Paul McCartney (37 page)

The first strike was against the nation’s most infamous musical miscreants, the Rolling Stones. In February 1967, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had been busted together for minuscule drug offences–neither involving acid–at Richards’ Sussex cottage, where they’d gone after watching the Beatles complete ‘A Day in the Life’ at Abbey Road. Also netted in the raid was Paul’s art dealer friend Robert Fraser, who at the time had 24 heroin tablets in his officer-style blazer-pocket. Photographer Michael Cooper, who’d shot the Sgt. Pepper cover, was present, too, but escaped any charges.

Next in line was International Times, the underground newspaper Paul had helped to fund and launch. IT was permanently under official fire for its open advocacy of marijuana–to say nothing of homosexuality and nudity–and had already been raided once, after publishing an interview with the black American comedian Dick Gregory which included the quote ‘I say “fuck white folks”.’ On 1 June, the day of Sgt. Pepper’s release, a member of IT’s editorial board, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for possessing a tiny amount of pot. Fearing this might presage a further, fatal police onslaught, the editorial team turned to Paul, who promised that if such a thing should happen, he’d hire the very best lawyers to defend them.

Yet for all the Beatles’ open espousal of the drug culture, it seemed inconceivable that any of them personally might be targeted. George Harrison, in fact, had been among Keith Richards’ house-party with his wife, Pattie, but they had left just minutes prior to the raid. Legend has it that the police waited for George to get clear before they went in, though in reality his escape was pure luck.

In this open season on British pop’s top echelon, Paul was as vulnerable as anyone else. He was a habitual pot-smoker, had started on cocaine (thanks to Robert Fraser) and, during Jane’s long absence in America, had taken to dropping acid. Jane would later recall her dismay when she returned to Cavendish, some time after Sgt. Pepper’s release. ‘Paul had changed so much. He was on LSD, which I knew nothing about. The house had changed and was full of stuff I didn’t know about…’

Yet he seemed utterly confident that being a Beatle gave him immunity from what lesser figures in the musical and counter-cultural world were now suffering. For instance, neither he nor John ever thought of backing away from the two busted Rolling Stones despite the risk of attracting police attention. While awaiting trial, Jagger and Richards composed a sneering riposte to the authorities entitled ‘We Love You’, for which Lennon and McCartney provided (uncredited) backing vocals. Also present at the session was America’s greatest beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Barry Miles and regular contributor to International Times. Ginsberg later recalled John and Paul singing together, ‘looking like Botticelli Graces’, while he conducted them through the control room glass ‘with Shiva beads and a Tibetan oracle ring’.

Paul was a steadfast friend to Jagger throughout these pretrial months when he could have expected further surprise visits from the forces of law and order at any moment. The Chief Stone was often to be found at Cavendish, together with Marianne Faithfull, whom he had wooed away from Indica gallery’s co-owner John Dunbar–and who’d greeted the police raiders at Keith’s cottage wearing nothing but a fur rug. During these hazardous demonstrations of solidarity, Paul little suspected that the Stones’ new album-in-progress, Their Satanic Majesties Request, would turn out to be a shameless imitation of Sgt. Pepper, both in content and packaging.

He was similarly supportive of Brian Jones, also awaiting trial after a separate bust, and a far less well-protected and more psychologically vulnerable character than Mick. To distract Brian from his problems, Paul invited him to join a Beatles session at Abbey Road for a track that eventually became ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’. And Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, who had been busted along with Brian–in his case, on non-existent evidence–was given sanctuary at Cavendish for as long as he needed. ‘If they want to bust you again,’ Paul said, ‘they’ll have to bust me as well.’ Which told ‘Stash’ there was no safer house.

The eve of his twenty-fifth birthday brought proof of just how invulnerable he felt. This usual master of polite evasion and soufflé-speak became the first Beatle–in fact, the first major pop star–to publicly admit taking LSD. It came about in an odd reprise of John’s ‘more popular than Jesus’ episode. Comments originally made to a minor British publication and causing little reaction were repeated by a major American one, unleashing a firestorm.

Some time previously, Paul had given an interview to Queen, a tiny-circulation glossy magazine mainly covering London high society. To his prospective audience of duchesses and debutantes, he not only owned up to having tried acid–before it became illegal of course–but rhapsodised about the ‘mind-expanding’ effect. ‘After I took it, it opened my eyes. We only use one-tenth of our brains. Just think what we’d accomplish if we could tap that hidden part. It would be a whole new world.’

Then on 17 June, America’s mighty Life magazine ran a post-Sgt. Pepper article, headlined ‘The Way-Out Beatles’, which recycled the quotes. In Britain, the resultant outcry was almost as great as ‘more popular than Jesus’ had caused in America. The Beatles’ best ambassador and PR man now found himself branded ‘an irresponsible idiot’ by the Daily Mail. A Labour Home Office minister, Alice Bacon, declared herself ‘horrified’ by Paul’s views and compared him unfavourably with Lulu, one of various goody-goody popsters to have spoken against the drug culture. ‘What sort of society are we going to create,’ the minister mused clairvoyantly, ‘if everyone wants to escape from reality into a dream world?’

Two days later, Paul gave an interview to Independent Television News in his garden at Cavendish in which he admitting taking acid ‘about four times’. The reporter asked whether he didn’t feel some responsibility for making drugs alluring to the Beatles’ millions of young followers. Deciding attack to be the best form of defence, he replied that he’d never wanted to ‘spread the word’ about acid: that was being done by ITN itself, and all the other news organisations currently at his heels. ‘You’re spreading it now at this moment… This is going into every home in Britain and I’d rather it didn’t… If you’ll shut up about it, I will.’

None of the other Beatles was caught up in the furore–though Brian Epstein loyally stood beside Paul, admitting to five acid-trips and insisting they’d caused him no harm whatsoever. John, above all, might have been expected to be sympathetic, but instead felt aggrieved that the band’s last and most reluctant convert to acid had made himself the spokesman for it. Living at close quarters on the road, the two had never annoyed each other half as much as they now would as demigods.

Nobody in or out of the media imagined Paul’s tripping had ended when LSD was outlawed. Yet he still was not considered to be in the slightest danger of being busted. Nor was the controversy allowed to interfere with the ultimate use of the Beatles as an advertisement for Britain. On 25 June, they starred in the BBC’s first-ever live television transmission via satellite, performing ‘All You Need Is Love’, the hippies’ mantra salted with Lennon sarcasm, to an audience of some 400 million people across five continents.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards joined the Beatles and other pop VIPs in the television studio for this literally universal dissemination of the Summer of Love. Two days later, they stood in the dock at Chichester Quarter Sessions to answer for their microscopic drug offences the previous February. After the most grotesque of show trials (which also managed to smear the unaccused Marianne Faithfull) both Stones were found guilty and briefly incarcerated, but released on appeal. Robert Fraser, who was tried for heroin possession by the same court, received six months’ imprisonment with hard labour, serving his time in full.

The Jagger–Richards case gave new impetus to the lobby calling for the legalisation of marijuana as a harmless recreational drug which did not lead to more serious use. On 16 July, a huge ‘legalise pot’ rally in Hyde Park gave London its first sight of flower children en masse and passed off peacefully, despite the heavy-handed intervention of police still clad in helmets and short-sleeved shirts rather than riot gear. The principal speaker was Allen Ginsberg, wearing a red sateen shirt covered with psychedelic patterns. The shirt was a gift from Paul, who’d hand-drawn the patterns himself.

Leading figures in the arts and science also rallied to the cause in an open letter to The Times (whose unexpected support had been mainly responsible for getting Mick Jagger off the hook). Since the letter was also to be a manifesto which couldn’t risk being censored or cut, it would have to take the form of a paid display advertisement. Paul agreed to pay the necessary £5000 and to get the other Beatles and Brian to sign it.

The letter duly appeared in The Times of 24 July, headed ‘The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice’. In addition to John Lennon MBE, Paul McCartney MBE, George Harrison MBE, Richard Starkey MBE and Brian Epstein, its 64 signatories included Britain’s greatest living novelist Graham Greene, the foremost drama critic of his generation Kenneth Tynan, the photographer David Bailey, the broadcaster David Dimbleby, a psychologist, a pharmacologist, a Labour MP and one of the two men who had discovered DNA.

However questionable its case that the risk of cannabis-smokers becoming heroin-addicts ‘was less than of drinkers becoming alcoholics’, the letter and background campaign had one positive long-term effect. Although pot was never to be legalised, the savage penalties for possession–up to ten years’ imprisonment or a £1000 fine–would, over time, be drastically reduced.

But in other countries, no such liberalisation took place–as Paul would one day discover to his cost.

On 24 August, the hippies’ four-headed deity found their own spiritual guide in Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and became converts to Transcendental Meditation. Soon afterwards, EMI’s chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood attended a reception hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. He found Her Majesty disinclined to the usual polite small talk. ‘The Beatles are turning awfully funny, aren’t they?’ she said.

Not so funny, perhaps. Young men who had achieved every possible and impossible success and tasted every conceivable material luxury by their mid-twenties might well become jaded by their so-envied lives and feel a yearning for some higher fulfilment.

Actually, only two of the four were in this susceptible state. George was already deeply immersed in Indian religion and music–hence the latter’s influence on Sgt. Pepper–while John was open to any relief from his chronic insecurity and self-hatred. Paul was not conscious of any particular spiritual void, nor was the uncomplicated Ringo, but the group mind held its usual sway.

Indeed, this decision concerning their souls was taken even more quickly than the one to grow moustaches. Hearing (from George’s wife, Pattie) that the Maharishi was to give a talk at London’s Hilton hotel, John, George and Paul, accompanied by Pattie, Cynthia Lennon and Jane, turned up in their millionaire-hippy finery and sat at the front, experiencing the extreme novelty of a spotlight being turned on someone else.

Here it was monopolised by a diminutive Indian gentleman with straggly hair and black and white forked beard whose high-pitched voice seemed to quiver with perpetual mirth. But if his appearance was rather comical, his message was riveting. His Beatle listeners had heard of meditation as a way of calming the mind, but had always thought it involved self-discipline and patience aeons beyond their attention span. This transcendental variety, however, offered an inviting fast track, needing only 20 minutes per day to produce a state of perfect ‘inner peace’.

After the lecture, John, Paul and George talked with the Maharishi and there and then signed up to his Spiritual Regeneration Movement, pledging to contribute a week’s earnings apiece to its funds and to study meditation at the guru’s ashram, or religious sanctuary, in India. Meantime, they agreed to join a ten-day induction course he was running at a college in Bangor, North Wales, starting the following August Bank Holiday weekend. With them went Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, until then the Summer of Love’s most notable casualties. But that distinction was about to be usurped.

At the end of the first day’s indoctrination in Bangor, John, Paul and George held a joint press conference with the Maharishi to announce an early major benefit: they were giving up LSD. ‘You cannot keep on taking drugs for ever,’ Paul said. ‘You get to the stage where you’re taking 15 aspirins a day without a headache. We were looking for something more natural. This is it. It was an experience we went through. Now it’s over and we don’t need it any more.’

The next day, Sunday, as the cycle of spiritual chats with the Maharishi and press conferences continued, a telephone began ringing persistently inside the college’s administration block. Paul said ‘Someone had better answer that’, and went off to do it. A few moments later, he was heard to shout ‘Oh, Christ … no!’

‘Everything was off the top of Paul’s head’

Until that moment, Brian Epstein and the Beatles had seemed to be amicably but inexorably drifting apart.

At the age of only 32, Brian had become the biggest impresario the pop business had ever known. His NEMS company controlled a huge roster of young artistes, now from other locations as well as Liverpool, all of whom looked to him for the same seemingly magic touch that had launched John, Paul, George and Ringo. He had diversified into the theatre, his original passion, both as a producer and director, and even begun to emerge as a performer in his own right, presenting British segments of the American TV pop show Hullabaloo.

Yet all of it put together didn’t mean as much as the first–and still the biggest–of his discoveries, those now-grown men he continued to call ‘the boys’. The end of live shows might have liberated the Beatles, but it had been a heavy blow to Brian. For it meant he could no longer orchestrate and shield and fuss over them from morning to night as no pop manager ever had before, and none would again. ‘What am I going to do now?’ he asked a colleague sadly on the flight home from their final American tour. ‘Shall I go back to school and learn something new?’