four fifth beatles: haibun by yoko ono

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1 four fifth beatles: haibun by yoko ono Michael Martone Stuart Sutcliffe a cicada shell it sang itself utterly away Basho Stuart s fingers blistered during the long rehearsals. He never played long enough for his fingers to callus. The group often used his flat to rehearse. Pete s mum owned The Casbah Coffee Club. One night, John and McCartney persuaded Stuart to buy, on time, the Höfner bass guitar. Bad skin and pimples, McCartney said of him much later. Stuart had the skin of an art student. In Germany, he wears dark Ray-Ban clip-on flip-up sunglasses like baseball players wear. He sings Love Me Tender. Stuart s hair was the first hair hair. He asked Astrid to cut his hair to look like Klaus s hair. She cut his greased-back, Teddy-boy hair into a mop. And then, after that, everyone s hair was cut that way. December, George is sent back to England, under-age. McCartney and Pete attempt arson at the Bambi Kino, are also deported. John takes a train, ferries home. Stuart stays in Hamburg. He has a cold. He meets Astrid and eight months later he leaves the Beatles. He wants to paint. He wants something else. McCartney borrowed Stuart s bass until he could earn enough to buy a smaller lefthanded Höfner of his own. I can hear Stuart ask McCartney not to change the strings around. And I can see McCartney play it upside down. 79

2 Before all this, before the time in Hamburg, Stuart joined John, McCartney and George. They were The Silver Beetles then. In the Renshaw Hall Bar, Stuart helped John change the name. They liked Buddy Holly. They liked his band, The Crickets, and came up with The Beatals. John later changed the name to The Beatles. It sounded French, he thought, and he got to Beatles through Le Beat, and Beat-less. Later, in Germany, Stuart collapsed in an art class in Hamburg. His condition grew worse. April. Stuart died before the ambulance reached the hospital. Three days later Astrid told The Beatles at the Hamburg airport. His brain exploded. His father did not know for three weeks. He was sailing to South America. A priest told him when he docked in Buenos Aires. There Stuart is on the Lonely Hearts Club album cover. There, among the dead, next to the flat picture of Aubrey Beardsley. He s the artist around here, John said of Stuart. sudden ice storm storms brick hearth the hearth cricket sings in spite of this this 80

3 Brian Epstein clinging to the bell he dozes so peacefully this new butterfly Buson Throughout his life Brian was kind. When John married Cynthia, Brian was the best man and afterwards bought their lunch. During Cynthia s pregnancy, Brian arranged for a private room in a hospital and offered them use of his flat. They needed somewhere to live. He was Julian s godfather. Brian loved men though that was not known until years after his death. It had been an open secret among his friends. In the Army, he had a tailor make an officer s uniform he wore when cruising the bars of London. He was arrested for impersonating an officer at the Army and Navy Club on Piccadilly. He was never charged, agreeing to see an army psychiatrist instead. They discharged him ten months later. The medical grounds were emotionally and mentally unfit. Brian studied acting. He was arrested for persistent importuning. He was blackmailed. Throughout the later court case against the blackmailer, Brian was Mr. X. Anonymity was allowed then. John often made jokes about it to friends and to Brian. No one outside said a word. The night Dylan turned him on to pot in New York, McCartney remembers Brian staring into a mirror, pointing at himself saying Jew! Jew! Jew! over and over. McCartney thinks of this as hilarious and finds it very liberating. John and Brian went on a four-day holiday together to Barcelona. The Spanish holiday was made into a movie, The Hours and Times. There were other books and interviews. John wrote You ve Got to Hide Your Love Away. 81

4 Epstein was overlooked when John, McCartney, George, and Ringo received the MBE. George said that the MBE stood for Mister Brian Epstein. Brian s autobiography is A Cellarful of Noise. McCartney said: If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian. John said that Brian s death was the beginning of the end. August. Brian dies. A hot summer. An overdose. The Beatles, in India, meet with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Jimi Hendrix cancels his concert at the Saville Theatre the same day. Out of respect, he says. Brian had for years taken pills to sleep. Sleep caught up to sleep. Mr. X. In a meeting at the music store, Brian proposed to the boys the idea of managing them. John, George and Pete arrived late for the meeting they had been drinking. McCartney was not with them. They told Brian he was taking a bath. He was taking a bath. John invited a friend to the meeting so the friend could later give his opinion of Brian. John introducing him to Brian saying, This is me dad. spring grass going green there where the scarab buried last year s pill of dung 82

5 Billy Preston Even with cicada Some can sing Some can t Issa Billy s kidney deteriorated in his later years, his hypertension. In 2002, a kidney transplanted. Four years later, he died in June, in the desert, in the west. He died of complications and other complications. A year before he died, he had entered a rehabilitation in Malibu. Drugs. Respiratory failure there left him comatose. For the year he slept, sleeping into sleep. In 1962, as part of Little Richard s touring band, Billy met the Beatles, when Brian promoted a Liverpool show. They d hook up again later. The band, always already about to break up, was recording Let It Be. George, closest to Billy, had quit the studio, had gone to see Ray Charles in concert in London. There, Billy was playing organ. Harrison brought him back to Abbey Road, a kind of gift, a kind of glue. He joined the band on the roof, the final public appearance. Get Back was credited this way: The Beatles with Billy Preston. His electric piano is prominent throughout the song. He plays an extended solo. In the movie, years later, he plays Sgt. Pepper in Sgt. Pepper s Lonely Hearts Club Band. As a boy of 12, he appeared in St. Louis Blues, played W.C. Handy as a young man. He was a regular on Shindig!, a member of the show s house band. 83

6 Will It Go Round in Circles and Nothing From Nothing were his two hits. Billy composed Joe Cocker s You Are So Beautiful. Turning breath into those O s. All those circles, breathing. He was the fifth member of the Plastic Ono Band. He never put his hands in the wrong place, Klaus said. Or Ringo said it. Or George. Or John. Or I said it about his hands. John said then I was Wind. I was Wind. Billy, Breeze. Touring, Billy, health failing, learned that George had died. He performed in the Concert for George in London, played a tribute song. Get back, he sang. Get back. Get back to where you once belonged. copper coin heads up the yellow flag iris bed japanese beetle 84

7 George Martin sounds of a temple bell reverberate in a circle a long night Shiki The Beatles audition for George in June at the Abbey Road studios. They record four songs. Martin isn t there and only listens to the tape after the session ends. Their original songs are simply not good enough, George thought then. And he asks each Beatle if there is anything they didn t like. George, The Beatle, said to George, Well, there s your tie, for a start. In September, they record their first single, How Do You Do It. George thinks it will be a hit. Everyone else hates it. It wasn t a hit. The next song is Love Me Do. George asks Ringo to play tambourine and maracas, and he does though he is not happy about doing it. In November, John and McCartney beg George to record another of their original songs, Please Please Me, and he does but as an up-tempo song, not as a slow ballad. George looks over the mixing deck at the end of the session, and says, Gentlemen, you have just made your first number one record. He will be right that time. Much later, after it was all over, George post-produced The Beatles Anthology that once was to be called The Long and Winding Road. George used an old 4-track analog mixer to mix the songs instead of a digital deck. He found the machine somewhere at EMI. He explained this by saying that the old deck created a completely different sound, which a new deck could not recreate. He also said the whole project seemed strange. He listened to himself chatting in the studio, thirty years before on the tape between the takes. His voice came back to him in this simple way. 85

8 George did not produce the two new singles overdubbing two of John s demos. George had lost his hearing. He left the work to others. He did listen for hours, just listening to John s voice with no desire to change or change it. George said he scored Eleanor Rigby after Bernard Herrmann s score for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho. He liked the way the bows cut through the strings. With Strawberry Fields Forever, George blended two very different takes into a single master through careful use of editing. George is the not dead one of all the ones who are dead now. He played all the instruments, spliced the tape. He wrote the final notes, scored scores. On In My Life, he played a sped-up baroque piano solo. Nothing was ever fast enough, and then later, he thought, it had all been too fast. windrows dry tinder timothy exhales fireflies the second cutting 86