Brian Epstein & The Beatles Top 100 Countdown (#40-36)

Yesterday we've discussed the possible events that may have taken place during Epstein's and Lennon's joint trip to Spain. Today we'll take it from there.

Private misdemeanours aside, there’s no doubt that by taking The Beatles from The Cavern and making them international stars, Brian tore up the rule book and raised the bar for British music. He believed Pop was an art form and was determined to deliver it to the masses. He traipsed the streets of London to secure the boys a record contract and a publishing deal, and after they had taken Britain he ensured they got their February 1964 slot on The Ed Sullivan Show – a now legendary television appearance, seen by 73 million Americans. The rest really is history.

The band were as upset as Brian when he didn’t receive an MBE alongside them in October 1965 – a snub presumed to have been because he was gay. The following month The Jewish Chronicle quoted Princess Margaret as having said, “I think that The Beatles believe that MBE stands for Mr Brian Epstein.” There is a great irony that such an outsider to established society was setting the programme for the cultural mainstream, in almost the same vein as the Motown acts across the pond – who became ‘the sound of young America’, yet weren’t allowed to swim in the hotel pools on tour because of the colour of their skin. A life of secrecy and a culture of prejudice got to Brian, and rather than relish in his behind the scenes powers, he became depressed.

If in his younger years he learned how difficult it was to come by gay sex, as he grew up Brian found it virtually impossible to establish a romantic relationship. It was, after all, illegal. In The Brian Epstein Story, Joanne Petersen – who was Brian’s personal assistant for the last few years of his life – wrote about her view into his private life. “He was a very sad and lonely person at times, and I felt sorry for him. I thought it was sad that he had so much going and yet he felt insecure. Brian was constantly searching, for love, for something to take his loneliness away, and in a way I think he went through a lot of self-punishment.” It’s widely believed that Brian never had a boyfriend, or indeed any kind of relationship, and this contributed greatly to his unhappiness. It was known in all his circles that he battled with addiction to prescription drugs – sleeping pills and other barbiturates – and he made failed attempts to curb his use at the Priory Clinic. His experimentation with other substances can be aligned with the years in which The Beatles discovered them too; from smoking marijuana with them in 1964, to trying LSD with them in 1967. He was also known to be a keen gambler, but drugs were to be his ultimate undoing. To be continued...

Now, let's get on with our Beatles songs countdown. At #40 is a song that many consider as one of the Stones' greatest songs, if not the greatest. Pitchfork Media places it at #19 on its list of "The 200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s" and Rolling Stone Magazine places it at #18 on its list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs.

Tomorrow Never Knows is the final track on Revolver (1966). It was written primarily by John. It was Lennon's rapid, excited response to the great escape of LSD. In acid, Lennon found his first true relief from the real world and the band's celebrity — an alternate space of rapture and self-examination that he re-created, with the energized collaboration of the other Beatles, in Tomorrow Never Knows. All of a sudden, the poetic advance and rustic modernism of Rubber Soul — issued only five months before these sessions, in December 1965 — was very old news. Compared to the rolling drone, tape-loop effects and out-of-body vocals that dominate Lennon's trip here, even the rest of Revolver sounds like mutation in process: the Beatles pursuing their liberated impulses as players and writers, via acid, in Pop-song form. There was no other place for this track on the album but the end. Eleanor Rigby, I'm Only Sleeping, Love You To and She Said She Said were all bold steps toward the unknown — Tomorrow Never Knows was the jump from the cliff.

The art of sampling in popular music may, in fact, start here. In January 1966, while tripping, Lennon took the precaution of consulting The Psychedelic Experience, a handbook written by LSD preacher Timothy Leary (with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner). The book itself was an extended paraphrase of Buddhist concepts, including reincarnation and ego death, in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Lennon ran a tape recorder and read passages from The Psychedelic Experience as he was flying. He was soon writing a song using some of the actual lines from Leary, including his description of the state of grace beyond reality. Lennon even used it as a working title: The Void.

The Beatles got him there with extraordinary speed. It took them only three tries to come up with a master take of the rhythm track, driven by Starr's relentless drumming. McCartney suggested the tumbling pattern Starr uses. Most of the otherworldly overdubs were created and recorded on the night of April 6th and the afternoon of the 7th — a total of about 10 hours. There is nothing on Tomorrow Never Knows — the backwards guitar solo, the hovering buzz of Harrison on sitar, Lennon's vocal drifting on what feels like the other side of consciousness — that was not dosed beyond plain recognition. The spacey, tabla-like quality of Starr's drumming was just him playing on two slackly tuned tom-toms, compressed and doused in echo. Loops were created using a Mellotron imitating flute and string tones; the cackling seagull sounds were either an altered recording of McCartney laughing or a treated slice of guitar.

Lennon hoped to sound nothing like his usual self. "I want my voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop, miles away," he proclaimed in the studio. Engineer Geoff Emerick achieved that effect by running Lennon's voice through the rotating speaker of a Leslie cabinet, which had been hooked up to the Hammond organ at Abbey Road. The result was heaven and earth combined: a luxuriant and rippling prayer, delivered in Lennon's nasal Liverpool-hard-boy tone. "That is bloody marvelous!" Lennon exclaimed repeatedly after hearing his effect. McCartney's reaction was equally joyful: "It's the Dalai Lennon!"

Ironically, all the way to the last overdub on April 22nd, the song was listed on Abbey Road recording sheets with another working title, "Mark 1." Starr came up with something much better. Like A Hard Day's Night, Tomorrow Never Knows was one of the drummer's malapropisms. The line does not appear in Lennon's lyrics. What Starr meant, of course, was "tomorrow never comes." He was wrong: It arrived, in reverb and technicolor, with ecstatic promise, at the end of Revolver.

At #39 is the song that made Beatlemania happen: I Want To Hold Your Hand was written and sung by both John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and recorded in October 1963. It was the first Beatles record to be made using four-track equipment.

With advance orders exceeding one million copies in the United Kingdom, I Want to Hold Your Hand would have gone straight to the top of the British record charts on its day of release (29 November 1963) had it not been blocked by the group's first million seller She Loves You, their previous UK single, which was having a resurgence of popularity following intense media coverage of the group. Taking 2 weeks to dislodge its predecessor, I Want to Hold Your Hand stayed at #1 for 5 weeks and remained in the UK top 50 for 21 weeks in total.

It was also the group's first American #1, entering the Billboard Hot 100 chart on 18 January 1964 at #45 and starting the British invasion of the American music industry. By 1 February it held the #1 spot, and stayed there for 7 weeks before being replaced by She Loves You, a reverse scenario of what had occurred in Britain. It remained on the US charts for a total of 15 weeks. I Want to Hold Your Hand became the Beatles' best-selling single worldwide. In 2013, Billboard magazine named it the 44th biggest hit of "all-time" on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

When the joyous, high-end racket of I Want to Hold Your Hand first blasted across the airwaves, America was still reeling from the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Beatles songs had drifted across the Atlantic in a desultory way before, but no British Rock & Roll act had ever made the slightest impact on these shores. The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein, were determined to be the first, vowing that they wouldn't come to the US until they had a Number One record.

I Want to Hold Your Hand changed everything. "Luckily, we didn't know what America was — we just knew our dream of it — or we probably would have been too intimidated," Paul McCartney told Rolling Stone in 1987. The single was most Americans' first exposure to the songwriting magic of Lennon and McCartney, who composed the song sitting side by side at the piano in the London home of the parents of McCartney's girlfriend, Jane Asher.

In September 1980, Lennon told Playboy magazine:

We wrote a lot of stuff together, one on one, eyeball to eyeball. Like in I Want to Hold Your Hand, I remember when we got the chord that made the song. We were in Jane Asher's house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the same time. And we had, 'Oh you-u-u/ got that something...' And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, 'That's it!' I said, 'Do that again!' In those days, we really used to absolutely write like that — both playing into each other's noses.

In 1994, McCartney agreed with Lennon's description of the circumstances surrounding the composition of I Want to Hold Your Hand, saying:

'Eyeball to eyeball' is a very good description of it. That's exactly how it was. I Want to Hold Your Hand was very co-written. It was our big number one; the one that would eventually break us in America.

The lightning-bolt energy lunges out of the speakers with a rhythm so tricky that many bands who covered the song couldn't figure it out. Lennon's and McCartney's voices constantly switch between unison and harmony. Every element of the song is a hook, from Lennon's riffing to George Harrison's string-snapping guitar fills to the group's syncopated hand claps.

After a teenager in Washington, D.C., persuaded a local DJ to seek out an import of the single, it quickly became a hit on the few American stations that managed to score a copy. Rush-released in the US the day after Christmas, the song hit #1 on February 1st, 1964.

Having accomplished their goal, the Beatles' appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th, drawing 73 million viewers, the most in the history of TV to that time. "It was like a dam bursting," Martin said.

Teens weren't the only ones swept up in Beatlemania. Some of America's greatest artists fell under their spell. Poet Allen Ginsberg leapt up to dance the first time he heard I Want to Hold Your Hand in a New York club. Composer Leonard Bernstein rhapsodized about the Sullivan appearance, "I fell in love with the Beatles' music — the ineluctable beat, the Schubert-like flow of musical invention and the F*ck-You coolness of the Four Horsemen of Our Apocalypse." Bob Dylan, who had just released The Times They Are A-Changin', saw the future. "They were doing things nobody was doing," Dylan said in 1971. "Their chords were outrageous. It was obvious to me they had staying power. I knew they were pointing in the direction of where music had to go. In my head, the Beatles were it." Here they are on the Ed Sullivan show:

At #38 we find Getting Better. It's a track from Sgt. Pepper (1967), written by Paul with lyrical contributions from John. McCartney's bassline was described by music critic Ian MacDonald as "dreamy" and "well thought out as a part of the production by McCartney". It was recorded after the main track was completed like many of the basslines on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band were.

The song's title and music suggest optimism, but some of the song's lyrics have a more negative tone. In this sense, it reflects the contrasting personas of the two songwriters. In response to McCartney's line, "It's getting better all the time", Lennon replies, "Can't get no worse!" In a December 1983 interview, McCartney praised this contribution as an example of things he "couldn't ever have done [him]self".

Referring to the lyric "I used to be cruel to my woman/I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved/Man I was mean but I'm changing my scene/And I'm doing the best that I can", Lennon admitted that he had done things in relationships in the past that he was not proud of.

In a 1980 interview in Playboy with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lennon, when asked about the song, commiserated that the song's lyrics came personally from his own experience abusing women in relationships in the past. He states: "It is a diary form of writing. All that "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved" was me. I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically - any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace. Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster."

One of the recording sessions for Getting Better is famous for an incident involving Lennon. During the 21 March 1967 session in which producer George Martin added a piano solo to Lovely Rita, Lennon complained that he did not feel well and could not focus. He had accidentally taken LSD when he meant to take an upper. Unaware of the mistake, Martin took him up to the roof of Abbey Road Studios for some fresh air, and returned to Studio Two where McCartney and Harrison were waiting. They knew why Lennon was not well, and upon hearing where Lennon was, rushed to the roof to retrieve him and prevent a possible accident.

At #37 is a song from Magical Mystery Tour (1967). Baby You're A Rich Man was the result of combining two unfinished songs written by Lennon and McCartney, in a similar fashion to A Day in the Life, and I've Got a Feeling. The verses from One Of The Beautiful People by Lennon were combined with McCartney's previously unaccompanied Baby, You're A Rich Man chorus.

The spirit of the song was pure Lennon. The working-class hero loved nothing better than tweaking the moneyed class: "The point was, stop moaning — you're a rich man, and we're all rich men, heh heh, baby!" he said. When Lennon sang, "How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?" he was talking to himself.

The Beatles built the track around a thumping mix of piano, bass and hand claps; the braying sound is Lennon playing a clavioline keyboard, which imitated the swirl of a Middle Eastern woodwind. Mick Jagger was a guest at the session and may have contributed backing vocals.

Lennon's deeply stoned delivery and abstract questions about "the beautiful people" captured the playfully spaced-out mood of the summer of 1967 — a spirit the Beatles were more tapped into than anyone. "At the back of my mind," McCartney said that year, "there is something which tells me that everything is beautiful."

Baby You're A Rich Man

Finally for today, at #36 is a George Harrison song from Abbey Road (1969). It's called Here Comes the Sun.

Harrison wrote one of the Beatles' happiest songs while he was playing hooky. By 1969, Apple Records was disintegrating into an endless squabble over money, with business manager Allen Klein and attorney John Eastman struggling for control of the group. "Apple was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: 'Sign this' and 'sign that,'" recalled Harrison. "One day I decided I was going to sag off Apple, and I went over to Eric Clapton's house. The relief of not having to go see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric's acoustic guitars and wrote Here Comes the Sun."

Harrison's estate, Kinfauns, was about a half-hour's drive away from Clapton's house. The two guitarists had grown close, with Clapton playing the solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Harrison returning the favor by co-writing Cream's hit Badge. "It was a beautiful spring morning, and we were sitting at the top of a big field at the bottom of the garden," Clapton wrote in his autobiography. "We had our guitars and were just strumming away when he started singing 'de da de de, it's been a long cold lonely winter,' and bit by bit he fleshed it out, until it was time for lunch."

Here Comes the Sun opened the second side of Abbey Road with a burst of joy. Along with Something, it gave notice that the Beatles now had three formidable composers. "George was blossoming as a songwriter," said Starr. "It's interesting that George was coming to the fore and we were just breaking up."

Even the highly competitive Lennon and McCartney had to grant Harrison newfound respect. "I think that until now, until this year, our songs have been better than George's," McCartney said to Lennon during a break in the Abbey Road sessions. "Now, this year his songs are at least as good as ours."

Catch the song here, if you're registered:

Here Comes The Sun