John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The first track laid down by the Beatles for their next album was one of John’s titled with this suddenly omnipresent buzzword. “I wanted to put out what I felt about revolution,” he would explain. “I thought it was about time we spoke about it, the same as I thought it was about time we stopped not answering about the Vietnam War. I had been thinking about it up in the hills in India. That’s why I did it. I wanted to talk.”

  Actually, John’s “Revolution” was not a call to take to the streets so much as a satire on all the well-fed young revolutionaries with their hotheaded desire to “change the world” and the iconic “pictures of Chairman Mao” hanging up behind their bathroom doors. It explicitly declined to give either moral or financial support to “minds that hate,” warning those bent in mere mindless destruction that “you can count me out.” By the time the song was ready to record, John seems to have felt he had taken altogether too soft a line. There was also the point that “destruction” could mean knocking down stubborn attitudes as well as buildings. So the crucial declaration became an equivocal “Count me out…in.”

  This first version (later to be known as “Revolution 1”) was performed at a slowish tempo and in an almost pensive tone, with John’s fuzzy lead guitar kept at low level and “Shooby-dooby” background vocals almost reminiscent of the Cavern club. It took up a total of forty hours’ studio time, including one session where, trying as ever to alter the timbre of his voice, John lay prone on the floor and sang into a microphone suspended from a boom. The most revolutionary element was Yoko: not simply being there but also taking part. The track lasted more than ten minutes, of which the last six consisted of John screaming “All right!” or just screaming, while Yoko moaned, hummed, chirruped, and intoned random phrases like “You become naked.”

  George Martin was more mystified than anyone by John’s decision to bring Yoko into the studio, felt “terribly inhibited” by her presence, but knew that to remonstrate with him “would rupture our relationship.” Similar diplomacy had to be exercised in regard to his other new songs which, in Martin’s view, came nowhere near “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “A Day in the Life,” or “I Am the Walrus.” Almost all were satirical in tone, with long, complicated titles that automatically excluded them from the singles market, and subtexts that would be lost on anyone who hadn’t shared his life over recent months. The voice was just as potent as ever, the craftsmanship just as meticulous (“revolution” carefully scanned with “evolution,” “real solution,” “contribution,” “constitution,” and “institution”) and the chord work just as ear-catching; the problem was with the mood. If Martin had not realized before, he did now: John was great only when totally serious.

  There were snapshots from Rishikesh to set alongside “Sexy Sadie,” his coded yah-boo to the Maharishi, and “Dear Prudence,” the ballad with which he’d sweet-talked Mia Farrow’s sister out of hiding. “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” memorialized another fellow student who would take time off from meditation to go tiger hunting, rather implausibly accompanied by his mother. “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” was at once a name-check for the baboons that used to steal his breakfast, an oblique reference to Yoko—and a lingering complaint about that unrevealed Answer. “I’m So Tired” was a more unkempt version of “I’m Only Sleeping,” recalling hours of insomnia and chain-smoking alone in his quarters, and cursing Sir Walter Raleigh (“He was such a stupid git!”) for ever having discovered tobacco. “Yer Blues,” written at the very bottom of that same depression, transposed the idiom from south to north, although its apocalyptic visions of despair and decay (“The eagle picks my eye / The worm he licks my bone…”) belong less to Muddy Waters and Blind Lemon Jefferson than to some acidhead King Lear.

  “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” came from the cover line on an American hunting magazine, horribly apposite to the current promiscuous shooting of beloved public figures in that country. It began as an elegiac love song and wandered through surreal terrain that apparently included a sports day at a nunnery (“Mother Superior jumped the gun”) before ending as a satiric soul barnstormer whose background chorus of “Bang! Bang! Shoot! Shoot!” is difficult to listen to today. “Glass Onion” taunted the overly earnest fans who ransacked his lyrics for hidden messages and meanings. References back to “Strawberry Fields,” “Lady Madonna,” and “The Fool on the Hill” lead to a spurious revelation: “The Walrus was Paul.” The sense of writing off the past was deliberate, as John later acknowledged. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just say something nice to Paul, that it’s all right and you did a good job over these few years holding us together.’ He was trying to organize the group…. so I wanted to say something to him. I thought, ‘Well, he can have it. I’ve got Yoko.’”

  If the other Beatles managed to reserve judgment on Yoko, the British public’s hatred and resentment of her for having abducted one of its four favorite sons grew daily more virulent. This was an era when racism still flourished unchecked at every level—the peculiar, sly British racism expressed in behind-hand jokes and farcical stereotypes, but none the less poisonous for that. In Yoko’s case, the “Jap” and “River Kwai” jibes were also tinged with ancient innuendo concerning the supposed sexual artfulness of Asian women. Private Eye magazine, still heavily influenced by John’s old friend Peter Cook, caricatured him as “Spiggy Topes, leader of The Turds singing group”; in a pun on the Kama Sutra word for vagina, Yoko was cast as “Okay Yoni.”

  But there was more than hostile print to endure; there was also the live animosity of female fans who waited for John endlessly outside Abbey Road Studios, and somehow managed to turn up wherever else he happened to go. When Yoko appeared with John, she was greeted by screams of “Chink!” or “Yellow!” One day, a bunch of yellow roses was thrust at her stems first, so that the thorns would prick her hands. Hitherto, John always had people protecting him; now he was obliged to shield Yoko from the mobbing, the name-calling, the ill-natured jostling, the voyeuristic leering.

  Being abused by complete strangers was nothing new to Yoko. She had become hardened to it as a child during the war, when her mother sent her out of Tokyo with her two siblings and the country people would shun or victimize them for their high caste. Later, too, when her family first settled in America, local children used to throw stones at her. “I’d always felt like an outsider, so this was kind of a familiar feeling—“The natives are stirring up again,’” she recalls. “There’s a narcissistic side of me that was totally in love with my work and had nothing to do with those pitiful people who were ignorant about me and saying things. And an incredibly romantic side of me thought, ‘This is a test. Fate is testing me to see if I’m going to give up this love affair.’ I thought of it almost as a Greek tragedy, because I was losing my daughter, I was losing my artistic credit, all because of my love for this man. I sensed that it would be a very difficult life for me—and I did sense that if I got involved, some terrible tragedy was waiting.”

  Few journalists at this stage bothered to talk to Yoko rather than abusing her from a distance. One who took the trouble was Anne Nightingale, a British music writer who became the first female disc jockey on the BBC’s new Radio 1 pop network. Behind the forbidding exterior, Nightingale discovered a friendly woman who talked about herself with the same instant openness that John did about himself, and whose weird ideas would have a eerie way of eventually coming true. She talked, for instance, of siting film cameras on Oxford Street to record the crowds that came and went every day—a vision of future closed-circuit TV surveillance. And to Nightingale she confided a clairvoyant terror of “ending up alone and shaking in a New York apartment.”

  Aside from Paul, George, and Ringo, only one other person’s opinion really mattered to John. Well before the story of him and Yoko was generally known, he took her to the bungalow overlooking Poole Harbour, where pedigreed cats padded over the well-vacuumed carpet and his MBE medal stood proudly on the TV set. “[He] had rung t
o say he was bringing someone down,” Aunt Mimi later recalled. “He came in all bright and breezy—typical John—and she followed behind.”

  Mimi’s response was one of pure horror, though the conventions of hospitality prevented her from voicing it as explosively as she would have liked. “I took one look [at Yoko] and thought, ‘My God, what is that?’ Well, I didn’t like the look of her right from the start. She had long black hair, all over the place, and she was small—she looked just like a dwarf to me. I told John what I felt while she was outside, looking across the bay. I said to him, ‘Who’s the poisoned dwarf, John?’”

  Very different was Yoko’s first impression of Mimi. “I thought she was beautiful, so tall and slim, with beautiful skin and bone structure. When John went to the bathroom and left us alone together, Mimi told me how she’d brought him up to be very good mannered, and always stand up when a woman came into the room.”

  In Yoko’s presence, Mimi contented herself with warning John of the effect their relationship would have on his popularity, citing the famous episode from her own youth where a young man close to the nation’s heart had sacrificed everything for an unsuitable woman. “She started saying how the Duke of Windsor had been so popular, but he lost it when he married Mrs. Simpson,” Yoko remembers. “He thought that he could get away with it because he was so popular,” Mimi said. “But he lost his popularity, and John, you’d better know that.’ Which meant she was saying it right in front of me, that I’m the Mrs. Simpson.”

  “John just laughed,” Mimi remembered. “He laughed it off, but he knew I didn’t like her and he knew I was a good judge of character. I couldn’t see what he saw in her and I thought it was wrong and nothing good would come of it.”

  Despite John’s recent adventure with acorns, he remained wholly committed to Apple as an expression of the Beatles’ collective will. To be sure, its official designation as Apple Corps—pronounced “core”—brought a breath of Lennon punnery wherever it cropped up. The company had moved into a large open-plan office at 75 Wigmore Street, just a few minutes by psychedelic Rolls from Montagu Square. John went in almost every day, determined to show himself every bit as much a director as Paul and happy to turn his mind to the smallest administrative matter, provided that Yoko was never more than a couple of centimeters away.

  The flagship division was, of course, the Apple record label on which henceforward the Beatles would appear with their own personally selected roster of artistes. A high-powered executive named Ron Kass was brought from the Liberty label to take charge, with Jane Asher’s brother Peter as head of A&R. And the first acquisitions certainly seemed to bear out Apple’s promise to foster talent from any quarter. Paul signed up Mary Hopkin, an eighteen-year-old Welsh folksinger who had won a television talent contest, and the Black Dyke Mills Band, a century-old brass band recruited from west Yorkshire mill workers. George brought in Jackie Lomax, a fellow Liverpudlian whose singing and songwriting he rated equally highly. No expense was spared in grooming these discoveries or on the media campaigns with which PR director Derek Taylor prepared to launch them. Further thousands were spent on the label’s logo, a green Granny Smith apple that might have been handpicked by Magritte for the A-side, a sliced-in-half one for the B-side. London’s most famous graphic artist, Alan Aldridge, was hired to write the copyright line in heartbreakingly beautiful italic script.

  The openness of the Beatles’ door—and wallet—was reiterated by a full-page newspaper advertisement, composed by Paul, urging anyone who believed they had musical talent and wanted to own a Bentley limousine to send their tapes to Apple. The result was an almighty deluge, not just of tapes by aspirant singers and bands but requests for finance across the whole creative field on which Beatles might be expected to smile, from impoverished poets in the Welsh wilds to seaside Punch and Judy men. Hundreds of applicants turned up to make their pitch in person; all but the most obviously certifiable were given a sympathetic hearing and many went away with large wads of Beatle cash, though few would ever be heard of again.

  As much as a business, Apple set out to become a kind of alternative welfare state. Plans were announced for an arts foundation that would award regular stipends to deserving applicants, even an “Apple school,” where the Beatles own children and those of their followers would be educated side by side. John took a particular interest in the school project, insisting it must bear no resemblance to the disciplined academies he and Paul had both attended, and bringing in their mutual childhood friend Ivan “Ivy” Vaughan, now a noted educationalist, to develop it. John’s other main protégé or charitable interest—depending on one’s point of view—was Magic Alex, by now established in a well-equipped workshop under the banner of Apple Electronics and supposedly at work on life-transforming inventions of every kind.

  Apple Films also acquired its own chief executive and burgeoning staff, and continued to issue grandiose mission statements—although, after the mauling given to Magical Mystery Tour, potential follow-up projects were being sifted with understandable caution. Fortunately, its obligations did not include supplying the third feature production that the Beatles owed to United Artists. In 1967, Brian had sanctioned a feature-length cartoon, translating their children’s song “Yellow Submarine” into a psychedelic fantasy in which their characters were voiced by soundalike actors. The plot conflated the song’s lyrics and Sgt. Pepper, with the cartoon Beatles voyaging by canary-colored submersible to a place called Pepperland to defeat a tribe of music-hating trolls called the Blue Meanies.

  A quartet of writers were involved, including the future bestselling novelist Eric Segal; even so, additional input had to be frequently sought from John. “Brodax [the producer] got half of Yellow Submarine out of my mouth,” he would recall. “[The writers] used to come to the studio and chat: ‘Hi, John old bean, got any ideas for the film?’ And I’d just spout out all this stuff, and they went off and did it.”

  The Beatles’ only direct involvement was with the music sound track, and that was hardly onerous. In addition to its iconic title song, the film recycled “All You Need Is Love” and demothballed three unreleased tracks from the Sgt. Pepper period, Paul’s “All Together Now” and George’s “It’s All Too Much” and “Only a Northern Song.” The rest of the score consisted of orchestral pieces composed and conducted by George Martin. Fearing that all this looked rather thin, the producer begged an original composition from John, who obliged with “Hey Bulldog,” “a good-sounding record,” so he later said, “that means nothing.” Genuinely witty and charming, the film managed to create Beatle magic by proxy and became a must-see that summer for anyone under thirty. However, its less-than-bumper-value sound track album was held back from release to prevent any conflict with the new song cycle still arduously taking shape at Abbey Road.

  By June, Apple had outgrown its Wigmore Street office and moved into a £500,000 Georgian town house at number 3 Savile Row, the heart of Mayfair’s bespoke tailoring district. The interior was painted white, carpeted in thick-piled apple green, filled with expensive furnishings, pictures, and fabrics, and equipped with a Cordon Bleu kitchen. A doorman in a gray frock coat was engaged to control the knot of girls—nicknamed Apple Scruffs by George—who instantly formed a round-the-clock guard beside the front steps. The basement was earmarked for a recording studio where the Beatles and other Apple talent could work in privacy and comfort. Laughing to scorn the comparatively simple technology that George Martin still used at Abbey Road, Magic Alex set to work designing a recording desk with a promised seventy-two-track capability.

  Mayfair also provided the setting for John’s first-ever solo art exhibition, which opened at the Robert Fraser Gallery in Mount Street on July 1. Since turning Paul McCartney on to Magritte, the gay Old Etonian Fraser had risen to even greater eminence among rock ’n’ roll’s demimonde. In 1967, he had been jailed for drug offenses alongside Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, but unlike them—the drug in his possession having been heroin—he had ser
ved his full term.

  The Fraser Gallery show, which John dedicated “to Yoko with love,” was saturated in her influence yet also as much a reflection of his childhood as any song he’d ever written. Its title, You Are Here, was a phrase familiar from map boards in the sprawling Liverpool parks of his boyhood, now given extra resonance by his sense of finally having found his way to himself. Spectators first encountered a series of charity collection boxes, among them the plaster orphan girl with one leg in braces who had stood outside so many High Street shops in the 1950s. As much as conceptual art, it seemed like self-prescribed therapy, finally laying to rest the fear and loathing he had always felt toward “cripples.”

  The exhibition proper consisted of a white canvas circle inscribed “You are here” in John’s handwriting, and an upturned hat with a handwritten card: “For the artist. Thank you.” At its opening, 360 helium-filled white balloons were released over Mayfair’s rooftops, each with a label repeating “You are here” and inviting its finder to write to John care of the Fraser Gallery. (A large number of replies subsequently came back, many expressing disappointment in his recent conduct or making racist comments about Yoko.) In a sarcastic comment on the show, a group of students from Hornsey Art College left a rusted bicycle outside, which so amused John that he instantly set it among his other exhibits.