Beatles would have confidence colossal enough to be so chastely down-beat?
Revolver was not presented in the usual patchwork album style but as a continuous, cohesive performance, as if they had chosen Abbey Road’s Studio Two as a substitute stage. There was, first of all, to underline this, some stagey coughing and throat clearing. Then came “Taxman,” not a love song but a bitter satire written as well as lead sung by a chronically bitter George Harrison, railing against the huge portion of the Beatles’ earnings due in income tax under jolly Mr. Wilson. There was “Eleanor Rigby,” sung by Paul alone with a string octet, a song more like a short story, evoking Paul’s Irish Catholic roots, about a lonely woman picking up other people’s wedding rice. There was John’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” answering back Paul’s sentimental conscience with a paean to unrepentant apathy. There was the contrast of George’s sitar-squibbly “Love You To” and the stunning, simple charm of Paul’s latest Jane idyll, “Here, There and Everywhere.” There was “Yellow Submarine,” a song for children (as it seemed) perfectly suited to Ringo’s happy drone, accompanied by slurpings and gurglings, ringing ships’ bells, a subaqueous brass band, and commands from the bridge in a John Lennon funny voice; and then John’s nonfunny voice, in “She Said She Said,” among graffiti-like guitar phrases, saying “I know what it’s like to be dead.”
On side two, to glorify the weather, there was “Good Day Sunshine.” There was “And Your Bird Can Sing,” more lucid Lennon nonsense, and Paul’s pretty, self-pitying “For No One.” There was “Doctor Robert,” the first of many in-jokes and concealed references to be planted in Beatles music: a sly dig at one of the upmarket medical men who kept them supplied with pills. There was George’s “I Want to Tell You,” with its wonderful message to pampered, unharassed, and fully employed 1966 teenagers that it was still okay to feel flat and dissatisfied (or “hung up”) the way George did; and then Paul’s “Got to Get You into My Life,” a soul song as neat and brassy and rousing as ever came out of Memphis or Chicago.