by Peter Brown
Janov directed that for twenty-four hours before his arrival John and Yoko separate into distant rooms and have nothing to do with each other. He stipulated that they must use no drugs or any kind of chemicals and not speak on the phone or listen to the radio or watch TV. The therapy sessions themselves were grueling. John would lie on his back spreadeagled in the middle of the floor while Janov took him back through all the hurt and rejection of his childhood. His heartrending screams could be heard all over the house. After a week at Tittenhurst Park the therapy sessions were disrupted by the noise of the construction, and the sessions were continued in a large suite at the Inn on the Park in London. At the end of three weeks, when Janov thought they were making progress, he invited them back to California with him, where they would officially enroll at the Primal Institute in Los Angeles and undergo a four- to six-month course of intensive therapy—shades of the Maharishi. In fact—and for John this was the nifty part—John’s immigration problems in the U.S. could be temporarily solved by Dr. Janov; one of the few ways he could be allowed in the country was for specialized medical treatment.
Just before John and Yoko were to leave for California, Janov suggested that it would be helpful for John in his therapy if he resolved some of his own ambivalent feelings for Julian, who was living with Cynthia and Roberto Bassanini. John hadn’t seen Julian since the car accident the previous July. A meeting was arranged, and John came alone in his Rolls to Cynthia’s Kensington home to see the little boy. “He was surprisingly pleasant,” Cynthia recounts. “He almost immediately went upstairs to Julian’s room, where they spent several hours playing together. I was delighted and so was Julian. Later, John came downstairs to have a cup of tea with me and tell me about primal therapy. Yoko was never mentioned. Just then the phone rang. It was the housekeeper at Tittenhurst Park, hysterical because Yoko was threatening to take an overdose of sleeping pills because John was spending so much time with me and Julian. John slammed down the phone and shouted, ‘That silly bitch! She’s threatening to kill herself!’”
After that, all communications and arrangements about Julian were made by Yoko Ono. Cynthia never heard the sound of John’s voice again.
The next day they were off to Los Angeles, where they rented a small house with a manicured lawn in Beverly Hills. In Los Angeles, according to Yoko, she promptly miscarried John’s third child. After a few days bedrest to regain her strength, she joined John in primal therapy. For nearly three months they spent two half days a week in therapy with Janov. The screaming sessions, which John found very effective, usually left him a wailing, hysterical puddle of misery on Dr. Janov’s office floor. “We’d go down to a session, have a good cry, and come back and swim in the pool,” John said. “And you’d always feel like after acid or a good joint, you know, sort of in the pool tingling and everything was fine. But then your defenses would all come up again—like the acid would wear off, the joint would wear off—and you’d go back for another fix.”
Yoko didn’t buy Janov’s therapy at all. John later claimed that she only went along with it from the start to satisfy him, that in her heart she felt John was only searching for another “Daddy.” But she also thought the therapy was useful for men who needed to be able to cry and release themselves. This form of expression was quite familiar to Yoko, who would not only scream and cry in her private life, but perform it on records and the stage.
As with the Maharishi, there came a moment of disillusionment with Janov. According to John, one day Janov appeared at a therapy session with two 16 mm cameras. John wouldn’t even consider having his session recorded. “I’m not going to be filmed,” John said, “especially not rolling around on the floor screaming.”
According to John, Janov started to berate them. “Some people are so big they won’t be filmed,” Janov said. Janov said that it was coincidental that he was filming the session, and it had nothing to do with John and Yoko’s fame. “Who are you kidding, Mr. Janov?” John said. “[You] just happen to be filming the session with John and Yoko in it.”
John and Yoko had many discussions about Janov’s professionalism. “I was rather cynical about it,” Yoko says. “I observed the relationship between Art Janov and his wife, Vivian, as a couple, and I felt that Vivian was rather unhappy. But we both decided that the therapy was beautiful but that people who were doing it didn’t have to be perfect. We wondered when it would end, and one day in the pool we looked at each other and realized that we were the ones who were going to say when it was over. John said, ‘Oh, if we’re the ones who are supposed to walk out I’ll tell them.”’
One day in June John turned up at the Primal Therapy Center and said to Janov, “Well, we’re cured. Thank you.” They left Los Angeles the next day.
If primal therapy did not turn out to be the magic elixir that John sought, it was one of the few Next Big Things to leave him with lasting value and improvement. Primal therapy put him much more in touch with his fears and angers, burdens that he had been carrying around with him his whole life. Being able to deal with his feelings in such an explicit way unleashed the artist in him, sending him back to the easel and canvas to translate his emotions into terms he understood best. The results are evident in John’s first solo album, the so-called “primal” LP, John Lennon/ Plastic Ono Band. This album is one of the most powerful and effective autobiographical works to be produced in any medium. John used the studio for a musical exorcism. By far one of the most disturbing songs on the album is called “Mother,” a far different tribute to his mother than “Julia” had been. In this taut, funereal song, John sings, “You had me but I never had you./I wanted you but you didn’t want me./ ... Father, you left me but I never left you.” The song culminates in a series of pitiful cries, as piercing as they are somehow poetic, of John calling, “Mooooooother! Mooooooother!” Just so nobody missed the point, there was also a short chant to the tune of “Three Blind Mice,” with the lyrics, “My mummy’s dead.”
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band also included John’s “Working Class Hero” song, with the Janovian lyrics, “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small./By giving you no time instead of it all ...” The most commercially successful cut on the album was a song called “God,” a simple litany of John’s disappointments. “I don’t believe in Jesus,” he sings, “I don’t believe in Bible ... I don’t believe in Elvis ... I don’t believe in Beatles ... I just believe in me ... The dream is over.”
5
Throughout the year Paul followed the adventures of John and Yoko in the newspapers with a growing sense of dismay and disgust. John was making a fool of himself, and it was time for Paul to break away, otherwise John would pull him down with him. Since it was foolish for Paul to continue to think there would ever be another Beatles album, Paul decided the first step in breaking away was to make an album on his own. That autumn, amidst all the bad vibes at Apple, Paul gathered his wife, their precious daughter Mary, Linda’s daughter Heather, and Martha the sheep-dog and headed for his remote farm, High Park, in Scotland to record his first solo album. He left without telling anyone, except for Derek and me, where he was going.
One reason why Paul was so eager to get out of town was because of the recent runaway success of the Beatles’ swan-song recording sessions, Abbey Road. This album turned out to be the last of the Beatles’ masterpieces, with most of the seventeen cuts a group effort, truly a minor miracle. The album was rhapsodically reviewed, for both its rock and roll and progressive pop cuts, all populated by some of the Beatles’ more astonishing musical characters, including Mean Mr. Mustard and his transvestite sister, Polythene Pam. George Harrison had the biggest breakthrough of his career on Abbey Road with “Something,” a beautiful love song he wrote for Pattie. This song went on to become one of the most widely covered of any Beatles song and one of the largest selling singles. Abbey Road, boosted by Allen Klein’s masterful, high-powered promotion and hype campaign, became the Beatles’ most successful album ever, selling over five milli
on copies the first year, which was two million more than Sergeant Pepper. It was the enormous popularity of Abbey Road that was focusing more attention on Paul for the moment instead of John, and Paul made a rare attempt to dodge the limelight by slipping away to High Park.
This little secret vacation of Paul’s had a morbid side effect. On October 12, 1969, an American disc jockey named Russ Gibb on Detroit station WKNR-FM claimed to have received an anonymous phone call saying that Paul McCartney was dead. The proof, in part, was allegedly wedged into the end of the song “Strawberry Fields,” which when played backwards could be deciphered as John chanting, “I buried Paul.” As much as this might have been John’s sentiments at the time, it was hardly true.
Soon after Russ Gibbs’ broadcast in Detroit, the Apple switchboard in London was deluged with calls from reporters and fans asking if it were true that Paul was dead. None of us found the rumor at all amusing, and we very sternly assured all the callers that Paul was alive, in good health, and enjoying himself, but to protect his privacy, we declined to say exactly where he was. But this only fueled the mystery of Paul’s whereabouts, and before we knew it the Paul-is-dead rumor became an issue of international conjecture. It seemed as if a Paul-is-dead mini-industry developed overnight. One of the more ghoulish entrepreneurs published an entire magazine devoted to the subject. According to the extensive lore that developed, Paul had been killed in a traffic accident, a tragedy portrayed in “A Day in the Life.” This occurred in November of 1966, the “stupid bloody Tuesday” in “I Am the Walrus.” Paul “blew his mind out in a car” because he “hadn’t noticed that the light had changed”36 and was decapitated.
Among the thousands of alleged clues and symbols, the Sergeant Pepper cover was said to depict Paul’s funeral, with the Beatles standing around his freshly dug grave. The Paul McCartney in the photograph was supposed to be an actor named William Campbell, who had undergone extensive plastic surgery to fool the public in an attempt to keep the group going, an ironic counterpoint to real life. The cover of Abbey Road was alleged to be a funeral procession, with Paul—barefoot because he’s a “corpse”—out of step with the other Beatles. Also, the Volkswagen license plate in the background, which reads 28 IF, was supposed to mean that if Paul had lived, he would have been twenty-eight. Unaccountably, he was only twenty-seven if he was still alive, but then not many of the clues made much sense.
Derek Taylor finally started telling reporters that Paul was on his farm in Scotland, but that didn’t satisfy their curiosity either. I finally called Paul on his private line at the farm and told him that work at Apple was being disrupted by the thousands of queries about his health. I asked him what he wanted to do about it, and he said, “Nothing, just let it go.” Which is what I did. But in a few days the situation had grown even worse, and I rang him back, telling him that we had to make a statement or in some way show that the rumor was nonsense. Paul was determined; he was going to say nothing and stay in Scotland and that was that.
That wasn’t good enough for Life magazine, however. The editors at Life were determined to publish photographic evidence that Paul was alive and dispatched a team of photographers and reporters to Scotland to track Paul down and bring back a photograph. The hearty group trooped over four and a half miles of marshy land on foot until they were in sight of Paul’s farmhouse. They were quickly discovered by Martha the sheep-dog, whose barking brought Paul running. Enraged at this blatant invasion of his privacy, as well as at their trespassing, Paul ordered them off his property, but not before they got their cameras out and started shooting scores of photographs of Paul yelling at them. Angrier still, Paul grabbed a bucketful of water he was using to feed the farm animals and tossed it at a cameraman, who took a picture of that, too.
Moments after the Life representatives left, Paul realized what he had done. He quickly recovered, jumped into his Land Rover jeep, and chased the photographers and reporters across the Campbelltown hills. Once again his old charming self, Paul apologized for his outburst and asked if they could come to a compromise; in return for the exposed film of his temper tantrum, he would give them an exclusive interview, plus exclusive photographs of him and his newborn daughter Mary—taken by the family photographer, Linda. The resulting interview and picture became the cover story of Life magazine. It amused us at Apple when Paul was quoted as saying, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. However, if I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know...”
In March of 1970, after nearly six months away, he returned to London with his solo album, McCartney. While no tour de force, it was a pretty, worthwhile album, which contained the hit songs “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “Every Night.” Paul had improvised studio effects with home remedies, including recording in the bathroom and the living room for different echos. On some cuts you can hear the front door slamming or the children playing in the next room.
As soon as Paul hit London, he rang up John. “I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing,” he said. “I’m putting out an album and leaving the group.”
John couldn’t believe that Paul even thought there was still a group left to leave. “Good,” he said. “That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally.”
Paul then informed me and Allen Klein that for personal reasons he wanted his album released on April 10 through Apple. Klein explained that April 10 was out of the question. April was the release date of Let It Be. Phil Spector had done such a good job on John’s “Instant Karma” single that John and Klein had given him all the dusty Let It Be tapes that had been locked in a vault for over a year and had told him to make an album out of it. The album was going to be released in time to back up the finished Let It Be documentary, which was to be released in theaters on May 20. Since it was a United Artists film, the date could not be changed. Also, Ringo had recorded a solo album, an innocent but mawkish album called Sentimental Journey, of classics sung off-key like “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.” Ringo’s album would have to be released next, after Let It Be.
Paul would just have to wait his place in line.
Paul called Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI in a rage. “I’m being sabotaged, Sir Joe, that’s what they’re doing to me!” he ranted. Sir Joe said he would see what he could do to help, but in the end it was up to the other Beatles.
Ringo went to see Paul one night at his home in St. John’s Wood. Ringo was the least volatile of them all and the best mediator to effect some sort of compromise. Ringo was at Paul’s house only a few minutes when Paul flew into a rage and, according to Ringo, “went completely out of control.” He shook his finger in Ringo’s face and screamed, “I’ll finish you all! You’ll pay!” He gave Ringo his coat and threw him out of the house.
Ringo, reasonable fellow that he is, told the others that if it meant so much to Paul to have his solo album released in April, they should let him do it, just to show friendship. Ringo’s own solo album was pushed back and the release of Let It Be pushed up. As it turned out, all three albums hit the market within three or four weeks of each other, flooding the record bins with Beatles products. It was a dismal marketing decision.
Paul was angry but not as angry as he was when he eventually heard the Let It Be album. Spector had completely bastardized the Beatles sound. Although it had certain merits, Let It Be was purely a Phil Spector Wall of Sound Production, with his inimitable backdrop of vast choruses and lavish orchestrations. Paul was mortified by the kitschy female voices—the first female voices ever on a Beatles record—and by what Spector had done to one of his prettiest songs, “The Long and Winding Road,” which Klein had earmarked as the album’s first single. Paul had originally recorded the song with just an acoustic guitar, similar to the way he sang the song in the finished documentary, with just his sweet voice carrying the song along. Spector had turned it into a monumental pile of mush, complete with strings, horns, and an ethereal chorus in the background.
Paul tried everything in his power to get it changed, first through S
pector, then through Klein; but it was too late, the record was already being pressed. This desecration of his work was the final straw.
On May 20, at the gala premiere of Let It Be at the London Palladium, none of the Beatles showed up. Instead of a film about the making of an album, it was a portrait of the dissolution of a group. Even more painful, it was about the dissolution of a friendship into animosity and hatred.
The night of the opening, George Harrison went into the studios with Phil Spector and began what was to be six months of work on his own solo album, All Things Must Pass. Not to be left out, Ringo went into the studios with Nashville producer Pete Drake to work on his next solo LP, Beaucoup of Blues, which took six days, instead of six months, to record.
On April 17 Paul McCartney’s solo LP, McCartney, with a cover photograph of a bowl of spilled cherries, was released to lukewarm reviews from critics. Inside the album package was an interview Paul had done with himself, making up the questions as well as the answers. It was self-serving, vain, and painted him in the poorest light. But it telegraphed one irrefutable message: the Beatles were dead.
Q: What do you feel about John’s peace effort? The Plastic Ono Band? Giving back the MBE? Yoko’s influence? Yoko?
A: I love John and respect what he does—it doesn’t give me any pleasure.
Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
A: No
