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

by Tim Riley

  “Steel and Glass,” a seething Walls and Bridges character study, usually gets heard as a portrait of Allen Klein, but Lennon never spoke of it that way. Its third person could just as easily apply to Lennon himself. Perhaps it’s a collage of everything he hated about himself that he responded to in Klein:

  Your mother left you when you were small

  But you’re gonna wish you wasn’t born at all

  The orchestration that wells up behind these lines shoulders a drama and fatigue Lennon doesn’t quite crack with his words. The density of strings and saxes transcends the wallowing tone, the defeated sound of a famous person expressing withering self-pity. This was harder to lament in “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out),” which betrayed a hard-core romantic caving in to cynicism: “Everybody’s hollering ’bout their own birthday/Everybody loves you when you’re six feet in the ground.” The album’s weakest track, the only one cowritten with Harry Nilsson, “Old Dirt Road,” marks time more by setting a mood than by pruning a theme.

  “Scared” splits the Lennon solo conundrum down the middle: on the one hand, the track pulses with a slow panic, and the first two verses thump the tone home something fierce. Even two wolf cries at the top sound less portentous than meek. Changing “Scared” to “scarred” for the second verse condenses Lennon’s antic wordplay down to formal ingenuity, and hints that future songs might profit from the same concisions. But as the track progresses, it suffers from production creep, to the point where even the mournful slide guitar solo drowns in a wash of self-righteousness. Lennon smartly elides the third verse within the end of the solo, and “tired” enters as the weak concluding verse: here’s yet another rock star, still suffering through adolescence in a middle-aged body, bemoaning the fact that life is hard when he knows better than most not to entreat his audience to feel sorry for him. The lyric turns hackneyed, and instead of the slow-burning grief of “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama” or “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out),” he settles for a production number that lessens everything else. Perhaps Lennon just needed to prove to himself how morosely self-absorbed he could be, even though he regarded self-seriousness as the ultimate sin.

  On the flip side, his love lyrics here have the same gut resolve they did on Plastic Ono Band, and betray a much more generous sensibility: “Bless You” imagines his wife in the arms of somebody else and whispers a gentle forbearance against love’s betrayals. Both “Surprise Surprise” and “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” have sass and thump, and the latter practically begs for McCartney’s bass.

  The cover art sported an eleven-year-old John Lennon’s watercolors of cowboys and Indians, curiously undistinguished given the scathing political comedy he was already capable of. And a long disquisition on the surname “Lennon” graced the inner pamphlet, by one Grady O’Spenster, to which Lennon jots, “oh yeah?” But by this point, no amount of self-deprecation and no number of hokey nicknames (Dr. Winston O’Boogie) can veil just how unmoored the Lennon persona has become: in the public’s mind, May Pang was a transitional figure, and even when his material had aesthetic heft, Lennon couldn’t squeeze his studio players toward the charismatic ensemble his voice once ignited. There are stale records by great artists that just sit there, daring you to unshelve them and listen, remaining mostly records of struggle that strain to shed light on better work. Calling Walls and Bridges an improvement on Mind Games smacks of faint praise.

  In Rolling Stone, Ben Gerson teased out the magnificence in Lennon’s newfound modesty: “On POB the tearing away of veils only revealed another face to Lennon’s utopianism. Then (keeping in mind his crucial inconsistency in idealizing his relationship with Yoko) illusionlessness seemed the ultimate liberation. Today Lennon knows that neither dreams nor their puncturing is the answer. There is no neat answer. When one accepts one’s childhood, one’s parenthood and the impermanence of what lies between, one can begin to slog along. When John slogs, he makes progress.”30 From the rocker who had confounded any kind of slog throughout his career, a Lennon slog was still like a weak Dylan song—better and more revealing than most of its competition. Thematically, it’s curious that Lennon delayed taking on this tension as a theme: how to create compelling rock ’n’ roll as a middle-aged divorcé, making sense of his life anew after wearing out all his familiar masks. Albums like this rested far more in the shadow of Beatles greatness than Lennon ever wanted them to, and weakened his own pronouncement that “I don’t believe in Beatles.”

  Once Walls and Bridges appeared in early October 1974, Lennon reluctantly unpacked Spector’s Rock ’n’ Roll tapes, dreading what he might hear. After some listening sessions at the Record Plant, he decided he could call back his Walls and Bridges players and take a stab at finishing it off. This aesthetic decision merged with a new business pinch. The head of Roulette Records, Morris Levy, owned the copyright to Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me.” Levy had filed suit against Lennon for copyright infringement on the Berry line “Here come old flat-top he come/Groovin’ up slowly . . . ,” the opening phrase for his 1969 Beatle song “Come Together.” Compared to a lot of the sampling permissions suits brought by the digital revolution, this case resembled legal blackmail, and Lennon agreed to settle by putting two Levy-owned numbers on his Spector project. When that project stalled, Levy kept pressing for Lennon to make good on his agreement.

  Walls and Bridges strengthened Levy’s leverage. Far from fulfilling the terms of his settlement, Lennon’s brief, unfinished snippet of Lee Dorsey’s “Ya Ya,” with Julian on snare drum, raised a red flag. Levy was not amused. He smelled delay tactics and immediately slapped a new lawsuit on the table, for $43 million. Lennon could either revive the Rock ’n’ Roll project or cave to Levy’s demands.

  In October 1974, Levy invited Lennon and some players to rehearse at his upstate New York ranch, and after recording was completed in November, Lennon gave Levy a tape of the resulting material as a show of good faith. He argued that he would rework the material for a new release soon. At one point in October, in passing, Lennon even mentioned an interest in Levy’s Adam VIII company, which sold records over late-night television ads.

  Levy took Lennon’s remark as a tacit approval to market the record, which he titled Roots, and began soliciting mail orders. Rock ’n’ Roll was already scheduled for release by EMI in March 1975, but was quickly bumped up to mid-February after Levy’s TV commercials began airing. This forced Lennon to round up players again to finish the album properly in New York with eight new numbers: “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” “Stand By Me,” “Rip It Up / Ready Teddy,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” “Peggy Sue,” “Ain’t That a Shame,” and “Bring It On Home to Me.” These tracks didn’t blend with the Spector material so much as redeem it, but Lennon’s voice made the meaningful connections, and in many other hands the entire project might have collapsed. In the meantime, Lennon had to return to court to block the Levy product until his record could be mastered and distributed.

  This time, justice tipped in his favor. In the resulting flurry of lawsuits, a judge awarded Lennon damages of $140,000 for Levy’s illegal release of the Rock ’n’ Roll tracks. Its cover, taken by Klaus Voormann and Astrid Kirchherr’s mutual photographer friend Jürgen Vollmer, reclaimed a Lennon photo from 1960, taken on his first trip to Hamburg. As he stands in the doorway, Lennon’s greased pompadour and steely gaze epitomize teenage hip, too young to care about anything but music. If he held on to his oldies ideal, marketing this album with a strong single might just redeem all the scrapes he had gone through to get it made.

  The camaraderie and mutual respect Lennon enjoyed on his Elton John session in September 1974 inspired John to invite Lennon out to the Caribou Ranch studios in Nederland, Colorado, west of Boulder, for a remake of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Lennon suggested a taut reggae break. As they recorded, Elton enjoyed a huge international hit while Caribou topped Billboard’s charts, with its iridescent guitar single,
“The Bitch Is Back,” comic outrage as ear candy. And yet, for Lennon to sit in with Elton at this point seemed less like sponging off pop’s new royalty than royalty itself genuflecting to greatness. Lennon must have been the only person in the world who didn’t expect their duet to be a smash. Many couldn’t help but wonder: could Elton John be a better version of Paul McCartney than even Harry Nilsson, Lennon’s new perfect foil?

  The “Night” single broke into the number one slot in November, and Lennon had to admit he had agreed to perform it. The Madison Square Garden show on November 28, 1974, marked Lennon’s first New York stage appearance since 1972 with the Elephant’s Memory Band, and his first crack at lead vocal on “I Saw Her Standing There” (and guitarist Davey Johnston can’t resist throwing in a slick “Day Tripper” reference). They also did “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  Aside from the huge wail of recognition, and the delight at catching a Beatle performing two Beatle songs, the appearance radiated symbolism. “That concert was a complete surprise, I didn’t even know about it,” Bob Gruen says. “I was in Connecticut having Thanksgiving dinner with my family, and I got a call that afternoon, drove back into the city, and picked up my tickets at the window. I didn’t even have a backstage pass. I had to work my way up to the front to get those pictures. There was only one other photographer there.”31 For many, the concert spontaneously recaptured some of Beatlemania’s swoon, however briefly.

  On a whim, Yoko Ono went with a friend, a “very weird thing for her to do,” Gruen says, and sent flowers to Lennon backstage, thinking that would be the end of it. But as she stood in the audience and watched him perform, she remembered feeling the crowd’s overwhelming embrace entwine with something of her own, something she couldn’t ignore.

  “So I went there,” Yoko explains, “and I was watching him from the audience and everybody was applauding like crazy—the house shook when he came on—and he was there bowing, but that’s not what I saw. Somehow he looked very lonely to me and I began crying.” Another public moment held very private meanings that were slow to emerge.

  Lennon didn’t know Yoko was in the audience. But they each spoke about this scene afterward, even though it took them several months to sort it all out. “Somehow it hit me that he was a very lonely person up on stage there,” Yoko said later. “And he needed me. It was like my soul suddenly saw his soul. So I went backstage. I said hello and he said hello.”32 In a very mysterious yet compelling way, this backstage greeting, the kind you can’t predict or choreograph, registered to John and Yoko as part of some larger momentum. But at the time, even the couple seemed bewildered by its implications.

  Chapter 23

  Get Back

  Lennon’s late solo career, between 1975 and 1980, represents an anomaly not just in his personal life but in the larger story of rock ’n’ roll. His withdrawal from the stage at thirty-five, so completely at odds with every myth Lennon ever created about himself, stirred a sense of potential around what he might be doing. After all, even detractors had to admit his solo career boasted deeply inspired work. Perhaps he had ransacked the Beatle castle so ferociously with Plastic Ono Band that he never quite regained his footing; Imagine settled in as a quiet rock classic, but it had more polish than reach: “Gimme Some Truth” evened out the ranting he attempted in “Give Peace a Chance” for a smooth-ride contempt, but “How Do You Sleep?” sank of its own small-minded rancor. For his last two years with the Beatles (1968–69), Lennon veered toward elaborate conceptual sideshows prodded by Ono’s art, branching out into film, gallery, and performance pieces. Ceding his rock ’n’ roll stage to her squalls in Toronto took both nerve and a new kind of pretense.

  But critics rarely note that once he played rock’s doo-wop Nietzsche in “God,” Lennon did, in fact, retreat from the musical avant-garde. Although John and Yoko shared the stage with Frank Zappa on their early visit to New York, and again at the One to One concert supporting Some Time in New York City, Lennon’s formal songwriting experiments receded. In the press he was outspoken and radical, but on record his pop sensibility never wandered. His conservatism dramatized itself best through a curious reversal: Yoko Ono made her best album, Approximately Infinite Universe, in 1973, with Lennon’s weakest support, the Elephant’s Memory Band.

  From Plastic Ono Band onward, Lennon increasingly moved toward safe, conventional, and overproduced pop, spiked by raunchy outbursts like “Do the Oz,” “Tight A$,” “Beef Jerky,” and “Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple),” all B sides and album tracks. His talent for ripe inference, as well as his uncanny bond with listeners, and his increasing silence after Rock ’n’ Roll and the Shaved Fish compilation (both 1975), signaled more unfinished business than irrevocable retreat. His best work plunged into adult rock themes: “Mother,” at once a Freudian cry at ripping himself from the Beatle womb, and “Working Class Hero,” which absorbed and reflected his parochial Scouser resentment—sarcasm draped in sophistry, his great misunderstood Dylan impersonation.

  The uneven mid-period work had held up through piercing songs about midlife stasis—“Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out),” “Steel and Glass”—and love songs that grew wary of romanticism—“Look at Me,” “Oh My Love,” “Jealous Guy,” and “How?” right on through “Bless You.” By contrast, Lennon’s late themes were suffused with deeply felt quietude, as challenging a mood for rock ’n’ roll as compliance. Capitol Records underlined Lennon’s pop conservatism by releasing “#9 Dream,” side two’s lead-off track from Walls and Bridges, as a follow-up single to his first solo American number one, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.” “#9 Dream” angled the nostalgia of “Mind Games” off straightforward Beatle romanticism that kept fans in thrall to a reunion, even if it was just a fantasy. Over the holiday season between 1974 and 1975, it hit number nine in the U.S., to become his second best-selling single, behind “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night” and “Instant Karma” and “Imagine” (which both peaked at number three). In Britain, he often scored in the top ten but had to wait until 1980, after he was dead, for “Starting Over” to reach number one. This conservatism, Lennon’s hewing to the public favor, reversed his Beatle path, especially considering how Double Fantasy (1980) would radicalize rock themes far beyond the agnosticism of “Imagine.” For Lennon, casting fatherhood as redemption counts as an exceptional, all-consuming irony.1

  Given his frequent betrayals of Ono, whom he idealized beyond all romantic proportion, this redemption came with great cost in both personal and mythic terms. While writing songs like “Oh My Love” and “Oh Yoko!” his zipper problem begged for comeuppance. Ono had finally kicked him out, as any self-respecting wife would. In the last interviews, both he and Yoko portrayed his years in the L.A. wilderness, followed by a humbling return in early 1975, as salvation lost and found, the prodigal husband reclaiming an epic lost affair. The bond persuaded even cynics of its monumental stature, the kind of Tristan-and-Isolde love that knew the outer realms of betrayal and forgiveness.

  As much as people protested, Lennon’s withdrawal from recording after 1975 did the whole Beatle mystique far more good than ill: better he turn in one final decent record and leave behind tempting outtakes than continue ramming his head against the wall of insurmountable expectations. Lennon’s weakest solo record, Mind Games, held its head above almost any weak McCartney effort and most of Harrison’s solo output; even when the material lacked depth, nearly everything Lennon sang rang out with mythos reflected, or just beyond reach.2

  And to those who lamented Lennon’s reuniting with Ono, his entrenched battle with Nixon’s cronies turned him into a liberal saint, redeeming all his radical outbursts and misguided agitprop through the quest to remain in America. Among journalists and cultural critics, led by Rolling Stone’s Ralph Gleason and the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell, Lennon’s INS case shouldered considerable historical weight. Column after column lamented the specter of Lennon as rock ’n’ ro
ll’s Charlie Chaplin, yet another victim of Cold War furies, hounded out of the country by small, paranoid minds. Lennon’s victory compounded the left’s sense of relief after Nixon resigned—on a purely political level, Lennon’s triumph meant that everybody had won more rights to push back against imperious governments run amuck. (Culturally, of course, Lennon knew he had long since defeated Nixon and his ilk—that’s one of the more persuasive explanations for Nixon’s paranoia.)

  In the days before his death, Lennon portrayed himself as proud, happy father, bread-baking househusband, off the sauce and out of rock’s loop, and better for it. The reality was messier, of course, with the radical twist that Lennon kept his indiscretions private and made sure his comeback conveyed a resolve toward stability and composure. He also dodged a central contradiction, the false choice he had created for himself by positioning Ono as the imagined sky on Mind Games, an indomitable force of nature. For some reason, having moved back from Malibu to New York with May Pang in June 1974, alternating nights with her and his room at the Pierre Hotel, Lennon felt his choices to be stark: either remain untethered on a celebrity-party circuit between New York and Los Angeles, and risk bottoming out like Phil Spector, or Janis Joplin, or Jim Morrison, or return to Ono and build a stable family. Somehow, he was humbled, or desperate, enough to choose the healthier of these two options. But many listeners mistook the public Lennon persona, the man who wrote “If I Fell” and “Dr. Robert” and “A Day in the Life,” for the private person. This public Lennon would have had no trouble pointing out the false dichotomy he imposed on himself. The archest rock ’n’ roller sold this choice to his listeners through yet another public-relations flourish, accomplished with the help of one final Rolling Stone cover, published in the weeks after his death.