One business matter had so harried and tormented Brian that he now refused even to think about it. In New York, the lawsuit against Seltaeb, the merchandising company, was about to enter its third year. The huge delay—caused largely by Brian’s failure to attend pretrial examinations—had seen Nicky Byrne’s claim for allegedly lost revenues rise, as the Beatles grew still more famous, from five million to twenty-two million dollars. The Beatles themselves even now knew nothing of the millions that their name had generated but that Brian had been unable to catch.
His other NEMS artists—apart from “my Cilla”—had long ago ceased to absorb his energy. Gerry Marsden was in a West End musical; Billy J. Kramer and the Fourmost had gone to other agencies. Brian was in fact actively seeking a business partner who could ultimately take over the whole NEMS operation from him. He had already offered a controlling interest to Larry Parnes, which Parnes turned down because the deal would not include the Beatles. Instead, Brian turned to Robert Stigwood, a ruddy-faced Australian who, since his arrival in London, had built up an impressive roster of emergent pop acts. Stigwood became NEMS’s joint managing director, pending his acquisition of a majority shareholding. Among the new clients he brought into the company were Cream, the Moody Blues, and Jimi Hendrix, a young blues guitarist from Seattle whose explosive virtuosity had turned even modern legends like Eric Clapton and George Harrison into besotted disciples. Also under Stigwood’s wing three brothers from Australia called the Bee Gees, until then thought not to have a prayer because their name sounded too much like the Beatles.
Brian himself was now rarely to be seen in the daylight hours. Joanne Newfield, arriving at Chapel Street each morning, would find her day’s instructions in the note pushed under his bedroom door—a note written at dawn in amphetamine wakefulness, before the antidote drug plunged him into sleep. Sometimes, pushed under the door, there would be a pile of money, won on his perpetual journey round the Mayfair gambling clubs. “Jo…” one note said, “Please bank my happiness…”
With luck, and a little extra dose, he would not have to open his eyes until mid-afternoon. Joanne knew he had surfaced when the intercom in his bedroom was switched on. “When he first got up, he always felt terrible—hung over from drink and pills. He’d take some uppers to get over that. At about five o’clock, he’d be full of life. He’d come in and say, “Right. Let’s start work.”
The mounting depression, the chemicals warring within him, produced fits of irrational anger that drove Joanne many times to the point of resignation. Like others before her, she could never quite bring herself to do it. “The smallest thing could send him half-crazy. I got him a wrong number once, and he literally went berserk. He threw a whole tea tray at me. Another time, it was my birthday: He was terrible to me all day. The next day, I found this note. ‘Jo—good morning. Better late than never. Many happy returns of yesterday. Be a bit tolerant of me at my worst. Really, I don’t want to hurt anyone…’”
Several times he made a determined attempt to pull himself together. He began seeing a psychiatrist and, on at least two occasions, went into a drying-out clinic in Putney. For one period of several weeks a doctor and a nurse took up residence at Chapel Street. The nurse went out one afternoon, and Brian escaped. He was missing for two days. No one thought of looking for him where he was more and more to be found—in the dismal trysting alleyways of Piccadilly Underground station.
At other times it seemed he could find satisfaction only by creating a bizarre facsimile of his own mother, or at least the all-encompassing security she had once given him. Among his secret ports of call was a dominatrix in Mayfair whose clients also included several senior figures in the Conservative party. Her main task was to gratify the almost conscious death wish that still remained a strong part of Brian’s sexual makeup while simultaneously making him feel childishly coddled and secure. He would lie in a rubber coffin while she read the newspapers out loud to him.
Life could still return to normal, as when his mother came down from Liverpool for a visit. Paradoxically, spells of conventional illness put him back on the rails. “I looked after him when he had glandular fever,” Joanne Newfield says. “He had a bout of jaundice as well, when Queenie came down to stay. Brian got into a good routine then and really seemed to enjoy it. I remember one Saturday afternoon how thrilled he was that he and Peter Brown had been out to Berwick Market to buy fruit. Brian thought this was wonderful. He’d done something normal—something just the same as other people did.”
Early in 1967, he made a second attempt to kill himself with a drug overdose. The Beatles were by then deeply involved in recording their new album. Brian had let an early pressing of “Strawberry Fields” / “Penny Lane” be stolen from Chapel Street by one of his boyfriends. Shortly afterward, the words “Brian Epstein is a queer” were scrawled on the garage door in lipstick. “He did once confide in me how hopeless his private life was,” Joanne says. “I’m no good with women and I’m no good with men,” he told me. He was in absolute despair that day.
“The doctor told me once that Brian was like a collision course inside himself. He could only be terribly happy or terribly unhappy. If there was any depression or misery, Brian would be drawn helplessly into it. The Beatles caused that happiness, and they caused that unhappiness. I don’t think there was any hope for him since the day he met the Beatles.”
The sixties’ increasingly tolerant atmosphere did little to ease his particular problems. In London at least, homosexuality had lost much of its Victorian stigma, thanks mainly to the fact that even ragingly hetero young men with their long hair, velvet suits, and ruffle-fronted shirts personified the traditional notion of “queers.” Nineteen sixty-seven was to see the decriminalization of homosexuality per se, with sexual acts permitted between consenting adult partners in private. But Brian’s tastes left him still miles on the wrong side of the law; besides, for someone in his public position and of his parentage and religious background, it remained as impossible as ever to come out of the closet.
America still held vestiges of happiness. With his lawyer friend Nat Weiss he had formed a separate company, Nemperor Artists, to represent NEMS acts in New York. Weiss had himself gone over to artist-management, handling groups like Cyrkle, whose song “Red Rubber Ball” Brian had correctly judged a million-selling U.S. single. Nemperor Artists had another new signing, of talents as yet unrealized—Brian Epstein. He virtually gave the company to Nat Weiss so that Weiss could become his agent.
The portly, rather strange New Yorker had become Brian’s most loyal, long-suffering friend. There were difficulties in that city, too, after encounters with predatory boys around Times Square. One day, when Brian was due to be interviewed on radio WOR-FM, Nat Weiss found him drugged almost insensible with Seconal tablets. Weiss somehow revived him and delivered him to the studio.
That interview, with the longtime Beatles adherent Murray the K, has survived on an hour-long tape in Nat Weiss’s possession. It is remarkable less for the subjects covered than for the tenacity with which Brian, once on the air, fought his way back from his Seconal coma. At the beginning, he can scarcely even speak. But slowly, his voice frees itself, his thoughts unstick. He can articulate what everyone—what he most of all—has hoped to hear. The Beatles and he remain as close as they have ever been. “There hasn’t been so much as…a row.
“At the moment they’re doing great things in the studio. They take longer nowadays, of their own volition, to make records. They’re hypercritical of their own work. Paul rang me the other day and said he wanted to make just one small change to a track.
“I hope ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ are going to prove a thing or two. And certainly—certainly—the new album is going to prove more than a thing or two.”
“So—there we go,” are Murray the K’s sign-off words. “It’s good to know the Beatles are still together. Eppy is still together…”
There had been moments at Abbey Road studios during the previ
ous four months when George Martin wondered whether the Beatles might have gone too far this time. There was, for instance, the time they asked him to provide farmyard noises, including a pack of foxhounds in full cry. There was the matter of the Victorian steam organs, the forty-one-piece orchestra with no score to play, and the hours spent searching for a note that only dogs could hear. At such times, the Beatles’ record producer feared this new album would end, if it ended at all, merely by baffling its listeners.
Early 1967 had found them in the now familiar position of having to out-do the rivals they themselves had created. After Revolver, every other creative mind in pop was awakening to the possibilities of an album that was not just a compendium of past hits but a self-contained work on a definite theme, its tracks working interdependently like movements in a classical concerto. Two post-Revolver productions from across the Atlantic that had taken the Beatles’ idea several notches further on were largely responsible for driving them back into the studio. One was the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, an almost Mozartian montage of multidubbed harmonies and counterpoint, recorded almost single-handedly by Brian Wilson while the rest of the band were out on tour. The second, even sharper goad was Freak-Out by a new California group called the Mothers of Invention: one of the first ever “double” albums, pungent with the iconoclastic wit of their leader, Frank Zappa, and embellished with quasi-comical sound effects and scraps of conversation.
The Beatles had originally meant their answer to Pet Sounds and Freak-Out to be an album in the most literal sense, each track a snapshot of Liverpool as they remembered it from childhood. But, having completed “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” they found their enthusiasm for the idea beginning to wane, and simply turned over those two unmatched pearls to Martin for release as their next single. Afterward they continued recording songs with no theme save the things they were currently doing, the newspapers they chanced to be reading, the London whose language and fashion they continued both to dictate and reflect. The newest London craze was for Victorian militaria, sold in shops with ponderously quaint names like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. So one night, the Beatles met to rehearse a new song, in that same vein of mustachioed whimsy, entitled “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“It was Paul’s number,” Martin says. “Just an ordinary song, not particularly brilliant as songs go. When we’d finished it, Paul said: ‘Why don’t we make the whole album as though the Pepper band really existed, as though Sergeant Pepper was doing the record. We can dub in effects and things.’ From that moment, it was as if Pepper had a life of its own.”
That life stemmed at first from simple enjoyment. They relished the idea that the four most famous pop musicians in the world should create mock bandsmen as their alter ego, and present their music in the faux-naif setting of a children’s circus and pantomime. Then, as the sessions progressed, there was born in both musicians and their producer that special life, that sensation comparable only with walking on water, that comes from the certain knowledge that one is making a masterpiece.
Its strength lay in the fact that to all four Beatles the vision was the same. All four were now converted to the LSD drug. Even Paul McCartney, the cautious, the proper, had finally given in. LSD is said to have beneficial effects only if used among close friends. In Sgt. Pepper it not only moved the Beatles to brilliant music, it also restored them to a closeness they had nearly lost in the numbness of being adored by the whole world. It would be remembered as their best record, and also their very best performance.
Martin had no idea about the LSD at the time. The Beatles, in deference to their schoolmasterly producer, kept even innocent joints out of his sight, puffing them furtively in the gent’s toilets. Martin was, in any case, fully occupied with trying to reconcile an infinity of new ideas with his by now antiquated and inhibiting four-track recording machine. As the kaleidoscope blossomed and expanded Martin and his engineer, Geoff Emerick, cadged extra sound channels by dubbing one four-track machine over another.
Martin had taught the Beatles much: He learned a little, too, in reckless spontaneity. The song that set the circus atmosphere was “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” a John Lennon composition suggested by the words of an old theater bill he had bought in an antique shop. Martin’s instructions as arranger were to provide “a sort of hurdy gurdy effect.” He did so by means of assorted steam organ sound-effect tapes cut into irregular lengths, thrown on the studio floor, then reedited at random. The result was a dreamlike cacophony, swirling about the Lennonesque big top where “summersets,” rather than somersaults, are executed, and “tonight Henry the Horse dances the waltz.”
Martin, indeed, found his last reserves melting in admiration of a song like John’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” whose images—of “tangerine trees,” “marmalade skies,” “newspaper taxis,” and “looking-glass ties”—were dazzling enough to a man with his middle-aged senses intact. It did occur to him sometimes that John looked rather strange, if not actually unwell. One night, in the aftermath of an acid trip, he looked so ill that Martin had to take him up onto the studio roof for air. Later, Paul took charge of him, driving him home to Weybridge and keeping him company in the hoped-for restorative of turning on yet again.
For Paul, Sgt. Pepper was a chance to experiment still further with the vein of narrative realism he had found in “Eleanor Rigby” and “Penny Lane.” Among the treasures he brought to the table was “Lovely Rita,” a cod love song to a meter maid, America’s more seductive term for a female traffic warden, its tweeness diluted by the background of yearningly ironic “ooohs” and “aaahs” from John. “When I’m Sixty-Four” found Paul looking forward to barely conceivable old age, a Darby-and-Joan vision of “doing the garden,” “renting a cottage in the Isle of Wight,” and grandchildren named “Vera, Chuck, and Dave.”
His most ambitious offering was “She’s Leaving Home,” the story of a young woman nerving herself to leave her dependent parents and elope with “a man in the motor trade.” Introduced by a rippling harp, the song unfolded like one of the new, gritty working-class plays to be seen on black-and-white TV—the young woman stealing away from home at daybreak, “leaving the note that she hoped would say more,” then her mother discovering her loss with a cry of “Daddy! Our baby’s gone!” It was a small—perhaps not so small—masterpiece from a humane and understanding heart, only slightly marred by its composer’s imperiousness when the moment came to cut it. As usual, Paul had produced a “head arrangement” that needed George Martin to turn it into a formal orchestral score. When Martin could not do the job on twenty-four hours’ notice, as Paul wanted, he found himself summarily dropped in favor of an outside arranger.
Paul, at least, had no doubt that every song the Beatles were recording formed a link in the overall concept. “This is our Freak-Out,” he kept saying. But Ringo was to have a different recollection. “After we’d done the original Sergeant Pepper song, we dropped the whole military idea. We just went on doing tracks.”
If they were not quite following the original plan, they were working together with a harmony, unity, and enjoyment they had seldom known before, and never were to again. George, as usual, was given his moment of control when Indian musicians came in to help record his latest sitar epic, “Within You Without You.” Ringo was called from the sidelines (“I learned to play chess during Sgt. Pepper,” he would later say) to do a vocal for “With a Little Help from My Friends,” the song destined to be given the crucial place after the overture. The roadies Neil and Mal took an active part, helping to operate the numerous sound effects and even playing backup harmonicas. Martin watched beamingly from the control room, still convinced that all these dazzling pyrotechnics were fueled by no stimulant stronger than tea.
Indeed, the album’s stand-out masterpiece, “A Day in the Life,” represented a John-Paul collaboration like none since early Beatlemania. The idea had been suggested to John by the death in a car crash of Tara Browne
, youthful heir to the Guinness fortune and a friend of both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. When he first played Martin an acoustic guitar sketch of the song, with its references to “a lucky man who made the grade and blew his mind out in a car,” Martin already felt the hairs prickle at the back of his neck. Unable to finish the lyric, John turned to Paul for something to fill its middle-eight. Paul provided a scrap of an unfinished song about getting up late and running for a bus, as cheery and everyday as the rest was bleak and apocalyptic. The bridge between the two parts was a long drawn-out cry of “I’d love to turn you on!” that they knew was asking for trouble. But there could be no pulling back now.
The song’s finale, John told Martin, had to be, “a sound building up from nothing to the end of the world.” That was the night Martin faced the forty-one-piece symphony orchestra and announced that what they were to perform had no written score. All he would tell them were the highest and lowest notes to play. In between, it was every man for himself.
The song, in its final form, was taped at Abbey Road amid a gala of pop aristocrats such as Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. The orchestra wore full evening dress and also carnival disguises distributed by the Beatles. One noted violinist played behind a clown’s red nose; another held his bow in a joke gorilla’s paw. Studio Two thronged with peacock clothes, Eastern robes, abundant refreshments, and exotically tinted smoke. The four Beatles sat behind music stands playing trumpets, with Brian leaning on a chair back among them. Their mustaches had aged them: It was Brian, in this last photograph with them, who suddenly looked like a boy.