He went on and on about Indian music and the Hare Krishnas and Hinduism. He talked about god and Vedic literature and Swami Muktananda. No one who has ever done a proper interview with him would ever describe George Harrison as the “quiet Beatle.” At that time, I didn’t even bother to transcribe our entire talk. He was very serious and extremely intense. And when I, an atheist, could no longer bear the spiritual path this conversation had taken, I asked him how he balanced a spiritual life and living in a world of drugged-up rock and roll musicians, which can be . . . “Seedy?” he offered. “Yes,” he admitted, “that’s probably the most difficult of all, because I really relate to these people. I love them, and they’re my friends, and from time to time I’ve really gotten into that—being crazy and boogying . . . parties and whatever all that involves. I go from being completely spiritual and straight. Then, after awhile, I’ve gone back in with the rockers again. But I’ve got a good sort of tilt mechanism in me. And when that hasn’t worked, I’ve had hepatitis.”
*
George talked more about how, when he took all these fantastic musicians on the road and “gave people some other experience than just watching Led Zeppelin all their lives, they don’t like that. People have a fear of the unknown. They’d rather you just go out and sing ‘She Loves You.’ So, now I’m just going to be selfish and write my own songs, make my own music, and sing all the nice tunes that people like.” I asked, why was that selfish? “It’s the glorification of myself,” he said. I suggested that, in actual fact, wasn’t he really pleasing a paying audience as opposed to trying to ram something down people’s throats? He finally admitted yes, okay, a lot of people don’t like Indian musicians. I pointed out that a lot of people don’t like Yoko’s wailing either, but John was intent on including it in his own work. George was silent for awhile, and then said, “Well, I don’t like the idea of compromising myself down to the point of like, say, Wings, or Paul. I could sing all the cute songs and everybody would love me. But it’s not very . . . creative.” He talked about Billy Preston and how great he was, and how he never could do what the Stones did. Which, he said, was to let Billy sing one or two songs and as soon as he got people dancing, just cut him off quickly and then “Mick swings across the audience on a rope. That’s disgusting. Billy is such a fine musician. If you’re going to have him, let Billy be Billy. Don’t have him and then strap him to the back of the stage.”
George talked about how difficult it was being an ex-Beatle. “People in America think we got together somewhere around 1964 and split up in 1968. But I went to school with Paul, he was a year elder to me, and we grew up from when I was thirteen and met him, and were together for seventeen years until we split. When you’re that close, you just lock each other up in pigeonholes. Musically, Ringo and John and I had no problem. But musically with Paul, I had a terrible problem, because later on I would come to the session, go to get my guitar out of the case, and he’d say, ‘No, no, we don’t want any guitar yet. Let’s do that later.’ So over time, it stifled my feelings. And I just had to get out of there.” I told George that when I had once asked Paul McCartney about all this, Paul had said that he could see where George would think the way he did, because George had been playing with such [other] “funky” musicians. But Paul disagreed with George’s assessment that the Beatles weren’t a very good band. “Well,” George said, “when you put it all together, it’s great. But each piece of it, it’s not that good. Ringo’s a great rock and roll drummer, but he’d be the first to admit that technically, he’s not very good. John was a lousy guitar player, but he played certain things that nobody else could play. He was brilliant and his singing was fantastic. Paul had amazing charm and he could write those sweet melodies. I don’t know what I had, but when you put it all together, it was the Beatles.”
As day turned into night, George continued talking. “There just was a time,” he said, “around 1968, when everybody’s egos started going crazy. A lot of feelings got hurt. And then there was the problem, which was the biggest problem of all: there was no way that Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney were going to be in the Beatles. That just helped put the nail in the coffin. Let It Be was the final straw for me,” George said. “On the very first day, soon as we started playing, it got back to ‘you do this, do that, don’t do this, do that.’ I thought Christ, I’d hoped [Paul] had woken up to that by now. But it was just misery. And with Yoko there, wailing ‘John . . . John’ on one side, and Paul waving his finger on the other side, I thought, I don’t need this.” As for Beatles nostalgia, George said (and this was in 1976), “I expected it. Beatles nostalgia was there anyway, it just took Capitol Records to package it. I can see it coming every ten years. Obviously, if you own the Beatles’ masters and you can do whatever you like with it, you can create nostalgia every time you have a deficit on your statements.”
• • •
On July 27, 1976, at one p.m., on one of the hottest days of that summer, John and Yoko arrived at the Immigration Building in lower Manhattan with lawyer Leon Wildes for the hearing that would end John’s four-year struggle to obtain permanent residence in the United States. Security was tight. The tiny courtroom was packed with about fifty people. John had a shorter haircut than the last time I’d seen him. He wore a white shirt, black suit, black tie, and black cowboy boots. He was tan, slim, and appeared healthy. Yoko had her hair pulled back from her face; she wore a long white dress and a serene expression. Peter Boyle and Bob Gruen were there for support. Assembled character witnesses included the aging actress Gloria Swanson—who shared an interest with the Lennons in the evils of eating sugar—Geraldo Rivera, Norman Mailer, and the Japanese designer Isamu Noguchi. The judge actually said to Noguchi: “I’ve enjoyed your coffee table for years.” John muttered to me, “How do you like this cast Yoko produced for me? It’s like The Gong Show.” Had he ever even watched The Gong Show? “Oh it’s wonderful,” he said. “They have all this amateur talent, and people hit a gong when they’re terrible. Eighty-year-old women dancing in men’s trousers, singing ‘Goin’ Through the Rye.’” The hearing appeared to be a formality; the foregone conclusion was that John would get his green card, which he did. I asked him, now what about making records? “It’s not just making records or getting musicians together,” he said. “First, I’ve got to make a bloody deal. I can’t think about making music. I just want to clear up all the lawsuits, be with the family, rest for a while longer, and travel. Then I can think about recording.” John got his green card, which was really pale blue, and he thanked Yoko: “I’ve always said there’s a great woman behind every idiot.” He told me that now he could go to Japan to “show the baby to relatives.” Then he and Yoko went off to the Upper East Side ice cream parlor Serendipity to celebrate. So much for the evils of sugar.
*
And then, after that four-year battle to remain in this country, the Lennons spent the next three and a half years rumored to be holed up in the Dakota on drugs and turning away old friends. Except that in fact, they traveled, went to parties and baby showers and Loraine and Peter Boyle’s wedding on October 21, 1977, where John was Peter’s best man. We all went from the four p.m. wedding ceremony at the UN Chapel, to a dinner at the French restaurant Lutèce, and then, for some reason, to a party for Rod Stewart at the Regency Hotel. In 1980, when the Lennons “re-emerged”—which to most people meant they returned to the music scene—it was to record Double Fantasy. The Lennons were paying for the album themselves, then would sell it to the highest bidder. That turned out to be David Geffen, because he showed respect to Yoko, he spoke to her and not John about business—which both Lennons appreciated. There was a rumor, too, that the couple threw the birthdates of various executives into their son Sean’s crib and he picked Geffen’s.
In August of 1980, I visited John and Yoko at the Hit Factory studio during the recording sessions for Double Fantasy. I found John in the control room, eating custard out of a cannoli. He told me he’d been on a sug
ar and caffeine binge. There were raisins and nuts in a bowl, and I was offered tea, coffee or Perrier. “If there’s anything stronger it’s probably going on in the back room,” John said. He talked a lot about a boat trip he had taken where he sailed the ocean with a captain and an instructor. “Yoko wouldn’t go,” he said. “Not unless it was Onassis’ yacht.” Yoko said, laughing, “I don’t like to slum it.”
We talked that day for a long time. And then a month later, in September, I went back to see them—this time at the Record Plant, where they were mixing the album. We did a lengthy interview about the album and their life over the past few years. They decided I would interview Yoko first, John second, and then, maybe the two of them together. Yoko started out by talking to me about women—how women were better for their inner wisdom and men were better for their outer wisdom, because the outer world had been structured by men. She talked about how she had been so involved with her work, but John had more experience with the world. About how so many women built their lives around men, but that was not her thing. With her, she said, it was always men building their lives around her. “Because,” she actually said, “I was Van Gogh. And whoever was with me was an assistant.” Then she said, “I thought men were less intelligent than me, but they could lift heavy things for me. But when I met John, I met another strong character. So, John could not only lift heavy things for me, he also had a sensitive soul. And through him, I learned what it was like to be a guy in this society. It’s not all that easy.”
*
At some point during my talk with Yoko, John came in and said that it would be best if he and I talked then, because there was a lull in the control room. We moved into another room and I turned on my tape recorder. I asked John when he decided to return to this rat race. He said he went through every thought you could possibly go through over the last five years. The first eighteen months it was hard for him to stop from jumping onto a piano, he said, because he’d been turning out singles and albums since 1962. So why now? “Because Sean’s five, I’m forty, and I’ve got the songs.” He described being a “househusband” in painstaking and lengthy detail. How he took care of Sean and oversaw every morsel of food that went into the child’s mouth every day. He described a typical day: he would wake up, oversee breakfast and the play periods, then lunch, then teeth-brushing, then perhaps a foray (a nanny would take Sean to the park while John took a nap), then dinner. He laughingly described himself as a “rich housewife,” because in truth, he had assistants, nannies, cooks and housekeepers. Yoko spent her time downstairs in the office, taking care of the family business, buying cattle, and purchasing additional apartments in the Dakota. John said he regretted not having been there for his older son Julian, who was born while John was in the Beatles and constantly on tour. It is possible that this was all a spin on things for my benefit, or for the benefit of the readers of my article. Every marriage has an unspoken—or spoken—deal, arrangement, something, that is known only to the people in it. Was he really happy to be home, safe, besotted by his son? Probably. He said he and Yoko made a conscious decision to live this way, and there can be no question that he was unequivocally present for the first five years of Sean’s life. Then again, there were always rumors that he was, in fact, drugged and depressed, and not making music because Yoko’s astrologist decreed that the stars weren’t aligned correctly during that five-year period. We will never truly know, because the only people who have written about this are people who were either disgruntled or fired employees, or disreputable authors who never met the couple. Of the two people who were actually there, one is dead and the other still attempts to keep some things private. But John seemed happy on that day we talked, and took great delight in describing having settled in at home. (I remembered how, five years earlier, he had told me he never wanted to settle down. But in the midst of this happy reverie, I chose not to bring that up.) He did admit that baking bread or preparing food for the family wasn’t as satisfying an accomplishment as writing and recording a song. “There’s nothing to show for it when you’re done,” he said. “But if you think about it, I’ve been under pressure since I was twenty-one or twenty-two—that’s in public, being very famous. That’s a long time to be expected to be churning out thousands upon thousands of things. And even if it was a hit, there came a point where I didn’t want to be churning out things anymore. Mal Evans, who worked for us, said he saw Elvis [Presley] recently, but I would never go see him, even though I worshipped him when I was a kid—before he went into the army. I would never go see him in Vegas. And I asked Mal, ‘What was he like?’ And Mal said, ‘Well, if you pretended you were sixteen, then it was all right.’ I don’t want to be a person that people have to pretend they’re sixteen to be able to see.” He went on to say that here he was, rocking and rolling, but that if it ceased to be fun, now he knew he could walk away—because he’d done it before. He talked about his new songs and said, “There is no way I could have written ‘Starting Over’ in 1974. I was a miserable son of a bitch. I’d split from Yoko, I’d been drinking myself nearly dead, making an ass out of myself, being a drunk in public. I’d always been a bit intense, but this was really a miserable period. I count myself lucky to be alive. I could have killed myself, easy. If I get depressed I think I want to jump out of a window. But it usually passes. I mean I was stepping out of moving cars in 1973 in Los Angeles.” I pointed out that when we spoke in 1974, he didn’t say any of this; that he seemed happy at the time, and had dismissed the craziness of his time in L.A. “Well,” he said, “I was pretty out of it. I’ve always been like that, even as a youngster. But then, I was surrounded by the Beatles and managers and they would protect me and cover for whatever I was doing. Paul or Brian Epstein would shuffle me off into a room before I would go wandering the streets again, looking for action. When I split from Yoko, there was nobody to say ‘No.’ I would be dead or insane or both if it wasn’t for her.”
*
We talked that day for hours. He seemed indignant about people—some critics, some other rock stars—who had publicly criticized him for “hiding” in his house. “People said I went ‘underground,’” he laughed. “Underground? I was living above the park. Mick [Jagger] was going on and on about me—how ‘John never calls and he keeps changing his number all the time and he’s hiding behind the kid.’ Everybody was trying to get me down to a recording session. They all thought, what John needs is a good session. As if they fucking know anything. They don’t know me at all; all they’ve got is their image of a person they’ve been in a disco with or something. The fact is, I never called Mick once in my life, so I don’t know why he’s complaining that I don’t call him. I never call anybody.” (I reminded him that he had, in fact, called me.) “Well,” he said, “I never even called the other Beatles, they always called me. I’m self-involved, I’m paranoid and I don’t like phones. I didn’t see a phone until I was about fourteen, we didn’t have one in the house. The phone was for emergencies and telegrams. Telegrams still scare me. From where I come from, it means somebody’s dead. Why were people angry at me for not calling them? If I was dead they wouldn’t be angry at me. If I’d conveniently died in the mid-1970s after the Rock ’n’ Roll album they’d all be saying, ‘what a great guy and wasn’t he funny with a Tampax on his head.’ It’s all right when you’re dead. But I didn’t die, and it infuriated everybody that I would live and do what I wanted to do, which was to hang around the house and be with the family.”
He said that Yoko turned him on to Zen and haiku and he turned her on to the heartbeat. He talked about how great David Bowie was in The Elephant Man on Broadway. How he thought the funniest remark he had read about himself was that he and Yoko never went out unless they went to Japan. He said they often ordered dinner in from Dial-A-Steak, but that they did go out of the house, adding that there were other entrances and exits out of the Dakota besides the front door. And he talked about Beatles nostalgia. “I think it’ll go on forever,” he said, “like
Glenn Miller.” He said he wasn’t particularly interested in the Beatles, or the Kennedys, or the 1960s. “The adults that were the twenty-year-olds in the ’60s have all turned into what we were supposed to be saving ourselves from—asking for the ’60s to come back with the Beatles and the Kennedys. They probably even want a war, so we can have an anti-war movement. They’re not getting their jocks off with the nuclear thing—it’s not big enough to draw a crowd. We don’t need the ’60s and we don’t need the Beatles and we don’t need the Kennedys. Let’s leave them where they are, in a nice memory.”
I asked him if he still believed in peace and love. He said he was always wavering on that subject. “It’s hard to be Gandhi or Martin Luther King or to follow them. I don’t admire politicians particularly, I think they’re showbiz people. But people who put their thing on the line, like Gandhi, who threw the British out by not shooting anybody . . . those are the political people I admire. But I don’t want to be shot for it like Gandhi and I don’t want to be shot for it like Martin Luther King. I admire their stance, but I don’t want to be a martyr.”
There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll Page 16
