John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  For John, composing under pressure, like some reporter chasing an edition, at first seemed to have negative effects. He would later recall a day at Kenwood when he spent five fruitless hours trying to think of something clever until finally, “cheesed off,” he went for a lie-down. Stretched on his king-size bed in his mock-Tudor mansion, with his myriad possessions all around, he suddenly thought of “a Nowhere Man…sitting in Nowhere Land.” With this as a peg, the song took only minutes to write itself.

  “In My Life,” another superlative achievement, began with similar brain-cudgeling and false starts. Since the publication of In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, various interviewers—notably the challenging Ken Allsop—had asked John why his song lyrics did not have the same highly individual stamp as his prose. He himself was aware of having “one mind that wrote books and another mind that churned out things about ‘I love you and you love me.’” Accordingly, he sketched out a song that would use poetic observation in the style of Wordsworth or Tennyson, recalling the Liverpool he had known as a child and lamenting how, even over his short lifetime, that old, solid world of ships and docks had all but vanished.

  The choice of subject can have been no accident. His Aunt Mimi was soon to leave Mendips for Harbour View, finally closing the long-extended chapter of his boyhood. His original lyric was a wistful return to years gone by, reliving the bus journey he had taken countless times from Menlove Avenue into central Liverpool, via Penny Lane, Church Road, “the Dutch and St Columbus, and the Dockers’ Umbrella [elevated railway] that they pulled down.”

  Somehow, this first attempt to immortalize Penny Lane refused to jell, so John cut the “travelogue” part of the song, making it instead a personal requiem for “friends and lovers…people and things that went before.” Even with an “I love you” payoff, it broke new ground. In the onward-and-upward-thrusting mid-Sixties, nostalgia was still comparatively rare. A twenty-five-year-old pop superstar was the least likely person to be looking back over his life as if time were already growing short.

  John’s laissez-faire attitude in the studio provided the track’s final winning touch. As usual, the vocal was recorded first, with space for an instrumental break to be added later. While the Beatles were out having dinner, George Martin devised a piano solo in the style of Bach, then fiddled with the recording speed so that on playback it had the spindly quiver of a harpsichord. He wondered how John would react to so pretty and demure an interpolation. John loved it.

  Also on the agenda was that other scrap of autobiography Martin had heard in the rough at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz, while Cynthia Lennon sat nearby, listening in happy incomprehension. Now titled “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” its purpose seemed to combine one existing trendy craze with another soon to dawn. All over Britain, people were transforming their once-cluttered kitchens and living spaces with austere tracts of Scandinavian stripped pine. And, rather than a guitar, as if in perpetuation of Help!’s comic subplot, George Harrison played a jangly Indian sitar.

  But no one who knew John—other than his wife—could fail to recognize the situation the song described or wince at its ring of absolute truth. Here he was in some arty dolly bird’s stripped-pine flat, talking and drinking wine into the small hours in hopes of seducing her, but at the crucial moment losing his nerve and slinking off to sleep the night in her empty bathtub, much like some overflow visitor long ago at Gambier Terrace. In the unnamed girl, most of John’s circle thought they recognized Maureen Cleave, the Evening Standard writer whose appeal for him plainly went beyond her Richmal Crompton-esque prose style. However, Cleave says that in all her encounters with John there was “no pass.” And Sonny Freeman, then wife of the Beatles’ favorite photographer, has always taken the lyric as an oblique reference to her. Circumstantial evidence seems compelling: her preference to be known as Norwegian rather than German, her wood-paneled flat under John’s in Emperor’s Gate, the late-night assignations they used to make under everyone’s noses.

  Classic pop tracks are a synthesis of words, music, and production; in general, the most effective lyrics turn to lead on the printed page. John’s for “Norwegian Wood” are among very few that can also be read as poetry or even drama. In twenty-six skillfully rhymed, perfectly scanned short lines, a scene is set, two characters are created and converse, a farcical climax is reached, followed by a slightly sinister epilogue. The ambiguous ending, “So I lit a fire…” (to comfort his bruised ego on waking to find the “bird has flown”? Or to torch the pristine timbers in revenge?), is almost worthy of Beckett or Pinter.

  However unalike the material Lennon and McCartney wrote on their own, they instinctively tuned in to each other’s wavelength, often supplying some final touch that turned a good song into a superb one. As John previewed the unfinished chorus of “Nowhere Man” and came to “making all his nowhere plans…,” Paul extemporized the little twist of “for nobody.” John in turn supplied the plaintive “I love you I love you I lo-ove you” bridge in Paul’s “Michelle,” modeling it on Nina Simone’s soul classic, “I Put a Spell on You.” Their closest collaboration was “The Word,” a song foreshadowing a whole era with its advocacy of “love” as a cure for all ills, and John’s promise to “show everybody the light.”

  “Nowhere Man” is generally viewed as a self-portrait, expressing John’s frustration and self-disgust at his exile in the Stockbroker Belt. In fact, he distances himself from the Nowhere Man (“…isn’t he a bit like you and me?”), leaving us with a character who could have stepped from some modish black-and-white TV play. No, the real window on his emotions—the raw anguish that, decades later, still rises up and batters you with a brick—is in the innocent-sounding “Girl.” John himself always insisted the song had no real-life model, that the girl in question was “just a dream.” God knows what kind of dream it could have been to provoke such aching misery, such dark visions of male enslavement and humiliation. In contrast with the Frenchified romanticism of “Michelle,” “Girl” has a zithery, Viennese-café, film-noir sound, punctuated by sharp hisses that could be pain or disbelief. Only once ever again will John sing thus, as if his heart is breaking inside him.

  “We’ve written some funny songs—songs with jokes in,” Paul somewhat misleadingly informed a journalist as the album neared completion. “We think that comedy numbers are the next thing after protest songs.” Its title was a pun on soul music and a sly dig at their archrivals (and private best mates) the Rolling Stones. A black American musician had recently commented that British groups like the Stones, for all their invasive power, played only “plastic soul.” The Beatles decided on Rubber Soul, implying that their variety at least was stamped out by a good strong northern Wellington boot.

  The cover was originally to have been a straight Robert Freeman group photograph, showing off their latest suede and leather Carnaby gear. To help them decide which image would work best, Freeman projected each color transparency onto a cardboard square the same size as an album cover. As a close-up head shot appeared, the cardboard slipped askew, distorting their features and making John dominate the frame like some cruelly impassive, suede-collared Tartar prince. All four loved this “fisheye” effect and unanimously picked it as the cover shot.

  John had scarcely delivered his lyrical tribute to “people and things that went before” when he found himself facing the most unwelcome of all possible examples. After a silence of more than a year, his father, Freddie, again reappeared in his life, this time even more publicly and embarrassingly.

  Early in 1965, Brian Epstein received a letter from a firm of literary agents announcing that they had “Mr Alfred Lennon, father of John,” under contract to write his life story. Their client, they said, was “deeply resentful of letters he has received from relatives and others, accusing him of trying to exploit the now famous son he neglected as a child.” Before starting the project, he wished Brian to arrange a meeting with John “so that he can give his own explanation of what ha
ppened when the family split up.” Brian wrote back a dismissive couple of lines saying he could not get involved in so private a family matter. The life story—really an extended interview—was duly sold to downmarket Tit-Bits magazine for £200.

  The genie was now well and truly out of the bottle. Following the Tit-Bits article, Freddie struck up an acquaintance with a Liverpudlian wheeler-dealer named Tony Cartwright, who was then working for Tom Jones’s manager, Gordon Mills. Cartwright was intrigued to discover what hotel workers up and down Britain already knew: that John Lennon’s errant father had had a lifelong ambition to become an entertainer himself. He offered to become Freddie’s manager and, on the strength of the Lennon name, had little trouble in getting him a recording contract with the Pye Piccadilly label. The two then set to work to write a song for the novelty market that had previously seen such money-spinners as Rolf Harris’s “Ringo for President” and Dora Bryan’s “All I Want for Christmas Is a Beatle.”

  The result was “That’s My Life (and My Love and My Home)”, a title uncomfortably though quite accidentally close to John’s “In My Life.” A monologue with instrumental accompaniment, it combined romantic allusions to Freddie’s seafaring years with self-justification about his failings as a father. The chewy Scouse voice (which not all of Pye Piccadilly’s technical resources could make a jot like his son’s) intoned sonorously against a background of violins and crashing waves: “It started in Liverpool where I was born…No father to advise me, but I carried on…I saw a lifetime of love go wrong…Pity was my partner all along…I’ll make no excuses for my own abuses…Because life makes us all that way…I could blame the cruel sea for taking me away…It could be the end of my story, but my story will never end.”

  The record came out in December 1965, unfortunately coinciding with the release of Rubber Soul. Freddie was caught up in a whirl of promotion that included performing his monologue live on Dutch television. But in the United Kingdom, it quickly sank without trace. Far from making Freddie’s fortune, it left him £20 in debt. Anticipating a life in the spotlight, he had undergone extensive private dental work for which he was left holding the bill.

  Though the record palpably never stood a chance, some journalists and disc jockeys undoubtedly did boycott it out of loyalty to John. Freddie later claimed to have heard from music-business insiders that Brian Epstein had brought pressure to starve it of coverage and airplay. A kitchen porter once again, he happened to find work at a pub in Hampton, just a mile or so from Weybridge. One day, he impulsively decided to call on John and ask point-blank whether the rumors of sabotage were true. Unfortunately, only Cynthia and Julian were at home. Cyn had never met Freddie and scarcely even knew she had a father-in-law, but was her usual kindly, hospitable self, introducing him to his grandson, making him tea, even trimming his untidy locks for him in Kenwood’s huge, incomprehensible kitchen.

  He returned a few days later when John was at home, but this time did not succeed in penetrating the house. Still convinced there had been skulduggery over his single, he unwisely brought along his erstwhile manager, Tony Cartwright, for support. There was a brief exchange among the three in Kenwood’s front porch as Lord Kitchener looked on balefully from his recruiting poster; then John retreated inside and slammed the door.

  A few months earlier, John and Cynthia had driven into London with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd for what promised to be a fairly low-key evening out. It began with dinner at the flat of John and George’s dentist, John Riley, in Strathearn Place, Bayswater. The only other person present was Riley’s twenty-two-year-old Canadian-born girlfriend, Cindy Bury, who worked at the recently opened Playboy Club in Park Lane. As the guests took their seats in the candlelit dining-room, Cynthia noticed a curious decorative touch: arranged along the mantelpiece with evident care were six sugar cubes.

  Riley was one of London’s leading celebrity dentists, and already such a pal of John and George that he had flown out to join them in the Bahamas while they were filming Help! The plan this evening was that, after dinner at his flat, he and Cindy would accompany the Beatle foursome to the Pickwick Club, where Brian’s latest acquisition for NEMS Enterprises, a trio named Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, were appearing live. Since Klaus was John and George’s old Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann, there could be no begging off or showing up late. Riley insisted that they must have coffee before leaving, and dropped a sugar lump from the mantelpiece into each of their cups. A few moments later, John turned to George and tersely announced “We’ve had LSD.”

  The thirty-four-year-old Riley was no career drug pusher; nor was he one of those sleazy people who get a kick from turning on celebrities. Both John and George had previously expressed curiosity about LSD, and, through medical connections, Riley had obtained some from a source in Wales. His girlfriend Cindy knew he planned to give it to them without their knowledge, but not that he’d chosen this particular evening or that she—and he himself—would be taking it for the first time along with them. “We were six friends and we were young, and if you were young in those days that’s what you did. You tried everything.” For Marcel Proust, a tea-soaked biscuit provided a springboard into the past. For John—and many more than him—the future was changed by sugar in his coffee.

  Cynthia Lennon, who had never heard of LSD and had been unwontedly happy and relaxed up to now, was the first to feel the drug’s effects. “It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film,” she recalls. “The room seemed to get bigger and bigger. This man [Riley] who’d been so nice and charming until then, seemed to turn into a demon. We were all terrified. We knew it was something evil—we had to get out of the house.” Cindy’s version is that they left quite normally to go on to the Pickwick Club as planned.

  That evening, it so happened, they did not have John’s Rolls waiting outside but had come up from Surrey packed into George’s Mini Cooper. By the time they reached the West End some fifteen minutes later (Riley and Cindy following by taxi), their first LSD trip was kicking in with a vengeance. Normally lighted theater and cinema marquees seemed to blaze with unearthly radiance and the pavement crowds to surge and roar like multiple Royal film premieres. All four were in a state hovering between dazzled stupefaction and hysteria; Pattie, as a rule the sanest of young women, was seized by a desire to smash shop windows. “We were cackling,” John would recall. “We were just insane. We were out of our heads.”

  None of them would afterward recall arriving at the Pickwick or watching Paddy, Klaus and Gibson’s debut. Klaus Voormann has no recollection of seeing John at all that night. John Riley and Cindy were left behind somewhere along the way, and neither John nor George ever saw them again. The next concrete collective memory was getting to the Ad Lib, just off Leicester Square, where they had arranged to meet Ringo. The Ad Lib was reached by an elevator that, as it carried them upward, suddenly seemed to burst into flames.

  As they sat in the club, telling Ringo about the fiery lift, it seemed that their table began to alter shape, lengthening and widening into the dimensions of an airport runway. But while the others reacted in panic or hysteria, John experienced a moment, if not of déjà vu, then of déjà lu. He had, after all, grown up on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice had only to drink or eat something for everyday objects to magnify on this same gargantuan scale. Alone of the group, too, he had read Confessions of an Opium-Eater, Thomas de Quincy’s 1822 record of drug hallucinations in which “a theatre seemed suddenly opened up and lighted in my brain [presenting] spectacles of more than earthly splendour” and “buildings, landscapes etc. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive….” Whereas the usually dour and stand-offish George experienced a sudden urge to tell everyone that he loved them, John felt de Quincy’s sensation, in more benign opium trances, of being “at a distance and aloof from the uproar of life,” when “crowds became oppressive…music even.” Sometime that night, a fellow musician came up and asked permission to si
t beside him. “Only if you don’t talk,” he replied.

  Later, George somehow managed to drive back to his house in Esher, keeping the souped-up Mini at a cautious 18 mph the whole way, with Pattie still suggesting mad escapades beside him and John manically telling jokes in the back. Unable to manage the further couple of miles to Weybridge, the Lennons decided to crash out at George’s, thinking that whatever ailed them would recede with a few hours’ sleep—little suspecting that LSD, unlike alcohol, does not cause drowsiness, and can take up to twelve hours to run its course.

  Cyn spent the rest of the night in extreme distress, unable to sleep or make herself vomit up the poison. But for John, the continuously unfolding visions—although sometimes so terrifying that they made him bang his head against the wall—were also like watching the most exciting and gorgeously colored movie while simultaneously starring in it. In the trip’s most memorable phase, he later recalled, George’s house became a giant submarine, which he piloted single-handedly through another de Quincy vista of “chasms and sunless abysses…depths below depths…a sea paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the Heavens.” As Cyn suffered in the bathroom, he also began turning out drawings at a furious rate. One showed four of the sea faces turned to him gravely and saying—as faces in real life so seldom would—“We all agree with you.”

  The substance to which that generous tooth fairy introduced John had actually been around, in various, little-publicized forms, since his early childhood. In 1943, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann stumbled on the psychoactive properties of ergot, or rye fungus, while seeking a cure for migraine. From ergot Hofmann compounded lysergic acid diethylamide, a drug combining all the illusions of opium eating, and more, with the hazards of Russian roulette. For it had the power to tap directly into its user’s subconscious, conjuring unrealized fears and insecurities from the darkest corners of the psyche, at some times creating euphoria but at others anxiety or terror, intensifying light and color and altering physical dimensions in ways that could unpredictably enchant or repel, bringing on hallucinations that could be heavenly or hellish. Odorless, colorless, and flavorless, it was so strong that optimum results could be produced by the smallest dose, usually in liquid form on a piece of bread or a sugar cube.