When she catches up with them at the retreat not long afterward, John scolds her. “Why are you always last, Cyn?”

On August 27, 1967, the phone rings at the Beatles’ dormitory on the grounds of the retreat. There’s terrible news from London: thirty-two-year-old Brian Epstein has been found dead at home from an overdose of sleeping pills.

John’s first reaction is practical. “Now we’re our own managers; now we have to make all the decisions,” he tells the others.

Then a horrible shock sets in, the same as he experienced when his mother died.

When his uncle George died.

When Stu died.

And now Brian.

Complicating matters was that “I introduced Brian to pills—which gives me a guilt association with his death.” John is desperately in need of guidance. “But then,” he says, “the maharishi talked to us and, I don’t know, cooled us out a bit.”

“He just told us not to be overwhelmed with grief,” John tells an interviewer. “Whatever thoughts we have of Brian…keep them happy, because whatever thoughts we have of him will travel with him, wherever he is.”

The Beatles choose not to attend Brian’s funeral, fearing a mob scene.

*  *  *

Brian’s absence is felt when the Beatles pursue their first project without him. Feeling like the group should push forward, Paul takes the reins and spearheads a project that has its beginnings in a song they recorded in April: “Magical Mystery Tour.” The band agrees to make Paul’s song the basis of a British TV movie in which the Beatles and an eccentric cast of characters take a Ken Kesey–inspired bus tour across the English countryside. When two weeks of shooting begins, on September 11, there’s no script, so almost all the movie’s promised “strange things” are improvised. Among the many bizarre scenes is a reenactment of one of John’s dreams in which he keeps shoveling heaps of spaghetti onto a table in front of a heavyset “Aunt Jessie.”

The new Beatles music—released as a six-song EP in England and padded with contemporaneous singles to create an American album—proves as popular as always. Paul supplies three of the sound track’s songs plus the separately released number-one single “Hello, Goodbye,” but the highlight belongs to John, who finally sets his Lewis Carroll obsession to music with the psychedelic milestone “I Am the Walrus.”

When the fifty-two-minute movie airs in black-and-white (though it was shot in color) on BBC1, on December 26, viewers are baffled, and reviews—for the first time ever for a Beatles project—are uniformly terrible. The reception is so bad that US networks decline to show it, and Paul must go on Britain’s The Frost Programme the following day to defend it. “We don’t say it was a good film,” he says later. “It was our first attempt. If we goofed, then we goofed.”