by Tim Riley
Dealing with this confounding Beatle symbolism became Lennon’s next great subject: the Beatle cataclysm cried out for a soundtrack; perhaps he could use his parents as some kind of allegory. The biggest band in the world would necessarily throw the longest, most excruciating wrap party, right? And whatever “Cold Turkey” had represented (withdrawal projected outward, a bomb tossed at royalty and its subscribers by returning his MBE, among other metaphors), its anguished concision left a lot of ideas on the table. Even as Harrison and Starr joined up with Lennon and Klein, Lennon must have blanched at how the Beatles could actually turn “Cold Turkey” down—now there was a starting point. Time to dream up the next big thing.
Naturally, telescoping his new partnership into the end of his band complicated the new, improved John and Yoko romantic image, too: perhaps if the Beatles survived as fiction, he might fall back on them still. That way, Lennon could project fearlessness beyond what he felt capable of. If the Beatles were really over, that meant free fall, and none of his most intimate friends to bounce off of. And so, in his inimitable, discursive manner, he simply plowed forward.
In many ways, Lennon and the others had already faced this new struggle squarely, even sung it with lust, in “Carry That Weight,” which was impossible not to hear as intimidating yet collapsing faith in their own legacy. All of the ex-Beatles would spend the rest of their careers trapped in this defining conundrum: how to create new music for themselves that didn’t depend on the Beatles. In many ways, Ringo Starr was best positioned for this mission, and his first two solo albums rival McCartney and Plastic Ono Band for sheer pluck. Sentimental Journey, which commissioned big-band arrangements from leading orchestrators (like the pre–Michael Jackson Quincy Jones) for the songs of Ringo’s Tin Pan Alley childhood, makes for a respectable farce: Ringo as crooner, who invests material like “Stardust” and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” with a goofy grin, whimsy of inimitable understatement. Doing Tin Pan Alley, Ringo was still far preferable to, say, Jack Jones or John Davidson. On the other hand, Ringo never got to host his own game show.
Starr’s Beaucoups of Blues, a Nashville session, brought the same flair to country songs, chiefly by Charlie Howard (“Love Don’t Last Long” and “I Wouldn’t Have You Any Other Way”) and Sorrells Pickard (“Without Her” and “Silent Homecoming”). Ringo, a “shit-kicker” from the Dingle, sounded like a Nashville hick. And with hands like Pete Drake on steel and D. J. Fontana on drums (Presley’s Sun Studios drummer), he could relax and let the band carry him. Most British critics abhor these sides, while Americans tend to ignore them. Unlike the other three, you get the distinct impression Ringo would have killed to play Vegas.
Harrison, on the other hand, flooded the engine with a double album, All Things Must Pass, overproduced by girl group svengali Phil Spector and supplanted by a third disc of ungainly jams (warm-ups that are more fun to participate in than to listen to). For a while there in 1970, Lennon had to read headlines like MAYBE GEORGE WAS ALWAYS THE MOST TALENTED AFTER ALL, which only fueled his revenge fantasies.
As the most overtly and expressively self-conscious of the four, Lennon knew full well that listeners would always compare anything he did to his immensely popular work with his former band, which made him timid in ways he hadn’t bargained for, and wasn’t used to. He compensated by reverting to his earliest pleasures, his wackiest instincts and most subversive impulses. In early 1970, this meant flailing about and grasping at chances as songs took shape. And in addition to Yoko, he turned to another musical partner to guide his voice and material for tape: Phil Spector, the titan he’d always wanted to work with.
“Allen [Klein], Yoko and I had been talking about him [Spector],” Lennon told Spector’s early biographer Richard Williams. “He’d had some kind of relationship with Allen, not a business one . . . or maybe it was. Anyway, they knew each other, and Klein really put us together. That’s one of Allen’s arts, bringing people together. It’s like a patron in the Arts. I mean, patrons used to get their percentages as well. . . . It’s the same kind of thing.”3
Paradoxically, his insecurity fed Lennon’s enormous ambition: his first several solo records (the singles “Cold Turkey,” “Instant Karma,” “Power to the People,” and “Happy Xmas [War Is Over]” and the Plastic Ono Band and Imagine albums) count as his best, made at the most precarious time for his emerging new identity, at many of the same studios he had worked at as a Beatle. For Plastic Ono Band and “Cold Turkey,” he deliberately chose Ringo Starr as his drummer, which conveyed both aesthetic insecurity and bold self-possession. (His choice of Manfred Mann’s Klaus Voormann on bass doubled as a cold, hard slap in the face to McCartney. No scene-stealing from the lower staves, thank you.)
One theme that emerged from this early solo period was just how chaotic and restless Lennon’s sense of self always had been—it was there underneath all those different Beatle guises, and it cropped up again in solo forms: towering pop romantic (“Instant Karma”), moon-howling ex-lover as wounded narcissist (Plastic Ono Band), New Age sage (“Imagine”), protest-song pamphleteer (Some Time in New York City), middle-aged cage-rattler and nostalgist (Mind Games, Walls and Bridges), hopeless and defiant romantic (“Stand by Me” and Rock ’n’ Roll), and finally, aging hippie house-husband on extended leave and father-redeemed-by-son in Double Fantasy. Each of these personas required steady maintenance, and Lennon was at his most revealing when caught contradicting his own billboards, either singing with others or trying to fit an outsize ideal into a half-assed concept. In retrospect, it’s clear just how hard he fought to get out from under the Beatle curse. In the end, though, he lived up to his sign-off line on the defining solo debut: “I just believe in me . . . Yoko and me . . . and that’s reality,” the corny, self-deflating myth of the giant who foreswore his kingdom for truth and beauty, only to lose everything so he could fight for it on adult terms all over again.
The four solo careers unveiled previously hidden internal politics as each man packed and moved out from the cozy Beatle mansion. Lennon seemed closest to Ringo, and then George; neither Harrison nor Lennon ever appeared on a McCartney solo album or vice-versa, whereas Ringo played for all three. Of course, Lennon’s solo “career” had begun as early as 1968 with numbers like “What’s the New Mary Jane” and “Revolution 9” during the White Album sessions, and then his avant-garde projects with Ono. Casual jams reflected these affinities as well: John and Yoko appeared onstage with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and the Bonnie and Delaney band in London in December of 1969. Harrison was slumming with the band after sitting in for a night and having rather too much fun; he appeared onstage anonymously until it got reported in the music press. Mostly they got away with two weeks of touring, with Clapton and Harrison sharing lead guitars almost before most audiences figured this out.
Only two semi–Beatle reunions reached the press in the early seventies, both offstage. McCartney joined Starr, Clapton, and others at Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding in Saint-Tropez in 1971; and Lennon, Harrison, and Starr did a session for Ringo’s Ringo album early in 1973 in Los Angeles. Harrison and Lennon often sat in on each other’s solo tracks, and drummer Alan White remembers Lennon anonymously adding acoustic guitar to All Things Must Pass. Harrison appeared on Imagine (1971), Mind Games (1973), and Walls and Bridges (1974). Ringo appeared on all three others’ solo records, most notably Lennon’s first, Plastic Ono Band, where he set down a new visceral authority in rock drumming and teased a new riddle from the band’s interpersonal chemistry: here Lennon and Starr’s musical intimacies rival Lennon and McCartney’s.
McCartney contributed material and played and sang on Ringo albums (most notably on 1973’s Ringo, with a standout track, “Six O’Clock”), but never on a Lennon or Harrison solo record. Lennon also contributed to Ringo’s projects (1973’s “I Am the Greatest,” which rivals “With a Little Help from My Friends” as a Ringo signature, plus a guide vocal of the Platters’ “Only You” and the writing of “Good
night Vienna” the following year). On Harrison’s work, Lennon chose anonymity. Lennon and McCartney never played on each other’s solo sessions, save for one informal Los Angeles jam from 1974, bootlegged as A Toot and a Snore, named for a snowy-oldies session with Lennon, McCartney (on drums), and Stevie Wonder; the dates coincide with reports about McCartney’s visit to Lennon’s Malibu hangout with Starr, Keith Moon, and Harry Nilsson. However, to prevent runaway rumors and preserve their hard-fought integrity as solo figures, Lennon and McCartney visited far more often and warmly throughout the seventies than they let on to the press.
But in the beginning, the spat had an epic stature, and when Lennon used the term “divorce,” few considered it an exaggeration. Never one to acknowledge grief, let alone submit to it, Lennon seems to have been so convinced of his choices that grieving came as a surprise, if it came consciously at all. The pop world at large may have lost its center, but Lennon seemed to feel everything more keenly, and in more complicated fashion, than the other three. As usual, he wanted his future to happen yesterday, the way some songs just tumbled out. But his divorce from the Beatles made his divorce from Cynthia look like child’s play, since these early conflicts defined the legacy of the Lennon-McCartney publishing catalog indefinitely.
The Beatles made it through 1969 intact, if only in spirit. Part of the problem came from the façade they felt forced to construct around Apple. Some cite reports of Lennon’s decision to quit the band as early as November 1968, when the others probably greeted it with the same bemused alarm with which they took in his announcement that he was Jesus Christ six months earlier.
This fiction, of an ongoing band with a future, came apart in a series of events over which they quickly lost control, and of which Lennon typically considered himself the victim. The Two Virgins controversy resurfaced as police raided Lennon’s erotic lithographs from the London Arts Gallery on New Bond Street on January 16, 1970. The gallery reopened that afternoon, but a summons entered Lennon’s legal file, and the underground reveled in how eagerly the authorities leapt for the bait.
Combined with John and Yoko’s peace campaigns, these tired obscenity charges stoked an increasing cynicism in the expanding boomer electorate. In Britain, this culminated in the International Times obscenity case, which sent its editor, John Hopkins, to jail. To British youth, this seemed unfathomable: the American student protests had grown far bigger in number, and the black power movement raised the ominous specter of radicals with automatic rifles terrorizing the post-riot world. That the UK government had succeeded in sending student leftists to jail for pictures of nipples seemed the height of absurdity, especially given the volatile, progressive fumes rock ’n’ roll had been spewing for years. A feeling of defeat hung over the counterculture as the new decade crept into view.
After a trip to Denmark to visit Ono’s daughter Kyoko, who was living there with her father, Lennon tooled around in a snowmobile, and the couple shaved their heads to auction off their locks “for peace.” The new Tittenhurst mansion they planned to move into underwent renovations for a new studio, so they stayed with friends and moved in slowly as work progressed. Part of Anthony Cox’s divorce agreement with Yoko allowed him to film the couple for several days, granting him exclusive rights to the content.4
Approximately one hundred twenty minutes of this cinema verité circulates in bootleg circles. The footage features a single handheld camera for an extended look at John and Yoko, roaming around a kitchen area and some bedrooms, listening to the radio, rolling joints, and watching TV with their new political cause, Michael X, a British Malcolm X wannabe who latched onto rock star patronage. The only dramatic moments come at the end, when Lennon appears on Top of the Pops to sing “Instant Karma,” with Yoko behind him, knitting blindfolded.
The song’s uplift rebuffed any cultural malaise. Lennon had woken up on January 27 with a new song exploding in his head, music that felt like the antithesis of “Cold Turkey” and all its careening exhaustion. He ordered a piano delivered to his Apple office and jumped in his car to lunge at one of his long-held pop ideals: to record and mix a single in one day. Everybody who heard it knew it was a hit, and EMI could barely get it out fast enough for Lennon: it appeared on February 9.
“I’m fascinated by commercials and promotion as an art form,” Lennon said later, “I enjoy them. So the idea of ‘Instant Karma’ was like the idea of instant coffee, presenting something in a new form. I wrote it in the morning on the piano, and went into the office and I sang it many times. And I said ‘Hell, let’s do it,’ and we booked the studio, and Phil came in and he said: ‘How do you want it?’ And I said ‘fifties,’ and he said, ‘Right,’ and boom, I did it, in about three goes. He played it back and there it was.”5
Richard Williams also talked later on about that day with Lennon:
It was a surprise session, typical of those days. Alan White remembers getting a phone call, saying that John wanted to do a session at EMI, and White “just turned up.” According to John, Spector was absent as the evening began. “We were playing, and we weren’t getting very far,” he remembered. “I knew I had a hit record. I’d written it that morning, and I knew I had it, but it would’ve taken me a couple of days to make, building up and building up and running between the two rooms. That way, it might have turned out very heavy and funky, like ‘Cold Turkey,’ but then Spector walked in.”6
Alan White, the Toronto Plastic Ono Band drummer, tried out a wayward drum fill in the middle of the second verse that Lennon adored—after the line “Why in the world are we here?” White tilted the whole track sideways for a few bars and then jumped right back into the groove, as if some alternate reality tore a brief hole in the song. (This linked the material with other deliberate Beatle mistakes, like the extra beat in “Revolution,” or the sideways 6/4 bar that launches the coda to “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey.”) With Harrison on guitar and leading the chorus, it all jelled spontaneously: “Suddenly when we went in the room and heard what [Spector had] done to it . . . it was fantastic. It sounded like there was fifty people playing.” Some hangers-on got in a car, “drove into central London to a discothèque,” noted Williams, “and dragged people out to the studio to sing the infectious chorus, ‘All shine on . . . like the moon and the stars and the sun,’ behind John.”7
One of these people happened to be Beryl Marsden, the young Liverpool singer Lennon had admired at the Cavern. Lennon was thrilled with the original rough mix that came out in Britain. But Spector snuck back to the States and kept working on it, and Capitol put out a remixed version of the song for the U.S. market later in the month. “It’s the only time anyone’s done that,” Lennon told Williams, sarcastically berating both Spector’s pretension and Capitol’s history of fiddling with Beatle tracks, a practice he took care to avoid as a solo artist.
As early as May 1969, while Lennon, Harrison, and Spector worked on “Instant Karma,” Allen Klein had trimmed Apple company fat by littering the place with pink slips. (“At one point, the company was losing money faster than the British government,” went Eric Idle’s joke in his TV parody, the Rutles). Apple offices kept functioning, but mostly as a façade. Even Brian Epstein’s assistant from the old NEMS shop on Charlotte Street in Liverpool, Alistair Taylor, had sought a Beatle override unsuccessfully. Film, electronics, and avant-garde divisions got the ax, except for Geoff Emerick, who was kept on to build his dream studio in Apple’s basement (and deliver the ultimate humiliation to Alex Mardas). Once built, this studio served as an elite facility for a brief period and was then closed. Demonized as both an American and a ruthless capitalist, Klein watched as Peter Asher stole off to California to launch James Taylor’s huge career. Only Derek Taylor, the colorful press chief, still held court most days in his second-floor office. But this now seems like another Klein calculation: Taylor simply kept feeding the band’s activities to his extensive contacts in an adoring press; why mend an unbroken myth machine?
For a time, Lennon and Ono enjoyed driving into London, holding forth to the press, and hatching new plans for festivals, events, art exhibitions, and future projects. Thrilled by Woodstock, and unshaken by the Rolling Stones’ Altamont fiasco (documented in the film Gimme Shelter), Lennon worked with Canadian promoters Ritchie Yorke and John Brower, who planned a huge outdoor music festival in Toronto the following summer. Yorke wrote dispatches about the utopian event in Rolling Stone, but Lennon could not hold on to his wish that it be free and finally abandoned it in early spring.
With all the band’s earnings from previous releases funneled into a frozen escrow account, Klein lobbied for a new release for quick cash: Couldn’t they cobble together something from that album and film made back in early 1969? Bootleg activity had turned Get Back into both a headache and a giant sunken cost. Now Lennon brought Phil Spector back in to see if he could sidestep the rough mixes that Glyn Johns had prepared from the previous spring. It’s a measure of the band’s low regard for these sessions that they not only sat on these tapes for a year but stopped doing so only under threat of bankruptcy. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr concurred that a revival of Get Back material could give them some wiggle room to sort out Apple’s mess; but McCartney, who loathed Klein, left countless messages unanswered from his Scottish hideaway. His absence, and complete unwillingness to communicate with the others, became silent assent.
Riding the brash stylistic coup of “Instant Karma,” which neatly stitched Lennon’s futurism with a booming girl group echo (with an opening piano quote from Richie Barrett’s “Some Other Guy”), Spector set up shop with fourteen-month-old Beatle tapes from January 1969. All four Beatles had pronounced the project hopeless. Within a couple of weeks, Lennon came away dazzled: “When I heard it, I didn’t puke,” he said. “I was so relieved after hearing six months of this like black cloud hanging over, that this was going to go out. I thought it would be good to go out, the shitty version, because it would break The Beatles, you know, it would break the myth. ‘That’s us, with no trousers on.’ We were going to let it out in a really shitty condition, and I didn’t care. I thought it was good to let it [the Glyn Johns mix] out and show people what had happened to us, ‘This is where we’re at now. We can’t get it together. We don’t play together anymore, you know, leave us alone.’ ”8
