Being disliked is a new phenomenon for John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and there’s grumbling that this wouldn’t have happened under Brian’s watch.

*  *  *

On February 16, 1968, the Beatles opt to follow the guru all the way to India. They touch down in Delhi with their wives (in Paul’s case, with his girlfriend, Jane), and a celebrity entourage including Mike Love of the Beach Boys, the folksinger Donovan, and actress Mia Farrow. Farrow is recovering from her own public loss—her marriage to Frank Sinatra. The fifty-year-old crooner and twenty-one-year-old actress had been married in 1966, but although the divorce won’t be finalized until August of 1968, he’d already served her with divorce papers on the set of Rosemary’s Baby, the supernatural thriller she was then filming inside New York’s historic Dakota apartment building.

The ashram is halfway to Tibet and halfway around the world from Los Angeles. At the Beverly Hilton, on February 29, 1968, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band wins Album of the Year and Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts, at the tenth annual Grammy Awards.

The Beatles are in absentia. They are in the audience of the maharishi, who’s insistent that they end all drug use.

George is a quick convert. “The meditation buzz is incredible,” he says. “I get higher than I ever did with drugs.”

Paul has trouble banishing the music from his mind. “The minute you clear it,” he says, “a thought comes in and says, ‘What are we gonna do about our next record?’”

Or two. During a month at the ashram in Rishikesh, he and John write most of the songs for what will become The Beatles, a double album known as the White Album after its minimalist white sleeve.

Their productivity causes George much consternation. He argues, “We’re not fucking here to do the next album, we’re here to meditate!”

“The way George is going he’ll be flying on a magic carpet by the time he’s forty,” John jokes, though he does take the meditation seriously and practices it for eight hours at a stretch. His brain is then flooded with lyrics for what he calls “the most miserable songs on earth.” He explains that “in ‘Yer Blues,’ when I wrote ‘I’m so lonely I want to die,’ I wasn’t kidding. That’s how I felt…up there, trying to reach God and feeling suicidal.”

John is aching for Yoko. And then her letters start arriving.

“I’m a cloud,” she writes on a postcard. “Look in the sky.” He tells Cynthia he needs more space, soon moving out of the bungalow they’d been sharing.

But he doesn’t stop making music. “John was keen to learn the finger-style guitar I played and he was a good student,” Donovan recalls. “John wrote ‘Julia’ and ‘Dear Prudence’ [for fellow maharishi disciple Prudence Farrow, Mia’s nineteen-year-old sister] based on the picking I taught him.”