Week Nine: The Beatles-Later Years (1965-1970)

November 1965: Bob Dylan single handedly showed the Beatles a new way to fashion themselves. He did this through the way that he sand, the way that he wrote songs, the scruffy and offhand way that he played harmonica and guitar. Even more, though, he did it through the edge in his voice, the defiance in his gaze, the breathtaking freedom of his actions both on stage and off.

His influence, in short, was a matter of attitude.

George Harrison was the first of the Beatles to pay attention. In 1963, with the band in the grip of Beatlemania, Harrison bought Dy­lan's second album, the one with "Blowin' in the Wind" on it, and played it for his mates. McCartney, impressed, duly bought the first Dylan album, the one with all the songs about death and the cover photo of a baby-faced, avowedly Chaplinesque tramp wearing a cor­duroy cap. As it happened, John Lennon owned a cap of the same style; and as he fretted out loud, with a reporter present, "Paul bought a Bob Dylan record, and he was wearing this exact cap on the cover. He even had the button open like mine. Everybody will think I copied it from him."

Never mind the intelligence and idiosyncrasy of Dylan's word­play—Dylan's look was reason enough for jealousy. A rival and a natural model in the eyes of Lennon, Dylan was a paragon of bohemian chic, someone who represented everything that Lennon still silently aspired to: artistic integrity, musical honesty, the priceless ca­chet of being hip, not with screaming teenagers, but with serious adults—poets like Alien Ginsberg, artists like Andy Warhol, political leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr.

On the night of August 28, 1964, the Beatles and Bob Dylan met face-to-face for the first time. The place was a hotel room in New York City, the occasion a post-concert get-together, organized after the Beatles had finished an outdoor show at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in front of 16,000 fans—many of them screaming teenagers.

Eagerly awaited, Dylan made a grand entrance, sweeping past a roomful of people waiting patiently to see the Fab Four—reporters, photographers, radio announcers, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Kingston Trio (for some reason, folk singers were drawn to the Beatles). waiting, Dylan was offered a hit of "speed"—since their days in Hamburg, the Beatles kept themselves up by using amphetamines. Turning down the pill, Dylan offered to roll a joint.

Sheepishly, the band admitted that they had never tried marijuana.

Dylan was floored. What about that line in their song? "Love that one, man," McCartney recalls him saying: "I get high, I get high, I get high." He was still laboring under the misapprehension that "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was a delphic ode to dope.

The band was eager to make up for lost time. Blinds were pulled, drapes drawn, doors bolted shut. Given the green light, Dylan began to roll joints. After issuing brief instructions about how to inhale, he lit one and passed it to Lennon. Reluctant to plunge right in, Lennon passed it on to Ringo—"my royal taster," he nervously joked. Ringo puffed away, while Dylan rolled and passed out more joints.

As the pot kicked in, the band became giddy. Ringo began to laugh, and the others began to laugh, too. "I'm so high," Brian Epstein exclaimed, "I'm on the ceiling!"

"It's as though we're up there," Paul agreed, pointing at the ceil­ing—"up there, looking down on us!"

Excited by a flood of sudden thoughts, McCartney, as he has re­called, scrambled around the room looking for a piece of paper and a pencil "because I discovered the meaning of life that evening and I wanted to get it down. . . . And I went into a little room and wrote it all down, 'cos I figured that, coming from Liverpool, this was all very exotic and I had to let my ordinary people know, you know, what this was all about: like if you find the meaning of life, you've got to kind of put it about. Mal"—the Beatles' road manager— "handed me the little bit of paper the next morning after the party and on it was written, in very scrawly handwriting: THERE ARE SEVEN LEVELS. Till then we'd been sort of hard scotch and Coke men. It sort of changed that evening."

Change it certainly did—for McCartney; for the Beatles; and for the global youth culture that the Beatles now embodied, if only sym­bolically.

Up till then, rock and roll had been primarily a music of revelry, a medium for lifting people up and helping them dance their blues away. Under the combined influences of marijuana and Bob Dylan's unkempt persona, the Beatles would turn it into something else again: a music of introspective self-absorption, a medium fit for com­municating autobiographical intimacies, political discontents, spiritual elation, inviting an audience, not to dance, but to //stew—quietly, attentively, thoughtfully.

The first thing to change was the texture of the Beatles' recorded sound. Starting with "Eight Days a Week," "She's a Woman," and "I Feel Fine," all recorded in October 1964, the band began to toy with different technical tricks in the studio, expanding their palette of musical colors, creating new kinds of artificial sounds: for "Eight Days a Week," they improvised a fade-in to the song; for "I Feel Fine," they worked with distorted sonorities and deliberately pro­duced feedback; and for "She's a Woman," they built an entire song around a boldly melodic bass line. The experimentation continued, as Lennon created an entirely acoustic, folk feel for "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," while McCartney helped George Martin overdub an austere string quartet onto "Yesterday," a ballad of classic proportions, instantly recognized as such. (In 1992, British composer Peter Maxwell Davies declared "Yesterday" to be his fa­vorite Beatles song, "because it demonstrates the generosity of spirit in Paul McCartney's melodies and their exemplary, instinctive technical know-how.")

Serious as their newfound dedication to sound was, a rediscovered taste for whimsy was another by-product of their new drug of choice. "Let's have a laugh" was their private code for "Let's go get stoned." On February 14, 1965, the same day that McCartney recorded "Yesterday," he also recorded "I'm Down," a raving par­ody of Little Richard, delivered with blithe abandon. At the end of the first take of "I'm Down," McCartney, audibly pleased with his performance, mutters "plastic soul, man, plastic soul"—a phrase that, slightly changed, would become the title of the Beatles' next al­bum, Rubber Soul.

A farewell to innocence, the album is (like Dylan's appearance at the Newport Folk Festival earlier in the year) a declaration of inde­pendence.

It has a number of contrasting facets. Some of the songs are comic playlets, including the opening track (on the original British version of the album), "Drive My Car," a facetious vignette that recalls Lennon and McCartney's youthful admiration for Leiber and Stoller. As if to honor the self-deprecating irony of the album's title, this song, like others, incorporates a riff borrowed from a black Ameri­can soul hit—in this case, the model is Otis Redding's "Respect." But the riff is so cleverly concealed, in a song structure so idiomatically distinctive, that it is virtually unrecognizable, functioning as an in­side joke, rather than a generic gesture.

And this was just the beginning of an album that sums up every­thing the Beatles had thus far brought to rock and roll, as well as of­fering a preview of where they were taking it—off the road, and into the studio.

For the preceding two years, as popular adulation for the band had continued to grow uncontrollably, the group had adhered to a tight schedule of touring, recording, and shooting films. Their fame had forced them into playing larger and larger venues, where the roar of the crowds routinely canceled out the sound of the music, creating within the band a growing contempt for the ritual of per­forming. "It's like we're four freaks being wheeled out to be seen, shake our hair about, and get back in our cage afterwards," John Lennon remarked at the time.

He was among the first, though certainly not the last, to remark on the strange vacuity of the live rock concert, once the shows had reached a certain scale, and the performers had provoked a certain level of frenzy: "I reckon we could send out four waxwork dummies of ourselves," said Lennon, "and that would satisfy the crowds. Bea­tles concerts are nothing to do with music, any more. They're just bloody tribal rituals."

Studio work was an escape. And for the first time in two years, the band now demanded a decent interval of time off in which to write and rehearse songs for a new album, their sixth to be released in England—and the first real indication of how profound Dylan's im­pact had really been.

Largely recorded in one month, between October 12 and Novem­ber 11, 1965, Rubber Soul was simultaneously witty and weighty, arty and folky, ironic and sincere—and altogether more impressive than any previous album by the Beatles or, for that matter, virtually any previous album by any other rock and roll act.

Consisting of fourteen songs, all of them new compositions, the album explored an unusual variety of textures and moods. The ex­otic instrumentation included sitar, the Indian instrument (used on "Norwegian Wood"), and bouzouki, a mandolinlike Greek stringed instrument (used on "Girl"). Distorted timbres dominate "The Word," the band's first ode to love as a universal panacea, while acoustic instruments and plush vocal harmonies characterize "Michelle," McCartney's loving parody of a French cabaret song. Throughout, McCartney plays electric bass with a melodic freedom and rhythmic daring rivaled only by his model and main inspiration, James Jamerson, a mainstay of Berry Gordy's Detroit studio band, who played on most of the era's hits by the Supremes, Four Tops, and Temptations.

But if any one song exemplifies the newfound sophistication of the Beatles' songwriting on Rubber Soul, it is "In My Life." A collabora­tive effort, its lyric, by Lennon, is set to a melody, largely composed by McCartney (though in retrospect, no one could agree on the de­tails of who had written what). "It was the first song I wrote that was consciously about my life," Lennon later recalled. It started out as a set of words, without music, cataloguing the places Lennon had passed by on the bus he rode as a child from his home into down­town Liverpool. "I wrote it all down, and it was so boring. So I for­got about it and laid back, and these lyrics started coming to me about friends and lovers of the past."

More powerfully than any Beatle lyric before it, "In My Life" communicates a melancholy mood of yearning, a sentiment that is also conveyed by McCartney's vaulting melody line. After rehearsing and then recording a usable basic track of the song on October 18, Lennon asked George Martin to add "something baroque-sounding here." Martin came up with a clever pastiche, recording a piano part at half speed, and then playing it back at full speed, in this way simu­lating the sound of a harpsichord.

From the moment it was released (on December 3, 1965), it was obvious to anyone listening—and that was millions of people—that Rubber Soul presented, in George Martin's words, "a new, growing Beatles to the world. For the first time we began to think of albums as art on their own, as complete entities."

But it was not just artistry that the album intimated. Halfway round the world, in the crash pads of the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Rubber Soul was avidly received by local poets and folk singers and protesters and the district's scattered bands of born-again beatniks and dope fiends. Listening intently and staring at the album art, people noticed the fun-house photo on the cover, the biomorphic lettering of the title, the line "I get high" in one of the songs on the American version of the album ("It's Only Love"—the line was yet another inside joke, this one aimed at Dylan). And in the Haight, as throughout the bohemian world of students everywhere, in art schools and colleges and universities, people wondered. Could it be—was it possible—that the Beatles, too, were getting stoned?

Years later, McCartney put the moment into perspective. "The main thing," he insisted, "is that people were getting high, that's the main thing. It was the shift from drink to pot in fact—that's really all it was."

Meanwhile, the man who had turned on the Beatles keenly fol­lowed their career, even composing an inscrutable parody of "Nor­wegian Wood" called "4th Time Around." To say that Bob Dylan was ambivalent about the Beatles doesn't quite do justice to the caus­tic closing lines of "4th Time Around": "I never asked for your crutch/Now don't ask for mine."

McCartney recalls a pilgrimage to see Dylan in London a few months after Rubber Soul had come out. "Oh, I get it," McCartney recalls Dylan saying. "You don't want to be cute anymore!" And McCartney, in retrospect, has agreed: "That summed it up. That was sort of what it was. The cute period had ended."

And the strange period was just starting.

June 1, 1967: In the late winter of 1966, not long after Ken Kesey had conducted his first Acid Tests, the wildest episode yet in the adven­ture of the Beatles was launched, at least symbolically, in an avant-garde art gallery and bookstore. Located in Mason's Yard, in central London, near the hottest pop club in town, the Scotch of St. James, the shop was called Indica—in honor of "cannabis indica," a strain of marijuana, and a shared enthusiasm of the shop's cross section of customers, the rock stars and East End artists and stylish West End aristocrats who in these months defined "swinging London" (as Time magazine labeled it).

Besides literature on drugs, Indica carried a discerning selection of beat writing and weird art, which instantly established the shop's tone as quirky and cutting edge: typical was one work, described by an early visitor, consisting of "handbags, lumps of cement, pieces of machinery, and odd scraps of miscellaneous bric-a-brac all glued to­gether on a canvas"—and available for purchase, at a cost of 200 pounds. The wares on display reflected the tastes of Indica's three youthful partners: Barry Miles, John Dunbar, and Peter Asher. Miles, who stocked the books, knew and admired a number of American poets and writers, including Alien Ginsberg and William Burroughs; Dunbar, a graduate of Churchill College, Cambridge, and also mar­ried at the time to pop singer Marianne Faithfull, filled the gallery with artworks that reflected his fondness for Warhol pop art and prankish neo-dadaism; while Asher had bankrolled the venture with some of his earnings from Peter and Gordon, a rock duo that had achieved global success in 1964, largely thanks to recording a Lennon-McCartney song, "World Without Love." (Asher's sister, Jane, was Paul McCartney's girlfriend at the time.)

In addition to helping out Peter and Gordon, Paul McCartney also helped out with Indica, designing flyers to advertise the shop, and also designing its wrapping paper. Even before the store was open to the public, McCartney had become its first prominent customer, buy­ing books like Gandhi on Non-Violence and Drugs and the Mind.

In March 1966, a few weeks after Indica had opened, McCartney brought John Lennon by. As Barry Miles has recalled, Lennon "pro­fessed to be looking for a book by someone named Nitz Ga." After an awkward effort to clarify the request—Lennon was deeply inse­cure about his intellectual pedigree, and ready to lash out at any hint of academic snobbery—Miles went off to hunt down a copy of some­thing by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. When Miles returned, Lennon was paging through a book he had found called The Psychedelic Experience.

First published in 1964, and written by Timothy Leary in collabo­ration with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Ex­perience was meant to help novices prepare to take LSD as a tool of spiritual enlightenment. To this end, the manual instructed users to recite a variety of passages more or less paraphrased from The Ti­betan Book of the Dead, for example: "That which is called ego-death is coming to you. This is now the hour of death and rebirth." In their general introduction, the authors offered an even simpler piece of advice: "Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream."

Intrigued, Lennon purchased a copy of both The Portable Nietz­sche—the book that Miles had found for him—and The Psychedelic Experience. Once home, he decided to put Leary's manual to the test. He'd taken acid only once before, and that trip had not been a happy one. Game to try again, Lennon took to heart Leary's advice—and found the inspiration, not only for a new song, "Tomorrow Never Knows," but also for a whole new way of making music: by whim, on impulse, with a little help from drugs, and a lot of help from elec­tronic gimmickry.

"Tomorrow Never Knows" was a psychedelic tone poem, evoking the singer's "ego death" with tape loops that swooped and swirled behind Lennon's vocal like a flock of vultures. As musicologist lan MacDonald has justly remarked, this recording, "in terms of textural innovation, is to pop what Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique was to 19th-century orchestral music"—a challenge, an inspiration, a revo­lutionary innovation in the arrangement of prerecorded sound. Re­leased on August 5, 1966, as the last song on Revolver, the Beatles' seventh album, "Tomorrow Never Knows" set the musical stamp on London's giddiest cultural season since the end of the war, a summer of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, at least for those in the know about the mind-altering ecstasies of LSD and cannabis indica.

The Beatles, however, had been booked by Brian Epstein on yet another grueling round of concerts. This tour started at the end of June with shows in Germany, proceeded to Japan, and then finally on to the Philippines, where the band had to brave an angry mob af­ter "snubbing" President Marcos and his wife by failing to attend a party Mme. Marcos had given in their honor. After a brief respite in the U.K., the tour resumed with dates in Canada and the United States. Most of the new material from Revolver was, like "Tomor­row Never Knows," impossible to reproduce on stage. In the studio, McCartney and Lennon were testing the limits of their artistry: on stage, they felt like puppets pantomiming music, prisoners of their own fame, trapped by the blind idolatry of their fans, who screamed so loudly that the band could scarcely hear itself play. When the tour ended (in San Francisco, on August 29), all four Beatles privately agreed that they would never tour again.

Returning to England, they took a vacation, their longest break yet since becoming the most famous band in the world. Ringo Starr relaxed with his family. George Harrison, who had recently met the sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar at a dinner party, flew to India to study with him at his Himalayan retreat.

McCartney, donning a disguise, trekked across France to test what it would feel like to live, as he once had, anonymously, without the burden of fame (he concluded that being famous wasn't so bad after all). And John Lennon, caught in a crumbling marriage, lapsed into a chronic state of passive ag­gression, reinforced by constant trips on LSD—a regimen broken by seven weeks on location in Spain, playing the part of a cockney sol­dier in Richard Lester's new antiwar film, How I Won the War.

Early in November, as the Beatles regrouped to go back into the studio to record their next album, word leaked out that the most fa­mous band in the world would no longer be available for live book­ings. And insiders were also quietly warned that the next album was going to be a long time coming.

Executives at the band's parent record company, EMI, weren't thrilled. The received wisdom was that a pop music act should regu­larly tour and issue new music if it wished to produce a steady stream of revenue. But there wasn't much that EMI could do. And so George Martin, still the band's producer, and soon to double as their resident voice of reason, was left to cope, as best he could, with per­haps his toughest assignment yet: "to give them as much freedom as possible in the studio, but to make sure that they did not come off the rails in the process." Apart from the acid-fueled innovations on "Tomorrow Never Knows," the music that the Beatles now began to create had little real precedent in the history of popular music. Slowly, almost indo­lently, one senses from the various accounts, the Beatles returned to the recording studio—but with no definite plan, and no fixed timetable. Since this, after all, was the Beatles, the most popular mu­sical act in the world, executives at EMI gnashed their teeth—and gave them virtually free run of their Abbey Road studios. If one of the boys had a flash of inspiration, he had only to pick up the phone and ask for studio time.

They sometimes kept George Martin and his staff waiting for an hour or two before ambling into the studio at, say, ten o'clock in the evening. Once they got down to work, McCartney relied on Martin to help him orchestrate and arrange the music, while Lennon got in the habit of issuing vague orders for the creation of evocative sounds (he once asked Martin to make a song sound like an orange). In these months, McCartney and Lennon were exasperating, arrogant, imperious—and, spurred by a variety of startling new albums, in­cluding Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan, Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys, and Fifth Dimension by the Byrds, they were also single-mind-edly dedicated to making the most mind-boggling album in the his­tory of rock and roll.

Years later, while making a television documentary about Sgt. Pepper, George Martin, still marveling at the beauty of the results, asked McCartney, in all seriousness, "Do you know what caused Pepper?"

"In one word," answered McCartney, without skipping a beat, "drugs. Pot."

Since the lads in front of the fatherly Martin had kept their bad habits to themselves, taking breaks to smoke in secret, the producer was incredulous: "No, no. You weren't on it all the time."

"Yes, we were," replied McCartney. "Sgt. Pepper was a drug al­bum."

So off to work they set, happily dazed and confused—and fasci­nated, as never before, with improvised wordplay, abstract sounds, and the chance results of deliberately induced prodigies of intoxi­cated reverie.

The first track set the tone for everything that followed. While he was in Spain, Lennon had pieced together a new song, "Strawberry Fields Forever." On the demonstration tape of the song he made at home, singing in his most plaintive monotone, accompanying himself only on acoustic guitar, he seems, as lan MacDonald has remarked, "to have lost and rediscovered his artistic voice, passing through an interim phase of creative inarticulacy reflected in the halting, child­like quality of his lyric. The music, too, shows Lennon at his most somnambulistic, moving uncertainly through thoughts and tones like a momentarily blinded man feeling for something familiar."

The lyrics in the song in fact did allude to something familiar, a Liverpool park that Lennon had called Strawberry Fields, where he had been able as a child to run free, playing hide-and-seek with his chums (a far cry from his current fate as a miserably married Beatle). George Martin has recalled instantly appreciating the unfeigned pathos of the new song, telegraphed in the line that Lennon chose to open the first version of the song, finished after nine hours of work on November 24, 1966: "Living is easy with eyes closed."

Striking though this first version was (in 1996, it was officially re­leased on volume two of the Beatles' Anthology), it did not satisfy Lennon. He may have been uncomfortable with the naked vulnera­bility of the singing, recorded straight, without any of the sonic tricks (multitracking, plus various brands of deliberate distortion) that he had come to count on to disguise the blemishes in his voice. Four days later, Lennon recorded the song again, starting with the chorus ("Let me take you down") instead of the verse, and asking Martin to modify drastically the sound of his voice, overdubbing and slowing it down by manipulating the speed of the tape recording it, in order to make it sound slightly warmer—and much, much stranger.

Still Lennon was not satisfied. The new version was uncanny in its poignance—but the music still, as it stood, was unlikely to blow minds.

The next day, on November 29, the group recorded the song again, this time with the intention of producing a more lushly orches­trated version. Pleased with the basic track, Lennon and McCartney in the days that followed oversaw the recording of additional musical elements, piled on like icing on a cake. Harrison appeared one evening with a svarmandal, an Indian instrument that sounded a lit­tle like a zither; unable to play it properly, he spent hours retuning the strings so that he could produce a glissando by plucking each string in turn, as a harpist would pluck the strings of a harp. Martin cooked up an obbligato for four trumpets and three cellos. Ringo created a tape loop of crashing cymbals, and then Martin turned the loop upside down, played it backward, and added the resulting woosh of sound to the sonic frosting. Lennon dubbed on another layer of vocals, another piano track, and, finally, a coda of im­promptu stoned tomfoolery, featuring incoherent vocal whoops from Lennon and an outburst of free drumming from Ringo. And so it went.

It was now nearly Christmas, and still "Strawberry Fields For­ever" was unfinished. Lennon remained torn between the relative simplicity of the slow early version, and the more baroque orchestral version that he had been working on ever since. Unable to choose, he blithely instructed Martin to splice the two versions together. As a trained musician, Martin was flabbergasted. "Brilliant," he shot back. "There are only two things wrong with that: the takes are in two different keys, a whole tone apart; and they have wildly different tempos."

Lennon scarcely cared. He had a relatively short attention span, and, unlike McCartney, wasn't especially eager to learn more about the technical details involved in making, and appreciating, a compli­cated piece of music. (Martin, in his memoirs, recalls, with scarcely concealed horror, the night he asked Lennon to sit through a record­ing of Ravel's Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloe, one of his fa­vorites pieces of classical music. When the piece was done, Lennon turned to Martin and said "I couldn't really understand the tune." When Martin protested that Ravel had written an absolutely gor­geous sustained melody, Lennon said, "Yes, but I'd forgotten how the beginning was by the time we got to the end.")

Swallowing his doubts, Martin went back to the drawing boards with his EMI staff of engineers, to see if they could do their master's bidding ("When it came right down to it," Martin once admitted, "we were all their minions"). The staff rigged up a Rube Goldberg contraption to vary the frequency of the tape playback. Luck was with them. By dropping the speed and pitch of the orchestral version, and speeding up the slower version of November 29, they were able to splice the two together.

Presto! Nearly four weeks and more than fifty-five hours after they had begun, the Beatles had produced a new piece of music. And even George Martin had to admit that the result was impressive. With pride, he once described "Strawberry Fields" as "a complete tone poem—like a modern Debussy."

If an argument is to be made for the creative value of serendipity in music—and the case for rock and roll as a form of art in part de­pends on it—then "Strawberry Fields" offers convincing evidence. As lan MacDonald (a trained composer himself) has put it, "Here, The Beatles show that technical shortcomings, far from constraining the imagination, can let it expand into areas inaccessible to the trained mind. Heard for what it is—a sort of technologically evolved folk music—'Strawberry Fields Forever' shows expression of a high or­der." It was certainly expression of a higher musical order than that of its distant precursor, Patti Page's music box version of "Tennessee Waltz."

Still, it was only one song. Worried by the amount of time spent in the studio, and concerned as well by a rumor circulating that the Beatles were about to break up, Brian Epstein begged George Martin to speed up the pace of work on the album—and also pleaded with him to release a new single in the meantime.

This put Martin in a bind. By the time Epstein made his request (at the start of 1967), the Beatles, according to Martin, had five more or less mind-blowing songs either complete or near completion: "Strawberry Fields," "When I'm 64," "Penny Lane," "A Day in the Life" and "Good Morning, Good Morning"—a blast of old-fash­ioned, feral rock and roll, and perhaps John Lennon's most vitriolic composition yet. The album that Lennon and McCartney were now in the midst of making promised to become a suite of songs loosely linked by autobiographical themes as well as the conceit that they were all being performed by a fictional group, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. "Strawberry Fields" and "Penny Lane" were the heart and soul of this musical project. To his regret ("it was the biggest mistake of my professional life"), George Martin nevertheless submitted to Epstein's pressure by letting him give EMI both of these songs, to rush into release as a new single.

With the completion of the next album now further complicated (the band had taken pride, since Meet the Beatles, in trying to fill each new album with all-new recordings), the Beatles went back to work. Amateurs they may once have been; lazy they were not. The Abbey Road studios had been turned into their private playground. They now proceeded to generate more songs using the ad hoc meth­ods pioneered on "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Strawberry Fields Forever."

On January 31, 1967, while taking a break from filming a promo­tional clip for "Strawberry Fields," John Lennon wandered into an antique shop and discovered a poster advertising "Pablo Fanque's Circus Royal": "LAST NIGHT BUT THREE! Being for the BENEFIT OF MR. KITE (late of Wells's Circus) and MR J. HENDERSON, the cele­brated somerset thrower!" Under pressure to produce a new song, Lennon bought the poster, hung it on the wall of his home studio, took some LSD, sat down at his piano, and began to write a song inspired by the poster. (In general, members of the band did acid in private, lim­iting themselves to pot at the actual recording sessions.)

By February 17, Lennon had a rough draft ready of the new song, "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite." He phoned Martin to book time in the studio that evening. Arriving with a sheet of lyrics and the chords, he played the song for Martin and the band, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. The group then spent the night working out the music, coming up with a preliminary arrangement that fea­tured a hand-pumped harmonium. "I'd love to be able to get across all the effects of a really colorful circus," John explained to Martin. "The acrobats in their tights, the smell of the animals, the merry-go-rounds. I want to smell the sawdust, George."

Since he was by now familiar with such musically vague but pro-grammatically precise instructions, Martin, instinctively assuming the role of a psychotherapist, asked Lennon to elaborate on his asso­ciations. Lennon mentioned his love for the music used on a chil­dren's television program. Martin thought of the little organ in Walt Disney's Snow black. Swapping hunches in this way, the two men eventually agreed that Martin in the morning should seek out and then make a recording of an old-fashioned steam organ of the sort once used on circus carousels.

After a day of research into the location of such an instrument, Martin concluded that finding and fixing up a real steam organ would cost too much time and money. Instead, Martin decided to collect recordings of classic steam organs.

At first, the recordings seemed useless. Almost all of them were of military marches. Stumped, Martin dipped into his bag of musical tricks and created a hurdy-gurdy-style arrangement scored for har­monium and several different kinds of conventional organs recorded at different speeds, and modified on playback, to create the impres­sion of a ghostly carnival fairway.

Still, you couldn't smell the sawdust. At wit's end, Martin, enter­ing uncharacteristically into the aleatory spirit of the Sgt. Pepper saga, took out scissors and tape. After tape-recording several passages from the steam organ recordings, he instructed his engineer to cut the tape into tiny pieces, throw the pieces up into the air, and then randomly splice the pieces back together. The sound this pro­duced—a swirling crazy-quilt of circus music, mixed into the other sounds like a dash of fairy dust—is one of the most magical touches on an album filled with them.

Work on Sgt. Pepper dragged on into the spring of 1967, as the Beatles made it plain that their quest for perfection would not end with the music. Thinking about the cover, Paul McCartney had an idea. He recalled how, as a boy, he would go into downtown Liver­pool to buy a new album and then lose himself in looking over the jacket on the bus ride back. Rock, after all, works on many different levels: not just as a public performance, but also as a private means of escape, a silent preoccupation. Organized as a whole, the songs on Sgt. Pepper, crammed as they were with spectacular new sounds, but also with odd, sometimes barely perceptible effects, extended an open invitation to daydream. It was music to get lost in—and as Mc­Cartney intuited, the music deserved a jacket to match: "The whole idea was to put everything, the whole world into this package; that's why we got Peter Blake in."

A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Blake in 1961 had pro­duced a renowned Self-Portrait With Badges, showing himself gazing blankly, looking forlorn and frumpy, clutching an Elvis Presley fan magazine, his jacket decorated with dozens of pins and buttons, the largest displaying a picture of Presley at his most glamorous. In the years since, Blake had worked extensively in collage, using postcards, pinups, and other junk that, by the standards of conventional fine art, belonged in a dustbin. By rescuing and rearranging this junk, he magnified its potential to produce nostalgia, a bittersweet yearning for a lost world of childlike innocence. Since much of the music on Sgt. Pepper embodied similar aesthetic impulses, Blake seemed a bril­liant choice to design the album cover.

With the costs of Sgt. Pepper still escalating, and with no firm date yet set for releasing the album, Brian Epstein was feeling pressure again from executives at EMI. When Sir Joseph Lockwood, the head of the company, learned that Blake's cover would cost fifteen hun­dred pounds, an unprecedented sum for packaging a pop album, he blew up: "Fifteen hundred pounds! I can hire the London Symphony Orchestra for that!" In the heat of the moment, Sir Joseph evidently forgot that the Beatles had in fact already hired a symphony orchestra, to play (at McCartney's suggestion) a mere twenty-four bars of music—the spiraling crescendo of sound used to bring to a climax "A Day in the Life."

Of course, the Beatles got their way. And after more than half a year of work, the finishing musical touches were applied to the al­bum on April 21. EMI, keen to recoup its mammoth outlay, geared up its publicity staff to saturate the world market with teasers and posters and proclamations that the Beatles were back, with a brand-new, mind-blowing album of music, on sale in June.

On May 12, a British radio station aired the album in its entirety; on May 20, the BBC followed suit, omitting "A Day in the Life," which had been banned on the grounds that it encouraged a permis­sive attitude toward drug taking. (One can only imagine what the censors thought the rest of the album was about.)

A few days later, Brian Epstein invited a select group of journalists and tastemakers to join the Beatles for a listening party. A lavish spread was laid out, and champagne flowed freely while Sgt. Pepper was played over and over again at full volume. "The boys were in fine fettle," a reporter told his readers on May 27: "Lennon won the sartorial stakes with a green flower-patterned shirt, red cord trousers, yellow socks and what looked like cord shoes. His ensemble was completed by a sporran [a fur-covered pouch usually worn with a kilt]. With his bushy sideboards and National Health specs he re­sembled an animated Victorian watchmaker. Paul McCartney, sans moustache, wore a loosely tied scarf over a shirt, a striped double-breasted jacket and looked like someone out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel."

In the annals of rock history, there has never been anything quite like the way that Sgt. Pepper was now received by its audience. Re­leased on the Parlophone label on June 1 in England and on the Capitol label on June 2 in America, it was, in the minds of many, a monumental event. In cities like London and Los Angeles, fans queued outside record stores to snap up a copy. In the first weeks alone, EMI sold millions of copies of the album, making it the most popular album yet released by the Beatles—and thus, by definition, the best-selling album in the history of rock and roll till then.

Throughout that summer, the sound of Sgt. Pepper was ubiqui­tous. Everywhere one went, from Los Angeles to London, from Paris to Madrid, from Rome to Athens, snatches of the album drifted out of open windows, faded in and out of consciousness as cars passed by, came in and out of focus in tinny tones from distant transistor ra­dios, the songs hanging in the air like a hologram of bliss. That mu­sic this wondrous and original should have been created by four young men with no formal training astonished everyone.

"In a way," George Martin remarked years later, "Sgt. Pepper is a Utopia." One had only to listen, relax, float downstream. With an open mind (no matter how one chose to open it), anyone could feel its spirit—of creativity, of play, of blissful joy. Just as everything had changed for John Lennon after his trip to the Indica bookstore and gallery, everything was going to change for the world as a whole. Writing with Olympian authority in the Times of London, the the­ater critic and cultural commentator Kenneth Tynan declared Sgt. Pepper to be "a decisive moment in the history of Western civiliza­tion."

That was an illusion, of course. But that is how it really felt.

-end