The Beatles, in fact, were not the first to nail down Swinging London in sound. Four months earlier, the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath album had created very much the same King’s Road and Carnaby Street feel, thanks mainly to the multi-instrumental talent of Brian Jones, whose intuitive sitar playing made George by contrast sound as though his fingers were all thumbs. But no one looked to the Stones to catch the zeitgeist, whereas for the Beatles it was now almost a duty to be in step with the nation’s destiny. Thus Revolver became the perfect aural snapshot of Britain’s greatest triumph since 1940, a moment that would be still unequaled and revisited as often as its soundtrack was replayed half a century later.
If they were not quite the first to distill the present, they made up for it by prophesying the future soon to dawn. It was there on Revolver’s seemingly aberrant closing track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a Ringo saying transmuted by John into a weird mélange of backward-played tapes, his once exuberant lead voice flattened to near tunelessness. “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream / Lay down all thought, surrender to the void / Or play the game Existence to the end. Of the beginning.” Like England World Cup victories, the days of “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah” were over for good and all.
The four who stopped running, who stood still at last in 1966 looking curiously about them, were beings such as the modern world had never seen. Only in ancient times, when boy emperors and pharaohs were clothed, even fed, with pure gold, had very young men commanded an equivalent adoration, fascination, and constant, expectant scrutiny. Nor could anyone suppose that to be thus—to have such youth and wealth, such clothes and cars and servants and women, made for any state other than inconceivable happiness. For no one since the boy pharaohs, since the fatally pampered boy Caesars, had known, as the Beatles now knew, how it felt to have felt everything, done everything, tasted everything, had a surfeit of everything; to live on that blinding, deadening, numbing surfeit that made each, on bad days, think he was aging at twice the usual rate.
It was as little comprehensible that to command such fame as the Beatles might not be enough; that each, in the stupendous collective adoration, felt himself to be overlooked as an individual; that each on his own should long to test the reality, or otherwise, of his independent existence.
John Lennon seemed the most determined—and best qualified—to make an individual career. That autumn, with Neil Aspinall, he detached himself from the other three to appear in a new film, How I Won the War, directed by the now extremely fashionable and financable Richard Lester. It had been clear to Lester, even in the harmless knockabout of the two Beatles films, that John had serious possibilities as a screen actor. This view was confirmed when How I Won the War went on release and John’s portrayal of Private Gripweed was singled out for critical praise. “I told him then he could do anything he wanted in films,” Richard Lester says. “But he wasn’t interested. It came too easily to him. He despised it.”
The Beatle who had vanished into Private Gripweed was never to reemerge. He kept his hair cropped short—a renunciation already front-page news throughout the world. He took to wearing the glasses he had always hated, perversely choosing little owl-eyed frames like those prescribed for him at primary school in the 1940s.
Under the cropped hair, the granny glasses, the clothes that tended increasingly toward flowered scarves and loose waistcoats, much of the same old John remained. The same impossible vagueness still caused him to forget the words of his own songs, his unlisted telephone number, even his aunt Mimi’s first name. The same impossible generosity would still press on anyone his last cigarette or whatever was in his pocket, whether sixpence or a thousand pounds. The same blistering sarcasm and silly puns kept those around him suspended between terror of his contempt and helpless, incredulous laughter.
When he came off the road in 1966 John’s life seemed to hold so many possibilities. Publishers wanted him to write for them. Print engravers and greeting card companies urged him to draw for them. Art galleries—now springing up in London almost as rapidly as boutiques—begged him to attend their private views. Art seemed to engage his whole attention for a time. He would drive up from Weybridge two or three times a week in the rainbow-daubed Rolls-Royce whose Scottish chauffeur also used it as an occasional bed.
Newest of all the new little West End galleries was the Indica in Mason’s Yard, run by Marianne Faithfull’s ex-husband, John Dunbar. In November 1966, the Indica was hanging an exhibition called “Unfinished Paintings and Objects by Yoko Ono.” The artist, a Japanese-born American, enjoyed minor notoriety in London for having recently exhibited her photographs of various unclothed human bottoms.
The night before the Indica exhibition opened, John arrived to look at it. He spent quite a long time over the Unfinished Paintings and Objects, particularly a painting attached to the ceiling with a ladder up to it and an apple unembellished but for a price ticket saying “£200.” Later on, John Dunbar sent Yoko across to talk to him in hopes he might turn out a useful patron. She proved to be very small and dressed entirely in black, her face almost obscured by clouds of black hair. Instead of speaking, she handed John a card on which was written the single word “Breathe.”
Next day, he was back in the small living room in one corner of the mansion that had taken nine months to decorate, folded up inside the small sofa he preferred to all his pastel-upholstered acres. He would lie there for hours, watching television or half-watching it, glancing at books and papers, then throwing them aside. He could lie there all day, not speaking to Cynthia, not seeming to notice Julian, his trance penetrable only by some scrap of nonsense from a TV quiz, some stray paragraph from the Daily Express, some costly and purposeless toy like his “nothing box,” a black plastic cube in which red lights winked on and off at random. He could spend hours in trying to guess which of the red lights would wink on next.
Late at night, if no excursion was happening, he would unfold himself from the couch and wander away to his studio, the guitars, the Vox organ, the ten linked-up Brunel tape recorders. Cynthia knew she would not see him again that night. Next day, she would have to keep the house quiet until early afternoon, when she took up his breakfast tray.
Sitting downstairs with her drawing or her needlework, cowed by the feuding between Dot, the housekeeper, and the general factotum’s wife, afraid to go outside the grounds in case some photographer saw Julian; thrifty, soft-spoken, eternally hoping for the best, Cyn was the same person she had always been.
Paul, the most committed performer, the most addicted to worship, the one who had worked the hardest at being a Beatle, now found himself at something of a loss. His first act, after the touring stopped, was to take a long and, for him, extravagant sabbatical. With Mal Evans—whose wife, Lil, still waited patiently at home in Sunbury-on-Thames—he set out on a long road safari across Africa.
His future, Paul announced on returning, would be concerned with all-round cultural self-improvement. He felt—as, indeed, both John and George did—that being a Beatle had been a form of missing life. The A-level Institute boy was excited, too, by London’s increasing artistic bustle. “People are saying things and painting things and writing things that are great,” he told the Evening Standard. “I must know what people are doing.”
In this endeavor, as in all Paul’s private life, his girlfriend Jane Asher was the main stimulus. Jane, unlike the other Beatles women, possessed complete independence: Now twenty-one, she had her own highly successful stage and film career. With her angelic looks went a strong mind and forthright manner that curtailed Paul’s ego, deflated his superstar pomposities, and made her a companion altogether preferable to any of the brainless beauties who clustered adoringly round him. He made a point of seeing all Jane’s plays, wherever the run happened to start. It was in Bristol, waiting to see Jane in a play, that a shopfront name gave him the idea for “Eleanor Rigby.” His best love songs had been written for Jane: In the feather-light “Here, There and Everywhere” she i
s an almost tangible presence.
His first project apart from the other Beatles was the composition of theme music for a new British comedy film, The Family Way. Newsweek magazine—which otherwise would hardly have noticed such a minor piece—considered his score “neat and resourceful.” He had already begun producing records—for Peter and Gordon, the duo featuring Peter Asher, Jane’s brother; for a group called the Escourts; and for Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers when they covered his song “Got to Get You into My Life.”
He had chosen a house at last: not in stockbroker land with the other Beatles but on Cavendish Avenue, St. John’s Wood. The district epitomized his cultural and social ambitions and was also conveniently close to the EMI studios. The house, discreetly large, was enclosed by high walls and protected by electronic security gates. With it, Paul acquired the accessory status symbols of a married couple: butler and cook. An Old English sheepdog named Martha roamed the extensive garden that, despite his family’s protests, he resolutely neglected.
As far as the press and public were concerned, the most interesting thing about Paul’s self-improvement program was the point in it when he and Jane Asher would announce their engagement. Jane had helped him to decorate and furnish the new house although, with a nicety characteristic of both, she did not officially live with him there.
Each of them had grown adept at fending off the same old, microphone-thrusting question. “I certainly would be most surprised,” Jane said, “if I married anyone but Paul.” And Paul himself, caught yet again outside his electronic gates, looked up from his Aston Martin with the geniality that never seemed to falter, listened to the question, considered, and replied: “Just say that when you asked me that, I smiled.”
George, so it seemed, was even more at a loss. He had been a Beatle ever since the age of fifteen. All his adult life had been spent running or, with his gradually more magnificent guitar, his mop-top framing his pale, wary face, just standing there.
For the final year of touring, if not longer, George had actively hated his Beatle existence. On the outside, it might appear pure gold; on the inside, it bristled with snubs and slights—the patronizing air of George Martin in the studio; the overwhelming brilliance of John and Paul’s partnership that allowed him, if he was lucky, one song per album; the realization that in their eyes he was still what he had been in Liverpool, the kid just tagging along.
His unvented rage he turned upon the adoring world. While Beatlemania was still a laugh to the others, to George it was an affront against the musicianship he had so laboriously taught himself. His fame seemed to have brought him only money and a terrible touchiness—a suspicion, already voiced in one song lyric, of “people standing round who screw you in the ground.” His wife, Patti—they had married in January 1966—virtually gave up her modeling career lest, in George’s eyes, people should try to exploit him through her.
It had been with the idlest curiosity, on the Help! film set, that George first heard Indian sitars playing a burlesque version of the Beatles’ own song “A Hard Day’s Night.” Help! was, of course, a goonish romp about Eastern mystics in pursuit of a sacrificial jewel. The finale was a pitched battle between Beatles and dacoits in the surf along a Bahamas beach while a many-armed Hindu idol lolled in the offshore swell. As Richard Lester remembers, no one quite knew if it was part of the script or not when, in the midst of shooting, an Indian suddenly rode up on a bicycle and handed each Beatle a small religious book.
From the joke film property and the Indian on the bicycle grew the earnest passion that was to make George Harrison the least recognizable Beatle of all. He acquired a sitar of his own and began to play it, initially as if it was a guitar. Clumsy as his first experiments were, they gave him something he had never had before—a definite and distinctive contribution to what the Beatles did in the studio. For not even George Martin could be snooty about sitars. The sound tentatively used on Rubber Soul was one of the prime elements, and praised as such, in Revolver. Henceforward it was recognized that when a group of Indians walked in and squatted down, balancing their strange, giraffe-necked instruments against the ball of one bare foot, that was when George took over and gave orders. In 1966, at a dinner party, he met Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar virtuoso who offered to visit his bungalow in Esher and give him private tuition.
He had already been to India once, briefly, on the run from the Philippines. In autumn 1966—after what he at least firmly regarded as the Beatles’ last appearance—he returned there with Patti for two months’ sitar study under Ravi Shankar. He also met Shankar’s spiritual teacher, or guru, who explained to him the law of karma—the Buddhist principle of inevitability. He and Patti traveled to Kashmir, where they witnessed religious festivals and conversed with students and holy men.
Just as he had once obsessively applied himself to the guitar, George now devoted his life to sitar practice. In this period, indeed, he rarely touched a guitar outside the recording studio. He practiced day and night, sitting on the floor in his Indian tunic with Ravi Shankar’s instructions playing on tape.
George, too, was now regularly taking LSD. For him, the mental landscape the drug produced was one he had already seen. It was the India of mystic sounds and mystic beings, able to levitate or lie on spikes or bury themselves; the India that, in sight and touch and voice and clamor and calm, was the furthest distance you could go from being a Beatle, wearing a suit, and singing, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He who had always kept his mind shut tight against all schooling, now began to devour books about yoga and meditation. The books promised a state he had so far found unattainable—of perfect pleasure, “enlightenment,” and peace. He need not worry then about the taxman and who was screwing him; about who recognized him, or failed to recognize him; about the girls who climbed into the garden he cultivated like a northern working man and broke the tops off his roses.
Only Ringo seemed to know for certain what he wanted. He wanted to stay at home with Maureen and their new baby, Zak. They called the baby Zak because it was the name Ringo had wished for when small. Life for Ringo was still that simple, even when he stood in the grounds of Sunny Heights, looking across his landscaped garden to the wall half-constructed by his own building company, and at his cars, the Facel Vega, the Land-Rover, the Mini Cooper, and at the house itself with its miles of soft furnishings, its white carpets, its six TV sets, its movie equipment, billiard table, and Las Vegas-style fruit machine. He would remember his childhood in the Liverpool Dingle and all those lonely hospital beds, and think: “What’s a scruff like me doing with all this lot?”
Even as separate householders and individual millionaires, they could not stop being together. No wife, no girlfriend yet had broken the inexplicable bond among four individuals who had not only grown up together but also helped each other through an ordeal none but that four understood. The habit continued of doing things, wearing things, buying things, having crazes for things in unison. When John took to wearing glasses, the others did. Paul and John, during the New Delhi stopover, bought sitars like George’s. All took simultaneously to baggysleeved flowered shirts, high-buttoning Prince Albert coats, wide-brimmed hats, and loosely tied scarves. And early in 1967, on the upper lips of all four, there appeared identical small curved mustaches.
Just as on tour, the people closest to them were the two fellow Liverpudlians who, as road managers, had so long formed their only bulwark against the world. Neil—or, as John called him, Nell—Aspinall, the nervous, clever former accounting student, and Mal Evans, the inoffensive ex-bouncer, continued to fill a role necessary to each Beatle and the four as a unit. Neil and Mal went where the Beatles went, wore what the Beatles wore, smoked what the Beatles smoked: For their not overlarge salaries they remained perpetually on call to provide any Beatle with any of life’s necessities, from a transcontinental chauffeur to a tray of tea and toast. Mal’s wife, Lil, in Sunbury, did not see him for weeks at a time. Neil—paradoxically in the service of such masters—was starting to
lose his hair.
Similarly, the close friends each Beatle had tended to be friends acquired collectively, in Liverpool or Hamburg. There was Tony Bramwell, George’s childhood acquaintance, who had progressed from NEMS office boy to stage manager of Brian’s latest venture, the Saville theater. There was Terry Doran, another Brian friend, his partner in Brydor Cars, but welcome in every Beatles home for his willingness to go anywhere, fetch anything, and his talent to amuse. There was Klaus Voorman, their art student friend from Hamburg, the boy whom Astrid forsook for Stu Sutcliffe. Klaus now played bass guitar in the Manfred Mann group but had stayed close enough to his former Hamburg mates to design the Revolver album sleeve. There was also, intermittently, Pete Shotton, John Lennon’s old school and skiffle crony, whom John had recompensed for the night he smashed Pete’s washboard over his head by buying a supermarket for him to run in Hampshire.
Creatively, the band seemed to be coasting—little dreaming it was just the calm before the storm. Though committed to making a third film for United Artists, they could not agree with Walter Shenson, their producer, over a script. John, especially, complained that in Help! they had been “extras in our own film.” One idea was that they should make a Western; another was that they should play the Three Musketeers; another—the one that Shenson thought most promising—visualized them as four living facets of the same personality. As with the previous two films, Shenson looked around for a quality writer. A script was commissioned from Joe Orton, the young working-class dramatist whose macabre comedies Loot and Entertaining Mr. Sloane had each been huge West End successes.