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

by Tim Riley

  On April 1, John and Yoko held a press conference in New York with Leon Wildes to announce the formation of a new conceptual country: Nutopia. “Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of Nutopia.” To Lennon, this seemed no less ridiculous than the constant runaround his immigration status had been subjected to. “Nutopia has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. Nutopia has no laws other than cosmic. All people of Nutopia are ambassadors of the country. As two ambassadors of NUTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people.”9 As a publicity stunt, it won points for comic flair, but it lacked the froth of the bed-ins, or Lennon’s returning the MBE to the queen. Lennon was in the moral right, but these were times that crushed spirits—the antiwar movement lay in tatters after Nixon’s reelection, and Lennon’s latest campaign seemed tilted against an all-consuming government bureaucracy bent on taking him down. For a rock star who had gone to great lengths to redefine himself as the singer of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” the epic proportions of Nixon’s paranoia made such sardonics seem frail.

  Within weeks after Klein’s contract expired, he announced plans to buy Apple outright, sending lawyers off to new galaxies of bickering and paperwork. Around this period, personal relations among the Beatles themselves softened considerably, with reports of informal visits and recording collaborations studding their schedules. Now that Klein was on his way out, they all started getting along better.

  The press, however, chewed reunion talk to a pulp. Lennon finally wrote up a statement making hay of it, called “Newswecanalldowithout,” a press release ridiculing every legal position, including some of his own:

  Although John and Yoko and George, and George and Ringo have played together often, it was the first time the three ex-Beauties have played together since, well, since they last played together. As usual, an awful lot of rumours, if not downright lies, were going on, including the possibility of impresair allen De Klein of GrABKCo playing bass for the other three in an “as-yet-untitled” album called I Was Teenage Fat . . . The extreme humility that existed between John and Paul seems to have evaporated. “They’ve spoken to each other on the telephone, and in English, that’s a change,” said a McCartney associated. “If only everything were as simple and unaffected as McCartney’s new single ‘My Love.’ Then maybe Dean Martin and Jerry Lewish would be reunited with the Marx Brothers, and NEWSWEAK could get a job,” said an East African official—Yours up to the teeth—John Lennon and Yoko Ono.10

  For a time, John and Yoko’s Upper West Side nightlife fed the tabloids. And they were photographed at an antiwar demonstration outside the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, D.C., on June 28, and at Senate Watergate hearings the next day. As part of a complicated loan agreement where Lennon borrowed against future earnings with Klein, Ringo Starr bought his Tittenhurst mansion, with its home studio setup. Then, as if on cue, Lennon’s hard living began to catch up with him: the American papers, which generally adored his manic quotability, strayed from the unwritten British rules of celebrity denial. Lennon drank a lot in public, took side girlfriends, and snuck around, and John and Yoko came to the studio more apart than together anymore. Producer Jack Douglas, who had worked with Lennon since Imagine, remembers how this talk started: “John was in the control room at a Yoko session I was doing, maybe it was Approximately Infinite Universe. Anyway, he cracked up at something he heard, and just then Yoko walked in. He was busted. From that moment on, Lennon was not allowed at Yoko sessions.”11 Those who knew him well knew Lennon to be famously generous and well mannered except when drunk, but lately he seemed to be getting drunk a lot. Old stories about his dark, violent side roared back from Liverpool and Hamburg. “He was a drunk,” Bob Gruen maintains, “and Yoko finally kicked him out. It was very abrupt, and had grown into one of those tired clichés, you know: you always say you’re sorry, but you always get drunk and screw things up again. Enough! You’re out!”12 Yoko Ono had slammed the brakes on becoming the new Cynthia Lennon.

  One night late that summer, as Gruen drove Lennon home from a Mind Games session at the Record Plant, Lennon told him to take him up to East 91st Street. “I’m staying with May,” he told Gruen, referring to May Pang, who had joined Lennon and Ono as an assistant during Ono’s Fly shoot back in October 1970, and walked onstage in a bag during The Dick Cavett Show.

  Yoko made a gamble widely misunderstood in American culture. One day she took Pang aside and gave her a new task: to be Lennon’s lover. At first, Pang was horrified—she had no interest in this arrangement. But when Lennon began flirting with her openly, she slowly succumbed. The separation had intriguing complications, with daily phone calls back and forth between Lennon and Ono, a symbolic short leash that Pang toughed out as if she were a late-twentieth-century concubine.

  Such arrangements are not rare in certain upscale Japanese circles, where a wife’s knowledge of an affair can override concerns about a husband’s indiscretions; most Americans, however, have little understanding of the nuances of aristocratic Japanese culture. For some Japanese, the competing value of the family structure holds sway; the wife maintains her status and keeps tabs on her husband. In certain cases, by the wife choosing her husband’s lover for him and overseeing an affair, adolescent impulses get resolved without an unruly and costly disruption. This was simply one step away from a gentleman keeping a geisha, that distinctly ruling-class Japanese arrangement that had all the trimmings of refined discretion except for how sex was exchanged for money.

  May Pang’s memoir, Loving John, tells of a young, conflicted woman who realized too late her role as pawn in Yoko’s game. Much of the book reflects Pang’s revenge fantasy against Ono, and it’s easy to imagine a young aide in this position falling hard for Lennon. Pang was all of twenty-two, and since she was an employee, Ono engaged in manipulative sexual harassment just as much as Lennon. As with too many Lennon tell-alls, though, Pang’s motive itself is suspiciously personal, and the dirt outweighs the substance. Her tone is matter-of-fact, even as she describes more a complicated married couple working out a private issue than a marriage gone sour. Yoko Ono calls Lennon nearly every day for hour-long details about his life and career, almost as if Aunt Mimi herself were keeping track of her nephew. The most curious aspect of this was how all parties submitted to the setup: Lennon made few efforts to push back against Ono’s constant inquisitions, and Pang felt like a kitten sparring with tigers. To make Ono out the lone culprit in this scheme ignores the many subtle allowances and emotional trade-offs each protagonist consented to.

  In his larger story, this eighteen-month “separation,” often called Lennon’s “lost weekend,” was merely physical. Lennon looked forward to many of Ono’s calls, and Pang accepted Lennon’s “legacy issues” while he professed love to his new consort. Like his implicit deals with McCartney, Epstein, and the Beatles, it’s another situation where Lennon willingly participated in an elaborate passive-aggressive scheme. Echoes of his Woolton childhood couldn’t be more obvious: Lennon had engineered the same dynamic between his mother, Julia, and her overprotective sister, Aunt Mimi. In this latest scenario, Yoko let him run wild to get his zipper problem out of his system. Perhaps she gambled that he would find his new young flame wanting in the conversation department, and perhaps after that scene at Jerry Rubin’s apartment on election night 1972, where he publicly humiliated her in front of their band, she doubted whether Lennon was worth staying with for the long run anyway. After years of struggling for recognition behind her more famous spouse, Ono had finally landed herself in a prestigious apartment uptown, and promoters were entreating her to tour Japan—without Lennon. In her home country, she had emerged as a cultural hero, and there was her own career to consider. Neither of them, however, was ready or willing to let go completely, so they simply separated for a while.

  But everybody who knew them in this period recalls many more affairs woven in between Pang and Ono. �
�I’ve always been surprised that no more girlfriends have come forward,” Gruen says now. “There were many, many different women Lennon slept around with, although Pang was with him the whole time. Some she knew about, others she didn’t. But she’s the only one who’s stepped forward to write a book.”13

  Once Lennon hit Los Angeles in September and the split became public, he sloped downward into an all-too familiar type: that of the middle-aged celebrity, fleeing his “romance of the century” for some hard partying with the old-boy network. (In rock terms, thirty-three used to qualify as “middle-aged.”) The bed-ins and wacky art happenings had devolved like so many other similar events into a typical clash of egos and appetites. The anti-Yoko crowd could take comfort only to the extent that Lennon reconvened with other rock legends (Keith Moon, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson) as an aimless, dissolute has-been coasting on his sixties reputation. For some, this self-destructive route was as idealistic as rock ’n’ roll would ever get.

  The artwork for Mind Games featured Lennon walking toward the viewer in a field, overwhelmed from behind by a huge screen of Yoko’s profile. Pang reports that Lennon told her, “Look, I’m walking away from Yoko” as if he had constructed a cosmic accident and couldn’t quite believe he had it in him. It’s one of those crude yet illuminating visual symbols that reveals far more in retrospect: Yoko isn’t the other half of the sky, she is the sky; figuratively, Lennon can no more “walk away” from her mythic comfort than he can stop breathing. His new antics in L.A. recalled his adolescent binges in Hamburg, but back then he always had Mendips to come home to. The Dakota became this all-protective symbol in the back of his mind, and his deal with May Pang always had this implicit retreat position, although Pang seems to have been too young to detect it.

  Lennon, of course, had seen so many celebrity scenes before, he walked through Los Angeles with a vague sense of déjà vu. Somewhere, deep down, he knew he didn’t want to end up like Brian Epstein, one too many lost weekends away from a stable home life he had never succeeded at. In Los Angeles, Phil Spector became his new counter example—the fellow genius who was busy screwing up his life even more than Lennon. In the middle of September, Lennon and Pang jetted off together to California, giddy with “freedom” and full of high-stepping schemes. He had been chatting up Spector about making an oldies album, which Spector was wary about, until Lennon convinced him he wanted to be treated as a mere singer (as if there had ever been anything “mere” about Lennon’s singing). Coming after the tepid Mind Games, this could only be seen as a fallback move. Instead of leading, Lennon followed.

  He left Manhattan after contributing a nostalgic book review to the New York Times, with a verbal alacrity largely missing from Mind Games. WBAI public radio had been broadcasting old Goon Show episodes, and Spike Milligan had just published The Goon Show Scripts.

  An unsigned introduction explaining the Goons to Americans read in part: “There was a plot of sorts which was somewhere between a Chinese opera and World War II in comprehensibility. . . . Goonery was not so much a show, more a way of life, and if you have to ask what it was, we’ll be here all day explaining the joke. The Goon Show expired, to eternal regrets in Britain, on Jan. 28, 1960.”14 Lennon’s review ran under the headline, YOU HAD TO BE THERE, AND HE WAS, and he began by saying he was twelve when the Goons first hit, and sixteen “when they finished with me,” a “conspiracy against reality” that shaped Lennon’s young sensibility. The review bulges with references and side-swipes that recall his best verse:

  Before becoming the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, who had never recorded rock ’n’ roll, had previously recorded with Milligan and Sellers, which made him all the more acceptable—our studio sessions were full of the cries of Neddie Seagoon, etc., etc., as were most places in Britain. There are records of some of the original radio shows, some of which I have, but when I play them to Yoko I find myself explaining that in those days there was no “monty-pythons flyin’ circus,” no “laugh-in,” in fact, the same rigmarole I go through with my “fifties records,” “before rock it was just Perry Como,” etc. What I’m trying to say is, one has to have been there! The Goon Show was long before and more revolutionary than “look back in anger” (it appealed to “eggheads” and “the people”). . . . A “coup d’etat” of the mind! The evidence, for and against, is in this book. A copy of which should be sent to Mr. Nixon and Mr. Sam J. Ervin.

  While openly adoring all the Goons, Lennon singles out Spike in particular: “His appearances on TV as ‘himself’ were something to behold,” Lennon wrote. “. . . He would run off camera and DARE them to follow him. I think they did, once or twice, but it kept him off more shows than it helped get him on. There was always the attitude that, he was ‘wonderful, you know . . . [indicating head].’ I think it’s ’cause he’s Irish. (The same attitude prevails toward all non-English British.)”15 Note the adoring reference to his wife, Yoko, even as he’s headed to Los Angeles with the help.

  As if to keep some semblance of a personal life afloat, Lennon moved about Los Angeles briskly—keeping busy as if scared to sit still. Just as Mind Games and Ringo hit the stores, Lennon showed up with May Pang for the first Phil Spector oldies sessions, where Rock ’n’ Roll was tracking at A&M Studios and Gold Star in Hollywood. Lennon and Spector had compiled a list of songs, and Spector handled arrangements and booked players like it was 1963. Biographer Mark Ribowsky recalled the producer’s point of view: “I just wanna be like Ronnie Spector,” Lennon told Phil.

  Lennon putting himself in Spector’s hands might have been preferable as a musical tactic, but as a matter of day-to-day professionalism, it quickly sprang leaks. “An excessively avaricious Spector immediately paid for the sessions himself,” Ribowsky writes in his well-reported account, “thus wresting official control from John, Apple Records, and his American label, Capitol. While Mind Games was the name of his last album, it soon came to characterize Phil’s design for this one. John could not get through the A&M studio gate unless he told the guard he was there for the Phil Spector sessions.”16 Lennon had begged to be treated like a singer; Spector obliged, turning the Mind Games title into a ruse. “You want mind games,” Spector seemed to chuckle, “I’ll give you mind games.”

  Dan Kessel, a guitarist and drummer, and son of jazz guitarist Barney Kessel, was part of a coterie who observed many Spector sessions, and he lapsed into conversation with Lennon about old records. “Throughout the Rock ’n’ Roll recording sessions, we’d talk to John often, especially during breaks between takes and playbacks,” Kessel says. “I remember he fell in love with my customized Gibson Everly Brothers guitar while we were recording ‘Angel Baby.’ He loved playing it so much I let him use it during the sessions. And even though there was no shortage in the Kessel Brothers guitar arsenal, John let me use his guitar, a modified, German hollow-body electric (that he called ‘Roger’) made in the fifties. Despite some repair work on the neck, it stayed in tune and sounded great.” After the session, Lennon pressed his guitar on Kessel as a gift. “I was flabbergasted and gladly accepted his guitar,” Kessel says.

  Lennon’s jaw dropped to hear Kessel talk about catching a Rosie and the Originals show in the late fifties. “John, and my brother David, and I agreed adamantly that ‘Angel Baby’ by Rosie and the Originals was one of the greatest records of all time, for many different reasons, which we discussed at length. And, after drinking quite a bit, we got all excited and emotional, even crying tears about it and the genius of the B side, ‘Give Me Love,’ too, and about how we all wished we could have been in the Originals.” Lennon hung on every word as Kessel described catching Little Caesar and the Romans, and shared details about the Rosie and the Originals show he heard at the El Monte Legion Stadium.17 According to Kessel, Lennon would have traded several Beatle guitars for such stories.

  Kicked off with high ambitions, the Spector sessions quickly unraveled into bad boys gone wild: liquor, the key culprit, worked as lubricant for a dazzling array of chemicals
, chiefly cocaine, then openly abused in Hollywood. One evening, Lennon veered so violently out of control that Spector and a staffer hustled him into his car and took him to the producer’s house. Having wrestled the rock star to the bedroom, they bound his wrists and ankles with neckties so he could simply yell off some steam. “They left him like that, tied up like a steer,” Ribowsky writes, “with John yelling ‘Jew bastard!’ at Phil as he left.”18 The old Liverpool anti-Semitism first used on Epstein returned to mock Spector, whom Lennon openly deified when sober.

  “Phil had to handcuff John because John would have killed himself,” Dan Kessel said. “Yoko really blew John’s mind when she threw him out, and he was raging out of his head and threatening suicide. John would sleep at Phil’s house and Phil would have to lock the door on him when he’d get too crazy. But when he woke up and it was all over, it was kinda like, you know, ‘Thanks a lot for doing that.’ ”19

  When Starr’s Ringo jumped two spaces above Mind Games to number four on the Billboard charts, Lennon wrote Starr a postcard: “Congratulations. How dare you. Write me a hit song.”20

  Dropping in on these Lennon-Spector sessions quickly turned into celebrity sport. Harry Nilsson poked his head in the door one evening and revived the friendship from the White Album sessions. They tore off to the races. Lennon, of course, had admired Nilsson since discovering Pandemonium Shadow Show, enough to mention his name in a 1968 interview. Nilsson enjoyed a huge international hit in 1971 with a Badfinger song, “Without You,” followed by “Coconut,” from Nilsson Schmilsson (1971) hitting number eight; 1972 brought three more hits from the follow-up album, Son of Schmilsson. Derek Taylor, the former Apple publicist, produced Nilsson’s next project, A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night, which set the singer’s rubbery voice loose on orchestrated Tin Pan Alley standards like “As Time Goes By” and “It Had To Be You,” long before such projects became vogue (with Linda Ronstadt’s unlikely What’s New in 1983, which used Nelson Riddle arrangements). Hitting clubs and baiting the paparazzi, Nilsson became Lennon’s royal sidekick, and they racked up humiliation upon outrage as the Spector project slowly collapsed around them.