by Tim Riley
After McCartney toured America with Wings in support of his 1976 single, the adamantly flaky “Silly Love Songs,” Lennon’s absence from the scene became a new rock theme. Critics began remarking on how much expectation had built up around any future moves. In the gap between disco and punk, when the Ramones, Talking Heads, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Bruce Springsteen were gathering momentum on the sidelines, the mainstream disco pop of Saturday Night Fever’s Bee Gees gave rock fans fits. The unmet expectations of Lennon’s solo career pressed up against everybody’s wavering sense of dislocation, and pop music’s overall lack of spine. (For some, it echoed the ghost of Buddy Holly, memorialized in Don McLean’s “American Pie”: “the day the music died.”) There was a lingering sense that had Lennon kept on writing, he would have made the breakthrough a lot of this early seventies material aimed toward.
Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone wrote “An Open Letter to John Lennon” that season in his “American Grandstand” column, in late 1977. Hearing rumors of Lennon traveling in Japan, his once ubiquitous presence seemed inexplicable. “Why, the new Ringo album just came out and you’re not even on that,” Marsh began.
George Harrison had toured America in the fall of 1974, and Gerald Ford’s son, Steven, invited him to the White House. Wires carried photos of Harrison with Billy Preston greeting Ford. McCartney’s tour made a much bigger noise, and also made Lennon look deliberate in his silence, since he had never really let an opportunity pass before. Even the new president, Jimmy Carter, invoked Bob Dylan lyrics during his inauguration speech in early 1977. Surely Lennon would want a piece of rock culture’s new legitimacy.
“Elvis is gone, the Sex Pistols have arrived,” Marsh continued, “and instead of trying to get rockers deported, the White House lets them sit around the Oval Office waiting room, looking for an audience with the Peanut King. . . . I think the notion of overt anarchists in the British Top Ten should pique your curiosity.” Since Lennon had such a claim on the public imagination, Marsh thought nothing of laying all this on his doorstep, as if none of Lennon’s renunciations had registered. “Somehow, without any comment from John Lennon, there’s a hole left in our understanding of what’s going on.”20 Maybe the unflattering cartoon Jann Wenner chose of Yoko that ran alongside Marsh’s piece persuaded Lennon to remain quiet.
Some of the things Lennon left behind provide more clues as to why he needed so much time to himself. Amid demo tapes, private home videos made for Yoko and Sean from hotel rooms, and home movies made in Japan, there’s a notorious audio diary Lennon made in 1979 that circulates among collectors. The Los Angeles DJ Elliot Mintz, who later became a celebrity publicist for Paris Hilton, questions the authenticity of many of these audio leaks. But John and Yoko were as lax about interior security as they were when out in public; several personal assistants testify to the vast range of files they had easy access to, and many couldn’t resist the temptation to purloin a letter or picture that had never been cataloged. This material still crops up at record shows, auctions, and online.
But on this 1979 tape, Lennon’s unmistakable voice begins by noting the date, and he stops and starts several times to collect his thoughts. As one of the only such tapes yet to emerge, it seems like a halting start to a larger oral autobiography, and Lennon’s thoughts pursue a rash of associations, smells, and subconscious leaps. Listening to this monologue, it’s easy to feel yourself cast as Lennon’s therapist, miffed yet fascinated. Did Lennon imagine his wife or son(s) might listen in someday? Or did he plan to listen back to his thoughts later on when he wrote up his Stanley sisters epic? (“A kind of Forsyte Saga,” which Lennon mentioned to Wenner.) History frets at all the unfinished business. But to ignore this evidence leaves out a revealing page in the story of Lennon’s self-awareness.
He begins on the fifth of September 1979, announcing the ongoing life story of John Winston Ono Lennon, and veers immediately into the only first-person description he left of that early Stanley apartment at 9 Newcastle Road. It’s the first place he remembers, he tells the tape, so that’s a good place to start. He describes the red brick house with some detail, its front-room curtains always drawn, and a picture of a horse and carriage on the wall, before veering straight into an early nightmare. But just as quickly, he tires of all the description and shuts off the machine, complaining that he can’t be bothered.
That earliest memory of a nightmare jibes with the blitz that continued on through Lennon’s first year of life. It’s hard not to notice how he drops this detail just before a description of the apartment’s layout, and then protests he’s bored, even though he’s described the picture on the wall and the aunt’s Cheshire home where it wound up in precise detail. Any shrink would tell you: there’s gold in that nightmare.
Then Lennon meanders off into catty talk about Dylan’s new single, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” accusing him of wanting to be a waiter for Christ. Lennon eviscerates Jerry Wexler’s whole Slow Train Coming production that the single conjures: Dylan’s singing is pathetic, he says, the lyrics embarrassing. Surveying the 1979 rock scene, Lennon remarks how the Mighty Dylan, McCartney, and Jagger seem to be sliding down a mountain, blood with mud in their nails. This leads to a reflection on how competitive he used to feel with fellow rock stars, and how silly it all seems from his new vantage. Even a couple of years back he remembers the anxious panic such competition induced. Now there doesn’t seem to be much use to listen to their albums. He still sends out for them, but they all sound pointless.
Lennon has enough wary self-consciousness to realize that even asking after his colleagues’ records indicates he’s not completely detached, that the ultimate detachment would mean not even knowing when they had new releases. But now, he says, he gets more pleasure than panic from reading the trades. It’s all a load of shit, he says to the recorder. Later on in the same sequence, he adds that they’re all company men in various masks.
This is what we assume all rock stars do: keep tabs on one another, make assessments, compare their own moves to their peers’ in the never-ending game of rock ’n’ roll high school, as if they’re all perpetual seniors vying for attention, pulling off practical jokes, pairing off with various cheerleaders. In interviews, Lennon was more open than most about this horse race, but this audio diary lets us eavesdrop on the real thing, humanizing the titans of classic rock with mock horror, and a palpable sense of relief.
Then his talk turns to neuroses, their roots, as Lennon chuckles at his young ambition (“I couldn’t walk so I tried to run,” he sang in “Mother”). In 1954, Lennon was thirteen going on fourteen years old. It was the year before Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” and his skiffle craze. Long before the Elvis boom confirmed all these new sensations and thrust him into music that affirmed every sexual impulse he could ever imagine, Lennon pressed his face up against the glass of formative sexual desires.
Then some bagpipes come over the radio in the tape’s background, and the music sends him reeling back further, to a distant horizon of boyhood summers with his aunt Mater (Elizabeth), where he attended an Edinburgh festival and heard marching bands. His favorites were the Americans, because they knew how to swing. And the summer ceremonies closed with one lone bagpiper, hit by a spotlight, for an emotional finale. Lennon describes the experience in great detail, the memory frozen in boyhood time. He describes always feeling free in Scotland, the same feeling he gets in Japan. You don’t feel as though you belong, he says, so you don’t have to deal with the social mores as much. It’s easier to be yourself in a foreign country, he says. Then he wonders out loud about taking Sean to see Liverpool. Nineteen eighty-one looks like a good year to go, he thinks. Then he shuts off the recorder again.
When he clicks the recorder back on during the same sequence, he drops a bombshell for all the future biographers sitting on his shoulder. He remembers sitting on the bed with Julia, his hand on her bosom, in the apartment at 1 Blomfield Road, off Mather Avenue, near Garston. He had taken a day off school to
hang out at her house, and they were lying about together; he wonders aloud if he should have done anything else. It was a strange moment, he says, because he had the hots for another female who lived across the road, but he always thought he should have done something more, and whether Julia would have allowed it. And then the tape cuts off again.
These associations summon more sensory associations, right down to Julia’s angora sweater, her yellow mottled skirt, and the adolescent envy he felt toward his stepfather, Bobby Dykins. It’s as if Lennon could still smell his mother lying next to him, and the primitive, unwieldy tension between teenage son and his flirtatious, mysterious, musical-mentor and out-of-reach mother. He remembers catching Judy going down on Twitchy, but can’t remember exactly what he felt—and then proceeds to describe the envy and confusion with as much articulacy as any shrink has ever hoped for. For Lennon, it was the idea of her going down on him, that sleazy little waiter, with his nervous cough and slicked-back hair. Dykins always used to push his hand in margarine or butter and grease his hair back before leaving the house, Lennon pointedly says. He was already feeling up girls, and his own sexual discoveries mingled with a teenager’s desire to provoke and dare Julia to favor him over anybody else. A passionate ambivalence about his status in her house with her daughters welled up like a flood of desire that took shape as a forbidden incestuous impulse.
He used to steal the tips Dykins kept in a big tin on top of a kitchen cupboard, and Julia would get blamed. That was the least those two could do for him, Lennon says bitterly. Already, as an adolescent, manipulating resentments between his elders to poke and prod his mother into noticing his cunning, filching from Dykins’s tip jar as revenge, the invisible houseguest thief with an adolescent boy’s imperious agenda. And here he sits, a father now himself, shuttled out to Long Island to look for a summer house, like a boy led along by an auntie, or a dilettante who can’t be bothered to choose his own vacation spot, an endless search for a new Scotland within driving distance of Manhattan.
Taken out of context, this matter-of-fact free association about Julia and boyhood feeds intense speculation about Lennon’s psychic health. But as he continues, Lennon lays out a context: his self-revelation about middle-age testosterone anxiety, where it’s taken him, and where he sits with it on Long Island, nearing forty. He describes reading in a magazine recently about someone’s sexual fantasies and urges that continued throughout life. How when this person was twenty and then thirty he thought they’d cool down a bit, and then when he got in his forties he thought they’d stop and they didn’t, not when he was sixty, seventy, and he was still dribbling on about it.
Lennon’s response is wild-eyed identification. He himself kept hoping that his sexual impulses might lessen over the years, but now resigns himself to the idea that they’ll go on forever. Even an amateur psychologist (or a pop audience, or a critic) can trace the larger themes in this monologue, the way Lennon connects superstar gamesmanship, his flirtatious mother, his stepfather’s grooming habits, and the primal sexual scene most children grapple with: catching his mother having sex. For Lennon, each strand tugs at complex sources: to start, the superstar gamesmanship takes place without rules, where rock ’n’ roll has already torn down so many phony show business benchmarks, redressing empty conventions, only to wind up yet another version of the same old game: grown men trying to outdo one another.
His utterance about his mother leaps from the tape as one of the very few instances where Lennon actually describes her in detail. “Julia,” the song he baked alone at EMI after all the other twenty-nine White Album tracks were cooked, remains notable for its dreamy particularities (“seashell eyes”) and doubles as a love song to Yoko Ono (“ocean child”). But nowhere else in the vast catalog of Lennon interviews does he go into a scene from childhood, the way Julia dressed, the memory of how she smelled, the way it made him feel, and the way his libido was ultimately entwined with grievance and loss. Consider how long it took him to retrieve this memory at all, never mind link it up with a contemporary quandary.
Aside from confirming Lennon’s adolescent disdain for Dykins, this audio journal provides a peephole into Lennon’s young mind, as he always took pains to speak respectfully of Dykins in many other contexts. Clearly, he felt for the man as they both lost Julia that night in 1958 when she was struck and killed on Menlove Avenue right outside Mendips. It’s almost as if Lennon left this tape behind for future biographers to delve into the nature of his sexual dysfunction. Like a time bomb, or forbidden Rosebud, hidden among the artifacts of his life.
Students of psychology may have a different interpretation. Lennon’s testimony (to himself? to his child? to his audience, eavesdropping long after his death?) has the air of a person doing his own therapy work in middle age—sifting through dreams, memories, and associations to make sense of a vast subconscious beset by uncertainty. Those incestuous impulses seem like rather ordinary Freudian fodder, especially considering Julia’s once-removed status in Lennon’s life, her well-known physical and personal charms, and a future rock star’s raging teen hormones. This all floods back through intimate details and a shared awkward moment on the same bed where he’d come upon her giving Dykins a blowjob. Is it possible to expect Lennon to long for his abandoning mother without a hint of sexuality?
Given everything he’s already spilled in song and interview, it’s impossible not to imagine a whiff of sexual magnetism between Julia and John. How could Lennon, the exhibitionist’s exhibitionist, not leave a trace of this somewhere for somebody to find? Alone in a car or a hotel room with a tape recorder, did he toy with history? Did he imagine some future ambulance-chasing biographers uncovering this moment? Or is this a MacGuffin, a Lennon prank planted to titillate, throw people off? Revealing to a cassette journal that he let his young teenage hand brush across his mother’s chest, just to gauge her response, seems like one of Lennon’s more innocent outrages.
Lennon’s response to Marsh and others calling for some kind of “statement” was steadfast silence, and stories began to appear about Ono managing his fortune, buying properties (in Florida and Long Island), and conducting Beatle business in lieu of a new manager. Instead of signing on with a new father figure to replace Allen Klein, Lennon let Ono steer the ship.
When the couple started to peek out of their shell, they began with a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times of May 27, 1979, signed by both of them. They described their retreat and referred to parenting, new philosophies, and the power of wishing. “The past 10 years we noticed everything we wished came true in its own time,” the ad started,
good or bad, one way or the other. We kept telling each other that one of these days we would have to get organized and wish for only good things. Then our baby arrived! We were overjoyed and at the same time felt very responsible. Now our wishes would also affect him. . . . Many people are sending us vibes every day in letters, telegrams, taps on the gate, or just flowers and nice thoughts. We thank them all and appreciate them for respecting our quiet space, which we need. . . . If you think of us next time, remember, our silence is a silence of love and not of indifference. . . . PS We noticed that three angels were looking over our shoulders when we wrote this!21
This prompted Dave Marsh to write another open letter in Rolling Stone, apologizing for the first: “If the past two years have taught me anything, it’s that every rock fan is on his own. And that this is a Good Thing. No more leaders, which you [i.e., Lennon] said first.” Marsh couldn’t stand Lennon’s precious tone in his ad, which only set off more rumors. Marsh warned against whatever expectancy was in the air, bemoaning comeback records long before they became standard rock career moves, and declaring Lennon a genius for picking the perfect moment to clam up. The statement, Marsh wrote, “actually accomplished . . . the undoing of everything your silence has worked toward; already there has been an avalanche of reunion rumors. Only you, John Lennon, can put an end to them.”22
Lennon often stayed at a getaway h
ouse in Glen Cove on weekends. Sometimes he went with Sean, sometimes the three of them went as a family. There, he made home videos with song demos, always lovingly dedicated to Yoko and Sean, singing songs (“Dear Yoko”) that were just as frankly private as the tapes. He introduced himself with the same loopy malapropisms and corny self-aggrandizements, but they were family barbs done purely for pleasure, not to impress a pop audience. He also recorded a Yoko Ono song that became the title track to Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him, a tribute album for her fiftieth birthday, compiled after his death. Elvis Costello recorded a brittle “Walking on Thin Ice” for the project, alongside turns from Rosanne Cash and Harry Nilsson. Lennon left behind a whispery version of the song himself, a posthumous valentine.
That last year, 1980, Yoko sent John and Sean to Glen Cove for a stretch while she stayed at a friend’s house on Fire Island. According to her own admissions to British biographer Philip Norman, she had become addicted to heroin again—a habit she concealed from John through their fragmented relationship and frequent travel. When considering the fairy-tale “happy ending” to the romance, Ono’s heroin relapse should factor in: how she waded in deep enough to spend months hiding it from her once-junkie husband and then kicked it cold turkey without his ever finding out.
For her forty-seventh birthday in February 1980, she told Philip Norman that she woke up in their Palm Beach mansion, El Solano, to find gardenias strewn from her bed all the way down the stairs and into the hallway. “He did that for me because he knew gardenias were my favorite flower. . . . And I felt so guilty because I’d gone back onto heroin and he didn’t know.”23 Later that year, Ono determined to kick the drug for good. She claimed to be suffering from a terrible flu, and forbade her husband and son from seeing her until she recovered. This puts Lennon’s audio diary into perspective: such frequent and extensive separations from his wife, whom he clearly adored, would rouse understandable sexual anxiety in men with one-tenth of his libido.
