Shout! (52 page)

As for Ringo, he sat patiently in a corner of the studio, waiting to be called to sing his song or drum as directed, whiling away hours when he was not needed in card games with Neil and Mal.

Their U.K. tour in the winter of 1965 included their last ever performance in Liverpool—though no one realized this at the time. They had intended to visit the Cavern Club and perform under its reeking stone arches, just for old time’s sake, but Brian talked them out of the idea for their own safety. John felt particularly enraged at being unable to move about as he pleased even in his home city. He longed to meet Bill Harry and his other art college cronies again at Ye Cracke and have a quiet pint or two under the mural of Wellington greeting Marshal Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo.

Had they made it to Mathew Street they would have found the Cavern still much the same as when they’d played there, even though it was now world famous as the club that broke the Beatles, and to play there was the objective of every band seeking to follow in their footsteps. There were still the same stone steps, the same reeking arches, the same mingled odors of cheese rind and sweat. Outside, Paddy Delaney the doorman still stood in his dinner jacket and cummerbund, often now
greeting celebrities such as Rex Harrison and Lionel Bart as they disembarked from chauffeur-driven limousines.

The Beatles’ last Liverpool concert also was their last chance to revisit the Cavern. Its owner, Ray McFall, had gotten into financial difficulties and, a few weeks later, suddenly announced to Delaney that the bailiffs would be coming in the following morning. The members tried to prevent this by holding an all-night session, then blocking the steps with chairs and setting off all the fire extinguishers. Police sympathetically cleared the demonstrators, then escorted Delaney out in a guard of honor, his immaculate dinner jacket white with foam. The warehouse was demolished soon afterward, and the tunnels beneath, with all their Beatles echoes and memories, obliterated by a car park.

The Beatles’ European and world tour of summer 1966 brought them another, slightly more satisfactory homecoming. The concerts included one in Hamburg, though this time they had to play for only thirty inaudible minutes at the city’s Ernst March Halle sports arena rather than all night on the Reeperbahn. “Don’t try to listen to us,” John told the German support band. “We’re terrible these days.”

There were backstage reunions with old Hamburg friends like Bert Kampfaert and Bettina, the Star-Club barmaid whose friendly nails had raked so many pale young Liverpool backs. John even found his way to Jonhannasbollwerk to see Jim and Lilo Hawke at the Seaman’s Mission and eat a nostalgic plate of Frau Prill’s real English chips. To the disappointment of all four the visitors did not include Horst Fascher, the bouncer whose killer punch had protected them on so many blood-thirsty Star-Club nights, and was once again in a bit of trouble with the law. At their concert, the Beatles dedicated “Roll Over Beethoven” to him, remembering how he loved to step in as their ad hoc vocalist whenever John or Paul were too pissed.

There was also a reunion with Astrid Kirchherr, the woman who had so crucially helped to create the image that now obsessed the world. Astrid’s photographs of those tough-tender child rockers, sitting on the fairground traction engine, had appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the world without any credit—or fee—to her. “It was one of a bundle of prints I’d sent over to Liverpool,” Astrid says now. “Later on, when it turned up in the media, it was credited to UPI. I didn’t sue them; what would have been the point? To me, it was just a photograph of some friends.”

Astrid told the Beatles she’d now given up photography, thinking herself not good enough. She had taken a job in a female drag bar, dancing as required with the “men.” In her black-draped bedroom there was still a blow-up portrait of Stu Sutcliffe above her head. Candles burned night and day in memory of the fifth Beatle whom no one but his mother and sisters in Liverpool now seemed to remember.

The tour’s stop after Hamburg was Tokyo, via the polar route. Because of a typhoon warning their aircraft was forced to land in Anchorage, Alaska. Nat Weiss in New York was roused from sleep by Brian’s voice on the telephone, demanding with some petulance, “Who
owns
Alaska, Nat? And can you recommend a nice place to stay?”

Their two Tokyo concerts, at the Nippon Budo Kan (Martial Arts Hall), were, not surprisingly, the best organized of the Beatles’ performing career. The promoters explained to Brian that any riot would have brought dishonor upon themselves. Accordingly, the nine-thousand-strong audience had three thousand police to guard them. Backstage, the Beatles were provided with geisha girls, a perpetual tea ceremony, and a Japanese road manager for liaison. Between concerts, in the twenty-four-room Presidential Suite at the Tokyo Hilton, a private bazaar was spread, of radios, cameras, happi coats, and painting sets. The Beatles all bought inks and calligraphy brushes and, having nothing intelligible to watch on television, produced a garish mural on one huge sheet of paper that was later given to the Japanese fan club.

They expected something similar in the Philippines. They were charmed, as are all newcomers to Manila, by a miniature Texas set down among tropical islands, by the skyscrapers, specially earthquake-proofed, the shanties and juke boxes and brilliant jeep taxis, the jungle foliage reflected in a speed cop’s Harley-Davidson. After dark, as the bats bounced like shuttlecocks against the rim of Manila Bay, shotgun blasts at random bespoke Southeast Asia’s most uninhibited autocracy.

The Philippines in those days were still the fiefdom of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, a woman long celebrated for her vanity, her enormous wardrobe, and unscrupulous use of her husband’s absolute power. Herself a Beatles fan, Mrs. Marcos had arranged a lavish garden party at Malacanang, the presidential palace, to introduce them to three hundred handpicked government officials and their families. The invitation delivered to Tony Barrow, however, gave no hint of these
elaborate preparations: Even Brian saw no particular necessity to attend.

Manila’s English language newspapers next morning carried the banner headline “Beatles Snub President.” When a president happens also to be a military dictator, his wounded feelings naturally evince widespread sympathy. The concert promoters sympathized by refusing to pay Brian Epstein the Beatles’ concert fee. Other citizens sympathized by telephoning death threats to the British embassy.

Brian, horrified by the furor, did his best to make amends. He asked to appear on Manila television the following night to explain that no snub had been intended. The transmission was almost wiped out by heavy static that, coincidentally, vanished as soon as Brian’s apology came to an end.

Departure from Manila Airport on July 5 was accompanied by ugliness unenvisaged even outside Litherland Town Hall. Deprived of all police protection the Beatles party dashed for the aircraft through a concourse of jeering customs officers; they were jostled, even punched and kicked. The KLM flight for New Delhi took off only after lengthy negotiations between Brian and a Philippines income tax official who refused to let them go until they had paid seven thousand pounds.

En route back from New Delhi to London, exhausted, disillusioned, bruised physically as well as mentally, the Beatles told Brian that was it, they’d had enough. When this tour finally wound its way to an end, there would be no more.

The news so devastated Brian that his whole body erupted in a painful case of hives. Suffering from total exhaustion he fled to a hotel in Port-meirion, the Welsh resort where he had always found a measure of relaxation and quiet. He had barely settled down there when Nat Weiss telephoned from New York to tell him that Beatles albums were being ritually burned in Nashville, Tennessee.

The previous February, in one of her regular Beatles reports for the London
Evening Standard
, Maureen Cleave had asked John his views, if any, on organized religion. His response gave little hint of a past life in the choir of St. Peter’s Church, Woolton. “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink…we’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.” He had nothing against Jesus, he went on, but the disciples were “thick.” “They’re the ones that ruin it for me.”

In Britain, the remark passed unchallenged—indeed, unnoticed. Such was not the case five months later when, on the eve of the Beatles’ American tour, Maureen Cleave’s interview with John was reprinted by a teenage magazine,
Datebook
. What in the
Evening Standard
piece had been merely an aside was headlined on
Datebook
’s cover: a stray ad-lib transformed to vaunting sacrilege. John Lennon was claiming that the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus Christ.”

In cheerily godless Britain with its enfeebled Protestant Church—already reeling under the mockeries of young satirists like Peter Cook and Alan Bennett—the remark had seemed no more than flippant and rather foolish. But to the core of old-fashioned, literal-minded Christianity that runs through America, it was no more or less than outright blasphemy. In fundamentalist southern states even the most avid female Beatles fans had no doubt as to whom they owed greater loyalty. The Tennessee radio station that invited shocked and disillusioned teenagers to cast their Beatles albums onto public bonfires was just one of hundreds originating similar protests throughout the country. One outraged community installed rubbish bins labeled “Place Beatle Trash Here”; another brought in a tree-crushing machine to pulp the offending vinyl. Pastor Thurmond Babbs of Cleveland, Ohio, threatened to excommunicate any of his flock who attended a Beatles concert on the approaching tour. Their music was banned on thirty-five radio stations, from Ogdenburg, New York, to Salt Lake City, Utah.

The outcry added further fuel to what was already extreme disenchantment with the British Invasion of pop bands who had followed the Beatles’ triumphal path across the Atlantic. Now, the product being offered to America’s youth was no longer innocent and charming Hamlet bangs, pixie boots, and deft one-liners. It had become a seemingly unstoppable procession of shaggy-headed and unsmiling yahoos who seemed to compete with each other in the tunelessness of their music and the mayhem of their performance. It was The Who, led by their anarchic, windmill-armed leader Pete Townshend, who ended each set by smashing his guitar to smithereens as though urging his audience to do the same to the concert hall. It was a new three-man band named Cream, the first ever to lose the definite article, whose drummer, Ginger Baker, delighted in firing off sticks like guided missiles to hit watching police or security men. Above all, it was the Rolling Stones, whose shaggy hair was popularly supposed to be teeming with vermin, whose
lyrics had to be bleeped on television, and whose recent U.S. smash, “Satisfaction,” was apparently a hymn to the joys of playing with yourself.

Worse even than that was the new mood growing up among America’s own young music makers, the singers and groups whom the Beatles had galvanized into new energy and experimentation barely two years earlier. Under the leadership of Bob Dylan American pop had ceased to be about high schools, drive-ins, and junior proms and become as much a medium of protest and ridicule as acoustic folk had ever been, but now reaching an infinitely wider audience. The hitherto unchallenged war in Vietnam, racial intolerance, white suburban snobbery, urban decay, even the prospect of impending nuclear destruction, all now found their way into the charts in songs that sold by the billion. Until this moment, every type of American mass culture had reassured its citizens that their country was infallibly the good guy. Now the mocking voices of Dylan, Joan Baez, the Byrds, and a hundred other insurrectionists broke the news that it had become the bad guy, not in folkies’ harsh monotone but in seductive commercial hooks and harmonies, set about by electric pianos, wistful flutes, and zithery twelve-string guitars.

The Beatles were not in any sense political or subversive. But there was no doubt that they had changed, radically and disconcertingly, from the instant charmers on the
Ed Sullivan Show
. The single they released early in 1966—unconnected to any album, and a double A side—bore the unmistakable stamp of Bob Dylan, and many others besides. Paul’s contribution was “Paperback Writer,” a vague satire against hack journalism and the mass media, set about by Pete Townshendesque guitar chords and intricate harmonies with more than a nod toward the Beach Boys. “Rain” was by John, echoing the Byrds as they had sounded in their smash cover version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but with his own special air of being pressured and persecuted almost beyond endurance: “When the rain comes, you run and hide your head…you might as well be dead…” Its closing babble of gibberish was added late at night in his private studio, by drunkenly running the vocal chorus backward.

As usual, advance orders took “Rain/Paperback Writer” instantly to number one in Britain and America. Only after 1 million copies had been taken home and played did some little uncertainty arise. “Paperback Writer,” which received the most radio play, frankly mystified
American fans with its allusions to a man named Lear and the
Daily Mail
. A suspicion formed, even if no one dared yet to say it, that the Beatles were not infallible.

A further bloody mess of controversy was just around the corner. To promote their American tour Capitol had issued a compilation album of songs from
Help!
and
Rubber Soul
, plus three from the new British album still awaiting release. The title of this hybrid, reflecting its most lyrical McCartney contribution, was
The Beatles—Yesterday and Today
. Any promise of gentle nostalgia was dispelled by a full-color sleeve on which the Beatles, wearing white butchers’ overalls, nursed dismembered and decapitated toy dolls and brandished bloody joints of meat.

The “butcher sleeve,” as it became known, was the Beatles’ own art-directing concept. Sean O’Mahony, editor of their fan club magazine, had been present at the photographic session and had covered his eyes in dismay when the props were brought in. Such was their power by then that Brian’s misgivings were overruled. The gruesome tableau appeared first in England, on the cover of
Disc
magazine. Capitol Records, cowed by their former lack of prescience, agreed that it would probably be a winner. Seven hundred and fifty thousand sleeves had been printed before the first calls came in from disk jockeys almost retching over their advance copies. The sleeve was then axed, together with all the promotional material, at a cost of two hundred thousand dollars. A special staff spent one weekend extracting each of the 750,000 discs from its butcher sleeve and inserting it into one hastily improvised round a picture of the Beatles leaning on a cabin trunk. In many cases, to save trouble, the new sleeve was simply pasted over the old.