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

by Tim Riley

  The other Beatles received word about Lennon’s accident while recording at EMI, as the skeleton for the medley with “Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight” took shape in one continuous track on July 7. They had finally determined to mount a new recording project, promising George Martin to behave themselves and turn in work “like before.” Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” followed on July 4. When Lennon returned the following week, he elatedly told his bandmates that Yoko was carrying a new baby. This makes the case for how serious he was about starting a new family with her. Her previous miscarriage, conveniently blamed on the drug bust (not on the heroin), and surviving the Scottish car accident could only indicate that this child was meant to be. She joined them in Studio 2 in a large rented bed, with a microphone hanging over her for comments, as they worked on twenty-one takes of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” (rehearsed but not recorded in both The White Album and Let It Be sessions) and overdubs for “Something” and “You Never Give Me Your Money.”

  The latest twist on Yoko’s studio presence was more awkward than ever, but at least it gave Lennon an excuse to skip the following week’s sessions for “Here Comes the Sun,” “Something,” “Octopus’s Garden,” and “Oh! Darling.” He returned on July 21 to start “Come Together,” which began with eight takes for a basic track, overdubbed with lead vocal and other instruments the following day. After that, all four Beatles gathered to make “The End” in seven different takes, with drum solos of varying lengths from Ringo for each take, and do more work on “Oh! Darling” and “Come Together.” After McCartney laid down his demo for “Come and Get It,” Apple’s new Scottish signing, Badfinger, jumped on it as a potential hit single for the Magic Christian soundtrack. Lennon listened to McCartney from the control booth, before the band launched into “Sun King” and “Mean Mr. Mustard,” recorded as a single track. The next day came overdubs to “Sun King” and “Mean Mr. Mustard,” and then “Polythene Pam” segued into “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” as another continuous track, in thirty-nine takes.

  While Lennon sat out many Abbey Road sessions, the album was shaping up nicely. And there were even sparks flying in some of the Lennon and McCartney collaborations, now in the form of fitting song fragments together. By the end of July, a rough draft of the song medley emerged: “You Never Give Me Your Money,” “Sun King”/”Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Her Majesty,” “Polythene Pam”/”She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” “Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight,” and “The End.”

  In August, they started work on Lennon’s “Because,” with George Martin sitting in on an electric Baldwin spinet harpsichord, and tracked the first of three elaborate vocal trios (mixed as nine separate voices) onto take sixteen. With all these basic tracks finished, the Beatles assembled early in the day outside the front gates of EMI Studios on August 8 for a cover shot. Photographer Iain Macmillan stood atop a stepladder with his camera in the middle of Abbey Road to snap the band crossing the zebra crosswalk, back and forth, because they couldn’t be bothered to fly to Mount Everest, their grandiose first choice. This fallback shot, four longhairs walking in step with one another across a tree-lined London avenue, became more emblematic than the Sgt. Pepper cover itself.

  Overdubs and orchestral sessions continued until August 20, when the songs were sequenced and some final edits stitched in. This Abbey Road sequencing had a peculiar back twist: the jolting cold finish of “I Want You” had been conceived as the finale to the album, with the two sides reversed (the medley being the centerpiece of side one) and the running order of side two as follows: “Come Together,” “Something,” “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).” The sides were flipped, and the order of side one adjusted—only in the final mastering stages. What sounds like a perfect layout to history’s ears came about by inverting the two sides.

  The band gathered on Lennon’s new Tittenhurst grounds on August 22, wandering around by the former servants’ quarters. Everyone had a beard except McCartney; Lennon wore a wide-brimmed hat, and a solemn-faced Ringo had a garish scarf flaring out of his jacket. These became the cover shots to the synthetic American 1970 album, a haphazard singles compilation, called Hey Jude (to which there is no remote British counterpart). Abbey Road came out the last week of September, and that fall, “Something”/”Come Together” turned into a smash international hit. With the album all but finished, the Beatles took a break and read newspaper reports of a huge rock festival in upstate New York in the middle of that August. In painful contrast to Ono’s two miscarriages, Linda McCartney gave birth to Mary, the first of three children with McCartney.

  In the weeks before Abbey Road appeared, Lennon and Ono worked at their Apple office fielding interviews, signing paperwork, and hatching new schemes. On September 12, the phone rang with a call from someone named John Brower in Toronto. Brower told Lennon’s assistant, Anthony Fawcett, about a rock ’n’ roll festival happening that weekend featuring Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bo Diddley. Lennon grabbed the phone when he saw Fawcett’s notes: he agreed to appear for a set if Brower could clear his immigration and visa documents and send him round-trip first-class tickets. Brower blanched: he had simply wanted Lennon to endorse the show, grab a quote for publicity. But his lineup had pushed a button for Lennon.

  Alan White, later the drummer for Yes, remembers getting Lennon’s phone call about the trip: “I’d like you to play on stage with me,” Lennon told him, “I need a drummer. I saw you playing and I really would like you to play with me.” White thought someone was playing a prank. Then the phone rang again. “It’s John,” he said. “I would really like you to come and play. Really, it’s me.” White had just turned twenty; he gladly obliged.

  The next day, a car took him to London Airport, where he met up with John, Yoko, Klaus Voormann, and Eric Clapton in the VIP lounge. “We rehearsed on the airplane,” White remembers. “I was playing on the back of the seat and we just played some standards, a couple of Beatles songs. It was put together very quickly.”31

  In addition to rehearsing “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” Clapton also remembers rehearsing “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” Lennon’s treasured Gene Vincent song, which didn’t make the set. They also worked up “Yer Blues” and a skeletal new number about heroin withdrawal, “Cold Turkey,” still shy of its signature guitar lick. “Give Peace a Chance” would close. Lennon famously took ill before the set, which Clapton remembers as sheer rock ’n’ roll intimidation: “We found out we were going on between Chuck Berry and Little Richard,” he writes, “and John was terrified, overwhelmed I think by the fact that he was going onstage with all his heroes.” Backstage, they did “so much blow” that Lennon vomited and Clapton had to lie down.32

  Energized by the sudden triumph of the Toronto gig, and nonplussed that the Beatles turned the song down, Lennon recorded “Cold Turkey” over two sessions with his new band (with Ringo Starr sitting in for Alan White). The same band laid tracks for Yoko Ono’s “Don’t Worry Kyoko” at Lansdowne Studios on October 3.

  Between Toronto and the studio, Lennon attached a roaring guitar lick to the frame of “Cold Turkey”—a clipped, melodic taunt that bent the classic Chuck Berry gesture into gnarled curves. Somehow, this lick gathered up the song’s self-loathing into a single gesture, binding feverish tension into a vortex of assault. (The guitar hook sprouted from similar figures in “Yer Blues,” and “I Want You [She’s So Heavy].”) Hearing the Toronto version back again, you can hardly believe the lick doesn’t yet exist—it’s as if they’re circling around it, chasing it down, fighting hard to figure out where the song wants to land. There are those who steadfastly refuse to believe Lennon ever sniffed or injected heroin, to whom this recording stands as the ultimate reproof. Its unrelenting yawp also takes the measure of Lennon’s Beatle withdrawal. The Beatles’ refusal to record “Cold Turkey” gave the track a final, unforgiving sting.

  This fall also saw Jo
hn and Yoko return to film, churning out Honeymoon and Rape Part II, among others. The most famous of these became Self-Portrait, an homage to Warhol that froze for forty-two minutes on Lennon’s penis. “The critics wouldn’t touch it,” Lennon boasted. That November, on an apparent whim, Lennon sent his chauffeur to pick up his MBE award from Mimi Smith’s mantelpiece in Poole and made headlines anew with his letter to the queen:

  Your Majesty,

  I am returning my MBE as a protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against “Cold Turkey” slipping down the charts.

  With Love,

  John Lennon33

  This caused a commotion in the press, especially among those who had originally protested the Beatles award. That flippant “Cold Turkey” remark proved particularly small-minded to some. People who took offense at that kind of thing, however, were just the sort Lennon targeted.

  Lennon continued to behave as if the Beatles were a sideshow to all his new projects, as Apple’s priorities finally collided. After Abbey Road appeared, the world soaked up the new music as a gift, happy to deny the evidence of their ears since at least The White Album: the four corners of this quartet had stretched its frame beyond the breaking point. This was enough to send Lennon over the edge: on September 20, 1969, as McCartney led off a group meeting by talking about how the Beatles should get back to “little gigs,” find their way back to the rooftop heights of “Get Back” and “One After 909,” Lennon suddenly summoned the nerve he had been lacking for at least nine months. As McCartney puts it, “John looked at me in the eye and said, ‘Well, I think you’re daft. I wasn’t going to tell you till we signed the Capitol deal but I’m leaving the group.’ We paled visibly and our jaws slackened a bit.”34 Later, Lennon admitted:

  I knew before we went to Toronto. I told Allen [Klein] I was leaving, I told Eric Clapton and Klaus that I was leaving and that I’d like to probably use them as a group. I hadn’t decided how to do it—to have a permanent new group or what? And then later on I thought, “Fuck, I’m not going to get stuck with another set of people, Whoever they are.” So I announced it to myself and to the people around me on the way to Toronto. Allen came with me, and I told Allen it was over. When I got back there were a few meetings and Allen had said, “Cool it,” ’cause there was a lot to do [with the Beatles] business-wise, and it would not have been suitable at the time.35

  Kim Fowley, rock scenester and announcer at the Toronto show, remembers talking to Lennon backstage about how the Beatles had “failed”: “We stopped making records we wanted to hear ourselves, where every track was better than the last,” Lennon told him.36

  Poring over these dates, a vague lineage to Lennon’s outrage emerges: Abbey Road mixed, sequenced, released; jumping off the ledge at the Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival with a new band; returning to offer “Cold Turkey” to the Beatles; sensing a finality to their rebuff; heading into the studio anyway with Ringo and cutting his first great solo rock ’n’ roll track . . . no wonder Lennon finally had what it took to make his announcement: if Paul had offered “Come and Get It” to the Beatles and been turned down, he might well have behaved in kind. Instead, McCartney saved his working drafts (“Teddy Boy” from the Get Back sessions, and soon “Every Night” and “Maybe I’m Amazed”) for his solo album the following spring.

  Lennon promised not to go public with his announcement, however, since Klein had started delicate negotiations with EMI to extend the Beatles’ contract. With the Beatles’ assets frozen since the Northern Songs takeover, everybody understood the need for new revenue—they all had lawyers to pay. Klein’s new terms with EMI proved winning: he boosted the Beatles’ royalty rate from 17.5 percent to 25 percent on U.S. sales and committed the band to two albums per year, either as a group or individually (this provided a significant loophole). And their new royalty terms jumped to $0.58 per album until 1972, when the number leapt to $0.72. Reissues were assigned the rate of $0.55, increasing to $0.72.37 These rates were the highest in the industry up to that point, so in Lennon’s eyes, Klein had proved effective.

  But Klein had also promised to get Northern Songs “for nothing,” and negotiations with ATV had disintegrated. Klein’s plan involved taking out several loans against Apple Corps to buy back Northern Songs. But McCartney’s father-in-law, Lee Eastman, sent ATV a letter saying Klein had no authorization to act on Apple’s behalf (McCartney had never signed with Klein, although he had given Klein the verbal go-ahead for the deal). Understandably, ATV backed out.

  Both ATV and Apple then launched campaigns directly to a small block of investors, for control of Northern Songs’ shares. During this lobbying, a Lennon quote hit the papers that shattered his own shareholders’ faith: “I’m not going to be fucked around by men in suits sitting on their fat arses in the City!”38 This tipped wary investors over to ATV’s side. The existing Lennon-McCartney publishing contract obligated them to continue writing songs for the company through 1973. But with no control over the company’s direction, they decided to sell their shares and simply collect royalties on songs they’d already written, divesting themselves of any future attachments to ATV. Lennon and McCartney sold their stock in October 1969 for £3.5 million. Harrison and Starr chose to keep their shares.39

  As this transaction went forward, Lennon learned that McCartney owned more stock than he did: his songwriter partner had been instructing their mutual Apple aide, Peter Brown, to buy up shares in secret. When the paperwork revealed this, Lennon’s take was 644,000 shares (worth £1.25 million) and McCartney’s added up to 751,000 shares (£1.4 million). The discrepancy meant far less to Lennon than his partner’s deception. A verbal agreement had been broken: they had set up Northern Songs with equal shares in their songwriting concern. As far as Lennon could tell, if they had not been forced to sell at this point, McCartney might have gone on scavenging shares indefinitely. Northern Songs carved up ownership as follows: the principal songwriters, Lennon and McCartney, each held 15 percent; Brian Epstein’s NEMS received 7.5 percent; Dick James and his partner Charles Silver nabbed 37.5 percent each; Harrison and Starr a mere 1.6 percent each. Lennon could not have been more shocked: not only had Epstein sold them out for a pittance, but his own songwriting partner, an intimate since age seventeen, had gone behind his back to gain more influence in their publishing. Lennon spoke of McCartney’s betrayal until he died; McCartney rarely mentions it. It’s hard to fathom that Abbey Road would have been made if Lennon had learned of this even three months sooner.

  Then, on October 12, Yoko miscarried again. By current standards, nobody paid much attention to the baseline chain-smoking and drinking that wallpapered their daily lives. But of course neither of them had come to grips with drugs, and with the suggestion of heroin in her system as recently as January (when they joshed about shooting up with Peter Sellers), it’s a wonder she conceived and carried the child as long as she did. This time, however, events plowed under whatever grief John and Yoko endured over the loss. Lennon, glad for the distractions, hurtled ever forward. Surely, nature wouldn’t keep on robbing him, not after everything he had suffered to get this far to find his creative new life partner and begin a new direction. Given the scanty evidence of a plunge, he seems to have recovered much sooner than he did from Ono’s first miscarriage just seven months previously.

  Lennon kept his promise not to let the band’s fallout leak to the press, but more and more he behaved like a free man, just as he had done increasingly since he latched on to Yoko Ono. Abbey Road sailed onto the charts, and George Harrison enjoyed a deliriously sunny hit single with “Something,” his first Beatle A side (the B side, Lennon’s “Come Together,” commanded a lot of radio as well). And most hard-core fans stayed in denial about the farewell gestures encoded in the album’s layout. At Christmas 1969, John and Yoko punctuated their bed-in year with an ambitious billboard campaign, featuring enormous white spaces in Times Square, New York; London; and eight o
ther major cities. The signs read:

  WAR IS OVER!

  IF YOU WANT IT

  Happy Christmas from John & Yoko

  At the press conference held announcing the campaign, a reporter shouted out, “How much does all of this cost?” “We don’t know,” Lennon answered. “But we’re accepting donations, and we’ve already had some, and anyway however much it costs it’s less than a single human life.”40

  An expanded defense of his peace campaigns came in an early 1971 interview with Richard Robinson: “Yes, they sell war beautifully. I mean they’ve really got it sewn up you know. TV and everything. They’ve conned a lot of our people into . . . They’re busy shaking their fist at the Daily Express saying what they wanted in any disguise they like, either topless or paper bag or whatever publicity gimmick you’re using.”41

  Almost as if they had to squeeze in more activity before the decade slammed shut, John and Yoko made appearances and returned to Canada before spending their last Christmas in England. They joined George Harrison for some gigs with the Delaney and Bonnie band at the Lyceum Ballroom, billed as “Peace for Christmas.” Apparently, Eric Clapton, who invited Harrison, enjoyed blending into the rest of the group instead of shouldering superstar expectations, and alongside Klaus Voormann, Bobby Keys, Billy Preston, and drummers Keith Moon, Alan White, and Jim Gordon, Lennon appeared as first among equals.

  Together, they piled on for a seven-minute version of “Cold Turkey” and then Ono’s “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow)” stretched to over half an hour. Also on the bill: the Hot Chocolate Band, the Pioneers, the Rascals, Jimmy Cliff, Black Velvet, and disc-jockey “Emperor Rosko.” John and Yoko capped off the 1960s by returning to Canada, where Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, known as a jet-setter, agreed to meet with them. They spent forty-five minutes in his office, and Lennon left with promises of Canadian government assistance for the peace festival he hoped to mount the following summer. Afterward, they met with the critic and futurist Marshall McCluhan, author of The Medium Is the Massage and among the first to recognize the Beatles’ intuitive grasp of multimedia mythology. He had just set up a new department at Toronto University, where he taught a radical new field, Media Studies.