‘I went back on to the plane to ask the boys,’ says Derek. ‘Paul was sitting beside the window, looking at them. He was smiling like mad at them, nodding his head wildly up and down, but he was saying to me, “Get out there quick. Tell them we want to go out and meet them, but you won’t let us because we’re too tired. Go on.”’
Even George Harrison, the Liverpool Echo one, became numbed by it all. ‘But I’ll never forget this big noise from Kansas City coming to see Brian when we were in San Francisco. Kansas City wasn’t on the tour. He was a millionaire, the owner of the local football club or something. He said he’d promised Kansas City that he would get the Beatles for them.
‘Brian said no. They couldn’t fit it in. This bloke said would 100,000 dollars change their minds. Brian said he’d go and ask the boys. They were all sitting playing cards and hardly looked up. Brian told them about the offer of 100,000, which is £30,000 in anybody’s money. They said it’s up to you, Brian, and went on playing.
‘Brian went back and told the man he was terribly sorry. They couldn’t give up a day off. The man said he’d promised Kansas City and he couldn’t go back without them. He tore up the cheque for 100,000 dollars. Then he wrote out one for 150,000 dollars. This was the highest fee that had ever been offered to any artist in America. He was offering them £50,000 for 35 minutes. Brian could see the prestige value of beating all American artists would be fantastic. So he said all right. The Beatles didn’t look up when Brian told them.
‘So the bloke went home, dead happy. But he knew he couldn’t possibly make any money. The ground wasn’t big enough to get back anything like he’d had to pay, but he’d kept his promise to Kansas City.’
The pillowslips on which they slept in their Kansas City hotel were later sold to two Chicago businessmen for £375. They cut them into 160,000 one-inch squares, mounted them on certificates saying whose bed they had come from, and sold them at one dollar each. A New York syndicate offered Brian £3,715,000 for the Beatles, but he turned them down.
During all the shouting and screaming and boasting of all their record-breaking tours, in Britain and America, the Beatles were crouching somewhere inside the giant piece of machinery that was transporting them round and round the world. They’d retreated inside it in 1963, forced by all the pressures, and remained there, hermetically sealed.
They were trapped in their dressing room before a performance. Then, afterwards, there was the mad dash, guarded by hordes of police and bodyguards, to the hotel. There they stayed, with the outside world locked out, till the time came for the next move. They never went out in the street, to a restaurant or for a walk. Neil and Mal serviced them, bringing sandwiches, ciggies and drinks. Out of jealousy, and sometimes out of fear of being left unprotected, they wouldn’t let Mal or Neil go out either. So they all sat in their hotel bedrooms, smoking, playing cards, playing their guitars, putting in the hours. Earning £1,000 or £10,000 or £100,000 for one-night stands was meaningless. Being rich and powerful and famous enough to enter any door was pointless. They were trapped.
For a long time, of course, there was great excitement. They had waited so long for this. They’d been playing for seven years together and getting nowhere, which at least meant they were physically and emotionally prepared for the terrible conditions of one-night stands. Even the one-night stands weren’t as strenuous as the Hamburg clubs, where they’d really learned to churn it out endlessly.
After the first record, so many stages came one after the other so quickly that they never got bored or complained about the slowness, at least for some time. They all remember the excitement of going from one peak to another. Getting a record in the charts, then a number one, then another, then TV shows, the Palladium, the Royal Variety Show and then, America.
Although John, Paul and George were not taken in or affected by all the publicity, they considered themselves good. They knew their music was good and were annoyed when anyone didn’t take it seriously. They didn’t for one minute consider, as so many people did, that they would just disappear. At last they were in, and they couldn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t stay in. This probably explains part of their attitude to the press. They didn’t feel grateful or in any way humble. They didn’t care about being funny or rude because they didn’t consider they owed anything to anybody.
Only Ringo was in any way rubbing his eyes. It had all suddenly happened to him. He joined them, then immediately they were away.
‘None of us ever worried about things like the future. I’ve always just taken chances myself and been lucky. I was lucky to get an apprenticeship when I did. I’ve always had a few bob in my pocket. But I always thought it was bound to come to an end some time.
‘There were good nights and bad nights on the tours. But they were really all the same. The only fun part was the hotels in the evening, smoking pot and that.’
25 the end of touring
Throughout the next two years, 1965 and 1966, their life was dominated by touring, which really meant no life at all. They averaged three long tours a year — one British, one American and one other foreign tour taking in several countries. They produced around three singles a year and one LP. They also aimed to do one film a year, but after their second film, Help!, in 1965, they came to a halt. It wasn’t until the end of this two-year grind that their lives and their work began to settle down into new patterns.
The details of all their tours are in newspaper files somewhere, for anyone mad enough to want to look them up. The Beatles certainly can’t remember. As always, they can only remember the laughs, such as their MBE.
On 12 June 1965 it was announced that the Beatles were to be made Members of the Order of the British Empire. There were immediate protests, from members of the House of Lords to ancient wartime fire watchers, who felt their MBE had been cheapened. A retired colonel said he wasn’t going to give the Labour Party a £11,000 bequest after all, or his twelve military medals. MBE medals were sent back from all over the world.
Brian was very pleased about the honour. He said later he never had any doubt that the Beatles would accept, but John says he seriously thought about saying no. Today his MBE sits on the TV in Mimi’s bungalow.
‘We thought being offered the MBE was as funny as everybody else thought it was. Why? What for? We didn’t believe it. It was a part we didn’t want.
‘We all met and agreed it was daft. What do you think, we all said. Let’s not. Then it all just seemed part of the game we’d agreed to play, like getting the Ivor Novello awards. We’d nothing to lose, except that bit of you that said you didn’t believe in it. We agreed in order to annoy even more the people who were annoyed, like John Gordon. We were just getting at the people who believe in such things.
‘All we did when we were waiting in the Palace was giggle. We collapsed, the whole thing was so funny. There was this guardsman telling us how to march, how many steps, and how to curtsey when we met the Queen. We knew in our hearts she was just some woman, yet we were going through with it. We’d agreed to it.