As April opened, most of The Beatles’ new album had been completed. The cover shoot, the most expensive in pop music history, had been completed in late March, and the dazzling album cover by xxxx xxxx, would be commensurate with the complex, ambitious and colorful music it contained. The band’s label, EMI, was so concerned about the amount of time and money the band had spent on the record, and so concerned about the band’s future, that they had required the band itself to pay the costs of the production of the album cover.
On Monday, April 3, George Harrison entered Abbey Road to finish recording the last track for the album, his only composition to make the cut: “Within You, Without You.” The title was fitting: Harrison was the only Beatle to be involved in the session, recorded entirely with a small Indian group and then an English string section. No other Beatles would appear on the track, which would ultimately open the second side of the new album.
The rest of the band had scattered, John Lennon and Ringo Starr heading back to their suburban manses, while Paul McCartney had hopped on a flight from London to Los Angeles, a quick jaunt with band aide de camp Mal Evans, to visit a variety of the friends he had so assiduously made over the years in California. His main objective was to surprise his longtime girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, for her 21st birthday. He would fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco and then to Denver, where she was performing with the Old Vic touring theater company.
The West coast trip would open the ever-curious McCartney’s eyes to new creative possibilities and musical friendships, and allow him to do his part in the creation of an upcoming international pop festival of which he was now on the Board of Governors. The trip would end, as had his ’66 trip to Africa, with an in-flight brainstorm that would produce a big idea for The Beatles’ next creative step.
It would also be his last real intimate time with Asher, for although he didn’t know it, McCartney was just weeks away from the encounter that would lead to his next romantic step as well, a romance that would last nearly 30 years.
After their quick stop in Los Angeles on April 3, McCartney and Evans got on Frank Sinatra’s Lear jet, which McCartney had rented for the week, and continued with a quick flight north from LA, to that other pole of the California music scene, San Francisco. McCartney, always eager to make new friends and hear new sounds, had long been curious about what was going on in tiny San Francisco, which was now punching well above its weight.
He flew into a city that revered him – The Beatles had played their last live show less than eight months before, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park – but it was a mostly live music scene that had also moved far beyond what The Beatles had ever done as a live band. The Bay area quintet The Beau Brummels had been the first American group to successfully respond to the Beatles’ initial invasion in 1964, with “Laugh, Laugh,” the first hit single to come out of San Francisco. But by 1967 the Brummels had long since been surpassed by psychedelic dance bands like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
McCartney was certainly aware of the new bands; the name for the Beatles’ new album was a nod to the fanciful names appearing in the area: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
McCartney’s brief stop in San Francisco was highlighted by a visit with the members of Jefferson Airplane, whose new single, “Somebody to Love,” had just appeared the previous week. It would eventually take the band into the Top Ten and introduce the larger world to the San Francisco sound. But for now, the band was still largely an “underground” phenomenon, which was much more interesting to McCartney – he was very familiar with success on the pop charts. Instead, he was curious about these new bands, as he had been with the new breed of bands appearing in London. Soon, he would be instrumental in bringing them together.
McCartney and Evans went to hear the Airplane rehearse at their frequent showplace, Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, a modest theater that was the epicenter of live music in San Francisco. Following the rehearsal, he returned with bass player Jack Cassidy and singer Marty Balin to the band’s communal house on Fulton Street, across the street from Golden Gate Park, where he enjoyed a rolled-up joint or two with the band, but reported turned down the offer of DMT, a new and rare psychedelic drug. McCartney had only just taken LSD for the first time two weeks before, and he remained a cautious man.
Though he apparently had trouble playing Cassidy’s right-handed bass, as he was left-handed, McCartney enjoyed the visit, and was charmed by tales of one of the founders of the San Francisco scene, novelist Ken Kesey, leader of the acid-dispensing Merry Pranksters. McCartney was particularly taken with the story of Kesey’s painted old bus, Furthur, which Kesey had driven across the U.S. in 1964, year of The Beatles’ invasion. On it, the Pranksters dispensed acid and new ideas like a bus full of Johnny Appleseeds. It had been filmed but never edited into the planned movie (until 2011).
Though San Francisco had apparently gotten a highly-usual dusting of snow the day that McCartney and Evans arrived, what was to be dubbed the Summer of Love was fast approaching. But regardless of the coming media hype, the local music scene was already at its height; approaching events, and circling record label executives would soon remove some of the biggest and best bands from the local scene; big money and distant audiences beckoned. Perhaps one sign of success was the steady rolling of tour buses, already going up and down Haight Street, the main thoroughfare of the Summer of Love.
There was clearly money to be made in San Francisco; another gold rush was underway. Whereas the first, more than 100 years before had drawn gold prospectors from every part of the globe, this one was attracting young people, drawn by the promise of highs and freedoms of every description. Those who would provide them those freedoms and highs were massing as well.
Two San Francisco businessmen were profiting from the scene, but they were not profiteers: Instead, Chet Helms and Bill Graham had been instrumental in creating the scene, offering the bands places to play that suited them, and treating them with a respect that few folk or even pop musicians had received. The two could hardly have been more different, but each, in his way, was crucial to the development of the scene.
Helms, 24, was first. A beatific Texan, a long-hair himself, he had made his way in San Francisco first as a pot dealer, where he met many musicians, and then as a promoter of free concerts, and finally, of shows at the Avalon and Fillmore Ballrooms. He was also an old friend of Janis Joplin’s, and was responsible for inviting the singer back out to San Francisco to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. His style was a Texas-meets-California version of down home.
Graham was something else entirely, a hardbitten New Yorker, born Wulf Wolodia Grajonca in Berlin to Russian emigre parents, who at eight years old had fled the Nazis, one of the One Thousand Children of Jewish heritage who escaped. His parents and other family members died in the Holocaust, but Grajonca, now called Bill Graham, was raised in a foster home in The Bronx, New York.
After serving in the US Army during the Korean War, Graham worked in restaurants in the Catskills, and in the early ‘60s he moved to San Francisco to be close to his sister Rita. He met Helms, who invited him to come to a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, for whom Graham later organized a benefit concert for the members’ legal defense. This introduced him to concert promotion, and by 1965, he and Helms were alternating booking acts at The Fillmore Ballroom.
So Graham, at 36, had seen the worst of humanity, but he was a lover of music, and of musicians, and eager to make a name for himself. He was no-nonsense in a scene that thrived on nonsense, but he treated the musicians with respect - as long as he received it in return.
At the time McCartney visited, Graham was also the Airplane’s manager, helping them out in the face of a lawsuit recently filed by their former manager, Matthew Katz. The money chase had begun in earnest in San Francisco, and would only escalate. These would not be the last lawsuits.
Graham’s growing influence on the concert industry in San Francisco would soon go national, when impresarios around the country took note of his approach, and saw the amounts of money suddenly in play. But San Francisco’s scene at this point was still tiny; the Fillmore held barely 1,000 people, the Avalon Ballroom roughly half that. San Francisco’s finest bands would soon outgrow them, but there were many bands from all over the world that would be happy to take their place.
Meanwhile, San Francisco was about to reinvent another area of music promotion that had long been relatively stagnant: Radio.
The two radio frequency bands, AM and FM, had long been mismatched: AM was the only real frequency in commercial use, with Top 40 radio and talk/sports radio its mainstays. The FM frequency was higher quality but rarely used. But a rules change in xxxx shifted xxxxx, and on this Friday, April 7, a new radio station, on the FM frequency spectrum, had begun broadcasting in San Francisco. KMPX, xx.x FM, programed by a recently-unemployed Top 40 DJ named Tom Donohue, would fit the style of the local bands, with their extended jams and increasing focus on albums rather than singles. Thus began something new: Free Form radio.
This was being done in New York City, at xxxxxx, but KMPX took it a step further (HOW?)
Soon, FM rock stations would pop up on the under-utilized FM dial all over the country, and as album sales officially surpassed singles the week of August 19, the combination would push everyone – musicians, promoters, disc jockeys and record buyers – into a whole new industry.
It wouldn’t be until 1978 that FM listenership surpassed AM, but in 1967, the die was cast, and FM would soon be challenging AM on multiple fronts. Popular music, particularly of the kind made by McCartney and his friends around the U.S. was finally being taken seriously.
McCartney’s choices in Britain had expanded since his youth, but Britain was still on a post-War footing when it came to radio: the BBC played very little popular music, and very little rock music. The only place where the music young rock fans would have wanted to hear was played on so-called “pirate” radio stations that operated in international waters, off the coast of Britain. By 1967, there were ten such stations: Radio Caroline, Radio London and several others broadcast not only popular music, but commercials, which was unheard of at the time on Britain’s government (BBC) radio. DJs such as Tony Blackburn, John Peel and Kenny Everett were nearly as popular as some of the biggest bands.
But the time of the pirate radio stations was nearing its end, as the British government had moved to shut these crass commercial interlopers down: In 1966, Parliament had debated the Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act, which had been passed and was to go into effect on Monday, August 14. The government was establishing new channels to address the growing need, but commercial stations were still beyond the pale for Britain. The Who would mourn the loss of the pirate stations with its first great album, The Who Sell Out, in December.
In California, the Airplane would soon be doing a cover shot for Life magazine’s June edition, and young people from all over the country would be flocking to San Francisco - along with everyone else who had a mind to cash in. John Phillips of The Mamas and Papas had already written “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair),” which he record with an old friend from New York, Scott McKenzie, and release May 13. By early summer it would be the mainstream theme song of the Summer of Love, and number one in the U.K.
As McCartney and Evans flew back to London, McCartney had another idea, which, like most of his ideas, quickly turned into a song: “Roll up” he sung to himself, “Roll up for the mystery tour.” His visit to San Francisco, the rolled up joints he’d enjoyed with the Airplane, and tales of Ken Kesey’s magic bus Furthur reminded him, a little, of the British tradition of “mystery tours,” packaged weekend jaunts with unknown destinations popular with British families.
And with Sgt. Pepper’s complete, the ever-creative Beatle was all ready with a new idea when he arrived back in London.