John Lennon The Life by Philip Norman

Author:Philip Norman
Language: ru
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2012-06-02T07:41:10+00:00

Amazing as it may seem, money was never the Beatles’ prime objective. They saw themselves always as artists on a continuous upward curve of experimentation and innovation. After creating an album like Rubber Soul, it was galling to have to run back onstage with their same old matching suits and hair, and blast the same old thirty-minute repertoire into the same vortex of mindless screams. In late 1965, the four had a meeting at which all agreed their in-concert standards had gone to hell, simply because no one was listening. As John said: “…we could send out four waxwork dummies of ourselves and that would satisfy the crowds. Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music any more. They’re just bloody tribal rites.”

Modern rock stars on tour are insulated from the outside world by dozens of aides, fixers, security staff, and PR people. But the Beatles, despite their hugely enlarged performance venues, still traveled with much the same small entourage that used to accompany them around northern dance halls: Brian; the two roadies, Neil and Mal; and press officer Tony Barrow. Whenever they went, they were available—and vulnerable—in ways that no headliners today would tolerate. For John, the whole process had become a repetition of school, except that now there could be no playing truant. “He got to the point where he just hated the audience,” says his old Hamburg friend and confidant Klaus Voormann. “He couldn’t stand that this herd of cows was just screaming. He was angry about those people’s reactions; he found it terrible. It was a complex with him. He’d gone from pretending to be this tough rock-’n’-roller into being a Beatle, which was also all about pretending. With all that he had, he wasn’t happy because he hadn’t come to terms with his own personality. He was a Beatle, and he knew that a Beatle doesn’t really exist.”

Britain had already, unknowingly, seen its last-ever Beatles tour, back in December 1965. Brian’s original plan had been the traditional countrywide trek, ending with a second Royal Variety Show appearance and yet another of their metropolitan Christmas pantos. However, the four had flatly refused to do either the Royal or Christmas show, and raised so many other objections to their itinerary that the whole thing was almost called off. Eventually, they compromised with a nine-date circuit of key cities, including the Liverpool Empire and ending in Cardiff on December 10.

Despite the shortness of the tour, John was in an overtly rebellious mood, emerging from the Beatles’ Rolls into the dank night fogs of Newcastle and Manchester, jacketless, in a white T-shirt—the new kind with a picture or slogan printed on the front—and greeting the stage-door media contingents with jeers and sarcasm (though in one-to-one interviews, even with the most obscure local journalist, he remained as open and honest as ever). Onstage, like the other three, he had virtually given up trying to make himself heard against the screams. Yet sometimes even now he would crash both forearms down on his organ keyboard in sheer fury and frustration.

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