1968 was a year of upheaval. Even in the camp of the most famous band of all: When the Beatles started working on the "Sgt. Pepper" successor in spring, hardly anything was the same - especially not this: John, Paul, George & Ringo were no gang anymore, but four grown young men. A fact that "The Beatles" shouldn't harm, though. In the following we look at the conditions, essence and consequences of the record that became famous under the unofficial title "White Album".
"Looking back, I would say that this evening was the last time the Beatles happily worked together in the studio. And it was no coincidence that it was the last Beatles session in which neither Magic Alex nor Yoko Ono took part." Although the scholars argue to this day whether Yoko was actually not there, there is no doubt that this is the speech of February 11, 1968, and that the man who chats from the sewing box was there on that Sunday: Geoff Emerick, sound engineer of the Beatles since the early years, right-hand man of producer George Martin and thus a reliable contemporary witness in questions of the Beatles' internal climate (the quote comes from his book "Here, There And Everywhere").
On this day, the Beatles record a new Lennon song at EMI Studios in London's Abbey Road, entitled "Hey Bulldog", which will appear on the soundtrack album "Yellow Submarine" released in January 1969. It is the last studio session of the band before a longer break, which all four musicians will spend in Rishikesh, India. There they want to attend a course of their Gurus Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on Transcendental Meditation.
When they reappear on Abbey Road on 30 May and start working on a new album there, they are, as Emerick writes, "completely different people".
Magical Mystery Flop
So something serious must have happened in between. If one looks back at the traditional testimonies of all those involved, there is not a single event in India that could explain such a change. On the contrary, more or less all sources describe the time in the Gurucamp of Rishikesh as harmonious and relaxed. George Harrison's then wife Pattie Boyd reports in her autobiography "Wonderful Tonight": "George, John and Paul wrote some songs there, while Donovan taught them fingerpicking techniques on the guitar. Somebody was always playing, there was talking to each other, singing, and there was always something going on somewhere, you were squatting a lot together."
Although Ringo and her wife Maureen left after just two weeks because she had problems with the many insects and did not get him the vegetarian food, basically all travellers to India were in good spirits. As Ian MacDonald notes in his standard work "Revolution In The Head", they even managed without drugs there, apart from occasional joints.
The reasons for the change in the working climate of the four-member pop miraculum from Mersey are therefore deeper. And they find their origin already in the previous year, when the band with the ingenious "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" experienced, as some think, their artistic climax. After the work delivered the soundtrack to the much conjured Summer of Love and the single anthem "All You Need Is Love" added a icing on the cake, the Fab Four and the Hippie Movement had become one - the world was Sgt. Pepper, and Sgt. Pepper was the gospel of counterculture. So far, so good.
For the first time in their joint career, however, the Fab Four's high-flying flight got into heavy turbulences. It began on 27 August 1967 with the news that their manager Brian Epstein had taken his own life with sleeping pills. Suddenly the group was on its own. Christmas brought the next blow to the office: the ambitious "Magical Mystery Tour" film, which the BBC broadcast on Christmas Day 2, fell through with critics and viewers. The Beatles had regarded the whole thing as a whimsical experimental film - off the band camp, however, people could not really laugh about the detached and little coherent nonsense. Paul McCartney felt compelled to give television presenter David Frost an interview the very next day in which he explained and justified the artistic intentions of the film.
Until then, the Beatles had taken it for granted that they couldn't do anything wrong anyway. Now that was exactly what happened. But they didn't really itch, and it's hard to believe that the band was made insecure by this. Deep in their collective subconscious, however, Lennon & Co. must have felt that they had spanned the bow and lost touch with those out there. But that didn't bother me either. John Lennon, for example, refused as Beatle to meet the audience's expectations anyway: "I don't think we have any responsibility to the fans. If you allow everything to be dictated by the fans, you only lead your life for other people."
