John finds himself locked in the biggest scandal since his comments about Jesus two years before. John takes Yoko to visit Mimi in Poole, England, where he had bought his aunt a waterfront bungalow for £25,000 in 1965 (in 2018, the property was listed for just under $9.5 million).

“Who’s the poisoned dwarf, John?” Mimi asks.

“It’s Yoko,” John answers.

“I’m an artist,” Yoko says.

“That’s very funny,” Mimi replies. “I’ve never heard of you.”

Cynthia certainly has. When she returns from Italy, she takes to calling the Beatles’ office and leaving messages. John doesn’t return her calls. If she wants to hear her husband’s voice, she’ll have to buy his new record.

The A side is “Hey Jude.” “[Paul] said it was written about Julian, my child. He knew I was splitting with Cyn and leaving Julian,” John later remembers.

“But I always heard it as a song to me,” he continues. “Yoko’s just come into the picture…The words ‘go out and get her’—subconsciously he was saying, Go ahead, leave me”—and their Beatles partnership.

Mick Jagger and a few lucky bystanders listen in when Paul spins an advance copy at the hashish-filled Club Vesuvio, in a London basement. “That’s something else, innit?” Jagger says to Paul. “It’s like two songs.”

The seven-inch single pushes the boundaries of recording technology to contain the song’s seven-minutes-plus running time. “It wasn’t intended to go on that long at the end,” Paul explains to the Rolling Stones frontman. “So then we built it with the orchestra but it was mainly because I just wouldn’t stop doing all that ‘Judy judy judy—wooow!’ Cary Grant on heat!”

The summer of 1968 is burning with social unrest.

Two days after the August 26 US release (August 30 in the UK) of Paul’s “Hey Jude” with John’s “Revolution” on the flip side, violence erupts in Chicago when antiwar protesters clash with National Guard troops outside the Conrad Hilton hotel, site of the Democratic National Convention, where Hubert Humphrey wins the presidential nomination over Eugene McCarthy while continuing to support President Johnson’s war efforts in Vietnam.

The demonstrators shout, “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.”

They are listening, too. “Hey Jude,” Apple Records’ first release, is also the Beatles’ most successful single, selling more than five million copies worldwide by the end of 1968.

*  *  *

As the recording of the White Album continues, John and Yoko need a place to stay. Ringo is able to provide them with one.