John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  On September 20, Klein called a meeting in Apple’s boardroom for the formal signing of the Capitol contract. Paul’s presence in the building for the first time in months meant that John had all his fellow Beatles on hand to hear his news. But initially he held back, confining himself to a generalized complaint about Paul’s dominance of the band since the Magical Mystery Tour album. “I didn’t write any of that except Walrus…You’d already have five or six songs, so I’d think, ‘Fuck it, I can’t keep up with that.’” His tone was more hurt than accusatory. “So I didn’t bother, you know, and I thought I don’t really care whether I was on or not, I convinced myself it didn’t matter, and so for a period if you didn’t invite me to be on an album personally, if you three didn’t say, ‘Write some more songs ’cause we like your work,’ I wasn’t going to fight.”

  The insecurity and fatalism revealed in this outburst were surprising enough. But John did not stop there. Warming to his theme—though still wounded rather than angry—he accused Paul of always having overshadowed him, not only by writing more songs but also by inveigling the lion’s share of studio time. It was not a row, more like the airing of mutual grievances before a marriage counselor. Surprised, and not a little hurt himself, Paul conceded that he might have “come out stronger” on recent albums, but pointed out that often when they went into the studio, John would have only a couple of songs ready to record. John agreed his inertia had been a factor: “There was no point in turning ’em out—I didn’t have the energy to turn ’em out and get ’em on as well.”

  Now that the cards were on the boardroom table, he took a swipe at what he termed Paul’s “granny music,” the cute, tuneful family-pleasers that, to be fair, had been part of the Beatles’ repertoire since Cavern days. Had fairness entered into it, he might have paused to reflect that, of the two songs he singled out for denigration, “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” one featured a rousingly committed Lennon piano solo and the other was too Lennonishly sick to please any granny alive.

  He also called on Paul to share the belated guilt he himself was feeling over their treatment of George. Previewers of Abbey Road unanimously rated its two George songs, “Here Comes the Sun” and “Something,” as highly as anything on the album, including the Lennon-McCartney suite. “Something,” especially, was far beyond George’s recent range: passionate, sophisticated, and devoid of his usual Indian preachiness. It had got him onto the A-side of a Beatles single at long last and would ultimately attract more cover versions than any Beatles hit since “Yesterday.” John repeatedly cited it as the best track of the collection.

  Still, no one but Klein had any idea what was afoot. Paul was all for burying hatchets and pressing forward, convinced all would be well if they could free themselves from balance sheets and office politics and return to a place that—he almost pleaded with John and George to remember—had not always been so very terrible. “When we get in a studio, even on the worst day, I’m still playing bass, Ringo’s still drumming, we’re still there, you know….”

  It was the cue for John’s bombshell at last. “He hadn’t even told me he was going to do it,” Yoko remembers. “Paul was saying ‘Why don’t we do it this way and that way…’ John said ‘You don’t seem to understand, do you? The group is over. I’m leaving’”

  “I started the band, I disbanded it. It’s as simple as that,” John himself would recollect. “When I finally had the guts to tell the other three…they knew it was for real—unlike Ringo and George’s previous threats to leave. I must say I felt guilty at springing it on them at such short notice. After all, I had Yoko; they only had each other.” According to Paul, he added that he’d originally planned not to tell the others until after they signed the Capitol deal. “Good old John, he had to blurt it out. I remember him saying ‘It’s weird, this, telling you I’m leaving the group, but in a way it’s very exciting.’ It was like when he told Cynthia he was getting a divorce.”

  Capitol’s new royalty rate was not all to have been suddenly put in jeopardy. According to music-industry wisdom in 1969, not even the Beatles could split up and expect to continue selling records in significant quantity afterward. It was therefore vital that no word of John’s resignation should leak out until the Abbey Road album had realized its full market potential. “Paul and Klein convinced him to keep quiet,” Yoko remembers. “We went off in the car, and he turned to me and said, ‘That’s it with the Beatles. From now on, it’s just you—okay?’ I thought, ‘My God, those three guys were the ones entertaining him for so long. Now I have to be the one to take the load.’”

  In fact, the outside world needed no telling that the end of the Sixties also meant the end of the Beatles. The international media seethed with predictions of an official split any day now, and speculation as to whether the eventual breaking point had been Yoko, Linda McCartney, Allen Klein, or the problems with Apple. Paul’s continuing unexplained absence from the spotlight fueled a worldwide rumor, supported by ever more ingeniously specious “evidence,” that he was dead.

  Along with the general dismay and disbelief could be felt something close to panic. For Britain’s war babies in particular, whose astonishing inheritance this decade had been, the Beatles were as essential to enjoying life as the sun on their shoulders. The Beatles had led them through every change in their lot since 1963, from blazers and balloon dresses to caftans and beads, from hairdos to hair-don’ts, from lemonade shandy to Bacardi and Coke, from fish-and-chips to beef Stroganoff and coq au vin, from cod-liver oil to patchouli oil, from Children’s Favourites on the BBC Home Service to Ravi Shankar and Stockhausen, from Brighton and Margate to Torremolinos, Ibiza, and Katmandu, from Woodbines to Acapulco Gold, from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Come Together,” from “I Feel Fine” to “Revolution.” A future without these companions, who were as potent as gods yet closer than closest family, hardly bore thinking about.

  The Abbey Road album, released on September 26, brought a brief surge of hope that things might not really be so bad as the newspapers said—even that the likeliest instigator of the breakup might have relented after all. How could a band falling apart create harmonies as close and warm as they were on John’s “Because”? How could a band said to be irredeemably darkened by anger and bitterness make a track as radiantly optimistic as “Here Comes the Sun”?—written and sung by George, but saturated in John’s influence, down to its recurrent little sigh of “And I say…” The publicity photograph, taken at Tittenhurst Park a month earlier, put all such illusions to rest. It was a portrait of four people going through the motions without a gleam of enthusiasm or conviction, unable to summon up a smile among them.

  With renovations at Tittenhurst still not complete, John and Yoko continued to use the front ground-floor office at 3 Savile Row as headquarters for Bag Productions and their peace campaign, watched over by a taciturn robot from the Plastic Ono Band. Throughout dozens of media interviews each day, John kept his word not to drop the smallest hint about his resignation from the Beatles. His line was that Apple’s troubles had all now been successfully sorted out by Allen Klein and that, in its new, rationalized form, the company would be going forward, with himself as much its enthusiastic proponent as ever. “The circus has left town,” he told Melody Maker, “but we still own the site.”

  On October 20, “Cold Turkey” was released as a single in the United Kingdom, coupled with “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)” and credited to the Plastic Ono Band. When it appeared in the United States four days later, many radio stations took it to be about drug use rather than withdrawal and denied it airplay, but it still charted at number 30 (14 in Britain), giving John his second out-of-Beatles hit in four months. A week later, he and Yoko released their third LP collaboration under the title Wedding Album. On side one, they were heard calling each other’s names with varying intensity against a background of their own heartbeats; side two comprised interviews, conversations, and
random sounds from the Amsterdam bed-in. The record came in an opulent white box, accompanied by old-fashioned matrimonial trappings—a facsimile of their marriage certificate and a photograph of a slice of wedding cake. It made no impression on the UK album chart, but in America was briefly logged at number 178.

  Though the term helpline had yet to be coined, that is essentially what John and Yoko made themselves in late 1969, not only to like-minded antiwar campaigns and pressure groups but to any victim of oppression, injustice, or discrimination. Each week, they received hundreds of pleas to lend their support to causes for which there was no established lobby or which had exhausted all other avenues of appeal. They could rarely resist an underdog, whether represented by Britain’s gypsy population or Hispanic immigrants working for slave wages in California vineyards. The more obscure and hopeless the petition, the likelier was John’s heart to be stirred. A group of hippies needing a home were astounded to be given rent-free, indefinite use of Dorinish, the rocky islet off Ireland’s west coast where he had once planned to build a tower and live as an artist-hermit.

  Near the top of his campaign agenda this winter was the James Hanratty case. Twenty-six-year-old Hanratty had been hanged in 1962 for the infamous A6 murder, so becoming one of Britain’s last victims of capital punishment. Doubts had always surrounded the case, partly because of Hanratty’s well-substantiated alibi, partly because a more hardened criminal had subsequently hinted he was the real killer. Hanratty’s father was a decent man who believed passionately in his son’s innocence and had fought to clear his name in an era when such miscarriages of British justice were almost unthinkable. Worn down by resistance from the judiciary and the police, he turned as a last resort to John and Yoko. They immediately pledged their support, promising to make a film about the case, meanwhile adopting the slogan “Britain murdered Hanratty” with the same fervor that they accused America of murdering Vietnamese.

  Each new cause they took up inevitably brought a fresh onslaught of mockery and excoriation for dabbling in matters they did not understand. To John, being regarded as figures of fun was a positive asset in the arena they had chosen. “Laurel and Hardy, that’s John and Yoko,” he admitted. “And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi get shot.”

  Although the British government sent no troops to America’s aid in Vietnam, it remained equally culpable in John’s eyes for never opposing or explicitly condemning the war. And in 1968, Britain once more seemed a willing party to mass murder, this time within its so-called Commonwealth. When part of Nigeria seceded under the name of Biafra, Harold Wilson’s Labour administration supported the Nigerian regime’s brutal repressive measures, which resulted in the slaughter of thousands and the starvation of millions more. John’s protest marked his final escape from the old, conformist self that had accepted a public honor via the same prime minister three years before. He retrieved his MBE from the top of his Aunt Mimi’s TV set and, on November 25, dictated identical short notes to Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street, saying he was returning it as a protest against Vietnam, Biafra, and “Cold Turkey slipping down the charts.”

  Not for a long time had any recipient of a Royal honor repudiated it; not since 1965, in fact, when sundry apoplectic colonels and civil servants had disowned MBEs in protest against the Beatles’ investiture. And now that John had resigned from the order, several of those former members clamored for reinstatement. An elderly ex-policeman who wrote to Buckingham Palace for his medal back was told that it had been lost. When John heard this, he sent word that the applicant was welcome to the one he’d just returned.

  As Christmas loomed, only the most optimistic fans, shivering at the doorstep of 3 Savile Row, could delude themselves that the Beatles had any future together. If Paul’s intentions were still a mystery, both George and Ringo seemed to be following the trail John had blazed and preparing for life on the outside. Early in December, George took his first tentative steps back to live performance by touring with Eric Clapton and a band Clapton had put together around the American rockabilly duo Delaney and Bonnie. Ringo had played cameo roles in two big-budget feature films, Candy and The Magic Christian, the latter alongside Peter Sellers, and was considering several further offers. Ironically, after so many years of near-muteness, he had beaten both John and Paul in releasing a solo album, a collection of standards entitled Sentimental Journey.

  On December 11, the premiere of The Magic Christian took place at the Odeon cinema, Kensington, graced by those stalwart Beatlemaniacs Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. John and Yoko arrived in a limousine decorated with a large placard reading BRITAIN MURDERED HANRATTY. They took care to draw up right behind the Royal car, so their message would be seen by as many photographers as possible. But the next morning, no paper even mentioned it. Three days later, Hanratty’s father appeared at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, calling for a public inquiry into his son’s conviction. On the ground beside him was a writhing white sack labeled A SILENT PROTEST FOR JAMES HANRATTY. This time, the occupants really were John and Yoko, as they proved later by accompanying Hanratty senior and other campaigners to hand in a petition at 10 Downing Street.

  As if John did not already have enough product on offer, the Plastic Ono Band’s debut at the Toronto rock-’n’-roll festival was released as an album, Live Peace in Toronto, on December 12. To promote it, the band took to the stage once more, this time at London’s Lyceum ballroom, with John, Yoko, and the robots augmented by a vast lineup, including George Harrison, gigging with John for the first time since 1966, as well as Eric Clapton, Delaney and Bonnie, Billy Preston, Keith Moon from the Who, and disc jockey Jeff Dexter on tambourine. The performance was filmed by the International Times’s John Hopkins and was meant to have been shown simultaneously on the video monitor inside one of the robots—an idea later adopted by rock acts everywhere—but unluckily the equipment malfunctioned. “The sound was atrocious,” Dexter recalls. “But no one seemed to care.” Yoko began the show inside a white bag, then emerged to sing “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” punctuated by screams of “Britain murdered Hanratty!” It was to be John’s last-ever live performance in Britain.

  Back in the summer, he and Yoko had begun discussing ways to link their peace campaign to the alleged season of goodwill. One short-lived idea was to persuade newspapers to run the headline PEACE DECLARED with the same prominence that WAR DECLARED usually received; another was to beam it out over the Telstar space satellite rather like a follow-up to “All You Need Is Love.” Finally they settled for the handbill-posting technique Yoko had often used for her art shows, but taken up a few notches by John’s wealth. On December 16, a huge white billboard appeared amid the hyperactive neon in Times Square, New York, and identical ones simultaneously at the hubs of London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Berlin, Montreal, Toronto, Tokyo, and Port of Spain, Trinidad. Their message spelled out in plain black type was “WAR IS OVER if you want it, Happy Christmas, John and Yoko.”

  As news organizations everywhere prepared reviews and retrospectives of the past year and past decade, one voice above all was sought to provide definitive commentary on both. BBC television made a documentary entitled The World of John and Yoko, to be screened on December 30, filming their subjects over five days, at Apple, in the recording studio, and in bed. Rolling Stone magazine named John “Man of the Year,” opining that “a five-hour talk between John Lennon and [President] Nixon would be more significant than any Geneva summit conference between the USA and Russia.” The greatest accolade came when Britain’s ATV company (the same that had snapped up Northern Songs) invited three eminent intellectuals to make a short film on their respective choices as “Man of the Decade.” The veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke chose John F. Kennedy; the left-wing American writer Mary McCarthy chose North Vietnam’s leader, Ho Chi Minh; the anthropologist and sociologist Desmond Morris chose John.

  Strolling through the grounds of Tittenhurs
t Park with Morris, Yoko, and a camera crew, John could not have sounded more upbeat, generally and personally. “Everybody is talking about the way [youth culture] is going and the decadence and the rest of it…. Not many people are noticing all the good that came out of the last ten years…Woodstock…is the biggest mass of people ever gathered together for anything other than war. Nobody had that big an army and didn’t kill someone or have some kind of violent scene like the Romans or whatever, and even a Beatle concert was more violent than that, you know….

  “I’m full of optimism because of the contacts I’ve made personally throughout the world…knowing there’s other people around that I can agree with, you know. I’m not insane and I’m not alone. That’s on a personal level and of course the Woodstock, Isle of Wight, all the mass meetings of the youth [are] completely positive for me…. And this is only a beginning. The Sixties bit was just a sniff. The Sixties was just waking up in the morning and we haven’t even got to dinner-time yet and I can’t wait, you know. I just can’t wait. I’m glad to be around and it’s gonna be great and there’s gonna be more and more of us and [peering humorously into the camera] whatever you’re thinking there, Mrs. Grundy of Birmingham on toast, you know you don’t stand a chance.”