The Walrus and the Elephants

by James Mitchell

  “We should do to the Republicans what we did to the Democrats in 1968,” Rubin said. “Bring a million to San Diego.”

  Fellow Chicago Seven veteran Dave Dellinger made similar references, including plans for a political concert. “We want John out of prison,” Dellinger said, “to organize the music in San Diego.”18

  It wasn’t just the radicals; the concert and Lennon’s appearance quickly sparked a bandwagon. Knowing that new laws were set to pass to reduce the penalties for marijuana possession, and equally aware of a Beatle-brightened spotlight on the cause, calls for Sinclair to be released gained momentum. A statement read during the concert from Ann Arbor mayor Robert J. Harris called Sinclair’s sentence a “horror” and “disgrace.” Harris praised the state legislature for revising pot laws; the East Lansing City Council agreed with a resolution in support of Sinclair’s appeal motion.

  “Nothing like this has ever happened in history,” Leni Sinclair said, her primary focus on getting back a husband and father. “And it won’t be the last time—it’s too much fun.”

  Arrangements were made for Sinclair himself to address the crowd; he snuck his way to a prison pay phone for a quick call to Ann Arbor. Andrews went onstage, stopped the show, and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a live phone call from Jackson.”

  “I’m so wiped out I don’t know what to say,” Sinclair told the audience. He asked the crowd to “say something to me,” and the night’s loudest cheer went up in an emotional outpouring.

  For many, the musical highlight of the night came at one a.m. when a special, unannounced guest star hit the stage. Andrews says he had only learned about the late addition a few days earlier.

  “I was sitting in the office and the phone rings,” Andrews recalls. “It’s Stevie Wonder. After we got John Lennon, nothing’s going to surprise me, and Stevie Wonder said he wanted to be part of it.”

  Wonder—a Motown success beginning at age thirteen whose musical genius shone early and bright—was careful with his politics. Andrews said the singer wanted to make it clear that he neither advocated nor supported the use of drugs, but that “he knew what they did to Sinclair and it wasn’t too nice.”

  Wonder launched into “For Once in My Life.” Backstage, Lennon’s ears perked up; he hadn’t known the Motown star was on the bill. Lennon scrambled to find Andrews and get near the stage.

  “Stevie Wonder is here?” Lennon cried in disbelief. “I gotta see him.”

  Andrews hesitated, picturing John Lennon in the crowd.

  “You don’t parade a Beatle around the audience,” Andrews told the star.

  “You have to understand,” Lennon explained, “Stevie Wonder is my Beatles.”

  A squad of security men formed a circle and Lennon was brought through the tunnel to the side of the stage. It wasn’t long before people nearby took their eyes off Wonder and gasped in recognition. Crowds formed, too close for Andrews’s comfort.

  “I told John it was getting messy, and like a trooper he obeyed,” Andrews recalls. “He thanked me . . . he was like a kid, seeing Stevie Wonder.”

  Wonder was uncharacteristically blunt about his politics and music that night. He played Sly Stone’s “Somebody’s Watching You,” which he dedicated to the FBI and “any of the undercover agents who might be out in the audience.” Addressing the reason for the concert, Wonder questioned a justice system that jailed Sinclair while the Ohio National Guard faced no charges: “A man gets ten years in prison for possession of marijuana, and another can kill four students at Kent State and walk free. What kind of shit is that? Sometimes I get very disgusted and very discouraged.”

  Eight hours after the concert started, Lennon took the stage for a short set of four as-yet-unrecorded songs: “Attica State,” “The Luck of the Irish,” “Sisters O Sisters,” and the evening’s tribute ballad, “John Sinclair.” Lennon was introduced by David Peel, who sang a song in their honor before the introduction. (“John Lennon, Yoko Ono, New York City is your friend,” he chanted in his deadpan style.)

  Lennon walked on with limited fanfare to enthusiastic applause, wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses and carrying two guitars. Onstage, Lennon introduced “Attica State,” which he explained he had started writing “as an ad lib” during his thirty-first birthday celebration in October, but since then “we finished it up.” A sound check—“hello, hello” into the microphone—gave way to a thumping start to the song.

  The performance wasn’t among Lennon’s best, a fact obvious to everyone including the singer. Several times during the set Lennon conferred midsong with his back-up players, visibly frustrated. Some of the reviews were critical: “Hardly worth the wait,” wrote Bill Gray in the Detroit News. Gray wasn’t impressed with the “unfamiliar” songs or Yoko’s vocal on “Sisters O Sisters.”19

  Lennon prefaced “John Sinclair” with a few remarks. He tuned his steel guitar while he addressed the crowd, speaking to his friends plain and simple as he always did. He was there to help Sinclair, of course, and “spotlight what’s going on,” but the message he wanted to spread was bigger than just one man in prison.

  Lennon’s speech was a keynote for a new era. He wanted people to know that passive indifference and benign protest belonged back in the sixties with the Beatles records.

  “Apathy isn’t it . . . we can do something. So flower power didn’t work,” Lennon shrugged. “So what, we start again.”

  Lennon sang: “Free John now, if we can, from the clutches of the man.”

  About forty-eight hours later they did just that.

  Footnotes:

  1Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 683.

  2John Lennon, interview by Peter McCabe and Robert Schonfeld at the St. Regis Hotel, New York City, September 5, 1971, Tittenhurst Park blog, http://tittenhurstlennon.blogspot.com/2009/08/john-lennon-st-regis-hotel-room.html.

  3Hendrik Hertzberg, “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, January 8, 1972, 28.

  4Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn, Red Mole, January 1971.

  5Hunter Davies, ed., The John Lennon Letters (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2012), 208.

  6Ali and Blackburn, Red Mole

  7Paul DeRienzo, “John Lennon, David Peel and Rock’s Greatest Flattery,” Villager, December 13, 2012.

  8Geoffrey Giuliano, Lennon in America: 1971–1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 35.

  9Elliot Mintz, “Elliot Mintz Interviews John Lennon,” Los Angeles Free Press, October 15–21, 1971.

  10Stu Werbin, “John & Jerry & David & John & Leni & Yoko,” Rolling Stone, February 17, 1972.

  11John Lennon, interview by Jean-Françoise Vallee, Pop 2, December 1971.

  12David A. Carson, Grit, Noise, and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 113.

  13Alan Glenn, “The Day a Beatle Came to Town,” Ann Arbor Chronicle, December 27, 2009.

  14Lennon, interview by McCabe and Schonfeld, Tittenhurst Park.

  15Glenn, Ann Arbor Chronicle.

  16Ibid.

  17The U.S. vs. John Lennon, directed by David Leaf and John Scheinfeld (Paramount, 2006).

  18Roy Reynolds, “15,000 Attend Sinclair Rally,” Ann Arbor News, December 11, 1971.

  19Bill Gray, “Lennon Let His Followers Down,” Detroit News, December 13, 1971.

  Chapter 2

  John and the Elephants

  “The music they are planning to use to crumble the morals of America is the rotten, filthy, dirty, lewd, lascivious junk called rock and roll.”

  —Jack van Impe

  John Lennon had said he’d felt somehow restricted on Beatles records, that there were limits on an individual’s v
oice when performing as part of a group. The intensely personal songs on his first true solo album in December 1970, John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, are considered among his finest work. Plastic Ono Band took a stripped down approach long before the term “unplugged” defined back-to-basics music. For Lennon it was simply an artistic choice: raw, naked emotion worked better with fewer instruments. Few artists reveal inner pain more openly than Lennon’s performance of “Mother,” inspired by the trendy “primal scream” psychotherapy he’d tried; the lyrics that describe his absent father and the loss of Julia Lennon are among his most painfully honest.

  Lennon had settled into Manhattan just as his second post-Beatles LP, Imagine, was released in September 1971. An enthusiastic Lennon told New Musical Express magazine it was “the best thing I’ve ever done.”20 The band was great, he said, and included “a guy called George Harrison . . . George used to be with the Bubbles or somebody,” and he expected the album to satisfy his more commercially minded fans. “This will show them. It’s not a personal thing like the last album, but I’ve learned a lot and this is better in every way. It’s lighter, too—I was feeling very happy.”

  Reviewers were uncertain what to make of it: Good, of course, but not as groundbreaking as Plastic Ono Band. The album includes introspective moments such as “Crippled Inside,” along with more conventional songwriting like “Jealous Guy” and the playful “Oh Yoko.” Lennon’s edgier side comes across in a bitter ode to Paul McCartney, “How Do You Sleep,” and politics dominate the Nixon-baiting “Gimme Some Truth.”

  Critics acknowledged the rhetoric of revolution, but expected nothing less than genius from Lennon, both musically and ideologically. Rolling Stone’s Ben Gerson offered observations about the man as much as the music: “John Lennon has carved out a new career for himself—as political gadfly, floating member of the international avant-garde and rock’s most psychologically daring tightrope artist. The other side of the coin is that he hasn’t fallen into the latter-day complacency of various other rock and roll over-achievers.”21

  Gerson gave a brief nod to the title track’s philosophical offering: “The consolidation of primal awareness into a world movement,” and how Lennon asked us to imagine a world without religions or nations, “and that such a world would mean brotherhood and peace.” He described Lennon’s singing as “methodical but not really skilled, the melody undistinguished except for the bridge, which sounds nice to me.”

  Mostly the review wondered about the absence of a self-reflecting Lennon, the introspective poet of a generation, now given to social commentary. In “Gimme Some Truth,” Lennon said he’d had enough of “schizophrenic-egocentric-paranoiac-prima-donnas.” Was the singer unwittingly playing “truth-teller” about himself?

  “Who is he speaking about now?” Gerson asked. “It seems to me that John is facing the most extraordinary challenge of his career, both personally and artistically. But then, great artists, of whom John is one, are nothing if not resourceful.”

  “Gimme Some Truth” was Lennon’s coming-to-America calling card; he was willing to try new things but tired of lies no matter the source. Invoking a popular Nixonian nickname, Lennon warned: “No short-haired, yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dickie is gonna mother-Hubbard soft-soap me with just a pocketful of hope.”

  • • •

  Whether the critics were ready for the new role he cast for himself, Lennon welcomed fresh ideas, either from the leaders of America’s Left or an almost indiscriminately broad spectrum of artists, both musical and visual, and provocateurs.

  “They were seeking direction about how to get into what was happening in New York,” John Sinclair says. “Never underestimate the role of Yoko Ono in that transformation. She was already a leading figure in the counterculture in America, especially in the arts of the early 1960s.”

  As eagerly as Lennon was welcomed and sought after by the highest levels of show business and radical politics, the avant-garde art world considered Yoko a leading figure in her own right. Shortly before moving to the Village the Lennons had spent a September weekend in Syracuse, New York, for the opening of “This Is Not Here,” the first major American showcase of Yoko’s work at the Everson Museum of Art. Museum Director Jim Harithas told the Syracuse Post-Standard that conceptual art was well regarded, and Yoko was “one of the earliest and most brilliant exponents.”22

  Conceptual art was misunderstood by mainstream, suburban America, its abstract symbolism dismissed if not ridiculed. A Syracuse Post-Standard editorial called the exhibit “an affront to good taste,” and not just for the art. Equal disdain was showered on the museum for inviting to town a man who once claimed he was more popular than Christ.

  Lennon responded in a letter addressed to “whoever wrote that Hokum about ART.”23 He liked to think he had some knowledge of art, Lennon wrote, and how long artists had suffered the barbs of talentless critics:

  I’d forgotten about people like you! Well well—you still exist, of course, in other small towns across the world . . . What on earth has what the husband of the artist said, four or five years ago, got to do with the current show at Everson Museum? Artists down the centuries have been up against bourgeois mealy mouthed gossip from the “grey people” (or Blue Meanies!). Society only likes dead artists.

  P.S. Why don’t you come and see the art—I’m sure the man you think I insulted would turn the other cheek and come.

  Among the thousands who did attend the show were luminaries including Bob Dylan, Dennis Hopper, and—lured by Yoko rather than Lennon—Andy Warhol, whose Factory included musicians, artists, and filmmakers that were among the Lennons’ new downtown neighbors, a colorful cast as comfortable with Yoko’s work as they were Lennon’s music.

  “She was out there, man,” Sinclair says. “You’d just see crazy shit where people would come up with scissors and cut her clothes off. Nobody was doing anything like that at all, and she met [Lennon] as a result of her weird art show in London.”

  Yoko’s art pieces included a ladder to climb, atop which a spyglass revealed a card bearing the word Yes; another invited people to pay a coin and hammer a nail into a piece of wood. (Lennon was said to have counter-offered that he’d pay an imaginary coin and pound an imaginary nail.) Other works expanded on the concept he and Yoko introduced in 1969 and called “bagism,” which they explained at a press conference from inside two large canvas bags: “total communication” that prevented appearance-based judgments about race, skin color, fashion, or ethnicity.

  “If people did interviews for jobs in a bag,” Lennon had told David Frost, “they wouldn’t get turned away because they were black or green or [had] long hair.”24

  Lennon brought to New York the same willing curiosity he had held for music and art a decade earlier, an approach that embraced everything from existentialism in Germany to Indian meditation. Lennon knew there were like-minded souls in New York with messages to deliver, both artistic and political; and he knew how to market and make accessible creative ideas better than anyone on the planet. Lennon turned his honeymoon into a bedroom press conference for peace; he bought billboards in a dozen cities across the world that read War is over . . . if you want it. These initiatives were, Lennon said, a method for sending a simple message:

  We’re trying to sell peace like people sell soap or soft drinks, [it’s] the only way to get people aware that peace is possible. It isn’t just inevitable to have violence, not just war but all forms of violence. We’re all responsible for Biafra and Hitler and everything, so we’re just saying “Sell Peace.” Just stick it in the window. Advertise yourself that you’re for peace if you believe in it.

  There were inevitable critics, and in response Lennon turned the attention back on the media itself, which meant the message would be repeated. He told New York Times writer Gloria Emerson that he was just trying to balance war headlines with positive thoughts, whether with billboards or the honeymoon bed as p
hoto op.

  “If I’m going to get on the front page I might as well get on the front page with the word ‘peace,’” Lennon said.25

  Emerson questioned whether Lennon had crossed a line, if he risked looking “ridiculous” with stunts like the bed-ins. She admired Lennon’s work and considered him a man of talent and intelligence, albeit one acting foolishly.

  “There weren’t that many that were siding with him,” Sinclair recalls. “How many others were taking out billboards in Times Square for peace? Maybe for their new movie, but not for peace.”

  Peace was the ultimate goal embraced by New Left leaders and organizers, Yippie activists, civil rights champions, and women’s liberationists alike—and everyone recognized the potential Lennon’s influence had to bring people together. In turn he was equally eager to meet anyone who was making things happen.

  “It wasn’t like sycophants congregating,” Sinclair says. “He was reaching out to people who were doing things and to bring what he had to the table. That was extraordinary. Usually if you wanted somebody to do something you had to get on your knees and beg. He wanted to be part of something.”

  • • •

  Politically charged rock and roll was a familiar sound throughout the Village and in the hippest New York bars, where local heroes were held in equal if not greater esteem than chart-topping sensations. Lennon heard rave reviews from Jerry Rubin, David Peel, and others about a down-and-dirty street band, Elephant’s Memory.

  Headliners at Max’s Kansas City, heard on edgy movie soundtracks, the Elephants practiced their craft at Magnagraphics Studio on Bedford Street, just a few blocks away from Lennon’s Bank Street pad. Magnagraphics owner Bob Prewitt remembers the Elephants as true counterculture heroes who stood out from the mainstream recordings made at the studio, a roster that included Sha Na Na; Blue Oyster Cult; bawdy diva Bette Midler; commercial work for the Electric Company; and, within a few years, Kiss. The Elephants were musicians’ musicians, capable craftsmen who maintained an underground credibility.