Canadian backpacker’s meeting with The Beatles in a spiritual retreat In India
When a 23-year-old Canadian man arrived at an ashram near India’s holy city of Rishikesh in 1968 to meditate, he was told the place was out of bounds because The Beatles were living there.Paul Saltzman had been backpacking in India when news arrived from Montreal that his girlfriend had moved on.Heartbroken, he had travelled by train, boat and taxi to the retreat, run by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one of the most flamboyant of the self-styled gurus to emerge from the era of hippiedom. The plan was to meditate and “cure my broken heart,” as Saltzman says.After many hours of persuasion, the helpful ashram attendant had let Saltzman in.He had headed straight into an hour-long meditation session, and come out feeling better. “The agony of heartbreak had gone. I stepped out into the woods to see the place,” Saltzman told me in a phone interview.There he spotted The Beatles for the first time.John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison, wearing traditional Indian dress, were sitting at a long table near a cliff. Some of their wives and girlfriends were there, as were actress Mia Farrow, Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and folk singer Donovan. They planned a three-month-retreat at the sprawling 18-acre estate.Saltzman asked if he could join. McCartney drew up a chair.
“I sat down and I heard a scream in my head: Eeeks, they are The Beatles!” says Saltzman, now 78 and an Emmy-award winning director.Four years before, in 1964, Saltzman had joined 18,000 shrieking fans to watch them live at the Maple Leaf Garden in Toronto. He didn’t remember much more.Now, in a stroke of serendipity, he was now standing in front of the world’s most-celebrated band.The Beatles had been basking in the success of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, their 1967 iconic album, and were beginning to write songs for the next, which would become known as the White Album.As Saltzman tells the story, the ice was broken in no time.”Are you an American?” Lennon asked Saltzman.”No, I am Canadian,” Saltzman said.”Ah, he’s from the one of the colonies,” Lennon quipped.A roar of laughter rose from the table.”So are you still worshipping Her [Royal] Highness then?” Lennon joked.Saltzman said that he didn’t, “personally”.McCartney and Starr joined in.”Well, you have the Queen on your money…”Saltzman replied: “We have the Queen on our money but, hey, she lives with you!”
Over the next week the backpacker hung out with The Beatles in the remote retreat by the Ganges. They meditated, sang, ate vegetarian food and talked.More than 50 years after he met the Fab Four, Saltzman has made a 79-minute documentary, Meeting The Beatles in India. Narrated by Morgan Freeman and produced by David Lynch, the film, among other things, contains rare images of the band taken by Saltzman. They are wistful vignettes of the rock stars in their prime, unguarded and relaxed.”It was a magically pure meeting. I loved their music. But I wasn’t really besotted with them as celebrities, and they behaved normally and had no starry airs or ego,” says Saltzman.He took pictures of the band on three occasions with his cheap Pentax camera. Thirty of 54 pictures he took had a Beatle in them.Then he returned home and put the colour slides away in a cardboard box in his basement for 32 years, until his daughter goaded him to do something with them. That was when he produced a limited edition book in 2005 carrying some of the pictures.
