Beginning a pattern that would continue throughout the making of the White Album, today different Beatles worked on different things in different studios. Paul and Ringo were adding vocals and basslines to “Don’t Pass Me By” in one while John (and presumably Yoko) assembled tape loops in another. The loops were intended for the upcoming stage production of John’s book In His Own Write, but I think that some of them may have ended up in “Revolution 9.”
Also today, John and Victor Spinetti — who had appeared in Magical Mystery Tour, and was the director and co-writer of the In His Own Write play — were interviewed by Peter Lewis for the BBC. The Beatles Bible has a complete transcript, but here’s a representative sample:
Victor Spinetti: But it’s not really John’s childhood, it’s all of ours really, isn’t it John?
John Lennon: It is, we’re all one Victor, we’re all one aren’t we? I mean, what’s going on?
And there’s no graceful segue here, but I do want to mention what was happening in California, where Robert F. Kennedy was pronounced dead at 1:44 this morning after having been shot about 26 hours earlier, shortly after a campaign rally at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. In one way of looking at it, this marked the end of whatever innocence America may have had left in the wake of the murders of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, causing an entire generation to throw up its hands and say “Fuck it.”
It also caused Mick Jagger to change a line in his song-in-progress from
I shouted out “Who killed Kennedy?”
to
I shouted out “Who killed the Kennedys?”
Which actually fits the meter better, so I guess you can’t say that nothing good came out of the assassination. But 50 years later this country still hasn’t really recovered from the blow. The death of Bobby Kennedy gave us Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic nominee, which gave us President Richard Nixon, and you can pretty much draw a straight line from there to where we are today.
Which begins to lead us down the path to the Topics Best Avoided, so that’s all for today.