Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  Then the Stones scandal resurfaced. Mick Jagger, Richards, and Robert Fraser, the art dealer, were finally hauled into a London court on April 18 and charged with possession of illegal drugs. The arrest had caused a scandal in the press, and the music industry gossiped about how by exempting George and Pattie Harrison (who were quickly ushered out of the crime scene), the ruling class revealed an impeccable grasp of rock’s elite. A critical calculation underlay this Stones fracas: even booking a “lesser” Beatle like Harrison would bring about too great a backlash. “We are not old men. We are not worried about your petty morals,” sneered Keith Richards to his arraignment judge. The rock world hustled monies and sympathetic editorials as Jagger and Richards spent three weeks in jail. The famous Times editorial—entitled “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?”—by a noted conservative Times editor, William Rees-Mogg, was widely viewed as a turning point in police attitudes toward marijuana. (The U.S. equivalent would have been the National Review’s William F. Buckley advocating for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.)

  The Beatles recorded straight through the storm, mostly buffing up errors and editing in transitions. The final session, on April 21, inspired a silent joke: the out-groove gibberish and dog’s whistle (the high-pitched fifteen-kilocycle tone, inaudible to human ears), brought more than seven hundred hours of work to a close. In sheer studio hours logged, this was an unprecedented amount of time to devote to a pop—or any—album. But Beatle fingers itched. They dove right into McCartney’s new “Magical Mystery Tour” track for three more days of recording.

  Only after Sgt. Pepper drew to a close did Lennon encounter Yoko Ono again, and this time even bystanders—and Ono’s husband—could read their chemistry. At the end of April, Tony Bramwell saw Lennon take in the 14-Hour Technicolor Dream event at Alexandra Palace. Ono appeared on the bill doing her Cut Piece, while her husband, Anthony Cox, roamed in the audience, scouting for patrons. (A May 17 BBC show called Man Alive: What Is a Happening? depicted Lennon looking chicly disoriented.)

  Bramwell remembers the event and the weird, space-out effect Ono had on Lennon’s trip. It was the kind of “happening” where “Suzy Creamcheese doled out yellow banana-skin joints,” and Bramwell saw Lennon come in with John Dunbar wearing an “Afghan-embroidered skin coat” and looking “very stoned.” Lennon told Bramwell they had been watching the event on TV down in Weybridge and jumped into his Rolls. “As we were chatting,” Bramwell writes, “John’s attention was caught by Yoko, who was giving a Fluxus performance with stepladders and scissors center stage, beneath the acrobats and jugglers swinging from the soaring cast-iron gothic pillars.” Lennon, at first distracted, soon became mesmerized by Ono’s performance.

  Ono’s Cut Piece had become a signature: she sat onstage and invited audience members to come up and cut off pieces of her clothing. She did this in a variety of settings for various lengths of time, until most or sometimes all of her clothes had been snipped off. She sat impassively, as if imprisoned, while the audience decided how far to take it. Even in a clinical museum setting, this piece generated great tension, as if Ono were a proxy for women everywhere, feigning indifference while the world tore off layer after layer of her self-respect.

  In this psychedelic setting, however, Bramwell remembers a “strangely unpleasant” vibe—with a light show and loud music, the piece became doubly disorienting. The sound of scissors slicing Ono’s clothing was amplified through loudspeakers, and some spectators began attacking her. She sat passively, like a specimen exposed for experimentation. When she was left completely naked onstage, some assistants led her away and she got dressed. This all struck Lennon as morbidly fascinating, as if somebody had read his mind and inverted the Beatle “Butcher cover” into a live set piece: the sick humor of dismembered dolls extended into pure theater, anchored by a woman who refused to turn away from the humiliation. The piece only worked if Ono’s gaze held steady, and her fortitude impressed him.

  As a cynical rock insider, Bramwell couldn’t deduce anything more going on than Lennon getting tweaked by Ono’s “mild S&M.” But he did note how Ono’s husband wandered around the club with a handheld movie camera, “urging on the mob.” When Cox came upon Lennon, “I saw a very knowing look flicker through Tony’s eyes.”18

  Although they delivered the Sgt. Pepper masters to EMI for postproduction, the Beatles went right on recording. They still needed material for Magical Mystery Tour, but they also did something new: they just jammed, as if reluctant to find the Pepper sessions coming to an end. On May 9, they laid down sixteen minutes of an instrumental that has never surfaced; and on May 11, they gathered at Olympic Sound Studios in Church Road, Kensington, where George Martin supervised engineers Keith Grant and Eddie Kramer (who went on to produce Jimi Hendrix). The song they recorded, “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” had a Lennon verse with a McCartney refrain that sounded thinner than any of their EMI sessions. It fell into the Yellow Submarine pile, but got slapped on the back of “All You Need Is Love” once it became the next single.

  One day later, they recorded McCartney’s “All Together Now” in nine takes with only acoustic guitars. The next week, Lennon and McCartney began work on a number that would lie dormant for two years, “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).” The master track contained five parts and took over fourteen takes, with Lennon on guitar, McCartney switching off between piano and drums, and Brian Jones dropping in on alto saxophone. Before Sgt. Pepper made its radio debut on Chris Denning’s Where It’s At, the Beatles went to Putney to play an acetate for Epstein at the Priory Clinic. (Like a forbidding parent, the BBC turned red at “A Day in the Life” and refused to broadcast the song, banning it even before release. How could anybody hear that hook [“I’d love to turn you on”] as anything but hallucinogenic bedlam? This excision only made the record’s finale more tempting.)

  During that week of Sgt. Pepper’s release in late May, the band cut Harrison’s “It’s All Too Much,” in four takes at the De Lane Lea Studios, Kingsway, and then had another late-night jam session. Epstein came into town to throw a huge release party at his flat on Chapel Street near Buckingham Palace, in the posh Belgravia neighborhood, where the press gathered to hear the new music, and the four Beatles, decked out in psychedelic scarves and jackets, were photographed in front of Epstein’s fireplace. Then Epstein scuttled back to the Priory.

  It would be easy to dismiss Sgt. Pepper as rock’s most overrated album if it weren’t the Beatles’ most underrated group effort. Almost everything you need to know about the band lies in its grooves, and it holds the best and worst of what they’re most famous for. Given that the major theme is their own fame and its discontents, there’s plenty of good raw material. It’s too fanciful for the garage-rock purists, but not nearly progressive enough for the avant-garde crowd—fringe tastes deplore how it passes the something-for-everybody test. Revolver strung together songs around a loose concept, a discussion about sex, death, taxes, and stimulants, held together by the idea of four Beatles talking into the night. Lofty ideas about “Taxman” avarice and thrifty spinsters needing “another kind of mind” to “relax and float downstream” engaged with each player like strong personalities in a sporting bull session. The Beatles’ own personalities gave Revolver cohesion, and it hung together because no other band could have made it. Both of these albums have long since transcended their moment; at the time, they struck many intelligent ears as audacious, impregnable, and too rich to imbibe in one or even several sittings.

  Sgt. Pepper’s cover shot alone now spars with Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa, or Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, as a defining piece of pop art. And like those counterparts, the album’s enormous impact steals attention from its poetry. American radio stations competed with each other to play it in its entirety for days on end. As one of rock’s earliest release “events,” it created its own unique moment in rock history. But in retrospect, the Beatles seem to be addressing history itself. Sgt. Pepper contemplates the emptiness
of flower power while posing as its emblem.

  Critics dote on Sgt. Pepper as rock’s great conceptual breakthrough, but Pepper created rock criticism. For the first time, a rock record prompted major newspapers like the New York Times and the Times in London to run formal record reviews of a pop act, and not by classical critics like William Mann. On June 18, the New York Times ran a sympathetically youthful voice of dissent from Richard Goldstein (who “was almost lynched,” quipped Robert Christgau in Esquire19): “Like an over-attended child, Sergeant Pepper is spoiled. It reeks of horns and harps, harmonica quartets, assorted animal noises, and a 41-piece orchestra. . . . An album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent. . . . When the Beatles’ work as a whole is viewed in retrospect, Rubber Soul and Revolver will stand as their major contributions.”20 Pepper’s reputation expands its appeal; but its popularity is also ironic, an echo of its underrated critical status. The Beatles themselves always downplayed its significance, feigning disinterest in the fascination that bringing back the title track as a reprise could give the sequence “thematic” unity. But the unities persist, even if unintentional—if the Beatles taught us anything, it’s how meanings can leap from accidents.

  McCartney’s album cover design casts the world’s most famous celebrities—and a few choice obscurities, like Stu Sutcliffe and occultist Aleister Crowley—gathered around a fictional “Victorian” Beatles brass band, as if posing for an old-fashioned photograph. The frame suggests one of their school pictures, with celebrity classmates past and present gathered in anachronistic reunion. In front of them, the word “Beatles” is spelled out in flowers atop newly toiled dirt, with “moptop” Madame Tussaud wax figures looking on balefully from the left—it’s a graveyard for Beatlemania.

  This great historical parade of celebrities, presided over by the Beatles at the funeral of their former image, suggests how fame can rob the best work of meaning. A mix of UK and American figures crowd each other out, from Mae West and Karl Marx to writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde beside classic Hollywood stars Fred Astaire, Laurel and Hardy, and Marlon Brando. (Lennon being Lennon wanted Jesus Christ next to Adolf Hitler, but got voted down.) Klaus Voormann’s Revolver cover displayed the four Beatles conjoined in a single collective consciousness, spilling out from all that long hair. McCartney’s Sgt. Pepper design gave the Beatles a fictional identity just like all these others, and the visual statement blended mockery with satire. “If we’re so famous,” their faces seem to say, “what happened to all these nice folks?”21 There’s an undertone of disbelief and suspicion about these mythic forces that gives the Beatles pause.

  In its own scary way, parodying the myth becomes another mythic move. Posing the band members beside this famous lineup compared them to these figures and tied their fate to history. The songs picked up this theme, and others, in the ongoing stylistic discussion between McCartney and Lennon. Their collaboration found its peak, with eccentricities that fed off each other’s strengths, for a sequence that would be all but impossible from the same relationship within a year’s time (with the “Lady Madonna” single, say, or the tempo argument around “Revolution”). Lennon’s word-painting influence on McCartney in “Fixing a Hole” plays out much the same way as McCartney’s melodic influence on Lennon in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” And McCartney’s contribution to “A Day in the Life” tends toward the avant-garde (postmodernist narrative!), whereas Lennon’s influence on “Getting Better” (“It can’t get no worse!”) takes a decidedly upbeat turn.

  Everything that follows Sgt. Pepper conveys the sense of each partner going back into his corner and cultivating his core musical beliefs rather than reaching out toward the other’s challenge—from here on in, they dabble on each other’s turf as a kind of virtuoso display, instead of collaborating: Lennon’s lullaby “Good Night” can only get overdone in the McCartney ballad vein, where McCartney’s “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” might as well be John and Yoko’s Liebestod. The Lennon-McCartney magic still erupts, but more as moments of ensemble and vocal harmonies than the elaborate negotiations that make up a partnership. Turning the worn seams of their teamwork into a subject (“A Day in the Life,” like “We Can Work It Out,” or “I’ve Got a Feeling”) remains one of their more brilliant strokes. But when Lennon’s vocal harmony leaps atop McCartney in that final, expectant verse of “Hey Jude” (on the repeat of the words “Take a sad song and make it better”), it sounds nostalgic—and that’s barely fourteen months later (August 1968).

  Overly self-conscious as only Lennon could be, the “A Day in the Life” track spelled out the Lennon-McCartney collaboration as inimitable, two halves of the same whole warring against each other: in the verse, Lennon’s angry iconoclast gets struck numb with inaction; McCartney’s upbeat tradesman awakes to an imprisoning routine. Each imagines the other as a kind of idealized self, and each lets the other down. “Penny Lane” posed itself as an answer song to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” pitting McCartney’s child’s vision of his schoolday bus stop against Lennon’s Salvation Army home. Instead of taking up an argument against each other in the same song, as in “We Can Work It Out,” the songwriting cell now divides and splits in two; the collaboration once so hard to decipher now wears its template on its sleeve. (That earlier single quickly turns prophetic, and ironic, once Sgt. Pepper gets released.)

  Does McCartney’s first-person bridge work as the dream life to Lennon’s news reader from the previous verse, or does the morning bus reefer send the listener back into Lennon’s waking nightmare? By dropping his song inside Lennon’s frame for another voice within the same head of the narrative consciousness, McCartney’s workday stiff acts out one version of Lennon’s newsprint estrangement and willful ignorance; as a character in this song, McCartney details an everyman alive yet unmindful to the world around him. What’s more horrifying, they seem to ask: being oblivious to everyday reality or sensitive to it?

  Sgt. Pepper elaborates on a coy parody of Victorian gazebo bands, and “When I’m Sixty-four” situates the rock tradition as an extension of music-hall shtick, as far from the racially charged contemporary thrust of rock as seems possible. This imaginary past that McCartney summons for rock ’n’ roll locates his stylistic approach to the music. Lennon is a rocker by temperament, McCartney a rocker by means; he’s happy to express himself in a variety of genres, and rock is simply one part of his palette. Sgt. Pepper dwells in a parallel world, with a fictional band serenading a fictional audience in bright colors and popular songs.

  For more than thirty minutes, Sgt. Pepper avoids Revolver’s harsher truths: the sleazy drug doctors, tax collectors, and duplicitous women. Pepper’s women are all desirable, romantic prizes like “Lucy,” the gentle geriatric romance partner of “When I’m Sixty-four,” and the buxom parking attendant of “Lovely Rita” (“Filling in a ticket in her little white book”). The exception is the young lady in “She’s Leaving Home,” who’s on a mission to upset her parents—her quest for love is ripped from a soap opera (“Meeting a man from the motor trade” sticks out like a line Lennon didn’t work on, or couldn’t be bothered with). But as fetching as “Lucy” or “Rita” might be, romance can’t save the narrator of “A Day in the Life” from his story. He can barely see the edges of it himself: salvation is out of reach.

  McCartney’s work balances and enlarges Lennon’s, in both subtle and dramatic ways, for a secret subtheme. The song-within-a-song triumph of the album’s final track is only its most virtuoso touch; the songs within an album within a persona—within a career—become the larger frame of reference. If you hear the album as one of bright, dapper, psychedelic showmanship, which opens with three lively and irresistible songs (“Sgt. Pepper,” “Friends,” and “Lucy”), each successive Lennon number traces darker and darker colors, from the disorienting freak show of “Mr. Kite” to the scrambled urban rush of “Good Morning,” a dystopian corn-flake jingle. Amid Lennon’s increasing unease, McCartney’s chipper �
��Getting Better” and “When I’m Sixty-four” take on a fragility they might not otherwise have had—it’s not his lover who needs a pep talk in the first, it’s the singer, and “Sixty-four” broaches the intimidating fear of age by tacking hard against celebrity insecurities: will our audience stay with us after we lose our mighty good looks?

  All this converges in “A Day in the Life,” where Lennon’s weariness becomes McCartney’s benign neglect—two versions of the same disaffection. Sgt. Pepper has too long been written off as a diversion, an “accession to its times,” in Greil Marcus’s words, when it codifies many of the aesthetic and technical breakthroughs of Revolver and gives many of those same freighted intellectual themes mainstream appeal. Pepper reaches toward a tragic statement manifested in “A Day in the Life”: fame is hollow, corrupts both artist and audience, and remains at best illusory. Yet people still praise that track’s technical feat while ignoring its hangover. “Strawberry Fields Forever” plumbed the loneliness of the world’s most famous man, the hangover that would sound utterly cliché were it not so unguarded, so inimitably John Lennon: part Beatle, part loner in his own band. “A Day in the Life” lifts Sgt. Pepper from its reputation as mere totem of Swinging London: it’s the hangover of a million bleary-eyed morning-afters shared among his listeners.