The Beatles (115 page)

The finality of the Beatles’ decision unnerved Brian. “
It wasn’t like the boys
to be so uncompromising with him,” says Tony Barrow. “They usually ran things like this past him, to hear his input.” Peter Brown, who thought it was still all in the talking phase, saw Brian afterward “completely distraught and inconsolable.” He remembered thinking, “He’s blowing this all out of proportion.”

By the time they boarded the plane back to London, Brian’s mood had grown “very dark,” according to Brown, “sinking into a hideous funk.” To make matters worse, the flight was awful. Several of the Beatles got food poisoning. Everyone had been so careful about what they ate while in India that they dove into the beef Stroganoff served after takeoff, which did the real damage. John and Ringo took turns throwing up, and Brian got hives. It was a long flight, and everyone was “very disgruntled, very unhappy.”

To Brian, it was clear from what he overheard that the end had come; that after four years of success and prosperity, his position was redundant; that the Beatles had precipitously cut him loose. “He was distraught about what he’d do if they stopped touring,” says Brown, who sat beside Brian throughout the trip. “ ‘There’s no
place
for me,’ he kept saying. I finally got impatient with him. He was just being a drama queen. There was so much other business for him to tend to, but it didn’t register.”

By the time they neared their destination, Brian was reeling from nerves and alcohol. His effort to contain the anxiety had backfired. A wave of manic depression swept over him that manifested itself like a shock. Slack, almost catatonic, he was consumed by the repressed anger. He was “so sick, so shaky,” that the airline radioed ahead for an ambulance to meet the plane.

Whatever happened, he begged Peter Brown not to send him to a hospital or an asylum; that would have been too much of a humiliation with the Beatles looking on. Instead, they transferred Brian to a limo headed to Portmerion, an eccentric little beach resort in northern Wales run by two “campy, upper-class guys” that served as a “weekend getaway” for the Liverpool gay community. Bertrand Russell lived down the hill, it had wonderful food. An extravagance of gently wooded walkways wound through the Victorian-style countryside. To Brian, it felt “rather chic and sophisticated,” the perfect place for him to contemplate the future and to mend. The hotel manifest said he would be there for a month, but that was really only for show. “Brian never stayed
anywhere
for a month,” Brown explains. Even ten days of rest, however, would do wonders for his badly rattled equilibrium.

But on the fourth day, just as he had settled in comfortably, the operator put through a call from Wendy Hanson, at NEMS in London. There was a story circulating in an American magazine, she said, about John and some comments he’d made about Christianity. “
You’d better get on top of this
,” she warned him. The shit had hit the fan.

Chapter 30
A Storm in a Teacup

C
hristianity will go. It will vanish and shrink….” The words sounded vaguely familiar to Brian as Wendy Hanson read him a telex that had come over the wire from America. “We’re more popular than Jesus now.”

Once he had heard the whole thing, straining through the crackles of provincial static, the source grew clearer, the March interview John had given to the Beatles’ longtime press groupie, Maureen Cleave. But it was more than an old story, Wendy explained. The night before, on July 31, Nat Weiss had gotten a call about six o’clock in the evening, informing him that Beatles records were being burned in Birmingham, Alabama. A few calls later he had determined that the makings of a firestorm had been ignited. Some of John’s comments to Cleave had been syndicated in
Datebook,
a cheesy American teen magazine, and sensationalized by some slippery editing. A headline slashed across the cover shouted,
JOHN LENNON SAYS: “BEATLES MORE POPULAR THAN JESUS,”
and inside,
CHRISTIANITY WILL GO
! The reaction was swift and predictable. Southern fundamentalists went apeshit over the remarks, labeling them
blasphemous
. A pair of Bible-thumping disc jockeys at WAQY immediately banned the playing of all Beatles records and sponsored a community bonfire fueled by the offending LPs for August 19 “to show them they cannot get away with this sort of thing.” Once the wire services picked up the story, similar “
Beatle Burnings
” and boycotts spread to other, mostly hardscrabble communities.

It would come to be a personal joke among the Beatles that in order to burn their albums, one first had to buy them, “
so it’s no sweat off us
, mate, burn ’em if you like.” And at the outset, the religious backlash seemed absurd.
KZEE, in Weatherford, Texas, “damned their songs
‘eternally’ ”; in Reno, KCBN broadcast an anti-Beatles editorial every hour; WAYX, in
Waycross, Georgia, burned its entire stock of Beatles records;
a Baptist minister in Cleveland
threatened to revoke the membership of anyone in the congregation who played Beatles records; South Carolina’s Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan nailed several Beatles albums to a cross and set it aflame. Boycotts were announced by radio stations in Ashland and Hopkinsville, Kentucky; Dayton, Bryan, and Akron, Ohio; Dublin, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; Barnwell, South Carolina; and Corning, New York, “
joining stations,” the
New York Times
reported, “in Massachusetts
, Connecticut, Michigan, and other states” that bought into the controversy. “
We were being told
” through operatives in New York, says Tony Barrow, “that there were now religious zealots who were actually threatening to assassinate John Lennon if the Beatles came to Memphis,” one of the scheduled stops on the upcoming American tour.

The Beatles, according to Paul, “
didn’t really take it too seriously
at all,” and he, particularly, wrote off the excitement to “hysterical low-grade American thinking.” Brian dissembled to the press, calling it “
a storm in a teacup
,” but beneath the icy elegance he was “deeply disturbed” by the implications and decided that a trip to the States was in order.

Nat Weiss met Brian at the airport in New York. “
The moment he got in the car
, he asked: ‘How much will it cost to cancel the tour?’ ” Weiss’s estimation of a million dollars didn’t faze Brian. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll pay it.” Then, in the next voice and despite the tension, he got down to vital concerns. “Are there any boys around?” he asked.

For the next two days Brian ran damage control from an office in the Paramount Building, on Broadway. Nat prepared the underlying strategy: John’s statements, as reported in
Datebook,
“
were taken completely out of context
.” Most people, he argued, ignored that John was saying “We are more
popular
than Jesus,” not “We are
more important…
” “
He did not mean to boast
about the Beatles’ fame,” Maureen Cleave insisted in a carefully scripted response. “John was certainly not comparing the Beatles to Christ. He was simply observing that, so weak was the state of Christianity, the Beatles was, to many people, better known.” It was highly unusual for any reporter to issue such a ringing defense of the subject of his or her story, especially going so far as to interpret his remarks. Cleave also appeared on a number of radio shows to discuss her viewpoint, at which point
Brian “request[ed] emphatically no [further] comment
from her.” But whatever the official reason, whatever the excuse, the situation remained
volatile. Radio stations, especially in the South and the West, “
were having a field day
,” as George later recalled. Not that John cared. “
I’d forgotten [all about it]
,” he said upon later reflection. “It was that unimportant—it had been and gone.” But once he had a chance to “reread the whole article,” his tune changed. “
Tell them to get stuffed
. I’ve got nothing to apologize for,” John snarled. As far as canceling the tour, that was fine with him. “I’d rather that than have to get up and lie. What I said stands.”

Nevertheless, Brian succeeded in persuading John of the need to shape a public statement. “
It went back and forth
for two days,” Nat Weiss recalls. The two men wrangled over every word until both John and Brian were satisfied that all sides were well served. John would apologize, but he refused to eat shit. Brian would do that for him.

The next day Brian booked a suite at New York’s Americana Hotel and summoned the world press to a hastily convened news conference. It was a typically staged Epstein affair: drinks and hors d’oeuvres were served, after which he read the following statement:

The quote which John Lennon made to a London columnist nearly three months ago has been quoted and represented entirely out of context. Lennon is deeply interested in religion…. What he said and meant was that he was astonished that in the last fifty years the Church of England, and therefore Christ, had suffered a decline in interest. He did not mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame. He meant to point out that the Beatles’ effect appeared to be, to him, a more immediate one upon certain of the younger generation.

To many beat reporters who listened, this sounded like a fairly liberal rewrite of John’s remarks. (Brian had called it “a clarification.”) Yet at the same time, it served to mollify them. Most of the papers that covered the event treated it like a news item, without comment. But it was clear to everyone, including Brian, that it wasn’t the last word on this subject—not by a long shot.

The press conference coincided with the release of two new Beatles records, and the music, as always, managed to work its essential magic. On roughly five thousand radio stations on August 5—that is, the stations that were
playing,
as opposed to
burning,
Beatles records—the single “Yellow Submarine” and “Eleanor Rigby” received its first airplay. What an earful of
music on two sides of a single disc—from the ridiculous to the sublime! When the reviews hit the trades, it was clear the record was every bit as audacious—and intricate—as its makers had intended. More and more often, the critics just threw up their hands. “
One thing seems certain
to me—you’ll soon be singing about a ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ” hedged Alan Evans in an issue of
NME.
“It should be a household favorite soon.” Otherwise, Evans couldn’t get a handle on “Eleanor Rigby,” writing it off as “a folksy ballad sung with very clear diction by Paul McCartney.”

About
Revolver,
which was released the same day, they were less ecstatic, even somewhat baffled by the music’s ample complexities. “The new Beatles’ album,
Revolver,
certainly has new sounds and new ideas, and should cause plenty of argument among fans as to whether it is as good as or better than previous efforts,” wrote
NME.
Songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” perplexed critics. They appreciated its message to turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. “But how can you relax with the electronic outer-space noises, often sounding like seagulls?” they wondered. “Even John’s voice is weirdly fractured and given a faraway sound.” And no one predicted the album’s powerful resonance, that it would be considered an artistic breakthrough, or that thirty years later, when
Mojo
magazine compiled “
The 100 Greatest Albums
Ever Made,” its readers would rank
Revolver
number one, hands down. “From the day it came out, it changed the way everyone else made records,” Geoff Emerick reminisced in that celebrated issue. “No one had ever heard anything like that before.”

And though they may have been ahead of the curve, the Beatles were not alone. Every week articles filled the pages of
Billboard, NME,
and
Melody Maker
with the incredible stuff that was pouring out of new groups. Two weeks before the Beatles’ American tour opened, the Lovin’ Spoonful soared to the top of the pop charts with the harder-edged “Summer in the City,” displacing “Wild Thing,” by the Troggs. The Beach Boys put out the legendary
Pet Sounds
about the same time Bob Dylan released
Blonde on Blonde.
“Mother’s Little Helper” and “Paint It Black” certified the Stones’ outlaw status. The daring “Eight Miles High” launched the Byrds into outer space. The Holland-Dozier-Holland assembly line continued cranking out sweet soul classics. Tim Hardin made his enviable debut, along with albums by Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Laura Nyro, the Mothers of Invention, and the Velvet Underground, each one as original and eclectic as the next. Ultimately, however, it was the Beatles that provided the most uncompromising, even disruptive, listening experience.
Q
would eventually refer to
Revolver
as a “
scaling of new musical peaks
… a quantum leap forward” for a band of beloved pop heroes. But corresponding as it did with John’s controversial comments, it also represented entry into a dark, ruthless crosscurrent destined to reroute the Beatles as cultural reactionaries.
Image,
which had always defined the Beatles, now daunted those fans who were unprepared for a transition. ”
We’re not trying to pass off as kids
,” John insisted. “We have been Beatles as best we ever will be—those four jolly lads. But we’re not those people anymore.” There was no point in keeping up the pose as those wacky teenage idols, not when they’d evolved into the kind of men and musicians who produced a document as riveting as
Revolver.
As individuals, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were growing up; as the Beatles, they were beginning to grow apart.