John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Again, Yoko’s recollection is somewhat different. “He said, ‘I heard there’s a happening or something…it’s about a bag.’ I said, ‘No, today’s event is this,’ and I showed him the sign that said ‘Breathe.’ When he breathed out, he did it really hard and he came so near to me, it was a little bit flirty in a way. Then he went to the apple and just grabbed it and took a bite. I thought, ‘How dare he do that?’ I thought it was really gross, you know; he didn’t know manners. He must have noticed I was so angry because he put it back on the stand.”

  The next exhibits to catch his eye really did invite spectator participation. “…I went up to this thing that said ‘Hammer a nail in.’ I said, ‘Can I hammer a nail in?’ and she said, ‘No,’ because the gallery was actually opening the next day. So Dunbar says, ‘Let him hammer a nail in.’ It was, ‘He’s a millionaire. He might buy it.’ She’s more interested in it looking nice and pretty and white for the opening…. There was this little conference and she finally said, ‘OK, you can hammer a nail in for five shillings [25p],’ so smart-arse here says, ‘Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings, and hammer an imaginary nail in.’ And that’s when we really met. That’s when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it and that was it.

  “Then I saw this ladder on a painting leading up to the ceiling where there was a spyglass hanging down. It’s what made me stay. I went up the ladder and I got the spyglass, and there was tiny little writing there. You really have to stand on top of the ladder—you feel like a fool, you could fall at any minute—and you look through and it just says ‘Yes’…And just that ‘Yes’ made me stay in a gallery full of apples and nails instead of walking out, saying, ‘I’m not gonna buy any of this crap.’”

  Yoko, however, was quite unaware of the epiphany. “He came back down the ladder again, said ‘Mm’ or something and just left. I went downstairs, where there were several art students who were helping us. And one said, ‘That was John Lennon…one of the Beatles.’ I said, ‘Oh, really? I didn’t know that.’”

  A fortnight or so later, she happened to be at the opening of a new show by an American rival—and friend—the Pop Art sculptor Claes Oldenburg. As she passed through a crowded space dotted with Oldenburg’s giant plaster milk shakes and foam-rubber hamburgers, she remembers: “Somebody grunted. And in a corner there’s a guy standing, looking so unshaven and pale-looking, a drugged-out-of-his-mind kind of guy. He’d been up with John Dunbar or someone, taking acid. And looking very angry…totally different from what I saw at Indica Gallery. And that was John. I think he always mixed up that night with the one when he came to my show at Indica.”

  Yoko moved on through the crowd to speak to Claes Oldenburg, but a few minutes later found herself back in the vicinity of John’s corner. “Then Paul [McCartney] came up and started to talk to me, saying, ‘My friend went to your gallery show….’ While we were talking, John walked over and said, ‘We have to go now,’ and just pulled Paul away. He seemed like an angry guy…an angry working-class guy.”

  The Beatles might have stopped performing onstage, but they still had to do so on record—and here there was no letup in the pressure to outdo their rivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Principally, this meant the Rolling Stones, who had become almost as big a concert attraction as the Beatles in their prime and who, having found fame as their polar opposites, now seemed to be muscling in on their territory. The Stones’ 1966 Aftermath album was not the familiar raunchy R&B but a crafted song cycle, overtly modeled on Rubber Soul and showcasing the talents of lead guitarist Brian Jones, an instinctive musical genius whose sitar playing made George Harrison seem ploddy by comparison. It was mainly to prove they had not been eclipsed by Aftermath that John and Paul took their next quantum leap and created Revolver.

  The Beach Boys’ superb 1966 album Pet Sounds was an answer to Rubber Soul by their unstably brilliant leader, Brian Wilson. No sooner had the Beatles answered Wilson with Revolver than he answered back with “Good Vibrations,” a single that took two months to make, cost a phenomenal $40,000, and packed in more layers of electronic and harmonic wizardry than many an entire album. The Byrds, too, those former Beatle look-alikes, had marked out their own unique territory athwart psychedelia and old-fashioned folk. Nineteen sixty-six saw the release of their Fifth Dimension album, containing the supremely weird and wonderful “Eight Miles High,” the closest aural re-creation of an acid trip that anyone had yet dared commit to vinyl.

  From New York’s Greenwich Village came the Lovin’ Spoonful—a play on the traditional, multihandled loving cup—whose singer-songwriter, John Sebastian, was like John and Paul rolled into one sunny smile. From the West Coast, where group names were growing as long as freight trains, came the Mothers of Invention, fronted by a dervish-headed, chin-bearded former advertising man named Frank Zappa. The Mothers’ album Freak-Out presented Zappa polemics such as “Trouble Every Day” and “Who Are the Brain Police?” as a sequential performance on a common theme, like a classical symphony or oratorio. This new notion of the “concept” album was something else the Abbey Road songsmiths would have to take on board.

  One competitor, above all, hovered constantly at the edge of John’s consciousness; never more so than amid this creative meteor shower of 1966. In May, Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde, an album in the startling new format of two 33 rpm discs packaged together. Backed by a circle of talented session musicians (including the future personnel of the Band), Dylan synthesized folk and rock with avant-garde poetry and rumbustious vaudeville into a string of instant classics: “I Want You,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” above all the sing-along, oompah-pah-ing “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35,” with its incantatory chorus of “Ever’body must git stoned!”

  When Dylan returned to Britain on tour later that summer, he and John again hung out together, although there was too much mutual uncertainty about who was inspiring and who copying whom for the friendship ever to be entirely relaxed. Dylan’s UK performances were filmed by the American documentary maker D. A. Pennebaker as a color follow-up to Don’t Look Back, his black-and-white chronicle of the previous year’s tour. One scene in Pennebaker’s sequel shows John and Dylan traveling together by car from Weybridge up to London. Both have clearly heeded the call of the Rainy Day Woman (traditional slang for a joint), though the effects on each are very different. Whereas Dylan stoned is a self-regarding bore, John remains lucid and humorous and even seems slightly embarrassed by his companion’s ramblings. The sequence ends abruptly as the usual hazard of driving from Weybridge in a sealed limo full of pot smoke kicks in, and Dylan announces that he needs to throw up.

  The Beatles therefore returned to Abbey Road Studios in late November with a daunting range of new possibilities to explore and competition to try to beat. The first potential new track that John played over to George Martin in their usual tête-à-tête manner was the song he’d written while away filming in Almería. “When I first heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ I was sidesmacked,” Martin remembers. “Even with John singing it alone to his own acoustic guitar, I thought it was a wonderful piece of work. I said, ‘What do you want to do with it?’ and he said, ‘You tell me.’”

  The song that subsequently evolved in the studio was at first simple, light, and literal. Where John had originally begun with the first verse, “Living is easy with eyes closed…,” Martin suggested going straight into the chorus, “Let me take you down,” that misleadingly plainspoken invitation to accompany him back to boyhood. Paul McCartney provided a crucial atmospheric touch, playing a Mellotron intro like some creaky, dusty harmonium in a 1950s church hall. Otherwise, the first takes featured the Beatles’ playing unadorned, with John’s voice artificially lowered by a semi-tone and sounding warm, nostalgic, even folksy.

  Martin (whose schoolmasterly reserve had long since disappeared) pronounced himself “thrilled” with this version, and even John seemed satisfied. A few days later, howev
er, he decided the song needed a heavier treatment. Martin wrote a formal orchestral score for cellos and brass, changing the key without telling John in order to reach the cello’s dramatic bottom C, while George weighed in with a new instrument from his tutorials with Ravi Shankar, a swarmandel, or Indian zither. Further engineering work was done on John’s voice, which drained away its former warmth and involvement and retracted its three dimensions to one.

  For Martin and the other three Beatles, this new interpretation lifted the song to a thrilling new plane. But John, although pleased with its added complexities and ambiguities, decided that after all he liked the earlier, simpler arrangement just as much. Martin’s solution was to splice the two different versions together, beginning in the dusty church hall then, after about a minute, plunging into the undergrowth of manic celli Cs and shivery Indian strings. This instrumental split personality exactly caught the contradictions in John’s lyric: the oracular wisdom mixed with confusion and uncertainty, the mysticism and yet ordinariness, the carefully crafted incoherence. Listening to it now, one does not feel its author’s new acid sensibility so much as his old, chronic nearsightedness: the picture of iron gates, weathered sandstone, and overgrown garden seems clear enough at first, then dwindles into the blurry perspective of the boy who never would wear his glasses. Martin summed up the effect perfectly as “dreamlike without being fey, weird without being pretentious—nostalgia with an air of mystery.”

  Paul, too, had been working independently on a song harking back to the Liverpool of his childhood. For him, the portal into Proustian remembrance was Penny Lane, that modest little thoroughfare in Liverpool 18, with its parade of shops and commercial buildings, where, in years past, he had changed buses and trams more times than he could count. Penny Lane was part of the other Beatles’ childhoods, too, and also of Brian Epstein’s. But for John—as that verse deleted from “In My Life” had already shown—it had the deepest resonance of all.

  The whole district was woven into his family history, both the one he knew and the one that had been kept from him. His father, Alf, now Freddie, had been educated at the Bluecoat Hospital in nearby Church Row. His mother, Julia, was working at a café in Penny Lane when she met Taffy Williams, the young soldier who made her pregnant during Alf’s wartime absence at sea. John had even lived in the immediate vicinity as a toddler, when his parents shared the Stanley family home in Newcastle Road. Later, in Aunt Mimi’s care, he had taken the bus to the Penny Lane junction each morning on his journey to Dovedale Primary. The pre-McCartney Quarrymen had made their debut at St. Barnabas church hall, and in early Beatlemania days, Cynthia had been secreted in a bedsit in adjacent Garmoyle Road. The lane itself had also witnessed a tragedy for John’s family in which history eerily repeated itself. Earlier in 1966, his mother’s former lover, Bobby Dykins, the father of his two half sisters, Julia and Jackie, had crashed a car into a lamppost there. Like the elder Julia after another road accident eight years earlier, poor well-meaning “Twitchy” had been rushed to Sefton General Hospital, but had died soon after admittance.

  In utter contrast with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Paul’s re-creation of Penny Lane was another short story in miniature, using photographic clarity and detail where John had fuzzy impressionism. McCartneyesque though the overall vision, almost every scene and character was like a snapshot from John’s boyhood. The “barber showing photographs” was Bioletti, the elderly Italian who had cut his hair—and his father’s before him—and whose shop window used to display sun-bleached pictures of customers proudly showing off their Tony Curtis or Jeff Chandler cuts. The “shelter in the middle of the roundabout” was where John had often lurked with his Outlaws, to gloat over stolen Dinky cars and, later, to grope girls. The “pretty nurse…selling poppies from a tray,” though principally a memory of Paul’s mother, was also a nod to John’s arch-crony Pete Shotton, whose girlfriend, later wife, Beth Davidson, often used to perform that voluntary duty each November before Remembrance Sunday.

  In the recording, Paul told George Martin he wanted a “clean sound,” different in every possible way from the aural tangles of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Hence the feeling of breezy open air under those “blue suburban skies” and the piccolo trumpet solo, borrowed from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, as if Bach himself were strolling among the Saturday-afternoon shoppers, debating whether to buy a poppy or get a haircut. Though absent from the finished track, John provided crucial input, helping to write the third verse, about the “fireman with an hourglass” (whose fire station, strictly speaking, lay some way off, along Allerton Road). There was also a typical Lennon leer as well as typical Lennon surrealism in the second chorus’s “four of fish and finger pies.” “Four of fish” meant four old pennyworth, the price of a goodly slab of battered cod or hake at a Liverpool chippie when he was a child, while “finger pie” was the olfactory reward of groping inside a girl’s crotch in a dark, windswept bus shelter. No pop song before had ever smuggled such arrant smut onto a million turntables—but at the time it was not even noticed, let alone challenged.

  With these two disparately stunning autobiographical fragments in the can, John and Paul decided the concept album that everyone now expected from the Beatles would be all about their memories of Liverpool and childhood. But even now their prerogative was not absolute. Despite almost three months’ intensive work at Abbey Road, they had not put together a second album for 1966, the one traditionally aimed at the lucrative Christmas market. George Martin therefore had no alternative but to make a selection from their past releases, stretching back as far as “She Loves You” and half apologetically entitled A Collection of Beatles Oldies…but Goldies! After Christmas, with no new album yet even remotely in sight, Martin decided to release “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” as a double A-side single on February 17. He has since called it “the biggest mistake of my professional life.”

  Record buyers had never before, and have never since, been offered such superb value on one two-sided disk. Yet, such are the ways of the world, “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” became the first Beatles single since “Love Me Do” not to reach number one in Britain. It rose to number two, but could not dislodge Engelbert Humperdinck’s country ballad, “Release Me.” For John, after so many effortless number ones, this came almost as a relief: in his new hippie love-all persona, he denied feeling any hostility toward Humperdinck or to a song that might ordinarily have made him stick his fingers down his throat. As if the Top 10 were now a commune rather than a greasy pole, he observed magnanimously, “There’s room for everything.”

  The story of John and Yoko has always been represented as that of a scheming, self-aggrandizing woman who marked out the famous Beatle as her quarry at their first meeting—or even before it—and then pursued him with ruthless dedication until she got him. In fact, no other pair of famous lovers in history can have come together in quite so roundabout a fashion, nor with so many mutual misgivings.

  Yoko admits to having been attracted to John at their first encounter, largely thanks to a penchant for “working class guys” that was part of her rebellion against her parents and background. Having just arrived in London as an unknown, she was also in urgent need of a wealthy patron to sponsor her work. Previously, the drumming up of such finance had been left to her husband, Tony Cox. But with their marriage now foundering, Yoko had to take on the task herself.

  Following their meeting at the Claes Oldenburg show, she did send John a copy of Grapefruit, her collection of “instructional poems.” But that had no ulterior motive, she insists: “I’d brought some books with me from New York because it wasn’t out yet in Britain. I’d mentioned it to John when we talked and, like any author would do, I sent him a signed copy.”

  Grapefruit confirmed to John that this unknown woman from inconceivable other worlds was on a wavelength he’d always thought to be his exclusive preserve. He kept the chaste little white book beside his bed, suspending all
his other omnivorous reading in favor of it, returning time and again to the single, unrhymed stanzas—sometimes only single lines—that hovered so intriguingly between the mystical and mischievous: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” “Make a key. Find a lock that fits. If you find it, burn the house that is attached to it.” “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” Conscious as he was of pop music’s barefaced opportunism and ridiculously inflated values, he also loved the “Ono price-list,” offering blank audiotapes said to be various types of “snow falling at dawn” at “25 cents per inch.”

  Cynthia Lennon would later claim that Yoko subjected John to a “determined pursuit” in which she bombarded him with letters and cards and “came to the house looking for him several times.” According to Ray Coleman’s 1980s biography of John, she turned up unannounced at Kenwood one day and, finding neither him or Cyn at home, persuaded the housekeeper, Dot Jarlett, to let her in to make a supposedly urgent telephone call. Later, she phoned John to say she had left “a valuable ring” beside the phone and would have to come back and collect it. Yoko says the whole story is pure fabrication. “I was never standing in front of the gate. That wasn’t my style. And anyway, I didn’t know where the house was.”

  Her only visit to Kenwood during this era was at John’s invitation, for what she presumed would be a pop-star party. Instead, it turned out to be a lunch, prepared by Cynthia, with two members of a design group named the Fool—soon to loom large in Beatles business—as the only other guests. That day, John was no longer arrogant, as at the Indica show, nor surly, as Claes Oldenburg’s, but a convivial host who talked animatedly about what he had enjoyed in Grapefruit. He was particularly struck by Yoko’s idea for “A lighthouse…constructed from prisms which exist in accordance with the changes of the day”—an effect which, unbeknownst to her, was already being developed under the name hologram.