Yeah yeah yeah, p.15
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, page 15
With “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which that bar of music later became, John took his songwriting to the next level. The song was about a field in Woolton, the scene of his favorite childhood adventures, where he spent blissful mornings playing in Calderstones Park with his friends. Strawberry Field (John added the s) wasn’t a patch of land but the name of an old Victorian house, converted for Salvation Army orphans, near the entrance to the park. “There was something about the place that always fascinated John,” Aunt Mimi recalled. “He could see it from his window, and he loved going to the garden party they had each year.” All those childhood memories came flooding back as John amused himself in Spain, working on a song that was among the most famous he ever wrote.
Paul returning from a holiday in France. Aboard his return flight he hit upon the concept for their new album: salt and pepper—Sergeant Pepper. © MIRRORPIX
Paul was also abroad, in France, where he took the sightseer’s route from Paris through the Loire Valley. His intention was to “travel incognito, disguised so that he would not be recognized,” or at least appear as inconspicuous as any young man traveling across France in a $150,000 Aston Martin DB5 sports car. Slicking his hair back with Vaseline and gluing a fake beard to his chin, Paul managed to walk freely around the quaint villages, browsing in little shops and dining outside at neighborhood cafés—something the Beatles never could have done.
But on the airplane home after a two-week safari in Kenya, Paul McCartney changed back into SuperBeatle. He began formulating an idea for a new Beatles album. He figured that if he could disguise himself and travel about unnoticed, then why not all the Beatles? They hated being the Fab Four, a nickname that had become synonymous with Beatle-mania. “I thought, ‘Let’s not be ourselves,’” Paul said. Let’s do something that could “put some distance between the Beatles and the public,” perhaps take on the personality of another, made-up band.
Paul and Mal Evans, one of the Beatles’ roadies, kicked around the idea during the inflight meal. At first, they played with names for a band, mimicking the groups that were just coming into vogue like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Lothar and the Hand People. Evans, distracted, picked up the little paper packets marked S and P, asking Paul what the initials stood for. “Salt and pepper,” he responded. “Sergeant Pepper.”
By the time the plane touched down in London, the entire concept was in place.
• • • • •
It was difficult at first for the other Beatles to understand Paul’s idea: an album made by the Beatles but not the Beatles. Would it be Beatles music? they wondered. “We would be Sgt. Pepper’s band, and for the whole album we’d pretend to be someone else,” Paul explained.
George wasn’t sure. He thought it sounded too much like a gimmick. Part of the problem was that George’s tastes were changing. He had become fascinated with Eastern culture, spirituality, and Indian music. “The first time I heard Indian music,” George recalled, “I felt as though I knew it. It was like every music I had ever heard, but twenty times better than everything all put together. It was just so strong, so overwhelmingly positive, it buzzed me right out of my brain.” It changed him in other ways, too. Meditation and yoga became a part of his daily routine. He transformed his home, filling it with brightly colored Indian artifacts and repositioning the furniture for maximum peacefulness. Long, flowing robes replaced his customary T-shirts and jeans. So an idea like Paul’s—that they become another band called Sgt. Pepper’s—sounded silly to George, who said, “I wasn’t really that into it.”
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
John with son Julian, age five. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
One of the Beatles’ best songs was inspired by a “blurry and watery” painting John’s son Julian brought home from nursery school. “The top was all dark blue sky with some very rough-looking stars, [and] green grass along the bottom,” Julian recalled years later. Near the corner, he’d drawn a stick-fi gure girl—presumably his classmate Lucy O’Donnell, identifi ed by her long blond hair. “I showed it to Dad, and he said, ‘What’s that, then?’” Julian blurted out the fi rst thing that came into his mind: “That’s Lucy in the sky, you know, with diamonds.”
John, too, was a bit skeptical, but he agreed to go along with it. Only Ringo was completely behind the idea, thinking, “Anything could happen, and that was an exciting process.”
Whatever their reasoning, one thing was certain: pop music was changing in a radical new manner, and the Beatles were determined to lead the way. Rock ’n roll, which was once only about cars, girls, and school, had become music for “serious” fans, and the level of artistry that fans expected from the records they bought got ever higher. Groups like the Doors and the psychedelic boogie bands put listeners on notice that rock music was growing up. Within the next few years, they would be joined by virtually all the 1960s rock greats: Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Traffic, Jethro Tull, Sly and the Family Stone, the Jefferson Airplane, Elton John, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Allman Brothers, Joni Mitchell, and Led Zeppelin, as well as the great soul groups—all of them riding the coattails of the Mersey sound created by the Beatles.
Throughout the first four months of 1967, the Beatles remained in Abbey Road, working steadily, fussily, on the new album. Never had they enjoyed such a luxury of time to record. In the past, there had always been a last-minute crunch to write enough songs and get them recorded before the next tour began. But now, at last, they had time, precious time. No deadlines, no tours, no movies, no nothing.
George Harrison with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, 1967. © MIRRORPIX
George Martin always considered the studio to be the Beatles’ “playground,” but a laboratory was more like it. No song was safe. Ideas that once might have been polished off in a day or two were turned inside out and upside down to see what would happen. At home following a long night’s work, John, Paul, or George might listen to a tape of the day’s session, pick up a guitar, and bang out an idea that sent everyone back to the drawing board. Immediately, this experimentation began to pay off.
By the middle of January, they began work on the epic “A Day in the Life.” This was no ordinary song. Even in the early run-through, it showed unmistakable brilliance. The gorgeous melody, as stark as it is soulful, stands as one of the Beatles’ finest accomplishments. But there were twenty-four bars of music in the middle that had been left blank. Something would materialize, they figured—it always did. Finally, it dawned on Paul: a big orchestra buildup. “It was a crazy song, anyway,” he said. Explaining it to John, he said, “We’ll tell the orchestra to start on whatever the lowest note on their instrument is, and to arrive at the highest note on their instrument. But to do it in their own time.” The effect, he said, “would be something really startling.”
The Beatles promote their new album, Sergeant Pepper, 1967. © MIRRORPIX
When Paul told George Martin to hire a symphony orchestra, the producer told him to forget it. He liked Paul’s idea, “but ninety musicians”—the standard symphony—“would be too expensive.” After thinking it over, they settled on half an orchestra—forty-one musicians from the prestigious London Philharmonic—to play twenty-four bars of music. It was a ridiculous expense, but it was for the Beatles, after all.
On February 10, the orchestra, all in tuxedos, assembled in Abbey Road Studio One, a hall as big as an airplane hangar. The Beatles distributed gag accessories to the horrified musicians: the violinists got red clown noses, the conductor was fitted with a fake gorilla’s paw, balloons were attached to the bows of the stringed instruments, the brass and woodwind sections wore funny hats and plastic glasses with fake noses. John giddily handed out fake cigars. “People were running around with sparklers and blowing bubbles through little clay pipes,” George Martin recalled. To many of the musicians, it was an undignified way to behave, and they were offended, but they all soon got into the spirit.
Once the musicians got their instructions, they played the crazy piece of music, with each instrument swirling higher and higher up the scale, creating a monster symphonic effect. But the high note that was reached at the end of the sequence just dangled there. It needed an end. After much discussion, they settled on playing “a gigantic piano chord” that would echo for just over a minute. The staff rolled three grand pianos into the studio, and on the count of four, ten hands clamped down on a single chord as hard as humanly possible, letting it reverberate through the hall. It was a magnificent, stirring effect, as final as it was dramatic, that served to punctuate one of the Beatles’ outstanding studio performances.
In a little over three weeks, the Beatles laid down the basic tracks for “Fixing a Hole,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” “Good Morning, Good Morning,” “Lovely Rita,” “Getting Better,” and “She’s Leaving Home.” The recording staff at Abbey Road had never experienced anything like it. The engineers were kept on their toes, trying to create the extraordinary effects that caromed around in the Beatles’ heads. How about speeding up the tape to play havoc with the vocals? they wondered. (They accomplished just that on “When I’m Sixty-four.”) Or slowing it down? (On “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” the tape was delayed.) Nothing was sacred.
The Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Cover
Artist Peter Blake told the Beatles they could have anyone they want appear in a group shot on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Anyone? The idea tantalized the Beatles, who loved the prankish quality of it. “Anyone” meant friends or heroes or family or, well, any face that tickled their fancy. Let the fans go crazy trying to fi gure out who was in the crowd and why. What a hoot it would be, they decided.
The Beatles made lists of the people they’d like to include. George’s list was the strangest: it featured eight Indian holy men, including the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Paul went mostly for artsy choices, like the writers William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley, and Alfred Jarry, dancer Fred Astaire, comedian Groucho Marx, the artist Magritte, and a locally famous footballer named Dixie Dean. John, true to character, wanted to stir up trouble and chose Hitler, then Gandhi (neither of whom made it onto the fi nal cover), philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and writers Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, and Lewis Carroll. And, for good measure, Jesus, who seemed to John like a “naughty” choice. When Blake collected the names, only Ringo hesitated. “Whatever the others have is fi ne by me,” he replied. “I won’t put anyone in.”
The Beatles at Brian Epstein’s home to launch the Sgt. Pepper album, May 1967. © MIRRORPIX
One of the most enterprising tracks was “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” John was explicit about the atmosphere: he wanted a “fairground sound,” something that jogged his memory of wandering through village fairs where one could “smell the sawdust” and hear the crowd amid the background racket of the arcade. George Martin put out a call for a steam organ. The cost of renting and programming one was prohibitive, he discovered, even for his golden boys. Instead, they created their own backing track—“a pumping kind of sound,” Martin called it—with other kinds of organs and a harmonica overdub. Over a six-hour marathon, Paul played various keyboards, John contributed the oompahpahs on an organ, and Martin pumped the harmonium nonstop until he literally gave out, collapsing on the floor from exhaustion. Almost magically, a fairground sound materialized. “John was thrilled to bits with it,” Martin recalled.
By the third week in April, the Beatles had reached the end of their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band odyssey. They had logged slightly more than five months in the studio, unheard of, considering that when they began making records everything had to be done in one day. Now the Beatles batted around ideas for an album cover that would complement the music. The situation, they agreed, called for something fresh, daring, and grand: unusual art, psychedelic design, an entertaining sleeve, and extra goodies. One of the project coordinators suggested printing the lyrics to the songs inside the album cover, over pictures of the Beatles. Lyrics! It had never been done. As routine as this practice seems now, the idea was revolutionary. “We wanted the sleeve to be really interesting,” Paul insisted. “Everyone agreed.”
Paul and Linda Eastman locked eyes early at the press listening for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, at Brian Epstein’s flat in May 1967. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
One thing was certain: there wouldn’t be a standard photograph of the four Beatles on the cover. Sgt. Pepper demanded a bold new look. Paul had made sketches of the Beatles dressed in Salvation Army– type band uniforms, standing in front of framed photographs of their heroes. The other Beatles approved of his concept. A professional designer instructed each of the Beatles to make a list of people whose photographs they’d like to feature on the cover. The names they proposed included artists, actors, writers, rock ’n rollers, philosophers, and an athlete. At the last minute, John, to his credit, insisted they include Stuart Sutcliffe. Before they were finished, the Beatles created a souvenir cutout kit, with a Sgt. Pepper’s bass drum, mustaches, and badges that could be slipped into the album. The whole thing came together in less than two weeks’ time.
For all their confidence, the Beatles worried about public and critical reaction as the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band drew near. “I was downright scared,” George Martin admitted, “but not half as worried as the Beatles.”
May 19, 1967, was launch day. It was time to put some of their worries to the test. To celebrate the occasion, a small press party was held at Brian Epstein’s town house. The invitation list was handpicked: a dozen top-tier journalists, a dozen photographers, half as many influential deejays, and of course the Beatles. Champagne flowed freely as everyone awaited the Beatles’ grand entrance. They were still upstairs in a photo session, having fun with the photographers, who were all familiar faces. Except one, that is.
Linda Eastman was an American photographer. She was twenty-five, a little older than Paul, with a portfolio jammed with rock stars in various candid poses. Not many women had broken into this profession, but Linda had several things going for her. Tall and willowy, with a natural milk-and-honey complexion, she was the kind of strikingly pretty girl who could nonetheless put guys at ease with a quick grin and an easy, outgoing manner.
Paul had met Linda four days before the party, at an exclusive London disco. He was instantly smitten with her and had spent the entire night talking to her about art. Now, at the album launch, he couldn’t help but admire her beauty and spunk. Linda had come dressed to kill, in an expensive double-breasted striped barbershop jacket over a sheer black sweater, with a miniskirt that flattered her gorgeous legs. A photograph taken of Paul and Linda during this encounter reveals their powerful attraction. Anyone standing nearby couldn’t help but notice that something was happening between them. He vowed to see her later and asked for her number. Of course, there was an obstacle: he was still dating Jane Asher. But they were drifting apart, due to Jane’s busy career and Paul’s wandering eye. And for the moment, he and the other Beatles were too nervous about the new album to pay much attention to girls.
Their worries were for nothing. The album’s release on June 1, 1967, caused an extraordinary sensation. The critics loved it, calling it “remarkable” and “pure poetry.” One wrote, “Over the last four years, Lennon and McCartney have developed into the greatest songwriting team of this century.” Time magazine gushed that the album “represented a historic departure in the progress of music—any music.” One thing was certain: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a runaway bestseller, topping the pace of all previous Beatles albums with a staggering 2.5 million copies sold in the first three months of its release.
A whole new type of Beatlemania broke out, not powered by screams and swoons as before, but rather by a kind of reverence in which every note the band played and word they sang was analyzed and dissected for greater meaning. Critics devoted columns and lectures to the Beatles’ cultural significance. Some people called them “messengers from beyond rock ’n roll.” And one famous philosopher, Timothy Leary, called them “evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with mysterious powers to create a new human species.”
But even in the midst of this very productive period, there were notes of discontent. Professionally, the Beatles felt the strain of a tight bond now entering its tenth year. They had been inseparable for the most part, shaping one another’s attitudes toward life and dreams about the future. As boys, they had clung to one another—to the Beatles—for stability and even survival, but as men, they were looking beyond the band for their individual needs.
George found the “assembly-line process” of recording “a bit tiring and a bit boring.” To him, the whole Sgt. Pepper’s business had been a turnoff. “A lot of time it ended up with just Paul playing the piano and Ringo keeping the tempo, and we weren’t allowed to play as a band so much,” he complained, not unjustly. Certainly there was less for George to do on this album. Guitar parts seemed to have taken a backseat to technical fireworks. And most of the songs he proposed doing had been rejected by John and Paul.
Whatever restlessness George felt in the studio was compounded by John’s self-loathing. The effects of LSD, along with a tired marriage, sunk John further and further into an emotional shell. “I was in a real big depression in Pepper,” John recalled. “I was going through murder.”
In picture after picture taken throughout the months of recording Sgt. Pepper’s, John looks miserable, achingly sad, his eyes as flat and lifeless as those of a poached fish. Food no longer interested him, probably a condition caused by the drugs. “It was becoming almost impossible to communicate with him,” recalled Cynthia, John’s wife. John was often spaced out and behaved much like a child.
