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

by Tim Riley

  It fell to another NEMS staffer, Peter Brown, to call the Beatles in Wales with the terrible news. Jane Asher picked up the phone, and called for Paul. They left at once, as the other three Beatles convened a press conference. Marianne Faithfull writes how “the Maharishi instantly exploited Brian’s death. . . . The Beatles were shattered. I can hardly bear to remember it.” And according to Faithfull, the Maharishi saw the situation suiting his own interests. She says that he told them: “Brian Epstein is dead. He was taking care of you. He was like your father. I will be your father now.”32

  It’s easy to patronize all the flaky spiritual types who moved through sixties culture. But Lennon responded to the Maharishi’s methods sincerely, as a way of confronting his drug intake and repairing his marriage with Cynthia. On his very first retreat, not only was Cynthia left behind at Paddington Station but news arrived of Brian Epstein’s death by overdose. Knowing now of the personal nightmares this conjured, we can surmise that a crushing sense of anguished recognition must have rushed through him. All of his intimate relationships seemed to end in sudden, irretrievable death.

  Epstein had been Lennon’s first great conquest. They beguiled each other in the darkest ways possible: Lennon enjoyed humiliating Epstein in front of peers and staff, and Epstein’s low self-regard and homosexual shame kept him coming back for more. He adored Lennon as much as he felt deserving of Lennon’s emotional abuse. As Sgt. Pepper progressed and the Beatles pushed Epstein aside to take greater control over their career, he responded by trying to cut them out of his own fortunes, resentful that everything he had done for them now somehow seemed like a mere backdrop to their untouchable star status. The Liverpool shopkeeper who had delivered Lennon from his provincial upbringing and helped him conquer the world had failed to keep up with the band’s transformative powers. A new Beatle company on the horizon promised even greater creative frontiers; but Epstein’s reluctance, and his own inexplicable restructuring of NEMS, steered their professional relationship into a ditch.

  Finally, Epstein’s descent into prescription drugs and alcohol, and frequent “sleep cures,” may have served as a cautionary tale to Lennon: despite their invitations, Epstein preferred to stay in London for another party as his boys went off to sit with the new mentor. With so many business and personal issues unresolved—perhaps irresolvable—Lennon’s loss must have felt inexplicable, damned, and soured by something beyond fatalism. No matter how rich or successful he got, no matter how much revenge he took on the world for his troubles, or how many riches poured down on his accomplishments, life always had a cruel retort.

  Journalists swarmed around Lennon and Harrison (Ringo kept to himself), both of whom gave quotes with spiritual happy talk about passing over and sending feelings to the departed. Lennon’s ashen expression in news footage belies his words: his face recalls the “more popular than Jesus” apology in Chicago, grief mixed with fierce anger, weary at how even in private moments like this people shoved microphones in his face to ask what he thought. Even making statements to reporters shows how completely at a loss Lennon felt in the hours after Epstein’s death: for all his bluster and arrogance, he didn’t have the wherewithal to simply ask for privacy, which would have been a perfectly reasonable request. The Maharishi had counseled the Beatles about death. “He told us . . . uhh . . . not to get overwhelmed by grief,” Lennon stammered to reporters. “And whatever thoughts we have of Brian to keep them happy, because any thoughts we have of him will travel to him wherever he is.”

  Did the Maharishi offer any words of comfort? “Meditation gives you confidence enough to withstand something like this, even the short amount we’ve had,” John replied, his eyes suddenly hoping something could make it so as he mouthed the words. “There’s no real such thing as death anyway,” Harrison ventured. “I mean, it’s death on a physical level, but life goes on everywhere . . . and you just keep going, really. The thing about the comfort is to know that he’s OK.”33

  It took a long time for the world to guess precisely how complicated Lennon’s feelings were that day. It’s another point where Lennon’s cocksure composer rubbed against a frightening artlessness. Perhaps he felt it might help take the sting out of Epstein’s death if he made some public statement; perhaps he simply needed public validation about the sudden turn of events to help him through this new trauma. “Making sense of it all,” and trying to set it all within the Maharishi’s framework, shows just how lost and abandoned he felt. There were worlds of unfinished business with Epstein, even as they plotted new business without him. It remains one of the central ironies of Lennon’s career that as his music enchanted millions, he lurched from one wrenching loss to another.

  The band spent that fall of 1967 creating Magical Mystery Tour, which would prove to be their first major flop, partially redeemed by the queasy, indelible Lennon oil spill of “I Am the Walrus.” Threads from “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” returned as frayed strands in this music: the group harmonies had all but disappeared, there were no Lennon-McCartney duets, and all of Lennon’s verbal twists felt overgrown, with too many targets, a thousand private jokes colliding in song. “Walrus” slowed a bad acid trip down for bilious humor.

  The motives behind Magical Mystery Tour combined everything that was impulsive and whimsical about the sixties with the tired conceit of pop stars dabbling in film. Since they had successfully skirted this pothole in their first two movies, which operate as parodies of rock stars on the big screen, the prime motivation for the Mystery Tour project feels misguided. The larger career arc they rejoined after the initial television broadcast of the film testifies to the redemptive power of the Beatles’ ambition—and their comeback became a defining component of what made them great.

  The group left Bangor promising the Maharishi they’d meet up with him soon in India for lengthier study. But once home, Lennon’s mood worsened. “I thought, ‘we’ve had it,’ ” Lennon later remembered.34 A group meeting early in September determined that any trip to India would need to be postponed. Riven with insecurity, they resolved to keep working, manage themselves, and get through the next project, putting off spiritual advancement until the New Year. McCartney gave an interview to the New Musical Express on September 9 that outlined plans for a new TV project and sound track, but little else. He didn’t mention Epstein. All four Beatles attended Epstein’s memorial service on October 19, down the road from EMI, at the New London Synagogue on Abbey Road.

  Ideas about film itself were undergoing radical flux in this period, and the edgiest “modern” cinema found documentaries and experimental improvisation cornerstones of the new sensibilities. Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, and their bus of psychedelic enlightenment, served as the Beatles’ role model. McCartney convinced the others how stories would spring out spontaneously from all the serendipitous situations most travelers encounter, and their sound track would rescue any weak moments. Perhaps it was the concept that tripped them up: tripsters roaming America in a psychedelic bus, with Jack Kerouac’s sidekick, the mythical Neal Cassady, at the wheel, blasting rock music and “turning on” the youthful tribes to expanded consciousness and delirious carnality, just didn’t translate well to Brits plunked down in the Midlands for a mystery tour. No sooner had they plotted the general outline of the shoot than they found themselves on a bus getting into trouble with routine details like food, lodging, schedules, setups, and scatterbrained plots. Tony Bramwell describes the world’s biggest rock stars learning dreary tasks of management with forty extras inside a traffic jam of fans and press.

  Luckily, enough goodwill and joie de vivre rescued some moments, and several sequences took shape between trips to the recording studio: “The Fool on the Hill” got the star treatment with the only professionally shot video of the project. (McCartney filmed this on his own in France. And it’s not hard to guess who put it way up front, right after the bus leaves, a sop to leading with more sentimental material.) One of Lennon’s bits i
nvolved a scene he wrote straight out of a dream: with his hair slicked back, in waiter’s tuxedo, he shovels spaghetti into an enormous woman, as if reenacting all the garbage of politesse he had to feed Aunt Mimi as a child. But it doesn’t have enough bite to strike much of a Lennon singularity; it’s anybody’s childhood resentment ballooned into a nasty comeuppance (and a rough premonition of a scene near the end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life). “Jimmy Johnson,” the giddy host, seems like an unctuous version of McCartney himself (“You are all my friends,” he announces). Johnson introduces the bus driver as “Alf,” but he gets no lines and no interactions throughout the film. You half expect Sigmund Freud himself to join the frolic and connect all these symbolic dots.

  As Lennon’s emotional slump began to infect his muse, his brilliance took on a brittle pedantry. The recently closed West Maling Air Station, near Maidstone in Kent, a huge expanse of concrete blocks built to absorb the impact of Nazi bombs, served as a giant outdoor set for “I Am the Walrus,” the sole music video from the film with any spark or guile (a touch of lust might have rescued some other sequences). Clumsily staged policemen held hands atop the concrete, swaying to the music, and a string of white-jacketed figures waved to the audience before trailing along behind the bus as the bobbies stepped into line at the back during the fade-out.

  The song’s recording, however, fares much better. George Martin’s frame blurs into the material for a beguiling mix of form and content; “Walrus” could be one of the few Beatle tracks that’s even more imaginatively produced than conceived. It descends into a long, disorienting fade-out, the tail wagging the song even more frantically than the false ending of “Strawberry Fields Forever” or the musical gags bookending “All You Need Is Love.” As sheer idea, “Walrus” trudges through its hairy arrangement toward a conventional, identity-crisis ego-fragmentation lyric, announcing its Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe idolatry rather too cravenly. Lennon had already earned these comparisons, and “Glass Onion” went so far as to suggest he’d outpaced them. (Lennon later regretted confusing Carroll’s “Walrus and the Carpenter” character as hero instead of villain, which makes his point in a backhanded, circuitous way—as in “Strawberry Fields Forever,” he’s not in control of his message.) Where “Strawberry Fields” has humility, and some gentleness, “Walrus” turns on all the faucets for a flood of imagery; it could be his least humorous stab at surrealism. He sings from the other side of some enormous creative chasm, the voice of LSD devouring a once-virile personality, the drug slowly curdling its host.

  In some ways, the bottoming out of “Walrus” also works as a dark psychedelic prophecy of the escalating violence, protest, and assassinations to come in 1968. The track stands as a mockery, the only song to upstage Magical Mystery Tour’s governing concept—more material on this level might have rescued more of the film. By contrast, McCartney toys with sentimental clichés like “Your Mother Should Know” and piffle like “Hello, Goodbye,” the same impulses that steered some of Sgt. Pepper into fanciful sitcom (“Getting Better,” “Lovely Rita”).

  Epstein’s managerial finesse became tangible by his absence. Magical Mystery Tour arrived stillborn. It premiered on Boxing Day, on BBC One, a black-and-white network at the time even though the entire shoot had been conceived in psychedelic color. The reviews were savage, and pundits argued over how, or whether, the Beatles could earn back their prestige. Another broadcast in color on BBC Two several days later only confirmed the first impression. Just six months earlier, Sgt. Pepper had turned on the world. Now the Beatles stared failure in the eye.

  Chapter 16

  I Should Have Known Better

  The sheer density of events between 1968 and 1970, the late-Beatle period that produced The White Album, Let It Be, and Abbey Road, can still detract from their accomplishments on these albums. Perched as they were atop twin ideals of hope and unity, the band began to splinter. World events synced up uncannily with Lennon’s personal upheavals, triggered by a gaping career disconnect at the end of 1967: where unwieldy Beatlemania led to a defining essay on fame and their persona with Sgt. Pepper’s “A Day in the Life,” the amateurish unraveling of Magical Mystery Tour telegraphed Lennon’s larger detachment. As they descended an old-fashioned Hollywood staircase in white tuxedos to sing its finale, “Your Mother Should Know,” they couldn’t have been more out of touch.

  This Beatle career crisis shrank against the larger historical canvas: instead of bounding out ahead (as they had with Rubber Soul and Revolver), the band began to play catch-up with its audience. The battles between students and their parents, soldiers and the fathers who cynically sent them to Vietnam while denying them the right to vote, between patriotic hard-hat construction workers and the college-deferred sons (and daughters) of the ruling class, reached a contentious pitch in America rarely seen since. The great “Classic Rock” explosion during the Beatles’ middle period (1965–67) had slowed time down, even made it stand completely still. In the early months of 1968, world events tumbled ahead at a frightening pace, and the cultural shifts took manic swerves. In this late phase, the Beatles cultivated their own disintegration as a late theme, as if rock celebrity had become so all-consuming that they could only reinvent themselves as individuals.

  It’s worth remembering, however, that for one sunny season, 1967’s fabled Summer of Love, Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” revived all the hope and possibility Beatle music had pointed toward since “She Loves You” and “I Feel Fine” and “The Word.” While it lasted, “All You Need Is Love” emblemized the dreamy potential on parade at the Monterey Pop Festival, where McCartney muscled Hendrix onto the bill for his American “debut.” By pouring lighter fluid on his Stratocaster and setting it on fire, Hendrix lit the psychedelic desires Lennon first glimpsed in “Rain” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

  It’s hard to say exactly when, but the simplistic chorus to “All You Need Is Love” began to ring cheery, and throughout 1968, world headlines drowned out its idealism. Compared to the cascading harmonies of Brian Wilson’s “Good Vibrations” (1966), or the choral waterfalls in “Nowhere Man” and “Good Day Sunshine,” the unison reiterations in “All You Need Is Love” rang wide but not deep. It’s a measure of that era’s shift in consciousness that you can’t hear Lennon’s song anymore without a twinge of foreboding, the sound of hope overreaching its grasp.1

  Sgt. Pepper, that great melodic symbol of psychedelic utopia, somehow intimidated rock’s mood off its axis; as the era unraveled into protest and violence, Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” grew fragile, and less durable (unlike most of their work up to this point). Even Lennon’s winning self-mockery—the French national anthem fanfare, or the Tin Pan Alley fade-out—can’t quite redeem the number’s cheeky nostalgia. Within a year of its debut, events made the refrain seem not just gullible but outmaneuvered. The song stayed the same, but its meanings had trouble transcending new realities.

  A ticker tape of that season’s headlines, as 1967 gave way to 1968, plowed under every optimistic impulse. In October 1967, as Lennon and McCartney wrapped up filming and began compiling Magical Mystery Tour footage in separate editing sessions, one hundred thousand protestors marched on Washington’s Lincoln Memorial and later held an all-night vigil at the Pentagon. Two antiwar activists, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, dubbed themselves “Yippies” and, in a defining stroke of media theater, announced that their collective spiritual energy would levitate the Defense Department. Norman Mailer turned the spectacle into a scathing interior drunkalogue in his nonfiction “novel,” Armies of the Night, which dramatized the tangle of hypocrisies at play between youth and entrenched power. Mailer’s seething epic spared no one, including old-guard leftists like himself who self-consciously exploited the students’ flair.

  The North Vietnamese army’s Tet Offensive at the end of January 1968 stalled out as a military action but turned into a psychological coup, convincing millions of Americans that the Vietnam War was intractable
. As the American presidential primaries started up, antiwar demonstrators hoped to exploit these contradictions. Students began to see American university campuses as potent symbols of the military-industrial complex. Most major universities, they argued, depended on Pentagon spending to keep scientific research afloat, so these connections had direct relevance to the war. To the antiwar activists, tuition stoked the war machine. This all made perfect sense to students, and many of their professors, who had held teach-ins on Vietnam as early as 1965. Leftist professors found themselves pitted against their own administrators. Campus marches, sit-ins, and rallies became symbolic of this larger confrontation.

  As Democrats tussled over war policy, and the Beatles’ new single “Lady Madonna” ascended the charts, the presidential race suddenly caved. Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar candidate, stunned political circles on March 12 by losing the New Hampshire primary by a mere 7 points behind President Johnson. This primary reshuffled the deck: Senator Robert F. Kennedy officially entered the race, and Johnson morphed from presumptive incumbent into lame duck. At the end of the month, Lyndon Johnson announced to a stunned nation that he would not seek reelection ( just as the “Lady Madonna” refrain, “See how they run . . . ,” taunted him from the top forty). In At Canaan’s Edge, the third volume of his monumental history of the “King Years,” Taylor Branch defines Johnson’s motives as noble, even patriotic: all his high-flown strategies had failed, and now even his most trusted advisors were telling him that defeat in Vietnam seemed likely no matter how much armor and human life he committed to the cause. Admitting failure and stepping down became the most honorable move left to him. The war’s frustrations, and the surging antiwar movement, had shamed Johnson from office; the man who had won more votes than any candidate in American history in 1964 could no longer defend his own foreign policy.