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

by Tim Riley

  For all the complicated, contradictory, and distressing associations fatherhood summoned in Lennon, he turned his relationship with his third son, Sean, into a mythic bond. The idea of John as the doting father seemed to take everyone by surprise, especially Julian, who had to settle for Paul’s sympathy and the dubious distinction of having inspired “Hey Jude.” Lennon marked his love affair with Yoko by writing songs like “Julia,” and “Don’t Let Me Down,” and “Oh Yoko!” and his filial attachment to Sean with “Beautiful Boy.” A handful of unsurpassed late songs, including “Woman,” “Beautiful Boy,” “Grow Old with Me,” and “Nobody Told Me,” reached beyond atonement to seal Lennon’s new life-begins-at-forty persona despite all the stray details they conveniently overlooked.

  Then, as quickly as he returned, Lennon became spectral, in the most traumatic reversal of all: the rock star shot by a delusional fan. In death, Lennon surpassed the hoariest of clichés: the violent yet accidental deaths of heroes like James Dean, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding; or the cautionary drug abuse tales like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. Lennon’s death recast all of these—and many since—as that of a rock star whose lambent flame expires in the midst of a triumphant comeback.

  Lennon’s personal battles between 1970 and 1975 paralleled his immigration struggles. Many interviews in this period voice his resolve to return to Britain and do more serious traveling. But if he left the United States, he might never get back, and so where once he had used the Beatles as his fallback position while branching out with Yoko, he now stayed in America as a way of falling back in with his wife. This cat-and-mouse game resembled Lennon’s passive-aggressive late-Beatle maneuvers: the INS kept threatening to kick him out, but Lennon’s legal team kept filing appeals and extending his temporary visas as his case bounced around, in semipermanent limbo, in appeals. Being hounded by Nixon strangely was no match for the pressures of being an ex-Beatle.

  Early in January 1975, U. S. district court judge Richard Owen ruled that Lennon and his attorneys, led by Leon Wildes, could access Immigration and Naturalization Services files dealing with his deportation case. Wildes was also granted permission to question INS officials. This gave Wildes leverage to determine whether the whole deportation order was based on his client’s 1968 drug conviction, or whether the files would show Lennon was being hounded for political reasons, which eventually proved to be the case. It was a major victory, and Lennon eventually went on the record with Lisa Robinson for Hit Parader magazine. His quotes revealed a thorough knowledge of the law, of the U. S. government’s overt hypocrisy, and how his British record had been twisted against him.

  Robinson asked him how many other lawsuits he was juggling at the time, and Lennon gave the immigration matter top priority. He seemed confounded that the government kept falling back on his 1968 marijuana misdemeanor: “My lawyer has a list of people . . . ,” Lennon told her, “hundreds of people in here who got around the law for murder, rape, double murder, heroin, every crime you can imagine. People who are just living here. I want it to end, but I can go on as long as they go on. It’ll probably go on until it gets to the Supreme Court.”

  Lennon also faced legal action from the man he had entrusted with his break from the Beatles, Allen Klein. Klein, the one who won Lennon over by doing his childhood-trauma homework, now appeared as a foe. As Lennon told Robinson: “He’s suing me, and Yoko, and all the ex-Beatles, and everybody that ever knew them! And he’s suing me individually, me collectively, any version of me you can get hold of is being sued. But immigration is the important one—the others are all just money, somehow a deal will be made. Immigration, that’s the one. I mean, if they can take Helen Reddy, they can take me.” What Lennon really wanted to do was travel. “That’s the thing I really miss most. I miss England, Scotland, Wales, all that sentimental stuff . . . but I also miss France, Holland . . . Germany I haven’t been to for years. I’d like to go to South America. I’ve never been. I’d like to be based here, and just travel.”

  Robinson’s interview plants another clue to Lennon’s evolving state of mind. Even before moving back into the Dakota with Yoko, he looked on his Los Angeles period as a nightmare. He describes waking up in the middle of another drunken bender and realizing he had to “straighten out.” And the lawsuits required as much attention as he could muster. “I don’t know how they happen—one minute you’re talking to someone, the next minute they’re suing you.”

  Perhaps he was wooing Yoko through the press the way he had once jilted McCartney. Only this time, when Robinson pressed him about gay rumors, she only got more candor. “I was trying to put it ’round that I was gay, you know—I thought that would throw them off . . . dancing at all the gay clubs in Los Angeles, flirting with the boys . . . but it never got off the ground.” Robinson goaded him, saying she’d heard that “lately about Paul.”

  “Oh, I’ve had him, he’s no good,” Lennon shot back.3

  Then, on January 9, 1975, the London High Court finally ruled on the dissolution of The Beatles and Co. partnership, four years after McCartney originally filed his suit against Klein and Apple. These two court breakthroughs accompanied some phone calls with McCartney, who invited Lennon down to New Orleans for Wings sessions that would lead to the Venus and Mars album. According to Pang, Lennon agreed to go and was even considering writing songs again with McCartney.

  One month later, in early February, Lennon paid a visit to Yoko at the Dakota. Pang describes Yoko luring him back with a new hypnotist’s smoking cure—an addiction Yoko knew Lennon was eager to break. Pang portrays Yoko as wielding a powerful psychic sway over Lennon. But ever since that backstage reunion at the Thanksgiving concert with Elton John, they had been visiting cordially and continued to speak on the phone daily. Later, Lennon said of this visit, “I was just going over for a visit and it just fell in place again. It was like I’d never left. I realized that this was where I belonged. I think we both knew we’d get back together again sooner or later, even if it was five years, and that’s why we never bothered with divorce. I’m just glad she let me back in again. It was like going out for a drink, but it took me a year to get it!”4

  One early Ono biographer, Jerry Hopkins, speculates that Ono welcomed Lennon back to the Dakota under three strict conditions: that he clean up his drug intake, flush his body of poisons, and adopt a macrobiotic diet; that he “repair the holes in his aura” and submit to her counsel on matters spiritual and astrological; and finally, that she take over his day-to-day business affairs.5 Tired of endless legal meetings that made the Get Back sessions in early 1969 seem like a lovefest, and worn down from months of hard living, Lennon enthusiastically agreed. It didn’t hurt that the Beatles court case had just closed. Now he needn’t bother Ono with that anymore, either. This time, instead of seeking out a new business manager to handle his affairs, he simply decided to appoint Yoko as heir to what he once expected from Epstein, McCartney, and Klein, and be done with it. He also resolved to clear his desk of all the lawsuits that had dragged on his career, both his immigration status and the Morris Levy lawsuit over Rock ’n’ Roll, Roots, and settling publishing accounts.

  John and Yoko’s overriding concern, however, was far from legal. They recast their reunion in glowing romantic terms to the press and privately pursued an even more intimate goal: to have a child. Yoko Ono, as we have seen, had suffered at least three miscarriages with Lennon. Once Lennon moved back into the Dakota in early February 1975, Ono became pregnant almost immediately, as if the fates were once again smiling. Counting back from Sean Lennon’s birth date, October 9, puts his conception around February 9. That same week, Rock ’n’ Roll hit stores, and Lennon went on the Scott Muni show on WNEW-FM, to sync the music up with his rejuvenated marriage: “The separation didn’t work out,” he said, in a widely quoted interview.6

  With a new hit album suddenly a reflection of his redeemed personal life, Lennon capped a middle-period trifecta: Mind Games entered a tunnel, Walls an
d Bridges groped toward the light, and Rock ’n’ Roll delivered a huge payoff for rock history—if not on par with early Beatles, then the next best thing. A towering record without the fierce complexity of Lennon’s original material, Rock ’n’ Roll became a great work ardent followers disagreed about. As a vocal performance, it ranks with Plastic Ono Band as some of Lennon’s most passionately compressed singing. Hearing “Stand By Me” seduce FM radio throughout early 1975 was all the argument you needed that Lennon’s solo songwriting career had fallen off: he vented much more through other people’s songs on this newly minted classic than he had on either Mind Games or Walls and Bridges.

  Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, and Buddy Holly all helped shape Lennon’s early Beatle persona, and by revisiting these writers, Lennon revived his career with reverse daring—backshifting into oldies mode seemed, paradoxically, both conservative and radical. Whether you take to its thicker arrangements or find them gaudy, the Spector tracks sound like a slow-motion train wreck averted by Lennon’s vocals, schlock snatched back from oblivion: numbers like Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” toot along with colossal jive, and Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula” bulldozes forward with sheer ebullience. Typically, for Lennon, this wasn’t just an aesthetic argument: in 1975, alongside George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) and its TV spinoff, Happy Days (1974), this release helped ignite oldies format for FM radio. And it earned Lennon some of his most bipolar reviews.

  Like pop stars falling back on country material (and loyal audience) when their careers hit the skids, the “oldies move” can work like a hymn to the gods that ward off doom. The Beatles themselves fell back on early rock ’n’ roll during the stalled Get Back sessions in 1969, and John Fogerty surfaced with a country-rock pearl, The Blue Ridge Rangers, in 1973, after losing control of his Creedence Clearwater Revival catalog. The flip side of this myth succumbs to nostalgia, the symbolic tide writers wade into when their muse dries up. With originality and versatility performed through other people’s material as the ideal, the Band’s bravura Moondog Matinee from 1973 towers over this subgenre, eclipsing efforts like David Bowie’s Pinups or Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things (which included “You Won’t See Me”).

  History inserted another wrinkle to Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll album even long before Spector was convicted of murder in 2009: before Anthology came out in 1995, a two-disc compilation of early Beatles BBC broadcasts called The Beatles at the BBC appeared, and bootleggers quickly dug deeper for the totality of that work, most notably on a ten-CD box, The Complete BBC Sessions (Great Dane, 1994). Eleven CDs of material have since surfaced from these vaults, comprising a huge tapestry of their live set list, encompassing the periods gigging throughout the north of England and Hamburg, before they finally recorded “Love Me Do.” The repackaging of this bold new rock ’n’ roll frame, the one featured on The Ed Sullivan Show in early 1964, rescued the work from American neglect. In 1975, Lennon landed nearby some of the same songs the Beatles had once used to craft their cherished young ensemble.

  Their overlapping song selections provide commentary on Lennon and McCartney’s shared view of rock history, and where they differed. For the BBC audience, of course, a lot of this early Beatle material survived in British cultural memory as an oral prehistory to the band’s recorded legacy; for Americans, the BBC material trickled out slowly at first. Finally, two years after Lennon’s death, in 1982, a syndicated radio special commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the band’s first appearance on the BBC, and Americans became familiar with how the Beatles sounded before “Love Me Do.” This new substratum of Beatle tracks held implacable charms. The Rock ’n’ Roll catalog Lennon siphoned off Radio Luxembourg and his mother Julia’s banjo chords recontextualized rock ’n’ roll anew; play it alongside McCartney’s workouts in this vein—1988’s Choba b CCCP (Russian for Back in the USSR) and 1999’s Run Devil Run—for a diagram of how Lennon and McCartney’s early repertoire echoed into middle age.

  Lennon’s list features several gaping omissions: Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the looming invisibility of a singer Lennon shrank from competing with, Elvis Presley. “Blue Suede Shoes” from the 1969 Toronto show and “Hound Dog” at 1971’s One to One set remain Lennon’s only published Presley takes, one-offs he never returned to. By comparison, McCartney does Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” (and superbly), but tackles Presley only twice, with “It’s Now Or Never” on a 1988 tribute to Presley film songs (The Last Temptation of Elvis) and “All Shook Up” on Run Devil Run (1999).

  As if to diagram their distinct yet complementary tastes, both Lennon and McCartney’s oldies albums are, by any measure, vocal triumphs. On his second effort, Run Devil Run, McCartney’s virtuoso touch added two imposing originals (“Try Not to Cry” and the title track), which were so attuned to early rock style that many simply assumed they were more obscure throwaways. His wiggling firehose on Larry Williams’s “She Said Yeah” spewed especially boyish wrath, a long-awaited answer to Lennon’s treatment of Williams’s “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie.” (Like “Twenty Flight Rock,” “She Said Yeah” had been a Rolling Stones staple.)

  Among the American songwriters Lennon and McCartney both covered, a different conversation took shape: with Chuck Berry, Lennon juiced up “You Can’t Catch Me” like a rebuilt Cadillac, and slowed down “Sweet Little Sixteen” to a purr, while McCartney shrink-wrapped “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” into tidy zydeco. McCartney paid tribute to Lennon via Lloyd Price (“Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and “Just Because”), Sam Cooke (“Bring It On Home to Me”), and a Gene Vincent number he heard his partner do numerous times (“Blue Jean Bop”). Lennon alone chose a girl-group standard (“Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes, without its signature opening drum calls, a dandy trick) and took on Buddy Holly (“Peggy Sue”), where McCartney backed off both. Instead, McCartney produced an entire Buddy Holly album for his Wings cohort, Denny Laine, called Holly Days (1977). This set featured McCartney overdubbing backup parts to Laine’s cardboard lead vocals, which is a bit like Prince backing up Cat Stevens. McCartney still has a Buddy Holly tribute record burning inside of him, if he ever takes the leap.

  Most tellingly, neither Beatle ever revisited any of the Beatles’ own defining covers, such as Smokey Robinson’s “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” or Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” which cemented both their good taste and respect for their own catalog. In 1976, when Capitol reissued Beatle covers and originals for a trumped-up package called Rock ’n’ Roll Music, it inexplicably excluded defining pieces, such as Lennon singing not only “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” but Arthur Alexander’s “Anna (Go to Him)” and the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You.” To add insult to irony, two of Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll tracks lined the coffers of Lennon’s rivals: for Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” he paid royalties to McCartney, who owned the rights to Holly’s catalog; and for “Bring It On Home to Me,” he paid rights to Allen Klein, who owned Sam Cooke’s material.

  In the years since Lennon’s death, the cutting-room floor has coughed up a magnanimous Lennon take of Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby” and Phil Spector’s 1958 number one with the Teddy Bears, “To Know Her Is to Love Her,” on the four-CD Anthology box Yoko Ono assembled in 2001. But only a plebe would prefer Spector’s treatment to the Beatles’ earlier renditions of that song for the BBC.

  Listening to Lennon’s updates, it’s important to remember the engines of desire motivating these early Beatle covers: more than many other groups, they performed this material as a living tradition. They paid no mind if Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” a hit in 1958, was already “old” in pop terms by 1963, when they played it on the BBC. For them, these songs had nothing to do with looking back: it was always about how much energy Chuck Berry had set in motion, and how much potential they heard coursing through his pregnant guitar licks. In the strongest Beatle covers, it’s almost as if you can sense their original material in the background, pushing its
way forward: “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” inspired Lennon’s “No Reply” and “Help!” and “I’m a Loser” as surely as “Long Tall Sally” yielded McCartney’s “I’m Down.”

  Returning to “You Can’t Catch Me” with Spector for Rock ’n’ Roll, Lennon tackled the song with similar fervor from a new vantage: if it had saved his life once as a teenager, perhaps it could rescue him again—from celebrity ennui, choppy marital waters, and the quandary of staring down Beatle ghosts while constructing a new persona. For some critics, like Jon Landau in Rolling Stone, Lennon sounded tired, incapable of harnessing his lightning-in-a-bottle personality. “In making an album about his past,” Landau wrote in May 1975, “he has wound up sounding like a man without a past. If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed that this was the work of just another talented rocker who’s stumbled onto a mysterious body of great American music that he truly loves but doesn’t really understand. There was a time when he did.”7

  Dismissing this music, however, didn’t account for the peculiarly lopsided embrace it received, on both the radio and the charts. In the Britain of early 1975, Rock ’n’ Roll spent twenty-eight weeks on the charts, peaking at number six, outperforming every previous Lennon solo album except Imagine. In America, the album tied with Plastic Ono Band at number six, but spent only fifteen weeks on the charts, Lennon’s weakest performing title since his first three albums with Yoko Ono (the two Unfinished Music titles and the Wedding Album). After everything the Beatles had done, this early rock ’n’ roll material burnished Lennon’s reputation more than his coffers. (It also made him the most exotic of UK “exports”: an ex-pat Scouser retooling American engines for British drivers.) Furthermore, it made hash of the UK’s supposed blackballing of Phil Spector’s work after Let It Be. Even critics tend to forget that Lennon employed Spector for four out of seven solo albums.