The Beatles (129 page)

It’s not as hard to figure out why Brian volunteered the Beatles as it is why they agreed to cooperate. They’d just finished five months of intensive work on
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
and were earnestly preoccupied with its promotion. What’s more, they were expected to contribute a song for the broadcast. It stood to reason that, because of complicated special effects, they could not perform anything from the new album. And an ancient yeah-yeah-yeah song was out of the question; they’d moved well beyond that image as a band. That meant writing something new for the program, which seemed like a crushing task.

Surprisingly, they didn’t balk.
Paul had been working on
a song anyway—“Hello Goodbye”—that he put up for consideration. At the same time, John brought in “All You Need Is Love,” which, according to George Martin, “
seemed to fit with the overall concept
of the program.” The show’s producers had issued only one instruction: “
keep it simple
so that viewers across the globe will understand.” Tony Barrow recalled how John sat at the piano and previewed the song slowly, playing it in an almost dirgelike fashion for his mates, after which George leaned toward Paul and muttered: “
Well, it’s certainly repetitive
.” The Beatles demo’ed John’s song at Olympic Sound and thus made a unanimous decision.

As the broadcast drew near, however, they realized that performing it live, without a safety net, was far too risky. Since the Beatles’ first few hurried recording sessions at the beginning of their career, they’d become used to taking their sweet time in the studio, overdubbing and correcting mistakes,
stretching vocals, massaging guitar licks, tweaking everything with electronics. Nothing was left to chance anymore. The Beatles hadn’t performed as a band in almost a year. There was no telling how they’d sound au naturel. “
We must do some preparation
for this,” George Martin told them. “We can’t just go in front of 350 million people without some work.”

A backing track would provide an insurance policy. But, unexpectedly, it was rejected by the show’s organizers. The idea of the live satellite broadcast, they reminded Martin, was to demonstrate how spontaneous performances were transmitted around the globe. A backing track violated the spirit of the event. But Martin knew what he couldn’t dare say: that the Beatles worked casually, by trial and error, often bumping about until he provided firm direction. They weren’t prima donnas, but they were in the neighborhood, and thanks to drugs, there was unpredictability to consider. Martin strongly defended using a prerecorded track and urged NEMS to “
make it a strict condition
upon which the group’s appearance would depend,” which a designated liaison eventually did. Ordinarily this kind of tactic might have produced a standoff at the BBC, but as time had grown short and the Beatles were already featured prominently in ads for the show, the producers had no choice but to accept.

The recording, as one might expect, grew progressively more complex, with layers of atmospheric and experimental sounds ladled over an otherwise languid rhythm track, the mongrel construction made impossibly more convoluted by stitching a few bars of “La Marseillaise” onto the opening. A harpsichord drifted in and out between plinks on a banjo, pulls on a string bass, bows across a violin (played by George Harrison, of all people), and other oddball effects. Just to make sure no stone was left unturned, a thirteen-piece orchestra filed in one night to weave samples of one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, “Greensleeves,” and “In the Mood” into the fade. So much for spontaneity. Five days and fifty-eight takes later, a “basic” track was approved.

What had once promised viewers a glimpse of the Beatles during a standard recording session had evolved into a production of epic proportions. Once they’d committed themselves to appearing, once they’d gotten
involved,
it became necessary to stage a spectacular event befitting their spectacular mystique. Heaven forbid the public perceive the Beatles’ recording session as merely
routine!
That wouldn’t do. So,
on the eve of the broadcast
, Tony Bramwell was dispatched to the London club circuit with instructions to hunt down famous friends willing to “drop in” on the session. At the Scotch of St. James, Bramwell drafted Eric Clapton; Mick
Jagger and Marianne Faithfull at the Bag o’ Nails; Keith Moon and Graham Nash at the Speakeasy; Gary Leeds, one of the Walker Brothers, at the Cromwellian. “
Everyone I asked jumped
at the chance,” he recalls. “In fact, most called it a night early, in order to put together a wardrobe.”

“
By 7pm [on June 25]
, the studio appeared to be in chaos,” Tony Barrow reported. Studio One, the big hangarlike facility at Abbey Road, was crammed with “flower-waving crowds of Beautiful People,” who were oblivious to the battalion of sound technicians and camera operators struggling to put the final touches on the historic transmission. One can only imagine the difficulty they had in adjusting the contrast for the cameras: to complement the carnival atmosphere, the guests were dressed to the nines in flamboyant, brightly colored costumes that clashed with the inflated latex globes and vivid balloons floating above the fixtures. Giant displays of exotic flowers radiated against the garish backdrop. The Beatles themselves gave off a fuzzy flush in their Technicolor garb: Paul, looking debonair in a double-breasted white sport coat draped over a shirt he had hand-colored the night before; George, decked out in an orange paisley jacket whose design and texture resembled an Aubusson carpet; Ringo, swathed cosmically in a silk, suede, and fake-fur outfit designed by the Fool that looked left over from the Crusades. “
It was so bloody heavy
,” he recalled. “I had all this beading on, and it weighed a ton.” Only John, doleful and glassy-eyed, turned up in a smart-looking banker’s dark pin-striped suit that seemed as outrageous for its elegance as for its posting on John Lennon.

In all the turmoil, between miscues and mischief, the Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” to the world without a hint of disorganization. They sat perched on barstools placed directly in front of the guests, appearing as cool as only the Beatles could look under such hothouse circumstances. John, Paul, and George seemed impervious to the do-or-die situation, synching their voices beautifully, perfectly, to the backing track. The prerecorded music no longer mattered—if it ever did. Remembered chiefly for its stripped-down, monotonous chorus, the song’s verses were nevertheless quite a mouthful for John, who spit them out on camera as though they were child’s play. “
There’snothin-youcandothatcan’tbedone…”
It sounded effortless, done in one Hail Mary take, much the way he’d fired off “Twist and Shout” four and a half years earlier: rock-steady and right on. For all the technical effects John had come to rely on for vocal support, none were needed to show off his extraordinary range that night. It was all right there, in the pocket, just where it had always been.

John relaxed visibly as the song cruised into its extended fade. “La Marseillaise” drew a ceremonial reprise, giving way to “In the Mood” and “Greensleeves,” as planned. But John, who had tinkered in rehearsal with a fragment of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” suddenly chimed in with a few bars of an old standby that no one—probably not even John—had anticipated. At a juncture in the action, he sang out: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah…,” in an inspired bit of self-parody: perfect!

It touched off a festive reaction in the studio. Balloons and confetti rained down from the ceiling, as five men draped in sandwich boards proclaiming “All You Need Is Love” in four languages paraded across the floor in front of the grinning Beatles. Mike McCartney launched a series of cue cards, instructing viewers to “Smile” and “Laf Now.” Another, scrawled hastily by his cousin Anne Danher, brandished the mysterious communiqué: “Come back, Milly! All is forgiven!”—a message to Paul’s aunt, on vacation in Australia, who, it was feared, might not return to Liverpool.

With the kind of exposure the song had received, the Beatles were left with little choice other than to release “All You Need Is Love” as a single. Most of the work had already been done. A few overdubs were added to polish the track; Ringo contributed an introductory drum roll, and John, never satisfied with the way he sounded, insisted on patching his splendid vocal. Otherwise, it was ready to be remixed and mastered the next day, and it was shipped a week later as the Beatles’ fifteenth single.

Curiously, no single was ever released from
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. The Beatles had already given that album everything they had and decided that, once again, it was time for them to move on.

Brian Epstein had been “
too out of sorts
” to attend the “All You Need” broadcast. Left to his own devices, Brian languished in seclusion, “
zonked
,” as one employee put it, “either drunk or on drugs.” There was no key role in it for him and therefore no emotional upside, nothing for him to grab hold of with which to lift himself out of the funk. Even though he busied himself with ongoing productions at the Saville Theatre (where,
on one amazing bill in early June
, he presented the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Denny Laine, the Chiffons, and Procol Harum), the sinister warp of moodiness was too strong for him to escape.

Once again Brian tried to blow out the cobwebs by throwing a party at
his Kingsley Hill estate. While the affair was meant to lift his spirits, sources indicate that Brian intended to meet with the Beatles before the other guests arrived so that he could tell them about his relationship with Robert Stigwood. With only a few weeks remaining before Stigwood’s option came due, he worried that it would appear as though he had deceived them.

It was not to be. After a number of wildly productive months and a reinvented image, the Beatles decided to reinvent Brian’s party as a full-fledged acid blowout. Their tripping, which had always been dependent on the drug’s available supply, suddenly knew no bounds, thanks largely to John. He had figured out how to tap the mother lode—the source of the purest LSD ever made, courtesy of the legendary chemist Stanley Owsley, whose lab operated out of San Francisco. Buying it was no problem; John had the money and agreed to pay top dollar for a lifetime supply. The problem was smuggling it into Great Britain. With the help of a few film freelancers, he commissioned a cameraman named Steve Sanders to film the Monterey Pop Festival, over the June 17 weekend. It didn’t matter that the festival’s film rights had long been sold to ABC-TV. When Derek Taylor reminded John of that fact, John didn’t demur. The film wasn’t intended for distribution, he explained, but for his own private viewing. He might have enjoyed watching it, too, had there ever been film in the cannister, but that wasn’t John’s motive. Instead, the crew’s equipment was used to conceal the acid.

Over the next three weeks, under the influence of the especially potent blotter acid, the Beatles seemed locked on a course of reckless hedonism. First they traveled to Greece, under the clutches at the time of a despotic military junta, for the purpose of buying a cluster of islands in the Aegean, where they could live and record communally, in splendid isolation. “
The idea was that you’d have
four houses with tunnels connecting them to a central dome,” Neil Aspinall recalled. The scenic space in between would be filled with meditation posts, recording and painting studios, a go-kart track, and a private landing strip. Neil would also be provided for on the island, along with the usual suspects: Brian Epstein, Mal Evans, Terry Doran, Derek Taylor, and their families.
According to several well-placed insiders
, this was the brainstorm of Alexis Mardas,
the son of a major
in the Greek secret police, who had recently ingratiated himself into the Beatles’ circle by beguiling them with stories of his mind-boggling inventions.
Magic Alex, as John dubbed him
, was working as a television repairman when he met the Beatles. Nevertheless, he possessed a powerful imagination and masterly gift for sweet talk.

“
Alex wasn’t magic
at all,” George admitted, “but John thought he had something and he became friendly with us.” Alex immediately produced his signature artifact, a box decorated with lights that flashed in an irregular fashion. What was it? What did it do? Whatever you wanted, he replied in the spirit of cosmic coolness. John, spaced out on acid, found the box fascinating; he could stare at it for hours. He introduced Alex to Paul and others as his “new guru,” shrugging in response to their questions about his powers.

Taking advantage of John’s susceptible condition and deepest anxieties, Alex concocted other mystical enthusiasms designed to tantalize his new disciple. He was working on a telephone, he said, that responded to voice recognition and identified incoming callers. There was a substance he was secretly developing that would enable him to build a force field around their homes, another that prevented anyone from rear-ending a car, an X-ray camera, invisible beams, wallpaper speakers. “
Magic Alex invented invisible paint
,” according to Ringo, who marveled at each fantastic brainstorm. He also encouraged a practice he called “trepanning,” which involved having a hole drilled in one’s head. “Magic Alex said that if we had it done our inner third eye would be able to see, and we’d get cosmic instantly.”

Drugs or no drugs, the Beatles had to suspect that they were being taken for a ride, especially when Alex requisitioned the V-12 engines from George’s Ferrari and John’s Rolls so that he could build a flying saucer. Paul claimed that they were onto Alex early but still enjoyed hearing his interesting ideas. “
We didn’t really call anyone’s bluff
,” he said, “it would have been a bit too aggressive. So we just let him get on with it.”

For the Beatles, the trip was sun-filled and joyous, but the Greek Islands were not, in fact, deemed residence-worthy. Between the rocky slip of a coastline, intermittent severe thunderstorms, and the boredom that set in as soon as the acid wore off, the thought of homesteading never came up. Even so, they instructed their accountants to purchase the islands anyway,
paying £95,000
, plus a 25 percent premium, which was taken off their hands a few months later for a modest profit. They would not always be so lucky.