John Lennon: The Life (53 page)

The four that day unveiled a striking new stage look: pale fawn jackets with epaulets and brass buttons fastening to the neck like British Army tunics from the Boer War period. Each in addition sported the official badge of a Wells Fargo agent, earned by their brief journey in the company’s security truck. And, as the film of the performance shows, they had their best time onstage together since Hamburg. “It was the high point of a vintage year,” remembers NEMS’s chief press officer, Tony Barrow, who accompanied the tour. “Real wealth had started to come through to them, their music was advancing by leaps and bounds, they were enjoying themselves beyond belief. They’d come up playing in places like the Liverpool Cavern where the audience was so close, you could reach out and take a half-smoked ciggie from a girl in the front row. At Shea Stadium, even though the front row looked miles away, they managed to create that same feeling of intimacy.”

On this occasion John made some of the linking announcements, Boer War tunic gaping open at the neck, his hair sweat-glued to his
forehead, his words progressively less coherent: “We’d like to do a slow song now…It’s also off
Beatles Six
[a U.S. album] or something…I don’t know what it’s off…I haven’t got it….” Toward the end of the eleven-song set, he exchanged his guitar for the Vox Continental organ he had used on “I’m Down,” the burlesque-depressed B-side to “Help!” Feeling “naked” without the Rickenbacker, he launched into a wild parody of Jerry Lee Lewis, dragging one finger cacophonously up and down the keys, playing with his elbow, even his foot. “John cracked up on that show,” Ringo would remember. “[He] just went mad. Not mentally ill…just got crazy.”

There was something else waiting at the top of the mountain. Twelve days after Shea Stadium—ten years after first hearing him and coming properly alive as a result—John met Elvis.

It was, of course, not quite the same Elvis whom that transfigured fourteen-year-old had force-fed his protesting aunt “for breakfast, dinner and tea” in 1956. Now thirty years old, Presley had abandoned not only rock ’n’ roll but live performances of any kind, instead turning out a series of increasingly bland and forgettable Hollywood movies, otherwise leading a sequestered existence at his Graceland mansion with the troupe of hangers-on and ex–service buddies known as the Memphis Mafia. Though he still had occasional chart hits, they were middle-of-the-road pop, devoid of his old sneering sexual magic. In America, he was as embarrassing a symbol of a craze-gone-by as bobby socks or the hula hoop; in Britain, even his most loyal fans had given up hope that he’d ever return to form.

Nor was it a given that the former King would wish to meet the young British invaders who had stolen his crown. The good luck telegram that so thrilled the Beatles before their second
Ed Sullivan Show
had, in fact, been sent as a PR gesture by Presley’s wily manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Initially, Presley had been baffled by their music and repulsed by their hair and clothes, complaining with old-fashioned Southern puritanism that they looked like “a bunch of faggots.”

There had been talk of a summit meeting during the Beatles’ main 1964 American tour, but schedules on both sides had proved too hectic; in the end, only Paul had spoken briefly to Presley by tele
phone from Atlantic City. This year, when the Beatles reached Los Angeles, the King also happened to be in town, fresh from filming on location in Hawaii. Fortuitously, too, Brian had scheduled some free time before the shows at Balboa Stadium in San Diego and the Hollywood Bowl. After intense negotiations with Colonel Parker, brokered by the
New Musical Express
journalist Chris Hutchins, the meeting was set for the evening of August 27.

Despite the Beatles’ ascendancy, there was no question as to who was the monarch and who the supplicants: they went to Elvis, driving from their rented mansion in Benedict Canyon to his in Perugia Way, Beverly Hills, accompanied by Brian, Tony Barrow, and roadies Neil and Mal. Secrecy was meant to be absolute, but Parker had tipped off a local radio station in advance. Consequently, a flotilla of press cars followed in hot pursuit, and dozens of screaming non-Presley fans were waiting outside the King’s gate. Racked with pre-audience nerves, the four had taken advantage of their thirty-minute journey to “have a laugh,” and so tumbled out of their limo giggling and uncoordinated, as though in some extra sequence from
Help!

Presley received them seated on a sofa, watching television with the sound turned down—exactly as John always did—and thumbing softly at a bass guitar plugged into a live amp. Such was the Beatles’ emotion that they registered only odd details of this modern Versailles: the Sun King’s brilliant red shirt; a jukebox playing “Mohair Sam” by Charlie Rich; the fact that Elvis did not have to rise nor even lean forward to adjust his TV set, but possessed a revolutionary handheld device that enabled him to do so without stirring on his throne.

John later recalled the weirdness of meeting someone whose face was almost as familiar to him as his own, but who was nonetheless a stranger, a million miles away even when shaking hands. “At first we couldn’t make him out. I asked him if he was preparing any ideas for his next film and he drawled: ‘Ah sure am. Ah play a country boy with a guitar who meets a few gals along the way, and ah sing a few songs.’ We all looked at one another. Finally Presley and Colonel Parker laughed and explained the only time they departed from that formula—for
Wild in the Country
—they lost money. He was just
Elvis, you know?…He seemed normal to us, and we were asking about his making movies and not doing any personal appearances or TV…. He was great: just as I expected him.”

Things warmed up still more when guitars were produced for John and Paul, and they reprised some of the Elvis songs they once used to smuggle into the Cavern’s all-skiffle program, while the true, honest-to-God, flesh-and-blood, in-this-room Elvis smiled indulgently and thumbed his bass, and the body servants of both factions hovered bonhomiously near. Later came games of pool and roulette, and a fleeting sight of Priscilla Beaulieu, the doll-like teenage beauty in training to become Presley’s wife. As the visitors left, seen off personally by their host, John turned and shouted “Long live the King!”

Subsequently, plans were discussed for Elvis to return the compliment and visit the Beatles at their Benedict Canyon hideaway. It never happened, even though an advance guard of Memphis Mafiosi came to check out the house. While they were doing so, John asked one of them, Jerry Schilling, to convey a further message of appreciation: “Tell [Elvis] if it hadn’t been for him, I would have been nothing.”

After the twin peaks of Shea Stadium and meeting Elvis, the remaining tour dates—each a display of industrial-strength Beatlemania in its own right—inevitably seemed rather a letdown. Resilient though the Beatles were (and no young men could possibly have led such a life without enjoying A1 health), all four, in their different ways, were starting to feel the strain. John in particular, at a moment that should have seen his self-esteem at its zenith, was overcome by the same inexplicable depression and loneliness that had permeated
Help!
Five thousand miles from Kenwood, under the balmy California sun, he suddenly began to reflect on his shortcomings as a family man and especially as a father; how, in the whirlwind of the previous three years, he had missed out on almost all Julian’s steps from baby to little boy. These feelings were poured out in a surprisingly emotional, contrite letter to Cynthia, saying how much he missed Julian and regretted “those stupid bastard times when I keep reading bloody newspapers and other shit while he’s in the room with me…. I really want him to know me and love me, and miss me like I seem to be missing both of you so much….”

So from the King to the Queen: on October 29, the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace to receive their MBEs at the sovereign’s hands, causing larger crowds outside her London home than any since her coronation day. Normally, the sequel to each Royal investiture is the recipients’ emergence into the palace yard, showing off their decorations with their proud families. As if to underline the Beatles’ status as pet aliens—nowhere more so than here—they arrived without any family members in support. Even Cynthia and Julian could not publicly share John’s triumph but had to be content with watching TV news reports at home in Weybridge.

Despite his skepticism, John found himself impressed by “Buck House’s” glittering grandeur and swept along by the pomp and protocol of the investiture ceremony. The Royal moment, when it came, had much the same unreal quality as beholding Elvis. “[The Queen] said something like ‘ooh ah blah blah’ we didn’t quite understand. She’s much nicer than she is in the photos…I must have looked shattered. She said to me, ‘Have you been working hard lately?’ I couldn’t think what we’d been doing, so I said, ‘No, we’ve been having a holiday.’ We’d been recording, but I couldn’t remember that.” After the ceremony, the Beatles signed autographs for their fellow awardees, then posed for the press with their decorations: four modest little medals in presentation boxes. John afterward gave his to Aunt Mimi, pinning it on her in a parody of the palace ceremony because, he said, she deserved it far more than he did.

Years later, he would say that, to calm their preinvestiture jitters and express a little covert defiance of those officious Royal stewards and chamberlains, the four managed to escape to a palace washroom for a few minutes and there sneak a few puffs of marijuana. But according to Paul McCartney, they had a laugh only in the literal sense. “I remember that smoking was not allowed generally and we went sneaking off to the bog, as we called it, for a ciggie and giggled a lot at the sheer cheek of us smoking a ciggie in Buckingham Palace. I don’t think it was a joint.”

T
o begin with, making records was something the Beatles did when they could find time. Their sessions at Abbey Road Studios with George Martin had to be slotted into the break-neck schedule of touring, filmmaking, television, and radio, and, like everything else, were arranged over their heads. “If it was time for a new single or album, I’d have to get in touch with Brian,” Martin remembers. “He’d look through his diary and say ‘I can give you May 19th and perhaps the evening of the 20th.’ I had to grab them whenever I could.”

Their producer in these early days was an all-powerful boss figure, combining the authority of the label head and the gravitas of a classically trained musician. From the raw material submitted to him, Martin chose the songs he considered worthwhile; he altered tempos, switched verses or choruses around, prescribed the ratio of
vocal to instrumental. In short, he performed all the functions of a good editor, whose discreet structural amendments and corrections in grammar or punctuation help brilliant copy speak for itself the more eloquently.

The first Lennon-McCartney compositions to be recorded were submitted as combined efforts, invariably written in spare moments in hotels or dressing rooms and sung and played on acoustic guitars by both authors together while Martin sat on a bass-player’s stool, listening with elegant impassivity. By 1965, John and Paul had taken to working mainly apart, usually developing most of each new lyric and melody before turning to each other for criticism and advice. Their individual composing techniques, Martin remembers, were utterly different.

“Paul would think of a tune and then think ‘What words can I put to it?’ John tended to develop his melodies as the thing went along. Generally he built up a song on a structure of chords which he would ramble and find on his guitar until he had an interesting sequence. After that, the words were more important than anything else. They used to come out sometimes as a monotone, just one note punctuated by the rhythm of the words. He never set out to write a melody and put lyrics to it. He always thought of the structure, the harmonic content and the lyrics first, and the melody would then come out of that.

“However good the song was, John never seemed that confident about it. In all the time we worked together, I never heard him hype his own work in any way. After he’d played over something to me, his first question was always ‘What do you think?’ The second was ‘What shall we do with it?’ After a time, I realised that he was actually embarrassed by his own voice. Whenever we did a vocal, he always insisted on wearing cans [headphones] and told me to put lots of echo through them, so that he couldn’t hear what he really sounded like. When we got into slap-echo, like on Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” he loved that and his voice always went through the cans like that, though not onto the record. It was like an ointment for him. It smoothed out all the things in his voice that he didn’t like.

“But then, you see, John didn’t like much. It wasn’t just his voice;
everything in his mind was much better than reality, always. And he was always somewhat disappointed with the results of what we did. In the beginning, I was in charge and no criticisms were voiced. But as he grew more powerful and more aware of what was going on, he grew more critical of everything. He was always searching for something he couldn’t quite grasp. His wonderful dreamland in there [inside his head] never really reached reality.”

In many ways, Martin remembers, John was more easygoing than the perfectionist, workaholic Paul. “If we were doing a song of Paul’s, he’d get hold of his guitar and tell George what he wanted him to play in the middle; he’d get on the drums and show Ringo what he wanted. And that used to irk the piss out of them sometimes, obviously. When John recorded a song, he let other people do what they were going to do: Paul would work out a bass line, maybe add a little bit here and there, and George would do his guitar solo, and Ringo would take care of the beat. John would be entirely focused on his part of things, and leave the others to get on with theirs. As long as the end result was up to standard, he’d be happy.

“Paul was his sounding-board, of course, and George had a huge amount of input, which, to my eternal regret, I didn’t sufficiently recognise at the time, but Ringo’s opinion was always important to John, just because he knew that with him there’d never be any bullshit. He’d often turn to Ringo and ask what he thought and if Ringo said, ‘That’s crap, John,’ he’d do something else.”

He took his role as rhythm guitarist with extreme seriousness, learning new chords as diligently as he ever had, sometimes even proudly announcing, “I’m playing a G minor seventh here, Paul!” But all other musical disciplines bored him. “George would work away like a Turkish carpet-maker at whatever it was, whether mending a car or constructing a song,” Martin says. “John couldn’t be bothered even to tune his guitar. He was a completely impractical man. And if there was someone around to do it for him, why not? That was his attitude.

“Remember that my focus was on the Beatles, not just on John, though inevitably how he was feeling dictated the general mood. He could get irritated by lots of things. Paul used to irritate him…and
George often did as well. But in the studio generally we all got on like a house on fire. Because he and Paul were turning out such wonderful material. No matter what kind of pressure they were under as live performers, they always came up with a fresh idea; they were never content to use a cliché, but always gave me something slightly different. Each song was a jewel on its own, and I used to bless them for that.”

Paul McCartney remembers how, in those days, even the fiercest dispute with his collaborator seldom lasted long. “One of my great memories of John is from when we were having some argument. I was disagreeing and we were calling each other names. We let it settle for a second, and then he lowered his glasses and he said, ‘It’s only me…’ and then he put his glasses back on again. To me, that was John. Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade, the armour which I loved as well, like anyone else. It was a beautiful suit of armour. But it was wonderful when he let the visor down and you’d just see the John Lennon that he was frightened to reveal to the world.”

In a life otherwise plagued by intruders and distractions, recording sessions became the Beatles’ one precious oasis of privacy. As EMI’s greatest-ever moneymakers, they enjoyed privileged treatment at Abbey Road that the greatest names of the past, Caruso or Sinatra, had not. Studios One and Two, each large enough to house a symphony orchestra, were set aside for Martin and his sacred quartet in open-ended sessions that were as much about exploration and rehearsal as actual recording, and habitually continued far into the night. Gone were the technicians’ white coats and the forbidding force field around the control room; gone even was the formality of rolling tape for a take. Such were the gems to be picked up at every moment that tape rolled all the time.

Wives and girlfriends, it went without saying, were totally excluded. Even Brian himself looked in only occasionally and was careful to make his visits as brief and businesslike as possible. This followed an unhappy incident when he had appeared in the control room unexpectedly late one night while the Beatles were hard at work on the cable-strewn floor below. Unusually for the public Brian,
he was slightly drunk and, still more unusually, accompanied by one of his gay friends.

This gratuitous reminder of the lifestyle he usually concealed from his boys would have been faux pas enough, but alcohol and a desire to impress his companion led to an even worse one. At the end of the take, he switched on the intercom and slurrily announced that something or other hadn’t sounded “quite right.” There was a horrible pause, then John’s voice came back with a line he had used before but which never failed to slice off its victim’s legs at the knees: “You look after your percentages, Brian. We’ll take care of the music.”

October and November of 1965 found the Beatles back at Abbey Road for the second UK album of their yearly quota, as usual timed to catch the Christmas market. However, the frenetic summer of touring, meeting Elvis, and joining the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire had left John and Paul almost no time to replenish the stock of songs used up by
Help!
Nor was it possible any longer to use rock and soul cover versions as a makeweight. They would have to write the whole album to order, and in double-quick time to make the December release date.

The competition out there had never looked more formidable. In Britain, half a dozen bands originally formed as ersatz Beatles with bangs and round-collared suits had proved themselves robust individualists and brought glory to other cities and suburbs once thought unmentionable—the Hollies, from Manchester; the Animals, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne; the Who, from Shepherds Bush in the west of London; the Kinks, from Muswell Hill in the north. Nor was exposure any longer as easy and assured as simply turning up at good old “Auntie” BBC. In mid-1964, a bold young entrepreneur had realized he could legally break the corporation’s government-enforced broadcasting monopoly by transmitting programs from a ship moored outside British territorial waters. There had since been a proliferation of such pirate radio stations, transmitting continuous pop record shows in Americanized formats with commercials, station IDs, and jingles. Besides their “old mate” Brian Matthew at the Beeb, a new Beatles track must tickle the fancies of seasick deejays
unsteadily at anchor between the Thames Estuary and the Firth of Clyde.

At home, the main threat was posed by the five former R&B purists who ironically owed their first major chart success to John and Paul. Under the guidance of Brian Epstein’s former PR man Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones had achieved monster fame with a delinquent image as carefully crafted and as illusory as the Beatles’ one of blandness and cuddliness. Fired by Lennon and McCartney’s example, the Stones’ Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were now writing songs together and, in their darker, sourer way, showing an almost equally sure golden touch. In July 1965, they outraged the singles charts with “Satisfaction,” a title fraught with masturbatory innuendo though, in fact, it was a hymn of hate against the penalties of pop stardom, the ineffable boredom of adulation and luxury, that John endorsed with all his heart. But, gallingly, he was not the first to say it.

The Beatles’ American triumph brought still greater pressures and insecurities in its wake. Thanks to them, the land that had once been so fiercely resistant to British pop now wanted nothing else, provided it came in squads of four or five, with fringed faces, skimpy suits, and oddball limey accents. Musical Anglomania had reached such a height that any new American band took care to look and sound like as much like a British one as possible, filtering their own indigenous music through the sensibilities of Liverpudlians, Londoners, Mancunians, or Tynesiders. Some of these, in turn, bounced Beatle-influenced American music back to Britain, with added dividends of skill and invention that could make the most feted of their transatlantic exemplars feel like beginners again. The two John considered the most talented—and, therefore, worrying—both happened to have names also beginning with a B. The first were the Beatly misspelled Byrds, whose soaring, sighing voices and twangly electric twelve-string guitars owed as much to traditional American folk as to mid-Atlantic Merseybeat. The second were the Beach Boys, former exponents of the simplistic “surf” sound, who took Beatlish harmonies into new realms of echo and multitracking, as different from John, Paul, and George’s homely fusions as a cathedral from a beach hut.

But the greatest challenger, so far as John was concerned, took some time to show his full hand. In May 1965, Bob Dylan had visited London to appear at the Royal Albert Hall. He was still singing protest songs alone with acoustic guitar and suspended mouth organ, though his stylish Mod clothes and ever-enlarging curly pompadour hinted that the days of kinship with ragged-assed folk heroes were numbered.

Still warmly grateful for their initiation into pot, the Beatles hastened to Dylan’s suite at the Savoy Hotel, unusually taking their womenfolk along to share the reunion. However, the atmosphere proved markedly less cordial than at the Delmonico in New York the previous summer. John felt that on their home territory, it would have been more mannerly for Dylan to call on them; he in turn seemed cold and, in the new word, uptight, though this may not have been all his visitors’ fault. Since their previous encounter, he had graduated from marijuana to sniffing heroin, and during his London debut was to spend three days in a hospital, reportedly suffering from “a cold.”

To lighten the tension, Dylan summoned his friend the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who also happened to be staying at the Savoy. John had read Ginsberg’s verse epic
Howl
, intrigued by the echo of his own “Daily Howl” at Quarry Bank school. But the sight of the thirty-eight-year-old poet in person, bald, black-bearded, overtly gay, and strenuously clownish, proved rather disconcerting. When Ginsberg perched on the sofa arm beside him, John asked sarcastically why he didn’t get a bit closer. At this, Ginsberg flopped into his lap, gazed up at him, and asked if he’d ever read William Blake. “Never heard of him,” replied John; such a willful untruth that even his usually diffident spouse could not let it pass. “Oh John, stop lying,” Cynthia chided. “Of course you have.”

Ginsberg stayed on in London after the Dylan concert and, a couple of weeks later, invited John and George, with Cyn and Pattie, to his thirty-ninth-birthday party at a mutual friend’s flat in Fitzrovia. They arrived to find their host naked, with a pair of underpants decorating his bald head and a hotel “Do Not Disturb” sign dangling from his penis. Nervous of being photographed in such company, the two
Beatles quickly made an excuse and left. Even Hamburg-hardened John seemed shocked. “You don’t do that in front of birds,” he was heard to complain.