The Beatles & Me: Remembering the Sixties
by Dominic Hilton
September 2022
As grieving Britain plunges head first down a vortex of nostalgia, Dominic Hilton suffers an acid flashback to the time he met those other apparently-immortal national treasures… The Beatles.
I shall never forget the first time I saw The Beatles. They were playing in the basement of the Cavern Club in Liverpool, and I arrived just as they were packing up their instruments. I had never heard a sound like it: all that disassembling and unplugging and zipping. “You look like four rags on sticks used to mop toilet floors,” I told them.
“It’s the groovy hairdos,” all four of them explained, in three-part harmony.
I nodded, pretending to know what they meant. Then I asked them where they were from and the short one at the back said, “Livehrpoowel,” which I’d never heard of. “I thought you were Germans,” I said, hoping to upset them.
“We’ve been in Hamburg, like,” they warbled. “We practically are German / ahh German / aaaaaahhhhhhhh German.”
That night I drank my first loganberry spritzer. It was spiked with window cleaner by Brian Epstein, the band’s clean-cut manager, who kindly drove me home to his house after I blacked out and choked on his vomit. I had never tasted anything like it (the vomit) and hopefully I never will. As I drifted back into semi-consciousness in Epstein’s Bentley, he placed an icy hand on my hairless upper thigh, saying, “So, what do you think?” “When?” I said, and he made a mental note of it, screaming, “You’re right, you’re right! It’s bloody Ringo, isn’t it?”
He began to wail like a dervish having cervical contractions, slamming his moisturised palms against the Bentley’s mahogany steering wheel as hot tears streamed down the fetching contours of his well-groomed mug. The luxury vehicle lurched on two wheels around a series of blind hairpin bends and I somehow managed to open the passenger door with my left foot, plunging 800 feet into a pitch-black rocky gorge. True, I fractured my coccyx and two of my ankles, but the surgeons agreed that was a small price to pay to break the fluffy handcuffs, which were cheap, and candyfloss pink.
The following summer, I saw The Beatles lip-sync at Shea Stadium in New York City. By now the band were stratospherically huge, like a nose on the face of Planet Earth. In a characteristic display of generosity, Epstein invited me to fly across the Atlantic on his private plane, flogging me the ticket at a reasonable price considering the eminence of my fellow passengers (The Beatles, one of the Leses from Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black). The plane was exactly the same as aeroplanes I’d seen in moving pictures, only with The Beatles in it. As I served drinks from a trolley, wearing a bespoke air hostess uniform with a feminine version of my name stitched into the lapel, Epstein fed me a spoonful of John’s curried jelly, triggering a myocardial infarction. Medically speaking, I died, and as a consequence I recall little else about the occasion, though I do remember how John ran up and down the aisle with his arms extended, pretending to be a plane crash, and how everyone threw their heads back to laugh, except Paul who said, “Oh, sit down, you smelly twat.”
“I told them about a friend of mine, Eleanor Rigby, who kept her face in a jar by the door.”
At Shea I screamed and screamed until the girl next to me got off my foot. The boys did well, remembering most of the lyrics to their number one hit songs and missing only a few dozen or so chord changes. “What do you think?” I asked a hysterical Beatlemaniac who had swooned seductively into my waiting arms after tossing her knickers into Paul’s face. “About what?” she said, before the ambulance men carried her away. I reported her comment to Brian Epstein who scribbled it into his notepad, saying, “The stupid cunt’s right! It’s fucking Ringo, isn’t it?”
The next summer I was giving the band a lift to Abbey Road studios in a red-white-and-blue Mini Cooper I’d stolen from my mother’s garage, when someone tapped on my shoulder, handing me a flask. “What’s this?” I asked. “Cream soda,” John said, and everyone laughed, except Paul who called John “a smelly twat.” I took a swig and immediately lost control of the vehicle, crashing into a Belisha beacon with a lollipop lady standing in front of it. Wedged under the Mini’s steering wheel, and thinking only of the band, I told the lads to make a run for it; but they already had, via the zebra crossing. I was discovered only two days later, and after a few more months in hospital, I re-acquainted myself with the Fab Four at one of Epstein’s notorious fondue gangbangs. (That was Brian, always ahead of the game.) “You’re still alive?” George asked me, as we traded anecdotes. I told them about a friend of mine, Eleanor Rigby, who kept her face in a jar by the door. I had no idea what I meant, but everybody thought it sounded deep, and I was nauseous from eating so much melted cheese laced with angel dust.
Over the next year, my relationship with the band steadily grew. They began to invite me into the recording studio and even offered me money once, when I scored another shipment of drugs for them. The Beatles were so like that: kind and law-abiding and straight-shooting and square-shooting and shape-shifting and squeaky clean and clean potato and copper-bottomed and lily-white and pure as the driven cocaine and down to earth and salt of the earth and salt of the downs. I recall one time when I handed Paul yet another fifty-kilo bag of ganja and he said to me, “Got any skins?” I hadn’t, so I went out and hijacked a lorry-load, just like that. They always inspired that kind of loyalty (The Beatles, I mean). True, I was arrested, and spent the next twelve months in Wormwood Scrubs, but I presume Paul got his skins from someone else.
The next summer The Beatles were set to become the biggest thing since Jesus, when John complained, and Jesus never got a look in. The five of us hooked up in India, where, by pure coincidence, I had been sent as a government spy. We were all sitting cross-legged on the floor (except me, who sat on my crossed arms) when I suggested to George that instead of going into the tea business, which was his plan, he should learn to play the sitar. “Hey, that’s a great idea!” he said, as I pulled the rickshaw over to Ravi Shankar’s shack in the mountains. The six of us sat in Ravi’s junk-filled yard for interminable hours as George perfected the right way round to hold his long, wooden instrument, jamming over tea and toast until the moon sat full in the diamond sky, and my sinuses began to bleed.
That summer I had my first experience with LSD when Paul filled my jar of chewable Zinc and Vitamin C tablets with acid tabs. It was like nothing I had ever known, and for three months I had a series of nasty trips in which I was Micky Dolenz’s uglier Siamese twin. I began to paint kaleidoscopic landscapes onto the walls of public lavatories and enjoyed a period of limited fame as a guru for three teenage virgins, until they gave me up and joined a Swiss convent in Waitangi. “But I am the eggman!” I insisted. “No, wait—the Walrus!” But they just looked at me as if I was nuts, and I went into rehab, where the scores were great.
It was a productive period for me, and I burnt four thousand holes in sofas in Blackburn, Lancashire.
That spring we shot the cover of Sgt. Pepper. It was my first incident with a firearm, and the record shattered into a thousand pieces. The police turned up, but John just told them it was me and I was carried away, saving the reputation of the band. Foolishly, I’d stood to the left of James Joyce for the album photo, thereby missing my place in history by a matter of inches. I served my time at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and prison was a mecca (not to say Macca) for cheap smack, which I mailed to my mother to give to the band.
“John and Yoko said we needed to imagine a world without possessions as we took a turn around the landscaped gardens in one of their deeper yellow Rolls Royces.”
That next summer I went on my first protest march. It was a powerful experience and apart from me spraining my ankle I really felt the winds of change blowing through my false beard. Finally, I was part of a herd, travelling together as one to nowhere, just for the sake of it. We sang the ‘Marseillaise’, until some clowns ruined it by turning it into a shitty song about how all we need is love. The Beatles were furious, but still managed to make a boat load of money out of it. They were full of nous, those boys. I’m not ashamed to say I loved them (for money).
The year after that, my ankle almost fully recovered, I was smoking some paprika in the studio with Yoko, Linda and three hundred groupies, when I wrote ‘Helter Skelter’, the name of which The Beatles stole for one of their own songs. The band had all these plans for a really crazy album cover when I suggested we give up and go home. And thanks to my timely request, The White Album was born. The rest, of course, is legend.
Later that decade, as the LSD slowly began to wear off and I learned to speak again, we all collectivised at John’s mansion, one of the nine-thousand-acre communes that he shared with Yoko and the servants. By now, we were going in and out of style, although, as ever, we were guaranteed to raise a smile, especially when we wore those flared velvet suits with heeled boots. We started to argue about the meaning of possessions. John and Yoko said we needed to imagine a world without possessions as we took a turn around the landscaped gardens in one of their deeper yellow Rolls Royces. George agreed, saying it was your inner spiritual health that meant everything, and that he would gladly give up his seventeen castles if somebody just proposed a better way to house his cats. I was about to suggest a sanctuary I knew when Paul jumped in, insisting that material possessions had nothing to do with happiness. “What about fun?” I asked, and he nodded pensively at my gnomic observation. Linda insisted that meat was the only possession worth having, until Paul reminded her that it was the other way around: meat was not worth having. “Oh, yeah,” she said, and we all laughed at how some day suckers would spend their hard-earned money on frozen vegetarian meals shaped like meat.
But the developing rifts were unavoidable. John and Paul were not talking, especially after I told John that Paul hated Yoko and Yoko that Paul had shagged John and John had shagged Linda and Yoko had shagged everybody—and still nobody was talking to Ringo. Eventually things just petered out and I moved to the Orkney islands for some much-needed recuperation. The band, wealthier than in the Fifties, entered a new decade with fresh ideas about God, pubic hair, frog choruses and yogic flying. I knew things were over when John wrote “How Do You Sleep?” about my insomnia, an unforgivable and vicious attack on a part of my life I had tried to keep a secret. Now, older and wiser, I know that Valium is the only answer.
An earlier version of this article appeared in openDemocracy. It is republished here under Creative Commons license.
