Contents Porpoise Song LonCon III is just around the corner and we’re Come and Keep Your Comrade 3 spending the weekend in front of our laptops Warm:The Curious Story of trying to pull a semi-coherent issue together. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Andy Hooper Head! doesn’t appear often these days, as both our lives have become increasingly busy. There Songs From The Top Of The 10 are jobs to hold down, PhD’s to study for, houses World and gardens to tend and somehow zines always Doug Bell get shunted down the list of priorities. Then there is con-running which seems to have infiltrated our Keeping It Weird 15 lives and is taking up what little fannish energy Christina Lake we have left after a day at work. I’m sure our star contributors Andy Hooper and Brad Foster must Talking Head 19 have wondered if their work would ever see the You Lot - edited by Christina light of day. Sorry guys! With a WorldCon almost on our doorstep, we felt it right to pub our ish. It provided a nice hard deadline. Which brings us Art Credits bang up to date. Once again we welcome the hugely talented Brad Foster back to the cover of I have forgotten the quiet pleasures of Head! with a splendid playful illustration. assembling a zine. You get the chance to re-read Steve Green provided the excellent loccol intelligent and well researched articles (Thank header. Spot illustrations this issue are you Mr Hooper) and place artwork where you from Brad (again, p.24) and Sue Mason think will be the most attractive. While selecting (pp.9 & 20), who also did the baccover. my Icelandic photos I had to fight the urge to Photos are likely either lifted from the cancel my LonCon membership and flee to interwebs or taken somewhere on holiday Reykjavik, because, yes, visiting that country did near the Arctic Circle by either Christina or affect me that much. Doug. Head! #12 was a flung together for Loncon Seeing the masters for a zine roll off the printer is III at the last minute in between wrangling for me a moment of creative joy. I’ve said before I the Novacon PR2 into shape. It is, as could quite easily stop there and never bother always, available for the Fannish Usual. We with the actual printing or circulation as I find that define that as: letters of comment, artwork, moment supremely rewarding. It is a feeling I’ve articles, obscure craft beers, retro-cycling missed over the last couple of years when we’ve gear, opera tickets, Mexican food, Nordic hardy published a thing. I am keen to experience pub crawls and assorted other gubbins. it again a lot sooner and more regularly. We can be found at the following locations: Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last [email protected] couple of years about stopping Head! at #12. [email protected] Most of our contemporary zines when we started If you live in fear of your thoughts not are long gone, save the mighty unstoppable getting to us due to stray EMP signals Banana Wings and Chunga. We both want to get knocking out electronic communications, back into publishing regularly, try something new, you could stick a stamp on a letter and (probably more regular and smaller to fit in better chuck it into a post box to: with our lives), and re-connect with the fanzine community. We’ve also talked about keeping 4 West Rise Head! going pretty much in its present state but Falmouth being more up-front about it - almost making it an Cornwall irregularly appearing Special. Quite frankly we TR11 4HJ don’t know what we’ll do, but we do know we both UK* love writing and publishing zines. *At least until the result of the Scottish Independence referendum is known. - Doug 2 Come and Keep Your Comrade Warm: The Curious Story of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” by Andy Hooper For The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr), 1967 was a year of powerful triumphs and inexpressible sorrow. Their 8th record album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, had spent 27 weeks of the year at the top of the U.K. Pop Chart, and 15 weeks in the same position in the USA. The band performed a new song not on Sgt. Pepper, “All You Need Is Love,” in front of a worldwide TV audience of 400 million people in June, and this too was an international hit. Yet another project, The Magical Mystery Tour, would take shape as both a double EP record and an experimental film, which a too-trusting British Broadcasting Corporation scheduled as the anchor of their Christmas night programme. Tragically, as this project was about to begin filming, the band lost its very close friend and manager, Brian Epstein, who died of an accidental overdose of barbiturates in August 27th, 1967. Epstein was trusted implicitly by all the group’s members, and after his death, they would struggle to find someone who could mediate between their interests. As 1968 began, The Beatles faced mounting pressure to create a worthy follow-up to Sgt. Pepper, while each member had begun seriously considering leaving the group. They had been together nearly eight years by this time, and chafed under the attention implicit in being a Beatle. Touring was no longer an option; after 1966, the incessant hysteria of Beatle fans and the immense overhead of moving the band safely from country to country, had made further tours impossible. But with nothing but the studio to look forward to, The Beatles had clearly grown restless, and 1968 would see another set of new ventures designed to keep their attention. Foremost among these was Apple Corp, a company founded to reinvest some of the band’s huge income in other artists, musicians, and projects supporting social justice. In practice, Apple Corps’ mission would remain perpetually unclear, while costing The Beatles millions of dollars and dramatically increasing the friction between them. Another important distraction was the band’s flirtation with Transcendental Meditation and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian TM teacher who was to become the band’s guru. George and his wife Patti Harrison had been introduced to the Maharishi by Alexis “Magic Alex” Mardas, who would soon be the head of Apple Corps’ Electronics Division. The couple had attended several lectures, and invited the rest of the band to attend a TM retreat in Bangor, Wales, organized by the Maharishi’s followers. Unfortunately, Brian Epstein died just a few days into this event, and the band was forced to leave to deal with the consequences of his death. With the Magical Mystery Tour project, the first thing they’d ever done that was generally panned, now thankfully behind them, the Maharishi invited The Beatles to join him at his ashram in Rishikesh, in Northern India. This expedition, which took place in February and Early March of 1968, was notorious for the large number of contemporary celebrities involved in the Maharishi’s program. In addition to The Beatles, the “students” at this session included the actress Mia Farrow, newly divorced from Frank Sinatra; she was the Maharishi’s personal pupil and briefly his traveling companion. Other seekers present included Mia’s siblings Prudence and John, director Paul Saltzman, journalist Lewis Lapham, actors Tom Simcox and Jerry Stovin, and several musicians: Donovan, “Gypsy Dave” Mills, flautist Paul Horn and from the Beach Boys, Mike Love. 3 Across the Universe The situation sounded like something seen in a Fellini film, and The Beatles had different experiences and different reactions to them. The ashram was located in the “Valley of the Saints,” in the foothills of the Himalayas, and a drive of at least six hours from the nearest airport. By the time they arrived, Ringo had already suffered a painful reaction to an inoculation against equatorial diseases, and stayed in India for less than two weeks. Paul had prior commitments in Britain to Apple Corps, and he and his girlfriend Jane Asher would leave in Mid-March. Even so, as he was leaving, Paul told another student, “I’m a new man.” John and Cynthia Lennon and George and Patti Harrison were even more personally impressed by both the Maharishi and the practice of meditation, and were committed to remain until the planned end of the program on April 25th. The traditional entrance fee for a multi-month course of meditation was a week’s salary; obviously, for The Beatles, this represented a rather large sum of money. All of them paid the money except for Lennon, who seemed to retain some degree of skepticism about the Maharishi, even as he enthusiastically made plans to participate in concerts and films and tours meant to support the TM movement. Such plans made Harrison impatient, who responded to such enthusiasm by saying “We’re not here to talk about music. We’re here to meditate.” In spite of this public opinion, George wrote several songs during this stay in India, and for the group as a whole, it was one of their most productive periods. Some sources claim they composed as many as 48 songs in the seven weeks that some of the group were present at the ashram, while at least 30 songs recorded by The Beatles are known to have been written during those months. While in India, they listened to Bob Dylan’s new album “John Wesley Harding,” and that too fueled the burst of new songs.