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

by Tim Riley

  The party disintegrated, with one humiliation piled on another. Nixon won with bigger numbers than when Johnson defeated Goldwater back in 1964, and now here was the partygoers’ own leftist icon, the leader of the Beatles, shaming himself and his wife even further. He began flirting aggressively with one of Rubin’s roommates, and Hoffman’s sometime romantic partner, right in front of Yoko. Then he took the woman’s hand and led her into the next room, playing the rock star with no scruples. The remaining guests were obliged to begin talking more loudly so as not to hear Lennon and his pickup going at it. When he reemerged, he simply took Ono’s hand and left.

  “That was the only time I remember Yoko breaking down and showing any of us what she was feeling,” Tex Gabriel says. “I gave her my sunglasses so she could leave with some self-respect. Everybody in the room knew what was going on, it was extremely humiliating. And we were all just sort of humiliated along with her, having watched Nixon’s landslide.”29

  The following morning, John and Yoko took a walk on the pier by the Hudson with Bob Gruen, who photographed Lennon down on his knees to Yoko begging for forgiveness. “He had been drunk, he was sorry, it was the same old story,” Gruen remembers. A new wariness emerged in Yoko—how long could this kind of public humiliation continue? At that afternoon’s session, Ono sang “What a bastard the world is,” a searing rebuke of male chauvinism. What kind of justice was this? Ono must have wondered: What did Lennon’s romantic idealization count for if not simple monogamy? As much as she adored her husband, Ono had more self-respect than Cynthia—this behavior was not the sort of thing she could build a marriage on.

  Lennon had moved to his wife’s artistic home and reworked his political identity by bonding with America’s most theatrical radicals. But in doing so, he became the target of U.S. authority in ways few could fathom, just as his marriage, already another outsize myth, foundered on his own self-destructiveness.

  PHOTO INSERT 3

  1973. New York. Producer Phil Spector lounges in front of John and Yoko Ono with the Plastic Ono Elephant’s Memory Band, standing. From left to right: John Ward (bass), Gary Van Scyoc (bass), Wayne “Tex” Gabriel (guitar), Jim Keltner (drums), Rick Frank (drums), Adam Ippolito (keyboard), and Stan Bronstein (saxophone).

  March 1, 1974. Los Angeles. Julian, John, May Pang, and an unidentified friend at a California poolside.

  March 12, 1974. West Hollywood. Lennon gets hustled out of the Troubadour club (Harry Nilsson is behind John).

  1974. Liberty Island, New York. Bob Gruen’s idea of posing Lennon in front of the Statue of Liberty, America’s welcoming monument, became a potent symbol of Lennon’s struggle against the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

  July 1974. The Record Plant East, New York City. With Elton John during the Walls and Bridges recording sessions.

  February 28, 1975. The Uris Theatre, New York. Backstage at the 17th annual Grammy Awards. Left to right: David Bowie, Art Garfunkel, Paul Simon, Yoko, and John.

  Late 1975. New York. John with baby Sean at the Dakota.

  Summer 1980. The Hit Factory studio, New York. During recording sessions for Double Fantasy, Yoko knits while John has a smoke at the mixing board.

  December 9, 1980. David Geffen and Yoko Ono leave Roosevelt Hospital, after John has been pronounced dead.

  December 9, 1980. Elliot Mintz escorts Barbara Bach and Ringo Starr out of the Dakota after their visit with Yoko and Sean.

  Summer 1980. John wearing his Quarry Bank school tie.

  Chapter 22

  I’m a Loser

  John and Yoko moved uptown—from the West Village to the fortresslike Dakota on Central Park West—during the spring 1973 Record Plant sessions that produced Mind Games. The building’s notoriously selective co-op board granted them access to actor Robert Ryan’s recently vacated seventh-floor apartment.1 Leon Wildes, Lennon’s attorney, added this as another endorsement of citizenship to the bulging immigration file.

  The building’s gothic presence was already famous, mostly for the gruesome portent of Mia Farrow’s horror hit, Rosemary’s Baby (1968). John and Yoko’s new neighbors included Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, and Roberta Flack, then a pop fixture with “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” For some reason, some Britons still look down on the Dakota, as if Lennon deserved better, apparently unaware of the building’s prestige as a Manhattan address.2

  Several concurrent legal problems arose as they settled into their new quarters. The Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) suddenly stepped up deportation proceedings based on Lennon’s long-lapsed visitation visa, which dated back to 1971. The FBI harassment continued, and Leon Wildes began to notice strange noises on his phone line. And the ongoing dissolution of the Beatles took a new turn as Lennon, Harrison, and Starr disentangled themselves from Allen Klein, whose contract expired in April 1973. From Klein’s point of view, he had performed well: even McCartney acknowledged he’d won £5 million for the band in back royalties from EMI/Capitol. But his stewardship of Apple had only exacerbated the rift between him, McCartney, and Eastman, and with every Apple deal it became clearer that the only way the band could settle their long-standing dispute was without Klein.

  For his part, Klein remained resolute: “Paul rejected a £1 million offer by the other Beatles to buy him out of their partnership,” Klein said of this 1973 decision. “But Paul turned it down. He wouldn’t take it. . . . He doesn’t want to get out, and that’s really the problem. Now you have a company with four partners, each of whom has a different interest, and to get each one to agree to something, like whether Ringo should make a film, becomes almost impossible. How do they stay partners? It’s very hard.” Klein insisted he had tried to arrange a takeover of Apple and all the other Beatles’ interests, in a merger with his own ABKCO company, but that McCartney blocked any such ambitions.3

  From the McCartney-Eastman side, the only thing Klein excelled at was back royalties—few could run Apple’s gridlocked board, and Klein’s jackhammer style worked against him. Conveniently forgetting his earlier pledge to Lennon, Klein began collecting commissions on contracts covering catalog material predating 1970. The Beatles found themselves cash-poor and anxious to table the entire conflict. Some sources claim Lennon still resented Klein having sided with Harrison against Yoko in the Bangladesh concert fiasco. What had first seemed frank and honest business strategy had become part of a much larger dispute on how to allocate all the Beatles’ resources—for every solo album released under the current agreement, all royalties funneled straight into escrow. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr ultimately took Klein to court to sever their relationship, which resulted in a $3 million payoff and the final Beatles settlement of Apple’s finances in early 1975.

  Oblivious to such financial arrangements and the tensions they caused, the pop market still clamored for new Beatle product, and the press ran reunion rumors weekly. During their early tours, “What will you do when the bubble bursts?” hounded them everywhere they went. Gamely, they dodged and mocked such nonsense through their recordings, which kept raising the stakes until the question itself rang hollow. Now, barely three years into their solo careers, none of them could promote an individual album without getting asked about playing with the others, to the point where they wondered aloud whether breaking up had been worthwhile. It was like getting pressed about honeymoon details during divorce affidavits. Rolling Stone, reporting on the new market for Beatle collectibles at fan conventions, interviewed four rock promoters about how they would handle a hypothetical Beatle reunion tour. They settled on a round figure of $50 million. The noisy, ideas-driven rock critic Lester Bangs—portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2000 in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous—declared that any Beatle reunion would amount to “the biggest anti-climax of all time.”4 A conundrum hung in this expectant, early-seventies-rock atmosphere: a yearning for the Beatles pressed up against not wanting to invest in almost certain disappointment.

  After Imagine, Lennon’s mid-p
eriod solo career swung between lacerating self-examination and groping intellectualism, with three albums that proved Plastic Ono Band his most emotionally direct yet layered work: in 1973, Mind Games followed him out to Los Angeles as his weakest effort yet; Walls and Bridges (1974) and Rock ’n’ Roll (1975) tilted him right back to New York, as if climbing his way out of a mistake. Pussy Cats, Lennon’s production of Harry Nilsson, also in 1974, straddled the line between greatness averted and desperation absolved. As new acts like the Eagles, Lou Reed, and Led Zeppelin ascended to pop royalty, Lennon’s work in this period reveled in the mood of an era still hungover from its glory days: you can hear the difference between a hangover at age twenty-six (“A Day in the Life”) and one at thirty-three or thirty-four (the false uplift of “One Day (at a Time),” the dread pulsing through “Scared” and “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out”). Such signposts mark the difference between the possibilities left in rock ’n’ roll and enforced rock ’n’ roll cheer that sank of its own fatigue. “A Day In the Life” remains the more mature statement.

  Rock careers travel fragmented paths, mocking and disrupting the linear showbiz narratives of hit records, schlock movie tie-ins, and sprawling end-games. In a lot of rock careers, weak sideshows illuminate core greatness. Dylan’s Self-Portrait (1970), for example, threw the elusively comic triumph of Blonde on Blonde (1966) or the elusively metaphysical John Wesley Harding (1968) into high relief, and the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup (1973), with the hit “Angie,” splashed cold commercial water on the band’s master stroke, Exile on Main Street (1972), which sported not just “Tumbling Dice” and “Happy,” but “Sweet Virginia,” “Rocks Off,” and “All Down the Line,” and their second defining cover of a revered Robert Johnson song, “Stop Breaking Down,” which rivaled “Love in Vain” (on 1969’s Let It Bleed). If rock style had been invented by and for teenagers, these acts now walked an anxious middle-aged line: since most of these figures came of listening age to the young Elvis, Buddy Holly, and Little Richard, the very idea of a rock career galloping into middle age carried ironic kick. And like Francis Ford Coppola, determined to reenergize the gangster genre with The Godfather, extending adolescent thrills into adulthood became rock’s new puzzler.

  Like the rock stars it spawned, the sixties rock audience, too, had grown up, and sought out more mature themes. A lot of material from this phase dealt either with outgrowing adolescence or succumbing to it all over again. The Beatles had played out the central coming-of-age story for the medium; now rock stars persisted in chasing youthful kicks. Hitmeister Elton John, for example, never seemed more like a Pillsbury Doughboy than when attempting social commentary (“Ticking,” off 1974’s Caribou). Mick Jagger responded by splitting his persona in two: offstage, he played the celebrity bad boy, but the narrative voice of his songs had already wizened through his immersion in the blues. McCartney’s persona reversed Jagger’s template: at home, he seemed the model father and family man; onstage, his act persisted with boyish charm. Lennon had already proven such a master of pop forms that his path seemed oddly simple: just fashion a career based on his direct experience, and he’d be fine.

  But the real-life hurdles of this career strategy proved daunting. Lennon had already turned in his big statement (with Plastic Ono Band); now he backpedaled. Nothing smacked more of passé than a sixties figurehead like Lennon going nostalgic. Worse than that, nostalgia became Lennon’s key selling point. With the “Mind Games” single, the author of both “The Word” and “All You Need Is Love”—who had renounced the Beatles, the sixties, and all those adolescent notions about heroic, utopian redemption in “God”—now wallowed in clichés about flower power and positive thinking: “Yes is the answer . . . And you know that for sure.” All of a sudden, even “Imagine,” released only two years earlier, sounded like the Sanskrit of sixties uplift. On “God,” Lennon’s brute insights had a bracing, clear-the-air candor; here, he reflected wistfulness as mere audience expectation—a yearning to be played to rather than exposed as cant.

  Lennon’s vocal, however, had inimitable overtones and kept you straining to hear more layers through his considerable craft: “Mind Games” wafted across radio with sweeping strings doubling guitar lines, surrounding Lennon’s voice like a cloud moving across a great horizon of feeling. But the album as a whole lacked a core emotion, or any recurring themes to hang on to; it had all the earmarks of a professionally designed logo. (Most of this material had trouble living up to Lennon’s epigram: “Madness is the first sign of dandruff.”) The exception proved the rule: “Bring On the Lucie (Freda Peeple),” a rolling protest anthem, with steel guitar atop Jim Keltner’s swirling drums, stood out like a great lost classic (and would make a soaring finale to The U.S. vs. John Lennon documentary in 2006).

  The musical clues all over Mind Games diagram a man in an aesthetic rut, a public metaphor for his unspooling marriage. It’s one of the few Lennon albums that sounds like “product,” where his vocals generally lack inspiration. This music didn’t illuminate or qualify much of anything else in his catalog, and the biggest criticism he exposed himself to was disregard for his audience’s best hopes. “One Day (at a Time),” an ambitious, multilayered song, sounds like Lennon getting ensnared in McCartney’s coy frippery while trying to mock him (with irredeemable lyrics like “ ’Cause I’m the fish and you’re the sea”). In Melody Maker, Chris Charlesworth called it “very twee,” which to Lennon ranked as anathema.5 When Elton John put his version on the B side of his “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” single, many fans mistook it for an original. “Intuition” was barely a song at all. Critic Neil Splinter noted: “At one time, I would have said that Mind Games is a terrible album because it in no way reflects Lennon’s capabilities. But after four solo albums, each one lousier than the last, I’m no longer sure that Lennon is capable of anything other than leading a friendly corner superstar existence.”6 Many other reviewers were kinder, out of sheer sympathy for the amount of stifled talent.

  Far from waning in the wake of the breakup, the market for Beatle product only expanded. In March 1973, the Grammys awarded George Harrison and Phil Spector the 1972 Album of the Year for the Concert for Bangladesh set. A bootleg outfit assembled a compilation called Beatles: Alpha/Omega and bought late-night TV advertising. It was boldly illegal but flew just under EMI’s radar, and began selling briskly.

  One of Allen Klein’s last acts as Apple administrator was to rush the Apple “Red” (The Beatles 1963–1966) and “Blue” (The Beatles 1967–1970) double albums to stores in April 1973, to meet soaring demand for an official “greatest hits” package to stem their losses. Both sets signaled a new era of sixties reissues that far outlasted the band’s original seven-year run, and they both raced to the top of the charts, becoming two of pop’s strongest “catalog” items. Each revived Lennon’s original idea for the Get Back cover, with all four long-haired Beatles grinning down at the camera from the same EMI balcony they had posed on, six years and several pop lifetimes earlier, for Please Please Me. Bootleggers had forced the new product, but the situation only fed reunion frenzy, and reminded pop listeners of rock’s black hole. The post-Beatle pop climate comprised the popular (like Three Dog Night or Led Zeppelin) and substantive (Fairport Convention and Randy Newman), but seldom both at once. Acts like Roxy Music, Steely Dan, and Joni Mitchell pulled this feat off, but without anywhere near the same massive cultural success as the Beatles. Not until Fleetwood Mac turned from blues to pop in 1975 did pop gain a new sense of melodic verve, and by then most Beatle rumors had grown wistful.

  As the Alpha/Omega bootleg rattled the Apple bean counters, Ringo Starr, in Los Angeles with producer Richard Perry, tackled a Lennon song written especially for him called “I Am the Greatest.” Lennon and Ono flew out to take part in the track on March 13, 1973, joining Starr and, ultimately, Harrison. Perry swooned at his good fortune: “We all sort of gathered around the piano and chipped in our ideas and helped complete it. Then the phone rang
and it was George, who said, ‘I hear there’s a track going on. Is it okay if I come down?’ ” Perry turned to John, who shot back, “ ‘Well, yes, of course. Tell him to get down here and help me finish this bridge.’ ”7

  In the UK, this constituted a major story: the New Musical Express ran a feature touting a reunion exclusive, despite the tart Lennon reply. “With or without the present situation,” Lennon told a reporter, “the chances are practically nil! . . . If any of you actually remember when we were together, everybody was talking about it as though it was wonderful all the time.” He hated the disingenuousness of all the Beatle talk almost as much as he feared its seductiveness: “All the press and all the people, all saying how great and how wonderful . . . but it wasn’t like that at all! And imagine if they did get together, what kind of scrutiny would they be under? Nothing could fit the dream people had of them. So forget it, you know, it’s ludicrous!”8 This sounded as if Lennon had read Lester Bangs’s admonition.

  Near the end of March 1973, New York judge Ira Fieldsteel ruled on Lennon’s temporary visa status, ordering him to leave the country (again) within sixty days or face deportation. Outside the courtroom, Lennon told reporters: “Having just celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary, we are not prepared to sleep in separate beds. Peace and love, John and Yoko.” Ono already had a green card, which granted her alien resident status, through her marriage to Tony Cox; Cox had disappeared with Kyoko. While the press wrote reams of sympathetic copy supporting the Lennon case, the FBI had already logged hundreds of surveillance hours to intimidate them out of the country. This only emboldened Lennon’s resolve to stay and fight.