The Beatles are coming to Doc(k) Day in Haliburton April 13.
While the Fab Four won’t be here in person – and George Harrison and John Lennon are no longer with us – their memory will be brought to life by Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman, who spent time at an Indian ashram with The Beatles in 1968.
His film, made during a return trip 50 years later, is called Meeting The Beatles in India. It will be part of a full-day of documentaries at the Northern Lights Performing Arts Pavilion. Saltzman will be speaking about his time in Rishikesh, to reminiscence about the experience with Paul, John, George, Ringo and others, and the photos he took of them there.
The initial trip came after an existential moment in the fall of 1967, Saltzman told The Highlander in a recent interview.
“I woke up one morning in my little rented room and I had the shocking thought that there were parts of myself I didn’t like,” he said. He asked out loud, without thinking, “what do I do about this?” His soul spoke to him for the first time, and said “India.”
He got a job with a film crew in the Asian country to finance the trip. After a time, he went to Delhi and got a fateful letter. It was from his girlfriend and she was breaking up with him. At 24, he was devastated. A friend suggested the ashram and he said he was willing to try anything.
Unbeknownst to him, The Beatles and some other celebrities were at the ashram and he was denied admittance. But he waited. Eight days in a tent near the ashram door before he was allowed in, as he wanted to learn to meditate to help heal his broken heart.
After an initial mind-blowing 30-minute meditation, he emerged to find The Beatles sitting outside at a table and said his body simply “curved” towards them. He asked if he could join them and they said yes. There were others too: The Beatles’ wives and girlfriends, Jane Asher, Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Boyd Harrison, Maureen Starkey, the singer Donovan, actress Mia Farrow, Mike Love of The Beach Boys and Beatles’ roadie Mal Evans.
Magical things
He sat down and said “magical” things happened. Initially, he heard a scream in his head, “it’s The Beatles”. Then his soul assured him they were just ordinary people. That’s when Lennon turned to him and asked him if he was American, and light-hearted banter ensued from there. “And that was it. They just took me into their group. I just sat around with them for the next week,” Saltzman said.
He said the four musicians were as close as brothers and at the ashram there was no ego. He doesn’t recall the name ‘The Beatles’ even coming up. With the world media trying to get through the ashram doors, Saltzman was one of only a few to take photographs.
He recalled a one-on-one conversation with John Lennon, when the musician asked Saltzman why he was at the ashram, and he told him he had come to learn to meditate to deal with a broken heart.
“And he looked off into the distance, then back at me and said, ‘yes, love can be very hard on us sometimes, can’t it?’ And then in the sweetest, most caring way, he said, ‘but you know, Paul, the really great thing about love is you always get a second chance’. He could not have said something kinder to me in that moment.”
The other amazing one-on-one experience was when Harrison invited him back to his room to hear him play the sitar. He didn’t have a camera or take photos, so, in the film, he is able to use graphic novel-type imagery.
“He starts to play and I close my eyes and just drift into an altered state,” Saltzman recalled, emerging in a blissful state.
The two 24-year-olds then talked, and Saltzman recalls a man of “profound humility and with a deep inner core of calm and warmth and love.”
He said in addition to the meditation, he had life-changing conversations, including with George in that moment. He said George told him, “we’re The Beatles after all… we have all the money you could ever dream of. We have all the fame you could ever wish for but it isn’t love, it isn’t health, it isn’t peace inside, is it?’ And that went right to the core of my being and it was life-changing.”
Saltzman returned home, wrote a magazine article about the experience, and then put the pictures away. It wasn’t until his 16-year-old daughter prompted him to do something with the story that he wrote a book, and then did the film.
And, the story came full circle when the woman who sent him to the ashram came to his book launch with her family. Forgiveness and love were there.
“I said ‘I have to thank you because if it wasn’t for you, none of this would exist’ and we had a good laugh.”
