Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  Whether intentional or not, the themes in the polished, confident-sounding Band On The Run were flight and freedom. In ‘Bluebird’, winged creatures flew to desert islands and coasted on the breeze. In ‘Helen Wheels’, which appeared only on the US version of the album, the carefree McCartneys cruised the length of the British Isles. ‘Mamunia’ lifted its misspelled title from the ‘safe haven’ of the Moroccan hotel where Wings had spent a blissful fortnight. Even the playful nonsense lyric of ‘Jet’ offered an invitation to soar up and away into the sky.

  But it was the episodic title track that best gave an insight into Paul’s frame of mind. At the beginning of ‘Band On The Run’, the mood is one of claustrophobia, of people trapped. Then, once the breakout occurs and the chiming acoustic guitar kicks in, the fugitives sprint into the sunlight, never to return. Maybe, just maybe, Paul had finally managed to escape the long shadow cast by his former group.

  Your post-Beatles feud with John was staged very publicly . . .

  Yeah. But it’s not like nobody else ever goes through that. We went through what everyone else did, y’know. Most people just argue with their family members and ours was done publicly. But I don’t really feel it was huge anger. It was more frustration than anger.

  7

  In La La Land

  The rumours first started swirling around in the last days of February 1974. Ringo and Harry Nilsson – nicknamed ‘The Beatle over the Water’ by the others – were spotted hanging out together at Capricorn Studios, the epicentre of bearded Southern boogie, in Macon, Georgia. It was exactly the sort of out-of-the-way location where you might successfully orchestrate a secret recording session. Soon the chatter turned to overwhelming noise: John, Paul and George were planning to fly out there to join them. The Beatles reunion was on.

  It wasn’t the first time this kind of tattle had circulated in the four years since the split. Eleven months earlier, a rumour had spread around Los Angeles that Klaus Voorman – Beatle pal since Hamburg, Revolver cover artist, bassist with the Plastic Ono Band – was to replace Paul in the reforming group. In truth, the three ex-Beatles plus Voorman were together in the studio hammering out the Lennon-penned ‘I’m The Greatest’, sung by Ringo on his third and eponymous album, and so the story hadn’t been too wide of the mark. John later ruminated that ‘Paul would most probably have joined in if he was around, but he wasn’t’.

  More promisingly, in setting the scene for a reuniting of The Beatles, Allen Klein was now out of the picture. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, his good relations with Lennon, Harrison and Starr had by now been lost in black clouds of bad advice and incrimination. When their management contract with him lapsed on 31 March 1973, Klein, knowing his time was up, announced that he no longer wished to represent them. Then, like a clamp-jawed terrier refusing to drop the bone, he attempted to launch a legal action against all four of the former band members.

  Walking into a London radio station to do an interview in December 1973, Paul was approached by a stranger and served a writ informing him that ABKCO was suing him and the other former Beatles for the seemingly arbitrary sum of $20 million. It didn’t overly trouble McCartney; he’d never signed the management agreement in the first place.

  The buzz surrounding the apparent Macon summit two months later, though entirely misplaced, was lent further credence, however, by the fact that, for a fortnight in New York at the beginning of February, lawyers for both parties had begun examining the details of the dispute between Apple and ABKCO. Frustratingly, any attempts at a settlement broke down, but both Lennon and McCartney individually appeared at the meetings, sparking gossip that they were trying to work out a deal for the future of The Beatles. In Britain, Melody Maker went big on the speculation, trumpeting on its cover ‘Beatles Get Together!’ Teasingly, none of the band’s individual publicists or Apple’s PR would confirm or deny the story.

  Then, on 25 February, Paul put out a press release that appeared to confirm that the group were set to carry on. ‘As soon as things are sorted out, we can all get together again and do something,’ it tantalisingly stated. ‘We’ve talked about it, but we haven’t been able to do anything because this has been going on and on.’ Deflatingly, within a fortnight, in an interview with US TV channel ABC conducted at the London offices of MPL, he was talking the reunion down. ‘I don’t think we’ll get together as a band again,’ he said. ‘I just don’t think it’ll work actually. It might not be as good.’

  It was a real concern. The idea that The Beatles could get back together and just magically pick up from where they’d left off was a naïve one, particularly after the troubled births of both Let It Be and Abbey Road. ‘It wouldn’t necessarily have been a great thing,’ Paul says. ‘What we did with The Beatles was so cool that if we’d started to try and reheat a soufflé . . . that would’ve spoiled the whole reputation. What would we do? Do some new songs and add a new addendum, a new chapter to the end of the Beatles story? And how long would that go for? And would that get a bit pathetic? And it’d be, like, “Why, boys?”’

  Still, a private Beatles reunion of sorts was imminent. In March the McCartneys landed in Los Angeles, a city where in 1974 the weed-refracted hippie idealism of the previous decade had given way to cocaine-shovelling egotism and creative self-indulgence. Its recording studios, clubs and secluded Hollywood hillside properties were riddled with the solipsistic and the drug-damaged. And it was this edgy, unstable environment that greeted Paul. The arch-irony was that for the first few weeks of the near two-month-long holiday in California, he wasn’t sure how long he would be allowed to stay in the country, until the legal wrangling over his US visa following the 1973 busts was finally resolved in April.

  Paul, according to gossiping music industry tongues, was in town to meet up with John and talk about getting the band back together. This story gained more credibility when Lennon and McCartney were spotted together, chatting and laughing backstage, at the sixteenth annual Grammy Awards at the Hollywood Palladium, where Stevie Wonder scooped Best Album for his peerless Innervisions and Roberta Flack walked away with Record of the Year for ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’. John, tempering his hardline attitude towards Paul, considered Band On The Run ‘a great song and a great album’.

  Lennon in 1974, however, was a mess. Behind him, in New York, his marriage to Yoko Ono lay in ruins, the trigger being his drunken infidelity with a girl at a party on the night of Richard Nixon’s re-election on 7 November 1972. Added to this, his career was in freefall. Badly shaken by the brutal reviews for his shonky, poorly selling 1972 political album Some Time In New York City, he’d already dismissed its similarly patchy follow-up, Mind Games, as ‘just an album . . . rock’n’roll at different speeds’. Also hanging over his head was a plagiarism lawsuit from music publisher Morris Levy, who had, rightly, accused him of cribbing the melody and opening lyric for ‘Come Together’ from Chuck Berry’s ‘You Can’t Catch Me’.

  Day to day, further weighing on his mind, he was living under the threat of expulsion from the US by the Nixon administration, which was secretly listening to his phone calls and trailing his cars, and attempting to use a 1968 marijuana drug charge in London as an excuse to turf this worryingly influential peacenik out of the country. The agonies were piling up and it was clear that Lennon was on the brink.

  ‘I just couldn’t function,’ he later admitted. ‘I was so paranoid from them tapping the phone and following me. I was under emotional stress. A manic depression, I would call it.’

  His companion in LA was the Lennons’ 22-year-old personal assistant, May Pang. In an effort to control her husband’s extramarital behaviour, Yoko had approached the wide-eyed Pang with a view to her becoming her husband’s mistress. Pang succumbed when John made a pass at her in a lift. As much in lust as in love with this new girlfriend – eyewitnesses reported that he could barely keep his hands off her – John had effectively replaced Yoko with a model seventeen years her junior.

  By this point, Lennon had
been in LA for seven months and was in the throes of the wildest period of his life since his days in Hamburg with The Beatles. Two unhinged characters were aiding him in his madness: the demented dervish that was Phil Spector and the spirits-guzzling, drug-ravenous Harry Nilsson. ‘We had some moments,’ Lennon said of the period in his life that became known as the Lost Weekend. ‘But it got a little near the knuckle.’

  John Lennon had moved to LA to escape the pressures of being John Lennon. The sprawling city had always been a favourite destination for the singer on Beatles tours, and he believed his problems might evaporate in the Californian sunshine. But his troubles were clearly not behind him. For a start, he was virtually broke, given the tangled mess that was Apple. Staying at his lawyer Harold Seider’s small duplex in West Hollywood, he and Pang were living hand to mouth until Capitol Records advanced the singer $10,000 against future royalties.

  In all this confusion and uncertainty, Lennon hatched a plan to get Morris Levy off his back and, at the same time, revive his own career. Settling out of court with the publisher, he agreed to record three songs from the catalogue of Levy’s Big Seven Music on his next album, proposed to be a set of rock’n’roll standards produced, in typically grandiose fashion, by Spector, the architect of his first three solo albums.

  Notoriously temperamental and unpredictable in the studio, Spector owed much of his recent success to Lennon and The Beatles. He was one of the few individuals to inspire awe in Lennon, and their relationship was one of shared admiration. But the producer was at this point going through an acutely strange and manic phase in his life, having recently split from his wife, former Ronettes singer Ronnie Spector, after she claimed he had kept her a virtual prisoner inside their fortress-like LA home.

  The uproarious tone of the sessions for the Rock’N’Roll album was set on day one, 17 October 1973, at A&M Studios, when Spector – who had packed the live room with 28 musicians, including drummer Jim Keltner, Stones sax player Bobby Keys and guitarist Jesse Ed Davis – turned up late and spent hours painstakingly miking the instruments.

  Bored to tears, Lennon and the band broke the seal on a gallon bottle of Smirnoff vodka.

  By day two the scene was one of surreal disorder. Spector arrived at A&M, late again, having for no particular reason decided to dress as a doctor, with stethoscope and white lab coat, under which he was surreptitiously packing a pistol. His kick at the time was amyl nitrate, the chief effect of which is a disorientating rush of blood to the head. He would constantly break open and inhale ampoules of it as he directed the musicians. ‘John didn’t take that,’ Pang claims. ‘But Phil would come around and put it under your nose anyway.’

  Roy Cicala, the owner of Lennon’s favourite New York studio, The Record Plant, had flown in to be chief engineer on the Rock’N’Roll sessions. ‘There was a lot of speed, cocaine, everything going on,’ he says. ‘Everybody was obnoxious.’

  Studio banter between Spector and Lennon became increasingly bizarre and worryingly intense. The producer barked loud, distorted remarks through the musicians’ headphones, at one point yelling, ‘What’s with these fucking horns and birds and seagulls and shit?’ Lennon lost his temper and cracked up, shouting, ‘Shut up! You fucking . . .’ These shenanigans, added to the various other pressures in his life, further affected Lennon’s sanity. ‘I was trying to hide what I felt in the bottle,’ he said. ‘I was just insane.’

  Matters came to a head one night when a particularly drunken Lennon started freaking out in Cicala’s car after being separated from Pang by Spector in the convoy of motors taking them home to the Bel Air house Lennon had borrowed from record producer Lou Adler. Wild and disorientated, the singer went berserk, kicking at the windows, screaming for Pang and, perhaps tellingly, Yoko. Arriving at the house, Spector’s bodyguard grabbed Lennon and dragged him to a bedroom where he and the producer tried to restrain the singer by tying him down, further enraging him when he thought he was about to be abused in a weird sex game.

  ‘He got wild because they took his glasses away,’ Pang reasons. ‘He was as blind as a bat.’ Spector and his bodyguard tied him up with neckties. ‘He started freaking out,’ says Pang, ‘because he didn’t know what was going on.’

  From here on in, the recording sessions became even more warped. Having been thrown out of A&M Studios after a bottle of booze was tipped into the mixing desk, the party continued at The Record Plant West. One day, a loud bang was heard from the control room. Everyone ducked. In the centre of the room stood Spector with a gun in his hand, pointing at the studio ceiling. Pang says, ‘John had his fingers in his ears, going, “Phil, if you’re gonna shoot me, shoot me. But don’t fuck with me ears, man, I need them.”’ It transpired that Spector had got into an argument with former Beatles roadie Mal Evans and fired a live bullet into the roof. ‘It frightened the hell out of us,’ says Pang.

  In the aftermath, Spector stole the album’s tapes and locked them in the basement of his house, claiming to everyone – although it was patently untrue – that they’d been destroyed in a fire at the studio. Only six weeks after they’d begun, the Rock’N’Roll sessions collapsed.

  Then, into the wreckage, stepped Harry Nilsson. A former bank computer operator turned songwriter for The Monkees, Nilsson and Lennon had been friends since the former impressed The Beatles with a cover of their ‘You Can’t Do That’ on his 1967 album Pandemonium Shadow Show, which cleverly incorporated elements of more than a dozen other Fabs songs. On its release, Lennon apparently listened to the album non-stop for 36 hours. During the New York press conference announcing Apple Records in 1968, both he and McCartney namechecked Nilsson as their favourite new artist. Instantly, Harry was made.

  A brilliant if erratic songwriter, whose pinballing humour found him writing lyrics about gang-bangs (‘Cuddly Toy’) and, incredibly, even his writing desk (‘Good Old Desk’), Nilsson enjoyed his greatest successes with his covers of Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s Talkin” from the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy and Badfinger’s ‘Without You’, a transatlantic number 1 in 1972.

  Sharing a twisted sense of humour and a penchant for mischief, Nilsson and Lennon were natural buddies. It was perhaps inevitable that the LA-dwelling singer would gravitate towards Lennon. Lennon clearly appreciated Nilsson’s edginess and was very likely looking for a male soulmate to fill the hole left by McCartney. For his part, Nilsson’s feelings for Lennon ran even deeper: ‘I really fell in love with him. He was all those things you wanted somebody to be.’

  A visitor to the studio during the frenzied latter stages of the Rock’N’Roll sessions, Nilsson claimed to have had a calming influence on the key players, in spite of his own reputation as a prodigious drinker and drugger. ‘Suddenly I was the maypole of stability, if you can believe that,’ he laughed. ‘They were at war . . . and I was a nice little centrepiece they could both dance around for a moment.’

  But Roy Cicala, for one, felt that Nilsson was basking in the reflected glory of having a Beatle for a mate. ‘Some days I would think that somebody’s taking advantage of somebody,’ he says. ‘The next day I would think, Wow, John is really enjoying it.’

  The pair’s notoriety was cemented on the evening of Tuesday, 12 March 1974, when, with May Pang, they visited the Troubadour club on Santa Monica Boulevard to watch a performance by New York’s folk-tinged, mock-bickering musical comedy duo The Smothers Brothers. The intimate venue was fast becoming Lennon’s favourite place to hang out and get wasted in LA. Only weeks before, he’d appeared there in the audience at a show by soul singer Ann Peebles, rat-arsed and with a sanitary towel stuck to his forehead.

  He’d asked a scornful waitress, ‘Do you know who I am?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she’d snapped back. ‘An asshole with a Kotex on his head.’

  Both Lennon and Nilsson were heavily oiled on their arrival at The Smothers Brothers’ show. The pair, along with the teetotal Pang, parked themselves at a table in the VIP area alongside the likes of actor Paul Newman and D
eep Throat porn star Linda Lovelace. They began necking brandy Alexanders (a sickly cocktail of brandy and milk) and proceeded to loudly heckle the performers, much to everyone’s horror.

  ‘Hey, Smothers Brothers,’ yelled Lennon at one point. ‘Fuck a cow!’

  Pang was humiliated. ‘The crowd loves it,’ Nilsson told her.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ she replied. ‘Do me a favour.’

  Then, the Troubadour’s manager came over and grabbed Lennon. ‘And you just don’t grab John,’ says Pang. ‘It brought him back to the old days. All of a sudden, the tables went flying.’

  Swinging punches at the bouncers as they were dragged out of the club and on to the sidewalk, Nilsson and Lennon were photographed by a camera-ready fan looking wild-eyed and out of it. ‘The next day John was mortified,’ says Pang. ‘He sent flowers to everyone.’

  Effectively homeless and living off favours, Lennon and Pang moved into a Santa Monica beachside property rented for Nilsson by his label, RCA. The house had been built by Louis B. Mayer and owned in the early 1960s by British film actor Peter Lawford, who lent it to President John F. Kennedy for his trysts with Marilyn Monroe. The first time Nilsson showed Lennon and Pang around the house, he opened the door of the master bedroom the couple were to be sharing and said, ‘So this is where they did it, Kennedy and Marilyn.’

  The house quickly became the go-to place for over-imbibing thirtysomething rock musicians. Alongside Lennon and Nilsson, Ringo and Keith Moon moved in. Given the lifestyles of the cohabitees, the scene soon resembled one long stag night.

  ‘We lived a normal, reasonable life,’ Nilsson later argued. ‘We’d wake up in the morning – well, about one o’clock. At first we were very polite. Then, after a while, it was, “Keith, get your nose out of the amyl.”’