Lennon

by Tim Riley

  Relaxing in his new home over the holidays, Lennon submitted to several days of interviews with zoologist and surreal artist Desmond Morris, best known for his book The Naked Ape (1967). Morris had selected Lennon for his portion of a TV show devoted to the sixties, called Men of the Decade. The program aired on the BBC on December 30, and a lot of this footage shot on Tittenhurst’s grounds can be seen in the 1998 documentary Imagine: John Lennon. For his portion, Lennon joined portraits of Ho Chi Minh, chosen by Mary McCarthy, and John F. Kennedy, chosen by Alistair Cooke.

  Morris had progressive ideas in mind, and his interview quoted Lennon roaming his estate on December 2, intercut with clips from the Beatles’ career, his songs, his bed-ins, and drug arrest, reflecting on the counterculture, peace, and how quickly the cultural ground had shifted during his seven years of fame. Lennon seemed particularly taken with Woodstock as a cultural symbol: “The biggest mass of people ever gathered together for anything other than war,” he enthused. “Nobody had that big an army that didn’t kill somebody or have some kind of violent scene like the Romans or whatever, even a Beatle concert was more violent than that and that was just 50,000. And so the good things that came out were all this vast peaceful movement.”42

  Morris tried to smooth Lennon’s radicalism for the mainstream by interpreting his sensibility as forward-thinking: “This eccentricity of his is more than a mere anti-establishment device, it also represents a plea for fantasy—if you like—in an unromantic age, a plea for the unofficial and the inconsequential in an age of officialment over organisation, a plea for unsophisticated fun in an age of sophisticated weapons. Above all—it’s a plea for optimism.”

  Lennon himself continues:

  This is only the beginning—this sixties bit was just a sniff, the sixties were just waking up in the morning and we haven’t even got to dinner time yet and I can’t wait, I just can’t wait I’m so glad to be around and it’s just going to be great and there’s going to be more and more of us, and whatever you’re thinking there Mrs. Grundy of South Birmingham on toast, you don’t stand a chance. (A) You’re not going to be there when we’re running it and (B) you’re gonna like it when you get less frightened of it.

  At the end of the show, Morris told the audience how their poll for the decade’s greatest figures had turned out, with Lennon the only pop star:

  President Kennedy

  Sir Winston Churchill

  Dr. Barnard

  Mr. Harold Wilson

  Prince Charles

  Prince Philip

  H.M. the Queen

  President Ho Chi Minh

  John Lennon

  Ranking up there with Churchill must have given Lennon a jolt—the name he had just shed alongside the name that was too controversial to be listed in full (note the omission of “Ono” in Lennon’s listing). And that list planted a seed in Lennon’s mind. Soon he plucked the name “Kennedy,” but not Churchill, out for use in a new song. (The Beatles had already skewered Wilson in Harrison’s “Taxman.”)

  There was plenty to cherish as Lennon walked the grounds at Tittenhurst with Desmond Morris: in the previous eighteen months, he had extricated himself from a static marriage and completely revamped his public image outside his band, and he was settled in his new mansion with his brainy Japanese wife who had almost as many crazy ideas as he did on a daily basis.

  Lennon’s curious humility sparred with hubris as he pored over the decade and how the next one stretched out in front of them. He had left the Beatles but agreed to keep that under his hat as Klein negotiated with EMI to keep Apple afloat. Yoko had transformed his life and given him ideas about how to step outside his Beatle identity, but they had already suffered two miscarriages together, and such trials are not for sissies. As at many different junctures with the Beatles, Lennon turned his transition away from the band into a theme; the questions of identity, and solo careers in the immense shadow of the Beatles, now began to hang over all of them. Once this new riddle grabbed hold of Lennon, his typical impertinence wrung it for all the material he could. He had started by redefining himself through Yoko, but he underplayed how traumatic leaving the Beatles was to his pride. In the months to come, Lennon’s muse kept insisting that despite all his losses, including Yoko’s two miscarriages across eleven months in 1968–69, he had not yet begun to grieve.

  PART THREE

  BEYOND BEATLES

  1970–1980

  Chapter 19

  Just We Two

  Lennon’s solo years trace a radically different creative arc from his Beatle career. By adopting a Scouser’s lower-class resentment to sneer his way into show business and conquer the world (“just rattle your jewelry”), his songwriting guile as a Beatle veered between musical fox and spiritual jape; hit movie songs and romantic ballads underwrote experimental rock concepts and lurching self-expression. In the sixties, Lennon had increasingly defined himself against McCartney to stretch standard songs toward impudent forms: the love triangles in “She Loves You,” “If I Fell,” and “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” sprint forward into coy first-personisms, like “Norwegian Wood” and “Nowhere Man,” and on through single-chord tape fantasias like “Tomorrow Never Knows,” even more personal statements like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and toward the outer reaches of “I Am the Walrus,” “Glass Onion,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” and his kitchen-sink manifesto “Revolution 9.”

  Lennon’s radical threads dovetailed into early experimental solo efforts with Yoko Ono. Then, just as he set out on his own from the safest show-business harbor anybody had ever conceived, he redirected these stylistic extremes back into conservative frames. “Come Together” wedged hallucinatory doggerel into a tightly knit blues. And where “Hey Bulldog” and “I Dig a Pony” suspended nonsense atop blues forms, the daring on Plastic Ono Band, his first post-Beatle solo effort, is all thematic—here, even his lyrics trace a new minimalism. As if he couldn’t simply release something on his own, Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band album is the experimental mirror piece, and it still holds up extremely well, given that her strong suit was more visual and conceptual than musical. (Nobody would mistake these albums except for the title they share.) Anyone still underrating Lennon’s guitar flair needs to account for his yammering squalls on Ono’s “Why” or his slide work on “Why Not.”

  The Beatles’ career now assumes such a familiar shape in rock mythology that it’s easy to forget their pioneering stature at the time. In late 1987, critic Mark Moses summed up the band’s influence back when reviewing an installment of their CD reissues for the Boston Phoenix: “Somewhere in our subconscious, we expect sufficiently ambitious bands to have life spans that mimic the contours and even the tempo of the Beatles’. In its grossest form, their trajectory could be described as frenzied pop mastery / unstuffy elegance / conceptual coup / renunciation of conceptual coup / end in pieces.”1 One way of looking at Lennon’s solo work is as Beatle John in reverse: blazing string of hit singles (“Give Peace a Chance,” “Cold Turkey,” “Instant Karma,” “Power to the People”) / kiss-of-death critical breakthrough (Plastic Ono Band) / utopian popular surge (Imagine) / political animus (Some Time in New York City) / midlife crisis as cautionary tale (the Los Angeles Troubadour incidents) / mid-period lull (Mind Games, Walls and Bridges, Pussy Cats) / celebrity collaborations (Elton John, David Bowie) / roots move (Rock ’n’ Roll) / greatest hits (Shaved Fish) / retire early: grand pause. Then: comeback.

  Compared to his Beatle period, Lennon’s emotional life became ever more bound up with his work: during the sixties, his creative work collided with reality at irregular intervals; he wrote his most revealing song, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” while alone in Spain in October 1966. Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper countered an emotional black hole, which boomeranged back into so-called “reality” through more sobering material typified on The White Album and in later blues forms. In the early seventies, Lennon’s mediocre work channeled his emotional ennui more directly—his s
olo period contains weak records, but they tend to be weak in interesting ways. And his vocal audacity rescued him from many a wrong move. The hinge between these two periods comes with Plastic Ono Band, a thematic extension of “Cold Turkey,” which equated heroin withdrawal with pulling out of the Beatles.

  Reducing Lennon’s end-game to pithy quips dramatizes just how far outside typical pop norms the new John Lennon brand reached. Insiders seesawed between delight and bewilderment at his uneven muse; the larger audience adopted him as another wacky eccentric who showed up on Dick Cavett or Mike Douglas or the Jerry Lewis telethon, paraded through wire stories and pulp magazines, presented at the Grammys or duetted with Elton John. Once again, the Atlantic Ocean barely explained the huge gap in Lennon’s persona: his British homeland never forgave him for relocating to America, while American fans cherished his presence and joined his battle for residency. He willingly traded his musical integrity to support radical causes: aesthetics became less important than protesting injustice (“John Sinclair,” “Attica State”) and feminism (“Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” “Woman”).

  The Beatles and the 1960s defined each other, but for such a political decade, most of their music aimed somewhere beyond politics. Toward the end, Lennon pushed his peers to comment more directly on their era. Similarly, Lennon’s solo persona took shape as the sixties unraveled: his individual voice developed as America suffered a malignant presidency and constitutional crisis, and his marital squalls paralleled his legal battles, both over residency and intellectual property rights. He joined Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr., Charlie Chaplin, and many, many others in J. Edgar Hoover’s impressive string of intimate enemies. To British ears, a Japanese wife, cultural resentment, and radical politics made this post-Beatle Lennon seem vaguely ungrateful; to Americans, flashing a peace sign for photographer Bob Gruen in front of the Statue of Liberty, there were few greater symbolic Americans.

  Paradoxically, the theme that grew increasingly more intense during Lennon’s solo career was his ongoing competition with Paul McCartney for a hit single, career reversal, or defining moment—the song, album, or tour when either might confidently step outside the other’s shadow. Lennon began breaking away from the band long before McCartney accepted the end, and the two wrote coded telegrams to each other across the pond as though volleying tennis balls of resentment and reproof as only sibling rivals could. McCartney’s high point during Lennon’s lifetime was Band on the Run from 1973, which contained “Let Me Roll It,” a guitar hook clawed from the death grip of “Cold Turkey.” Lennon slammed the door on the band by boldfacing his self-confidence, screaming, “I don’t believe in Beatles,” only to lob “How Do You Sleep?” to emphasize how defensive he remained. Without the Beatles to frame his braggadocio, each Lennon outburst sheathed insecurity. Lennon and McCartney each had more than enough talent to sustain himself with original material, but looking over their shoulders noticeably distracted both.

  To the Beatles as individuals, the band’s dissolution had wrenching emotional effects. Typically, McCartney hid his grief by retreating up to rural Scotland; Lennon lashed out at anyone and everything for his first two solo albums. In symbolic terms, the end of the group took on vast cultural ripples, to the point where the messy legal battles became symbolic of how hard it was to let go of the larger Beatle ideal and the cultural authority their albums conferred.

  To start with, the Beatle catalog retained such vitality on radio that it seemed cheap to watch this band dissolve in a blizzard of lawsuits. Courtroom haggling demeaned their aesthetic significance and corroded a lot of the charm they had traded on for so long. For the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team, so long a symbol of individualism within a larger partnership, crashing on the banal rocks of a showbiz publishing feud reflected an era’s coming-of-age anxiety. Well into the seventies, the 1960s still refused to die.

  Every Beatle year between 1962 and 1969 brought convulsive changes in both persona and musical development, rippling outward into the way everybody absorbed and interpreted the band’s influence; how people thought and behaved, the ideas they carried around about themselves and their world, had forever changed. Now came the biggest change of all: the fallout and aftermath of show business’s biggest brand. Because the Beatles were as much pure symbol as they were musicians, the whole collapse-of-empire story became a tussle all by itself: who would control this narrative? In these mythological terms, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were already ancient, so it took years for everybody—these solo artists and an audience reluctant to let go of any possibility of reunion—to accept the new reality.

  Lennon did his best to nudge things along. But dropping his Beatle persona meant confronting why he had erected such a beguiling façade in the first place. The end of the Beatles meant peeling back skin, exposing old wounds. When his defining band began to topple around him, all Lennon knew how to do was grab on tight to the woman who seemed to understand him best and lurch forward into parts unknown. Yoko Ono helped persuade him to aim at rock star fame beyond even Beatle fame: his solo status comprised a multimedia performance artist who dabbled in politics and whose marriage constituted a new writing partnership, voicing new utopian ideals nestled in a romantic frame. And whatever else everybody made of their romantic hype, all arrows pointed toward a true partnership. Until 1973, John and Yoko spent few nights apart—and Lennon liked to brag about bringing her into the men’s room. Now, as the press began publishing his quotes about feeling frustrated inside the band that had carried him for so long, Lennon adopted an even fiercer tough-guy cheek while one-upping every celebrity couple since Taylor and Burton.

  Lennon left the band quite literally kicking and screaming. McCartney, outmaneuvered and outnumbered by Lennon, Harrison, Starr, and Klein, retreated with his new young family and gathered up his spirits for the coming fight. Linda, who already had a daughter, Heather, from her first marriage, gave birth to Mary at the end of August 1969. In those days, Linda took as much grief from McCartney fans loitering around his Cavendish Avenue home as Yoko did from racist hate mail, usually postmarked UK. Lennon carried on with Ono in public as though nothing much had changed: the Beatles had just released an album and spun off a huge international hit with George Harrison’s old-fashioned romance, “Something.” But the B side, Lennon’s hushed, inviolable “Come Together,” received lots of airplay, reminding pop how many leagues ahead of the game the Beatles remained.

  To Lennon’s mind, however, another hit record played straight into Beatle myth. Wasn’t new product just another way of fulfilling everybody’s overhyped expectations? They had now released two complete albums built from fragments, and everybody on the inside could see they worked more and more independently. The ensemble peaks of The White Album and Abbey Road happened in spite of their faltering friendships, not because of them. (This ironic tension between the band’s musical fluidity and their interpersonal squabbling rivals even Harrison’s late songwriting surge.) And the four musicians had still not reconciled what to do with the Get Back tapes, which they feared might ruin their reputation.

  Beatle news was old news; new windmills called Lennon’s name daily. He used his ground-floor Apple office to hold court with the press, sent acorns to politicians to plant for peace, worked on lithographs, and carried on in general like the madman he hoped the world still adored. There had always been a certain flexibility about the band and its aura; Lennon simply carried a bigger megaphone than the others—McCartney and Harrison had each worked independently on movie soundtracks, and Ringo dreamt of an acting career. As long as they took care of musical business together, Lennon felt free to carry on with whatever else caught his fancy. In this post-Woodstock autumn, as Abbey Road graced the airwaves, EMI—and the Beatles’ worldwide audience—resisted rumors of the band’s imminent breakup simply by wishing that the music had once again won out over the band’s conflicts.

  As far as the public knew, Abbey Road sounded like another conquest, complete with icon
ic album cover and imaginative musical expanse. When pressed, even fans might admit to two side one clunkers, Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden,” which sounded like a mere “Yellow Submarine” sequel, and McCartney’s overbaked trifle “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” which Lennon loathed (calling it “granny music”). Without the churlish undercurrents of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the synthesizer sheen in “Maxwell” quickly wore thin. If only McCartney had let Lennon take a run at the lead vocal of “Oh! Darling.”

  As he turned his sights on his new life with Yoko Ono, Lennon expected a reprieve, or at least a whiff of relief. But the Beatles were not something anybody, even of Lennon’s outsize eccentricities, could simply set to one side. He had put it best himself back in 1963, to Michael Braun: “This isn’t show business. It’s something else.”2

  Dealing with this confounding Beatle symbolism became Lennon’s next great subject: the Beatle cataclysm cried out for a soundtrack; perhaps he could use his parents as some kind of allegory. The biggest band in the world would necessarily throw the longest, most excruciating wrap party, right? And whatever “Cold Turkey” had represented (withdrawal projected outward, a bomb tossed at royalty and its subscribers by returning his MBE, among other metaphors), its anguished concision left a lot of ideas on the table. Even as Harrison and Starr joined up with Lennon and Klein, Lennon must have blanched at how the Beatles could actually turn “Cold Turkey” down—now there was a starting point. Time to dream up the next big thing.