The Beatles (107 page)

Weirdness abounded in Los Angeles. First, the police refused to cooperate with the Beatles, saying that “
they could not be responsible
for their security.” Then Phil Spector invited them to his mansion and did a number with drugs and guns. Both circumstances produced some awkward moments for the boys, but nothing that would compete with their visit with Elvis.

For over a year Brian and Colonel Parker had been attempting to arrange a summit between their two megastars, with only egos—massive egos—standing in the way. “
Keen to preserve their artists’ prestige
,” neither manager wanted to blink first when it came to deciding who would accept the other’s invitation. But in the end, the Beatles conceded, agreeing to pay their respects to the King.

Elvis had just returned from Honolulu, where he’d been filming
Blue Hawaii,
and was holed up with the Memphis Mafia at a rented house in Bel-Air. When the Beatles arrived, sometime after ten o’clock on August 27, they were “
laughing… all in hysterics
,”
partly from nerves
, which they all suffered, and partly from the joints they’d shared in the car. The house was unusually big and ornate—“like a nightclub,” John thought. Inside, Elvis was posed regally on a huge horseshoe-shaped couch, the King, larger than life in a flame red blouse beneath a tight-fitting black jacket and black slacks. A big arm was thrown around his queen-in-waiting, Priscilla Beaulieu, and on either side, his loyal squires: Joe Esposito, Marty Lacker, Billy Smith, Jerry Schilling, Alan Fortas, and Sonny West.

Perhaps more than anyone else, John was shaken by the sight of his boyhood idol. Before he’d gotten a guitar, before skiffle, before Paul, George, and Stu jump-started his own pop odyssey, John had heard “Heartbreak Hotel” and knew “it was the end for me.” Now, John resorted to buffoonery, acting and jabbering as if he were Inspector Clouseau.
“Oh, zere you are!” he clowned, peering absentmindedly at his host over his glasses.

The other Beatles were speechless, gazing around at the Vegas-like setup of pool tables, craps tables, and roulette wheels crowding the den. A well-stocked jukebox stood purring in the corner. The room was bathed in red and blue light, which gave it the appearance of a cheesy after-hours club. No one knew what to do, or say. After a brief, embarrassing silence, Elvis summoned them to sit down beside him but grew weary of the Beatles’ vacant stares—“
It was hero worship
of a high degree,” Paul admitted—and started clicking nervously through the channels of a wall-size TV set.

“
If you guys are just gonna
sit there and stare at me, I’m goin’ to bed,” Elvis huffed, tossing the remote control on the coffee table. Turning to his girlfriend, he said, “Let’s call it a night, right, ’Cilla? I didn’t mean for this to be like the subjects calling on the King. I just thought we’d sit and talk about music and jam a little.”

“That’d be great,” Paul said, suggesting they try a song by “
the other Cilla
”—Cilla Black—at which point guitars and a white piano were produced, along with ample drink. “
We all plugged in
whatever was around, and we played and sang… ‘You’re My World,’ ” John recalled. Unwinding gradually, they segued into a few Presley barn burners—“That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” with Elvis carrying the melody and Paul vamping on the piano—before finishing with “I Feel Fine.”

By now John had slipped from feather to thistle. “Zis is ze way it zhould be,” he mimicked, “ze szmall homely gazering wiz a few friends and a leetle music.” Chris Hutchins, who recollected the visit in his 1994 chronicle,
Elvis Meets the Beatles,
writes that beyond the faux French accent, John chided Elvis rudely—and in front of his pals, no less—about his lack of chops, the post-army soft-core singles, and string of cornball movies. “I might just get around to cuttin’ a few sides and knockin’ you off the top,” Presley said with a shrug, feeling hard-pressed to respond. Nobody could dispel the “uncomfortable undertones… and superficial cheerfulness” that punctuated the evening until sometime after two, when the Beatles finally departed.

“Sanks for ze music,” John said in parting, then bellowed: “Long live the King!”

The next day the hungry pool of reporters covering the tour pounced on the story of the historic meeting, which had been press-managed—and largely fabricated to suit both managers—by Tony Barrow. Every
journalist was supplied with a generous sampling of quotes from each of the Beatles, who fairly tripped over one another in the rush to praise their idol. Only in private would John admit what he really felt. “
It was a load of rubbish
,” he concluded. “It was just like meeting Englebert Humperdinck.”

After the Beatles’ final performance—at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, on August 31, 1965—everyone was ready to head home.

The pitch of the crowd in San Francisco was
a bit too “wild
,” even for the Beatles, who thought they had seen it all.
Before the show, Wendy Hanson
had been bitten by a fan who trampled on the hood of her car. Hearing about the incident made John “nervous.” Superstitious by nature, he took every chance event as an omen, and when he walked onstage to discover the guitars out of tune, it set off all kinds of alarms. Paul had much the same reaction when he saw “
the dreadful crush of fans
up against the stage.” A massive stampede of teenagers had broken through the barricades and surged forward, wave after wave attempting to vault the stage, only to be turned back by a detachment of stagehands. “
Calm down!” Paul screamed
at them. “Things are getting dangerous.” But to no avail. One kid leaped over the amplifiers and snatched the cap off John’s head before swan-diving into the audience. A security guard was knocked cold by a Coke bottle and more than two hundred fans fainted.
Paul even stopped the show
midway through so that police could rescue a pregnant woman who was being trampled. “
At one point I glanced down
and saw Joan Baez trying to pull kids to their feet and bring them around with smelling salts,” recalls Tony Barrow, who says he feared for his life. Eventually the Beatles had seen enough and bolted, leaving Ringo to deliver a fitting postmortem. “
We survived
,” he told an interviewer. “That’s the important thing, wouldn’t you say?”

By the fall of 1965, the Beatles had drawn a deep collective breath. The luxury of six weeks off allowed each of the boys to catch up with his personal life and to step out of the all-consuming glare that had highlighted one of the most productive seasons of their career. In a reversal of the pattern that had governed their lives, the break gave them time to settle into new homes,
see friends, and
sleep.
Beatlemania raged on without them.
Help!
kept them on the radio and in front of packed, delirious audiences, while Paul’s single of “Yesterday,” released only in America, captured the top spot on
Bilboard
’s Hot 100 for four weeks running, spawning a cascade of competent if
uninspired covers
by Marianne Faithfull, Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, and Andy Williams. The only commotion during the rare hiatus was caused by Ringo Starr when, on September 13, Maureen gave birth to a boy—“
a little smasher
,” as Ringo dubbed him—at Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital, whom they whimsically named Zak. “
I won’t let Zak
be a drummer!” Ringo vowed to reporters outside the delivery room, but whether he realized it or not, the matter was out of his hands, and if he didn’t realize it, most of the grinning press corps did.

In the meantime, October 12 loomed as the kickoff for recording a new album at the Abbey Road studios.
EMI insisted on the date
so that there would be new Beatles product available for the coming holiday season.
The only song ready was “Wait
,” which they had completed while in the Bahamas and recorded for the
Help!
soundtrack. Otherwise, John and Paul “had to force themselves to come up with a dozen new songs” in a little more than two weeks, which seemed like an impossible feat, even for such naturals.

One thing was certain: this record wasn’t going to sound like anything they’d ever done before. There was too much going on in the rock music scene, too much creativity in the air. Paul spoke for the others when he complained of “
being bored
by doing the same thing.” Lyrics like “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret” no longer seemed relevant. The Beatles had moved on emotionally, preoccupied with inner thoughts and feelings that gradually shaped their adult lives. “
You can’t be singing 15-year-old songs
at 20 because you don’t think 15-year-old thoughts at 20,” Paul explained. “
We were expanding
in all areas of our lives,” Ringo recalled, “opening up to a lot of different attitudes.” And they’d moved on artistically. “
We were suddenly hearing
sounds that we weren’t able to hear before,” George observed.
They were all still influenced
tremendously by American R&B—although gravitating toward Stax and Motown artists as opposed to Little Richard and Chuck Berry—but other forms and diverse sources that had constantly swirled around them finally began to coalesce. Certainly jazz patterns and country licks had always figured in Beatles songs, to say nothing of the music hall influence still prevalent in every aspect of their careers. It had taken time, however, for them to learn how to put it all together.

As Paul well knew, in his capacity as a keen listener of pop radio, the summer of 1965 had already produced a rich vein of exceptional hit singles analogous for their offbeat originality and authentic voice. Dylan had started the ball rolling, not only with “Like a Rolling Stone” but also the Byrds’ cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which bounced the process into another lyrical dimension. The Animals were offering their bluesy melodrama, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” followed by the Who’s anthemic “My Generation,” Unit 4 + 2’s “Concrete and Clay,” and the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love.” One can only imagine the bruising body heat created by the Stones’ one-two punch of “The Last Time” and “Satisfaction.” By contrast, the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” seemed like the perfect pop confection to counterbalance the scorching imagery.

The competition, such as it was, turned out to be all the incentive John and Paul needed. Throughout the beginning of October, the songs ripped off their guitars, one right after another, and each as different and revolutionary as the last. If anything, the short two-week schedule seemed to sharpen their focus on the task of transforming and shading the Beatles’ tone.

In “Norwegian Wood,” which John had begun in February while skiing in St. Moritz, they gave a moody, vaguely Oriental voice to a furtive adult relationship. There was nothing predictable about “Norwegian Wood,” neither in its lyric—“
a very bitter little story
,” as George Martin referred to it—nor in its delivery.
John claimed he based the narrative
on an extramarital affair he was having—insiders say with the journalist Maureen Cleave—and that it was “my song completely,” meaning the entire composition. Decades later Paul would take issue with that account, raking it from top to bottom, beginning with the fanciful title, which he said was nothing more than an inside joke about the cheap pine walls in Peter Asher’s bedroom. “
[John] had this first stanza
,” Paul recalled, but really only the first line and nothing else, as far as he could remember, except perhaps the underlying tune. There was in fact no indication that John had anything more than a general idea of where they were headed. But no matter: once a song was begun, no conceit could stop their momentum. Everything just poured out, the character of the girl or “bird,” her rejection of the lover along with his due penance—“to sleep in the bath”—and the extreme revenge he exacts the next morning, after “this bird has flown.” The way Paul recollected it, they wrote most of the song together in a single afternoon, finishing it during a productive session at Weybridge.

John’s house was also the scene for “Drive My Car,” which Paul called
“
one of the stickiest
” they struggled through in the writing process. Paul had sketched out a rough outline for the song on his way there from London. When he arrived, the tune was already set in his head but “
the lyrics were disastrous
,” he admitted, “and I knew it.”
Baby, you can buy me golden rings.
John called it “
crap
” and dismissed it as “
too soft
.” Besides, it wouldn’t scan. And the longer they played with and reworked it, the more entrenched the phrase became, much like the “scrambled eggs” impasse with “Yesterday.” Pass after pass turned up the same problem. When the lyric threatened to block the entire session, John and Paul discussed throwing in the towel. Instead, they went to have tea, still unresolved: a great sassy melody with nothing to hang on it. When they returned to the attic half an hour later, they took another swing at it and replaced the central theme with an idea John suggested:
drive my car
—perhaps, as Paul implied, to ply the old blues euphemism for sex, perhaps because it just sounded good. “Baby, you can drive my car.” An entire narrative flowed from it, rich with imagery and innuendo. It came alive in the studio, it just took off, with a flirtatious piano riff and a skintight backbeat, underscored by a soulful bass and guitar motif, “
like the line from ‘Respect,
’ by Otis Redding,” George recalled, which further emphasizes the song’s raunchy feel.