Yeah yeah yeah, p.13
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, page 13
Part of the reason for this was security. The Beatles were always in danger of being trampled by fans. But another part was self-preservation. The obligations heaped on the Beatles were extraordinary. More than ever, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into.
The work in New York placed even greater demands on the boys. On Saturday, August 14, they taped their third appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. “Four hours of constant rehearsals,” according to one observer in the theater. “Six songs, no break, just total dedication.” Afterward, as the sun went down, the Beatles boarded a helicopter bound for Shea Stadium, in Queens. It was a clear, beautiful night, but the Beatles were gaunt faced and anxious, barely glancing at the scenery. Between the helicopter ride, which they dreaded, and the destination, which seemed unreal, it was all they could do to keep their food down.
A 56,000-seat horseshoe where the Mets played baseball, Shea Stadium was bathed in a halo of light and looked like a stage prop from eight thousand feet up. “For the boys,” recalled their press officer, “seeing the stadium was an absolute high. They were awestruck, gobsmacked, as the Liverpool expression goes.” No band had ever played to an audience so large. The show was already in progress as they flew overhead. The pilot switched on a two-way radio so his passengers could monitor the sound onstage. As he swung above the parking lot, a deejay shouted over the stadium PA system, “You hear that up there? Listen…it’s the Beatles! They’re here!” The sky lit up as thousands of flash-bulbs exploded. “It was terrifying at first when we saw the crowds,” said George, “but I don’t think I ever felt so exhilarated in my life!”
It was too dangerous to land the helicopter on the baseball field, so it was diverted to a strip near the old World’s Fair site, where the Beatles were transferred into armored cars. “It was organized like a military operation,” recalled a photographer who was along for the ride.
As the Beatles scanned the stands from the Mets’ dugout, they fell back in laughter. Everywhere they looked were kids—wall-to-wall kids. “It seemed like millions of people,” Paul recalled, “but we were ready for it.”
Beatles fans scream at the top of their lungs during a concert at Shea Stadium, August 15, 1965. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
As the Beatles charged from the dugout to the stage situated over second base, more than fifty thousand kids jumped to their feet and screamed, wept, and thrashed in what must have sounded like pure bedlam. A reporter compared the roar to “a dozen jets taking off.” The Rolling Stones’ lead singer, Mick Jagger, who was watching from a seat behind the first-base dugout, was visibly shaken by the crowd’s behavior. “It’s frightening,” he told a companion.
More than fifty 100-watt amplifiers had been set up along the base paths of the diamond, but they were no match for the wall of sound from the stands. The fans drowned out all the singing and most of the music. “It was ridiculous,” John remarked of the experience. “We couldn’t hear ourselves sing.” During two numbers, he wasn’t even sure what key they were in. And later, when watching the replay on TV, he noted, “George and I aren’t even bothering to play half the chords, and we were just messing about.”
For promoters everywhere, however, the Shea Stadium concert was a major breakthrough. Forevermore, it turned a pop music performance into an event.
The Beatles tour continued across North America, rekindling the excitement in Toronto, Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In each city, the usual concert halls had been rejected in favor of open-air stadiums and arenas, with screaming and hysterics a part of every show. In Los Angeles, with a few days off, they got a real treat: an invitation to visit with Elvis Presley, whom they had all idolized as kids.
Perhaps more than anyone else, John was shaken by the experience of meeting his boyhood idol. He acted foolish, clowning and jabbering, when he was introduced to Elvis. The other Beatles were speechless. No one knew what to do or say. After a brief, embarrassing silence, Elvis summoned them to sit down beside him but grew weary of the Beatles’ vacant stares. “If you guys are just gonna sit there and stare at me, I’m goin’ to bed,” Elvis huffed. “I didn’t mean for this to be like the subjects calling on the King. I just thought we’d sit and talk about music and jam a little.”
“That’d be great,” Paul said, suggesting a few songs they could play together. Unwinding gradually, they tore through a few of Elvis’s hits, including “Blue Suede Shoes,” with Elvis singing and Paul playing the piano, before finishing with the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine.” Still, it was an awkward evening, one they would be reluctant to repeat. Even at this point the Beatles could learn one of life’s important lessons: that sometimes it is better to live with your fantasies than to make them come true.
• • • • •
After the Beatles’ final performance, in San Francisco, everyone was ready to head home. The pitch of the crowd in San Francisco was a bit too wild, even for the Beatles, who thought they had seen it all. Before the show, one of their assistants had been bitten by a fan who also jumped on the hood of her car. Hearing about the incident made John nervous. Paul had much the same reaction when he saw “the dreadful crush of fans up against the stage.” A stampede of teenagers had broken through the barricades and surged forward, wave after wave, attempting to vault onto the stage. “Calm down!” Paul screamed at them. “Things are getting dangerous.” He even stopped the show midway through so that police could rescue a woman who was being trampled.
George with Pattie Boyd on the set of A Hard Day’s Night. © K&K ULF KRUGER OHG/REDFERNS
Eventually, the Beatles had seen enough and bolted, leaving Ringo to speak for the rest of the band. “We survived,” he told an interviewer. “That’s the important thing, wouldn’t you say?”
• • • • •
Having survived, the Beatles took a well-deserved vacation, giving them time to settle into new homes, see friends, and sleep. Beatlemania raged on without them. Their records were all over the radio, while Paul’s single of “Yesterday” captured the top spot on the Hot 100 for four weeks running. The only action during the rare break came on September 13, 1965, when Ringo’s wife, Maureen, gave birth to a boy, whom they named Zak. “I won’t let Zak be a drummer!” Ringo declared to reporters outside the hospital delivery room, but twenty years later, Zak would handle that very job for the Who. Otherwise, Paul tore around London, gorging himself on culture. (“I must know what people are doing,” he said, in between visiting art galleries, taking piano lessons, and listening to experimental music.) And George took time out in January 1966 to marry his girlfriend, Pattie, which left Paul as the only bachelor in the band.
In the meantime, the Beatles’ record company wanted a new album in time for the holiday season. That meant John and Paul had to come up with a dozen new songs in a little more than two weeks, which seemed like an impossible feat, even for such naturals.
Ringo and Maureen in 1965, greeting the press after their wedding. © MIRRORPIX
One thing was certain: this record wasn’t going to sound like anything they’d ever done before. There was too much going on in the rock music scene. Paul spoke for the others when he complained of “being bored by doing the same thing.” The Beatles had moved on creatively. “You can’t be singing fifteen-year-old songs at twenty because you don’t think fifteen-year-old thoughts at twenty,” Paul explained. “We were suddenly hearing sounds that we weren’t able to hear before,” George observed.
Help!
Ringo Starr behind the camera during the filming of Help! on Salisbury Plain. © MIRRORPIX
John plowed tremendous emotional upheaval into his songs. He said “Help!” grew out of one of the “deep depressions” he went through, during which he fought the desire “to jump out the window.” He wasn’t speaking literally; the people closest to John never recall any suicidal tendencies. But his dissatisfaction with the direction the Beatles were taking, coupled with his frustrating marriage, left him feeling despondent and “hopeless” during the song’s writing.
“I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for help,” John insisted later on. “He was feeling a bit constricted by the Beatle thing,” Paul observed. But at the time he began writing “Help!” it was fashioned as a title song for the band’s new movie of that name. Paul was summoned to John’s house especially “to complete it,” he recalled, which they did without delay, nailing it in one two-hour session in the upstairs music room.
As everyone well knew, the summer of 1965 had produced a rich vein of exceptional hit singles, notable for their originality and authenticity. Bob Dylan had started the ball rolling, not only with “Like a Rolling Stone” but also the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which he had written. The Animals, a London band, offered the bluesy “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” followed by the Who’s “My Generation” and the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love.” And nothing stood up to the Rolling Stones’ two smash hits, “The Last Time” and “Satisfaction.”
Such great competition turned out to be all the incentive John and Paul needed. Throughout the first few weeks of October, new songs were ripped off their guitars one right after the other, each as different and original as the last. There was nothing predictable about songs like “Norwegian Wood,” “Drive My Car,” “Nowhere Man,” or “In My Life.” Paul had also been noodling around with “Michelle.” It was clear they had another hit on their hands.
The album, named Rubber Soul, “broke everything open,” according to rocker Steve Winwood. “It crossed music into a whole new dimension and was responsible for kicking off the sixties rock era as we know it.” Almost every music fan echoed his opinion that the Beatles had “raised the bar” in a way that made musicians reconsider how they wrote and recorded songs. Even Newsweek, which two years earlier had ridiculed the Beatles’ haircuts and unlikely talent, now called them the “Bards of Pop” and their songs “as brilliantly original as any written today.”
In just three short years, the Beatles had gone from long-haired rebels to international idols, cutting across age groups and cultures. Fans and critics wondered where they could go from here. Would they rock harder, louder, or perhaps looser? It was anyone’s guess.
No one imagined the actual outcome. Because in time, the Beatles got weird—very weird.
Chapter 9
THE END OF BEATLEMANIA
The Beatles had always gone all out to make great-sounding songs; now it was time, they decided, to make great-sounding albums. The trouble was, Abbey Road was still in the dark ages as far as technical practices were concerned. The four-track machines used to record every artist from the London Philharmonic orchestra to Herman’s Hermits were regarded as dinosaurs elsewhere in the world. And it frustrated the Beatles no end.
To complicate matters, the band’s two primary songwriters, John and Paul, were working on material that required more advanced techniques in everything from musicianship to recording. John, in particular, had roughed out the blueprint for a song he mysteriously called “Mark 1” that screamed out for unusual sound effects. Some of the lyrics were taken from ideas in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. “Whenever in doubt,” he had read, “turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” The whole concept was irresistible to John for many reasons. Rushing home, he took some LSD. Almost immediately, the words came: long, strange strings of words started threading around gauzy ideas.
He played it for Paul, who hadn’t yet experimented with LSD, during a meeting at Brian Epstein’s flat. Incredibly, it “was all on the chord of C,” according to Paul. Somehow, John had stripped the music to its most basic structure. Paul was intrigued but wondered how George Martin would deal with it, especially considering the Beatles’ reputation for churning out melodic four-chord hits. To his credit, Martin “didn’t flinch at all when John played it to him,” Paul recalled. “He just said, ‘Hmm, I see, yes. Hmm, hmm.” Martin thought it was “rather interesting,” according to Paul.
Interesting but unfinished. The lyric was only two verses and the melody just one chord. “We worked very hard to stretch it into two verses,” Paul explained. “We racked our brains but couldn’t come up with any more words because we felt it already said everything we wanted to say in the two verses.” Still, they had to find a way to make it longer while still preserving its originality.
Paul came up with the solution: tape loops. He’d discovered a process whereby if he removed a piece from the tape recorder and replaced it with a loop of recording tape, he could play a short phrase or sound that would go round and round, overdubbing itself, which made a funny sound. Moreover, the loops could be played at various speeds, as well as backward and forward. He demonstrated this for the others in the studio, encouraging George and Ringo to make loops as well.
The Beatles on the set of Top of the Pops, June 16, 1966. © MIRRORPIX
John loved the loop concept for “Mark 1” and discussed several ideas for the vocal, each one crazier than the next. “He wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from the hilltop,” George Martin recalled. Most producers would have dismissed such an idea out of hand, but Martin, a wise and patient man, gave the Beatles enormous leeway. Their ideas might have sounded weird initially, but he recognized that because of their lack of formal musical training, they often just needed someone to translate what they meant, to express it in terms that made sense to sound technicians. Which is where he came in: he was their unofficial translator.
Martin set to work to create some kind of a Tibetan effect in the studio. But John’s next suggestion—that “we suspend him from a rope in the middle of the studio ceiling, put a mike in the middle of the floor, give him a push, and he’d sing as he went around and around”—was met with a barely tolerant smile.
Eventually, their engineer came up with an inventive idea they loved. He put John’s voice through an organ speaker and re-recorded it as it came back out. This gave John’s voice a vibrato effect, which was a revolutionary sound. Such innovation was considered taboo at Abbey Road, where engineers were discouraged from playing around with the equipment. “I remember the surprise on our faces when the voice came out of the speaker,” the engineer recalled. The Beatles were beside themselves with glee. They realized that the possibilities were limitless. Recording was no longer just a way of putting out songs but a new way of creating them.
Once the Beatles got their hands on the controls, they found it impossible to leave them alone. “The group encouraged us to break the rules,” the engineer said. They felt that “every instrument should sound unlike itself.” As well as each of the Beatles. John flirted with the idea of having “thousands of monks chanting” in the background of “Mark 1.” That was highly unlikely, but a way to simulate it was to double-track John’s voice—that is, to re-record John singing and to superimpose the recording over the original.
John was especially “knocked out” by the sound. He made up a goofy name for the effect, calling it “a double-bifurcated sploshing flange.” A sploshing flange! And from that point on, the technique known throughout the recording industry as “flanging” was practiced.
After listening to the spooky-sounding “Mark 1,” which they eventually retitled “Tomorrow Never Knows,” it was inevitable that the Beatles would want to tinker in some way with every new song. For instance, on “Rain,” John threaded a tape of the vocal onto the recorder and played it backward. The sound was unlike anything he’d ever heard before, a piercing scronnnch whuppp-whuppp-whuppp interspersed with wailing feedback. Everyone in the studio reveled in the process, running instrument and vocal tapes in every direction. They used it on “Taxman” and throughout George’s guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping.” At some point, however, it got out of hand. “And that was awful,” George Martin recalled, “because everything we did after that was backwards. Every guitar solo was backwards, and they tried to think backwards in writing.”
Backward or forward, the work was producing amazing results. There was a sense of real adventure—and real accomplishment—in the studio. It seemed as though ideas were ricocheting off the walls. “We were really starting to find ourselves in the studio,” Ringo observed. Some of the magic, of course, was the result of drugs, with which they were all experimenting to various degrees, but somehow the Beatles’ focus remained razor sharp. “We were really hard workers…we worked like dogs to get it right.”
Recording now occupied almost all of their time, which made it difficult for the band to get up for playing gigs. The excuse they gave was: “It was too much trouble to fight our way through all the screaming hordes of people to [lip-synch] to the latest single.” But the truth was, it was becoming harder to reproduce onstage the kind of effects-heavy music they were creating in the studio. Foot pedals for guitars were still a few years off, and there were no remote sound-mixing boards or monitors then. Their new songs, like “Eleanor Rigby” and “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contained sounds that could be made only in the studio. There was no way they could play them live. And yet, they had to find a way to publicize their new single, “Paperback Writer” and “Rain.”
No one recalls who came up with the solution, but sometime in early May 1966, the Beatles decided to make amusing promotional films of both songs—lip-synched versions set to comical scenes not unlike those in A Hard Day’s Night. The films would be sent out to TV stations in place of live performances. “I don’t think we even thought of calling them ‘videos,’” Ringo speculated, but videos indeed they were—the first of their kind, and eighteen years ahead of their explosion into the forefront of pop culture.
