The Beatles (126 page)

The Beatles worked on polishing “Magical Mystery Tour” over four days at Abbey Road, looping the track with extraneous traffic noise and sound effects from the studio’s audio library. When even that failed to lift it off the ground, they added background shouts and layered on echo. What had once provided punch, however, now sounded deliberate, if not heavy-handed. It took every ounce of their imagination to finally finish the song.
When the Beatles returned
to the studio on May 9, essentially to decide what to do next, it was clear they had run out of steam. The session deteriorated into a disorganized, loopy, seven-hour jam—perhaps due to boredom, perhaps to drugs—nevertheless, a condition that served to stall work on the project for several months.

Obviously, this frustrated Paul, who thrived on the energy crackling in the atmosphere. Even when the Beatles had no commitments, he seldom rested. At the slightest spark, he would flame into action. “We can do this. Then we can do that. And maybe if this falls into place, we can take it there and do…” If the rest of them wanted to get stoned and sleep in front of the telly, that was their problem. Fuck the dopeheads! Paul was bursting at the seams with creative energy, and nothing, absolutely nothing, was going to stand in his path.

Somehow he kept things moving long enough to launch yet another session in advance of his mystery tour and several other rapid-fire projects, including a full-length feature cartoon based on the song “Yellow Submarine” and a new single set for summer release. Part of the other Beatles’ cooperation may have rested on their curiosity about the studio. For only the second time in their record career, they decided to work outside of Abbey Road, detouring for a night to Olympic Sound, in nearby Barnes. The Stones worked there, as did dozens of the edgy, emerging British bands, where it was said that the studio manager, Keith Grant, ran things at a slam-bang pace.
Fast
was attractive to the Beatles, who were easily bored to begin with; add to that their exacting, exhaustive work on
Sgt. Pepper’s,
and a quickie sounded like a splendid proposition.

The Olympic song, itself, was a paste-up job. Based on a news item he’d seen about hippies—the Bay Area’s self-proclaimed “beautiful people”—John had been playing around with a lyric called “One of the Beautiful People” that scanned as too convoluted and long-winded on its own. It wasn’t going where he wanted it to—that is, until Paul tacked on the lick “baby, you’re a rich man” that had floated to the fore in his notebook. Suddenly, as with so many of their collaborations, the Lennon-McCartney team pulled a song out of the scrap heap—or, as John later dismissed it, “
a combination of two separate
pieces… put together and forced into one song”—the whole being spectacularly more than the sum of its parts. With “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” they had come up with a number whose imagery, if nothing else, captured the blatant hypocrisy of the burgeoning hippie scene.

Working at Olympic was a welcome liberation from the frustrations the Beatles faced during the
Sgt. Pepper’s
sessions. There was none of the ponderous, scientific, deliberate approach to sound recording that had paced their recent sessions. No eggheads padded through the control room in identical, starched lab coats, paging through engineering manuals and dog-eared rule books. No one had to be
consulted
before a piece of equipment or technique could be employed. Geoff Emerick, their trusty board man, had the touch—but he was an EMI drone, part of the system, whereas Keith Grant ran his own show from the board. At Olympic, his session
felt
like rock ’n roll.

After laying down the first few takes, several of the Stones showed up to root on the Beatles and lend a hand. Brian Jones tinkered with a spacy oboe effect, Mick Jagger sang a few lines of backup. The whole thing had the feel of an after-hours party. By the time the shindig reached its peak in
the postmidnight hours, even John fed off the buzz and grew giddy, expressing his delight by tweaking bits of the lyric. There were numerous aborted takes owing to his frisky, even scandalous, improvisations. He took some wicked shots at Paul, Ringo, and Mick, according to one observer; otherwise, “everyone else was spared.”

Not quite everyone. An oblivious victim wasn’t mentioned by name, but no interpretation was necessary when John, grinning like a jackal, was
unable “to resist singing
, on some of the later choruses, ‘Baby, you’re a rich fag Jew.’ ”

Rueful of his decision to sell a controlling interest in NEMS, Brian still hadn’t told the boys that Robert Stigwood had taken over the day-to-day operations. “
He knew he had to confront it
,” says
Peter Brown
, “but he couldn’t find the right time—or right way.” No matter how he presented it, it would seem weak, perhaps even underhanded. Still, by not telling them, Brian was playing a dangerous game; sooner or later the Beatles would find out, at which point there was sure to be a dramatic confrontation. Moreover, they might feel betrayed by the apparent deception. Of course, Brian hoped to invalidate the Stigwood deal before the option came due, making the Beatles’ knowledge of it irrelevant. Still, should the strategy backfire, it could damage his relationship with the boys. And he knew it. Paul was already on Brian’s back about their intricate financial arrangements, wanting to know, well,
everything
. “He was a real pain in the ass,” Brown says. “He always thought he knew best. He was always second-guessing Brian’s decisions.”

Had he done more than second-guess, Paul might have stumbled into the darkest tunnel, which was the Beatles’ personal management contract with NEMS. It was up in October 1967, just a few short months off. After five years at the reins of the greatest show on earth, Brian watched as the date loomed near, and he was terrified—“
positively sick
”—of being sacked as the Beatles’ manager. Brian had certainly taken them to the toppermost of the poppermost, but now that they were there, how much more could he do for them? No dates needed to be booked. No record deals needed negotiating. What, if anything, did they expect from a manager?

As with everything, it came down to money. The Beatles were satisfied, for the most part, by the increases in their new EMI contract, although resentment festered over the remaining careless deals, especially the lopsided music publishing arrangement with Dick James, which was
siphoning off hundreds of thousands of pounds, maybe millions, from their coffers.
Paul felt strongly
that he and John deserved more than a 20 percent share of their copyrights. Why had Brian allowed them to sign away the lion’s share of their rights? With so much leverage, why wasn’t he able to muscle James into a more equitable arrangement? Paul wasn’t the only one asking such questions—George wanted answers, too—but he was the most persistent.

Paul had heard vague rumors about an American accountant named Allen Klein, who had restructured the Rolling Stones’ Decca Records contract and won them a $1.25 million signing bonus. “
What about us?
” he demanded of Brian during a confrontation in a crowded elevator.
What about us?
It was the kind of question Brian dreaded most.

While the paranoia may have been irrational, his fear of Klein wasn’t. Brian had taken an immediate disliking to the American the moment he laid eyes on him. They had met in 1964, when Klein was managing Sam Cooke, and it was clear that this was a beast of a different nature. Brian may have liked hustlers, but he didn’t like
hustlers,
which Klein clearly was, a “
fast-talking, dirty-mouthed
man in his early-thirties, sloppily dressed and grossly overweight,” as Peter Brown described him in a 1983 memoir. He’d approached Brian on the premise of an opening spot for Cooke on the Beatles’ American tour, but once Klein got his foot in the door he cleverly turned the talk to the business of renegotiating the Beatles’ EMI contract. Brian, of course, was neither interested nor amused. This cheek—together with Klein’s “poaching” of Donovan and the Rolling Stones—earned Brian’s bitter enmity. It became Brian’s strategy to keep a good distance from such a potentially dangerous adversary, so much so that when Klein bumped into Brian and Nat Weiss at a Cyrkle gig in Palisades Park,
Brian refused to shake hands
.

No one in the inner circle felt even remotely that the Beatles would cut Brian loose. “At worst, they might have renegotiated his commission, reducing it from twenty-five percent to perhaps fifteen,” says Nat Weiss, a believer with particular insight, “and I told Brian this whenever he wrestled with the subject.” Nat says that deep down, even Brian believed they would ultimately keep him on—“It’s a matter of chemistry,” he’d admit—but that, too, would eventually give way to his destructive impulses.

Most days, he couldn’t drag himself out of bed before five o’clock in the evening, and often then it was only to stumble downstairs, “
fucked-up and all hazy
,” in pajamas for tea and toast. His personal secretary, Joanne Newfield, “
felt that more and more
he was having trouble coping.” Once,
when a phone number he demanded wouldn’t go through as a result of Joanne’s mistake, “he just went wild,” she recalled, hurling a china teapot across the room and striking her. Another time, Joanne misdialed the Grosvenor House and barely dodged the airborne phone. Peter Brown also suffered countless humiliations at Brian’s hands. Following a vacation to Acapulco and Mexico City in late February, the two men settled in Brian’s usual thirty-fifth floor river-view suite at the Waldorf Towers in New York, where they planned to catch the last performance of Jane Asher’s American tour. “
One night Peter had been
sent out on an errand,” recalls Nat Weiss, “and when he came back it was clear he had overspent for something.” Brian was presented with a receipt and some change, but it seemed only to aggravate the situation. Suddenly he flung the change in Peter’s face and screamed, “You’re sacked! Go back to London—and go
economy
class!” Then it got extremely physical. Weiss recalls: “It was really very violent.” (Brown did go back to London, but he remained on the NEMS payroll, ever determined to foster Brian’s welfare.)

In an effort to reverse, or at least slow, his boss’s decline, Brown conspired with their friend John Pritchard, the conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, to get Brian out of London on weekends, where the go-go lifestyle seemed to be consuming him. Paging through the listings in
Country Life,
they spotted one place in particular, “
a rather grand farmhouse
” in the next village from Pritchard’s, a few miles from Rushlake Green. Brown knew instantly that Brian would love it. Known as Kingsley Hill, it was a handsome, ivy-and-wisteria-covered structure, a few hundred years old, with a small garden and a pond on the property. At £30,000, it was quite reasonable, and Brown had predicted correctly—after one viewing, Brian bought it on the spot. But it did little good.

His drug abuse worse, he became “
more irrational, more incoherent
.” Concluded Robert Stigwood: “You can’t count on Brian anymore. He’s not in his right mind. The best thing we can do is just ignore him completely.”

“Stigwood had Brian written off as though he was dead,” says Nat Weiss. Even by Robert’s standards, however, it was a little premature.

May 19, 1967, was launch day: Brian from his quarters at the Priory, where he once again had retreated in yet another failed attempt to reach some equilibrium, and
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
to the London
press.
^*
No one had come within a mile of the Beatles since the beginning of the year—the
Daily Mail
complained they had “
isolated themselves not only
personally, but also musically”—so it was time to put some of the speculation to rest. To commemorate the occasion,
a small but “grandiose” party
was held at the Chapel Street town house, whose living room had been hastily rearranged to accommodate the handpicked guests. The invitation list was highly selective—a dozen top-tier journalists, a dozen photographers, half as many influential deejays, scattered among a few NEMS insiders and, of course, the Beatles.

Champagne flowed freely as the press awaited the Beatles’ grand entrance. They were still upstairs in a photo session brokered by Tony Barrow, held captive while a dozen power-driven cameras clicked away without pause. Normally, photo sessions were excruciating ordeals, stiff and phony, but the Beatles felt comfortable with this outfit. All were familiar faces on the clubby British rock circuit, most of them young, long-haired guys about their age who mixed and socialized after the job was done. All except one, that is.

Linda Eastman was an interloper—an American
and
a woman—but very much a photographer in her own right. She had been twenty-three years old when, two years earlier, she talked her way into a Rolling Stones press party to strike up a conversation with Mick Jagger. Determined to take advantage of the opportunity, “she pulled out an expensive camera,” a guest recalls, “and flirted gamely with Mick while reeling off several rolls of film.”