Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

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СКАЧАТЬ and extremists. ‘Beatle worship is idolatry,’ read a placard wielded by a picket of the ultra-religious at the San Francisco show. The boys moved on to play under equally trying circumstances in Las Vegas and Vancouver, where Republican Canadians, who wanted to sever the nation’s constitutional links with Britain, protested against the Beatles as emissaries of the Queen. Even more alarmingly, Ringo received death threats in Quebec from anti-Semites who mistook him for a Jew. For their concerts at the Montral Forum, Ritchie had a bodyguard sitting beside him on stage. What with the screaming fans, the inadequate sound systems, and now the fear that there might even be assassins in the audience, the Beatles’ brief set got shorter by the night. They rushed through their shows, wanting them over with as soon as possible.

It was the sound quality that bothered George Martin most when he came out to record the boys playing the Hollywood Bowl on 23 August for a live LP. The producer found the challenge of getting a decent recording insuperable. ‘It was like putting a microphone at the end of a 747 jet – just a continual screaming sound.’* The following afternoon the boss of Capitol Records, Alan Livingston, completely uninterested in the Beatles just recently, hosted a garden party in their honour at his Beverly Hills home. Wherever the band went these days, hotel managers, record executives and mayors wanted to meet them and introduce their family members, especially their children, and Livingston was no different. He sat the lads under a tree in his garden so friends and associates could parade their daughters down the line, each Beatle expected to say a word to the girls, who were too young to raise more than a polite smile from the musicians, until a rather more mature young lady thrust herself forward.

      ‘My God, you’re beautiful,’ remarked Paul, as he took her hand.

      ‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ replied Peggy Lipton.

      At 19, Peggy was an actress under contract to Universal Studios, more or less unknown, though she later achieved celebrity in the TV show Mod Squad. Like many American teens, Peggy was enamoured of the Beatles, and had papered her bedroom walls with their pictures. Unlike most of her contemporaries, Peggy also had the chutzpah and contacts to engineer a meeting with her idols, her sights set firmly on Paul, whose name she had screamed at the Las Vegas Convention Center the previous week. After the show Peggy and a girlfriend inveigled themselves into a party the boys were due to attend. ‘I affected the schoolgirl nymphomaniac look,’ Peggy recalled in her autobiography, Breathing Out. Unfortunately, the Beatles didn’t show. Alan Livingston’s garden party was Peggy’s second attempt to meet Paul, and this time she managed to speak to him and slip her phone number to a member of his entourage. Peggy was summoned that evening to the Bel Air house where the Beatles were staying.

      I arrived almost sick to my stomach with butterflies. I had lost my virginity only six months earlier and I’d been thinking about Paul day-in, day-out for a year. He greeted me sweetly and checked me out with a quick once-over. He liked what he saw. We sat downstairs. He played the piano. The next thing I knew we were on our way upstairs [where] he took me in his arms and kissed me … I took a shower to slow things down and when I came out wrapped in a towel, he caressed me in front of the window and let the towel fall to the floor. This to me was an utterly romantic gesture. Paul was a romantic.

      Afterwards Peggy left the house feeling cheap. She returned the next day, though, clear evidence of Paul’s unfaithfulness to Jane Asher, who remained his steady girlfriend in London.

      After shows in Denver and Cincinnati the Beatles returned to New York, where they booked into the Hotel Delmonico, the manager of the Plaza being unwilling to accommodate them after the mayhem of their first visit. The Beatles were to play two shows at Forest Hills tennis stadium. The second night they met Bob Dylan.

      The meeting and subsequent relationship between the American musician and the Beatles is significant. Along with Elvis Presley, Dylan and the Beatles form the great triumvirate of rock, interconnected on different levels. Like the Beatles, Dylan was a young man in his twenties from a provincial, working-class, northern town, in his case Hibbing, Minnesota, where he was a high school rock ’n’ roller before he discovered folk music, sharing Paul’s passions for Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Elvis. Dylan’s musical path diverged when he discovered the folk troubadour Woody Guthrie and joined the New York-based folk revival whereby emphasis was put on reconnecting with the roots of American vernacular music, singing songs with a strong narrative, often a moral or otherwise instructive story, framed with poetic language. Dylan was a folk star before the Beatles found fame, his début album released on CBS when the boys were still playing Merseyside dance halls with Pete Best. By the time CBS released Dylan’s second album, the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Dylan and the Beatles were both stars, though of a different order. Girls screamed at the Beatles. Dylan’s audiences listened to him in respectful silence, as to a poet with important things to say. ‘He was proud of that,’ notes Bob’s journalist friend Al Aronowitz, who also knew the Beatles and helped effect their historic meeting.

      Dylan and the Beatles were also singer-songwriters, at a time when few artists wrote and performed their own material, extremely fecund writers who were rapidly creating fat song books with ample material for themselves and other artists to perform. As Brian Epstein bestowed Lennon & McCartney songs on acts he managed, Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman gave Bob’s compositions to his own stable of artists, notably ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ to Peter, Paul and Mary, who had a big hit with it in 1963. Initially suspicious of folk music, Paul had been very impressed by The Freewheelin’; hard on the boot-heels of which came The Times They Are A-Changin’, then Another Side of Bob Dylan, albums that featured lyrics more sophisticated than anything John and Paul had so far written. Meanwhile the Beatles had something Dylan didn’t have, and wanted, which was chart success. For all these reasons, Bob and the Beatles were curious about one another. A summit meeting had been on the cards for some time when John Lennon asked their mutual friend Al Aronowitz to set it up.

      Bob drove down from his digs in Woodstock for the occasion, with his roadie Victor Maymudes, a tall, saturnine hipster who rarely left Dylan’s side. They picked up Aronowitz at home in New Jersey en route to the Delmonico in Manhattan, where Big Mal Evans escorted the Americans up to the Beatles’ suite. In an anteroom, a number of celebrities were waiting to be admitted to the presence, including Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan was ushered past them, Aronowitz making the introductions, ‘a proud and happy shadchen, a Jewish matchmaker’, as he wrote. Drinks were poured. The Beatles offered Bobby and his friends pills, which they’d been guzzling since Hamburg days. Aronowitz suggested they smoke dope, he and Bob assuming – having misheard the phrase ‘I can’t hide’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ as ‘I get high’ – that the Beatles were fellow pot-heads. As it turned out, the Beatles hadn’t smoked pot before – at least not good pot, as Victor Maymudes was careful to qualify: ‘They actually had smoked pot before, but they hadn’t smoked good pot. They didn’t know the power of pot.’ Dylan himself rolled the first joint, which was given to John, who handed it to Ritchie, who proceeded to smoke it like a cigarette, not passing it around. More joints were rolled so every Beatle had his own herbal ciggie, with another for their normally strait-laced manager.

      A few hours earlier Brian had ticked off Derek Taylor in his usual tight-ass way for drinking Courvoisier cognac in the hotel. ‘You’ll pay for that bottle, Derek. That is to go on your bill.’ Under the influence of dope, Brian was transformed into a totally different person, reeling around the Beatles’ suite like a happy child. He said he felt like he was on the ceiling and, pointing at his refection in a mirror, repeatedly said: ‘Jew!’ The others thought this and everything else hilarious and profound. ‘I remember [Paul] saying that he was thinking for the first time,’ said Aronowitz. ‘He told Mal Evans to follow him around and write down everything he said.’ Mal couldn’t find a piece of paper, so Paul noted down his revelations. The next day when he read his notes he saw that he’d written, ‘There are seven levels.’

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