Events leading up to final tour

In England, Harrison met sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, who agreed to train him on the instrument.

During a tour of the Philippines, they unintentionally snubbed the nation's first lady, Imelda Marcos, who had expected the group to attend a breakfast reception at the Presidential Palace. When presented with the invitation, Epstein politely declined on behalf of the group, as it had never been his policy to accept such official invitations. The group soon found that the Marcos regime was unaccustomed to taking "no" for an answer. The resulting riots endangered the group and they escaped the country with difficulty. Immediately afterward, the band members made their first visit to India.

The nature of their modest on-stage amplification meant their music could hardly be heard, as the group's small Vox amplifiers struggled to compete with the volume of sound generated by screaming fans, and they grew increasingly bored with the routine of performing live. Realizing that their shows were no longer about the music, they decided to put an end to concert touring.

1966–70: Studio years, break-up and solo work.Deprived of the routine of live performances after their final commercial concert on 29 August 1966, Lennon felt lost and considered leaving the band. Since his involuntary introduction to LSD in January, he had made increasing use of the drug, and was almost constantly under its influence for much of the year." Lennon's continuous experience with LSD during the year brought him "close to erasing his identity". 1967 saw the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever", hailed by TIME magazine for its "astonishing inventiveness", and the group's landmark album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which revealed Lennon's lyrics contrasting strongly with the simple love songs of the Lennon–McCartney's early years.

In late 1967 Sgt. Pepper was the subject of a scholarly analysis by American literary critic and professor of English Richard Poirier, who observed that his students were "listening to the group's music with a degree of engagement that he, as a teacher of literature, could only envy." Poirier identified what he termed the "mixed allusiveness" of the material: "It's unwise ever to assume that they're doing only one thing or expressing themselves in only one style ... one kind of feeling about a subject isn't enough ... any single induced feeling must often exist within the context of seemingly contradictory alternatives."

McCartney said at the time, "We write songs. We know what we mean by them. But ... [y]ou put your own meaning at your own level to our songs".]

Sgt. Pepper's elaborate album cover also attracted interest and study. The heavy moustaches worn by the band reflected the growing influence of hippie style.

On 25 June the band performed their forthcoming single, "All You Need Is Love." The song was adopted as a flower power anthem.

Two months later the group suffered a loss that threw their career into turmoil. Having only been introduced to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi the previous night in London, on 25 August they travelled to Bangor for his Transcendental Meditation retreat. Two days later, their manager's assistant phoned to inform them that Epstein had died. His death left the group disorientated and fearful about the future. Lennon recalled: "We collapsed. I knew that we were in trouble then. I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music and I was scared. I thought, we've had it now." "I knew we were in trouble then", Lennon said later. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared". They later travelled to Maharishi's ashram in India for further guidance, where they composed most of the songs for The Beatles and Abbey Road.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 873