The Beatles Story: In Their Own Words | Part One

[Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] he made cakes so we always add sugar through the water she ended up doing a lot of jobs because he left when i was three he decided that was enough of that and so she did any down home job she could get to feed and clothe me i was raised by my auntie my father my mother split when i was about four i spent some time with mother up till about four then i was brought up by an auntie my mom was a nurse she was a midwife as well and my dad was a cotton salesman my mother was from an irish family called french and she had lots of brothers and sisters my grandmother used to live in albert grove which was next to arnold grove i was terrible at school because i didn't spend much time there because i was also very sick as a kid i had uh peritonitis when i was six and a half which it just means burst appendix and you're gonna die and they said to my mother you'll be dead three times but there we are we're still here my dad was a musician amateur musician and he would play piano around the house we always had a piano and i've got some lovely childhood memories of lying on the floor and hearing him play when my parents were younger they used to have to listen on an old crystal radio set sometimes known as the cat's whisker when i went to art school i was at art school for five years when i went to this sort of college i went in there they would only allow jazz to be played you know they wouldn't allow rock and roll in it was frowned upon those days so we had to con them into letting us play rock and roll there on the record player by calling it blues you know whatever record was being played you'd try and listen to it you know you couldn't even get a cup of sugar let alone a rock and roll record there was no such thing as an english record i think the first english record that was anywhere near anything was move it by cliff richard and before that there'd be nothing i remember being in school when i was a kid and somebody had a picture in one of the musical papers of elvis i think was an advert for heartbreak hotel and i just looked at it and just thought he's just so good looking he just looked perfect when i was 16 elvis is what was happening a guy with long greasy hair wiggling his ass and singing hound dog and that's all right mama and those early sun records which i think are his great period that's him that is the guru we have been waiting for the messiah has arrived suddenly he was a rock and roll hero who had glasses [Music] ain't no idea about doing music as a way of life until rock and roll hit me and then when rock and roll hit me that changed my whole life drums were the only thing i wanted and i came out and i used to look in shops and see drums that's all i looked i never looked at guitars or anything my dad used to be a trumpet player himself and for my birthday he once bought me a trumpet from rushworth and draper's one of the music stores in liverpool and then when i was 16 i reestablished a relationship with my mother for about four years she taught me music she first of all told me the banjo and from that i progressed to guitar she the first song i learned was ain't that a shame an old rock hit fat domino uh when i was 13 14 i used to be at the back of the class drawing trying to draw guitars big cello cutaway guitars with f holes little solid ones with pointy cutaways and rounded cutaways and you know i was totally into guitars and i heard about this kid who had a guitar and it was three pound ten it was just a little acoustic round the whole type guitar and i got the three pound ten off my mother that was a lot of money in those days but i suddenly figured out that i wouldn't be able to sing with this thing stuck in my mouth so i went back to the shop and traded it in for a guitar i was about 16. i bought a 30 bob bass drum 30 shillings huge mother just a huge one-sided bass drum it's a joke in the family guitar is all right for a hobby but it won't earn you any money in fact you know sometimes we travel the whole of liverpool just to go to someone who knew a chord we didn't know um remember once hearing about a bloke who knew b7 now we knew e and we knew a it was quite easy but we didn't knew reset we didn't know b7 that was kind of the missing part of the link the other chord the lost chord so on we got on the bus trooped across liverpool changed a couple of buses found this fella and he showed us b7 we learned it off him got back on the bus went home to our mates and went zhing got it yeah paul and i used to just kind of get together played a bit but it was we were just school boys then there was no groups involved till a little bit later you know they say beggars can't be choosers and we were just desperate you just get anything whatever film came you'd try and see it [Music] george and i lived very near each other in liverpool so in fact we were just a bus stop away from each other i get on the bus and then the stop afterwards georgia get on so being quite close in age we'd sit together and we'd talk about stuff and that um in fact he was i think about one and a half years younger than me that's quite a big age difference at that time so i suppose i used to talk down to him a little bit as you do to a sort of kid who's one and a half years younger than when he's sort of 14 and a half and i'm sort of 16 you know might have been a failure of mine to tend to talk down to because i'd known him as a younger kid he was always nine months older than i even now he's still nine months old [Music] paul met me the first day i did bibapalula live on stage and a mutual friend brought him to see my group called the quarrymen i had a mate at school who was called ivan ivan vaughan and we were born on exactly the same day from liverpool so we we were great mates and uh one day he said do you want to come to the wilton village fete so i said yeah all right so we went along one saturday afternoon i remember coming into uh the field where they had the fate and just a bit over there there was a wagon uh and on the back of this or a little stage or something on the up on this stage there was a few lads around and there was one particular guy i noticed at the front with a sort of checked shirt sort of blondish kind of hair a little bit curly sideboards looking pretty cool and he was playing sort of one of these guitars guaranteed not to crack you know not a very good one but um but he was making a very good job of it you know i remember being quite impressed and he was doing a song by the dell vikings called come go with me and the thing about it was he obviously didn't know the words but he was pulling in lyrics from blues songs so instead of going uh come little darling come and go with me she's that is right he'd then go down down down to the penitentiary they'd be doing some little stuff he'd had on big bill brunsey records and stuff so i thought that's clever that's he's pretty good that was john and we met and we talked after the show and i saw he had talent and he was playing guitar backstage and doing 20 flight rock by eddie cochran i was the singer and the leader i made the decision whether to have him in the group or not was it better to have a guy who was better than the people i had in obviously or not and that decision was to let paul in to make the group stronger and i turned around to him right then on first minute do you want to join the group and i think he said yes the next day i said well i've got i got i got this friend who's really good you know and he said well yeah like what you know i said well you can play raunchy perfectly and we all love that song so we said well god i've got to try them out remember we ended up on the top deck of a bus empty late night bus kind of thing and just us there and just go on george get your guitar out go new show man i thought you know and he got it out down down there sure enough no perfect raunchy you're in [Music] [Music] stuart was john's friend mainly from art college stuart was a very good painter we were all slightly jealous of john's friendship john being a little bit older certainly than me certainly than george he was a little bit you know he wanted to sit next to him on a bus and stuff like he's the older fellow you know it's just the way it was now when so when stewart came in it was a little bit it was sort of he was sort of taking a little bit of that position away from us we had to take a little bit of a back seat the famous stories where he sold his painting to john moore exhibitionism so the question was what do you do with 75 quid so we said you know that happens to be exact amount it takes to buy a hoffner base and that'd be a great thing to spend the money i said no no i'm a painter i've got to spend on paints and such like you know we said no stew really and john and i kind of gave him quite sort of persuasive argument that the best thing to do obviously was to buy this often a base which he did he went and did that and um only trouble was he couldn't play it but it was better to have a bass player who couldn't play than to not have a bass player at all when we started off we had a manager in liverpool called alan williams he's a great bloke a real good motivator he was very good for us at the time you know and he eventually got us an audition that was held at one of his clubs called the blue angel and um it was for larry pons who had a big stable so-called of rock stars down in london we eventually got the audition i think larry picked up quite a few liverpool groups at that audition as a record you know this is also the audition this is something for larry to take a look at or whatever and we always unfortunately have to ask stewart to sort of turn a little bit away from the camera or say to him look don't get cause because he couldn't play that well we might be in a and he might be an a flat and we thought someone spot this because we always looked see where people were on the guitars so we'd ask him to sort of turn away a bit so there are a few photos with stuart moodily with his back to the camera you know that was the reason there but anyway that was it was a pretty pathetic tour by the end of it we were broke we had no money we're all cold and freezing and you know just miserable and and that was it you know we all came back to liverpool and nothing happened really we didn't really know i felt really sad because we were like orphans or something we didn't have our shoes were all full of holes and our trousers were a mess and we didn't have uniforms you know and we were crummy the band was horrible you know we were really an embarrassment we didn't have amplifiers or anything so i would say to the others when they were depressed or we're all depressed you know i thinking the group was going nowhere and this is a shitty deal we're in a shitty dressing room i'd say where are we going fellas and they go to the papiani in pseudo-american voices and i said where's that fella they'd say to the top almost the papamoas i say right then we'd all sort of cheer up and then we had all sorts of different drummers all the time because they people who owned drum kits were far on cubitine was an expensive item and they were usually idiots you know we've got pete best just because we needed a drummer the next day to go to hamlet he came down to the jacaranda club we did a quick audition with him and jumped in the van and went to hamburg [Music] everything else was such a buzz you know being right in the middle of the naughtiest city in the world at 17 years old it was kind of exciting and learning you know about well there's all the gangsters and there's the transvestites and there's at that time we were just kids led off the leash really come straight from liverpool to hamburg and we were used to these little liverpool girls but by the time you got to hamburg if you if you got a girlfriend there she's likely to be a stripper he's the only kind of people who were around at the time we were around late at night though so i mean you'd for someone who'd not really had much sex in their lives before which none of us really had to be suddenly involved with a sort of hardcore striptease artist who obviously knew a thing or two about sex um was quite an eye-opener [Music] in hamburg because we had to work six or seven hours a night on stage with no rest the waiters always had these pills got preladen and so the waiters when they'd see the musicians falling over with tiredness or would drink they'd give you the pill you take the pill you'd be talking you'd sober up you know you could work almost endlessly until the pill wore off then you'd have to have another i don't think that's where we um found our style we developed our style because of this fellow though he used to say you've got to make a show for the people i used to come up every night shall we max we used to make shower and john used to dance and like a gorilla and we'd all you know knock our heads together and things like that [Music] rainbow's a professional drummer who sang and performed and had ringo starr time and he was in the one of the top groups in liverpool before we even had a drummer rory and the hurricanes they were the first ones in liverpool who really wanted to get into rock and roll by the time we all met up in germany they were playing one club we were playing another um they were just great by them and i used to like because we used to do long hours we used to do 12 hours at a weekend between two beds uh when we ended up on the same club and so if they had the last set i'd sort of be semi-drunk and demanding they play slow songs we made friends with a lot of people there was um the ones who became our real friends were the ones who like who are known now as klaus bormann jurgen vollmar and that's really we took all the famous photographs of us at that period i was 17 and when we first went out then we went to the indra club and then got moved to the kaiser keller and then that ended up with us getting the gig to go to the top 10 club and right before that happened i got busted for being underage now they had this kind of situation in germany which i'd never come across before which was a curfew um and after 10 o'clock at night anybody who was under 18 had to get out and i was only 17 i was sitting in the van like i started getting worried and eventually somebody found out we didn't have any work permits or pieces so they started closing in on us and the police came one day and then they just booted me out well paul and pete got me you know deported and [Music] by the police for burning the condom on the wall and uh so they were back before me and john got back about two days later i was really happy you know thinking oh great and then that's what the support of nature you see and stewart just stayed there because he decided to get the right-hearted with astrid so the second time we went back when i was 18 that's when we were backing up tony sheridan at that point this fella came into the club who was they said oh he's this famous record producer and musician he was called bert kemfort and his claim to fame was he had a number one hit in america not only was he a record producer but he had a hit in america called wonderland by night it was it kind of turned out to be a trumpet sort of solo but he came in the club and remember this buzz went around we've got to be good play really good we may get a chance to record which we did i think he came back two times and then he said oh i want you to come in the studio with sheridan and record and we got all pleased with ourselves and then we got to the studio and he just wanted us to like back up sharon [Music] while we were out there we started to see all the groups and stuff and started to get a little bit dissatisfied with pete not massively but just a little bit of dissatisfaction started to creep in i seem to remember him you know starting to not turn up for gigs and then we kept getting ringo in ringo starr who had changed his name before all of us and who had a beard and was grown up and was known to have a zephyr zodiac which was a very big car in those days you know i mean nobody had this he was knock off probably you know it fell off the back of a showroom but [Laughter] ringo kept sitting in with the band and every time ringo sat in the band it just seemed like this was it this happened three or four times and then that was the end you know we were just pals and we'd have a drink after it and then we think i'd be back with rory and around about this time stuart and i got a little bit fraught too see because i i claim that what i was trying to do was make sure we were musically very good but this did create a couple of rifts and i can see now how i could have been more sensitive to it but who's sensitive at that age certainly not me well when we first met him he couldn't play at all when i mean when he first got a base uh and he learned a few tunes occasionally it was a bit embarrassing he didn't you know if he had a lot of changes to it he was but he knew that too that's why you know he was never really that at ease being in the band and that's why he left when we finished the gig in hamburg he decided to go back to art college at that point paul was still playing a guitar and remember saying well one of us is going to be the baseball i remember saying and it's not me i'm not doing it john said i'm not doing it either he went for it and then we went back to liverpool and got quite a few bookings you know they all thought we were german you know we're builders from hamburg and they all said you speak good english things like that so we went back to germany we had a bit more money the second time so we bought leather pants and we looked like four gene vincent's only a bit younger i think john put this thing in um the mersey beast right which was also started by bill harry who went to art college with john just saying that uh this little guy appeared on a flaming pie you know in the sky and said let there be beetles with an a [Music] so anyway we did well at the cabin and attracted some big audiences and the word got around what had happened was a kid had gone into brian's record store and had asked for my bonnie and then he found out that the beatles was supposed to be a liverpool band and they were playing the cabin so he went down the street and and checked us out because i remember bob waller the disc jerky saying and we have a mr epstein who owns them's enterprises in here and everybody's going wow you know big big deal [Music] this was quite a new world really for me uh i was amazed by this sort of dark smoky dang atmosphere this beat music playing away and um the beatles were then just four lads on that rather dimly lit stage amongst all that something tremendous came over and i was immediately struck by the their music their beat and their sense of humor actually on stage and even afterwards when i met them i was struck again by their personal charm and uh it was there that really it all started i know he said yes he might as well straight away he got us some jobs got us a bit more money and um then started getting us radio shows and things like that and then you know as we go ahead we got into our suits you know he talked us out of the leather suits i remember we had to drive down to london on uh new year's eve because we did a session for deca you know an audition day [Music] so brian then had this tape which he hawked around and i think it was somebody in the hmv shop on oxford street knew george martin and told brian to go and play the tape to george martin and then he gave us the audition at abbey road george had done little of no rock and roll when we met him and we'd never been in a studio so we did a lot of learning together he had a very great musical knowledge and background um no i i thought they they had tremendous charisma i knew that that alone would sell them and we did a reasonable audition not very good but the thing he didn't like was our drummer and i said to if when we do the next session i mean i don't want to interfere with the beatles and what you're doing with them that's fine but i'm going to provide the drummer we really started to think we um needed the great drummer in liverpool historically it may look like we did something nasty to peas and it may have been that we could have done it better but the thing was as history also shows ringo was the member of the band it's just that he didn't enter the the film until that particular scene you know their first record did very well it sold a hundred thousand copies that was love me do and bob willa got on the stage telegram in his hand i've got news for you and it looked terrible we thought you know something disastrous has happened and he says the beatles record please please me number one in the national chart and the lads themselves just stopped and looked at him yeah they thought he was joking he must have been you know that was paul he must be joking and there were lots of people who didn't know the beatles and they all started cheering and clapping and there were about three rows of gales at the front and every one of us started crying it was a terrible night you know we knew then they get famous and they'll go away and they'll belong to us no more you can be big headed and say yeah we're gonna last 10 years but as soon as you've said that you think you know we're lucky if we last three months from that moment onward they blossomed they became wonderful songwriters but before they showed evidence of that i still had to have an album out and so what i did was i mean i'd been up to the cabin and i'd seen what they could do i knew their repertoire i knew what they were able to perform and i said let's record every song you got come down to the studios and we just whistle through them in a day so we were just trying to improve all the time and we'd listen to something that somebody else had done and we'd just try and beat it a bit we try and beat what we were doing and i mean by the time we got to something like from me to you it was nice because i remember being very pleased with the chord in the middle which was different from what we believed anything that you wanted then he [Music] you know this is something we hadn't done before in the early days we'd make a record in 12 hours or something and they'd won a single every three months and we'd have to be right in it literally in the hotel or on in a van the demand on us is tremendous remember sitting on a pair of twin beds in a hotel bedroom had a day off so we were going to write a song all our early songs had always had please please me from me to you p.s i love you you've always had this very personal um thing thank you girl and we hit on the idea of doing a kind of reported conversation i saw her yesterday she told me what to say she said she loves you so it just gives us another little dimension really just meant that the song then was something different from what we and other people had written before [Music] i have it from a reliable source that a half million advance orders have been made for the beatles latest single release she loves you it looks as though it could well be three number ones in a row for the liverpool boys and it was great you know we were kings and we all you know just at the prime and we all used to just go around london in our cars and meet each other and talk about music with the animals and eric and all that and we were very close to the stones we're always kind of you know a little nervous before each step we went up the ladder we were a little nervous but we always had that confidence and that was a good thing about being four together not like elvis you know i always felt sorry later for elvis because he was on his own he had his guys with him but there was only one elvis nobody else knew what he felt like but for us we all shared the experience you were treated differently and you had to get used to that then then you you know you found yourself in in a weird land because of all these people you've grown up and lived with suddenly you it was the one place you didn't want it to change because it all changed out there and you were never secure really who your friends were unless you had them before you know people are so in awe of fame i mean all you have to do is go on the radio or the television once and if somebody sees you on there and then they see you down the street they act different don't they but the beatles have been on the papers every day for a year or so everybody changes you know they're so impressed by it and they people forget how to act normal today the beatles returned from sweden to be greeted by what the british press are calling beetlemania we'll see what the queen mother thinks of beetlemania when the beatles perform at the royal variety show on the 4th of november [Music] with the beatles was the first kind of put together album of first songbook so to speak and they gave me a list of their songs and and they were all thinking in terms of singles still um we weren't thinking in terms of an album being you know a piece of an entity by itself it was a collection of songs and all we did was to record singles and uh or and the ones that weren't too good we wouldn't issue a singles we put them on an arm which is what with the beatles the beatles second lp with the beatles has broken the record for advanced sales of an lp with the beatles has an advance of a quarter of a million the record was previously held by elvis presley's blue hawaii brian epstein could well be right in his prediction that the beatles one day will be bigger than elvis presley i think one of the cheekiest things we ever did was say to brian epstein we're not going to america until we've got a number one and the reason we did that we'd seen a lot of people like adam faith cliff richard british stars quite big stars over in britain go over to america and be like third or fourth on the bill to people like frankie avalon who we didn't really respect of fabian and people like that who were a little bit sort of one hit wonders to us so we thought that's the kiss of death is to go over to america and you know come down in your career really and take a take a downward step so we didn't want to do that so for some reason we just said to brian right we're not going to america till we've got a number one record we were trying to get in america all the time i really thought she loves you would have broken the american but if you think of our frustration here um we were being turned down by the company which emi actually owned and i was so frustrated by this i say well if they're not going to let us they're not going to put it out i mean in the case of from e2 was the first one we should we offer them um we'll they can't deny us other people putting them out so i would then take the record back from them and try and get it up with another label and i did negotiations with swan and with vj each of whom very tiny labels in the states took one or the other titles and they put those records out in america and of course being small labels they didn't make great deal of of success and that was the way it worked out we released please please me flop from me to you flop changed record labels released she loves you they'd all been big hits in england all been number one all of them flops nothing but by this time the news from england and europe was overwhelming that they were a hit group and they had to take them more seriously than they're done before and also the swan and vj labels were making inroads they were selling by this time so capital were forced to release i want to hold your hand it wasn't designed specifically for the american market but like the ones before it it was a great record we got a telegram um in the evening after one of the shows when we were having a drink at the hotel and it came a capital records congratulations lads number one in u.s charters and so we all hit the roof i remember riding around on mal evans's back for about 20 minutes or so yeah and he was you know happy to bear me it was just very high uh sterics you know and brian rang me around about half of us one in the morning he said i know you won't mind being woken up i said well i wasn't asleep anyway he said well i've just heard from america we're number one john so far all british pop stars have not made a tremendous impact on the states how do you think you're going to fare well i can't really say can i i mean is it up to me no i mean i just hope we go all right no ack act reached this invading plane arriving at new york city's kennedy airport but the pandemonium created by the 3000 teenagers on hand to greet the sortie of britain's bristling beetles is something one might expect from a collision of planets [Applause] [Music] liverpool's contribution to american culture is something that to say the least sparks many diametrically opposed reactions which starts at the beatles first press conference hello john hello brian what what are your first impressions of arrival in america yeah i don't know the sort of the wild they're all wild they just seem to get wilder than they are here in england well it seemed like it maybe it's just the first impression here they just seemed these youngsters from liverpool england and their conduct over here not only as fine professional singers but as a group of fine youngsters we'll leave an imprint with everyone over here who's met him let's go but nobody ever made it in america and we were dying to be the first a lot of people had tried and failed in america we were just very confident and just the confidence was at an all-time high you know i thought we'd conquered america i mean we it was sort of an attitude we had okay we've conquered sweden we've conquered france yes america was ours [Music] the next few minutes are in the lap of the gods and the hands of the beatles which means anything can happen we're going to hear sort of versions of the songs from their films who was worse oh paul i see i think john was about the worst ah ringer was very good he was he's a good lady they're saying he's an evil [Music] [Applause] [Music] chaplain if i have to go [Music] all together i think it's 30 days there's just more people here because they're bigger stadiums we normally play in theaters in england i just think that last year you visited more countries than ever isn't that right yes yes yes oh yes which has been your favorite one that you visited america i think yes i'll agree with that ring agrees with that why in particular because you make a lot no it's good you know it's like britain only with buttons i see yes that's the sort of abstract thing yeah there's more people you know in america so you've got big audiences and it's all wild and happy i remember once when we were going to go back for the second uh tour of america and they were saying oh yeah we're going to start in san francisco with a ticker tape parade and that was once when i actually did say you know i'm not going i'm not i'm not having a ticker tape parade you know i mean it was only seemed like a year as since they just assassinated kennedy and um yeah i could just imagine you know this how mad it is in america you know it's just so much fun [Music] and i found that love was more than just holding hands [Music] [Music] most of the boys songs today are taken from their latest lp which is called what poor called beatles for sale and and uh it's got eight of our songs and the rest are the rest eight from fourteen what's that nine please i'm not very good at counting until i see six of course six yes eight and six well i didn't get that one who counted didn't get counted who were the other numbers kansas city one of the problems with all their concerts was that they couldn't hear themselves everyone's used to the today to the technology and great concerts and everyone has a foldback speaker at their feet so they can hear what's going on didn't have that in those days so the the three uh john paul and george will be standing at microphones in front of a screaming crowd of 60 000 and ringo would be at the back of the drums and rinko said to me you know they said it was very difficult following he said i couldn't do anything clever i couldn't do great drum kicks on drum rolls or or fills so i just had to hang on to that backbeat all the time to keep everybody together you know i need someone [Music] we've done the hard day's night uh film which was great and dick lester had done this kind of slightly artsy black and white thing that i think we'd all loved so the next thing was okay well what do we do now well maybe a color film in color yeah wow they see they had more money for that one so then things went a little bit uh awry i think because what happened then was people were sort of giving up the drink which had been the sort of stimulant of the times and we're getting into the herbal jazz cigarettes um and it was changing things a bit you know things were becoming a bit more imaginative a little more crazy by then we were smoking marijuana for breakfast at that period and we were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us because it was just for glazed eyes giggling all the time you know in their own world we had fun in those days and i think that was one of the reasons for not learning the script we just sort of showed up a bit stoned you know instead of smiled a lot and hoped we'd get through it i enjoyed filming it you know i'm sort of satisfied but not smoked about it you know it'll do we couldn't do it any better than that because we're not capable of enough actors to make it any better than that [Music] i know that we were searching around for a title and that was always a kind of crucial thing to us you know to get the titles good night john got the idea i think for the title help and i think from things he said later i think it was a bit his state of mind you know he was feeling a bit constricted by the whole beatle thing he never said that when he wrote it he said it retrospectively that was how he was feeling and that's why he wrote that um but he was kind of plump and um and you know he had his i think that's he just didn't feel right you know i mean i go into these troughs every few years it was less noticeable in the beatles because the beatles image and thing would carry you through it you know i mean i was in the middle of a trough in help you know but you can't see it really i mean i'm saying i'm singing help for a kickoff you know and but it was less noticeable because you you're protected by the the image of the power of the beatles [Music] i used to live in this uh little flat up at the top of a house in a little room i had and i had a piano by the bed and i just woke up one morning with this tune in my head um i thought i don't know this tune or do i it's like an old jazz tune or something because my dad used to know a lot of old jazz stuff maybe i've just remembered it or someone said no no no no went to the piano found the chords to it you know it was like in g f sharp minor seventh sort of b and that and um kind of just remembered it made sure i remembered it and then i just hawked it around all my friends and stuff and said what's this you know it's got to be something it's like a good little tune you know and i couldn't have written it because i just dreamed it you know you don't get that lucky and it wasn't until he got the lyric together that we he'd decide to record and say how should we do it i said well it's a lovely song super song i can't really see what ringo can do on it i can't really see what heavy electric guitars are going to do on it why don't you just go down there and sing it to me with a guitar and decide what to do with it then and it was good actually because all the others the guys i looked at them they were oops i mean you know solo record and they said yeah you know it doesn't matter it's not nothing we could add to it so do it [Music] this is a form of protest to the queen because this order is being debased by everybody in giving this to um people who are not deserving of it if i had the mbe i think i should be slightly put out of being placed on the same level as a pop singer how do you feel john about having the md i feel great we're honored i thought it was really thrilling that uh you know we're gonna meet the queen and they're gonna give us a badge so yeah this is cool we were standing in the line waiting to go through it was an enormous line you know hundreds of people and we'd been grilled by the guardsmen saying this is what you do when you get up there and then we were so nervous that we went to the toilet and in the toilet we smoked a cigarette because we were all smokers in those days but years later i'm sure john thinking back and remembering oh yes we went in the toilet and smoked and it turned into a reefer because you know what could be the worst thing you could do before you meet the queen is smoke a roofer but we never it was like this whole momentum was going you know that had been going for years and it just kept rolling and now we were playing stadiums you know that was in the days when people were still playing the finsbury park astoria you know and to play at shea stadium i never felt people came to hear our show i felt they came to see us because from the counting on the first number uh the volume of uh screams would just drown everything out vox made a special big amplifiers for that tour and they were like 100 watts we went up from the 30 watt amp to the 100 watt amp i feel fun [Music] babe is good to me you know she's happy [Applause] i'm in love with her [Music] [Applause] and it was fantastic [Music] they were um finding new frontiers all the time they were becoming more and more productive and the work they were giving me was much more interesting well by this time the beatles were really into experimenting they loved working in the studio the studio was their refuge from the mad world outside of concerts and fans and and pressures and interviews and so on in the studio they could be themselves with me and they weren't interrupted they weren't bothered by anybody and they could do what they wanted and they had this eternal curiosity for new sounds they were always coming to me and saying what can you do to give us a new sound but during that year towards the end of that year anyway i kept hearing the name of ravi shankar i heard it about three times and about the third time i heard it it was some friend of mine who said oh if he heard this person robbie shankar [Music] and so it was around that time i bought a sitar i just bought like a cheap sitar in a shop called india craft in london they were trying out new instruments and always coming to me saying what what ideas have you got for this you know i don't see too much difference myself in rubber sole and revolver to me they could both be like volume one and volume two um maybe i'm wrong i haven't played them right back to back of each other but they both were very pleasant and enjoy the records from from for me i mean it has that quality because it you know it's the follow-on and we're just starting i feel to really find ourselves in the studio you know where what we could do which was you know over just being the four of us playing our instruments and and the vocals and their ideas now are beginning to become much more potent in the studio and they would start telling me what they wanted and they would start pressing me for more ideas and more ways of translating those ideas into reality um i didn't have too many songs they were more or less the ones i'd written i've always had a couple of ones i was working on or thinking about and later in the later years i did have a huge backlog but in the mid 60s i think you know i didn't have too many well i think george went through the same problem i went through first of presenting his songs but you know that didn't really last long and then he started coming up with great songs [Music] and it was on revolver that of course we have the track tomorrow never knows which was uh a great innovation that's me and my uh tibetan book of the dead period and the expression tomorrow never knows was another of ringo's so i gave it a throwaway title because i was a bit self-conscious about the the lyrics of tomorrow never know so i took one of ringo's malapropism which was like hard day at night and to take the edge off the heavy philosophical lyrics when we took the notorious wonder drug lsd yeah it was uh we didn't know we were having it john and i had the had this drug and it was given we were having dinner with our dentist and he put it in our coffee and never told us and we'd never we never heard of it i mean it's a good job we hadn't heard of it because there's been so much uh paranoia uh created around the drug the people now if they take it they're already on a bad trip before they start whereas for us we didn't know anything we were so naive and so we had it and we went out to a club and it was incredible something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling i'd ever had in my life it was just like [Music] fantastic i just felt like in love but not with anything in particular or anybody just with everything just everything was perfect and we walked and things weren't the same that night as they'd been it was all this alice in wonderland stuff was going on but strange things [Music] the quote which john lennon made to a london columnist more than three months ago has been quoted and represented entirely out of context i mean early in 1966 john gave an interview to maureen cleve do you remember her at the ending standard in which he made a chance remarks saying we are the beatles are more popular than jesus christ you know i'm not saying that we're better or greater or comparing us with jesus christ as a person or god as a thing or whatever it is you know i just said what i said and it was wrong or was taken wrong and now it's all this the repercussions were big i mean there was [Music] particularly the what they call a bible belt the beatles made a statement in all the newspapers that they're getting more better than jesus himself and the ku klux klan being a religious order is going to come out here the night that they appear at the coliseum here and we're going to demonstrate with uh different ways and tactics to stop this performance the clan is going to come out here because we're the only organization that will come out and make a stop to these accusations this is nothing but blasphemy and we're going to try to stop it any terror way we can but it's going to stop we're known as a terror organization i think we have terror organizations we have ways and means to stop this if uh this is going to be the case yes what ways and means well i don't want to say this but uh there'll be a lot of surprises uh monday night i believe when they get here just the general beatlemania was um [Music] you know it took its toll and also because we were seeing it then from as no longer as like uh naive kind of you know just on the buzz of of our fame and success you know by this time i mean the dental experience had you know it kind of made us see it from a different light and it was no longer fun anymore i don't think anyone didn't want to stop touring probably paul would have gone on longer than george and i but you'll have to ask paul about that oh no you know touring's good and it keeps us sharp and we need touring and musicians need to play you know i'd keep music live i've been sort of a bit that attitude but finally i agreed with them you know and it was like you were right know i think it was george and john who particularly against it uh particularly got fed up we might have been wax works for all for our you know what the good we did there you know nobody heard anything or not even you know a basic beat i don't think they were too busy tearing each other up we were just tired you know it had been how many four years for us of lagging around you know screaming in this mania you know we were tired we needed to rest by the time we got to candlestick park i think we'd we knew now yeah sure you know this wasn't uh this wasn't fun anymore i think that was the main point and you know we'd we'd always try to keep you've got to really try and keep some fun in it for yourself in anything you do you know and we've been pretty good at that we'd enjoyed touring and we'd enjoyed doing a bit of tv we'd enjoyed europe we'd enjoyed america wow but now even america was beginning to pale you know because of these conditions you've mentioned and the fact that we've done it so many times so by then it was like yeah well don't tell anyone but this is probably our last gig yeah see there was big talk at candlestick park or that very period about you know this has got to end this is it [Music] [Music] [Music] will be is [Music] [Music] is [Music]

Channel: Music Box USA

Views: 290,450

Keywords: The Beatles Story: In His Own Words | Parte One

Id: P1OuTPEge0Y

Length: 55min 13sec (3313 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 10 2022