by Ken McNab
On the same day as the Lennons were indulging in celluloid silliness, Ringo Starr was lying in a bed in Middlesex Hospital. The drummer, the one the others fretted most about in the event of a split, was the first to pay a physical price for the collective stress that had built up during the past nine months. He had been admitted with severe stomach pains, a sure sign of the latest strains placed on a nervous system already weakened by almost fatal childhood illnesses. He was allowed home after three days, and went back to playing the only role he ever knew – waiting patiently by the phone for a summons to come into the studio for a session.
Lennon was especially conflicted over his place in the universe. Dylan’s Isle of Wight performance may have left him unmoved, but it also spoke to his internal struggle. One half of him loved the idea of going back on stage, the natural home for any performer; the other half was frightened to death by the immense expectations that accompanied talk of a Beatles gig. ‘They would be expecting God or something,’ he observed. Of course, if he were to go it alone or with Yoko, as they had done at Cambridge in March . . . the thought would remain parked for the moment.
On 1 September, as thousands of festivalgoers began the long homeward trek from the Isle of Wight, Dylan himself arrived at Tittenhurst, seventy-five miles away. He and Sara stepped out of an Apple-chartered helicopter to be greeted by Lennon and Harrison. Lennon was keen to repay the Bard of Hibbing for his hospitality at Forelands. Prior to that occasion, the last time the two men had spent any meaningful time together had, of course, been in May 1966, when, monitored by the camera of film-maker D.A. Pennebaker, they sat in the back of a limo, both of them either stoned or drunk. As included later in the rarely seen film, Eat the Document, it was far from their finest moment. ‘The camera captured the incoherent ramblings of two impossibly stoned rock stars riding around London in the back of a chauffeured limousine,’ sniffed Rolling Stone magazine fifty years later, in May 2016.
Lennon often appeared unsettled in Dylan’s presence, as if intimidated by the American’s mercurial personality. Now, though, he was on home turf, happy to show off his rock-star mansion. It should have been an easygoing visit; three hero-worshipped, influential and wealthy rock stars, comfortable in each other’s presence. But the conversations turned out to be laboured and awkward. Harrison and Dylan clearly had a rapport, but Lennon felt like an outsider, an ironic role reversal of his teenage relationship with Harrison. In a bid to cut through the unease, he suggested he and Dylan join forces on a new song he had been working on. ‘Cold Turkey’, he hoped, might appeal to the non-conformist in Dylan. But Dylan declined the invitation to jam in Lennon’s newly built home studio, feeling that he and Sara had already overstayed their welcome. Perhaps he was still weary from his show the night before. Perhaps he was simply bored in Lennon’s company. Perhaps – and this seems more likely – he simply didn’t like the song, with its harrowing lyrics about heroin withdrawal and its jagged-edge guitar, which sounded nothing like the rustic-tinged tracks that could be found on Nashville Skyline, Dylan’s most recent album.
The truth may never be known, given that the visit still remains largely shrouded in intrigue five decades later. Dylan, typically, has never publicly referred to it; Lennon did, briefly, but only in passing during his soul-baring interview in Rolling Stone the following year.
‘He came over to our house with George after the Isle of Wight and when I had written “Cold Turkey”,’ Lennon told the magazine’s editor Jann Wenner. ‘I was trying to get him to record. We had just put him on piano for “Cold Turkey” to make a rough tape but his wife was pregnant or something and they left.’
Soon, Dylan’s helicopter was ferrying him and Sara back to London before they headed across the Atlantic the next day. They were driven to Heathrow by Harrison, whose friendship with Bob continued for the rest of his life. Lennon and Dylan met again only rarely. Bob was the first but not the last to pass on the latest musical diary entry in the ongoing real-life ballad of John and Yoko.
Convinced that ‘Cold Turkey’ had Number One written all over it, Lennon breezily pitched it as The Beatles’ next single during a band meeting early in the month. ‘I said, “Hey, lads, I think I’ve written a new single,”’ he recalled. Unsurprisingly, McCartney and Harrison, who had already heard the track, decided a song that graphically choreographed the pain of heroin withdrawal was unsuitable for the band. It wasn’t a question of not liking the song – Starr would play drums on the sessions when it was recorded by Lennon on his own, later in the month – the decision was solely down to image. The lyrical content alone was a guarantee of it being shunned by radio programmers, thus depriving it of valuable airplay. Lennon viewed the snub as simply more evidence of his growing musical detachment from the band he had founded. The fact was, he simply didn’t need them any longer. Especially now that he had another musical outlet for the music the other Beatles considered too outlandish – The Plastic Ono Band. He later said, ‘I thought: “Bugger you, I’ll put it out myself.” ’
This latest example of musical disengagement between Lennon, McCartney and Harrison was brought into sharp focus during a conversation captured by Anthony Fawcett, the Lennons’ assistant, round about the time of Starr’s hospitalisation. He let a tape run during several fraught and revealing chats and reproduced them in his own book of that period, One Day at a Time.
Mostly, they bring into the open the simmering undercurrent of hurt feelings, guilt and introspection that was rapidly nearing boiling point, especially over Lennon and McCartney’s carve-up of the band’s singles. One exchange went as follows:
Lennon [to McCartney]: We have the singles market, they [George and Ringo] don’t get anything. We’ve never offered George B-sides, but because we were two people, you had the A-side and I had the B side.
McCartney: Well, the thing is, I think that until now, until this year, our songs have been better than George’s. Now this year his songs are at least as good as ours.
Harrison: Now that’s a myth, because most of the songs this year I wrote about last year or the year before. Maybe now I just don’t care whether you are going to like them or not, I just do ’em . . . most of my songs, I never had The Beatles backing me.
Lennon: Oh, come on, George. We put a lot of work into your songs, even down to ‘Don’t Bother Me’. [But] in the last two years you went Indian and we weren’t needed.
Harrison: That was only one tune. On the last album [the White Album], I don’t think you appeared on any of my songs.
Lennon: Well, you had Eric [Clapton] or somebody like that . . .
McCartney: When we get in the studio, even on the worst day, I’m still playing bass, Ringo’s still drumming and we’re still there, you know . . .
Except they weren’t. There was a reluctance to admit the truth that was clear to each of them individually. Then came the phone call that arguably set in motion a chain of events from which there would be no way back.
*
John Brower was a hipster dabbling in music promotion in Toronto, the Canadian metropolis with a bar on every corner and a band in every bar. Kim Fowley was a music scenester already basking in a reputation as a record producer, songwriter and Sunset Strip Svengali. Fate brought the men together when rock journalist Ritchie Yorke suggested to Brower that Fowley would be the ideal person to bring on board for a major music event he was planning in the city.
Nostalgia was back in vogue for the simple three-chord chug that had sparked rock ’n’ roll into life a decade earlier. Fowley and Brower, like millions of others, felt its electrifying charge. Brower had already helped stage a Toronto festival in June. Buoyed by its moderate success, he and his business partner, Kenny Walker, set their sights higher by announcing plans for a one-day-only rock ’n’ roll revival festival, which would see the founding fathers of the genre share a bill with those new artists seeking to carry the torch for the next generation. Brower moved quickly to secure the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, Little Rich
ard and Chuck Berry alongside contemporary bands such as Junior Walker and The All Stars, the up-and-coming Alice Cooper, Tony Joe White, and The Doors, who were given top billing for the show that was planned for Saturday, 13 September, at the University of Toronto’s 20,000-seater Varsity Stadium.
It was an ambitious undertaking and one, which, unfortunately, quickly showed signs of unravelling. Ticket sales failed to catch fire. With less than two days to go, fewer than two thousand briefs had been sold, leaving Brower and Fowley, whose primary role was to anchor the evening from the stage, staring into a financial abyss.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. In a moment when ambition seemed to overtake reality, Fowley, who had once met The Beatles in 1965 in London, suggested Brower cold-call Apple in London to try to get John Lennon involved. Perhaps the appearance of a Beatle appearing from music’s Mount Olympus introducing the heroes who had fired his own rock ’n’ roll dreams would be enough to rescue the event. As Fowley told Brower: ‘He loves Chuck Berry and Little Richard, and The Beatles have done songs by both of them and they opened for Gene Vincent at the Star Club in Hamburg back in the early days.’
By any yardstick, it was still a long shot but Brower, nevertheless, put in the call at around 5 p.m. Toronto time (10 p.m. UK time) the night before the gig was due to take place. ‘What do you have to lose?’ Fowley challenged Brower as he summoned the necessary chutzpah to try and chisel Lennon into flying three and a half thousand miles at twelve hours’ notice for what amounted really to twenty minutes’ work. It seemed like mission impossible, but it turned out to be a carpe diem moment.
In London, despite the late hour, the Apple switchboard was still manned. An operator listened as Brower said it was a matter of extreme urgency that he speak to Lennon. It was like a Bible salesman dialling the Vatican and hoping to get through to the Pope, but the pleading in Brower’s voice paid off. He was initially put through to Fawcett, the Lennons’ human shield/call screener, who listened intently while scribbling down notes on a piece of paper . . . rock ’n’ roll festival . . . Toronto . . . Gene Vincent . . . Bo Diddley . . . Chuck Berry . . . Little Richard . . . John Lennon . . . emceee. Sitting opposite and seeing the names of his heroes on the pad, Lennon suddenly became animated, and grabbed the phone.
The next part of the conversation blew Brower away. ‘Suddenly I hear John saying, “Well, we wouldn’t want to come unless we could play,”’ Brewer would remember. For a nanosecond that could easily have been an eternity, he held his breath – he thought Lennon was offering him one of the biggest showbusiness coups in history.
‘The phone in our office was on speaker so everyone could hear. There was a collective gasp before I stammered, “You mean The Beatles?” John replied, “No, just me and Yoko and we’ll put a little band together.”
‘“Okay, we’ll squeeze you in,” I blurted, immediately realising how dumb that must have sounded. “We can’t pay you but we’ll get airline tickets for everyone and put you up somewhere nice. Is that okay?” Lennon agreed on one condition – that he be allowed to film it and record it for a possible live album.
Coincidentally, Yorke was at that same moment at Apple interviewing Harrison in Taylor’s office and he immediately vouched for both men. All the stars were suddenly in cosmic alignment. Brower said he would sort out all the visas; Fawcett and Evans were dispatched to put in calls to various musicians on Lennon’s wishlist for his pick-up band.
The first name that came to mind was Harrison’s. But the guitarist no longer felt compelled to follow him blindly into some madcap scheme that, on the surface at least, seemed preposterous. Furthermore, he was in no mood to go on a long-haul flight with Yoko to play the kind of music he had no feel for. He said, ‘John asked me to be in the band, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t really want to be in an avant-garde band, and I knew that was what it was going to be.’
Instead, Lennon narrowed his search down to Eric Clapton, Klaus Voormann, a long-time friend from Hamburg who now played bass for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and who had also designed the cover for Revolver, and Alan White, a twenty-year-old drummer who had impressed Lennon the night before as part of the resident band at a London club.
White, who would go on to have a stellar drumming career with Yes, was convinced he was being pranked when he took Lennon’s call asking him to be in his garage band. Oh, and by the way, they would be flying from Heathrow the next morning to Toronto to play at an outdoor festival.
White told me: ‘The first thing I did was hang up because I was sure someone was playing a joke. I just couldn’t believe John Lennon was on the phone. And then he rang back and assured me it was him. He said, “Do you want to do a gig in Toronto?” and I said, “Yeah, sure” . . . as you do. He said, “Okay, I’ll send a limo for you in the morning.” The band I was playing with at the time were all pee’d off because I was supposed to do a gig that night with them . . . make some money for them, and I said, “Don’t you realise I’ve got to go play with John Lennon?” We had to cancel the gig.’
Unlike White, however, Voormann was not ready to dive headlong into John’s latest musical fantasy without first getting the lowdown. The two had been friends since Klaus had first wandered into Hamburg’s famous Kaiserkeller Club, having been drawn there by the rowdy stomp of young guys playing a unique brand of rock ’n’ roll. He was long considered part of The Beatles’ inner circle but even that didn’t give Lennon a free pass over his services.
He recalled: ‘John asked me if I would do it, and I paused because I couldn’t believe what he was saying. He would always get very uptight when you were not immediately like, “Yeah, that’s great! Sure I’ll do it!” I paused a little and said, “You’ll have to explain this a little to me. I have no idea what The Plastic Ono Band is. Is that Yoko’s band? Do we have to go naked onstage or what?” I had no idea in my mind. Suddenly it was not John Lennon; it was The Plastic Ono Band, so I knew it had something to do with Yoko. And he explained to me, “I want to go in the studio and record together, and I want the band to play. Eric said yes already. How about you?” I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”’
Clapton’s participation was key. Lennon and Yoko, at that point still committed to keeping their promise to Brower, then decided to hit the sack, leaving the job of rounding up Eric to Apple flunkey Terry Doran. In Toronto, Fowley and Brower carried out a preemptive media blitz announcing that Lennon and his band – they cleverly didn’t say what band – would be appearing at the Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival Concert the next day. Inevitably, ticket sales soared on the back of this unexpected coup, especially after Brower was clever enough to persuade Lennon to tape his confirmation for cynical and disbelieving radio station execs in a separate phone call.
By the next morning, however, the enterprise looked doomed. Lennon had woken up to the reality of what he had got himself in to, and was scared to death. He called their assistant, Anthony Fawcett, still bleary-eyed from making all the travel arrangements, and told him to apologise to Brower and send flowers instead.
In the meantime, Clapton had been roused from his slumbers at home and, guitar in hand, was already at the airport with Voormann and White. At that point, chaos ensued. Fawcett called Brower in Toronto from a payphone at Heathrow to deliver the bad, but not wholly unexpected, news that the Lennons had reneged on their promise. Standing beside him was an irate Clapton with whom, by a fortuitous quirk of fate, Brower already had a relationship. Just eight weeks earlier, the promoter had taken a massive financial hit over a gig in the city by Blind Faith, the supergroup Clapton had raised from the ashes of Cream. Now, history was in serious danger of repeating itself.
Desperate, he pleaded with Fawcett to let him speak to Clapton as a matter of urgency. Brower recalled the conversation as follows: ‘Eric, you may not remember me, but I’m the promoter who lost $20,000 on your Blind Faith show last month. Please call John Lennon, and tell him he must do this or I will get on a plane, come to his house, and live with hi
m, because I will be ruined.’ On hearing this, Clapton rang Lennon from the same payphone and, according to Fawcett’s account, ripped into him, accusing him of rock-star grandstanding and told him in no uncertain terms what he felt and virtually ordered him to get his backside in gear.
At the same time, Fawcett was involved in his own salvage operation. He said, ‘Knowing their moods, I took a chance, decided not to send the flowers and asked everyone to stand by at the airport. I rushed over to Tittenhurst hoping that with a little encouragement they would change their minds and go through with the concert. When I arrived they seemed more relaxed and in much better spirits, having just finished breakfast. John appeared to be getting his confidence back about performing. I suggested we could still catch a later flight and there was a glimmer of enthusiasm. The clincher came when Eric called to tell John that he was really keen to play. Without a second thought about his earlier cancellation, everything was on again.’
Three hours later, the first incarnation of The Plastic Ono Band was seated, guitars in hand, in the back of a Toronto-bound Boeing 707, scrabbling their way through a rehearsal for an acoustic set of rock ’n’ roll oldies that they should all know so well: ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, ‘Money’ and ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzy’. Huddled alongside them were members of the Tittenhurst Mafia that now included Fawcett, Mal Evans, Terry Doran, and Dan and Jill Richter.
Lennon’s decision to form a new band, in retrospect, was his first unilateral declaration of independence from The Beatles, but no one recognised it then as such. Certainly not McCartney, Harrison or Starr. As the plane soared high over the Atlantic, reality began to dawn on Lennon. Clapton had just come off a disastrous European and American tour with Blind Faith but was nevertheless gig-ready. Voormann was a veteran of live shows and White was too young and too gung-ho to bother about nerves, despite the stellar company. Lennon hadn’t fronted a proper rock band before a paying audience since Candlestick Park more than three years earlier. Now here he was, busking at the back of a Boeing for an audience that expected to hear every note. He recalled: ‘We tried to rehearse on the plane but we couldn’t hear a thing.’
