A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon’s death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner’s The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are --  our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over.  If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability.  The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don’t know how it will all end up. Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I’m waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You’d better face it, kid—he’s never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn’t pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn’t really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don’t own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It’s not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn’t want to write it … It’s like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn’t make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we’ though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we’d spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul’s songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields’ or ‘Across The Universe’, somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I’m singing out of tune because I’m psychologically destroyed and nobody’s supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One’s Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I’m better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I’m-supposed-to-be' because I’ve seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I’ll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone’s house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna’ was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the  juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It’s really a tribute to the mother figure, it’s a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted  "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie.  Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he’d heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John’s alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though  it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story they told over time, to sand away a few of the rougher edges, to make themselves look better, and to avoid hurting others. So what I'm going to tell here is the official story, or something close to it, but be aware there are other competing narratives out there. Indeed, the retreat to Rishikesh seems to be a break in the Beatles' story in many ways. Up to that point, everything about the group fits a clean, simple, narrative. Sometimes later investigations have proved that narrative wrong, as when Mark Lewisohn finally showed how the Beatles really got signed to Parlophone, but even there that was just filling in some missing details that explained curious omissions in the record. After this point, while we know the dates and times of recording sessions and so forth, the grand narrative of the group fragments. Every event takes on a different complexion depending on who is telling the story, what their memory of it was, and what their agenda is when telling the story. Sessions that McCartney described as "the tension album" were described by Starr as "full of love", even though as we will see Starr, not McCartney, was the one to quit the band during them. That would continue throughout the rest of the group's career together. And Lennon and Ono's relationship is a big part of this. From this point on, every anecdote reads differently depending on who you're more sympathetic to, whose view of their relationship you believe to be more accurate, and whose memory of a difficult, stressful, time you find more reliable. And in order to form any kind of opinion at all about that, you need to understand at least some basic facts about Yoko Ono, the most controversial figure by a long way in the Beatles' story, maybe in the whole of rock history: [Excerpt: Yoko Ono "Namyohorengekyo"] Yoko Ono came from precisely the kind of background that would make her fascinating to John Lennon -- a background of extreme material wealth but emotional neglect, from a family in which the strong impulse to create and rebel was always stifled by an equally-strong impulse to conform to rigid societal codes. Her father, Yeisuke Ono, was a Christian -- a minority religion in Japan -- from a nouveau riche background. His father had worked his way up from being a branch manager at a bank to being president of the Japan Industrial Bank. Yeisuke had originally wanted to be a musician, and he had a strong grounding in classical traditions, and was also fascinated both by jazz music and by the new experimental Western composers of the 1930s like Schoenberg and Henry Cowell: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] But as the mere son of the president of a bank, Ono was still the social inferior of his wife. Isoko Ono was from a family that were part of Japan's hereditary samurai nobility, and Isoko's grandfather had owned a zaibatsu, one of a handful of huge conglomerates that monopolised industries and owned their own banks. Yoko Ono's maternal family have been described as the Japanese equivalent to the Rockefellers or the Gettys, and it's been suggested that Yeisuke was literally the first commoner that Isoko had ever interacted with. Their marriage was not at first approved of by Isoko's family -- not only was Yeisuke a commoner, he was also a Christian rather than a Buddhist -- and under pressure from both families to conform, Yeisuke gave up on his ambition of being a musician and became a bank executive. He was transferred to work in San Francisco before Yoko's birth, while his wife and child remained in Japan, and he  didn't see his daughter until she was two years old, when they moved to the US to join him. Even then, he only saw his daughter by prior appointment, and they were never close -- to the extent that while Yeisuke had been an admirer of avant garde music in the thirties, Yoko didn't discover the same composers he was listening to until her time at university in the fifties. Yoko was trained in the piano from an early age, but as she later said “I was too shy to play in front of my father, I would go and play in the next room, just to let him know I was working.” Yeisuke would scrutinise her fingers on a regular basis, to see if she could possibly become a concert pianist as he had tried to be, but soon decided she couldn't. The family shuttled between Japan and the US through the 1930s, and Yoko was brought up bilingual, as well as being brought up in a multireligious household. That shuttling obviously came to an end when Japan and the US went to war at the end of 1941, when Yoko was eight years old, and for her crucial pre-teen years she actually did suffer from some deprivation, and even went hungry at times, as bombing of Japan's major cities disrupted the lives of even the most privileged people in Japan. During the war her father spent some time in both Vichy France and in the “Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" -- what the Japanese government called what had previously been French Indochina before the Japanese invasion and which later became better known as Vietnam -- as part of his work, and he seems to have spent some time in a prisoner of war camp. According to Isoko Ono, indeed, Yeisuke was “a Class B war criminal,” though if he was there seems to be no other evidence of the fact. For most of that time, his family continued their life of extraordinary privilege, but there was a short period where they went hungry, and Isoko had to trade the family's luxury goods for basic food staples. But this was a very short period, and once the war ended Yoko was back living in extreme luxury -- she went to the Gakushūin, or Peers' School, a school that had been established solely for the children of the nobility, and one of her classmates was Prince Akihito, who would later become the Emperor of Japan. Indeed, according to one of her cousins, one of her teenage boyfriends was the then Prince Yoshi, now Prince Hitachi, the future Emperor's younger brother. But she was dealing with emotional neglect. She has always described her mother as cold, distant, and unloving, much more concerned with following the proper rules of society than with her children's happiness, and her father as having wanted a son. When she told her father she wanted to be a composer, he told her that composition was too difficult for women. (Her mother, on the other hand, told her to avoid marriage and children as long as possible, because Isoko had wanted to be a painter before her marriage.) Indeed, when the family moved back to the US after the war, moving to Scarsdale, New York, they left Yoko in Japan to finish her schooling. But eventually she followed them to the US and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence, an expensive private liberal-arts college which at that time was women only. Yoko was equally interested in the visual arts and in music, and she particularly loved the work of composers like Webern: [Excerpt: Webern, "Cantata no. 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] It was that interest that led her to, and then past, the music that her father had enjoyed in his own youth. As she said later, “My heroes were the twelve-tone composers— Berg, Webern, those people—and I was just fascinated by what they could do. I wrote some twelve-tone songs, but then my music went off into an area that my teacher felt was really a bit off the track … and he said, ‘Well look, there are some people who are doing things like what you do, and they’re called avant-garde.’” She started creating compositions like "Secret Piece", a work she created in 1953, when she was nineteen, that's in very much the same style as those of Cage or La Monte Young, consisting of a single F note held in the bass and the instruction “with the accompaniment of the birds singing at dawn.” Later she would revise that piece, making it fully an instructional piece in the mould of Cage. She removed the stave with the F note and instead changed the piece to the instruction "Decide on one note that you want to play. Play it with the following accompaniment: The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer" Her work quickly started to blur the lines between paintings, music, and theatre, and encompass what we would now call performance art and conceptual art. By the early sixties she was creating what she called Instructional Paintings, or "paintings to be constructed in your head," and the essential theme of her art for most of these early years was an attempt to reveal the participatory nature of art, and make the audience aware that there's no such thing as a passive observer, but that a work is created as much by the audience as by the artist. While she was at Sarah Lawrence, she was introduced to Toshi Ichiyanagi, who would later become one of the most acclaimed Japanese composers of the latter half of the twentieth century, and the two soon married, and decided to take up life as Bohemian artists. They started hosting concerts in their loft, co-curated with La Monte Young, the composer we talked about in the episode on the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio For Strings"] We talked in that episode about Young's involvement in the Fluxus artistic movement, and Ono was a big part of that as well, and was at least according to many the primary driving force behind the concerts, which became the start of the "loft culture" that would be the breeding ground for much of New York's Bohemian art scene over the next couple of decades. As Ono later said “Everybody advised me not to do this, they said nobody’s going to come all the way downtown to look at or listen to this.” -- and indeed only twenty-five people turned up to the initial concert. But among those people were John Cage, the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, and Marcel Duchamp. Ono and Ichiyanagi split up in the early 1960s, and Ichiyanagi moved back to Japan -- though they did have an attempt at reconciliation in 1962 after Ono was invited by John Cage to come with him on a tour of Japan: [Excerpt: Yoko Ono, John Cage, Toshi Ichiyanagi, David Tudor and Kenji Kobayashi, “26’55.988”] It was during that time that, as we heard in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", Cage dedicated his piece 0'00, a sequel to 4'33, to Ono and Ichiyanagi. This was Yoko's first return to Japan since she'd left as a teenager, and she spent a couple of years in the country, and became part of the new Japanese avant-garde circle the same way she had previously been involved in the New York arts scene. It was in this period that she premiered works like "Cut Piece", one of her most famous and influential pieces of work. She later said of "Cut Piece" that it was "a frightening experience, and a bit embarrassing. It was something that I insisted on—in the Zen tradition of doing the thing which is the most embarrassing for you to do, and seeing what you come up with and how you deal with it.” "Cut Piece" is a powerful and disturbing work about the male gaze and also about the selfish nature of most artists. It involved Ono sitting in a spotlight with a large pair of scissors, and then inviting audience members to come up and use the scissors to cut off a piece of her clothing, while she remained impassive and unmoving, until she became naked. But her marriage to Ichiyanagi was well and truly over by this point, even as Ichiyanagi was becoming a massive success, and she had other problems. She was questioning her place in the world and the value of her work, and said later "The whole avant-garde world seemed bourgeois to me. Who was I beyond Toshi’s wife and John Cage’s friend?” An accusation of plagiarism by one reviewer seems to have pushed her over the edge, and she attempted suicide. This had apparently been something she'd done before -- according to her “As a teenager, I was always trying to cut my wrists or take pills. And later, even though my … husbands were terribly supportive of my work, I was always feeling frustrated as an artist. I felt I was not being accepted by society work-wise.” She ended up in a psychiatric hospital, one which had a reputation for overmedicating patients, but was eventually released through the efforts of one of her husband's friends, a minor American artist named Anthony Cox, who Ichiyanagi had asked to help her out. She and Cox eventually married -- indeed, they married twice, as the first time had to be annulled when they realised Yoko's divorce hadn't yet been finalised. Yoko soon found herself pregnant, and Kyoko Ono Cox was born on August 8, 1963. Kyoko would later become the inspiration for one of Yoko's most famous songs: [Excerpt: Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand in the Snow)"] Cox largely took a backseat to his wife's work, becoming a househusband and Kyoko's primary caregiver while Yoko continued creating, first in Japan and soon back in New York, where she reconnected with her Fluxus associates. With Cox's help, while she was still in Japan she had set up her own small press, Wunternaum Press, and published a book of her "event scores", Grapefruit, which consisted of instructions you could follow to do your own performances of her works, like her 1964 piece Tunafish Sandwich Piece: Imagine one thousand suns in the sky at the same time. Let them shine for one hour. Then, let them gradually melt into the sky. Make one tunafish sandwich and eat. In 1965 she also made a film version of "Cut Piece", with Albert and David Maysles, two documentary filmmakers who had also recently made the film What's Happening! The Beatles in the USA and would later go on to make the documentary Gimme Shelter about the Rolling Stones' ill-fated 1969 tour of the US, as well as the classic documentary Gray Gardens. Ono also started making her own films -- avant-garde conceptual works in much the same vein as those made by Andy Warhol around the same time. The most famous of her works from this period is probably a film originally titled No. 4 but now better known as Bottoms, which consists of footage of various people's bottoms while they walk on a treadmill. The purpose of the film, as with many of Ono's works, was apparently to help bring about world peace. But Yoko and Cox's relationship was falling apart, and she accepted an invitation to perform in London partly as a way of getting away from him, but he insisted on following her and bringing their daughter with them. At first, Yoko's work was not especially well received in London, but then she was asked to put on a show by John Dunbar, the owner of the Indica Gallery and bookshop, who was also the husband of the pop star Marianne Faithfull: [Excerpt: Marianne Faithfull, "As Tears Go By"] Dunbar was part of the same arty social circle as Paul McCartney, and the Beatles were regular visitors to the bookshop -- as we heard in the episode on "Tomorrow Never Knows", it was where John Lennon picked up his copy of The Psychedelic Experience. And so Lennon was invited to a private showing of Ono's work before it opened to the public. We've already covered Lennon's reaction to Ono's show in the episode on "All You Need is Love", and so there's no real need to recap it here, but Lennon was fascinated by Ono, at first purely as an artist, though he rapidly developed rather stronger feelings for her. According to Cynthia, Yoko kept visiting Lennon's house and showering him with postcards and letters and trying to seduce him -- Ono denies this, and to be fair to both parties, it's easy to see how a relatively small and infrequent number of visits or letters could blow up in one's memory given what happened. But Ono kept herself busy, and the two didn't see each other all that often. One time they were definitely in the same room was the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, the big "freak out" event we looked at in passing in various of our episodes on 1967 British records, which featured bands like Soft Machine, the Move, the Pink Floyd, and a band named John's Children, who had just released their flop single "Desdemona", written by their guitarist Marc Bolan: [Excerpt: John's Children, "Desdemona"] Lennon was in the audience for the Technicolor Dream, which also featured conceptual and performance artists and underground films on a second stage. Ono was one of the artists on this stage, performing "Cut Piece", though according to one biography I've read of her, she didn't actually perform it herself on this occasion -- she was overwhelmed by the massive crowd of hippies, very different from the small audiences of avant-garde art appreciators she normally performed to, and she ended up getting someone else to perform the piece while she was stood at the side watching. Possibly one of the reasons that Cynthia thought that Yoko was flooding Lennon with postcards was another of her conceptual pieces -- the 13 Days Do-It-Yourself Dance Festival -- in which for thirteen days she would send instructions on postcards to a mailing list of people who had signed up, cryptic instructions like "measure the horizon" or "send something you can't count." One can see how getting one of these in the post every day for nearly two weeks would seem like something different to Cynthia than it did to Yoko. At one point, John invited Yoko to the studio to watch the Beatles as they recorded Paul's song for Magical Mystery Tour, "The Fool on the Hill": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Fool on the Hill"] Afterwards, Yoko discovered what his real motivation was, as he brought her back to a flat with a sofa bed that he'd clearly used many times before. She was offended -- not by the idea of them having a sexual relationship, as she'd already started to fall for him, but by the way in which he assumed her interest, and the way he was seemingly treating her as just another groupie. Later, she would forgive this behaviour, reasoning that he could hardly take her out in public given that he was one of the most famous men in the world at the time and was still married, but for the moment, she decided that she was going to get some distance from Lennon, who she found herself falling for. She left Britain for France, and didn't even realise at first that Lennon had also left the country to go to India. She associated London with Lennon, and didn't actually return to London until she was invited by Ornette Coleman, the great free jazz saxophonist, to perform with him at the Royal Albert Hall, a recording that was later included on the Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band album: [Excerpt: Yoko Ono and Ornette Coleman, "AOS"] When she got back to London, she found a pile of letters at her flat from Lennon. She would later ask him “When you wrote me all those letters, weren’t you worried I’d run to a newspaper or something? You’re a married man," and he replied that he used to send letters just like them to his friend Stuart Sutcliffe -- one of several things which led Ono to the conclusion she has expressed later, that Lennon was bisexual, at least by orientation if not behaviourally (something he apparently told her in later years). She decided that if he propositioned her again, she wouldn't say no the next time. Yoko started up their correspondence again, and her postcards started arriving in Rishikesh. These letters would be sent to Tony Bramwell, an Apple staffer, in Delhi, and Bramwell would forward them on to Rishikesh in brown wrappers, so that Lennon could hide them from Cynthia. Even so, Lennon soon decided that he and Cynthia were going to sleep in separate cabins, on the pretext that he was going to spend more time meditating. He still had in his mind at least the partial desire to fix their marriage, but that was becoming less and less of a priority for him as he realised his affection for Ono might be reciprocated. While the purpose of the retreat was to meditate and to learn the Maharishi's teachings, the three songwriting Beatles also produced a lot of music while they were there, and a lot of the songs on their forthcoming album were inspired directly by events that took place in Rishikesh. Prudence Farrow, for example, got so heavily into meditation that she stayed in her cabin for days at a time meditating without coming outside, and some of the other people there became concerned for her mental health, and Lennon wrote the song "Dear Prudence" about her: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Dear Prudence"] Both Lennon and McCartney were inspired by a lecture by the Maharishi to write songs on the same theme -- Lennon's "Child of Nature" would remain just a demo for several years: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Child of Nature"] Before being reworked into his solo track "Jealous Guy": [Excerpt: John Lennon, "Jealous Guy"] While McCartney wrote "Mother Nature's Son", which did make the album: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Mother Nature's Son"] Harrison wrote many songs on the trip, so many that given his smaller quota of songs on the albums, some ended up getting used by other artists, saved for solo albums many years down the line, or in some cases left out altogether like his song "Dehra Dun": [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Dehra Dun"] It was also while they were in Rishikesh that the group first heard Bob Dylan's new music, the album John Wesley Harding, which we'll talk about a bit more in some upcoming episodes. That album was a stripped down "back-to-basics" album in much the same way that their own recent "Lady Madonna" single was, but it contained a lot of Western narratives like the title track: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "John Wesley Harding"] And while the Beatles enjoyed the songs, they couldn't help but parody them, with McCartney writing the ridiculous cowboy song "Rocky Raccoon": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Rocky Raccoon"] Many, many songs were written by the group during their stay in Rishikesh, about the characters they encountered, or sayings of the Maharishi, or insights they had on the trip, but at least one song written shortly after the trip's end had a less salubrious inspiration: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Sexy Sadie"] That song, "Sexy Sadie", was originally titled "Maharishi" before Harrison persuaded Lennon to water it down. Almost as soon as they arrived, the Beatles started to leave. Starr was the first to go -- he was always the one who was the least keen on meditating anyway, and the food was upsetting his stomach, which was still delicate from childhood illnesses. He was basically living on cans of Heinz baked beans, and only stayed for around a fortnight. McCartney held on for longer, but left around a month after he arrived. He would remain a practitioner of meditation, and would only rarely say negative things about the Maharishi in the future, but he felt he'd learned all he could, he'd had his little holiday, now he wanted to get back to London and back to his artistic friends and celebrity lifestyle. He could meditate just as well in London as in Rishikesh, after all. But Harrison and Lennon both stayed behind, both intending to stick things out for the full three months the course was supposed to last. In the end they managed two. They both had very different reasons for staying though. In Harrison's case, he was not only a believer in Transcendental Meditation, but he was increasingly becoming a believer in Hinduism, and for the rest of his life he would remain a very religious man, devoted to his newfound faith, and he would continue to admire the Maharishi. Lennon, though, was someone who throughout his life would, by his own account, look for substitute father figures, to fill the void he felt from what he perceived as his abandonment by his biological father and the early death of the uncle who had helped raise him. He would turn to some guru or political figure or business advisor or psychiatrist, see them as possessing the answer to all his problems, and then as soon as they were revealed to be flawed human beings, he would viciously denounce them for not being the perfect god figure he'd built up in his own imagination. This is one of Lennon's less attractive character traits -- as many of the traits we talk about in this episode are -- although one thing at least can be said of him, that he later became self-aware enough to know that this was a pattern in his behaviour, correctly identify it, and take steps to try and fix it. But just as Lennon started to realise that this particular guru might not give him The Answer, another one turned up: [Excerpt: "Magic Alex" Apple promo] Alexis Mardas was someone else, like Yoko Ono, that Lennon had met through John Dunbar and the Indica Gallery. Mardas, who became known as "magic Alex", was a Greek student who worked part-time as a television repairman. Mardas had had an exhibition at the Indica Gallery of "kinetic light sculptures," and through that he had first met Brian Jones, and produced a rather underwhelming psychedelic light show for the Rolling Stones' live show. Through Jones he had been introduced to the Beatles, and he had impressed Lennon with a box with randomly blinking lights. On the basis of this, Lennon had decided he was an electronics genius, and he had been put in charge of the electronics division of the Beatles' new company, Apple. Mardas kept making the odd little toy along the lines of his box of blinking lights, while promising the Beatles new innovations that mysteriously never quite materialised, like an "artificial sun" as bright as the real one that could be used for the opening of the Apple Boutique, an X-ray camera, paint that could turn things invisible, and a working flying saucer. We'll be hearing more about Mardas in a future Beatles episode, but at this point he was still very much the Beatles' exciting new discovery, and regarded at least by Lennon as a genius. He arrived at the ashram around the same time that McCartney left, supposedly to work on setting up a worldwide satellite TV transmitter so that the Maharishi's message could be beamed all over the world. Mardas immediately took against the Maharishi and his influence over Lennon and Harrison -- whether you think that's one con man recognising another, or someone scared that his meal tickets might come to their senses with some positive influence is, like much that happened at this time, subject to interpretation. But either way, Mardas started to chip away at Lennon's belief in the Maharishi, pointing out that for a man of the spirit the Maharishi seemed very comfortable with material success (which was actually one of the things that had attracted so many celebrities to him -- when given a choice between "take all you have and give it to the poor" and the famous quote from the Maharishi "You don't have to give up your Rolls Royce," someone who has just gone to the trouble to have their Rolls painted in psychedelic colours with a new stereo system would be more receptive to the latter: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Sexy Sadie"] Indeed, in a lot of ways the Maharishi's teachings resembled not traditional ascetic monasticism, but the very American ideas of the Prosperity Gospel and the New Thought -- the idea underlying almost all of the American religions and movements that rose up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like Christian Science, Scientology, and Spiritualism, that the physical world is a manifestation of your mental attitude, and that if you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps hard enough, you too can be a yogic flier. Kurt Vonnegut would describe his feelings about the Maharishi in a piece for Esquire later that year, saying: "Maharishi replied that any oppressed person could rise by practicing Transcendental Meditation. He would automatically do his job better, and the economy would pay him more, and then he could buy anything he wanted. He wouldn’t be oppressed anymore. In other words, he should quit bitching, begin to meditate, grasp his garters, and float into a commanding position in the marketplace, where transactions are always fair. And I opened my eyes, and I took a hard look at Maharishi. He hadn’t wafted me to India. He had sent me back to Schenectady, New York, where I used to be a public-relations man—years and years ago. That was where I had heard other euphoric men talk of the human condition in terms of switches and radios and the fairness of the marketplace. They, too, thought it was ridiculous for people to be unhappy, when there were so many simple things they could do to improve their lot. They, too, had Bachelor of Science degrees. Maharishi had come all the way from India to speak to the American people like a General Electric engineer." This was what had appealed to the Beatles at first -- after all, they had more claim than most to consider themselves self-made millionaires. And indeed, McCartney, at the press conference when he returned from India, had talked up the Maharishi's capitalist bootstrap version of the world, saying of Indian poverty  "You see, if we just give handouts to people, it’ll just stop the problems for a day, or a week, you know. But, in India, there’s so many people, you really need all of America’s money to pour into India to solve it, you know. So, you’ve got to get to the cause of it and persuade all the Indians to start working and, you know, start doing things. Their religions, it’s very fatalistic, and they just sit down and think, ‘God said, this is it, so it’s too bad to do anything about it.’ The Maharishi’s trying to persuade them that they can do something about it." But this was also enough unlike the conventional idea of holiness that it became easy for Mardas to plant seeds of doubt in Lennon, especially. Soon there were other accusations -- depending on which sources you read, that he had groped an unnamed student, or that he had attempted to rape Mia Farrow. Regarding the latter, Farrow has later said that the Maharishi hugged her when they were together in private, that at the time she had believed it was a sexual assault, but that later she had decided that it was a nonsexual embrace.  But she left the ashram almost immediately. There may have been multiple sets of accusations, because the various accounts of what he was accused of seem to differ, but there was a general belief, promulgated by Mardas, that he had done something sexually improper. Later, most of those who were there have said that they no longer believed that the Maharishi had done anything wrong, and thought that the accusations were all the result of Mardas' stirring. But of course we know very well that people have a tendency  to rationalise away powerful men's sexual assaults. I have no idea what, if anything, actually happened, and given that the Maharishi, Lennon, Harrison, Cynthia Lennon, and Mardas are all now dead it's unlikely that anyone will get to the bottom of what was actually accused and whether it was true or not. Even the Maharishi didn't know why they were leaving, and kept asking them why as they told him. Lennon told him “Well, if you’re so cosmic, you should know why.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, “Sexy Sadie”] According to Pattie Harrison, "Paul was on to the next thing which was Apple, Yoko was calling to John from a cloud, but George was dreading going back to London, facing all the stuff connected with their business and trying to find a new manager to replace Brian." So while John and Cynthia Lennon went straight back to London, George and Pattie Harrison went off to visit Ravi Shankar, as George was intending to appear in a documentary about him, and wanted to catch up with his friend while he was in India. While they were there, Pattie took a photo of George lying on a mattress, which she later called "the last image I have of him looking completely happy and at peace." On the journey back from India, John finally confessed to Cynthia for the first time that he'd been unfaithful. Perhaps he felt hypocritical having reacted so badly to the Maharishi's apparent sexual immorality, perhaps he was actually trying to fix his marriage. At any rate, Cynthia was horrified, but also felt that that might be the first step towards mending things -- after all, he was finally being honest now. When they got back, he also seemed happy to see Julian -- something that was very rare. A short while later, after visiting Derek Taylor, who had come back to Britain from LA to be Apple's new press officer, and seeing Taylor's children, John even suggested to Cynthia that they should have another child to keep Julian company. By this point Cynthia was so confused and distressed that she broke down in tears, and told him that he should be with someone more suited to him, like Yoko Ono, not her. That was nonsense, John said, it was her that he loved. Now, the timeline gets thoroughly confusing here. According to the conventional narrative, Cynthia went on two separate holidays, one to Greece and one to Italy, in quick succession, and major events happened during or after both. If you're to take all the standard accounts and timelines at face value, Cynthia came back unexpectedly early from her first two-week holiday on the twenty-second of May, three weeks after she left, then went on another holiday a couple of days after she arrived back, to coincide with John's trip to New York on the eleventh of May, and so most of what follows somehow happened in a time of minus eleven days. Either some of the most pivotal events in the lives of John and Cynthia Lennon and Yoko Ono happened in negative eleven days -- perhaps the eleven days that were lost in the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar? -- or everyone involved had differently faulty memories and confused their stories later.  I suspect Mark Lewisohn will eventually clear this up, but until he does I'll have to be vague about what happened when and elide some details. Anyway, two events definitely happened in May 1968 which would have major ramifications for the Beatles' future. The first of these, and the one whose date we can pin down exactly, is that Lennon and McCartney took a trip to New York, where they held a series of interviews and press conferences announcing the formation of Apple, and explaining the new company's mission: [Excerpt: Lennon and McCartney interview] During that trip, Paul McCartney reconnected with an American photographer he'd had a brief flirtation with the previous year, Linda Eastman, the daughter of the lawyer we've heard mentioned a few times, Lee Eastman. His relationship with Jane Asher was by this point over -- she would announce that their engagement was off two months later, but it had been falling apart for a long time -- and he asked for Linda's phone number. The two would get together again the next month when McCartney visited LA to address a Capitol Records conference, and would remain inseparable for almost thirty years. The other event was also the end of one long-term relationship and the beginning of another. While Cynthia was away on one of her holidays, John Lennon invited Yoko Ono to come to his house. Mindful of her resolution that if he asked again she'd say yes, she came round. The two spent hours playing with Lennon's tape recorder, making avant-garde experimental music of a kind that Ono had been making for years, but which was new to Lennon -- although McCartney had done similar experiments already. [Excerpt: John Lennon and Yoko Ono, "Two Virgins" around 04:36] That music would later get released on the album Two Virgins. The timeline gets confused here, but the narrative as it's generally told is that Cynthia got back early from her holiday in Greece, to find Yoko in the house, and John and Yoko in matching dressing gowns (Yoko has always said that they were properly dressed). Cynthia fled the house and went off to stay with her mother, but came back a couple of days later, and John told her that she was still the one he loved, and that he wanted to fix the marriage. But then shortly after that he encouraged her to go on holiday again, this time to Italy and taking Julian with her. As soon as she'd gone, Yoko left Tony Cox and her daughter Kyoko and moved in to Kenwood, the Lennons' marital home. She started making public appearances with Lennon almost straight away, and the first Cynthia found about her marriage being over was a visit from Magic Alex in Italy, telling her “I’ve come with a message from John. He is going to divorce you, take Julian away from you and send you back to Hoylake.” Originally, Lennon was going to sue Cynthia for divorce, claiming she had committed adultery with a man she was spending time with in Italy, who would later become her second husband (no-fault divorce was only finally brought in in the UK in 2022), but as he had no evidence of that, the tables were soon turned, and the eventual divorce was on the more reasonable grounds of *Lennon's* adultery. There was also a game of musical houses, with Cynthia and Julian first moving into a London flat owned by Ringo, where Cynthia's mother was already living, before it being decided that Kenwood was the better place to bring up a small child while John and Yoko would prefer living the life of artists in London. They swapped residences, with John and Yoko moving into the flat owned by Ringo, but for a while as well John and Yoko lived briefly with Paul McCartney. McCartney had been the first person that Lennon had told about his new relationship. Partly this was because McCartney was still his closest friend, but also it has been suggested by Ono that there was some jealousy there -- that Lennon worried that McCartney was in pursuit of Ono. It seems unlikely that he was, but it's also often been suggested that at one point Ono was briefly interested in McCartney. Either way, while there's no actual evidence of romantic or sexual interest on either side, Lennon became paranoid that someone would steal his new love away from him. There have been many explanations given for Lennon's behaviour with Ono over the next year or two -- the two would never part from each other's company, Ono even following Lennon into the men's toilets at the recording studio. The explanation that Ono has given is the one that rings truest to me -- that far from this being her weird imposition into the Beatles' lives and working relationships, which is how Lennon's bandmates seem to have seen it, it was actually a decision *Lennon* made, because he was profoundly insecure and jealous, and was literally terrified that if they were apart for even a few minutes she'd go off with another man. And in the middle of all this turmoil, the Beatles were starting work on a new album: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm So Tired (Esher demo)"] Work on what became known as the White Album started with a session at George Harrison's house, in which the three songwriting Beatles ran through the material they'd written in India. At that session, the group ran through twenty-seven songs acoustically, of which nineteen would end up making the album. One thing jumps out when looking at these demos, and that is just how dominant John was at this point. Lennon would, in later years, talk about how from his perspective the problems in the group over the next few months stemmed from McCartney feeling insecure. Everyone is agreed that McCartney had been the dominant force in the group from early in the recording of Revolver, through Sgt Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour. Lennon had contributed some of the high points during that period, and the quality of what he produced was so high it had masked to an extent how small the quantity of songs he'd written was, but for much of that time he'd been suffering from depression, utterly lethargic, and by his own account taking acid almost every single day, which is not a state in which one can really be productive. One of the great things about the Lennon-McCartney partnership was that both men's peaks of productivity seemed to happen at different times, so in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania, McCartney had contributed a small handful of excellent songs while Lennon wrote the vast bulk of the material, but McCartney had become the main productive partner as Lennon's mental health declined. Now the roles had been reversed again. Whether it was temporarily coming off drugs under the influence of Maharishi, the effect of the meditation, or stimulation from his new relationship with Ono, Lennon was at a creative peak, and that's shown by the Esher demos, and at the same time McCartney was in a comparative slump. Lennon wrote fifteen of the twenty-seven songs demod in that session, which included some of the strongest material he ever wrote. McCartney on the other hand wrote only seven, with Harrison contributing five. Of course, quality matters as well, and some of the songs McCartney did bring in are among the greatest songs he ever wrote, but at the same time it's clear that Lennon was, however temporarily, becoming the dominant partner again. But of course, all that talk about dominance between Lennon and McCartney leaves out George Harrison. While eleven of Lennon's fifteen songs demod at Esher would end up used for the album, with two more being revived for Abbey Road a year later, and six of McCartney's seven would be used on the album, only two of Harrison's five would be used, and for example it would take fourteen years for his song "Circles" to be heard outside this demo session, when he included it in his 1982 album Gone Troppo: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Circles"] And similarly, while the group would work intensely on his "Not Guilty", the group's version would be left on the shelf until 1996, and the song would first see a release on a solo album in 1979: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Not Guilty"] Nonetheless, it was McCartney who, according to Lennon, was feeling marginalised as Lennon reasserted himself as the group's main songwriter -- though McCartney would also contribute a number of other songs as the sessions for the album itself progressed. A few days after that demo session, the group went into the studio to start work on the first song to be cut for the new album, a track by Lennon titled "Revolution", which he had earmarked as a potential single. That session was the first one he'd brought Ono to as his partner, rather than as someone he was bringing along for a visit as he had to the "Fool on the Hill" session. Beatles sessions had always been a boy's club up to that point, with no women involved in the sessions except as occasional orchestral session performers, or in "happenings" like the televised "All You Need is Love" session. Lennon actually lied to the other Beatles at first, saying Ono had been dealing with some mental health issues and he needed to look after her, which led to Harrison in particular being very concerned for her -- much to her bemusement, as she had no idea Lennon had said this. That concern would soon turn to annoyance -- of all the Beatles Harrison seems to have been the least supportive of Ono at first, saying he'd heard bad things about her from other people in the New York arts scene she had been part of. According to Ono, Lennon had very different eventual plans -- at this stage, according to her, he was thinking that he could persuade the group to have Ono join as a fifth member, on the grounds that she was a major artistic talent of her own. While the idea of John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko being the Fab Five does sound a little preposterous, we'll see in this episode and the next one on the group that they did start bringing in outsiders to be part of the group's process in a way they hadn't previously, so maybe it wasn't quite *as* daft as it sounds. But there was of course no chance the other Beatles would agree to that, even if he'd suggested the idea to them outright at any point. At this initial session, Ono actually kept an audio diary of her feelings while the group were recording, which reveals her as almost as insecure as Lennon: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Revolution (with Yoko Ono audio diary)"] The track they were working on, "Revolution", was Lennon's response to the confusing political state he'd discovered the world to be in when he got back from India. The attitude of the counterculture had changed *dramatically* in the early months of 1968, from being primarily about expanding one's own mind through drugs and Eastern mysticism, with a side order of calling for peace in Vietnam (something that was nowhere near as relevant in the UK as in the US anyway), to being focused on hard-left revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow the entire capitalist system and replace it with -- well, there were differences of opinion on that, and factions of anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, and so on having very heated internal battles about matters which to those on the outside of the left seemed like angels on pinheads, but were of urgent relevance to those on the inside. Lennon's own attitudes towards revolution would change radically multiple times over the course of a relatively short period. Lennon was never a particularly systematic thinker, and had a tendency to agree with the last person he'd spoken to, unless he was in a bad mood, at which point he would violently disagree with the last person he'd spoken to, but his instincts were of the left, and so he would go through periods of supporting anyone who could be thought of as radical, no matter how ridiculous or dangerous, and periods of moderation. This ambivalence was borne out in the song, which in this initial version contains an equivocation about whether he can be counted out or in to destruction: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Revolution 1 (take 18)"] The version of the song that was included on the eventual album, take eighteen, lasted ten and a half minutes in the original recording, most of which was an extended jam, over which Lennon would scream and moan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Revolution 1 (take 18)"] Lennon hived off much of that material for another project. As he explained later:  "The slow version of ‘Revolution’ on the album went on and on and on and I took the fade-out part, which is what they sometimes do with disco records now, and just layered all this stuff over it. It was the basic rhythm of the original ‘Revolution’ going on with some 20 loops we put on, things from the archives of EMI." That experimental tape loop project, which was largely done by Lennon, Ono, and George Harrison without the involvement of the other Beatles or of George Martin, became "Revolution #9", the oddest thing ever to be put on a Beatles album -- a tape collage in the same style as composers like Stockhausen: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Revolution #9"] The track divides opinion like no other track the Beatles ever recorded, with many listeners finding it intolerable, but with others thinking it an impressive piece of avant-garde music. My own view, for what it's worth, is that it justifies its place on the White Album precisely because so many people found it unlistenable. The White Album is one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, and even if only one percent of the people who heard the track found it enjoyable or interesting, that one percent of people amount to hundreds of thousands of listeners, many of whom will have been shown for the first time the potentials of avant-garde art. Oddly, after starting work on the album with "Revolution" (as it was then called, though the track was later retitled "Revolution 1", for reasons we'll get to) on the thirtieth of May, the group would spend almost the whole of June working on side projects. Between the first and twenty-sixth of June, only two new Beatles tracks were started. The first of these was Ringo's "Don't Pass Me By", his first solo composition, and one he'd been working on for several years at that point: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Don't Pass Me By"] The other was McCartney's "Blackbird", a song that was partly inspired by his step-grandmother talking about being comforted by the sound of a blackbird outside her window, and which was musically inspired by the Bouree from Bach's Suite for Lute in E Minor [Excerpt: Bach, "Bouree from Suite for Lute in E Minor"] McCartney has also talked about the song being inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the US -- "bird" being slang for woman, he was thinking of Black women rising up and demanding civil liberties, though to be honest it would be impossible to tell that from the song itself, which reads very literally without the knowledge of its composer's intent -- though whatever meaning you take from it, it's one of McCartney's best pieces: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Blackbird"] The track as released only features McCartney on guitar, vocals, and foot-taps, along with some birdsong sound effects -- and those sound effects were nearly the wrong ones. Apparently the assistant engineer John Smith, when mixing the track, was putting the birdsong on when Ken Townsend walked in and asked why, if the song was called "Blackbird", the bird he could hear was a thrush. Townsend was a country person while everyone else involved had grown up in cities, and nobody had noticed that they were using the wrong recording. But the bird on the record is the correct one: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Blackbird"] During the recording, Lennon suggested to McCartney that he should use a brass band on the track, inspired by Harry Nilsson's use of one on his cover version of "She's Leaving Home": [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "She's Leaving Home"] It was a suggestion that made a lot of sense -- "Blackbird", like a lot of McCartney's material at this time, has a lot of Nilsson's style about it, and Nilsson would later cut his own version of the song. McCartney decided not to use a brass band on "Blackbird", but he did later use the idea for another similar-sounding White Album song, “Mother Nature's Son”, which Nilsson would also later cover. But other than these two tracks -- one of them only featuring one Beatle, the other a minor trifle -- most of June was spent on other things. Harrison and Starr, with their wives and Mal Evans, flew off to California, for Harrison to appear in some scenes in a documentary on Ravi Shankar, and straight after they flew back home, McCartney flew to the US to address Capitol Records staff about Apple. Lennon, meanwhile, was promoting a play -- an adaptation of his books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, which he had adapted with the actor Victor Spinetti and playwright Adrienne Kennedy -- and was also doing conceptual art stunts with Ono, like planting acorns to promote world peace. They were also moving forward with plans for Apple Records. The very first Apple Record of all was not ever released to the public. The record labelled Apple 1 was, in fact, by of all people Frank Sinatra. As a birthday present for his wife Maureen, Ringo had had Frank Sinatra record a version of "The Lady is a Tramp", retitled "The Lady is a Champ", and with new lyrics by Sammy Cahn, a classic songwriter who had written many of Sinatra's hits but who in later decades mostly stuck to writing new parody lyrics to old standards for corporate events and the like. Only a handful of copies were ever pressed up, but it was given the catalogue number Apple 1: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "The Lady is a Champ"] Maureen's birthday was in August, but before then the tracks that would make up Apple's first real releases had already been recorded. When Apple finally launched, it would be with the intention of putting out four simultaneous single releases (though as it happened, logistical issues meant that in the UK they came out in two batches of two, a week apart). One of these would be the next Beatles single, but the other three would be tracks Paul and George had produced for other artists. The first of these, and the most successful, was Mary Hopkin. Hopkin was a Welsh folk singer, who had appeared on the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks. She had been seen on the show by the model Twiggy, who had pointed McCartney in her direction. McCartney had, for two years, been trying to persuade someone to record a song he'd heard by an obscure American folk singer, Gene Raskin. That song was based on a song from the 1920s, "Dorogoy dlinnoyu" by the Russian composer Boris Fomin and lyricist Konstantin Podrevsky [Excerpt: Tamara Tsereteli, "Dorogoy dlinnoyu (By the Long Road)"] Raskin had written a new lyric for that melody, in English, and copyrighted the whole thing in his own name. McCartney had been unsuccessful in persuading anyone that it was likely to be a hit -- he'd tried the Moody Blues, among others -- but he thought it was perfect for Hopkin, and he produced her version of the song: [Excerpt: Mary Hopkin, "Those Were The Days"] Harrison, meanwhile, was producing Jackie Lomax, the former member of the Undertakers we heard about earlier who had signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. For Lomax's debut Apple single, Harrison brought in a song he'd written during the group's trip to India. He'd demoed "Sour Milk Sea" during the Esher demo sessions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Sour Milk Sea"] But the version recorded with Lomax was very different. Lomax's track featured three quarters of the Beatles -- Harrison on rhythm guitar, McCartney on bass, and Starr on drums -- plus session pianist Nicky Hopkins, Britain's most prominent session keyboard player, and on lead guitar Eric Clapton, with whom Harrison had become very close friends in the preceding months, both of them in particular bonding over their love of The Band's Music From Big Pink. This supergroup created what was probably the hardest-rocking sound any of the Beatles had been involved in up to that point: [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Sour Milk Sea"] McCartney's other side project at that time was very far from being a hard rocker -- at the end of June he recorded the Black Dyke Mills Band performing an instrumental he wrote as a TV theme, "Thingummybob": [Excerpt: The Black Dyke Mills Band, "Thingummybob"] But on the other hand, the Beatles soon replicated a very similar hard rock sound on John's "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey", recording for which started a couple of days before "Thingummybob": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey"] That was a song that had been largely written in Rishikesh, made up of lines from lectures given by the Maharishi, apart from the reference to the monkey, which initially was just inspired by the wild monkeys around Rishikesh -- who had also inspired McCartney's trifle "Why Don't We Do it in the Road?", after he had seen them copulating in public. But the monkey reference by this point had taken on a different aspect. Ono, who had for most of her life been completely clean-living and teetotal, had been introduced to heroin use while she was performing with Ornette Coleman at the beginning of the year -- at this point, heroin was largely a drug used by jazz musicians rather than rockers, though that was about to change. Ono had introduced Lennon to the drug, and the two were casual users at this point, but were both rapidly heading down the road to addiction -- or to having a monkey on their back, to use the vernacular. This hard rock style was only just starting to become popular in 1968, and the Beatles were clearly fascinated throughout the recording of what became the White Album by the possibilities of loud amplification. But that wasn't the only style of music they were making. Also recorded during June was "Good Night", one of the sweetest things Lennon ever wrote, which he'd written as a lullaby for his son, Julian: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Good Night"] That was one of the few signs of outward affection for his son that Lennon showed during the sixties -- though the message is possibly undercut by the fact that Julian apparently never knew the song was written for him until the 1980s. The next song to be started by the group was one of McCartney's, and it was a song that caused more tension than any other song in these sessions. "O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da" is an attempt at reggae, sung in a cod-Jamaican accent (though the phrase "O Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da" itself is apparently from a Nigerian dialect, and was taken by McCartney from the Nigerian conga player Jimmy Scott -- going back to what was said about the orientalism of "The Inner Light", the way that this song conflates Nigeria and Jamaica is rather problematic). The group made multiple attempts at the song over the course of several days, leading to intense frustration from Lennon in particular at McCartney's perfectionism over what Lennon thought of as a terrible song -- though it was Lennon who came up with the idea that salvaged the record, as he came up with the distinctive piano intro, and took it at a much faster pace than the group had previously been playing the song: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da"] As Geoff Emerick tells the story "After about four or five nights doing ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ John Lennon came to the session really stoned, totally out of it on something or other, and he said ‘Alright, we’re gonna do ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’.’ He went straight to the piano and smashed the keys with an almighty amount of volume, twice the speed of how they’d done it before, and said ‘This is it! Come on!’ He was really aggravated. That was the version they ended up using." Despite that, the group then did *another* full ground-up remake a couple of days later, which they decided against using.  One can perhaps see Lennon's point about how much time was spent on McCartney's songs, even though the song is a relative trifle (and the initial version of the song, which made it on to Anthology 3, is not noticeably worse than the released version, and has a nice Nilssonesque feel to it). It was during the sessions for "O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da" that the first departure from the team that had been working together for years happened. It would not be the last. Geoff Emerick had been working with George Martin as long as the Beatles had -- indeed, depending on which of the conflicting accounts you believe, their first session might have been Emerick's -- and he'd been the primary engineer since the start of the Revolver sessions. But he had had enough of the tension between the band members, which had ramped up enormously during the 1968 sessions, especially between John and Paul. He had also had enough of the unprofessional noodling, constant remakes, and general time-wasting. Indeed, *everyone* was tense. And eventually, when McCartney was still messing around with changes to his lead vocal, trying to make tiny changes, George Martin made a suggestion about his phrasing. McCartney, in a bad mood, said to Martin "If you think you can do it better, why don't you come down and do it yourself?" That was unlike McCartney, but not totally unheard-of. But Martin had had enough, and shouted at McCartney -- the only time Emerick recalled ever hearing him raise his voice in a session, yelling "Then bloody sing it again. I give up. I just don't know any better how to help you." Emerick quit working Beatles sessions that day, and refused to even consider going back to them. His place was taken by Ken Scott, and recording went on. At the same session as the remake of the remake of "O-Bla-Di" the group also did a remake of Lennon's "Revolution". The version they'd recorded at the beginning of the sessions would still get released -- it made it on to the album as "Revolution 1" -- but Lennon wanted the song to be a single, and McCartney and Harrison thought the track they'd recorded was not commercial enough for a single -- it was too slow and laid back. That was something that Lennon could fix. To fix it, he reworked the track, taking inspiration from a 1954 R&B single, "Do Unto Others" by Pee Wee Crayton. Like "Blue Monday", the Fats Domino song which had provided some inspiration for McCartney's "Lady Madonna", "Do Unto Others" was written and produced by Dave Bartholomew, and it had a very distinctive guitar intro played by Crayton: [Excerpt: Pee Wee Crayton, "Do Unto Others"] That became the intro to the new recording of "Revolution", which would simply be called "Revolution", with no number: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Revolution"] While Lennon had been ambivalent about destruction on the acoustic version of the song, at the time he recorded this electric version, he had no ambivalence at all: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Revolution"] Although that state too was only temporary. When the single finally came out, the Beatles went on the David Frost show to promote it and performed both sides of the single. For that performance (which used the original backing tracks but live vocals), the group incorporated the "bom shooby doo-wop" backing vocals they'd done for "Revolution 1" but which hadn't made the single version, and Lennon once again equivocated about his feelings on destruction: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Revolution (David Frost)"] The song caused some controversy within the counterculture, especially in the US where the politics of the time were rather more pointed. Britain in 1968 had a government which by historical standards was about as left-wing as it ever got, and which had made a series of liberal reforms which activists had been demanding for decades, like legalising some gay sex acts between consenting men over twenty-one, abolishing the death penalty for murder, and legalising abortion. That did open up the space for even more radical demands, but at the same time there seemed to be no pressing need for them -- for most people, the Wilson government was more than left wing enough and the Trotskyists calling for revolution in the UK were posturing fools. The UK had its problems, but for most on the left, it looked for the moment like progress was being made towards fixing them. In the US, though, the situation was rather more pressing. Every young man was in danger of being drafted, if he wasn't already in the military, to fight in an unpopular, unwinnable war . And there had been constant riots, labelled as "race riots", usually provoked by police brutality against Black people, and a right-wing backlash against the Civil Rights movement was already coming into prominence, while the Democrats, once Robert Kennedy was murdered, had nothing to offer other than continuation of the Vietnam war under Hubert Humphrey. Under those circumstances, it was perhaps more understandable that people wanted more radical change than electoral politics offered, and those people were bitterly disappointed to hear Lennon, with his image as the most radical Beatle, arguing for moderation and equivocation rather than revolution. Most notably, Nina Simone recorded her own answer record to "Revolution": [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "Revolution"] As we've seen, Lennon himself wasn't entirely sure about his own message in the song, and he was rather welcoming of Simone's attack, saying “I thought it was interesting that Nina Simone did a sort of answer to ‘Revolution’. That was very good – it was sort of like ‘Revolution’, but not quite. That I sort of enjoyed, somebody who reacted immediately to what I had said.” But while Lennon had definitely made "Revolution" commercial enough to go on a single, as it turned out it would only be the B-side of what would become one of the group's most important recordings, and one that Lennon himself would sometimes cite as his favourite McCartney song, though what it says about Lennon, and about his relationship with McCartney, is complex at best: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] The story of how Paul McCartney wrote "Hey Jude" is one of those anecdotes that's been told so often that all the edges are worn off, and the truth might as well be a myth, because almost everyone with even the slightest interest in the band can recite it along with McCartney, but of course part of what we do in this podcast is to tell those stories again. So... as we've seen, Lennon had left his wife, Cynthia, and in doing so he more or less abandoned his son Julian, as well. The two would always have a complicated, strained, relationship, and while Lennon would always be ambivalent about his treatment of Cynthia, he would publicly acknowledge that he had been a terrible father to Julian. At this point, Lennon had decided he simply wanted nothing more to do with Cynthia, and he cut her totally out of his life. What hurt Cynthia, almost more than that, was that the other Beatles' wives also cut her out of theirs. She had considered Pattie and Maureen friends, but neither of them would speak to her after the split -- she always said that she believed that Lennon had put pressure on them through their husbands. But McCartney felt sorry for her. Perhaps regretful for his own rather callous treatment of Jane Asher, who finally announced publicly her own split from McCartney in the middle of July, he showed one of the best sides of his own character. Unlike the other Beatles, who cut Cynthia out of their lives, he decided to drive up to Kenwood to visit her and Julian -- by all accounts McCartney had spent more time actually interacting with Julian than Lennon himself had. He brought Cynthia a single red rose, and joked with her that he should marry her now she and John had split, but he also wanted to reassure Julian -- he's said later that he always feels sorriest for the children when divorces happen. On the way down he started singing to himself, "Hey Jules, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better..." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] McCartney changed "Jules" to "Jude", because the latter sounded better to him, and the song he'd been singing to himself slowly became a romantic one -- with occasional exceptions, McCartney has never been one who thinks too closely about his lyrics, and he tends to fall back into writing romantic lyrics with placeholder words. Those lyrics, while they were initially inspired by Julian, soon took on a more universal resonance, and one which was probably inspired by McCartney having finally started his relationship with Linda Eastman, who he would soon marry and from whom he would remain inseparable until her death in 1998 (though at this point, while Linda was still living in America, he was also seeing another woman, Francie Schwartz). The lyrics, with lines like "you have found her, now go and get her" and "You were made to go out and get her," along with the general theme of making the best of a bad situation, could very easily apply to McCartney and his new love, and something good coming out of the increasingly tense situation in the group. But they could also apply to Lennon, who had also found a new love. And in Lennon's eyes the message of the song was obvious -- to him, it was the better angel of McCartney's nature recognising that because he'd found Ono, he would no longer be as interested in being a Beatle, and granting him permission to move on and be with her. It was a song that he would always love for that reason. And of course, there may be elements of both of these things in the finished song, and it may well be that McCartney started out thinking reproachfully of his partner but then also ending up wishing him well. People are complicated, relationships are complicated, love is complicated. And McCartney has said, often, that when he performs the song live in recent decades, he's always thought of Lennon, especially on one line: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] Lennon and McCartney didn't often collaborate fully on songs by this point, but they did often suggest ideas to each other and help finish songs up, and they were always the other's first audience, both for songs and for matters in their personal life. And so McCartney played "Hey Jude" for Lennon before the song had been finished -- or at least before he *thought* he'd finished the song. He didn't like the line "The movement you need is on your shoulder" -- he's later said that it sounded to him like he was talking about a parrot, and also the line broke the rhyme scheme. Most of the rest of the song is one of McCartney's best crafted lyrics in terms of formal properties, with a lot of clever internal rhymes that don't draw attention to themselves too much, and the closest to a bad rhyme being the rhyme of "shoulders" plural with "colder". But in the second middle-eight he was rhyming "shoulder" with "perform with", possibly the single worst attempt at rhyming in any of McCartney's songs. So when he was playing the song for Lennon, he said when he got to that line "Don't worry, I'll change that". And in McCartney's telling of the story Lennon said "you won't, you know". Lennon went on to say that it was the best line in the song, and when McCartney protested that he didn't know what the line meant, Lennon said it didn't matter -- *he* knew what it meant. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] The initial sessions for "Hey Jude" were at Abbey Road, as almost all Beatles sessions were, and they were some of the tensest to date, in part because of the presence of a documentary film crew who were getting in the way. At one point George Harrison took himself off to the control room rather than stay in the studio with the other Beatles, after a row with McCartney. McCartney had increasingly been taking control of the arrangements of his own songs -- particularly after they'd shifted to overdubbing the bass later, so he could play a lead instrument like piano or guitar in the basic tracking session. In this case, McCartney was on piano, with Starr on drums, Lennon on acoustic rhythm guitar, and Harrison on electric guitar. As most electric guitarists would, Harrison started adding fills answering the lead vocals in the gaps between lines. You can *very* faintly hear this on the version released as “take one” on the White Album box set, but not clearly enough that I can isolate a part and show you what he was doing. But it was something like what Duane Allman played on Wilson Pickett's cover version of the song: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Hey Jude"] But McCartney wanted the arrangement to be much sparser, and asked Harrison not to play the parts, and by all accounts did so in a not-especially-tactful manner. Harrison would later say "Personally I'd found that for the last couple of albums, the freedom to be able to play as a musician was being curtailed, mainly by Paul," and that "Paul had fixed an idea in his brain as to how to record one of his songs. He wasn't open to anybody else's suggestions." One can of course understand both sides of this disagreement. McCartney was the songwriter, and knew how he wanted his song to go, and that's a perfectly reasonable position to take -- if you've written a song of the quality of "Hey Jude" you want it to sound its best. But Harrison, equally, considered himself an equal member of the band, and up to early 1963, when the group had started to concentrate on Lennon/McCartney songs, he had been equally featured in lead vocals, and he was the lead guitarist. He hadn't signed up to be a backing musician for a singer-songwriter, and he wanted to have some creative say in what he played. Both men's points were reasonable, and in a band where people were communicating better, they would have come to some reasonable agreement, but as it was, it became a festering wound between the two. The initial recordings at Abbey Road were scrapped, and the group moved on to Trident studios, the only studio in the UK with a working eight-track machine at the time. The Beatles would later discover that there was an eight-track at Abbey Road that hadn't yet been installed, and which they liberated and set up themselves, but for now they were off to Trident, partly because Abbey Road was booked up on the days they wanted to use. That meant that the engineer on the track was Barry Sheffield rather than any of the engineers the Beatles were used to working with, all of whom were EMI employees and not allowed to moonlight at other studios. The mix they got of the track apparently sounded great in Trident, but sounded terrible on EMI's equipment when played back, and took a lot of work from both Ken Scott and Geoff Emerick, who popped in to help out, though he refused to work any more actual Beatles sessions, to get it sounding OK, though Emerick said the track "still didn't have the kind of in-your-face presence that characterises most Beatles recordings done at Abbey Road." One anecdote that is often told about the track's final recording is that Ringo Starr was apparently in the toilet when the take started, and had to creep through the other musicians to get to his drum kit, but still came in perfectly in time: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] The other most notable thing about the track is its sheer length. I have seen various claims about the length of the track, and don't have a vinyl copy of the original single to time with a stopwatch, but the length of the single mix as released on the Mono Masters CD in 2009 is seven minutes and nineteen seconds. Before this point, the longest a Beatles single had been was "Strawberry Fields Forever" at four minutes and ten seconds. George Martin was hesitant about the song's length, saying no radio station would play a track that length, to which Lennon's reply was a simple "They will if it's us". The group also pointed to Richard Harris' "MacArthur Park", a recent hit which had itself topped seven minutes: [Excerpt: Richard Harris, "MacArthur Park"] I've seen several sources say that "Hey Jude" was deliberately mixed to be one second longer than that track, though my CD copy of "MacArthur Park" is eleven seconds longer than "Hey Jude". I suppose it's possible that the original single mixes were slightly different (you often get discrepancies of a few seconds between different releases of tracks in different formats) but it's more likely to me that someone has made a mistake which other books have then copied. Much of the length of the track is taken up by the mantra-like end section of the song. George Martin said of that "In the case of 'Hey Jude', when we were recording the track, I thought that we had made it too long. It was very much a Paul song, and I couldn't understand what he was on about by just going round and round the same thing. And of course, it does become hypnotic." But Martin also said "I realised that by putting an orchestra on you could add lots of weight to the riff by counter chords on the bottom end and bringing in trombones, and strings, and so on until it became a really big, tumultuous thing." As so often with the Beatles, Martin's orchestration work took an idea which on paper shouldn't have worked, and gave it enough of a dynamic shape that the track worked brilliantly: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] The orchestral musicians playing on the track also got double the normal session rate, because after playing their rather simple parts over the "na na na" refrain they were asked to sing along and clap their hands, to add to the massed vocals. All of them did, apart from one musician who apparently walked out saying he wasn't going to sing along to Paul McCartney's bloody song. There's one other interesting point about "Hey Jude" that should probably be pointed out, and that  is that it is almost certainly the first track to get to number one in the UK and US to have the f-word included, and to have that word played unexpurgated on the radio for more than fifty years. It's buried in the mix, but it's one of those things that once you've heard it you can't unhear. It comes at almost exactly three minutes into the track, and it's not clear exactly who says it. According to most sources, it's McCartney swearing, after he hit a bum note on the piano. According to Malcolm Toft, one of the engineers at Trident, it's Lennon -- there'd been a sudden volume spike in his headphones while recording his backing vocals and he swore and pulled them off. Either way, it was left in, with Lennon apparently telling people that "most people won't notice it, but *we'll* know it's there" Have a listen and see what you think -- unless your ears are more delicate than Lennon's and you don't want them exposed to the kind of utter filth that still gets played on daytime Radio 2: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude"] Despite George Martin's worry about the song, "Hey Jude" became one of the biggest hits of the group's career, reaching number one in seventeen different countries, staying at number one in the US for nine weeks (at the time the joint longest ever time at that position), was the biggest selling single of 1968 in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, and is currently the fourth most-streamed Beatles track. One suspects that part of its popularity was actually down to the very thing that Martin thought might hinder it. While DJs were discouraged from playing long songs in general, they had the excuse that it was the Beatles, and so could safely put it on and have enough time for a bathroom break or similar -- a song of that length is always good to have available for those little emergencies that come up when broadcasting live. In the UK, the song's time at the top of the charts was shorter, only two weeks, but the Beatles couldn't have been too unhappy because the record that replaced it at number one was the other Apple record released at the same time, and produced by McCartney, “Those Were the Days”. There was though one unfortunate aspect to the promotion of the single. The Beatles had briefly owned a shop, the Apple Boutique, which had been a massive failure and closed down and was stood empty. McCartney and his then-girlfriend Francie Schwarz went to the shop, which was on the corner of two major London streets, and whitewashed the windows and then wrote "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" in the paint with their fingers. What they hadn't realised is that "Jude" is German for Jew, and had been painted on the windows of many Jewish-owned businesses at the beginning of the Nazi regime. According to some sources, one old Jewish man actually smashed the window, he was so upset at this reminder of what he had been through. McCartney was of course mortified. Between the recording of "Hey Jude" and its release as a single, Ringo Starr had quit the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] Starr had been stressed for a while, and as he would later explain "I left because I felt two things: I felt I wasn’t playing great, and I also felt that the other three were really happy and I was an outsider. I went to see John, who had been living in my apartment in Montagu Square with Yoko since he moved out of Kenwood. I said, ‘I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.’ And John said, ‘I thought it was you three!’ So then I went over to Paul’s and knocked on his door. I said the same thing: ‘I’m leaving the band. I feel you three guys are really close and I’m out of it.’ And Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three!’ I didn’t even bother going to George then. I said, ‘I’m going on holiday.’ I took the kids and we went to Sardinia." The final straw seems to have been another argument about one of Paul's songs, in this case the Beach Boys pastiche he'd written in Rishikesh, "Back in the USSR". We don't have many details about exactly what happened, but apparently as with Harrison and "Hey Jude", McCartney was trying to tell Starr exactly how to play the track, and Starr got sick of his playing being micromanaged. So Starr went off to Sardinia and had a holiday on Peter Sellers' yacht, during which time he learned that octopuses create little gardens for themselves out of shiny rocks and discarded tin cans, information he would later put to good use. At first, the group continued without him almost as if nothing had happened. They'd recorded a bit when other members had been gone, and George had even had a brief holiday earlier that month while the others had carried on without him. But that had been different -- he'd just been on holiday. Ringo had quit. The date that Ringo quit the Beatles, the twenty-second of August, was also the date that Cynthia filed for divorce from John Lennon. That date was not of course the end of the Beatles, but it serves as as good a marker as any for the beginning of the end, the point at which everyone had to acknowledge once and for all that nothing would be the same. The group recorded "Back in the USSR" without Ringo. McCartney was, as we established when he played on the Paul Jones session, an underrated drummer, and he became the group's de facto drummer for a couple of weeks, though the finished version of "Back in the USSR" seems to have Lennon, McCartney *and* Harrison all playing guitar, bass, and drums. The basic track was cut with Harrison on guitar, Lennon playing bass for the first time on a record, and McCartney on drums. Then it was overdubbed with Paul and George both playing basses (one four-string and one six-string) while Lennon added additional snare drums to beef up the sound, then a further overdub with McCartney on piano, and Lennon and Harrison on guitar and bass, and at some point Harrison seems to have added some additional drum overdubs too, though if he did it's the only time we know of he ever played the instrument: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] McCartney also played drums on Lennon's "Dear Prudence", which again was completed with no input from Starr at all. Starr's departure from the group was kept quiet, and the group soon realised that they needed to show their drummer some more appreciation. They sent him a telegram telling him he was the best rock and roll drummer in the world, and when he finally deigned to return they had his drum kit covered with flowers. The fact that Ringo, generally seen as the easiest-going of the group, had actually quit, seemed to get the group on their best behaviour at least for a while. Starr remembers the rest of the sessions as being full of love for each other, and certainly after Starr's return at the beginning of September they seem to have become vastly more productive in the studio, and that studio time seems to have been far more devoted to full-group performances, where for a lot of the previous few months there had been sessions with only one or two of the band (usually McCartney, but sometimes others) showing up to just record their own songs without the others' participation. The first track they completed after their reunion was one of George's best-loved songs: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"] Like many of Harrison's other songs, that song had been inspired by Eastern philosophy -- in this case by opening a copy of the I Ching and seeing the phrase "gently weeps". The song had gone through several iterations, starting out as a gentle acoustic ballad and slowly moving towards the new heavy rock idiom. For a song about a guitar, obviously it needed a powerful guitar solo, and Harrison had tried a few things with little success -- the group had cut an earlier take of the track, and he had recorded an overdubbed backwards guitar solo the day that Ringo came back -- but he hadn't been happy with anything he'd done. He was also still worried about the stress between the band members, and happily he could kill two birds with one stone.  He had become increasingly friendly with Eric Clapton since Clapton had guested on the Wonderwall soundtrack, and the two of them would remain the closest of friends for the rest of Harrison's life. Clapton was particularly important to Harrison at this point because Harrison was starting to think of himself as primarily a guitarist once more, and Clapton was encouraging him in falling back in love with his main instrument. Clapton was the most highly-regarded British guitarist of the time, and Harrison thought that if he brought Clapton in for a session, the other Beatles would be on their best behaviour, *and* Clapton could record a better solo than Harrison: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"] That track was notable for a couple of other reasons as well. The Beatles had finally discovered the eight-track machines that had been hidden in Abbey Road and got them set up, and were recording in eight-track on their home turf for the first time. And it was recorded without a producer. George Martin had got as sick as anyone of the toxic attitude in the sessions, and was unaware of the change that was about to happen. The sessions had also stretched far, far, longer than any previous Beatles album, and a lot of the time had been spent on material he felt was substandard. He was sick of endless timewasting and arguments, and some have suggested he was also trying for a bit of a power-play to show the Beatles how much they needed him, as they were increasingly being disrespectful to him. He decided that he was just going to go on holiday and leave them to get on with it with their engineers and with his assistant, Chris Thomas. Thomas arrived back from his own holiday a few days after Martin left for his, to find a note reading, according to Thomas' memory, "Dear Chris, Hope you had a nice holiday. I'm off on mine now. Make yourself available to The Beatles. Neil and Mal know you're coming down." Luckily for everyone involved, Martin had chosen his assistant very well. Chris Thomas had never produced anything on his own before, and was very much thrown into the deep end, becoming the Beatles' de facto producer for most of the month of September, producing and playing on several of the key tracks on what became the White Album. But while Thomas would obviously never again produce anyone as big as the Beatles, he would go on to have a *hugely* important career in his own right, and will be turning up many times over future episodes. He mixed Dark Side of the Moon for Pink Floyd, played Moog on Bowie's first couple of albums, produced most of Roxy Music's records, co-produced Never Mind the Bollocks for the Sex Pistols, produced several of Elton John's biggest hits, and some of the most successful records by INXS, the Pretenders, Pulp, and more. During the time that Thomas was in charge before Martin returned, the group largely completed six tracks, some of which would later get some overdubs with Martin's supervision, but the basic tracks of "Helter Skelter", "Glass Onion", "I Will", "Birthday", "Piggies", and "Happiness is a Warm Gun" were all recorded while Martin was away. Of these, both "Happiness is a Warm Gun" and "Glass Onion" would deserve extended attention were this not already a ludicrously long episode, but all I can really say here is that they're interesting tracks, and that a few of those tracks are going to come up in an episode on another band in a short while, and I'll try to discuss them then. It's possibly unfortunate for Martin that he chose that period to leave the group alone, because when he came back in October, much of the work still to be done was on less substantial songs than those -- though Martin will have had a lot of fun with two of McCartney's trifles, "Martha My Dear", which featured an interesting score from Martin, and "Honey Pie", a twenties pastiche which required some effects to make it sound period-appropriate, and which seems clearly inspired in part by Tiny Tim, the singer who had had a novelty hit earlier in the year with "Tiptoe Thru' the Tulips With Me". McCartney seems at one point to be doing an impression of Tim: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Honey Pie"] Tim would make a guest appearance on the Beatles' Christmas record that year, after Harrison asked him to do a recording: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Nowhere Man"] But for the most part the last few songs to be recorded were things like Harrison's "Savoy Truffle", a perfectly enjoyable but frivolous song about how his friend Eric Clapton was going to have a toothache from eating too much chocolate: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Savoy Truffle"] That line about “what you eat you are” was inspired by the film You Are What You Eat which we've mentioned several times previously in connection with The Band and Tiny Tim. Derek Taylor, who was friends with the film's makers, suggested the line. Rather oddly “Savoy Truffle” would be one of two Beatles tracks (along with "Got to Get You Into My Life") covered by Ella Fitzgerald on her bizarre but rather wonderful 1969 album Ella, produced by Richard Perry, Tiny Tim's producer (and future producer of both Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr), on which she also covered tracks by the Temptations, Nilsson, and Randy Newman: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "Savoy Truffle"] The final song to be recorded for the album was Lennon's "Julia", the lovely ode to his mother and Yoko he wrote in Rishikesh. While there were a handful of Beatles tracks on which McCartney was the only Beatle performing, "Julia" is the only solo Lennon performance on a Beatles album: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] And with that, the album was done. The album had had the working title "A Doll's House", after Ibsen, and that title would actually have fit the music rather well -- there are a lot of songs about childhood in the collection, and songs that are child*like*, like Lennon's "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" and McCartney's "Rocky Raccoon". But the band Family put out their own album, Music From a Doll's House, during the recording, and the group had to change their plans. Instead, the record was called simply The Beatles, and was put out in a plain white sleeve with no markings on the front except the band's name embossed in slightly raised lettering (although it came packaged with photos of the group, a collage by Richard Hamilton, and the lyric sheet, the austere surface concealing as much complexity in the presentation as Sgt Pepper had). While the album was titled The Beatles, everyone just called it The White Album. As soon as recording had ended, Harrison was off to America, where he was going to produce a series of sessions by Jackie Lomax in LA with the Wrecking Crew, for what became Lomax's Apple album Is This What You Want? [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Is This What You Want?"] During that trip to the US, Harrison took some time out to visit Bob Dylan and the Band in Woodstock. While there, he also collaborated with Dylan on a song that would later turn up on one of his solo albums: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "I'd Have You Any Time"] The time spent with the Band was to prove pivotal to Harrison, and to the Beatles' career. Harrison saw the way the Band worked, with everyone an equally respected contributor, with everyone trusted to come up with their own parts and revise them together as a group in an informal setting where people played for the joy of playing, and compared it mentally to being told what to play by Paul and having his own songs dismissed, and the tension that had characterised the White Album sessions, and he started to think seriously about whether he wanted to be in the Beatles at all. He also recorded half of another solo album while he was in the US, one which has led to serious accusations of plagiarism. Electronic Sound is Harrison's second solo album, released in 1968, and features Moog music. Except that only half of that Moog music was anything to do with Harrison. It consists of two extended tracks, "Under the Mersey Wall" and "No Time or Space". "Under the Mersey Wall" was music that Harrison created when he got his own Moog in 1969, but as for "No Time or Space"... Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause were two of the first people in the US to own a Moog, and they were the only Moog session players at the time -- of a list of the first ten recordings to feature a Moog, listed on the Moog foundation website, eight featured Beaver programming the machine he and Krause owned and operated together, one -- the Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd featured Beaver and Micky Dolenz, who also owned one of the first Moogs, both playing, and only one, by Jean Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, *didn't* feature Beaver. As Beaver and Krause were the Moog players everyone on the West Coast turned to, ever since their demonstration of the instrument at Monterey, when Harrison wanted Moog on the Jackie Lomax album, he called them in. Then according to Krause, “We did the session, it was very normal, and we finished in the wee hours of the next morning. Harrison asked me to stick around and show him some more things on the synthesizer. Paul and I were just preparing some new material for our second Warner Brothers album, and I was showing Harrison some of the patches and ways in which we were thinking of doing our work. What I didn’t realise, because it was late and I was tired and I wasn’t paying attention, was that he had asked the engineer to record the session that I was demonstrating. I didn’t think anything of it at the time.” When Harrison got his own Moog a few months later, Krause flew over to help him install it, and as he said later “The vegetarian then took me into the living room where there was this long leather couch – I thought that was interesting. Across from that was the Moog synthesizer set up on a table. Understand, he had just got it delivered that afternoon. It had just arrived. He said, ‘I want to play you something.’ After supplying the requisite amount of smoke he put on this tape. Now, one thing I have is a really good memory for sound, and I remembered what we had done back in California in November – and here it was on that tape! Harrison says to me, ‘Well, I’m putting it out as an album. If it makes a couple of quid I’ll send it to you.’ I said, ‘Not without my permission you’re not, that’s Paul and I’s stuff.’ And then he said, ‘Trust me, I’m a Beatle.’ Trust me, I’m a Beatle! I said, ‘Yeah? Call me a cab, I’m going home, and don’t use my stuff.’ He said, ‘When Ravi Shankar comes to my house he’s humble,’ and something else about Jimi Hendrix. Then he asked me to patch him a bagpipe sound. Perhaps he was more conscientious about his behaviour at other times. Maybe it depended on how much you genuflected.” Krause and Beaver's work came out as half of "Harrison's" album: [Excerpt: "George Harrison", "No Time or Space"] While Harrison was in the US, work started on sequencing the White Album. The album became the Beatles' only double-album, and even its admirers, of whom I am one, would say that not all of the material on the album is the Beatles' best work. George Martin wanted the group to put out an album of their normal length -- fourteen songs or so -- including just the very best of the material, and there's an argument for that. You could indeed create a fourteen-song album from the White Album that would be nothing but material of the same quality as the best of their other work, though every listener would put together a different list. And there's some material on there that everyone would agree is trivial or filler -- though many listeners, myself included, find much of the filler delightful, and there's a difference between profound and worthwhile. In the end, though, the album came out as thirty tracks -- twelve songs by Paul, who had had a writing spurt as recording had progressed, four by George, one by Ringo, twelve songs by Lennon, and "Revolution #9", a Lennon work which is really in a category of its own. Only two songs that had had serious time spent on them were left off -- George's "Not Guilty" and John's "What's the New Mary Jane?" -- everything else was included. Martin later stated that he thought the reason they wanted to put out some material he considered substandard was contractual -- their contract with EMI said that they owed a certain number of tracks, and they wanted to get as many of them out the way in one go as possible. But even if that is the case, the White Album works in part *because* of the sheer mass of material on it. Even the tracks that one listener or another finds unlistenable add to the total effect. It's an album that overwhelms you with the variety of styles and modes, while still somehow feeling coherent. And that coherence is because of the effort that Lennon, McCartney, Martin, and Ken Scott put in, in a sequencing and mixing session, which included crossfading all the songs on each side so that each would be a continuous side of music. That session took twenty-four hours straight, the longest session the Beatles ever did, and it included things like putting three of the four songs with animal names in the title in a row, putting all the hard rock songs on one side, and making sure there was one George song on each side and one Ringo vocal on each disc. In the end, I think McCartney gets the last word on whether they should have cut some of the tracks: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "You know I'm, I'm not a great one for that, you know, 'maybe it was too many of that', look, what do you mean? It was great, it sold... it's the bloody Beatles White Album, shut up!"] There's no answer to that, is there? While the album was finished, and Ringo went on holiday to Sardinia again while Paul went on holiday to New York, to meet up with Linda, the rest of the Beatles team had an eventful month between the album's completion and its release. George Martin was working on the score to the Yellow Submarine film and preparing mixes of the tracks that were being given to the film. George Harrison spent much of the month producing Lomax's album, meeting the Band, and stealing Beaver and Krause's work for his own album. He also, while still in LA, added extra guitar under the pseudonym L'angelo Mysterioso, to a song he co-wrote with Clapton (and with a single line about swans in the park supplied by Ringo), Cream's hit "Badge": [Excerpt: Cream, "Badge"] And John and Yoko had the most intense five weeks imaginable. They arranged the release of their album "Two Virgins", which was eventually released a week after the White Album, and which featured photos of the two of them totally nude, both front and rear, on the cover. EMI refused to distribute it, and it was eventually released through another distributor, and sold with a plain brown wrapper around the cover. The cover also included a quote from McCartney -- "When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a Saint." Two days after the White Album sequencing, Lennon and Ono were arrested for drugs possession by Sgt Pilcher, who was notorious for going after pop stars and planting evidence. We'll be talking about Pilcher more in a future episode, but for now all we need to say is that Lennon and Ono usually claimed that there were no drugs on the premises -- apparently they'd been warned in advance and they had thoroughly cleared the place because Jimi Hendrix had lived there before them -- but on at least one occasion Lennon also said that some of what they found was probably his. Whether it was or not though, Lennon chose to plead guilty, and take the full blame, so that Ono could go free -- she was an immigrant and under risk of deportation if she was convicted of anything. This meant that unlike other cases involving Pilcher, Lennon didn't fight, and so he ended up with a criminal record. This would come back to bite Lennon. Another reason he didn't want Ono to have to deal with anything was that she was pregnant, and he hoped to save her from the stress that would come from a trial. But the stress was still too much, and Ono ended up hospitalised. Lennon insisted on being by her side throughout her time in hospital. Lennon's divorce from Cynthia came through while the two were in the hospital. According to Cynthia "Walking into court beside my lawyer was terrifying. The place was packed with the press and I had to swear in front of them under oath that my marriage had broken down irretrievably, that my husband had publicly admitted adultery and that Yoko was pregnant by him. Throughout this awful, surreal experience I felt humiliated and painfully aware that I was alone. Afterward I fled home and collapsed, sick with apprehension about the future. I had no idea how I would cope and still found it hard to believe that, after ten years together, I had been severed from John’s life with a few brief words from a judge in a public court. I should have hated John for what he had put me through. I was certainly angry with him and bitterly hurt. But I couldn’t hate him. Despite everything, I loved him still." Two weeks after that, the day before the White Album was released, Yoko miscarried. Lennon and Ono were by this point committed to publicly documenting their life as art, and there is actually a recording on their follow-up to Two Virgins, entitled "Baby's Heartbeat", which is a recording of the heartbeat of the foetus as the miscarriage was happening, and which is followed on the album by a two-minute's silence, both as mourning for the baby and as a tribute to John Cage. I thought seriously, literally until typing this very sentence, about ending this episode on that track, because if they considered it important enough to include, and wanted people to hear it, it would seem almost dishonest to talk about that miscarriage and not mention it. But I eventually decided that would be too distressing and might traumatise some listeners. It's out there if you want to hear it. Instead, I'm going to play you a brief snatch of a track Yoko would record about the event a couple of years later, with John on guitar, Ringo on drums, and George on sitar, "Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City": [Excerpt: Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band, "Greenfield Morning I Pushed An Empty Baby Carriage All Over The City"] By the time the White Album came out on November the twenty-fifth, 1968, the Beatles had been pushed to their limits. Since the start of the year they'd had a member quit and come back, a divorce, a broken engagement, a partner having a miscarriage, a drug arrest, two new relationships, had several house-moves, found and in some cases lost a new religion, started a new business, one member developing a heroin habit, and between them made two and a half solo albums, two non-album singles with B-sides, a handful of songs for other projects, and produced a couple of albums for other people, as well as their own double-album. What they needed, more than anything, if the Beatles were to continue, was a break. And they got one. For just over a month. On the second of January, 1969, they were to start work on their next album. But that's a story for another time...