Free The Beatles by Steve Turner

are boy/Back in the USSR.’”
    Through more diligent research, Noebel would have discovered that the official Soviet line was that the Beatles were evidence of capitalism’s decadence. Just as the Nazis declared jazz music and abstract painting ‘degenerate’ so the Communists railed against the evil of rock’n’roll and promoted folk music that extolled the virtues of the State. Young people in the Soviet Union were just as excited by the Beatles’ music as their Western counterparts but had to rely on bootleg recordings, smuggled imports and radio broadcasts from America and Britain. In 1988, with the Cold War about to be consigned to history, Paul paid tribute to his Soviet fans by recording an album of rock’n’roll standards on the official government recording label, Melodia. In May 2003 he played a concert in Red Square and had a private meeting at the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin who told him that he had listened to Beatles music as a teenager. “It was very popular,” he told Paul. “More than popular. It was a breath of fresh air, a window onto the outside world.”
    “‘Back In The USSR’ is a hands-across-the-water song,” said Paul in 1968. “They like us out there. Even though the bosses in the Kremlin may not, the kids do.”

DEAR PRUDENCE
    Prudence was Prudence Farrow (younger sister of the American actress Mia Farrow) who attended the same course with the Beatles in India. The song was a plea to her to come out from her excessively long periods of meditation and relax with the rest of the group.
    At the end of the demo version of ‘Dear Prudence’, John continues playing guitar and says: “No one was to know that sooner or later she was to go completely berserk, under the care of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. All the people around were very worried about the girl because she was going insane. So, we sang to her.” Later, John was to explain that Prudence had gone slightly ‘barmy’, locked in her room meditating for three weeks, “trying to reach God quicker than anyone else”.
    Paul Horn, the American flautist, says that Prudence was a highly sensitive person and that, by jumping straight into deep meditation, against the Maharishi’s advice, she had allowed herself to fall into a catatonic state. “She was ashen-white and didn’t recognize anybody,” he says. “She didn’t even recognize her own brother, who was on the course with her. The only person she showed any slight recognition towards was Maharishi. We were all very concerned about her and Maharishi assigned her a full-time nurse.”
    Prudence, whose living quarters were in the same building as the four Beatles and their partners, denies that she went mad but agrees that she was more fanatical about meditating than the Beatles were. “I’d been meditating since 1966 and had tried to get on the course in 1967, so it was like a dream come true for me,” she explains. “Being on that course was more important to me than anything in the world. I was very focused on getting in as much meditation as possible, so that I could gain enough experience to teach it myself. I knew that I must have stuck out because I would always rush straight back to my roomafter lectures and meals so that I could meditate. It was all so fascinating to me. John, George and Paul would all want to sit around jamming and having a good time and I’d be flying into my room. They were all serious about what they were doing but they just weren’t as fanatical as me. The song that John wrote was just saying, ‘Come out and play with us. Come out and have fun.’”
    This she eventually did and got to know the Beatles well. The Maharishi put her in an after-lecture discussion group with John and George – who he thought would be good for her. “We talked about the things we were all going through,” she says. “We were questioning reality, asking questions about who we were and what was going on. I liked them and I think they liked me.”
    Although the