Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (25 page)

When BEV broke up, Paul invited Dudley Edwards to come and stay with him at Cavendish. It was companionable having a young northern chap of his age around the house with Jane away. Also, like medieval princelings, each Beatle tended to maintain a court who served, flattered and amused them. Often these courtiers were given a small task to perform while they shared their Beatle’s privileged existence. In theory Dudley was at Cavendish to help decorate the house in the emerging hippie style, which was characterised by a combination of old, new and hand-made. Paul invested in many mod cons including a state-of-the-art kitchen, hi-fi, and expensive new colour television (which lured Aunt Ginny down from Merseyside to watch Wimbledon). The curtains were drawn by an electric motor, while the master bedroom had the luxury of an
en suite
bathroom with sunken tub. Paul was also buying antiques, including a huge clock, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, which hung in the dining room; a Victorian street lamp was erected in the front yard, contrasting with the geodesic contemplation dome in the back.

Paul set Dudley Edwards to work painting tiny creatures into the pattern of the William Morris wallpaper that covered his dining room walls, creating a vast mural. ‘I started painting the mural in his dining room, but Paul didn’t seem that bothered about the mural being done,’ recalls Edwards.

Paul would say, ‘Put your brush down, we’re going out shopping.’ That would be one minute and the next minute he’d say, ‘Put your brush down, we’re going to a night club.’ And the next thing, ‘Are you coming to the recording studio?’ I just accompanied him, went with him everywhere, basically enjoy[ing] ourselves.

With Jane away, Paul and Dudley entertained a parade of women at the house, including the American singer Nico, who visited Cavendish when her mentor Andy Warhol was passing through town and stayed. This was Paul’s domestic scene, in early 1967, while he was recording
Sgt. Pepper
.

In mid-January, the Beatles started work on their monumental track ‘A Day in the Life’, the inspiration for which is often attributed to the untimely death of Tara Browne. Paul was sufficiently close to the playboy heir to have invited him to Rembrandt in recent months. One night he and Tara decided to ride over to see Uncle Mike on a couple of mopeds. Paul came off his bike, split his lip and broke one of his front teeth. He would wear a cap afterwards to cover the broken tooth, and grew a moustache while the scar healed, helping start a trend. All four Beatles soon wore little moustaches. Not long after this incident, on 18 December 1966, Tara was killed when his Lotus hit a van in London. It was reading news reports of the death - GUINNESS HEIR DIES IN CAR CRASH; A BOY WHO HAD TOO MUCH-that is often said to have prompted Lennon to begin work on ‘A Day in the Life’, though Paul doesn’t recall a particular connection. The lyric was created in the cut-up style of William Burroughs, jumbling together scraps of newspaper articles, a compositional method John and Paul were a little sheepish about at first, according to BEV artist Douglas Binder who stumbled upon them doing a cut-up at Cavendish.

I think it was John who said, ‘If our fans knew how we composed our lyrics and music they’d have a real shock.’ He was embarrassed about it at this time because it was done in a surrealistic manner of actually tearing bits of paper from the newspapers, or headlines from the newspapers, connecting them to make some lyrics …

Although ‘A Day in the Life’ is primarily John’s song, Paul’s part was again significant. He played the evocative, dead-sounding piano and contributed the bridge:

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head.
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late.

While being a relatively slight thing in itself, the bridge provides a nice, breezy contrast to John’s sombre verses (old boys from the Inny interpreting the line about going upstairs and having a smoke as Paul having a ciggie on the No. 86 bus to school).

Still more interesting are the twin passages of
ad libertum
orchestral music, coming before Paul’s bridge, then again after the last verse, building to the climax. These bold musical passages were Paul’s idea, working in the same uncompromising spirit of composition as Germany’s Karlheinz Stockhausen. McCartney and Lennon were both now familiar with the leading ‘serious’ composers of their age-the likes of Berio, Cage and Stockhausen - some of whom they had met or had contact with in other ways (Paul struck up a correspondence with Stockhausen). These composers had stretched the boundaries of ‘classical’ music in the twentieth century, creating works seemingly as far removed from Beethoven, say, as rock ’n’ roll would seem to differ from their own music, though of course ‘music is music’ as another avant-garde composer, Alban Berg, has remarked. Rock ’n’ roll songs are shorter and simpler than symphonies, but they are made up of the same notes and not necessarily less affecting. In the spirit of these innovators, Paul put a radical suggestion to George Martin as to how they might fill 24 bars in the middle and end of ‘A Day in the Life’, though his initial instructions were impractical. ‘He said, “I want a symphony orchestra to freak out,”’ recalls Martin, who said the musicians wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Instead, he wrote a musical shriek for 41 musicians, playing their instruments from the lowest to highest note.

The recording of this remarkable passage of music was organised as a happening, and filmed for posterity. The Beatles came to the session in what was becoming identifiable as flower power costume (whimsical, colourful and foppish), while George Martin and his orchestra were requested to wear evening dress. The studio was lit with coloured light-bulbs, the Beatles passing out masks and other items of fancy dress, which many of the session players obligingly wore. One elderly violinist performed wearing a gorilla paw; another wore what looked like a penis nose. The Beatles invited their friends, partners and fellow celebrities to take part, including the singer Donovan, a particular mate of Paul’s, and members of the Rolling Stones and the Monkees, the American band recently created in emulation of the Beatles for a TV show. It showed how confident and essentially good-natured the Beatles were that they were friendly towards the absurd Monkees, then making their first visit to the U K. Monkee Mike Nesmith recalls being invited to the ‘A Day in the Life’ session as if they were equals: ‘It was festive and crowded with people well known in the music scene and business of the time. Because it was a working session there was a certain understanding that there had to be work done, and that we were all part of it.’ After Paul had conducted his apocalyptic ascending chord, the celebrities were asked to emit a final, punctuating
hummm
, later replaced by a crashing E chord, played by Paul and others simultaneously on keyboards, the sound allowed to reverberate on the record until the needle lifted. Thus Paul became a composer of serious orchestral music, at the cutting edge of what was happening in the twentieth century, decades before his more self-conscious and conservative forays into ‘classical’ composition with his
Liverpool Oratorio
and other works.

By the standards of the day,
Sgt. Pepper
took a long time to record: five months including mixing. Considering the exceptional quality of the work it now seems to have been achieved quickly, and Paul still found time to do other things. In January, Dudley Edwards asked if the Beatles would contribute music for a rave he was helping stage at the Roundhouse, a disused train shed in North London, an event the hippies were calling
The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave
. Working with his fellow Beatles, Paul created a 13-minute sound collage the band called
Carnival of Light
, made up of tape loops and extemporaneous screams and shouts. Paul handed the experimental tape to Dudley. The star was displeased when organisers at the rave allowed the tape to run on past the section he’d intended to be heard, with the result that the crowd was treated, in addition to
Carnival of Light
, to a demo of ‘Fixing a Hole,’ one of the new songs on
Pepper
, that also happened to be on the spool. ‘He was quite angry about that,’ recalls Dudley. ‘It wasn’t intentional. I was busy trying to do the light show, so was Doug[las Binder]. I don’t know who was left with the responsibility of playing the tape, but anyway it got an airing - I think Paul forgave us in the end.’

Paul also continued to give thought to the Beatles’ next film, one they were contracted to make. Having considered making an anti-war picture, as discussed with Bertrand Russell and Len Deighton, but which John had effectively now done as a solo project, and having turned down producer Walter Shenson’s suggestion that the Beatles remake
The Three Musketeers
, the band commissioned an original script from the fashionable playwright Joe Orton, whose hit farce
Loot
Paul had enjoyed. Orton was riding high on the success of his second play,
Entertaining Mr Sloane
, in January 1967 when he was summoned to Brian Epstein’s newly acquired townhouse in Chapel Street, Belgravia, a ritzy address near Buckingham Palace. The playwright found Paul in the drawing room listening to an advance pressing of ‘Penny Lane’. Orton thought Paul’s new moustache gave him the look of a turn-of-the-century anarchist. Over supper, McCartney said that while he generally only got ‘a sore arse’ from going to the theatre (a dig at Jane),
Loot
held his attention. This and the fact that Orton confessed to a fondness for smoking grass served to break the ice. ‘Well, I’d like you to do the film,’ Paul told the playwright. ‘There’s only one thing we’ve got to fix up.’

‘You mean the bread? ’ asked Orton. He requested and received thrice his usual fee and shortly thereafter turned in a typically outrageous script,
Up Against It
, in which the Beatles would commit adultery and murder and be caught in drag
in flagrante
. It was rejected.

Although it seems obvious now that the double A-side ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’/‘Penny Lane’ was a masterpiece, the best single the Beatles ever released, it was their first single since ‘Please Please Me’ to fail to reach number one in Britain, kept off the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck, an old Larry Parnes act, crooning ‘Release Me’.
²⁵
Perhaps the new Beatles were too arty for their fans. The band was clearly drifting away from the eager-to-please light entertainers of yore. The accompanying promotional film for the new double A-side showed the boys as hirsute hippies, John dramatically changed from mop-top to whiskery intellectual. At least Paul smiled from under his anarchist moustache; John increasingly wore the remote expression of the heavy drug user.

‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ did not feature on
Sgt. Pepper
in the UK or the USA, where Capitol Records used the same track listings for the first time. If they had included those two songs on the album,
Pepper
would have been even more impressive, and George Martin considers the failure to do so ‘the biggest mistake of my professional career’. What would they have left off, though, to make room? Perhaps George’s India-inspired ‘Within You Without You’, which was interesting, but didn’t quite fit. Apart from ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and ‘Fixing a Hole’, Paul’s other contributions to the album were ‘Getting Better’ and ‘Lovely Rita’, the latter a slight work inspired by the experience of being given a parking ticket outside EMI Studios by a traffic warden named Meta Davis. That might have been dropped in favour of ‘Penny Lane’. A reformatted
Sgt. Pepper
along these lines is very attractive.

Although a concept album of sorts, only the second track, ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, sung by Ringo as Billy Shears, developed the narrative set up in the opening song, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. It was when Neil Aspinall suggested that the boys should reprise this tune on Side Two that the album became a song cycle of sorts, though never a full-blown one like the Who’s
Tommy
(1969). It was really the way
Sgt. Pepper
was packaged and presented that gave the impression of a cohesive work of art.

Paul claims credit for coming up with the concept of the album sleeve, in which the Beatles stand with cut-outs of their heroes in an ornamental garden, the work realised by their artist friends Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth. Originally the cover was to be a design by the hippy art group the Fool, of whom more later. ‘Robert [Fraser] pulled out this cover that the Fool had done - looked like a psychedelic Disney,’ recalls Jann Haworth. ‘He just showed it to us and said, “I don’t like this, and I think Paul really isn’t happy about it, I think really you should do it.”’ Husband and wife proceeded to build a three-dimensional stage set - something Jann’s set designer father did for his living - Jann overseeing the planting of an ornamental garden in the foreground, red flowers spelling out BEATLES, while Peter concentrated on creating the crowd of heroes, using blown-up, tinted photographs of famous people, only some of whom the band suggested. ‘Basically they chose about a third of the heads,’ recalls Jann. ‘It wasn’t a big enough crowd.’ So the artists came up with the rest. Paul’s choices included Fred Astaire and William Burroughs. John’s wish list included Jesus and Hitler, both ruled out by EMI.

The pictures were assembled in Michael Cooper’s photographic studio in Chelsea, the Beatles themselves dressing up in pseudo-military uniform, made from shiny fabrics in Day-Glo colours. Paul wore his MBE. To the band’s right were arranged Madame Tussaud’s waxworks of themselves at the time of Beatlemania, while in front of the band was a bass drum upon which the album title had been painted in fairground lettering. Paul later hung the drum skin on his drawing room wall. Finally, the assemblage was photographed by Michael Cooper. Produced in a full-colour gatefold sleeve with, for the first time in pop, the album lyrics printed on the reverse, and a cardboard insert of souvenirs designed by Peter and Jann,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
was a complete artwork, ambitious and stylishly realised. If one has a criticism of the music,
Pepper
can seem over-rich, like an over-egged cake. Individually the elements are brilliant, but other Beatles albums are, to these ears at least, more enjoyable.