The Beatles (143 page)

Paul assumed that his hospitality would have a therapeutic effect on John and Yoko, that they would enjoy a carefree, homey stay and start off life together on the right romantic foot. Instead, they spent almost all their time at Cavendish camped out on his couch, watching television and staring vacantly into each other’s eyes—activities, that, according to Barry Miles,
made “Paul [feel] uncomfortable
.” Miles put much of the blame on “their drug use [which] made communication difficult,” but attributed it to smoking weed and “eating hash cookies that Yoko baked.”

Paul, however, knew different. “
[John] was getting into harder drugs
than we’d been into,” he recalled, crediting it to a sinister liaison with the junkie art dealer Robert Fraser, who’d only recently gained his release from prison on a drug charge. It was Fraser, according to Paul, who introduced John to heroin before the Beatles left for India, and he’d begun sniffing it with Yoko soon after their return. The residual effects both troubled and “disappointed” Paul, as well as the other Beatles. Outwardly, the drug manifested itself, he said, in
John’s “adversity and… craziness
,” but the underlying influence had also crept insidiously into the songs.

It was evident right off the bat, when on May 30, 1968, the Beatles began work on the new album. The first song they tackled was John’s indecisive but audacious, bluesy “Revolution,” which kicked things off in tantalizingly chaotic fashion. Eventually, three versions of the song would
find its way into release, but the foundation of this track set the tone for the contradictory rhetoric that followed.

“Revolution” may have sprung from the anger and disillusionment that fractured mainstream society in 1968, but it was written in the peaceful splendor of Rishikesh, which, as John later noted, wrapped a “
‘God will save us’
feeling about it.” In the days just preceding the recording, however, the news was full of the student rebellion and subsequent strikes in Paris. John put little faith in the outcome of student violence. His vision was utopian; he didn’t believe in
overthrowing
governments; he wanted to
revitalize
them, to change the world peacefully by forcing blissful smiles onto the faces of bureaucrats and ideologues who wielded the power. The way to best serve that, said John, was through talk, through communication, by putting faith in the people. “
I really thought that love
would save us all.” But Paris was on his mind as he entered the studio.

The Beatles recorded an initial eighteen takes of “Revolution” in a blistering ten-hour session that stretched from the afternoon of May 30 well into the night. In its original version, the song swung into a smoldering, bluesy groove that built gradually and coasted into a fade after about five minutes of upbeat jam. On the last take, however, the Beatles let it all hang out. There was more of an edge to John’s performance, which signaled the rest of the group to stay alert. They knew the score: anytime a vocal turned hot, there was magic to be mined. And John sounded torrid. He hit all the phrases with particularly sly accents. As the arrangement drew to the usual close, John shifted gears and all hell broke loose, punctuated by fractured chords and strings of shrill violent feedback, with mournful screams riding up over the runaway passage. If the additional six-minute free-form jam was meant to convey the sound of revolution, as he said, it succeeded, thanks to the tumultuous explosion of sound. The squall picked up speed from its own momentum, and the Beatles tore forward for ten minutes, until John shouted: “OK, I’ve had enough!”

The first part, the blues, became known as “Revolution No. 1.” (The rest of it was lopped off and used as the groundwork for what would become the inscrutable blockbuster, “Revolution No. 9.”) Honest but conceptually clumsy, the song was never intended as a galvanizing anthem for the radical New Left. “
He doesn’t really get off the fence
in it,” Paul said much later. Clearly, John grappled with his position. The next day he took a pencil to it, trying to sharpen his central theme, rewriting the song right up until it was put on tape. Even then he appeared uncomfortable with the point of view. During rehearsals, a studio technician observed John struggling
with the lyric—“hedging his bets,” as Paul described it—tweaking crucial phrases each pass he made through the verse. “
He seemed to be particularly focused
on one specific line, testing it again and again with alternative endings.” Perched atop a barstool, curled closely over his guitar, John sang, “When you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out,” following it with “… you can count me in.” Out… in… out… in… “I don’t think he was sure which way he felt about it at the time,” Paul recalled, and on the album version they covered all bases: singing “out”
and
“in.”

Throughout each successive take,
Yoko Ono sat “perversely
” by John’s side. “
It was fairly shocking
,” recalls Alan Brown, a technical engineer who had begun working at Abbey Road only a few weeks earlier. Even though Brown was relatively new on the scene, he knew the golden rule: outsiders were prohibited from entering the studio when the Beatles were recording. The boys themselves never allowed visitors to watch them work.
Never!
Even Brian Epstein and Dick James had entered at their own risk and stayed only long enough to conduct some piece of vital business.

Now, suddenly, Yoko had landed in the thick of things.
She “just moved in
,” according to George, who was not at all pleased. “
John brought her into the control room
… at the start of the ‘White Album’ sessions,” said Geoff Emerick. “He quickly introduced her to everyone and that was it. She was always by his side after that.”

Yoko’s appearance in the studio functioned as a declaration of war. John knew the bombshell he’d drop by pulling such an aggressive stunt, and he seemed perfectly willing to light the fuse. The look on his face “
dared the others
” to say the wrong word. He almost longed for the opportunity to stage a showdown. Of course, at that very moment, someone should have stood up to him. Someone should have taken John aside and ordered him to get his act together. Someone should have demanded that Yoko leave the studio immediately. Someone should have laid down the law. Incredibly, however, no one did a thing. The other Beatles pretended that nothing unusual had occurred. Inside, they seethed and cut one another tense glances, furious at the intrusion but reluctant to confront John.

Why did they refuse to defend their sanctuary? Why did they shrink from such a petty schoolyard challenge? The Beatles, like everyone else, were caught in the undertow of John’s addiction. They were shaken and terrorized by his volcanic mood swings. He had become more irrational, more hostile toward his mates, erupting unpredictably and without provocation in violent rages. He was always on edge. Of course, the more
explosive John became, the more careful the Beatles were to avoid setting him off and the harder they had to stretch to look the other way. During a rehearsal at George’s house, he swept a tape recorder off the table, sending their work scattering in every direction. Even Paul was unable to bring him under control with a well-placed comment. The emotional ups and downs were simply too difficult for them to fight.

As John waded deeper into the junk, his bond with Yoko strengthened. There wasn’t anywhere he went that she didn’t follow. If John entered the control room to speak with George Martin, Yoko accompanied him. If he huddled with Paul regarding a song or arrangement, Yoko joined the discussion. Whenever Neil arrived to review personal group business, Yoko sat among them.
Studio grunts watched
in amazement as she followed John into the bathroom.

What’s more, she refused to remain a spectator. From the very first session of the new album, Yoko made it clear that she intended to
participate,
hijacking John’s mike during the long “Revolution” jam and moaning or uttering some mumbo jumbo, like “you become naked.” The other Beatles had good reason to be pissed off. To them, this behavior violated their unwritten pact. They had put up with John’s hair-trigger tantrums, his drug “
talk about fixes and monkeys
,” his increasingly strange and fragmented songs, and his hallucinations. But by allowing Yoko Ono to interrupt their session, he had crossed the line. “
[The studio] was where
we
were together
, and that’s why we worked so well,” Ringo explained. “We were all trying to be cool and not mention it, but inside we were all feeling it and talking in corners.”

A sticky tension quickly developed in the studio. The Beatles barreled through forty hours of work on “Revolution,” trying to overlook the intrusion, but Yoko made herself difficult to ignore. Wherever they turned, she was in their face. On “Revolution No. 9,” which meandered on for days while John tinkered with sound effects, Paul remembered: “
Yoko was there
for the whole thing and she made decisions about which loops to use.” She listened to playbacks and critiqued their work. She instructed George Martin to discard takes that everyone else thought were acceptable. Even while the Beatles recorded “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Blackbird,” John and Yoko remained locked away in Studio Two, experimenting with more loops for “Revolution No. 9.”

“Blackbird” was built on a lilting passage from a Bach bourrée that George and Colin Manley had taught Paul at Liverpool Institute. “
I bastardized it
,” he admits of his earnest recitation, “but it was the basis of
how I wrote ‘Blackbird,’ the voicing of the notes… [with] the B string open and the bass G.” Its placement on the record may have suggested a group decision, but the song was anything but an all-out Beatles effort. George and Ringo weren’t even in the studio, having flown off to the States for a brief visit.

It was only a matter of time before tensions boiled over. Paul tiptoed around John and Yoko like a guarded diplomat, but he was clearly disgusted. Wanting nothing more than to work on the music, Paul spent half the time at EMI deferring to the couple’s head games. Finally, the second week in June, he gave John a piece of his mind. Given their rivalry, the others must have been surprised that it took him so long. “
I could hear them
going at it in the hall,” recalls an EMI employee who had stopped in his tracks, “and it was terrifying. Paul was positively
livid,
accusing John of being reckless, childish, sabotaging the group.” But the more Paul fumed, it seemed, the less John responded. “It wasn’t making the least bit of an impression.”

John thought he did his best to appease the others, but his hostility was impossible to contain. He decided that by ignoring Yoko, they’d insulted her. It infuriated him that the Beatles refused to welcome her as they would any other musician. “
She came in and she would expect
to perform with them, like you would with any group,” John argued. But when she tried to jam with them, “there would be a sort of coldness about it.” That was putting it mildly! Referring to the deep freeze toward Yoko that followed, he later said, “Why should she take that kind of shit from those people?”

But Yoko only brought to the surface resentments that had been brewing among
those people
for the past year. John couldn’t stand Paul’s crowd-pleasing attitude, nor his insistence on doing things a certain way—
his
way. He was “
fed up [with] being sideman
for Paul.” The type of music he wanted to play was being obliterated by the kind of “
cop out
” material Paul was churning out for the masses. And Paul, of course, was tired of dealing with a drug addict who was more interested in staring blankly at the television set than in making records.

Just when a showdown seemed inevitable, Paul left on a weeklong visit to the United States, where he planned to promote the Apple agenda at a Capitol Records sales conference. On June 21 he flew to Los Angeles with Ivan Vaughan and Tony Bramwell, while John and Yoko edited “Revolution No. 9” and launched the basic track for “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.” It would not be the last time that maintaining peace necessitated separating John and Paul from each other by different continents.

In Los Angeles, Paul issued a proclamation that took EMI by surprise. “From now on,” he told the stunned audience of adoring execs, “our records will be released on the Apple label.” That was news to the Capitol crew, who regarded the Beatles as their star attraction. Convinced of the Beatles’ Midas touch, the American label was eager to tap into the promising Apple pipeline.

With Apple at their disposal, assuring them of financial success, the Beatles decided they no longer needed anyone else. In June they had Ron Kass notify EMI that henceforth they would be releasing their own records and expected the company to handle distribution. Sir Joe Lockwood was more annoyed than opposed. Recognizing the Beatles’ valuable association with EMI, he became a reluctant ally. He’d allow it for Europe, as long as the group’s Capitol identity remained intact. The American label depended heavily on the Beatles’ star power as a magnet to attract top talent, and EMI was not about to let them out of the Capitol contract without a fight. But Ron Kass held trump. “
Finally, he just told EMI
to forget it—that Apple intended to sign a distribution deal in America with another label, at which point they withdrew the demand and agreed to a worldwide arrangement.”