Yeah yeah yeah, p.17
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, page 17
Often in the evenings, the Maharishi led his young followers on excursions to the nearest village, where local tailors sat cross-legged on mats operating ancient sewing machines. The Beatles had traditional Indian outfits made—loose-fitting, gauzy shirts and wide pajama bottoms, and saris for the women—and shopped for souvenirs. They explored open-air markets and found restaurants that served cold, perspiring beakers of “forbidden” wine.
On one occasion, everyone trooped down from the meditation center along a dusty jungle path, swinging lanterns in the fading twilight. For some reason Paul had brought his guitar, and as they descended through the steep overgrowth, he serenaded the party with bits of a new song he’d been working on. “Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace…,” he sang gaily over the thrash of footsteps. The song focused on a Yoruba phrase he’d picked up from Jimmy Scott, a conga player. “Every time we met,” Paul recalled, “he’d say, ‘Ob la di ob la da, life goes on, bra,’” and the expression had stuck in Paul’s head.
By now Paul and John had written enough good songs for two or three albums. “We’re not here to do the next album,” George scolded Paul. “We’re here to meditate.” But an album was already taking shape in Paul’s mind. He was very satisfied with the songs he’d written and thought several of John’s—particularly “Across the Universe” and “Bungalow Bill”— were among his partner’s “great songs.”
Ringo Starr and his wife, Maureen, on their way to the transcendental meditation center of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
For Ringo, the urge to see his two children became overpowering, and after two weeks he and Maureen decided they’d had enough of the ashram. Besides, Maureen was frightened of the fist-sized insects that flew through their room, and Ringo couldn’t handle the spicy curries. For them, it was time to go home. The same with Paul and Jane. Paul was never as committed to meditation as John and George were, and after a month, he decided to leave as well. He was concerned that John and George “might never come back.”
“John took meditation very seriously,” Cynthia recalled. His approach to it brought with it a remarkable change; he seemed happier, certainly healthier. But Cynthia was beginning to suspect the Maharishi’s power over John, that there was some sort of mind control being used to wrestle her husband away from his career. “He seemed very isolated and would spend days on end with the Maharishi, emerging bleary-eyed and not wanting to communicate with anyone. He was so deeply within himself through meditation that he separated himself from everything.”
It didn’t occur to Cynthia that John was struggling to separate himself from her. For the past few weeks, they’d hardly exchanged a word between them, even in private moments. Knowing that John hated confrontations with her, Cynthia chose to ignore the bad vibes. “Something had gone very wrong between John and me,” she concluded. “It was as if a brick wall had gone up between us.”
It wasn’t a brick wall, but paper: a flurry of postcards sent by a woman John had met in London, an artist, who intrigued him. The postcards arrived in India almost every day. John rose early and stole away to collect them at the postal drop near the dining hall. The postcards were like catnip for him; he couldn’t resist getting the next one to see what kind of cosmic mischief the woman had cooked up. “I am a cloud,” she scrawled on one. “Watch for me in the sky.” “I got so excited about her letters,” John recalled, that he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
It wasn’t the Maharishi, but Yoko Ono who had taken control of John’s mind.
• • • • •
John had met Yoko at an art gallery in London in November 1966. He had gone to see a wacky new exhibit called “Unfinished Paintings and Objects.” The friend who took him there called it “a real happening,” which turned out to be an understatement. John buried himself in the exhibit’s catalogue, reading the nutty entries: “…mirror to see your behind… sky T.V….eternal time clock…Painting to hammer a nail…Painting to let the light go through… Crying machine…” “Is this stuff for real?” he wanted to know. The descriptions sounded like a put-on. Then one of the exhibits caught his eye, and he moved in for a closer look. On a shelf were several nails atop a Plexiglas stand, and next to that, an apple—it looked real as far as he could tell—with a little card that said APPLE. When he asked his friend for the price of the apple, he was told £200. “This is a joke, this is pretty funny,” he thought.
Suddenly, the artist, a slip of a young Asian woman, was at his side. She had an amazing presence, John thought. There was something strange and exceptional about her. “Hey, man,” his friend said, “allow me to introduce Yoko Ono.”
She showed him another exhibit that he loved—a piece of plasterboard with a small sign inviting visitors to hammer a nail into its surface. “You can hammer a nail in for five shillings,” she said. Grinning, John responded, “I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings if you let me hammer in an imaginary nail.” It was pure Lennon humor, and Yoko loved it.
John Lennon with Yoko Ono at the “You Are Here” art exhibition, 1968. © MIRRORPIX
Afterward, over the course of several months, she tried to get John’s attention. And somewhere along the line, something piqued his interest in her. He underwrote one of her nutty projects. He liked that she refused to play by the rules. She was a true original—like him. In Yoko, he saw a kindred spirit. And she excited him. She was unlike any other woman he’d ever met. A real challenge.
Now, returning to London from India, he was occupied by thoughts of Yoko Ono. For weeks, he continuously thought about her. His marriage difficulties sent John into a deep depression, during which he drank too much and took drugs. While Cynthia was away on a vacation in Greece, John finally fell in love with Yoko. “I can’t bear to be apart from her,” he told a friend. As far as John was concerned, that was the end of his marriage. “I’m going to go and live with Yoko, even if it means living in a tent with her.”
• • • • •
John Lennon’s marital problems couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Beatles. They had just opened their new business venture, Apple Music, and were struggling with a scheme that invited anyone with a good idea to write to them for money. The promise of money and the Beatles was too much for people to resist, whether they had talent or not. “Overnight, we were swamped with calls and kids who wandered in demanding an audition,” recalled their office manager. “Everyone tried to get through the door in the next couple of weeks.” George called it “madness” and described the outcome as “basically…chaos.”
George hated the new company and considered it a “ridiculous” idea from the start. He resented that all the decisions were being made by John and especially Paul. There were bad feelings brewing among them for the first time in their career. The Beatles had always been a tight-knit fraternity—one for all and all for one. Cynthia Lennon called it “a marriage of four minds that were always in harmony.” Always may be too strong a word, but on those occasions when it became necessary to close ranks, the Beatles formed an airtight bond; there was nothing and no one capable of splitting up the core group.
Now, however, little jealousies began to crop up, threatening the stability of the band. For the first several months of getting Apple up and running, Paul took complete control of the operation. Which only made things worse for John. “They could never agree on anything,” recalled an assistant at Apple. “Ego started becoming more important than success. John automatically blackballed any of Paul’s suggestions. Paul killed George’s; George rejected John’s.” Even their forthcoming recording sessions for a new album, drawn from the songs they’d written in India, produced a fresh strain. Each of the Beatles argued for their personal songs. “The Beatles were getting real tense with each other,” acknowledged John.
John and Yoko celebrate their impromptu marriage with the Rock of Gibraltar as a dramatic backdrop, March 20, 1969. © MIRRORPIX
Part of the tension stemmed from his relationship with Yoko Ono. It had thrown his life into complete upheaval. When they appeared in public together, even the adoring fans were outraged. Where was Cynthia? they wondered. Who was this other woman? The Beatles were days away from beginning work on an important new album, and suddenly John’s personal problems, not music, had become the group’s primary focus.
But there were bigger problems to come. Throughout the early recording sessions for the new album, Yoko Ono sat by John’s side. “It was fairly shocking,” recalled an engineer who worked in the studio. There was an unwritten rule that wives and girlfriends never came to the studio. The boys never allowed visitors to watch them work. Never! In Paul’s view, the studio was sacred, the Beatles’ relationship to it like “four miners who go down the pit”—and “you don’t need women down the pit, do you?” Now, suddenly, Yoko had landed in the thick of things. She “just moved in,” according to George, who was not at all pleased. After that she was always at John’s side.
By 1969, it had come to this: dispassion—along with Yoko Ono—in the recording studio. © MIRRORPIX
The other Beatles pretended that nothing unusual was going on. Inside, however, they seethed. They cut one another tense glances, furious at the intrusion but unwilling to confront John. Worse, perhaps, Yoko refused to remain a spectator. From the very first session of the new album, Yoko made it clear that she intended to participate, grabbing John’s mike during one take of a song and moaning. The other Beatles were very angry at John. By allowing Yoko Ono to interrupt their session, he had crossed the line. “We were all trying to be cool and not mention it,” said Ringo, “but inside we were all feeling it and talking in corners.”
They tried to overlook Yoko, but she made herself difficult to ignore. She was always in their faces, making decisions about what instruments to use. “Beatles do this…” “Beatles do that…” Every time she interrupted, it sent a chill through the studio. She even instructed George Martin to throw away certain takes of songs. Finally, during the second week of work, Paul gave John a piece of his mind. “I could hear them going at it in the hall,” recalled a studio employee, “and it was terrifying. Paul was positively livid, accusing John of being reckless, childish, sabotaging the group.” But the more Paul fumed, the less John responded.
Yoko only brought to the surface resentments that had been brewing among the Beatles for the past year. John couldn’t stand the way Paul insisted on doing things a certain way— his way. The kind of music John wanted to play was being upstaged by the material Paul was writing—more pop oriented and less raw rock ’n roll. And Paul was tired of dealing with John’s drug-taking and seeming boredom with the recording process.
In the interest of cooling off, Paul left for a business trip to Los Angeles, where he announced the opening of the Beatles’ new label, Apple Records. While he was there, Paul arranged to see a woman he had first met at the Sgt. Pepper’s launch party in London, American photographer Linda Eastman. “The moment Linda arrived that was it, as far as other girls were concerned,” said a friend who accompanied Paul on the trip. What he liked best about Linda, Paul recalled, was her take-it-as-it-comes attitude toward life. It was a relief from the more formal structure of his relationship with Jane Asher, to whom he had become engaged. Although Paul suggested they’d be seeing more of each other, he made no promises to Linda.
Jane still loomed large in his life, if not in his heart. For the longest time, Paul had had a hard time keeping up with her. Jane’s diary, which she lived by, was a clutter of fascinating appointments and social commitments. “Paul was clearly in awe of her,” recalled a colleague. But if anything, Jane now had a hard time keeping up with him. Paul was an internationally known figure, sought after as much by strangely dressed freaks as he was by distinguished diplomats and intellectuals.
“Hey Jude”
In the midst of John’s divorce, Paul drove out to Kenwood to see Cynthia and Julian Lennon. He thought it was tragic for the two of them to be cut off from the Beatles family and wanted to let them know he was still their friend.
The trip out took about an hour, during which Paul passed the time singing, improvising a lyric to serve as “a hopeful message for Julian”: “Hey, Jools—don’t make it bad; take a sad song and make it better…” Throughout his visit with Cynthia and Julian, the tune kept turning over in his head. By the time he returned home, he was ready to put on the fi nishing touches.
Paul tied the song up neatly in one sitting, changing Jools to Jude, after a character in the Broadway show Oklahoma! whose name had the right ring. In his enthusiasm, he rushed to play “Hey Jude” for John and Yoko, who had arrived at his house as it came together. The couple was silent and sullen, not so easily impressed, but John later acknowledged the song as “one of [Paul’s] masterpieces.”
“Jane confided in me enough to say that Paul wanted her to become the little woman at home with the kiddies,” Cynthia wrote in a memoir. But that wasn’t the plan Jane had mapped out for herself. According to another friend, Jane had “clearly decided that she was setting her own terms on how she conducted her career.” There were to be no cop-outs, no compromises, no backseats taken to pop stars.
As far as Paul was concerned, their relationship was drawing to an end. And he was still very upset by John’s recent breakup with Cynthia.
A week or two after returning to London, Paul drove out to visit Cynthia and her young son, Julian. He wasn’t certain how John would feel about that, but he decided it was the decent thing to do. The trip to their house took about an hour, during which Paul passed the time writing a lyric as “a hopeful message to Julian”: “Hey, Jools—don’t make it bad; take a sad song and make it better…” His voice glided over the tune, a beautiful melody that drew the listener below its gentle surface like a lullaby. Later, Paul tied the song up neatly in one sitting, changing Jools to Jude, which had the right ring to it. John eventually acknowledged the song as “one of Paul’s masterpieces.”
The Lennon estate, Kenwood, during remodeling. © MIRRORPIX
Even so, it did little to alleviate the Beatles’ problems. The recording session for their new album became more splintered. “I remember having three studios operating at the same time,” recalled George. “Paul was doing some overdubs in one. John was in another, and I was recording some horns in a third.” With the focus running in every direction, friction was inevitable. Tempers flared whenever one of the Beatles didn’t get his way or disapproved of one of the others’ favorite songs. John made no secret of the fact that he was “hurt when Paul would knock something off without involving” the rest of the band. George felt ignored by John and Paul, who dismissed his songs as lightweights. Even on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” one of George’s best compositions, he sensed that John and Paul were merely going through the motions. “They weren’t taking it seriously,” he recalled.
All these incidents began to take a toll. Even in the midst of such creative accomplishment, the Beatles’ rock-solid support structure was crumbling.
Chapter 12
THE DREAM IS OVER
When the Beatles finished recording for their new album, they decided on a revolutionary release: a double album. John, George, and Paul had written “so much material” in India that to do otherwise would have meant scrapping too many good songs. George Martin was dead set against a double album, as were Ringo and George, but there was an agreement among the Beatles that the complete set was “definitely rocking” and deserved to be heard. It also deserved a suitably rocking cover.
A famous artist suggested they call it something as utterly simple as The Beatles and package it in an all-white cover, with nothing more than a title pressed into the front. The Beatles loved that idea. The UK release of The Beatles—known forever afterward as the White Album—on November 22, 1968 (exactly five years after With the Beatles appeared), was regarded as an international event, certainly, as one newspaper referred to it, “the most important musical event of the year.”
For the time being, the album’s success overshadowed the band’s personal difficulties, but the Beatles’ nerves were frayed. No one liked the direction in which things were heading. They were disgusted with the situation at Apple, which was in disarray. John more than anyone was growing increasingly dissatisfied. As he saw it, the band was content to continue making more Beatles records, content to continue as the lovable lads from Liverpool, which didn’t interest him. He no longer found the Beatles’ music intriguing. Worse, perhaps, he thought the “togetherness had gone” and said, “There was no longer any spark.” Their musical and personal issues demanded a break with the past. So he decided that it was time for him to leave the band.
The others were rightfully shocked. Breaking up the Beatles had never crossed their minds. Paul recalled: “Our jaws dropped. No one quite knew what to say.” He was determined to hold the group together, but there was no way John wanted to be involved in any more Beatles escapades. The group was over as far as he was concerned.
