The Beatles Boxed Set (21 page)

            The
accompanying soundtrack album, bearing the same name, contained the single
A
Hard Day’s Night
and the previously released
Can’t Buy Me Love
, both
of which became number one singles for the Beatles.

            After
filming, John prepared his book,
In His Own Write
, with its publication
date on April 27, 1964. It contained short stories and poems and line drawings.
Notably, it was the first solo Beatle project in any form, and was followed by
A
Spaniard in the Works
in 1965.

            John
took a short vacation with his wife in Tahiti, accompanied by George and Pattie
Boyd, a model he’d met on the set of their film. Epstein had booked them as Mr.
and Mrs. Leslie and Mr. Hargreaves and Miss Bond. The press caught up with them
in Hawaii, but eventually managed some privacy. They swam and snorkeled and
sailed from island to island. It would be their last break of the year.

John and Cynthia in Tahiti, 1964

            In
June and July, the Beatles busied themselves with touring internationally,
where Beatlemania followed them. They staged 37 shows in 27 days, from Denmark
to New Zealand. For the first five sets, the band used Jimmy Nicol on drums as
Ringo was hospitalized after a tonsillectomy. He rejoined the tour when he had
recuperated enough.

            The
Beatles’ fourth LP album,
Beatles for Sale
, competed for studio time as
they toured the world between May and September. They would record between live
gigs and TV shows. Then they were back in the US, this time remaining for a
month. They flew from London to San Francisco on August 18, and nine thousand
screaming fans greeted them as they arrived.

            They
would witness with their own eyes how the Beatle fever had grown. For their
second American visit, they were to stage 27 concerts in 25 cities in over 30
days. They were booked at $50,000 per show in large areas, enabling the Beatles
to gross more than one million dollars in ticket sales alone. By the end of
their tour, they had met Bob Dylan, who introduced the Beatles to cannabis.

            Beatlemania
had grown, far more than what the Beatles had imagined. It certainly had its
advantages, and downsides as well. It was getting difficult to go from one
place to another, and had to stage daring escapes and complicated evasive
maneuvers. The boys asked Epstein to hire his own security detail.

            On
John’s 24
^th
birthday, they began a seven-day tour of Britain,
starting in Bedford and ending in Hull. Then they were back in the studio to
complete their fourth album.

            Finally,
Beatles for Sale
was released on December 4, 1964, containing eight
originals and six covers. Then they were awarded Members of the Order of the
British Empire (MBE) by none other than the queen herself.

The
Beatles were back on the road, this time in America. They were to perform at
Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965 in New York. Quite unexpectedly, it would be
their concert with the largest attendance; more than 56,000 screaming fans
descended on the stadium the day of the concert.

            Performing
in front of these enormous crowds was a wild dream come true. But it also
proved disastrous for the Beatles, who barely heard themselves above the
ear-splitting noise that had the policemen covering their ears. From start to
end, John, Paul and George had to constantly look at each other to stay in sync
as they could not hear Ringo’s beats. At the end of their performance, John was
exasperated that he used his elbow to play the keyboard, prompting George and
Paul into fits of laughter.

John and Paul at Shea Stadium during
their 1965 concert

            Their
1965 tour was highly successful, but more and more, the Beatles were growing
tired of having to compete with the high volumes of noise to make their music
heard. Their 30-watt amplifiers, upgraded to 100 watts by the Vox company, did
not help to make their music heard by the audience.

            The
Beatles also toured in the Philippines, and it proved to be their first and
their last. They nearly got themselves killed when they turned down an
invitation for lunch with the First Lady. All of a sudden, they found
themselves with no security, and on their way to the airport on their last day,
they were mugged and beaten. It was so traumatizing that John said, “No plane’s
going to go through the Philippines with me on it. I wouldn’t even fly over
it.”

            And
when they got home, another bomb was waiting to explode. John had given an
interview to British reporter Maureen Cleave, and he said, “Christianity will
go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will
be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go
first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was alright but his disciples were
think and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

            John
didn’t mean to cause offense with this comment, which went unnoticed in the UK.
But when US teen magazine
Datebook
reprinted the comment five months
later – on the eve of the Beatles’ US tour – it sparked a controversy that
prompted Christians to burn Beatles records. The Vatican protested as well, and
radio stations in some countries banned the playing of Beatles records.

            At
a press conference, John said, “If I’d said television was more popular than
Jesus, I might have got away with it.” He clarified what he meant by his
“bigger than Jesus” comment, then added, “If you want me to apologize, if that
will make you happy, then okay, I’m sorry.”

            These
events, and the fact that their concerts were no longer about the music, they
mutually decided that their August tour would be their last.

Now
that they had no concert tours to attend to, the Beatles had no other
commitments than to see about the recordings of their studio albums. Their
Rubber
Soul
album showed the group’s maturity and the complexity of their music.
Released in December 1965, it reached the markets in time for the Christmas
season.

           
Rubber
Soul
was an immense commercial and critical success, often cited as among
the greatest albums in music history. On Christmas day, it replaced their
previous album at the top of the charts and stayed in that position for eight
weeks.
Revolver
, the Beatles’ seventh studio album, came out in August
1966 and differed from
Rubber Soul
in such a way that
Revolver
had
an electric guitar-rock sound.

            It
snaked its way on the British and American charts until it claimed the top
spot, remaining there for seven weeks and six weeks, respectively. It would
receive a number of accolades, some of which came after John’s death.

            It
would be almost a year before the Beatles released another album, the
Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. They began recording songs in November
1966; the album was released in June 1967. The times have changed for the
Beatles, who traded their famous mop tops with long hairs and their baby faces
with moustaches. John was already sporting his wire-rimmed glasses, after
seeing Buddy Holly sporting one.

            The
album, which was more commonly known as
Sgt. Pepper
, was recorded in
more than seven hundred hours and released following the non-album double
A-side single
Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane
.

            Among
all the Beatles’ albums,
Sgt. Pepper
was the first to include complete
lyrics. These lyrics had been studied and analyzed by several critics and
ordinary people. Take, for instance, John’s
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
For years, many people claimed that it referred to LSD, mainly because the
first letter of each of the title’s nouns intentionally spelled LSD, a drug
that John took from time to time.

For a while, the BBC banned the song although John denied
the allegations. He claimed that he was inspired to write the song after his
son, Julian, came to him one day and showed him a drawing he called “Lucy – in
the sky with diamonds.” Lucy was his classmate, Lucy O’Donnell.

Julian Lennon’s drawing of “Lucy – in the
sky with diamonds,” which inspired John to write a song called
Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds

John was surprised at the idea that the song was a subtle
reference to LSD. He said, “It was purely unconscious that it came out to be
LSD. Until someone pointed it out, I never even thought of it. I mean, who
would ever bother to look at initials of a title? It’s not an acid song. The
imagery was Alice in the boat.”

But in 2004, during an interview, Paul claimed that the
song, contrary to what John claimed, was about LSD. Paul commented, “A song
like
Got to Get You into My Life
, that’s directly about pot, although
everyone missed it at the time.
Day Tripper
, that’s one about acid.
Lucy
in the Sky
, that’s pretty obvious. There’s others that make subtle hints
about drugs, but you know, it’s easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on
the Beatles’ music.”

Nevertheless,
Sgt. Pepper
seemed to eclipse the
successes of the group’s previous albums as it spent 27 weeks at the top of the
UK Album Chart and 15 weeks at number one on the US
Billboard
200. All
in all, the album spent 201 weeks on the UK charts and became the second
biggest-selling album in UK chart history behind Queen’s
Greatest Hits.
The album even won the Beatles four Grammy Awards in 1968.

Shortly after
Sgt. Pepper
’s release, the Beatles
performed their upcoming single,
All You Need is Love
, in front of about
350 million viewers on
Our World
, the first live and satellite
television production. The single was released a week later during the Summer
of Love.

With all the successes surrounding them, the Beatles were
shocked two months later to learn that their manager since 1962, Brian Epstein,
was discovered dead in his room. The Beatles, having been introduced to
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi by George Harrison, were away in Bangor for the
Transcendental Meditation retreat. It would be later when they learned that
Epstein’s death was accidental, though it was rumored to be a suicide.