John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman

Author:Philip Norman
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780060754013
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services Inc.
Published: 2008-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

18

A MOST RELIGIOUS FELLOW

You might as well paint a target on me.

The world tour Brian had scheduled to begin in June 1966 was supposed to have eased the pressure on his boys. Their only European shows were three in West Germany. Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand were bypassed in favor of single-city visits to Japan and the Philippines. Following those hopefully unexacting appearances in Tokyo and Manila, they would have more than a month’s break before returning to the ever-reliable embrace of America.

Behind them they left a new single that was like an hors d’oeuvre for the banquet to come on Revolver. The undisputedly more commercial A-side was Paul’s “Paperback Writer,” a satire on pulp fiction and Fleet Street, finally making use of a phrase that the poet Royston Ellis had dropped into his and John’s consciousness in 1960. On the B-side, John’s “Rain” was a celebration of acid’s transfiguring power at its most benign, when a wet leaf could appear to blaze brighter than gold and a raindrop coursing down a windowpane to reveal all the mystery of Creation. “Can you hear me?” the voice of the new apostle repeated over and over. “I can show you…” Multitrack harmonies and varispeed tempos created an effect both dense and liquid, as of a sonic tropical monsoon. For the fade-out, George Martin had the idea of playing John’s vocal opening backward. John loved the result, and from then on wanted everything played backward.

After such a creative surge, the thought of returning to a thirty-minute stage repertoire of dusty old hits was hardly bearable. And, what with putting the finishing touches to Revolver—and the certainty that no one out there would be listening anyway—the Beatles scarcely even bothered to rehearse before starting out on the road. During their opening concert, at Munich’s Circus-Krone-Bau, John, George, and Paul simultaneously forgot the opening of “I’m Down,” and had to stop and confer about it. Even after this, the usually meticulous Paul managed two further slipups in the lyric; then George mistakenly introduced “Yesterday” as a track from Beatles for Sale. Not since earliest Quarrymen days, and rarely even then, had they shown such blatant unprofessionalism.

The third West German concert took them back to Hamburg for the first time since January 1963 and provided a clearer-than-usual measure of how far they had risen since. The former illegal laborers, suspected arsonists, and police detainees now arrived at the city’s central station aboard a luxury train fitted with velvet drapes and marble bathtubs, which had been used to transport Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit a year before. The former all-night ravers at the Kaiserkeller and Star-Club now played just two shows of thirty minutes each in the 5,600-seat Ernst Mercke Halle, although, as if to keep up Reeperbahn tradition, police arrested forty-four spectators for violence.

Numerous old friends were granted instant dressing-room visas, among them Astrid Kirchherr; Bert Kaempfert, the Beatles’ first record producer (whose song “Strangers in the Night” had stopped “Paperback Writer” from

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