The Beatles (118 page)

“Strawberry Fields Forever” allowed John to wrestle with a confessional song as confused and dramatic as his emotions. “[It] was
psychoanalysis set to music
,” he reasoned later, after having spent years on the therapist’s couch. For years he had been sugarcoating his imagery, reluctant, except in a few notable cases, to reveal himself personally in a song. It was easy, with Paul as his sidekick, to keep the lyrics unspecific and upbeat.
But with
Rubber Soul
and
Revolver,
John had turned a corner on his craft. He finally sensed the true scope of his potential—a gift he’d suspected all along—and realized that to make the leap to great songwriting, he would have to open up his heart.

“Strawberry Fields Forever” lifted everything onto the next level. For inspiration, John took himself back to Woolton, the scene of his favorite childhood escapades, where he spent blissful summer mornings in the company of Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan, and Pete Shotton playing in Calderstones Park. Strawberry Field wasn’t a patch of land but, as John pointed out, the name of “
an old Victorian house
converted for Salvation Army orphans,” near the entrance to the park. “
It [provided] an escape
for John,” Paul remembered, musing on his own memories of the place. “There was a wall you could bunk over and it had a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in.” Aunt Mimi told Albert Goldman: “
There was something about the place
that always fascinated John. He could see it from his window, and he loved going to the garden party they had each year. He used to hear the Salvation Army band, and he would pull me along, saying, ‘Hurry up, Mimi—we’re going to be late.’ ”

All these memories came flooding back as John amused himself in Spain, sifting through the scrapbook of his less-than-idyllic childhood. “
I took the name”—Strawberry Fields
^*
—“
as an image
,” John explained, and he used it as inspiration to express his seriously conflicted feelings about growing up and self-awareness. Instead of rhymes and wordplay, John poured strings of surreal images into the verses to bring his emotional world alive.

During September 1966 Paul was also abroad, in France. For a change of scenery, Paul, who loved to drive, decided to take the sightseer’s route from Paris through the Loire Valley, stopping off at the grand châteaux of Chambord and Chenonceaux that bordered the country roads, before heading west to Bordeaux. His intention had been to “
travel incognito, disguised
so that he would not be recognized,” or at least appearing as inconspicuous as any young man could while crisscrossing rural France in a sleek dark green Aston Martin DB5. It would be an ideal opportunity, he thought, “
to ease the pressure
… [a]nd retaste anonymity.” Slicking his hair back with Vaseline and gluing a stage-prop Vandyke to his chin, Paul managed to walk freely around the quaint ancient villages, browsing in the
little shops and dining
al fresco
at neighborhood cafés, at home in a world from which the Beatles had been excluded. Freed from the glare of megacelebrity, he settled into a blissful routine. A few hours each day were spent essentially cloistered in a hotel room, writing furiously in a journal and “thinking all sorts of artistic thoughts.” In the late afternoons, with sun bathing the streets in soft, even light, Paul shot reel after reel of 8 mm film, experimenting with quirky, whimsical images: a cross leaning in a cemetery, horizons tilting at crazy angles, a Ferris wheel in full spin, a gendarme directing traffic. Movies had such seductive energy; Paul found them a particularly exhilarating way of expressing himself. The whole experience brought him back down to earth: “I was a lonely little poet on the road with my car.”

But once up in the air again, Paul McCartney, lonely little poet, changed back into Superbeatle. He met Mal Evans in Bordeaux, then flew off to Kenya for a two-week safari. On the plane ride home from Nairobi, on November 19, Paul began formulating an idea for a new Beatles album. Less about music, it was more a premise: if
he
could disguise himself on vacation and travel about unnoticed, then why not all the Beatles? They hated being the Fab Four, a nickname that had become synonymous with the trappings of Beatlemania. “I thought, ‘
Let’s not be ourselves
. Let’s develop alter egos so we’re not having to project an image which we know.’ ” They could “
put some distance between
the Beatles and the public,” take on the personae of another, fictional band.

Paul and Mal kicked around the idea during the in-flight meal. At first they played with names for a band, mimicking the variety of groups that were just coming into vogue: the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Lothar and the Hand People. Mal, distracted, picked up the little corrugated packets of paper 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 at Heathrow, the entire concept was in place.

As always, Paul’s enthusiasm was complicated by the ambivalence of the other Beatles. It was hard for them to grasp the uniqueness of what he envisioned. An album
made
by the Beatles—but
not
the Beatles. Would it be Beatles music? they wondered. Then again, what
was
Beatles music these days? “
We would be Sgt. Pepper’s band
, and for the whole of the album
we’d pretend to be someone else,” Paul explained. Pretend!
Pretend
was one of those words that always raised a red flag; the whole thing sounded like a gimmick. Besides, everyone’s head was in a different place.

George was especially skeptical. “
I had gone through so many trips
of my own,” he recalled, “and I was growing out of that kind of thing.” In fact, of all the Beatles, no one was undergoing as much change, with as much boundless and exciting speed. The skinny, pale boy with big ears and no ambition, the dropout burdened with intellectual insecurity, who used to follow half a block behind John Lennon, had developed into a grimly optimistic, pensive young man clamoring for “the meaning of it all.” LSD had jolted George awake. Tripping had given him enlightenment; it altered his consciousness and put him on the path to self-realization. “Spirituality,” George was starting to believe, was what he needed. “
You’ve got to be connected spiritually
if you hope to achieve anything in this world,” he wrote to Arthur Kelly soon after the Beatles had stopped touring.

In fact, George had been dancing around the fringes of spirituality for some time. As early as Speke, when he experienced frightening flashes of “divine awareness,” during which a “
feeling would begin to vibrate
right through [him]… so fast it was mind-boggling,” he had begun struggling with the concept of a greater power. Before his twenty-first birthday on the set of
Help!,
in the Bahamas, when he heard the trancelike call of Indian music—the same day, coincidentally, that Swami Vishnu-devananda gave him a copy of
The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga
—George had already been exposed to Eastern and mystical philosophies. Now when George spoke, the ideas flowed effortlessly—about the doctrines of rebirth and reincarnation, serenity and self-fulfillment, as well as pacifism, which had padded to the forefront of the Beatles’ interests.

With John in Spain—along with Ringo, who claimed he “
hung out with him
[on the movie set] because he was lonely”—and Paul off in France, George and Pattie made an unprecedented trip to Bombay, where they were guests of the legendary sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. “The first time I heard Indian music,” George recalled in 1967, “I felt as though I knew it. It was everything, everything I could think of. 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.” George had first met Shankar in June, at Peter Sellers’s house, at which time “
he offered to give me some instruction
on the basics of
sitar.” There was challenge enough, he soon discovered, in “
how to sit and hold the sitar
,” which was murder on the hips. As he watched Shankar—actually playing the complicated instrument—deep in concentration but in perfect form and control, George must have felt overwhelmed by the extreme discipline involved. Even after a few cursory passes at it, he had difficulty achieving a proper tone. In India, however, George presented himself as a student,
Shankar’s “disciple
,” for intensive training, most of which was conducted by the master’s protégé, Shambu Das.

The instruction drew George more deeply into his teacher’s professional and personal life. Often after a long day of lessons—“
Sometimes [George] would play
up to eight hours a day,” Das recalled—Shankar would conduct him on enlightening visits to local temples or they’d meander through the maze of dusty streets, teeming with humanity and exotic musky scents, discussing the mystical enthusiasms necessary for “
harmonizing with a greater power
.” Although a fastidious performer who aggressively pursued a demanding concert schedule, Ravi implored George to “expand his consciousness.” They read books “
by various holy men
and swamis and mystics,” practiced meditation and yoga, and listened to music in the evenings. Gradually, but not often, they approached the study of Hinduism in a manner that was more philosophical than religious. The trip to India, ostensibly a musical pilgrimage, had served as a turning point for George. “
Ravi and the sitar were excuses
,” he came to realize. “Although they were a very important part of it, it was a search for a spiritual connection.”

It was in this keen, highly tuned state, clearly pulsing with enlightenment, that George returned to London on October 22. He quickly transformed his Esher bungalow, filling it with brightly colored Indian artifacts and repositioning the furniture for maximum sunlight and serenity. Long, flowing robes replaced his customary T-shirts and jeans. When Donovan, another lotus-eater, arrived at Esher for a weeklong visit, they smoked hash, critiqued each other’s lyrics, and engaged in many dreamy, abstract discussions about life that lasted late into the night. The Scottish folksinger was mesmerized listening to George, who was as much a rascal as he, “speak with such confidence about truth and self-fulfillment.” He was no longer the cheeky little whacker, as Aunt Mimi had dubbed him, who would take the mickey out of others in order to amuse John and Paul. In a long, thoughtful evaluation, he acknowledged “the trip to India had really opened me up…. I’d been let out of the confines of the group.” The
Beatles would always define him as a musician, but out of the limelight, George was ready to be his own man. Consumed with the burden of a developing identity, he even grew a mustache to assert his individuality.

Identity. Identity. Identity.

When he heard Paul’s proposal—that the Beatles take on alter egos—it sounded “mad,” as though they were somehow drifting into old, uncomfortable territory. George assumed they had been moving away from such silliness. Now, from what he could tell, “it felt like going backwards.”

For Brian Epstein, backward or forward didn’t seem to make much of a difference.
Down
was the direction he seemed directly headed. Since returning from America, his life had tilted on its side like a listing ship and now it felt as if he were sinking, drowning, and no one was there to rescue him.

To make matters worse: Diz was blackmailing him. A letter arrived at the Nemperor office in New York demanding money—$10,000 in cash—in exchange for Brian’s papers and those compromising photographs. Right off the bat, Brian decided to pay up. Grievously holed up in his bone-white Chapel Street flat, he considered it “
blood money
,” necessary to ending the hideous affair. There was no point in stirring up more trouble. “
Don’t do anything else
about it,” he instructed Nat Weiss by telephone. But Weiss’s briefcase was part of the hustler’s ransom, “and on that basis,” Nat says, “I called a lawyer named Bob Fitzpatrick, and we had [Diz] arrested.” Some of the money was recovered, along with the letters, but the photographs, the most damning material, had vanished. “And that’s what ultimately sent Brian into a suicidal depression.”