Cyn screams, succumbing to panic. “We all thought there was a fire, but there was just a little red light,” John says. “We were all screaming like that, and we were all hot and hysterical.”

When the door opens, they rush to tell Ringo about the fire they’ve hallucinated.

The whole experience feels like something out of John’s favorite book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Later, “going about ten miles an hour, but it seemed like a thousand,” John remembers, George somehow manages to steer the Mini back to the house. John and Cyn decide to stay the night.

John decides that George’s house resembles “a big submarine” that seems “to float above his wall, which was eighteen foot, and I was driving it.” He stays up late, making drawings “of four faces saying, ‘We all agree with you!’”

“God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic.”

Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Hello, darkness, my old friend.

—“The Sound of Silence”

As work on the Help! sound track continues, no one close to John realizes how much the title track mirrors his fraught emotional state. “I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest,” when really, John says, “it was my fat Elvis period.”

John’s not himself lately—and he has put on weight. It’s stress. John’s second book, A Spaniard in the Works, is to be published in June of 1965, and he hasn’t yet finished it, complaining that the writing feels like schoolwork.

During composition of the sound track, the ever-present Lennon-McCartney musical rivalry bubbles over, in part because of the rigors of their contractual obligations to EMI. As John later tells Rolling Stone, “They would say well, you’re going to make an album and get together and knock off a few songs, just like a job.”

Paul remembers “Ticket to Ride”—the first Beatles song to run over three minutes—as a collaboration that took shape during a February 1965 afternoon session at John’s house. “We wrote the melody together,” he says. “Because John sang it, you might have to give him 60 percent of it.”

Although in interviews, John stakes a greater claim, telling Playboy, “That’s me, one of the earliest heavy-metal records,” and that “Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums,” the two collaborate as well as ever. Even if their disagreements got to the level of name-calling, Paul recalls, “he’d let it settle for a second and then he lowered his glasses and he said, ‘It’s only me…’” and put his glasses back on again. “Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the facade,” Paul says, “the John Lennon he was frightened to reveal to the world.”