The History of Rock and Roll, Volume 2 by Ed Ward

Author:Ed Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

chapter five

INVENTING “THE SIXTIES”

Memories of a free festival: Cutting the fence at Woodstock (Photo © Baron Wolman)

As for Britain, if there was a war raging, it was a fairly polite one. Neither the Beatles (who’d retired from live performance, although they never announced it) nor the Stones (who were preparing a new album followed by a U.S. tour) were at Woodstock, but the Beatles, at least, were keeping busy. There was a new “Beatles” single, “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” which didn’t sound like everyone in the band was on it (and they weren’t: it was John and Paul overdubbing) and detailed the travails of the couple, who’d gotten married in Gibraltar on March 20. They stayed on the rock long enough for the papers to be signed—Gibraltar is a British possession, so they were on British soil—and then jetted off to Amsterdam, where the first part of their honeymoon consisted of a “Bed-In,” in which they lay in bed in matching white pajamas, invited the press in, and talked endlessly of peace. Room service brought meals, and allegedly the couple never left the bed except to go to the bathroom. Staying there for a week as members of the press filed in and out, the couple rambled on about nonviolence and the scourge of war. Somehow the single rose into the top 10 and was followed by a much better single, credited to something called the Plastic Ono Band, “Give Peace a Chance,” recorded during yet another Bed-In, this one at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, after the couple had appeared at a “rock & roll revival” show in Toronto and been denied entrance to the United States because of Lennon’s drug conviction (and because the FBI quietly considered him a subversive). Seeing another opportunity for some peace publicity, they invited the press yet again, and recorded the single, helped by the talents of Tommy Smothers, who played acoustic guitar, and the voices of Timothy Leary, Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, and the Canadian chapter of the Radha Krishna Temple. This ramshackle production, however, not only launched a hit but also became an anthem that’s still sung at peace marches and other protests today. Just as important to what was to come for the Beatles, though, was Paul McCartney’s marriage the week before Woodstock to photographer Linda Eastman, a wealthy New York–based photographer who’d taken some nice portraits of Paul and whose father was an imposing entertainment lawyer whose clients included trombonist Tommy Dorsey and painter Robert Rauschenberg. Paul and Linda had no intention of making their marriage a spectacle, and Paul and his new father-in-law hit it off right away.

All the Beatles, though, jumped into the Apple label immediately, coming up with projects. First out of the gate was a single, “Those Were the Days,” by a winsome Welsh teenager, Mary Hopkin, who’d done some TV and whom model Twiggy had suggested to Paul as a natural. The song is an old Russian showbiz number, cloyingly sentimental, and

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