Mystery Tours and Discord 1967-8 169

McCartney gives the double In February, all four Beatles flew to Rishikesh, India, to continue
thumbs up, his sign of
their studies with the Maharishi. But before they left, they filed into
exceptional approval, while
Abbey Road once more, adding vocals to 'The Inner Light' and com-
watching a sequence from
the Beatles' animated film pleting three other new songs. McCartney's 'Lady Madonna' was a
Ye//ow Submarine. rollicking, Fats Domino-inspired track, driven by McCartney's ener-
getic piano playing and overlaid with saxophones and some wild
scatsinging by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison. Another song
taped during these sessions was 'Hey Bulldog', destined for Yellow
Submarine and essentially a riff-based throw-away.

The real gem, however, was 'Across the Universe', another of

Lennon's musical diary entries. Curiously, this recording lay un-

released for nearly two years. 'Across the Universe', like McCartney's
'Yesterday', was composed in a sudden burst of inspiration. As
Lennon explained it, he had spent an exasperating evening arguing
with Cynthia, and after she fell asleep, the lyrics came to him all at

once. The first lines perfectly evoke the argument from Lennon's
point of view, yet to a listener ignorant of the song's provenance, they

stand as a stream of lovely images:

170 The Beatles

LEE MINOFF HEINZ KDIIMANN AL BRODAX GEORGE IHINN1I!

Mystery Tours and Discord 1967-8 171

A theatrical poster for

Ye//ow Submarine shows the

entire cast of animated

characters, with the good
guys (Young Fred, Jeremy
Boob, the Beatles and Old
Fred) on the left, and the

bad guys (various species of

Blue Meanie) on the right.

172 The Beatles

Words are floiving out

like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither while they pass,

they slip away across the universe.

To accommodate the odd metres of the poem, Lennon uses a gently

lyrical melody, as beautiful and wrenching in its way as the best of

McCartney's ballads. But he was dissatisfied with the recording, so
with 'Lady Madonna and 'The Inner Light' sharing the single and
'Hey Bulldog' reserved for Yellow Submarine, 'Across the Universe'

was shelved.
There was another autobiographical clue buried in the lyric.

'Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox,' Lennon

sang, using an image - wind in a letterbox - similar to those used by

the Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono in her writings and 'instruc-

tion' pieces. Ono had come to London from New York, where she

was a member of Fluxus, an underground collective of conceptual

artists that included the composers La Monte Young, Jackson Mac
Low and Dick Higgins, the artists George Maciunas, Takako Saito
and Geoffrey Hendricks, and at least a dozen others who were influ-

enced by the music of John Cage and the art of Marcel Duchamp.
Lennon had .attended a preview of Ono's show at the Indica Gallery

a few months earlier, and had been taken with Ono's deliberately

outrageous sculptures and performance pieces. Their paths crossed

several more times, whereupon they began a peculiar correspondence,

sending each other aphoristic postcards. They continued their corres-

pondence while Lennon and the other Beatles sat at the Maharishi's

feet in Rishikesh.

The Beatles had gamely followed Harrison on his spiritual quest,

but the Rishikesh expedition brought their interest to an end. Starr

left after eleven days, complaining about the food. The others lasted

a few more weeks, but abandoned Rishikesh precipitately after the

Maharishi came under suspicion of making advances to one of the

women in the class, the actress Mia Farrow. They announced their

break with the Maharishi, but continued to say - though with muted
enthusiasm - that they considered meditation beneficial. Indeed, they
had ample proof of that. During and immediately after their Indian
sojourn, Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were unusually prolific,
Mystery Tours and Discord 1967-8 173

and even Starr finished a song that the others considered acceptable.
This bumper crop would yield The Beatles - the double-disc set

popularly known as the 'White Album' because of its blank cover, the
antithesis ofSgt. Pepper— and the single 'Hey Jude'.
Work began in May, when the Beatles gathered at Kinfauns,
Harrison's bungalow in Esher, to rehearse and make test recordings of

twenty-three new Lennon, McCartney and Harrison songs. Four of

these were dropped before the official sessions began at Abbey Road
later that month, and of the nineteen that were formally recorded,
two were left unreleased. That left seventeen of the Esher songs, more

than enough for a conventional album. But the Beatles continued to

write during the sessions, which lasted from May to October, and by
the time they were finished they had recorded thirty-three new songs.

Most of the Esher surplus eventually turned up in other forms.

Lennon's lyrical 'Child of Nature' was later rewritten as 'Jealous Guy',

and appeared on his Imagine album in 1971. McCartney's 'Junk' was

included on his eponymous solo debut in 1970. Harrison, having
brought seven songs to the sessions, ended up with three leftovers. He
gave 'Sour Milk Sea to Jackie Lomax, one of the first artists signed

by Apple Records. His 'Not Guilty' turned up on George Harrison

in 1979, and 'Circles' was included on Gone Troppo in 1982. Only a

quirky avant-garde piece by Lennon, 'What's the New Mary Jane?',

was never released commercially.
A few notable changes occurred in the Beatles' lives just before the

sessions began. Back from India, they began transforming Apple from
an amorphous concept into a real production company. Offices were
set up, and plans were announced. Lennon and McCartney flew to

New York to talk about the venture in a series of television interviews,

where they described Apple as 'Western Communism' — a company
that would share the Beatles' wealth by offering opportunities for

artists to develop their potential. This magnanimity was short-lived,

but it lasted long enough to turn Apple into a money drain, as its

largesse was tapped by both sincere hopefuls and outright con artists.

Apple Records turned out to be a remarkably eclectic enterprise.

There were early hits with the Welsh folk-singer Mary Hopkin,
the Beatlesque rock band Badfinger and the American folk-rock
singer James Taylor. The organist and singer Billy Preston and the

soul-singer Doris Troy filled out the rhythm and blues end of the
174 The Beatles

One of the first public

ventures of Apple, the

production and

merchandising company
that the Beatles formed
in 1967, was a London
boutique. It was disastrous

from the start: neighbouring

businesses complained

about the psychedelic

mural, and the shop
haemorrhaged money until

the Beatles gave away its

custom-designed stock and

closed its doors.

Harrison had introduced the

Beatles to Indian culture,

and although for the others

it proved to be a fad,
Harrison continued his

studies of Indian music for

some years with Ravi

Shankar, right, one of the

world's master sitarists.

Mystery Tours and Discord 1967-8 175

spectrum. The Modern Jazz Quartet, one of the premier American

jazz ensembles, recorded two Apple albums. So did John Tavener, a

young British composer whose music would come into vogue in the

late 1980s. Harrison brought in the sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, as

well as the Radha Krishna Temple, which sang in praise of the Hindu
pantheon. What other label could boast this stylistic breadth within
its first two years?

Meanwhile, in mid-May Lennon and Ono decided that they were

fated for each other, and after spending a night together, while
Cynthia was away on holiday, they recorded their first avant-garde

collaboration, Unfinished Music No. i: Two Virgins, a collection of

atmospheric, seemingly improvisatory instrumental and vocal pieces.
This too would find an outlet on Apple, in a jacket showing the col-
laborators entirely nude, front and back.
Lennon and Cynthia separated forthwith, and they were divorced
by November. From late May, Lennon and Ono were inseparable,
and were frequently in the news. Two Virgins, or its cover art, was
naturally the focus of controversy when it was released soon after

Lennon's divorce was final. A month earlier Lennon and Ono were
arrested for possession of cannabis resin while staying in a London
apartment owned by Starr. And when Ono had a miscarriage in

November, Lennon documented her hospital stay with a portable

cassette recorder and released the results (including a tape of the

dying baby's heartbeat) as part of Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With

the Lions.

The inseparability of Lennon and Ono extended to Beatles record-

ing sessions, to the irritation of the others, who preferred the privacy

that had been part of the group's working method. It is absurd to

blame Ono for the breakup of the Beatles; the reasons are far more
complex. Yet her presence clearly increased the tension in the musi-
cians' relationship. Ono stumbled into this atmosphere with the naive
belief that as she and Lennon were now collaborators, Lennon's other

collaborators would happily follow Lennon's lead and avail themselves

of a new artistic sensibility. Lennon also apparently thought they
might see it that way, and he was deeply wounded by what he later

described as McCartney's and Harrison's dismissive treatment of Ono.

It became a resentment that he dwelled on in interviews for the rest

of his life.
176 The Beatles

in 1968, Lennon and Yoko

Ono, soon to be his second
wife, declared that they had
nothing to hide, and proved

it by posing nude for the

cover of their controversial

Two Virgins album, a

collection of avant-garde

collages. Banned in many

places, it was sold in a

brown paper sleeve.

Still, it is likely that the 'White Album' sessions would have seen
the fragmentation of the group even without Ono. The fact is,

Lennon, McCartney and Harrison were by this point fully engaged

only by their own songs. When the intensive session work began,
the band worked together, and it continued to do so periodically,
particularly when the basic tracks for a new song were started, or

when a song demanded a sense of live interaction. But within the

first week, a new working method had evolved. Often, one or two
Beatles could be found working on a song in one of the Abbey Road
studios, while another worked elsewhere in the building. Each was
in charge of his own songs, with the others drifting in and out, con-

tributing where necessary.

This seemingly chaotic approach proved quite efficient, yet the

apparent insularity of the four musicians did not prevent disputes.

During the sessions for McCartney's 'Hey Jude', McCartney and
Harrison were at odds over Harrison's desire to add a bluesy answer-
ing figure between the vocal lines. Harrison ended up sitting out the

session, spending his time in the recording booth with Martin. There
was also a battle over 'Revolution', a Lennon song released as the
Mystery Tours and Discord 1967-8 177

B-side of 'Hey Jude'. Lennon first recorded a slow, mostly acoustic

version and wanted to release it as a single. But McCartney and
Harrison objected that it lacked the necessary energy, and Lennon
acquiesced, remaking the song as one of the most raucous of all

Beatles tracks.

Other disputes erupted regularly during the sessions. Geoff

Emerick, an engineer (and later producer) who had been on Martin's

team since Revolver, resigned because the atmosphere was so poison-

ous. And Starr found the sessions so dispiriting that on 22 August he
quit the band, convinced that he was not needed. In a way, he was

right. During his nearly two week absence, McCartney did much of
the drumming. Still, they coaxed him back on 4 September, in time

to film promotional clips for 'Hey Jude' and 'Revolution'. The group's
first single on its new Apple label, these two songs offered a glimpse

of what the Beatles were up to at Abbey Road. The musical implica-

tions were clear enough: apart from comparatively subtle chamber

orchestra assistance on 'Hey Jude', these songs showed the Beatles as

a straightforward rock band, with no overt studio trickery, backwards

tapes, exotic instruments or psychedelic sounds.

There were a few new twists. McCartney's 'Hey Jude' — his avun-
cular advice to the five-year-old Julian Lennon about dealing with his

parents' divorce ('take a sad song and make it better') - is a tuneful

piano ballad that clocks in at over seven minutes, an unusual stretch

for a pop single, and longer than anything the Beatles had included
on an album. Moreover, the last four minutes were simply a sing-

along wordless chorus ('nah nah nah nah-nah-nah naaaah') repeated

over and over, with occasional scat-singing flourishes from McCartney.

'Revolution' was raw Lennon, back in form as a rock screamer

and supported by aggressive, distorted guitars and a rollicking piano.

Cosmic imagery and evocations of universal love are sidelined for the

moment. Here Lennon expresses his uneasiness with the exhortations

to revolution by militant student movements both in the USA and

in Europe. Lennon felt he had common cause with these groups. He
agreed with their opposition to the Vietnam war, and he was all for

the empowerment of what he considered to be his audience. But in

singing that 'we all want to change the world', he added a caveat. 'But
when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count
me out.'
178 The Beatles

Although he acquiesced in the decision to remake 'Revolution' as

a rocker, Lennon had no intention of abandoning the original slow

version. That version, renamed 'Revolution I , was included on the

album, and with the single and another recording from the album,
'Revolution 9', it made a compellingly picturesque trilogy. In the

acoustic version Lennon presents his argument gently, and a little

ambiguously: here, when talk turns to destruction, he is unable to

make up. his mind, and sings 'don't you know that you can count me
out — in'. In the more furious electric version, violence seems a cer-

tainty, and Lennon has decided: count him out. But his protests do
not stop the rush toward destruction. The triology's denouement,
'Revolution 9', is an extraordinary piece of electronic music that, in

just over eight minutes, paints a vivid picture of revolutionary chaos.

It is not a paean to revolution as a heroic endeavour, although frag-
ments of triumphal music peek through the texture. It is a gritty look

at the collapse of a society.

The basis of the work, though virtually inaudible in the finished

production, is an instrumental jam, cut from the end of 'Revolution 1'.

Over several days, Lennon and Ono, with help at one session from
Harrison, raided EMI's archives and their own record collections, and

made tape loops from sound effects recordings and from snippets of
orchestral,. choral and opera recordings. They used material from the
'A Day in the Life' sessions, and recorded mellotron sounds, spoken
observations and off-the-cuff aphorisms, hysterical laughter, shouts

and even the chanting of football crowds. All this was laid over the

original Beatles recording, as was a tape loop of a clinical voice inton-

ing the words 'number nine'. This repeating 'number nine', panned

across the stereo image and fading in and out over the course of the
work, became the recording's most recognizable leitmotif, but there
were recurring musical motifs as well. What all this added up to was
a work that was alternately comical and terrifying, an incoherent mass
of sound from which a cinematic drama seemed to emerge.

Opposite, though not the Stranger still, the song that follows this nightmare on the album
Beatles' principal spokes- (and which closes the final side) is Lennon's 'Good Night', a sweet
man for peace - that was
\ u \\^ sung by Starr and accompanied by a lush string backing that
'•
Lennon's job - Starr poses .
,

here with a dove in a 1968

emerges from beneath the final shouts of Revolution 9 . The juxta-

portrait by Richard Avedon. position is brilliant in its incongruity.