The Beatles (122 page)

The Beatles also invited a few musical friends of their own stripe, among them Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, Donovan, Brian Jones, Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, Pattie Harrison, two Dutch designers—Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger, who operated a firm called the Fool that would eventually play a role in another aspect of the Beatles’ career—and the Hollies’ Graham Nash, all dressed outrageously in flowing robes or waistcoats with long silk scarves and flared pants, all pleasantly stoned, all spectators for the happening that was about to take place.

Once the orchestra was given instructions, the two conductors—George Martin and Paul McCartney, the latter in a red butcher’s smock draped over a purple-and-black paisley shirt—led the ensemble through five separate performances, each one a cyclone swirl of rolling, vibrating babel. Martin more aptly termed it an “
orchestral orgasm
.” “
It was a remarkable
, breathtaking experience,” says Ron Richards, who took cover in a corner of the control room and, with head sandwiched between hands, was reported to have cried: “
I just can’t believe it
…. I give up!”

But the Beatles were just getting started. All five takes were mixed down onto one track, creating a monster symphonic effect that exceeded everyone’s expectations. But the high note that was reached at the end of the sequence just dangled there, unfinished. It needed a coda. But how could anything complement the sound of 205 turbulent instruments? What could, in effect, land the plane with as much panache as the flight? Initially, Martin dusted off one of John’s acid fantasies from
Revolver,
when he proposed the sound of four thousand monks chanting accompaniment to “Tomorrow Never Knows.” As nutty as that sounded, Martin thought it might actually work in this case—not four thousand monks, of course, but a chorus of eight or nine people chanting a mantra that could be overdubbed four or five times to create the illusion of thousands. The
concept, which everyone responded to eagerly, was ditched after several rehearsals revealed that no one—most of them smokers—could hold the note for more than fifteen or twenty seconds.

Instead, they settled for producing “
a gigantic piano chord
” that would sustain for just over a minute. The staff rolled three grand pianos into Studio One, including the one reserved exclusively for
Daniel Barenboim
that was normally kept locked. On the count of four, ten hands—Paul, John, Ringo, Mal Evans, and George Martin—clamped down on an E chord as hard as humanly possible, letting it reverberate, enhanced by some complex technical magic (boldly employing heavy compression and increasing the gain by degrees), right up to the last ounce of fade.
It took nine attempts
to perfect but was well worth the effort. It was a magnificent—stirring—effect, as conclusive as it was dramatic, capping a dazzling thirty-four-hour arrangement that serves as perhaps the Beatles’ outstanding studio performance.

Much has been written over the years analyzing “A Day in the Life,” how it expresses John’s disillusionment and comments upon the hopelessness of society or redefines the “mythical” Sgt. Pepper’s band by interjecting a measure of sobering reality.
Newsweek
’s critic
hailed it as the pop version of “The Waste Land.” Others singled it out as a case of acid reflux. But, one by one, these grand visions amount to nothing more than personal bias. The song was, after all, recorded before the album concept even took shape, and was written almost as an exercise, lifting random images from the pages of the
Daily Mail
that “
got mixed together
in a little poetic jumble,” according to Paul, so “that [it] sounded nice.” No one can argue with the song’s beauty or its astonishing power. Moreover, it reveals the Beatles’ skill and growing confidence as craftsmen—virtuosos—in the studio. John’s vocal, Paul’s musical daring, Ringo’s exquisite, inimitable drum fills are unparalleled. But whether it is profound remains purely subjective. Instead, “A Day in the Life” shines as one of the most innovative sessions in history, one in which the Beatles experimented with sounds and styles that refined the slapdash recording process into a feat of technical artistry. “I’d love to turn you on…,” they had teased, and in the end, it was a promise fulfilled.

Even in the midst of this “
very productive period
,” there were muted notes of discontent. Professionally, the Beatles felt the strain of wear and tear on a tightly yoked bond now entering its tenth year. They had been inseparable for the most part, shaping one another’s early attitudes toward life, as well as dreams about the future. As boys, they had clung tenaciously to one another—to the Beatles—for stability and even survival, but as men, they were already looking beyond the band in response to individual needs.

George, who suffered through a stretch of extreme growing pains and a preoccupation with all things Indian, found the “
assembly[-line] process
” of recording overdubs “a bit tiring and a bit boring.” To him, the whole Sgt. Pepper business was a turnoff, not so much for its concept, which wasn’t all that fascinating, as for the diminishing role he filled in the recording studio. “A lot of the 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, and not unjustly. Certainly there was less for George to do on this album. Guitar parts seemed to have taken a backseat to technical fireworks. Most of the songs he proposed—a miscellany of mantras and ragas—had been rejected by John and Paul. The facade of Beatlemania that had been his pass into John’s and Paul’s world lost its luster, and now the old sense of alienation that he’d felt in Liverpool and Hamburg was pecking at a nerve.

Whatever restlessness George felt in the studio was compounded by John’s personal burden of self-loathing and envy. The destabilizing effects of LSD, coupled with a stagnant marriage and twenty years of snowballing rage, sunk Lennon further and further into an emotional shell. “
I was in a real big depression
in
Pepper
and I know that Paul wasn’t at that time,” he recalled. Paul’s glaring “confidence,” as John saw it, only inflamed his outlook, and as a result, John said, “I was going through murder.”

The extent of his anguish is apparent in the volume of photographs that survive as a graphic account of the
Sgt. Pepper
sessions. In picture after picture taken throughout the months at Abbey Road, the sleepless nights begin to show. John looks miserable, achingly sad, his face dissipated from abuse, his eyes as flat and lifeless as a poached carp.
Food no longer interested him
, probably a condition caused by the drugs that were sustaining him. For hours, sometimes days, he remained transfixed in a cosmic consciousness, either staring at the ceiling like a zombie or giggling into his hands. Cynthia equated John’s LSD fixation with “religion” and
wrote that, because of the incessant tripping, “
it was becoming almost impossible
to communicate with [him].” In one respect, she said, his “
tensions, bigotry, and bad temper
were replaced by understanding and love,” but the downside was tragic. During the winter and early spring of 1967, he reached an apogee of drug-taking and self-abuse unparalleled since art college. The nightly scenes when he returned home had lost their intimacy. John was often too spaced out, talking gibberish and behaving much like a child. And he brought home swarms of street freaks “as high as kites,” who tripped and drank and passed out in the house, causing havoc chez Lennon.

John’s problem, according to Paul, was that he was “stuck out in suburbia, living a middle-class life.” It wasn’t the John Lennon he knew at all. It was someone else pretending to be John, pretending to be a husband and father in a fake, alien world. The
real
John Lennon was the sharp-tongued bohemian from Liverpool, the guy he knew from art college who enjoyed dancing on the edge, going for broke, not the house husband in the ritzy-titsy Stockbroker Belt, as Weybridge was called, with boring neighbors and a seriously boring wife. Paul knew that wasn’t where John was at. And where it left John was plain to him: John was in hell.

He had company. Even before the latest round of headaches, Brian had felt threatened by the Beatles’ metamorphosis. He had vowed to maintain control over all aspects of their career. But this new direction saw them slipping further from his reach. At the beginning of the year—right after they’d settled into the studio—he had negotiated an extension of the Beatles’ contract with EMI. He thought his position would be strengthened by the generally favorable terms and increased royalty rates.
^*
Even with a new deal in place, however, his insecurity mounted. Touring had sustained Brian. He loved the detailed work and traveling with the boys. Hardly a day went by that he didn’t bring up the subject of tours, as if to somehow keep the idea of it alive. “
I know Brian was convinced
they’d go out again,” recalls Tony Barrow. “He actually had dates penciled in—they’d start in Glasgow and do Brighton.” But Barrow knew better. John and George had been adamant; even the other two had no interest in playing to audiences. Ever.

Other circumstances indicated to Barrow that Brian had lost control over the Beatles’ press functions as well. It was becoming impossible to get any interview or photo session approved, even when it was impressed upon Brian that a prestigious publication had put in a request and was sending Lord So-and-so as its rep. There would be days, maybe weeks, of excuses, hedging, until Brian eventually lost patience and snapped:
“Of course I’ve been to them. Don’t you realize? They’ve said no.”

When it came to the Beatles, the sad truth was that Brian’s role had been reduced to that of a figurehead. Distancing himself even further from the process, Brian moved out of NEMS and took a private, tucked-away office on Albemarle Street, out of which only he and Wendy Hanson operated. He also decided to sell a controlling interest in NEMS to a flashy operator named Robert Stigwood. Like Brian Epstein, Stigwood was among the small, pioneering band of gentleman British impresarios who, beginning in the mid-1960s, built empires by spreading the gospel of rock ’n roll. By 1965, he had already gained prominence as one of the first independent producers and
gone broke in the process
—twice, in fact, the second time, as Peter Brown points out, with “
borrowed money from EMI
, knowing he would never be able to pay it back.” Nat Weiss sized him up as “a real carnival promoter… a man who had two cents [to his name] but could run up a bill.” But Brian detected what other music insiders knew and respected, which is that Stigwood had qualities that, in the rock world, superseded fiscal responsibility: fabulous style and taste, not to mention an eagle eye for talent. “Robert seemed like
the
solution to our worries,” Peter Brown remembers. “Even though no one came out and said it, Brian was no longer paying attention and couldn’t adequately run the company as it was. Suddenly, here was this person who could not only run it effectively but improve on it in the process.”

To encourage a deal, Stigwood and his partner, financier David Shaw, whisked Brian off for what has been described as “a dirty weekend” in Paris, an expression that can only be taken to mean attractive young men and wanton sex. Stigwood had already prepared a proposal. “
It was quite simple
,” he recalled. “We’d be joint managing directors together, and he gave me an option… for six months. If I paid him half a million pounds [in that time], then the controlling shares… would be transferred to me and my company.” Half a million pounds seems a ridiculously small amount for a company that, just two years before, was valued at twenty times that. But that was then—when the novelty of Beatlemania was still
thrilling, and before the drugs and depression tightened their grip. It wasn’t fun anymore. Without much ado, Brian made the deal that was presented to him in Paris, dotting all the i’s and crossing the t’s that enabled Stigwood and Shaw to move into NEMS right away.

Only one small detail was overlooked: he neglected to tell the Beatles anything about the new arrangement.