Lennon

by Tim Riley

  Douglas, a washed-up lounge singer in search of a lounge, got his singing out of the way at the top of each show and then chatted up celebrities and did the odd cooking segment. He was hopelessly square but, like Ed Sullivan, willing to gamble on what rock audience ratings might do for his career. “Douglas just read off cue cards the whole time,” Krauss remembered. “He had no idea who many of these people were.” Meanwhile, the show’s syndication was dropping as Merv Griffin made inroads with the celebrity set from Los Angeles and Las Vegas. When Krauss learned that John and Yoko were staying at the Bellevue Hotel, right down the street from where the show taped, he grabbed an assistant and went straight for his target.

  “I was hip to what Lennon was up to at this point,” Krauss says. “I had lived in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention . . . and there was a definite impulse to push back against Nixon’s war and the entire establishment, which was beating up peaceful demonstrators and all that.” Krauss knew simply booking the Lennons would send a signal to middle America, Nixon’s “silent majority,” and help his host’s ailing ratings ailing host’s ratings.

  Lennon answered his hotel-room door, welcomed Krauss in, and they jumped into a lengthy discussion about current events: Nixon, Vietnam, the antiwar movement, and all kinds of music. Krauss invited them to be on the show with Mike Douglas, explaining that their ideas needed to reach this larger middle-class audience. He offered to pay them scale, which got a laugh, and then aimed his pitch even higher. “I told them I didn’t just want one show, I wanted them for a whole week. ‘Here in this room,’ I said, ‘you’re preaching to the choir, but I have a mission: The Mike Douglas Show goes into people’s living rooms, and there’s this whole other audience that needs talking to.’ ”

  Krauss threw his weight behind making the show happen, even if it meant battling his network bosses at Westinghouse every step of the way. He knew there would be fights, but he could barely imagine the scale of the venture. Mostly, he remembered a very warm feeling as John and Yoko agreed to the challenge together: “They were very excited about it all, they asked if they could spend a week putting together each of the five shows, so I said sure.”

  They agreed to tape in Philadelphia on Thursday nights, and Lennon asked “very politely” if he could have a few minutes to talk it over with Yoko in private. Krauss agreed, and when they came back into the room they all hugged, and Krauss recalled a thrilling feeling at what he had just accomplished: booking the world’s most famous rock star on daytime TV in the era before Oprah. “I mean, this is why I got into the business,” Krauss says now, “for the big stuff, you know, change the world, expose the older audience to the great things these people were doing. . . . And we all just kept hugging each other, and it was very trippy for a few minutes there, like something very special was going to come out of this meeting.”9 Krauss could not have fathomed how his producing skills were about to get tested.

  Throughout November and December, John and Yoko commuted between New York and Philadelphia by limo to tape their shows. As hosts, they listed the radicals they wanted as guests, including Jerry Rubin and other members of the Chicago Seven. Krauss made every effort to balance this radical agenda with his host’s base audience. Rubin showed up, only to explode into expletives (“Fuck the president! Fuck the president!” in a sequence that never aired). When he wasn’t massaging his nervous Westinghouse executives, Krauss took daily, hour-long phone calls from Yoko Ono, who wanted to know every detail about each and every guest. Rubin flamed out, but Krauss successfully booked Tom Hayden and Black Panther Bobby Seale. Lennon brought down the Elephant’s Memory Band to perform songs from both Imagine and his forthcoming Some Time in New York City. Yoko smashed a teacup and put it back together over the course of the week to symbolize world peace.

  Once Mike Douglas’s wife learned of the booking, she started complaining to Krauss regularly, and his superiors urged him to cancel Lennon because of all the noise coming from Douglas’s chief protector. From the other side, Yoko Ono’s daily calls ultimately drove him even crazier than the network. When he booked a regular comic, Louis Nye, Ono called him to ask, “Who is this Louis Nye?” Krauss explained how Nye’s routines gave the show variety and helped with pacing, but Ono complained, “Well, we’ve never heard of him, we don’t think we should be on with him.” Krauss had to smooth over her constant harping while keeping everything on track. He wound up dreading her calls. “This went on day after day; Yoko was relentless,” he says. “There is no question in my mind she broke up the Beatles. It was awful. . . . You’d take Yoko’s call and it always meant a long, drawn-out debate, and she didn’t appreciate the different political interests I was juggling just to make it happen.”

  The other show tradition Krauss engaged in with John and Yoko was to pull off a surprise guest, somebody John hadn’t dared ask for, who would turn him into a driveling fan. “I always liked to surprise the guest hosts, like when we had Mama Cass on, she was a General Hospital fanatic, so I got the entire cast of General Hospital to surprise her on the set one day and she was just flabbergasted,” Krauss recalls. “I’d always ask, ‘If you’d like to meet anybody in the world, who would it be?’ I knew Lennon would want to meet Chuck Berry, so I worked very hard to get him on and kept it a big secret until the day of the taping.”

  When Berry appeared, Lennon gaped at the man backstage, then sang two numbers with him: “Memphis, Tennessee,” which he hadn’t sung since his BBC radio days with the Beatles, and “Johnny B. Goode,” Berry’s discrete history of the style, the Presley epic in miniature. It would be the only time these two harmonized.

  They taped one show per week for four weeks, and Krauss remembers juggling a very eager and conciliatory Lennon against Ono’s constant phone calls. Things went relatively smoothly until the final taping, when everything unraveled, and the early camaraderie Krauss felt with John and Yoko nearly exploded just before the last show. By this point, however, the couple’s phones were being tapped, and FBI agents followed them around everywhere, which gave their already hounded lives a surreal aspect, especially since nobody believed them when they complained about government harassment.

  “We got into a real hassle in my office,” Krauss remembers. “Here I was busting my ass to accommodate them; I stuck my neck way out, and yet it wasn’t enough for them.” Suddenly, John and Yoko accused Krauss of working with the FBI, which he found simply preposterous. “They were paranoid,” he remembers thinking. “And John was agreeing with her. . . . She said to me, ‘In fact we know you’ve tapped our phone. We know you’re trying to kill John.’ And I looked at them in shock and all I could say was ‘No, I’m not.’ And then I stood up, and John stood up, and we started to go at it: it was ‘Fuck you!’ and ‘Fuck you!’ ” A show assistant ran back to Mike Douglas’s office, so Douglas came running down the hall, followed by security and several executives. Somehow the backstage scene settled down, and everybody walked out onstage to do the last show.

  This incident shows just how nervous Lennon got before performing, and how intimidated he was at this early stage of his immigration fiasco. In addition to coping with his cars being followed and hearing phone taps, nobody could believe that what John and Yoko were experiencing had anything to do with reality. The flare-up also shows considerable marital strain. Krauss tried to forget the whole thing, but once the final taping wrapped, John and Yoko acted like nothing had happened:

  After the show I stayed away from them, I had had it. At the end of the show, John comes up to me, and it was like nothing had happened, he gives me a hug and shakes my hand and he doesn’t let go. And he says, “Michael, I think they went off great, what do you think, were they good for you?” And I just said, “John, they were just great.” Yoko was still seated, and she turned to me and said, “Michael, they were terrific, and you’re terrific.” And just an hour before Lennon was ready to kill me.

  These programs aired the following February, 1972, and turned Mike Douglas into a
ratings champ because of his counterculture booking. Before the week was out, salespeople called Krauss to tell him, “We just want to thank you: our rate card has increased ten percent, you’re making us all money.” The viewership jumped to an all-time high, and because Krauss ran the Lennon shows during sweeps week, when Nielsen collected viewer data, they “picked up close to one hundred more stations, and that meant a lot . . . because the show was starting to wither on the vine; now it was this whole new thing.” But with all of Lennon’s antiwar talk on The Mike Douglas Show, the FBI suddenly felt vindicated in stepping up its surveillance against this influential peacenik.

  This daytime talk-show success fed the long, late-night bull sessions at the Lennons’ apartment, and sent Hoffman and Rubin off scheming for more exposure. The perfect event seemed to drop in their laps even before the Douglas episodes aired: Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the state’s leading university, harbored a fervent political scene headed by the radical band the MC5. Its manager, John Sinclair, had been thrown in jail in 1969 for passing along two marijuana joints to an undercover cop.

  Ann Arbor rockers championed Sinclair’s cause at concerts and through alternative newspaper ads, which caught Jerry Rubin’s attention that fall. He networked to get John and Yoko on a benefit bill December 10 in the Crisler Arena at the University of Michigan. Lennon wrote a bluesy slide number called “John Sinclair,” which told the man’s story and landed on a hiccupping “Gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta . . . set him free!” refrain that coaxed whoops and hollers from fifteen thousand fans who heard its inaugural voyage. Those hiccups, puffing atop a steam engine of injustice and resentment, refashioned Buddy Holly’s glottal barbs into political frustration. Also at this event, Lennon debuted “Attica State,” the gorgeous and underrated “Luck of the Irish,” and Ono’s “Sisters, O Sisters,” which was backed by Jerry Rubin and a pothead evangelist named David Peel with his troupe, the Lower East Side.

  The audience had to wait more than eight hours for Lennon to appear, but the bookings showed good taste: Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs, and a young Bob Seger (formerly with the System); jazzers Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd were broken up by leftist speeches and poetry from Allen Ginsberg, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale. Lawyer William Kunstler, who defended the Chicago Seven, sent a taped message which told the audience that Sinclair’s “harsh sentence dramatizes the absurdity of our marijuana laws, which are irrational, unjust and indefensible.”10 The event was televised locally by Detroit’s WTVS, even though Lennon didn’t go on until after 1 A.M. on Sunday morning.

  Like turning a key, the concert sprang Sinclair from jail. The Monday after the Saturday-night concert, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state’s marijuana statutes were unconstitutional. The TV news footage that evening showed Sinclair coming out of prison to greet his wife and kid. Lennon had finally resolved the ambivalence of “Revolution” and appeared at a political rally with topical protest songs, the way leftists had always hoped he might. And while the songs weren’t top shelf for Lennon, they showed lots of promise, binding leftist outrage with rock journalism. In Sinclair’s case, it marked a heady victory. If only all revolutions could be this simple.

  Reviewers, however, singled out Ono—reviving some of the sting that had driven them out of Britain. “One major factor nearly spoiled the whole thing,” wrote Bill Gray in the Detroit News on December 13. Lennon “brought Yoko Ono. . . . Mrs. Lennon may be the genius that John keeps insisting she is. Possibly, if he keeps heavily hyping her, someone might believe it. But before a singer can be judged, she must first be able to carry a tune. Yoko can’t even remain on key.” And the new songs Lennon offered up were “interesting, but lacking in Lennon’s usual standards.”11

  The following week, on December 17, the Apollo Theater staged a benefit for the Attica State Prison victims’ families, and John and Yoko showed up to play three songs: “Attica State,” Ono’s “Sisters, O Sisters,” and “Imagine.” Afterward, Lennon quietly contributed a large check to the Attica Defense Fund.

  Backstage, a young photographer named Bob Gruen snapped some photos. He met John and Yoko waiting for their limo and posing for photographs with some other musicians. Lennon told him, “We never see any of these pictures, where do they all end up?” And Gruen replied, “Well, I live right around the corner from you, I’ll show ’em to you.” A few days later, Gruen brought over some prints, knocked on Lennon’s door, and Jerry Rubin answered. Rubin said, “Who are you?” and Gruen told him he was simply dropping off some photos. Gruen’s discretion may have made his reputation: “Yoko later told me that nobody ever visited them without wanting to meet them.”12 The next week, they rang him up to take more photos.

  Another John and Yoko daytime TV appearance featured a heated political argument, but most Americans never saw it. To promote “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” which came out on December 1, the couple appeared on a David Frost talk show taped in New York on December 16. Hunched over his skiffle tea-chest bass, Lennon performed with Yoko as a member of the Lower East Side backing David Peel for “The Ballad of New York,” before Peel’s group gathered at the lip of the stage for Lennon’s “Attica State,” “Luck of the Irish” (a shorter version), Yoko’s “Sisters, O Sisters,” and “John Sinclair.” Two middle-aged audience members spoke back after “Attica State” and accused Lennon of sympathizing exclusively with the prisoners. “You make it sound like the only worthwhile people in this world are the ones who committed crimes and were put away,” a woman said.

  This direct confrontation seemed to take Lennon aback. “When we say ‘poor widowed wives,’ ” he responded, “we’re not just talking about prisoners’ wives, we’re talking about policemen’s wives, anyone that was there—” The idea that someone might defend the state’s actions at the prison simply baffled him. “They must have done something wrong in the first place, or they wouldn’t have been there!” another man shouted, interrupting Lennon. The crowd divided, and the class and cultural lines became clear: the bohemians fielded accusations of glorifying terrorism, and the hard-hat conservative crowd condemned Lennon’s response. “We’re not glorifying them,” Lennon contended, visibly upset. “This song will come and go. But there will be another Attica tomorrow.”13

  Frost seemed intrigued that such a discussion had broken out after the music. But while Lennon argued that he lamented every single Attica death, the audience exchanges veered toward hostile. After the commercial break, Lennon stayed backstage while Yoko handled Frost’s remaining questions; the anomaly went unexplained. As when he fled the Concert for Bangladesh rehearsal, such open confrontation spooked Lennon beyond words.

  As a politico, Lennon’s songwriting dipped, but not nearly as much as he took heat for. He seasoned his vitriol with humor in many scattered editorials from this period. In early December 1971, he signed a rather flat defense of Bob Dylan, who had suffered months of harassment from a “fan” named A. J. Weberman: “A.J. claims everything Dylan writes is either about Weberman or about heroin. What bullshit,” the letter read. “It is time we defended and loved each other—and saved our anger for the true enemy, whose ignorance and greed destroys our planet.” The letter was signed: “The Rock Liberation Front, David Peel, Jerry Rubin, Yoko Ono, John Lennon.”14

  The Elephant’s Memory musicians remember chatty phone calls with McCartney, but in public, Lennon still stoked the showbiz feud, ridiculing his former partner in print. In a piece he wrote for Crawdaddy magazine, he said he heard things on McCartney’s Ram that struck people as bent. Even if you credited “Too Many People” with some offhanded swipes (“Too many people preaching practices / Don’t let ’em tell you what you want to be!”), “Back Seat of My Car” was a make-out anthem that Lennon persisted in pointing in the wrong direction: “Too many people going where? Missed our lucky what? What was our first mistake? Can’t be wrong? Huh! I mean Yoko, me, and other friends can’t all be hearing things.” Defending “How Do You Sleep?” Lennon adm
itted, “So to have some fun, I must thank Allen Klein publicly for the line ‘just another day.’ A real poet! Some people don’t see the funny side of it. Too bad, what am I supposed to do, make you laugh? It’s what you might call an ‘angry letter,’ sung—get it?”15

  He got more specific when the UK’s Melody Maker ran a year-end McCartney interview, repeating a lot of the comments he gave Life magazine, with some potshots at John and Yoko’s political escapades and slaphappy concertizing. Lennon dashed off a hilarious response, which Melody Maker printed on December 4, 1971, capping off a year of exchanges both overt and opaque:

  It’s all very well playing ‘simple honest ole human Paul’ in the Melody Maker, but you know damn well we can’t just sign a bit of paper. . . . You say, ‘John won’t do it.’ I will if you’ll indemnify us against the taxman! Anyway, you know that after we had our meeting, the fucking lawyers will have to implement whatever we agree on—right?

  Lennon mentioned a phone conversation where they combed over all the legal issues once more, still getting stuck on Apple issues: “As I’ve said before—have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something?” And Lennon got defensive when McCartney criticized his playing live, which sent him ranting about all the concerts he’d done even before he’d left the Beatles:

  “Half a dozen live shows—with no big fuss—in fact we’ve been doing what you’ve been talking about for three years! (I said it was daft for the Beatles to do it, I still think it’s daft.) So go on and do it! Do it! Do it!” Lennon listed all his live appearances: “Eg Cambridge (1969 completely unadvertised! A very small hall), Lyceum Ballroom (1969 no fuss, great show—30 piece rock band! “Live Jam” out soon!), Fillmore East (1971 unannounced. Another good time had by all—out soon!!) with the great David Peel!!! We were moved on by the cops, even!!! It’s best just to DO IT, I know you’ll dig it, and they don’t expect The Beatles now anyway!”