The Beatles (112 page)

Diz, in Nat Weiss’s estimation, amounted to nothing more than “
a garden-variety hustler
.” Weiss first encountered the boy when the Beatles played Shea Stadium and claims he “knew exactly what he was” the moment he laid eyes on him. “Diz was a predator,” he says, and what he wanted was money. For a while, Brian bankrolled his phantom acting career, signing Diz to an artist’s contract with NEMS and authorizing a modest weekly stipend. But when that didn’t pan out, there were arguments and violence. Fistfights were a common enough occurrence. Valuable antique vases would be heaved against the wall or mirrors shattered during late-night assaults. “
I went over [to Brian’s flat]
one morning and found the glass-top coffee table smashed to smithereens and five dozen tulips strewn all over,” Ken Partridge recalls. “Diz had beaten Brian up and stolen his records, although Brian rather enjoyed it in a funny sort of way.”
In New York, Diz demanded three thousand dollars from Nat Weiss, ostensibly to buy a car, although the lawyer suspected that it was going for drugs. Weiss wrote him a check but warned: “
If you show up again
after I give it to you, I
promise
you I have friends who will deal with you.”

Threats meant nothing. Diz showed up—only in London next time, where he was received by the lovesick Brian as the “
sweetest, most special plaything
, the object of my dreams.” Almost immediately, however, they reverted to their old pattern, taking obscene handfuls of drugs and beating the shit out of each other. Peter Brown outlines an explosive incident in his book,
The Love You Make,
when Brian ordered Diz out of his house, at which point, he said, “Diz raced to the kitchen, grabbed the largest knife he could find, and held it to Brian’s jugular vein while extracting an additional sum of money from Brian’s wallet.”

By the end of May and the beginning of June, the Beatles were busy putting the finishing touches on their new album, which was perceived among them as defining “
a new British sound
,” if not a brilliant leap forward.

“Taxman” was finally behind them. The scathing satire, with the slurry, psychedelic edge, is the strongest of a record three George Harrison compositions that made the final cut, and an extraordinary contribution to the album’s aesthetic sensibility. Among the Beatles, true genius radiated from the Lennon and McCartney nexus, but “Taxman” is a huge achievement. It is wry, witty, caustic, and concentrated, with “
sharp, incisive jolts
of energy” that burst from the song’s offbeat “
studio-
verité
” introduction: wandering notes, a cough, a false count. What a delightful surprise!

Like many topical lyrics, “Taxman” sprang from the anger and disillusionment that followed a meeting with Bryce Hammer, the Beatles’ accountants, weeks before the session began. “
I had discovered I was paying
a huge amount of money to the taxman,” complained George. Paul recalled George’s “
righteous indignation
” in those business meetings. “Well, I don’t want to
pay
tax,” he’d fume. “It’s not
fair.
”

George’s response would open the album. Everything is taxable according to his account: the street, your seat, the heat, and your feet. No matter what you do or how much you have—
pay up and shut up.
And it doesn’t stop there. After you are dead, he advises listeners, be sure “to declare the pennies on your eyes.” “Taxman” is as sly and critical as anything Dylan was writing. Of course, John had helped; he said he “
threw in a few one-liners
to help the song along.” And Paul doubled on guitars, playing looping bass lines and delivering the song’s signature savage guitar solo.
But as far as first-rate songwriting went, with “Taxman” George had finally arrived.

Earlier that month “Eleanor Rigby” had been given
the full symphonic treatment
, courtesy of a lush arrangement by George Martin—and inspired by Bernard Herrmann’s score for
Fahrenheit 451—
that featured a double string quartet: four violins, two violas, and two cellos. This prompted Paul to lend a similar flourish to “For No One.”
The song is an elegant ballad
about a crumbling relationship built atop a descending bass line that he’d written in the bathroom of a Swiss chalet in March.

The Beatles let their hair down for one of the album’s final tracks. On “Yellow Submarine” they gave a blunt comic edge to a children’s song Paul had brought in by layering it with
gentle wisecracks
and sound effects from their boyhood iconography. Studio Two was in complete disarray as the four Beatles, along with Neil, Mal, and a full battalion of Abbey Road irregulars, ransacked the trap room, a small equipment closet just inside the door, where a trove of noisemaking effects was conveniently stashed. The vast wooden floor was suddenly littered with “
chains, ship’s bells, hand bells
from wartime, tap dancing mats, whistles, hooters, wind machines, thunderstorm machines”—every oddity they could lay their hands on. A cash register (the one eventually used to ring up Pink Floyd’s “Money”) was dragged out, along with several buckets, a set of bar glasses, even an old metal bath that was promptly filled with water.

“
They had a whole crowd
of people to do the effects,” recalled Geoff Emerick, who crisscrossed the studio like a jittery football player, attempting to properly mike the gadgets. Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, and Pattie Harrison were recruited to rattle and clink various hardware. The Beatles’ chauffeur, Alf Bicknell, swirled chains through the bath, engineers John Skinner and Terry Condon made whooshing noises. Ringo handled the vocals with his typical deadpan panache, and with George Martin at the controls, it was all very reminiscent of the goofy Spike Milligan sessions he’d produced in an earlier age. Everyone laughed and hooted as the tape captured the hijinks. At some point after hours of overdubs, Mal Evans strapped on a bass drum and, bashing away, led a conga line around the cluttered studio while the ensemble chanted the memorable refrain: “We all live in a yellow submarine….” It was party time in Studio Two.

Oddly enough, by the time the Beatles set out for a three-date concert tour of Germany on June 23, the LP still wasn’t titled. There were plenty of
plausible candidates, however. Originally, everyone got behind calling it
Abracadabra
until Neil discovered another album with the same name. Lounging around a fifth-floor suite in the Bayerischer Hof in Munich, following a rather rusty opening concert at the Circus-Krone-Bau, other titles were proposed—and discarded:
Pendulums; Fat Man and Bobby;
and
After Geography,
Ringo’s send-up of the Stones’ recent album,
Aftermath.
George’s tape of the album, which blared in the background, didn’t inspire much. “
Let’s just call it
Rock ’n Roll Hits
of ’66,
” Paul suggested, getting prickly. “That’ll solve it.” But, of course, that only drew groans.
John came up with
Beatles on Safari,
and Paul offered
Magic Circle
, which John tweaked and twisted into
Four Sides of the Circle.
Later,
Revolver
seemed to fall out of the sky.
Paul put it up for consideration
, and it was an immediate hit.
Revolver.

It seemed fitting that the Beatles pondered album titles in Germany. Two days later they were due in Hamburg, scene of their emergence—officially—as the Beatles. It had been only four years since their last show at the Star-Club, four years since they went from being the amphetamine-stoked resident band in a Reeperbahn rathole to millionaire Members of the British Empire and a worldwide phenomenon. Four years: in that brief span they’d collected nineteen number one hits and six gold albums; they’d made two box-office smashes, become virtuosos, and played in front of more people than any other act in the history of show business.

The late-night train ride from Essen to Hamburg on June 25 was especially poignant. In the suite of smoky coach cars, Tony Barrow played host to several dozen press and members of the entourage who partied noisily until dawn. But up ahead, in a private compartment, the mood was warm, sentimental. There were only eight people in the luxurious velvet-draped car,
the same one that had transported Queen Elizabeth
and the royal party through Germany months before, and the significance was lost on no one. Throughout the five-hour journey, the little company cut appreciative glances at one another: the four Beatles, Neil Aspinall, Mal Evans, Brian Epstein, and Peter Brown. “
We all knew each other
from way back in Liverpool,” recalls Brown, “and we didn’t have to prove anything to each other. It was relaxing, fun. There was a lot of comfort, all of us sitting there like that, together, in peace.”

Essen had been neither comfortable nor peaceful. “At Essen,
the brutality started to show
itself,”
Melody Maker’
s Alan Walsh reported. “At each concert over-enthusiastic fans were dragged outside and on several occasions were beaten-up by bouncers who apparently seemed to enjoy
it.” Boys,
thugs
—not the usual gaggle of teenage girls—behaved like disembodied spirits, screaming, singing along, jerking their bodies back and forth, and fighting among themselves. Hordes of brutal-looking, jackbooted police, with loaded Lugers strapped to their hips, moved in with “huge, muzzled dogs at their heels,” trying to move the crowd back. And it got uglier outside.

Nevertheless, for the first few shows the Beatles played, the country cast its inimitable spell, with the sets a core of old up-tempo rockers powered by the atomic beat. It was almost as if they could hear Bruno Koschmider demanding:
“Mach schau, mach schau!”
and responded, as they had years earlier, with exaggerated body language.

Every one of them was looking forward
to arriving in Hamburg. So much had changed since their stay there as penniless wannabes; they were “still just the boys,” as Paul insisted much later, but “
[they’d] got famous in the meantime
.” Bettina Derlin, the Star-Club’s buxom bartender, pushed through a cordon of police at Hamburg’s railway station to greet the Beatles’ train. What a blast from the past! John, who’d always fancied the girl, couldn’t get over her moxie. “
How about Bettina
being on the station [platform] at seven o’clock this morning!” he marveled when the touring party arrived at the Schloss Hotel in nearby Tremsbuttel later that day. But the procession of familiar faces didn’t stop there. “
[A] lot of old ghosts materialized
out of the woodwork,” George remembered (although there were several—the pimps and pill pushers—he admitted, who remained better off buried). The backstage area at Ernst-Merck-Halle, where the Beatles played two concerts, resembled an old school reunion. Bettina was there, this time with an old girlfriend of Paul’s in tow. Horst Fascher bared his lethal grin. Bert Kaempfert swept in with his family, and as the boys spotted him John broke into a creaky rendition of “Strangers in the Night.” It was old home night for the Beatles. But no “ghost” hit them as powerfully as when Astrid Kirchherr walked through the door.

Astrid—Stu’s girl, his
wife.
Their German muse. Astrid Kirchherr—soon to be Mrs. Gibson Kemp, having become engaged to Ringo’s young replacement in Rory Storm’s band. And, of course, she looked absolutely ravishing, just as they remembered her.

It was hard for the Beatles to tear themselves away from her. She was someone from their past whom they’d loved and who’d never tried to capitalize on or abuse their friendship—a rarity, it seemed, these days. Moreover, she’d brought John a sheaf of letters that he’d written to Stuart Sutcliffe in 1961 and 1962—“
the best present I’ve had
in years,” he told
Astrid, meaning it—and the effect of holding them again made his hands tremble. Occasions like these were too few and far between on their round-the-world odyssey as the Beatles. They helped remind these four boys every now and then that they were real people, with real needs.

Signs of strain showed at their press conference just before the Hamburg shows. In place of their trademark Scouse wit, the Beatles snapped and snarled at the German media, who fired a barrage of unusually inane questions at them. “
What kind of questions are these?
” John fumed after a reporter commented on Ringo’s complexion. “Come on, are there any members of the press here?” Later, while Paul attempted to respond to a question about his dreams during sleep, John interrupted: “What do you think we are? What do
you
dream of?
Fuckin’ hell!
” All these infantile questions—“Do you wear long pants in the wintertime?” or “Do you polish your MBE medal?”—he could bear no longer. If the press was going to act like idiots, he’d respond as he pleased. No one said he had to behave like a trained seal—and he wouldn’t. Not John Lennon.

No, he’d had it with the media and their “
soft questions
.” And he’d had it with Brian’s restrictions about saying what was on his mind. They might have been okay for one of Larry Parnes’s teenage attractions, they may have once even served a purpose for the struggling young Beatles, but John was twenty-five years old and had a mind of his own. If Paul wanted to play by the rules, that was his prerogative. John had decided that he wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut.