In 1968, Paul Saltzman was a lost soul. The son of a Canadian TV weatherman, he was working as a sound engineer for the National Film Board of Canada in India when he received a “Dear John” letter from the woman he thought was going to be his wife. “I was devastated,” he says. “Then someone on the crew said: ‘Have you tried meditation for the heartbreak?’”
Saltzman went to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – the founder of transcendental meditation – speak at New Delhi University. Emboldened by promises of “inner rejuvenation”, Saltzman then travelled to the International Academy of Meditation in Rishikesh. It was closed, due to the arrival of the Beatles.
As explained by Paul McCartney in the Beatles book Anthology, the exhausted group, still coming to terms with the death of their manager Brian Epstein in August 1967, had arrived in Rishikesh with wives and girlfriends to “find the answer” through the teachings of the Maharishi, whom Paul, George and John had first encountered at a lecture at the London Hilton. “There was a feeling of: ‘It’s great to be famous [and] rich,” said McCartney, “but what it’s all for?’”
“I didn’t even know the Beatles were in India,” Saltzman says. “I waited outside for eight days and then I was taken to a small room where I was taught transcendental meditation. What replaced the agony [of the breakup] was bliss.”
Saltzman is now 78, and his new film, Meeting the Beatles In India, is one of two forthcoming documentaries on the subject. With narration by Morgan Freeman, and contributions from director David Lynch and Beatles biographer Mark Lewisohn, it is expansive and grand, but at its heart is the smaller, affecting tale of Saltzman himself.
He is charming company and there is a trustworthy innocence to his storytelling, his face openly ready to laugh or cry – both of which he does during our talk. You imagine it was something of this openness that led the normally wary Lennon to invite Saltzman to sit with the group, their wives and friends, one warm February morning 53 years ago.
Read More at https://amp.theguardian.com/music/2021/jun/03/the-beatles-in-india-with-their-long-hair-and-jokes-they-blew-our-minds
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