by Tim Riley
Lennon zeros in on the key point about destroying what’s wrong with the existing political systems. Of course there’s something wrong with a system that inspires such a destructive response, Lennon argues, since it would only reinforce the existing violent pathologies.
What are the alternatives? Lennon demands. What new system of government will replace the old? And if the Beatles vs. the Stones inspires the same kinds of arguments, then such analogies provide weak frames of reference, and listeners can’t be paying very close attention. Rock ’n’ roll had already been a powerful force for changing people’s worldview; ambivalence about political upheaval would seem to be a relatively sane response to 1968’s dilemmas.28
It’s curious that leftists like Hoyland weren’t more incensed by Magical Mystery Tour, which overplayed the psychedelic conceits just as the antiwar movement surged. With the billowing success of the “Hey Jude” / “Revolution” single, and the thirty songs that came tumbling after on The White Album, the Beatles erased Magical Mystery Tour from pop consciousness. In any other context this would have done more than simply revive their career. But an audience once enthralled by the Beatles now seemed immune—Lennon’s engagement wasn’t enough, or didn’t measure up to radical hopes, or sent the wrong signals when he could be doing so much more.
The battle in the United States between youth and the establishment had reached one impasse after another, and the Beatles had regained their footing only to find they had lost some relevance. The punch line came just as Yoko entered Queen Charlotte’s Hospital the week after the arrest: Nixon’s “law and order” campaign, and cynical “Southern strategy,” elected him president of the United States in November 1968, dashing what was left of antiwar hopes.
Ever since, the sixties rock mythos has been oversimplified beyond all reason: to the left, it represents a ferment of change and possibility; the right still uses it as shorthand for all manner of cultural ailments, from sexual and women’s liberation to religious freedom, abortion rights, and civil dissent. Ronald Reagan, governor of California from 1967 to 1975, went on to become president in 1980 by leveraging these same cultural divides, and George W. Bush, a boomer himself, ran his entire presidency on these themes. As the Vietnam War dragged on, American campus dread of Nixon between 1968 and 1974 reached fever pitch, rivaled only by progressives’ distaste for George W. Bush two generations later.
As 1968 began to recede into the holidays and New Year, Lennon and Ono grieved the loss of their first child by diving back into public appearances. The times called for activist rock stars, and no Two Virgins nudity scandal or miscarriage would get in the way of their promoting their romance as performance art. Their most notable performance came at Stonebridge House in Wembley, on December 11, where the Rolling Stones were filming Rock and Roll Circus. The prospective TV special featured the Who doing “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” Taj Mahal, and the debut of a band Jagger had discovered, Jethro Tull.
Lennon sang a shaky version of “Yer Blues” with Keith Richards on bass, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, and Hendrix’s Mitch Mitchell on drums, billed as the Dirty Mac. Lennon and Jagger taped a halfhearted introduction, but the entire project got shelved due to the Stones’ misgivings about their own tired performance. It was Brian Jones’s last appearance. Between Lennon’s vocal and some admiring support, “Yer Blues” achieves a sloppy grace that lives on in the ABKCO DVD which finally appeared in 1996. But the comedy bit with Jagger flops.
Over Christmas, John and Yoko took the stage at the Royal Albert Hall for a “Celebration in December” art benefit, billed as an “Alchemical Wedding,” in which they squirmed inside a white bag on the stage, shades of stunts still to come. The following week they dressed up as Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus for the Apple Christmas party.
To get his comments into the British press alongside Cott’s Rolling Stone interview in America, Lennon greeted two students, Maurice Hindle and Daniel Wiles, for a long talk that expanded on leftist discontent with “Revolution.” Lennon, fast becoming an authority on political revolution, stuck to his ambivalence, insisting that “ruthless destruction” would only lead to having “ruthless destroyers” in power. The Soviets were just as ambitious as any Capitalist country when it came to competing in the Olympics or the Space Race, he continued. Lennon added that the petty bickering on the far left about being “extremer than thou” revealed them as “exclusionary snobs,” incapable of leading, never mind organizing, a united movement. “But I tell you what,” he continued, “if those people start a revolution, me and the Stones’ll probably be the first ones they’ll shoot. Y’know, I mean that. . . . And it’s him—it’s the guy that wrote the letter that’ll do it, y’know. [Gestures around to his stockbroker mansion] They’d shoot me just for living here, y’know.”29
Ono’s miscarriage may have pricked Lennon’s conscience, and prompted some meager attempts at civility. He in fact asked Cynthia for visitation rights with Julian. She in turn asked their longtime chauffeur, Les Anthony, about the scene at the Montagu Street flat and he described it for her over a cup of tea:
He told me it was just as well that Julian hadn’t gone to the . . . flat while John and Yoko were there. “It was a complete tip,” he said. “They were doing heroin and other drugs and neither of them knew whether it was day or night. The floor was littered with rubbish. Couldn’t have had a little one there.”30
Cynthia duly moved out to find her own place with Julian, and John and Yoko returned to Kenwood for a month near the end of the year to get the property sold. Then they took over Ringo and Maureen Starr’s neighboring house as the Starrs moved into Peter Sellers’s home. Only a year earlier, Lennon had been marching down glitzy stairs in a white tuxedo, snapping his fingers to “Your Mother Should Know” for the finale of Magical Mystery Tour as protestors marched on the Pentagon. Now, as he moved into Ringo’s house with a new lover, the Lennon who sang “I Am the Walrus” seemed like a character from some distant past.
Chapter 18
Thank You Girl
Grief-stricken by the loss of their child and back on heroin, Lennon and Ono showed up exhausted and aloof for the shoot of Let It Be in January 1969. The project hung on a loose McCartney theme, a wide-open rehearsal for a television special that would build to a climactic live show on some exotic stage: a cruise ship, an Egyptian pyramid, or the Royal Albert Hall as a fallback. Starr (having previously walked out after being humiliated) and Harrison wanted nothing to do with Beatlemania logistics and refused to commit to anything more than a single live gig. The shoot’s daily hassles reflected underlying fissures. The continuing debates about the finale, whether to continue or simply abandon the project, and the band itself became a running commentary throughout the month; the show within this show veered between grudging compliance and open disintegration.
The schedule turned into its own punch line: Starr had contracted to appear as Peter Sellers’s adopted son in the movie adaptation of Terry Southern’s absurdist novel The Magic Christian, set to begin shooting in early February 1969. Whatever the Beatles decided, they had only one month to work up new material. Lennon’s arrest, Yoko’s miscarriage, Apple’s first-year stumbles, the grueling finish to their last sessions, the film crew union rules which dictated a ten-to-five schedule, and the drafty cold of the Twickenham soundstage—all compounded the band’s weakening bonds. By this point, McCartney had assumed the leadership role Lennon once took for granted: without Epstein to tell them what came next, McCartney simply rallied the others to keep everything from spinning too far off course. But poisonous months had passed since McCartney’s last cinematic brainstorm, Magical Mystery Tour, and now his enthusiasms met blank stares.
Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had filmed the “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” promotional films for Frost on Sunday, hired on to shoot the loose, cinema-vérité format. Almost immediately, the band scaled back the idea of a foreign jaunt and booked for January 18 the old Roundhouse venue, the place where Barry Miles lau
nched his International Times alternative newspaper in 1966 (with Soft Machine and Pink Floyd). As the Beatles sleepwalked through rehearsals, auditions for The Magic Christian progressed on the same lot. More than twenty-nine hours of film were shot at Twickenham during that first week of January 2–10, before Harrison, doing a Ringo, abruptly quit. “See you ’round the clubs,” he said on his way out.1 The transcripts from all these bootlegs, the most complete recorded documentation of any Beatles sessions (compiled in Get Back by Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt), provide sobering insight to the band’s interpersonal toxins.
Listening to these tapes, it’s hard to reconcile the unfocused drift of the music with the Beatles’ status: all through the holidays and into January, the double White Album dominated the album charts (without a hit single), on its way to outselling every other album they had ever released. The White Album’s oblique anti-conceptual format, and its free-ranging thirty tracks, made it more challenging to absorb than Sgt. Pepper or Magical Mystery Tour; a reinvention on this scale presented looming contradictions framed with formal rigor—swinging from “Glass Onion” to “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” sounded like familiar tropes stretched to extremes. How could such different sensibilities coexist in the same band, never mind between songwriting partners like Lennon and McCartney? To their audience, the Beatles’ continuous reinvention of rock ’n’ roll meant inventing new ways to be popular, transforming themselves into new versions of the core idea. Between themselves, however, they grasped at new reasons to stay together.
Assenting to McCartney’s rehearsal-to-stage concept, they agreed on one guiding musical principle: they wanted a spare ensemble without any of the tape manipulation or studio trickery they had mastered on their five preceding projects. This home-baked ethic rode psychedelia’s backlash, the “roots” impulse behind “Lady Madonna” and the “Revolution” single taken one step further: overdubs were shunned, although heavy editing ultimately concealed an abundance of flaky takes. Where The White Album inverted Sgt. Pepper’s conceptual conceit (no metaphor, no theme, no cover, no band, no pretense at “otherness”), their new venture chased yet another new ideal: ensemble interplay as bedrock. Rock’s studio wizards revived their garage band origins as grown-ups.
This “back-to-basics” idea, eventually dubbed Get Back after a McCartney number, answered two influential records from 1968: Bob Dylan’s hushed John Wesley Harding and the Band’s backwoods Music from Big Pink. Intrigued by these projects, George Harrison jammed with these musicians in upstate New York over Thanksgiving 1968 and brought back song demos to pass around (material that wound up on The Basement Tapes). On the hundreds of bootlegs from these January 1969 sessions, Harrison can be heard launching into “Please Mrs. Henry,” “I Shall Be Released,” and the Band’s “To Kingdom Come”; at one point the Beatles considered recording “Million Dollar Bash.” (Some of these Dylan songs had already leaked: producer Joe Boyd, who comanaged the UFO club where John watched Yoko’s Cut Piece in 1967, soon showed up with “Million Dollar Bash” at Fairport Convention’s Unhalfbricking sessions.) To Beatle ears, a new challenge hung in the air: could they produce music this intimate, this lived in, without fussing over its production? What would a new “live” Beatles album, without embroidering, sound like at this point? As a motivating idea, all four Beatles seemed as curious about this as anybody.
In its final released form, the locations for Let It Be split the footage up into three distinct sections: early rehearsals on a huge soundstage with no recording equipment at Twickenham Studios (where they had worked on A Hard Day’s Night and Help!); the new Savile Row basement of Apple Corps headquarters, where George Martin booked an eight-track recorder (but didn’t really “produce”); and the compromise finale, an unannounced rooftop set where the band played for an impromptu audience overlooking London’s foggy skyline. Each venue held its own quirks and complications, but John and Yoko’s withdrawn expressions and distracted air spooked the final cut; surely a Lennon this reserved, this withdrawn, didn’t typify Beatle sessions.
In the movie, Yoko Ono’s blank passivity became the public face of Lennon’s force field. His seeming indifference made it convenient for the Beatles—and then the world—to blame her for his withdrawal from group work. Unlike when she contributed singing to “Birthday,” and lent her uncredited hand in “What’s the New Mary Jane” and “Revolution 9,” during previous months, Ono sat like a question mark as the Beatles trotted out their new songs for one another in Let It Be. A smile squeaked through, but only when Lennon twirled her around for an oblivious waltz during Harrison’s “I Me Mine.” McCartney’s comments verged on schoolmarmish at some rehearsals, which only made Lennon seem more remote, as if prowling around the edges of the band, working up the nerve to quit. His passive-aggressive campaign, imposing Ono on the others as a putative fifth Beatle at both musical and business sessions, dared each of them to quit before he did—first Ringo, the previous summer, and in this month, Harrison. Cynthia’s observation from the previous spring circled back again (“They seem to need you less than you need them”), only this time Lennon’s withdrawal carried a subliminal threat. Just a year before, he barked throughout the zany fade-out to “Hey Bulldog” with his new flame; now he seemed completely, defiantly submerged. We know today that Lennon was drowning grief in heroin; in the movie, the couple’s attitude scans as benign contempt.
To open the sessions, Lennon greeted the band with a promising new song, “Don’t Let Me Down,” a gently swaying blues that shouldered greater meaning as the month progressed. As they had done in so many previous opening sessions (“Tomorrow Never Knows” for Revolver, “Strawberry Fields Forever” for Sgt. Pepper), the Beatles spent this first session arranging a new Lennon track into three distinct sections: verse, refrain, and bridge (“I’m in love for the first time”). By the time “Don’t Let Me Down” premiered on Apple’s roof, its open-ended address became an involuted farewell to the band, its audience, and Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting partnership.
Despite this promising Lennon number, that first week of shooting in early January nearly derailed the entire project. McCartney had plenty of songs to share, but he uttered open disappointment that Lennon had only one. Time was when Lennon would partner up with McCartney to get songs ready in advance of recording sessions. Now the band wondered if Lennon would even show up and, if he did, have enough energy to interact. The final cut of Let It Be features a famous contretemps between McCartney and Harrison on camera, but George’s walkout actually followed a row with Lennon on January 10, in the middle of Chuck Berry’s “I’m Talking ’Bout You.” He simply put down his guitar and announced he was “quitting the Beatles immediately.” Just as they had when Ringo left the previous August, the other three carried on, either assuming that cooler heads would prevail or that a private meeting would patch up the spat. This time, the press got wind of it, and Harrison gave a quote to the Daily Mail on January 16 confirming the “tiff,” adding, “There was no punch-up. We just fell out.”2
Within a couple of days, the band held a private meeting at Ringo’s home. Apparently, both Yoko and Linda Eastman attended, but Yoko persisted in “speaking for” Lennon, who remained silent, as the others despaired at how to get through to him. Predictably, the meeting went nowhere: in fact, Harrison’s beef with Lennon boiled down to how he hid behind Yoko. Her performance at this meeting only fixed Harrison’s resolve. On set the next day, McCartney referred to Harrison still being “on strike,” and a discussion ensued between McCartney, Linda Eastman, Neil Aspinall, Lindsay-Hogg, and Ringo, about the band’s fragile situation. McCartney defended John and Yoko, standing up for their “sincerity,” even as he complained about how Yoko intruded on the pair’s already dwindling songwriting sessions. Eastman, Aspinall, and Starr all contributed more cutting appraisals. McCartney outlined two options: either “oppose Yoko and get The Beatles back to four or . . . put up with her.”3 As for the stalled film project, McCartney suggested they pay the crew,
see out the week, and check if the situation improved. If not, the Beatles might just fold. Later that afternoon, when Lennon and Ono finally arrived, Lennon tried out a new song, “Dig a Pony” (which had a winding, circular riff resembling “Day Tripper” and “Birthday,” sliced into half time for the verse). Perhaps they had turned a corner.
The next day, Peter Sellers dropped in for a visit and wondered why cameras were rolling on a huge set with no action. Get Back recounts a barbed back-and-forth between Sellers and Lennon as the movie star poses with the band for a photo. Peter apologizes for arriving without drugs, since he knows Lennon is fond of them. John mockingly proclaims that they’ve “given up” drugs, having whitewashed that matter for Hunter Davies’s authorized biography. Then Lennon warns Sellers not to leave needles in the men’s lavatory, citing his own drug arrest—but hastens to add how he “understands that people in show business need to take drugs to relax.” The other Beatles cover their faces with embarrassment, as if they’ve just given Lennon the same lecture (not to leave his works in the bathroom), but Lennon plows forward. Sulpy and Schweighart report that Lennon “flatly states that drug-taking is better than exercise,” while Yoko jokes that “shooting up heroin is exercise.”4 This Let It Be outtake screens a lot funnier than it reads, even if it stumbles on John and Yoko’s heroin use, another source of the stalled sessions and Lennon’s productivity. It also hints how they may have graduated from sniffing to syringes.
That second week at Twickenham became a wash: the Beatles joked acidly about the end of the band, or how Clapton might replace Harrison; McCartney needled Lennon about his lack of material; and Lindsay-Hogg watched a lot of footage go down the toilet. A second group meeting with Harrison that weekend hatched a temporary peace. (It’s not clear whether Ono attended this meeting.) Perhaps a change of space would tilt the sessions in a new direction. They canceled the Roundabout date, and decided to ditch the drafty Twickenham set for the basement room of their Apple offices, where they could get more comfortable.
