Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year

417 Pages·2016·7.09 MB·English

by  Steve Turner

DEDICATION
To my class of 1966—Robert Benjamin, John Chandler, Don Eales, Sue Engall,
Stephen Goodwin, Bob James, Peter Kay, Keith Newitt, Dave Nightingale,
Wanda Pasciewicz, Linda Rainbow, Malcolm Rock, Danny Smedley, Neil
Spencer, Geoff Thompson, and Andrew Windsor
To Abby Gibson and the new generation of Beatlemaniacs
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Prologue
December 1965
January 1966
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Epilogue
APPENDIX A: CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
APPENDIX B: THE BEATLES’ JUKEBOXES
SOURCES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY STEVE TURNER
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Hunter Davies for permission to quote from his 1966 interview with
Paul McCartney as reprinted in his book The Beatles Lyrics. Thanks to the BBC
Written Archive Centre (Caversham Park) for permission to quote from Donald
Milner’s interview with George Harrison that was broadcast on The Lively Arts
on December 11, 1966. Thanks to Mike Barrow for permission to quote from
correspondence written by his father, Tony Barrow.
PROLOGUE
We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation—a ship going to
discover the new world. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.
—JOHN, 1974
Nineteen sixty-six was without question the pivotal year in the life of the Beatles
as performers and recording artists. Before that they were the four loveable guys
from Liverpool who wore identical suits on stage, played to packed houses of
screaming (largely female) teenagers, played themselves in movie capers, and
wrote jaunty songs chiefly about love. After 1966, they were serious studio-
based musicians who no longer toured, wore individually selected clothes from
Chelsea boutiques, wrote songs that explored their psyches and the nature of
society, and were frequently considered a threat to the established order by
governments around the world.
During that twelve-month period they went through changes that would have
crushed men with less resilience and vision. The marriage of John and Cynthia
and the live-in relationship of Paul and Jane Asher were disintegrating. John
began consuming LSD so recklessly that it affected his self-worth and sense of
identity. “I got a message on acid that you should destroy your ego,” he told
Rolling Stone in 1970. “And I did.” As a group they had their lives threatened in
Japan, America, and the Philippines. Church leaders, senators, governments,
radical political groups, and the Ku Klux Klan denounced them. They saw their
critical acclaim rise and shares in their publishing company fall. Records were
sold and records were burned.
It was the year that Ringo met Charlie Chaplin, Paul met philosopher
Bertrand Russell, George met sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, and John met Yoko
Ono. It was also the year that the group recorded Revolver, the album that many
critics consider their greatest artistic achievement, and started recording Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the other LP that vies for top place in
reviews not only of the Beatles’ personal legacy but also of the history of rock
albums.
So how was it that this quartet of slightly undereducated musicians from a
working-class city in the north of England came to create such a mold-breaking
record in 1966 and prepare themselves to do something similar in 1967? How
did the Beatles go from chart-oriented pop to progressive rock in such a short
time, from adulation in high schools to respect on college campuses, and what
were the creative and social forces that combined to turn them from artistes into
artists?
In books covering the whole career of the Beatles, this period necessarily has
to be compressed into thirty or forty pages. Some of the best authors have had to
chronicle the Beatles’ final tour of America in a few paragraphs and gloss over
the weeks when they were neither recording nor playing.
But the only way to fully understand this transitional period is to slow it
down, in order to examine the details. The times when the group was out of the
public eye are as revealing as those when they were at work, because this was
when they enjoyed the newfound freedom to explore their personal passions and
develop individual points of view. It was away from the cameras and the security
guards that they absorbed the art and thought later implemented in their own
creations.
David Crosby, a member of the Byrds and friend of the Beatles, has made
the point that the most creative musicians, the ones who ultimately alter their
genre, tend to be synthesizers. “By taking widely disparate streams that haven’t
been formally in contact with each other, you become a synthesist and create
new forms,” he said. “The Beatles took folk music chord changes and a rock
backbeat and synthesized a new form.”
But these fusions are rarely done consciously. The musical artist, as Crosby
also observed, listens to various forms of music and allows the influences to
permeate the creative consciousness in a natural way. The Byrds listened to Ravi
Shankar and John Coltrane, and this led to them writing songs like “Eight Miles
High.” In 1966, the Beatles listened to artists as varied as Smokey Robinson,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Albert Ayler, Bob Dylan, Bernard Herrmann, and the
Beach Boys and came up with Revolver.
For at least six years—virtually since the end of their teenage years—they
had been working nonstop. When they weren’t on stage, they were in the
recording studio. When they weren’t recording, they were writing. When they
weren’t doing any of these things, they were promoting themselves on TV and
radio. John used to say that he was only a Beatle once he exited the front door of
wherever he was living, but between 1959 and 1965 he was out of the house
more than he was in it.
This was all good for business, but it didn’t encourage personal growth.
There was little time to reflect, explore, or develop meaningful friendships
beyond their small circles of family, school friends, and business associates.
Their identity was bound up in that of four people who wore the same clothes,
had the same haircuts, and spoke in the same accents. There was little incentive
for John, Paul, George, or Ringo to pursue independence of thought, image, or
creativity. “We were an entity,” Paul admitted in 2011. “Mick Jagger used to call
us the Four-Headed Monster.”
It was only when they cut back on tour dates, and then stopped touring
altogether, that they began to contemplate how different they might be in their
individual interests, values, and aims. As they did this, each group member
began delving into new areas of thought and culture and enriching the work of
the Beatles with their findings. In turn, slowing things in this book down allows
me to look in more depth at apparently incidental people, places, and art that
helped to mold the Beatles’ attitudes and, ultimately, their work during this
period.
The Beatles were already the market leaders in pop. They not only sold more
records than anyone else but also set recording standards and heralded artistic
changes. Everyone looked to them to see in which direction pop would be
heading. But in 1966 that influence began to spread to creative people working
in forms other than music. Photographers, designers, and painters became
inspired by their example. After hearing “Taxman,” the American poet and
Trappist monk Thomas Merton confided in his diary: “They are good. Good
beat, independence, wit, insight, voice originality.” “Eleanor Rigby,” with its
image of a face kept “in a jar by the door” stopped illustrator Alan Aldridge in
his tracks, because he saw parallels between it and his own exploration of
surrealism. “The music and the lyrics of the Beatles,” he said, “are a tremendous
springboard into the imagination.”
As they became more influential, they also became more influenced. They
knew that the more they gave out, the more they needed to take in, and therefore
they actively sought material that might challenge and stir them. At the same
time they were sought out by those who wanted to piggyback on their fame,
prestige, and power. There was no shortage of entrepreneurs keen to turn the
Beatles on to new fashions, music, art, books, experiences, philosophies, and
even new technology.
This had obvious downsides—they were deluged with useless information
and risked being conned by fraudulent inventors, spiritual leaders, and even
dieticians—but it ultimately proved beneficial, since it enabled them to remain
that vital one step ahead by availing them of a wide range of contemporary
ideas, tastes, and products well before the general public got to hear of them.
What surprised me most when examining this period of the Beatles’ lives
was how unpremeditated the developments were. They wanted to progress, but
there was no grand career plan. Their basic approach to Revolver was no
different than it had been to With the Beatles or Rubber Soul. They wrote each of
the songs close to the time of recording, had no overarching theme in mind, and
stopped when they’d recorded enough for fourteen tracks and two sides of a
single. A title wasn’t decided on until the sessions were completed, within weeks
of the LP’s release. An old friend was commissioned on the spur of the moment
to design the cover, and he wasn’t given a detailed briefing or a title. George put
their work ethic in a nutshell when he said: “We’re not trying to do anything.
That’s the big joke. . . . Everyone gets our records and says ‘Wonder how they
thought of that?’ or ‘Wonder what they’re planning next?’ or whatever they do
say. But we don’t plan anything. We don’t do anything. All we do is just keep on
being ourselves. It just comes out. It’s the Beatles.”
When they discussed the emergent songs with each other before they were
recorded, the Beatles often had little more than a tune, partial lyrics, and the
suggestion of a feeling they wanted to communicate, but most of the magic took
place in the studio. It was a combined effort of the players and writers along with
producer George Martin, with his wealth of knowledge about the business of
recording, his impeccable connections with classically trained session musicians,
and his ability to score music, and younger technicians such as engineer Geoff
Emerick who were always eager to find solutions to meet the seemingly
impossible demands of John and Paul.
When George said that they did no more than be themselves—“It just comes
out”—he was telling the truth, from his perspective, but not taking into account
the fact that in order to “be themselves” they first had to find out who they were.
This involved self-reflection and a willingness to uncover and pursue their
inclinations. It also required informal research into music and other art forms to
see what they really liked. They each exposed themselves to new cultural
experiences, some of which they’d previously dismissed, and were surprised
how their tastes changed in the process.
But inner changes and fresh influences don’t always combine to create new
art. Not everyone has the capacity to forge new forms in this way. Good work