Even so, it’s a major coup when John invites her to his house for a sit-down—not one but four exclusives (each of the Beatles agrees to speak with Cleave individually).

John is being generous to his friend, but he also has a point to make. Dubbed the “cheeky Beatle” or “the smart Beatle” because of his snappy one-liners and naughty double entendres, he wants to show that the members of the band, the so-called mop-tops, are free thinkers on the important issues of the day, such as the escalating war in Vietnam and social injustices happening around the world.

“How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This” runs in the March 4 edition of the Evening Standard. Cleave reports on Lennon’s intense bouts of self-education, most recently the Indian music George has introduced him to and his own reading on world religion.

“Christianity will go,” John predicts in the midst of their wide-ranging conversation. “It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

Says John later, “A few people wrote into the papers, and a few wrote back, saying, ‘So what, he said that. Who is he anyway,’ or they said, ‘So he can have his own opinion.’ And then it just vanished.”

The band’s prim image is starting to chafe. Beatles photographer Robert Whitaker observes, “All over the world I’d watched people worshipping like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.”

When the opportunity arises to shoot something different with Whitaker, the Beatles are eager.

“There we were, supposed to be sort of angels. I wanted to show that we were really aware of life,” John says.

Whitaker agrees. “I got fed up with taking squeaky-clean pictures of the Beatles, and I thought I’d revolutionize what pop idols are,” he later says in an interview. Near the end of March, the band books a photo shoot with the twenty-six-year-old, and they take some surrealism-inflected photos of a smiling Fab Four dressed in white butcher coats, holding slabs of meat and dismembered baby dolls. Whitaker “knew we liked black humor and sick jokes,” Paul recalls. “It didn’t seem too offensive to us. It was just dolls and a lot of meat.”

With the band’s latest American tour scheduled for August, Capitol decides to release Yesterday and Today, a compilation of songs pulled from the American versions of Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver plus the previously released “We Can Work It Out” / “Day Tripper” single. Capitol needs a design for the cover.