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

by Tim Riley

  Lennon’s oldies set leapt into the top ten on his soaring cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” King had used the song as his second solo flight from the Drifters, back in 1961 (after 1960’s “Spanish Harlem” and “First Taste of Love”). He cowrote the number with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, working off a 1960 Soul Stirrers’ number, “Stand By Me Father,” making it one of Lennon’s few gospel-sourced tracks (his other gospel move sets the underrated “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” swaying). Lennon also remade Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me,” but only stitched up with “Send Me Some Lovin’,” the weaker of two medleys. The stylistic reach mattered less than the way Lennon twisted nostalgia into a vital contemporary gesture. Where the typical oldies move serves as a stall tactic, a retreat or fallback position, Lennon’s immersion in this material suggested enough untapped richness and innuendo to tip the music (originally for and about teenagers) toward adult metaphors. The finale, “Just Because,” forges a truce between sentimental nostalgia and rearview regret: how faded teenage romance needn’t be patronized.8

  As “Stand By Me” became an FM rock radio staple, reviving Lennon’s presence after its agonizing delays, Capitol asked him to assemble a solo greatest hits package, called Shaved Fish, which got scheduled for Christmas 1975. Returning to the charts in top form sparked a new cross-Atlantic volley with his ex-partner: Paul McCartney had thrown down a sassy guitar slam called “Junior’s Farm,” which reached number three in November 1974, in between Lennon’s hits “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” and “#9 Dream.” “Stand By Me,” Lennon’s spring 1975 single, bumped into “Listen to What the Man Said,” McCartney’s Venus and Mars hit. (These song volleys across albums between ex-collaborators went back to “How Do You Sleep?” and McCartney’s “Dear Friend,” and continued on McCartney’s Band on the Run [1973].)

  In Lennon’s mind, this jockeying for popular attention must have felt like par—only this time, when he picked up the phone, David Bowie came on the line. “David rang and told me he was going to do a version of ‘Across the Universe,’ ” Lennon recalled, “and I thought ‘great’ because I’d never done a good version of that song myself. . . . It’s one of my favourite songs, but I didn’t like my version of it. So I went down and played rhythm on the track. Then he got this lick, so me and him put this together in another song called ‘Fame’ . . . I had fun!”9

  Lennon made a series of appearances that spring of 1975 to demonstrate his belief in Rock ’n’ Roll and reform his “lost weekend” reputation. For the Los Angeles–based music industry, it was as if he’d finally chosen to play the game. In early March, he walked out onto the Grammy Awards as a presenter alongside Paul Simon, wearing a long tuxedo jacket, beige beret, and scarf. Lennon announced the winner, Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You,” only to spy Art Garfunkel bounding up the stage steps, which sent Lennon and Simon off into a string of reunion gags.

  JOHN LENNON: (introduces Art to Paul): Which one of you is Ringo?

  PAUL SIMON: (to Garfunkel): I thought I told you to wait in the car . . .

  JL: Are you ever getting back together again?

  PS (motioning to Garfunkel and Lennon): Are you guys getting back together again?

  JL: It’s terrible isn’t it?

  ART GARFUNKEL (deadpans to Paul): Still writing, Paul? (huge laughs)

  PS: I’m trying my hand at a little acting, Art.

  JL: Where’s Linda? (delayed tittering) . . . Oh well, too subtle that one.

  At this same event, McCartney was a no-show for two awards: Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group and Best Produced Non-Classical Recording, for Band on the Run. The Beatles also received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award. Lennon made some of the parties with Yoko Ono on his arm, which ran on the entertainment wires, just like a regular celeb.10

  As his public persona restored itself, and he approached his final public performance, Lennon’s immigration status turned a decisive corner. In March, Leon Wildes began reporting his findings in the INS files he’d been poring over, saying he now had “information that shows that the Government deliberately ignored [Lennon’s] application, actually locking the relevant document away in a safe.” One memorandum stated that John and Yoko were “to be kept under physical observance” because of their political activism. This became the first substantiation of wiretapping that the FBI had engaged in, beginning back in 1971. Wildes added that once he found the source for this document, it would “break the case wide open and prove that there has been a miscarriage of justice.”

  The next month, April 1975, Lennon filmed a TV tribute to Sir Lew Grade, chairman of ATV Publishing (which controlled Lennon and McCartney’s Northern Songs publishing concern), at the Hilton Hotel in New York, the result of another court settlement. Lennon and his band members wore face masks attached to the back of their heads, which Lennon called “a sardonic reference to my feelings on Lew Grade’s personality!” (two-faced). For “Slippin’ and Slidin’ ” and “Stand By Me,” Lennon sang in front of a band called BOMF (Brothers of Mother Fuckers), and for “Imagine,” he sang alone with his guitar, his hair pulled back across the top of his head into a ponytail, chewing gum and somehow lending the song a cynical undertone. Honored to be a featured performer at a gala event, he couldn’t let the 1969 Northern Songs takeover go unremarked. It marked the last time Lennon sang in public.

  By all appearances, Lennon enjoyed his new comeback status and had no intention of retiring. He sat down with Tom Snyder, NBC’s smug late-night talk-show host, for a full hour on Tomorrow at the end of April. To continue his public-relations campaign for his legal residence status, he brought Leon Wildes out for the final segment. Snyder asked Lennon why he wanted to stay in America when he could live anywhere he wanted. Lennon replied, “I like to be here, because this is where the music came from; this is what influenced my whole life and got me where I am today, as it were.”11

  The following month, Lennon accepted Larry Kane’s invitation to participate in WFIL’s Helping Hand Radio Marathon, an annual Philadelphia charity event for multiple sclerosis. Kane had traveled with the Beatles on some of their first tours of America, as a radio reporter from Florida. Since then he’d served in Vietnam, bounced around broadcast journalism, and landed as the local news anchor for WFIL.

  Surprised and delighted by Lennon’s assent, Kane now hosted the biggest draw the event had ever seen. Lennon “spent the entire weekend, every waking moment, pitching for the cause and signing autographs for thousands and thousands of people,” Kane remembers. Fans waited in line for hours to shake his hand and say hello, and Lennon patiently signed autographs for every single one. “You can’t imagine what an effort he made. He came down on the train and basically said, ‘Put me to work.’ He told me he always wanted to do the weather, so we did a little gag with him on the evening news. He had a blast.”

  Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia’s mayor and former police chief, made a remark that Kane didn’t seize upon until much later. Rizzo shuddered at the idea of such a big star roaming unprotected through the outdoor crowds gathered at the TV station. He assigned extra police units throughout the weekend, which passed without incident. “That guy needs to pay more attention to his security,” Kane remembers Rizzo saying.12

  In June, John and Yoko headed for a summer on Long Beach, Long Island. From here on in, interviews slackened, and Lennon went into retreat from public life. To jerk an impervious system into action, Wildes decided to shift tactics and filed suit against former U. S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell on June 16, 1975, charging “improper selective prosecution.” Wildes’s gambit worked: if the government wouldn’t take Lennon’s steel-cased legal defense seriously, perhaps they’d respond differently to an offensive tack. It paid off much better than anyone might have hoped.

  That fall of 1975, two happy events found Lennon back in the headlines. On October 7, a three-judge U. S. Court of Appeals overturned his deportation order. Wildes had called the government’s bluff, and
backed up against a new suit that would have opened more files, the INS finally folded. The government decided any more revelations from such a high-profile case could only damage their eroded reputation. Calling his 1968 UK drug conviction “contrary” to the “U.S. understanding of due process,” the ruling spelled out a sweeping reversal of the government’s “excludable alien” pursuit: “Lennon’s four-year-battle to remain in our country is a testimony to his faith in the American dream,” the ruling stated. Instead of being an enemy of the United States, the government now declared him a hero.

  Yoko Ono stayed home, due to deliver at any moment. Lennon made his own best narrator for this story later, in the 1980 Playboy interview. He talked about a Chinese acupuncturist in San Francisco who listened to their fertility troubles and scoffed at the British doctors: “Heck, you have a child,” Lennon quoted the healer as telling them. “Just behave yourself. No drugs, no drink, eat well. You have a child in eighteen months.” When Western doctors told the couple they couldn’t conceive, Lennon realized “that I did want a child, and how badly.” And it wasn’t just any baby Lennon wanted: “I wanted Yoko’s baby, not a baby.”13

  Having endured the miscarriages, and an infant who died only days old after the drug arrest back in November 1968, avoiding the public glare for the last two trimesters of Yoko’s pregnancy finally left them blessed. It was a lesson they promised to honor. After a long, difficult labor, forty-two-year-old Ono gave birth to Sean Taro Ono Lennon on Lennon’s thirty-fifth birthday: October 9, 1975. “I feel higher than the Empire State Building,” Lennon told reporters. He also announced Sean’s godfather: Elton John. “Ah, we worked hard for that child. We went through all hell together—through many miscarriages and terrible, terrible times. So this is what they call a love child in truth. We were told by many doctors in England that we could never have a child.”14 Relief collided with elation. Apparently, Ono’s age was less of a concern during the delivery than her bad reaction to a blood transfer. Lennon, the anxious husband, had to literally force the physician’s attention. “Somebody had made a tranfusion of the wrong blood type,” Lennon later told Rolling Stone, and Ono began convulsing.

  “I was there when it happened,” Lennon recalled, “and she starts to go rigid, and then shake from the pain and trauma. I run up to this nurse and say, ‘Go get the doctor!’ I’m holding on tight to Yoko while this guy gets to the hospital room. He walks in, hardly notices that Yoko is going through fucking CONVULSIONS, goes straight for me, smiles, shakes my hand, and says, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you, Mr. Lennon, I always enjoyed your music.’ I start screaming: ‘My wife’s dying and you want to talk about music!’ Christ! A miracle that everything was okay.”15

  The Lennon househusband myth that emerged from his five-year seclusion (1975–80) proved largely true, if oversimplified: after breakfast, Ono descended to the ground-floor Dakota offices to run Lennon’s estate, intimidating financiers by pulling out Tarot cards in the middle of negotiations and deploying her reputation as a wacky artist, the high priestess of Lennon’s fortune, to outmaneuver opponents. Lennon stayed in to look after Sean. There was help, of course, so between personal assistants and nannies, unlike the many househusbands he inspired, Lennon could afford plenty of time to himself.

  Fatherhood became Lennon’s new career, and his great late theme. He spent long stretches completely disengaged from the music business. Too many competing yet unreliable testimonies among personal assistants, numerologists, acupuncturists, and other service providers create this period’s patchy narrative. The better sources—producers, engineers, musicians, and interviewers—help confirm the contours of Lennon’s own accounts. As usual, Lennon exaggerates things. In contrast to his first years with Yoko Ono outside the Beatles, when he courted publicity for his heady romance, for once in his life he shut down his public persona and focused on home life.

  Occasionally, Lennon would peep out from behind his curtain to blurb an article he took an interest in. The September 1975 issue of Modern Hi-Fi & Music magazine featured an interview with Hal Fein, who mentioned Bert Kaempfert. Lennon responded, banging out familiar absurdist cadences on his typewriter, worth quoting for his inimitable voice.

  He begins with vivid memories of his first producer and the record’s circuitous path to Epstein’s ears:

  He Fein must have been one of the people working with [Kaemfert][sic] . . . but he no rings da bell (too much). Brian (Epstein) didn’t hear the record over the air . . . one of the kids went to his shop to see if he had our record . . . he didn’t . . . so he checked it/us out . . .

  Lennon recalls cutting a few tracks behind “Tony Sheriden” (sic), including “My Bonnie,” but that Kaemfert thought the Beatles too bluesy. He signs off with “Those were the days mein friend! Very corduroy, j.l.”

  He finishes by mentioning the book about the bands first manager, Allan Williams, “The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away,” and apologizes for his sloppy typing. It’s a hastily dashed-off note that looks toward the epic stories he recounts in late 1980.16

  As the tumultuous year of 1975 wound down to the happiest of endings, Lennon felt a strong tug to stay in and help mind his child, even as rock stars kept knocking on his door. Over the holidays, John and Yoko invited Bob Gruen to the Dakota to take some family pictures. His hair tied back in a tight ponytail, “Lennon never looked happier to me,” Gruen says now.17 During that Christmas week, Gruen happened to be visiting when carolers came to the door, which initially caused alarm—nobody made it up to that level without getting buzzed through first. Gruen went to see what the noise was about, and the singers turned out to be Paul and Linda McCartney. The scene became a warm reunion, with the McCartneys taking turns holding Sean. Gruen resisted the urge to take photos. The two couples shared Christmas together, ordering out pizza, and watching the sun go down on the Manhattan skyline from John and Yoko’s living room. Elliot Mintz, the California deejay, who was also there, remembers the scene, and took vivid mental notes.

  “The conversation became less rhythmic, the words more sparse,” Mintz wrote later. “I was paying close attention to John and Paul and the way they looked at each other . . . during this Christmas sunset, it was obvious to me that the two of them had run out of things to say.” In wry conclusion, Mintz describes a fond farewell between John and Paul, and then adds with withering understatement: “Yoko and Paul have yet to reach comfort level with each other.”18

  Children’s redemption of wayward parents became Lennon’s great late theme. He talked about it throughout all his later interviews, retelling the story of Sean’s hard-fought journey and how it seemed to link up with his own. Ever since he buried his first child with Yoko back in November 1968, the miscarriages and separations only seemed part of some bigger narrative. “In the way we think,” Lennon said in 1980, “Sean chose us as parents. The gift of that responsibility doesn’t end. I don’t know if it ends when we die. It’s an ongoing process. It’s a tremendous gift and a tremendous responsibility. And I think responsibility was something I never wanted—of any description. . . . It was a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turnaround.” He made it sound as if he’d renounced drugs, even though there’s plenty of evidence that he hadn’t. Still, it was hard to argue with a quote like this: “More than taking a tab of acid in 1965, you know, that kind of thing, which I thought was the biggest thing that ever hit the world at that time, you know. But this is more than.”19

  To many fans, hearing this former acidhead and loose cannon talk about “the gift of that responsibility” was like Little Richard extolling abstinence. And John and Yoko centered their new romantic persona more around parenthood than romance. The young Lennon had created his first family from his band mates, surrounding himself with his best friends making music, presenting a collective front to the world as a way of masking the free-fall isolation. Now, at the age of thirty-five, after years of hard living that had brought him little pleasure and less security, Lennon settled into a daily routine. For t
he first time in his life, he stepped off the pop treadmill for an extended break.

  Chapter 24

  Three of Us

  Westerners—and not just the British—project a bundle of Asian stereotypes onto Yoko Ono, but her detractors discount Lennon’s attachment and devotion. His last five years with her only seem, at least on the surface, to provide more fodder for the anti-Yoko school that brands Lennon a caged beast. Ono’s reputation as a savvy negotiator and protector of Lennon’s estate steals attention from her intellectual whimsy, her delight in upending people’s assumptions about art and where it lies in wait. Her severity masks an implacable creativity that has only grown in stature—the work across several mediums bends conventional notions about art, music, and performance. With a furious playfulness, she dazzled Lennon right up through their final collaboration; he adored her pop orgasm on “Kiss Kiss Kiss,” from Double Fantasy.

  All this gives Cynthia Lennon’s famous remark a new twist. Cynthia describes a vivid parallel she saw when Yoko Ono took Lennon back in after first kicking him out. “When I read comments from Yoko comparing herself to Aunt Mimi,” she says in John, “I had to smile. She’d got it dead right.”1 Ono represents more a fusing of Aunt Mimi with her younger sibling, Julia, those feuding Stanley sisters who turned his teenage years into a rigged game of musical chairs. Lennon looked out at them both as he stood with the Quarrymen at St. Peter’s Church in July 1957, the day he met Paul McCartney, singing the Del Vikings’ “Come Go With Me”: Mimi scowled, Julia beamed. Perhaps as an emergent father, Lennon grew closer to the carefree Julia in Yoko than to the militant Mimi. There’s much more evidence that Lennon was happiest in the last five years of his life than not; tearing down Yoko ignores this vital truth.