There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  On November 12, 1992, I went with Phil to Rolling Stone magazine’s 25th anniversary party at the Four Seasons restaurant. Phil, who was an amazing mimic, spent quite a lot of time that night doing his impersonation of Ross Perot. Then Martin Scorsese came over to the table. He started to tell Phil how much Phil’s music meant to him growing up in Little Italy in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s. Phil stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge Scorsese. I kicked him and hissed, “Phil, this is the greatest living movie director standing here talking to you and you are being rude.” He whispered to me, “He stole my music for Mean Streets.” I said he should be honored that his music was used in Mean Streets. Marty, who became increasingly more uncomfortable with Phil’s snub, eventually edged away. Later in the evening, Marty was standing and chatting with Lou Reed and Keith Richards. Phil looked over at them and asked me to “Go get Scorsese.” Oh no, I said, I’m not getting in the middle of any trouble. He assured me it would be all right. So, I went over and relayed the “invitation,” and asked Keith to accompany us. Scorsese went over to Phil Spector. Phil Spector hugged him. And that was that.

  *

  I thought about all of this while recently watching Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary, and reading over my notes and transcripts from that day I spent with John Lennon on East 52nd Street. There were many—many—nights when I sat up very late listening to Phil Spector talk about John. I have many letters from Phil about his feelings for John. Phil revered Irving Berlin and Stephen Foster and Cole Porter and Jerome Kern. Often, when we were out, we would literally sing the songs from the Kern musical Show Boat together. We both idolized Lenny Bruce—whom he had known well, had recorded for Philles Records, whose daughter Kitty was a friend of ours, and whose routines Phil and I could both recite word for word. But I don’t think anyone was as meaningful to Phil as was John Lennon. When I took Phil to Yankee Stadium on August 29, 1992, to see U2 (and he corralled a phalanx of policemen to escort him onto the field to the soundboard, where we watched the show), he became obsessed. After the show, he talked to me about U2 until around five a.m., comparing Bono to John Lennon. The following day I received several faxed letters from Phil that basically said he had not met anyone since John who had the insight, imagination, fire, enthusiasm, intelligence, voice and pure innovative rock and roll roots in his heart and soul that Bono had. He went on to say that he rarely got excited about anything, but as a songwriter himself, he saw that talent in Bono, as much as he had with John. He wanted to record Bono in mono. They never did work together. My good friend, the great producer Rick Rubin, a Beatles fanatic who has worked with Bono, always wanted to meet Phil. I never could get them together.

  • • •

  Tony King, who ran Apple Records from 1970–1975 and who organized the recording of John’s Mind Games album, was in Los Angeles during John’s crazed period and the Spector sessions. Later on, Tony became friendly with John and Yoko when John went back “home” to the Dakota. Tony was a good friend of Elton John’s and he brought John and Elton together to record “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.” John promised Elton that if the song went to Number One, he’d sing it with him onstage at Madison Square Garden. It went to Number One. So, on November 28, 1974, John performed it onstage with Elton at the Garden. Yoko sent gardenias backstage, but she didn’t want John to know she was at the concert. Tony King escorted her to a seat in the eleventh row. John was a nervous wreck, but he would have been worse had he known Yoko was in the audience. At the midnight supper after-party in the Grand Ballroom of the Pierre Hotel, John told me, “I had a great time. But I wouldn’t want to do it for a living.” Among the guests at the party were Loraine and Peter Boyle, Peter Rudge, Elliott Gould, Cheech and Chong, Angela Lansbury, Atlantic Records co-founder Jerry Wexler, and Yoko, wearing white. Uri Geller was there, bending spoons. It was clear to anyone who saw the Lennons that night that it was only a matter of time before John would move back “home,” to Yoko. By February, he was back in the Dakota.

  *

  And, despite the fact that years later he would tell me he never phoned anyone, ever, in 1975 John called, saying, in that unmistakable voice: “Hello, it’s me, John, Beatles,” and invited me to the Dakota for a chat. He wasn’t pushing an album at the time, but the New Musical Express wanted an update about his deportation problems, and it was to John’s advantage to keep his name in the papers. We talked on February 19, 1975—I noted that it was my mother’s birthday. The Lennons’ seventh-floor apartment had the tall, mahogany doors that still mark the Dakota’s hallways. You left your shoes at the door outside their apartment; this was a Japanese custom but practical as well—there was white carpeting in the apartment. There were Persian carpets, art deco objects and Yoko’s “art.” The art included life-sized Barbie doll mannequins kneeling in front of vases filled with roses, a bandaged chair, and an empty glass on a white column. At the time, it was amusing. Today, some sucker would probably pay a fortune for it. And if I were to tell Yoko today that she was a precursor to Damien Hirst, Matthew Barney and that bunch, I’m sure she would wholeheartedly agree. In fact, it’s not that far-fetched a comparison. All of this stuff co-existed in their apartment with John’s tape recorders, guitars, a jukebox, and a white baby grand piano. Gold albums lined the long hallway that led to the large kitchen where John and I sat and talked. By now, I had enough of a rapport with the Lennons that Yoko was comfortable remaining downstairs in their office—in one of the several apartments she had purchased in the building—while I spoke to John for hours, upstairs in their kitchen.

  *

  I told John he seemed ecstatic to be back home with Yoko. “I am, I am,” he said. “This is no disrespect to anybody else I was having relationships with, but I feel like I was running around without me head on, but still functioning. You don’t want to admit it while it’s happening, that’s what was making me go barmy. You think you’re just going to a party but you end up throwing up in the toilet. Now I feel I’ve got me head back on. Yoko and I were always in touch, either on the phone or one way or the other, but I just sort of came home, is what happened. I feel like I went to get a coffee and a newspaper somewhere and it took a year.”

  He described his deportation situation as “hellish.” Basically, he said, the government stance was that he had to leave the country. “It started because of my conviction in England for marijuana, which was planted by Sergeant Pilcher—which everybody knows by now because the guy’s in jail for some other case.” (This was the same policeman who busted Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards and others at Keith’s house in Redlands, England, in the 1960s.) “We were busted by about twenty people,” John said, “there was dogs, it’s a whole film. They wouldn’t let us get dressed, they threatened to break the door down. It was [even] questioned in the Houses of Parliament: why were so many people needed to bust two people? It took them hours—they were all over the house, they could have planted us with diamonds and we’d have had no chance of controlling them. I was a wreck, just panic stricken. Cops. In jolly England. I still half believed [that stuff] about the good old ‘bobby’ helping you down the street. And I was really nervous about Yoko, because we’d just got to living together, it was all in public, and I thought they’d deport her, they’d deport us, so I just copped a plea, thinking what the hell, it was a misdemeanor. But they still write letters to the papers, claiming that Lennon is a convicted criminal . . . he wants to live in this land of milk and honey and that’s too bad. No mention of how much taxes I’m paying. It’s been going on since 1971 and it’s just crazy.” I asked him where else he would want to live—Canada? “You know they always say that,” John laughed, “because whenever I talk to Canadians, they ask me if I like Canada. And I say yes, I like Canada. I like Toronto, and Montreal, I don’t know much about the rest of it. Then the next thing I know, they say I’m going to live there. Every country I’ve been to I’ve thought, could I live here? So I was always answering
on that level. It’s that old bit where if you’re in some small town people say to you, ‘what are you doing here?’ Like, ‘surely you don’t want to live with us or even visit our town.’ When I was driving through America or if I’m anywhere, people say why are you here?? Of all places . . . Everybody’s always thinking our place is nowhere, nobody would want to be here not even for a minute.”

  *

  He went on and on about Senator Strom Thurmond and about how he and Yoko had been wiretapped on Bank Street and how many famous Nazis were living in America and no one hassled them. “There was two guys following me around in the car,” he said. “This was before Watergate, remember, and people were thinking, Oh that crazy Lennon . . . what an egomaniac, who’s gonna follow him around? Why would they want to bother with him for? They were bothering with me because we were associated with Rubin, Sinclair, these little rallies and being seen around with them people. It’s like a mini-Watergate case.” (My transcripts of just this conversation run over eighty pages.) He offered me tea. “Want it with milk or what?” Then, back to the Nazis. “There’s a list of Nazis as long as your arm, with all the things they’d done—one of them even ended up holding a service in Congress at one time. It’s just ludicrous, it’s Kafka.” I asked if the President was aware of this? “You bet,” he said, then added, “You can’t have one junkie in the White House and try and kick another out.” What? “Well, George [Harrison] passed through, you know. No, I’m being flippant, neither of us are junkies.” (Except that on some level, they probably, at that time, were.) I asked how long this political harassment could go on. “As long as they can go on. As long as I’ve got the money. If they don’t stop it, it’ll go to the Supreme Court. I mean if they can take [Australian singer] Helen Reddy, they can take me, is what I say.”

  I asked John how much of his time was taken up with the deportation case as opposed to, say, music. He said it was on his list of lawsuits. “People sue you if you just bump into them on the street. Just ask any rock musician how many lawsuits he’s in. The more money there is, the more lawsuits there are. The bigger the artist, the more lawsuits. I mean, people sue me for anything. I don’t know how it happens. One minute you’re talking to somebody, the next minute they’re suing you.” I burst out laughing, then apologized. “No, it is funny,” he said. “You have to laugh about it, it’s just so ludicrous.” He talked about how it helped to be visible, to have a record out. “Because,” he said, “it reminds the powers that be of me and what I represent. Power is power to those people, and whatever power I have, they’re aware of it. Power doesn’t frighten power, it makes it respect it in their business. You’ve got the bomb, we got the bomb, everything’s okay. If you ain’t got the bomb you don’t even get a look in. So I’m always aware of keeping my bomb. Even though I blow it a few times, I always manage to put my bomb back together again, because that power is necessary.” I asked if he thought this would all have a happy ending? Would he one day be knighted by the Queen of England? “I’m not really interested if I get knighted at seventy,” he said. “I want it now. Not the knighthood; I’ll take a green card and a clean passport. And cash I earn in the bank, in my own name, and I’ll let my music, or my art, speak for me. If they give me a knighthood, I’ll deal with it then. Sir John.” He laughed.

  *

  We talked for hours about whether Brian Epstein was the mastermind who packaged the Beatles. “Everything is true and not true about everything. That’s one thing I’ve learned. Both things are both true.” I told him that was a very Yoko answer. Wasn’t there a time, I asked, when the Beatles were naive? “Oh, we weren’t naive,” he said. “We were no more naive than he was. I mean what was he? He was serving in a record shop. He saw this group of rockers, greasers, playing loud music and a lot of kids paying attention to it. So he thought, Well, this is a business to be in. He liked the look of us, and thought, I’ll be a manager, it was as simple as that. We had nobody better and we said, all right, you can do it. Then he went shopping around, getting us work. We were pretty greasy. And outside of Liverpool, when we went down South in the leather outfits, the dancehall promoters didn’t really like us; they thought we looked like a gang of thugs. Then he said, ‘Look, if you wear this suit . . .’ We liked suits. Everybody wanted a nice, black, sharp suit. We liked the leather and the jeans, but everybody wanted a nice suit, even to wear offstage. Yeah man, I’ll have a suit. So, if you wear a suit, you get this much money. All right, wear a suit, you get more money, wear a suit, I’ll wear a fucking balloon if they’re going to pay me. Epstein fronted for the Beatles. He played a great part at whatever he did, he was theatrical, that was for sure, and he believed in us. But he certainly didn’t package us the way they said [he did]. If he was so clever at packaging products, what happened to Gerry and the Pacemakers and Cilla Black? Where are those packages? Only one package survived, the original package. We weren’t picked up off the street, we allowed him to take us. Paul wasn’t that keen. He’s more conservative in the way he approaches things, and that’s all well and good. Maybe he’ll end up with more yachts.”

  *

  I told John there were rumors that he hadn’t been able to see George Harrison at George’s concert with Ravi Shankar at Madison Square Garden. And I asked about the supposed kerfuffle with lawyers and signing the papers that dissolved the Beatles. “I like George and I love him,” John said, “and we’re all right, and I saw him and there was no big deal. But the business was always interfering with the pleasure. And it was hard to deal with each other anyway. I’ve seen a lot of Paul and Ringo over the last two or three years, because they come to town a lot. I see Ringo in L.A., and when Paul is in New York, they always come to see me. George and I were trying to talk to each other after having not talked for three years, except vaguely, through lawyers. Plus he had the pressure of his concert and all the shlack that was going ’round it, so we just tried to communicate in the hotel. I just hung around there for a couple of days, virtually living in the hotel with him. But it’s still hard to communicate because he was in the middle or the end of a psychic drama he was going through. And then, I just didn’t happen to turn up on the day that they wanted [the papers] signed. But I signed it in the end, in Disneyland. I wanted to go over it one [more] time. I’d already seen [his show] in Long Island, at Nassau Coliseum, so I wasn’t going to go to Madison Square Gardens [sic] because I don’t really enjoy sitting in shows, no matter whose they are. Because you either have to go backstage with all that hassle or you’ve got to sit in the front. I did that with Elton in Boston, but I got all that, ‘Oh look who’s there’ business. I know they all do it, Mick . . . they’re always doing it, but it wears the shred out of me, sitting in concerts. I’d rather hear records anyway. There are very few people I want to see in concerts; I’d only go to friends. I prefer records, I always did. It’s like watching a painter paint. Just give me the painting.”

  “My personal opinion about George,” John continued, “and I can’t blame him because I understand it, but I think he should have kept Ravi separate. It just doesn’t work. Although I’m no one to talk about what works and what doesn’t work, but it’s easier to see it from a distance. Apparently some shows were all right, the one I saw was a good show. And I don’t know whether it was because Ravi wasn’t there, but that’s my opinion. I think Ravi’s great and all that, but I’m with the kids; I want to see George do George: George Beatle or George ex-Beatle, whatever it is. I think it’s a case of being cut off—either deliberately, or because he’s so involved with the Eastern trip. It’s easy to get cut off. If you’re just surrounded by people who aren’t rocking, you forget what it is.”

  • • •

  On November 14, 1976, a little more than a year after that conversation with John, I visited George Harrison in his rented house at the top of Beverly Glen Canyon in Los Angeles. The beard and the mustache were gone, his hair was slightly wavy, and in his own words, George Harrison was “cute” again. He wo
re a denim jacket trimmed with satin, jeans and a Dark Horse (his record label logo) t-shirt. He smoked Gitanes cigarettes nonstop. He was much smaller and initially, far more amusing than I had expected. Derek Taylor had arranged for us to do an interview to promote George’s new solo album, Thirty Three & 1/3, because, George said, “I think I needed to come around again. Like another lap—remember me, folks?” There was a press dinner that night at Chasen’s, and all of this promotional activity was an attempt to overcome some of the negative press he’d received for dragging Ravi Shankar and all those Indian musicians on tour with him in 1974 to an audience that really just wanted to hear “Here Comes the Sun.” George admitted to me that when he sings, he knows he sounds “sad,” even though, he said, “I’ve written a lot of funny lyrics. There are a lot of jokes. But because I sound sad, and because some people just don’t like Indian musicians, well . . .” he trailed off. “For me,” he said, “the problem with [Paul McCartney’s] Wings concerts were that there weren’t enough Indian musicians.”

  During our very lengthy talk, he had a lot to say. Occasionally, he sounded bitter. He said the Beatles had sold fifty million albums but were treated shoddily by their record company. In fact, he spoke much more about money and record deals and record label executives than I’d ever heard from John Lennon—with whom I’d spent far more time. He talked, as John had, about how he was getting used to lawsuits. He talked about the 1976 plagiarism lawsuit against him for his song “My Sweet Lord” in great—great—detail. He had never, he said, thought his song sounded like the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine,” that the guy who wrote “He’s So Fine” had died in the late 1960s and had never even heard “My Sweet Lord.” “But,” George said, “if he’d been a musician, he probably wouldn’t have flinched.” How his own inspiration for “My Sweet Lord” had been the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day.” George told me, “I just loved that song. The chord changes in ‘My Sweet Lord’ were the same as ‘Oh Happy Day,’ and I was trying to come up with something like that.” He said that the whole thing had made him so paranoid that he was afraid to pick up a guitar. “I suppose if it was the only song I’d ever written I would feel bad, you know? But I feel . . . annoyed. Because I know the motives behind that lawsuit weren’t very nice. I saw that guy in court and I wouldn’t buy a secondhand motorcar off him. It was very emotional to be in court, playing a guitar. And there were all the secretaries from the other courts, everybody coming in, let’s see George giving a concert.”