The first song up is a bluesy, acoustic version of John’s “Revolution,” to be titled “Revolution 1” on the album. He envisions it as a single, but Paul and George think it’s too slow, so they regroup to cut a raging electric version of the song. John plays his electric guitar at maximum volume, but he’s not getting the sound he wants.

“No, no, I want that guitar to sound dirtier!” he shouts at engineer Geoff Emerick, who patches together two preamps and overloads the signals to create the distorted guitar sound John is after.

Miraculously, the console doesn’t overheat and explode, but tempers routinely do. John and Yoko break off to work on “Revolution 9,” a “sound collage” that springs from the swirl of tape loops, chants, and sound effects that closes out the original ten-minute version of “Revolution 1.” (The number 9 holds meaning for John; he was born on October 9 and lived at 9 Newcastle Road in Liverpool.)

“It was as much Yoko’s as it was John’s,” Emerick says. “Certainly it wasn’t Beatles music.” (A critic for New Musical Express calls this track “a pimple on the face of the [White] album” with “some character coming back every few minutes to tell us ‘Number Nine, Number Nine.’”)

John places supreme value on Yoko’s contributions. “She inspired all this creation in me. It wasn’t that she inspired the songs. She inspired me. The statement in ‘Revolution’ was mine.” It’s filled with the kind of ideas that John voices on a television interview with BBC2 to promote the opening of In His Own Write, the stage adaptation of his first two books, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965).

“I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends, you know,” John says on the June 6 broadcast. “If anybody can put on paper what our government, and the American government, and the Russian, Chinese…what they are all trying to do, and what they think they’re doing…I think they’re all insane.”

“It’s an overtly political song about revolution and a great one,” Paul says, defending him.

*  *  *

On June 18, John takes Yoko to the premiere of In His Own Write at London’s Old Vic theater. They wear matching outfits and sit in the front row.

Only those in his inner circle know he has left Cyn for Yoko and that Yoko is already two months pregnant.

As the production begins, the actors onstage are drowned out by hecklers who point to John and shout, “Where’s your wife?” and “Where’s Cynthia?”

“I don’t know!” he shouts back.

Outside the theater, the crowd of angry fans yells “Chink” and “River Kwai” and “Yellow” at Yoko. Someone extends a bouquet of yellow roses toward her stems first, puncturing her hands with thorns.

The next morning, their relationship is international news.