Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

by Rob Sheffield

“Are you scared when crowds scream at you?” John cracks, “More so here than other places, perhaps.” The city where he says this is Dallas.

A legend to last a lunchtime. The Rutles were the perfect Beatle parody, starring Monty Python’s Eric Idle and the Bonzos’ Neil Innes in their classic mock-doc All You Need Is Cash, with scene-stealing turns by George Harrison, Mick Jagger, and Paul Simon. (Interviewer: “Did the Rutles influence you at all?” Simon: “No.” Interviewer: “Did they influence Art Garfunkel?” Simon: “Who?”)

But for once, Dylan is slightly behind the times. Rubber Soul was the one where they didn’t want to be cute, and that was six months ago. The Beatles are well beyond the point where their tambourine-man hero wants to pin them. Rubber Soul is also where they took their Dylan worship places he couldn’t go himself,

The Beatles probably numbered among the last people on earth to try LSD without having first heard about it via the Beatles.

You could make a case that acid was the worst thing that ever happened to psychedelia, at least as far as music is concerned. Everything adventurous about hippie rock probably would have happened on pot if acid had never been invented, and obviously too many of the musicians switched on by pot got burned by the harder stuff.

During the years when he still indulged, Paul was to weed what Winston Churchill was to alcohol—his body chemistry was designed to flourish on a daily intake that would turn anyone else into a turnip.

1966: the most manic of the Beatlemania years. The lads get chased around the world, playing twenty-five-minute sets that have nothing to do with the increasingly complex music they’re exploring in the studio. A long-forgotten John quote about religion—“we’re more popular than Jesus now”—gets dug up and creates a scandal in America. A Ku Klux Klan protest outside their Memphis show draws eight thousand people. The butcher cover gets censored. Murder threats. Harder drugs. Uglier mobs. Dreadful flights. And in their spare time, the Beatles make the greatest rock album ever, Revolver.

Revolver is all about the pleasure of being Beatles, in the period where they still thrived on each other’s company. Given the acrimony that took over the band in the last two years, it’s easy to overlook how much all four of them loved being Beatles at this point and still saw their prime perk as hanging with the other Beatles.

“In a recent article, Time magazine put down pop music. They referred to ‘Day Tripper’ as being about a prostitute and ‘Norwegian Wood’ as being about a lesbian. And I just wanted to know what your intent was when you wrote it, and what your feeling is about the Time magazine criticism of the music that is being written today.” Paul replies with a straight face. “We’re just trying to write songs about prostitutes and lesbians, that’s all.”

One of the most important sonic innovations on Revolver was a sweater—Geoff Emerick stuffed Ringo’s wool sweater into his bass drum, giving Ringo’s drums that distinctive thwomp everybody else spent years trying to copy.

more dangerous influence was cocaine, which Paul flirted with heavily that year. Cocaine was so little known at the time, the cops who raided Keith Richards’s Redlands mansion in 1967 threw away his stash because they had no idea what it was, while seizing his collection of hotel soaps.

“Famous and loaded though I am, I still have to meet soft people.”

They go on to record their bitchiest music (“And Your Bird Can Sing”), their prettiest (“Here, There and Everywhere”), their friendliest (“I Want to Tell You”), their harshest (“She Said She Said”), their jauntiest (“Got to Get You into My Life”), and their jolliest (“Yellow Submarine”).

They’re so assured in their hipness that it doesn’t even occur to them to argue the point, which is how Revolver can sound so arrogant yet so suffused with warmth. If you play “And Your Bird Can Sing” or “Love You To” back to back with “Ballad of a Thin Man” or “19th Nervous Breakdown,” Dylan and the Stones can sound like sophomores trying a little too hard to impress the seniors.

They talked about calling it Magic Circles, then went with the pun Revolver, but either way the title presents a good idea of how tight the Beatles’ revolving circle was, yet how open it remains to anyone who wants to listen—which turned out to be everyone.

LIKE ALL THE PRE-PEPPER ALBUMS, REVOLVER GOT BUTCHERED by the U.S. record company, but it bled worse than any of them. Capitol cut three John songs—“And Your Bird Can Sing,” “Dr. Robert,” “I’m Only Sleeping”—leaving him with only two, fewer than George.

Revolver was one of the Eighties’ most influential album releases, up there with Thriller and Legend and Straight Outta Compton, up there with 1999 and Appetite for Destruction and the Big Chill soundtrack. It might sound strange to call Revolver an Eighties album, but like Legend or The Big Chill, it created new ways to access pop history as a living thing. You can trace the whole Britpop explosion of the Nineties (see Oasis, Pulp, Blur, Radiohead, The Verve, and countless others) to the revisionary experience that went with the 1987 Revolver CD. It also begat a more analytical breed of Beatle fan, especially since EMI rolled out the discs in installments, rather than dumping the whole catalog on the market like the Stones did.

He’s still the John who hatches a complicated plan in 1967 for the Beatles to buy their own island, so the four of them can go off by themselves, untroubled by the outside world. Along with the roadies, of course, and Brian Epstein and Derek Taylor and ah yes, naturally, the wives and kids.

John even picks out a Greek island for the purpose, having sent Alastair Taylor from Brian’s office to scout real estate in the Mediterranean. The island John chooses is called Leslo, eighty acres, four beaches—perfect. “It’ll be fantastic, all on our own on this island,” he announces. “There’s some little houses which we’ll do up and knock together and live sort of communally.”

“For Paul this was a nightmare,” Marianne Faithfull recalled later. “The last thing Paul wanted was to live on some fucking island.”

Taylor handles the legal details of buying a Greek island for an English rock group. (Price: ninety thousand pounds.) But

His childhood has followed him everywhere, leaving him stranded in an adult life where nothing is real. He does not want to be rescued.

John wants to add Hitler, just for a laugh. They go so far as to create a Hitler blowup, which can be seen in some of the outtakes, but fortunately they stashed him off in a corner of the room before the shoot. Gandhi’s on the cover, but EMI’s Sir Joseph Lockwood puts his foot down and airbrushes him out behind a palm leaf—he wants to sell the record in India.

Denouncing Pepper became a sign of rock realness, for purists such as Keith Richards (“a mishmash of rubbish”) or Bob Dylan (“a very self-indulgent album”) or even John Lennon. “With

Less assured men might have sweated a drop or two under this pressure. The Beatles relished it. They figured it was just a matter of showing up at the studio and waiting for genius to strike. There is no evidence any of them (besides George Martin in a few dark moments) entertained the idea this project might be a letdown. They even discussed plans to turn each song into a movie. “It started with ‘Let’s get Antonioni to film a track, and let’s get Jean-Luc Godard to film a track,’ ” their press agent Tony Bramwell recalled. “But there was no budget for it.” That innovation was left to Beyoncé, fifty years later.

Keith Richards came up with a perfect explanation for how it sounds: sheer sexual exhaustion. “Three thousand screaming chicks could just wail you out of the whole place. Just looking at the crowd, you could see them dragging the chicks out, sweating, screaming, convulsing.” All those years of screamers took their toll—especially since the Beatles were way ahead of the Stones when it came to on-the-road girlie action. “They talk about us, but the Beatles, those chicks wore those guys out. They stopped touring in 1966—they were done already. They were ready to go to India and shit.”

For me it breaks down into three songs I love (“A Day in the Life,” “Fixing a Hole,” “With a Little Help from My Friends”), five I like (both “Pepper” themes, “Lucy,” “Getting Better,” “When I’m 64”) and five that leave me temperatures ranging from lukewarm to nipple-hardeningly cold.

The mono version was the one the Beatles, Martin, and Emerick spent three weeks mixing. The stereo mix was a quickie afterthought, with none of the Beatles involved or even present.

“A Day in the Life” is overpoweringly heartsick—not a young man’s song, but a song by an adult who feels his life is a waste, staring blankly at the people he passes on the street.

Two weeks later, the Beatles added the final touch: the piano crash that hangs in the air for nearly a minute. George Martin had every spare piano in the building hauled down to the studio, where five men (John, Paul, Ringo, Martin, and Mal Evans) played the same E-major chord, as Geoff Emerick turned up the mikes to catch every last trace. By the end, the levels were up so high you can hear Ringo’s shoe squeak.

was only after Brian’s death that Paul’s imperious side became intolerable for the others.

Their unity depended on Brian—he shielded his boys from lepers and crooks, but more importantly, he shielded them from one another. Eighteen months later, in the World War III of the Get Back sessions, Paul was pleading, “We’ve been very negative since Mr. Epstein passed away.”

When Sgt. Pepper came out, he was in rehab at the Priory, though he checked out for a day to throw a release party. He died two months later from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. Not a suicide, because it wasn’t one big dose; he took too many over the course of three days, evidently losing track of how many he’d already swallowed. He was bored during a long weekend when the band was out of town and he had no ability to amuse or control himself. “Unconscious self-overdosage” was the coroner’s verdict. He was only thirty-two.

When the Nixon Administration tried using John Lennon’s bust as an excuse to deport him, the senator who led these efforts was Strom Thurmond, the white supremacist who went to his grave hushing up the secret black daughter he fathered with his housekeeper. The Beatles always had great taste in enemies.

Beatles racing to catch up with Aftermath. John wasn’t kidding about the “two months later” principle—every time the Beatles discovered a new trick and proved it could be done, the Stones would breeze along a few months later to prove it could be done sarcastically.

Three seconds into “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” you can hear the Stones have crashed into new territory: the change has come. Beggars Banquet, released a couple of weeks after the White Album, is the first record where it sounds like the Beatles might as well have never been born as far as the Stones know. Brian is no longer allowed anywhere near a dulcimer or harpsichord;

stares John dead in the eye. But all he says is, “Okay then.” Because that’s it. That is how the song should go. And Paul, furious though he is, can’t fail to hear it, because he’s too obsessive about his songs (even this song) to ignore it. So he utters his five least favorite words—“Let’s do it your way”—and lets John lead on the piano, faster and jumpier than before. And that’s the version on the record. You listen to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” a lighthearted ode to family life beloved by children of all ages, you’re hearing John beat on the piano, pretending it’s Paul’s skull.

developed an intense love for the songs that begin and end Side Two—“Martha My Dear” and “Julia,” two songs about women, one extremely Paul and the other extremely John. None of the other Beatles plays on “Martha My Dear” besides Paul, just as nobody plays on “Julia” besides John. (It’s the only Beatles song that’s solo John.) They’re alone with these women.

McCartney did the most explicitly political songs—“Blackbird,” inspired by the U.S. civil rights movement, and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” a celebration of West Indian immigrant life in London—a contentious topic in the summer of 1968, after Enoch Powell’s racist “rivers of blood” speech condemning black immigrants. He

guarantee I’ve never programmed a White Album without “I’m So Tired,” with John’s whisper-to-a-scream vocals, so funny yet so harrowing. Paul joins in for the last line, doing the John imitation he also does so well in “Come Together.” The song is over in less than two minutes, both men wildly amused by one another, even as John screams “I’m going insane!” What an intense moment it must have been to share a laugh like “I’m So Tired.” To get blazed up by that comic presence. And to lose this presence, and know you’re losing it, to see it slipping away right in front of you.

L.A. district attorney Vincent Bugliosi introduces America to a new superstar: Charles Manson. The previously unknown creep with the psycho eyes is officially credited with a string of horrific killings in L.A, and what drove him to massacre people? He listened to the Beatles and lost his mind. With a whole hippie sex-and-murder cult primed to trigger a race war all over this land. Could your children be next?

The local Hell’s Angels chapter was in charge of security. The Angels’ fee: $500 worth of beer. Everybody knows how that turned out: 300,000 kids crammed into a decrepit speedway that couldn’t hold them, a hastily rigged stage three feet off the ground, no food, no water, no facilities, no escape, no shelter. The Angels loaded on acid and speed and alcohol, charging their bikes into the crowd, mauling fans with pool cues, beating musicians to a pulp onstage. Four deaths. One homicide. Crosby. Stills. Nash. War, children, it’s just a shot away, with a Hollywood crew on hand to film every minute. In the immortal word of Jerry Garcia: “Bummer.”

Conspiracy theorists have even argued Altamont was an FBI operation to destabilize the counterculture. (The most compelling case is Alex Constantine’s book The Covert War Against Rock. The book also suggests Michael Hutchence was assassinated for supporting Greenpeace, so caveat emptor.)

Manson-and-Altamont became the new Beatles-and-Stones, providing Nixon’s America with the perfect twin metaphor for why kids today were in need of some restraints. You still see Manson and Altamont cited as examples of why freedom doesn’t work. They’re why you never go with a hippie to a second location.

Manson remains America’s most popular—no other word for it—murderer, even though by all accounts he never killed anybody and wasn’t present when anybody was killed. Hollywood speed dealer Tex Watson might seem more like the leading man—he was there both nights, did the actual killings etc. But Bugliosi made the decision to give Watson’s friend and accomplice Charlie the auteur credit—again, no other word. Tex was all wrong for the part. He had short hair and boy-next-door looks—a high school football hero, for crissakes. Manson was a longhair, wild-eyed cartoon villain who belonged in a cage.

but Bugliosi told the tale this way countless times over the years, more or less verbatim, and it made him the nation’s first and only celebrity D.A.

Marcia Clark would like a word

When Manson made the cover of Life, Watson, incredibly, wasn’t even in Bugliosi’s custody yet; he was still in his home state of Texas, as he and his lawyers spent nine months negotiating the terms of his extradition. They did a good job with that. (He got a separate trial, wrote a book about finding Jesus in jail, and still has his own Christian ministry. He fathered four children in conjugal visits.)

“Something” became George’s greatest hit, as well as the one that made John and Paul most jealous. It was the first time the Quiet One got the A-side of a single. Oh, how it must have burned Paul he didn’t write this song. And that’s how “My Love” happened.

“My Love” is the worst song any of the Beatles had anything to do with.

here they are on the stoop of the EMI Studios at Abbey Road, and after the shoot, they’ll head inside for the afternoon session, to work on “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” One of these days they’ll finish the record, then they’ll never be inside together again and it’ll be a place they can’t go back to. They