The Love You Make (69 page)

A Day in the life, The Beatles Day by Day
is a fascinating volume listing a daily calendar in the lives of the Beatles including illness, travel, appearances, and personal details. For an excellent, song-by-song musical analysis, the reader is directed to Nicholas Sehaffner’s
Beatles Forever.

These songs were lost years later when Jane Asher threw them out during a spring cleaning of Paul’s London house.

Ringo says that Andy White is on the single but that he can hear himself on the album cut.

Iris Caldwell later married British pop star Alvin Stardust.

Even more ironic, “Mull of Kintyre” was McCartney’s only unmitigated flop record in America and one of the many reasons he left Capitol Records in the seventies.

Earlier in the evening, discussing possibie “ad libs” during the concert, John had threatened to tell the royal audience to “rattle their fucking jewelry.

Years later, when Cynthia Twist wrote about her marriage in her heavily self-censored autobiography,
A Twist of Lennon,
she changed the date of her marriage to 1962. This inaccuracy has been noted many times in Beatles biographies. Recently, Cynthia confessed it was an inadvertent mistake; she has a mental block against admitting Julian was conceived out of wedlock and often still confuses the dates.

The real “fifth Beatle” was without doubt Neil Aspinall.

The Beatles discovered many years later that Elvis never sent the telegram or even knew about it. It was sent, instead, by Colonel Tom Parker.

Jacobs gave notorious, elaborate theme parties on weekends at his Brighton mansion, which would begin in the afternoon and continue through the next day. Luminaries like Sophie Tucker would often entertain and once a guest expired in the bedroom in the service of a young male courtesan. Jacobs simply locked the bedroom door and didn’t mention it until the party was over.

Neither EMI or Capitol thought to cover movie soundtracks in their contracts with the Beades at the time.

Not her real name.

Name changed.

Mal Evans kept these notes—ludicrous pontifications in retrospect—with him up until the time of his death in Los Angeles in 1976. They were confiscated by the police and lost with some of his other belongings.

“Yesterday” was not included on the American version of the
Help!
LP as it was in the U.K. It was released as a single by Capitol in September of 1965.

Not his real name. As far as the dentist’s real name, George, Pattie, and Cynthia all claim that they cannot remember it.

The exchange later turned into the John Lennon composition, “She Said. She Said”: “She said, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead, I know what it is to be sad.’ / And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.”

Ringo later rented this flat to Jimi Hendrix, who painted the entire place in black paint, including the furniture and silk wallpaper. Candles were burned on every table, scorching them with hot wax. Ringo sued Hendrix for destroying the flat, and the case was settled out of court.

After building several suburban homes, Ringo’s construction company went broke.

There were only billiard tables readily available in the U.K. when Ringo decided he wanted a pool table, and one had to be flown overnight from America at twice its cost. He told this story whenever he played on it. Shooting pool became one of Ringo’s enduring passions.

The authors were present at an auction at Abbey Road studios in 1981 during which the bidding was fierce and heavy over the roll of toilet paper and its holder that Ringo had complained about. A very happy man purchased it for around £65.

In the U.S. Capitol put together an interim LP,
Yesterday and Today.
This was a compilation of various singles and other material left off previously released U.S. albums. The album contained, among notable others, “Nowhere Man,” “Drive My Car,” and “Dr. Roberts.”
Yesterday and
Today had its place in Beatles trivia as the only album to initially lose money. The album was distributed in the U.S. with what was called the “butcher jacket” photo of the Beatles in white smocks, with decapitated dolls and red meat strewn about them. Although John thought the cover “as relevant as Vietnam,” it was a good example of the Beatles’ occasional poor judgment, the record-rack jobbers got so many complaints, they refused to ship the album. Capitol tossed away 750,000 covers and pasted-over many others. A S250,000 advertising campaign was also aborted.

Astrid reportedly now owns two clubs, one of which is a gay bar.

One of the most curious side effects of John’s “Jesus” remarks was that the South African government banned all sales and radio play of Beatles albums. This ban was kept in effect until 1970, when it was lifted for Paul, George, and Ringo John Lennon’s music, at this writing, is still forbidden. Despite the American boycott, their new album,
Revolver,
sailed to the top of the American charts and remained there for two months.

Making a third movie was an option, but a suitable script could not be agreed upon by the four Beatles and Brian. Instead, an animated-feature-length cartoon was licensed to King Features in the U.S., eventually called
Yellow Submarine,
which Brian hoped would satisfy the terms of the U.A. contract. The Beatles had virtually nothing to do with this animated film, aside from composing a few songs for it when it was almost completed. Although U.A. rejected
Yellow Submarine,
as the third film, it went on to become a commercial and artistic success. Ironically, U.A. later acted as a distributor of the film in the U.S.

Journalist and author Hunter Davies had been commissioned by Brian to write the Beatles’ authorized biography. It was published in the U.K. and the US. in 1968. All of the Beatles, including their families, had final control over what appeared in the book. Davies says the book went through wholesale censorship, with the Beatles tearing out pages they didn’t like as they read the manuscript. The only parent who asked for changes was John’s Aunt Mimi, who “went mad” according to Davies when she read the manuscript. Among other changes, all curse words were deleted, the drug use was toned down, and Mimi insisted that her sister Julia had married “Twitchy” so that no childrcn were born out of wedlock. Qucenie insisted that a reference to Brian’s homosexuality be deleted. She said it wasn’t true. Another story not even considered for inclusion in the book was John’s trip to Spain with Brian. John admitted to Davies that he had slept with Brian “to see what fucking with a guy was like.”

Nat Weiss handled some of the arrangements in the United States, including the rental of a house for a weekend that Paul asked for in San Diego. Since no house was available for a weekend, Nat rented one for a month. The family who was living in the house happily vacated it for Paul and jane—at a much greater price. The only problem was Paul wasn’t going to San Diego at all—he meant to say San Francisco. “I didn’t realize there was that much of a difference,” he told Nat. The house in San Diego went unused.

“A Day in the Life,” arguably the best-remembered song of the album, employed the services of a forty-two-piece symphony orchestra, which was assembled at the Abbey Road huge studio number one in black tie for the occasion. George Martin had scored all twenty-four bars of music for them beginning at “pianissimo” with a line right through all twenty-four bars to the highest possible note, ending in “fortissimo. The forty-two pieces were double-tracked again and again into a thundering, shattering finale. The last note of the album trails off for forty-five seconds, and the microphone pots were turned so high to catch the last fading tones the air-conditioning system at Abbey Road is audible. For a final touch, a note of 20,000 hertz was added, which could only be heard by a listening dog.