The Walrus and the Elephants

by James Mitchell

  Wildes appreciated John and Yoko’s desire to remain in America, and assured them that Yoko’s need to have access to her daughter—with her husband at her side—made a compelling legal argument.

  There was one possible problem: Lennon traveled with the baggage of a 1968 misdemeanor conviction for possession of cannabis. Sergeant Norman Pilcher and the London Drug Squad had arrested Lennon as part of a series of pop-star busts; Pilcher’s mug shots included George Harrison, Donovan, and no fewer than three Rolling Stones—Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones. On advice of counsel Lennon had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and paid a small fine.47

  That conviction was a relatively minor stain on a passport application, but technically enough to cancel a visa. During previous visits Lennon had obtained a waiver for temporary stays, but John and Yoko now wanted more time in America, perhaps another year; Lennon had been told that the conviction could be dismissed after five years, and could clear the way for more permanent arrangements. Lennon asked if Wildes could somehow get them just a little more time.

  A grace period should be easy enough, Wildes said. Even better, why not apply for permanent residency?

  “If you’re as important as everyone says you are,” Wildes told Lennon, “I may be able to put the government in a very embarrassing public posture.” Wildes knew that the INS preferred to avoid trials that involved famous names. INS district director Sol Marks—who had shared more than a few Long Island Rail Road commutes with his friend Wildes—and lead prosecutor Vincent Schiano handled cases ranging from mob bosses to Xaviera Hollander, author of The Happy Hooker. (Hollander reportedly sent Schiano a copy of her book, in which her inscription asked if he really thought she was an “undesirable” alien.) Going after Lennon would invite considerable media exposure; Marks could only imagine the public backlash if he tried to kick a Beatle out of the country.48

  Wildes planned to argue that Lennon was an “outstanding person in the arts or sciences,” and challenge the harsh result of asking a woman to choose between staying with her daughter or leaving with her husband. Informally, Marks told Wildes that an extension of one or two months would likely be granted; but only one, no more.

  Marks’s response suggested to Wildes there was more to the matter than he thought: “Don’t ask me any questions,” he told Wildes. “These people will never get another extension. And Leon: tell them to get out.”

  • • •

  Another protest briefly caught Lennon’s attention in early March, one inspired by profit rather than politics. Lennon had more than a casual interest at stake; the players involved included a business partner, a fellow former Beatle, and a rock legend.

  Allen Klein, a fireball attorney and sometime rock impresario, had been entrusted by Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr to represent the Beatles post-breakup. (That choice was at odds with Paul McCartney’s idea of having his in-laws manage the Apple holdings.) Anointed by three-quarters of the band to handle their affairs, Klein had worked with Lennon on the Imagine promotional film, and in 1971 produced Harrison’s massive charity benefit, the June “Concert for Bangladesh” at Madison Square Garden. The crisis-driven humanitarian blowout—said to be the first of its kind on such a scale with a superstar cast that included George and Ringo, Eric Clapton, and Bob Dylan—seemed successful at first: millions of relief dollars were generated by concert attendance, record sales, and film rights.

  A closer look at the accounting, however, called into question Klein’s credibility and the extent of aid actually realized by the show: A February 28, 1972, New York magazine article revealed that the bulk of donated funds never made it to Bangladesh. Some went straight to Klein’s pockets.49 A. J. Weberman, a Greenwich Village character and self-declared activist, seized the opportunity for righteous anger and populist protest. Weberman recalls that Klein had employed some creative accounting that was legal if unethical.

  “Allen Klein claimed that 85 percent was used for expenses,” Weberman says. There were no legal requirements as to a certain percentage of donations making it to the recipient, and Klein’s answer gave the impression that he had taken money intended for those in critical need.

  “I decided that if he needed to rip off the starving people of Bangladesh, he must be one hungry gentleman,” Weberman says. “We decided to have a free lunch program for starving music executives based on the Black Panther breakfast programs.”

  A week after the New York article appeared, Weberman and “a bunch of hippies” stopped by several fruit stands, did some dumpster diving, and took a supply of spoiled produce to Klein’s office building; the “free lunch” they deserved, delivered as promised.

  “We started trashing his office with rotten fruit,” Weberman recalls. A confrontation followed, with arguments over who was helping or hurting the children of Bangladesh. Outside of the office, Weberman claims to have had a sidewalk showdown with producer Phil Spector, who had supervised the Bangladesh recordings.

  “I told him I was gonna punch him in the nose and he wouldn’t be able to snort coke anymore,” Weberman says.

  The confrontation had little impact on a matter that took years to resolve. Several lawsuits followed before rights and royalties were straightened out. Ongoing sales of the album, CD, video, and DVD continued into the twenty-first century to benefit the George Harrison Fund for UNICEF.

  Weberman enjoyed brief counterculture credibility after taking on the suit-and-tie crowd. Tales were told on the street, in the Village Voice, and through the underground grapevine before reaching the ears of John Lennon. Klein’s credibility was obviously important to Lennon—the relationship was not fated to be long-term—and any controversy over the Bangladesh concert qualified as a dodged bullet: Lennon had considered joining his former bandmates onstage.

  Weberman was invited to Bank Street, “after they heard what we did,” he says, and enjoyed talking with John and Yoko about “religion, atheism, politics, the third world, national liberation, the Vietnam War, topics of that nature. Lennon was quite responsive, and we were basically on the same page at the time. We were friends.”

  John and Yoko indulged Weberman at first, and paid for a postage meter to distribute his Yippie Times newspaper; the Lennon/Rubin connection included having Elephant’s Memory play at a “Smoke-In,” a festival Weberman recalls for a ten-foot-long stage prop: “We rolled this giant joint out of straw at the band shell in Central Park.”

  It was a brief alliance, one of many fleeting encounters during Lennon’s nascent months in Greenwich Village. Lennon willingly met with anyone and everyone; some of those he met then claimed strong relationships after only slightly making John’s acquaintance. Weberman had a minor reputation somewhere between cultural critic and curious crackpot, known for stunts in some ways similar to the Yippie model, and for a brand of psychological research he called “garbology,” the study of someone’s trash to uncover their true nature.

  Of particular fascination to Weberman were the garbage cans of Bob Dylan. Weberman stalked Dylan long before that term was coined, and had drawn speculative conclusions from his findings. He declared himself head of the “Dylan Liberation Front” out of concern that the voice of a generation was a drug addict. Weberman claimed that his garbage-can investigations revealed indications of heroin use—which Dylan had reportedly wrestled with briefly—although the science was hardly credible given the recreational residue that might be found in Village trash cans, whether or not generated by the resident. Weberman also believed that Dylan’s political loyalties were driven by a need for drugs. In Weberman’s view, Dylan was not the liberal voice many believed.

  “I had come to the conclusion that Dylan was once a leftist and sold out in order to take heroin and make a lot of money,” Weberman says. “I was wrong: he was never a leftist, he was always on the right to begin with.”

  That’s where Weberman lost Lennon, who considered Dylan a frie
nd, a songwriting influence, and pioneer messenger of New Left ideals.

  “Lennon and I had our differences about Bob Dylan,” Weberman acknowledges. “If I said something bad about Dylan, he got really agitated and Yoko had to hold him back. People hated me when I went after Dylan. Everybody loved John, and if you loved John you hated Weberman.”

  When he went after Allen Klein, Weberman said his actions were on behalf of the Rock Liberation Front—yet another name to confuse federal investigators—an organization he said had evolved from his own Dylan Liberation Front. His claim that John and Yoko were the newest RLF soldiers had already been publicly denied in a Village Voice letter from the true Rock Liberation Front, which consisted of the Lennons, Rubin, and David Peel.50 They denounced Weberman for his Dylan obsession and wild accusations, and deplored the tendency within the Left of attacking one another: “A. J. Weberman’s campaign . . . is in the current fad of everyone in the revolution attacking each other and spreading false rumors about each other.”

  There had been more than enough of that in Lennon’s life already by that point.

  • • •

  Was John Lennon merely a means to an end for his new friends in the Movement, a bit player in an ongoing political game, or had he assumed a more powerful role? FBI reports in March 1972 struggled to clarify Lennon’s place in the Movement, the leadership of which seemed to be in transition. Undercover agents, informants, and investigators pooled information from sources both credible and inflated.

  By then Jerry Rubin’s populist act had eclipsed his usefulness in the eyes of many of his former friends in the Movement. After his embarrassing performance on the Mike Douglas Show, Rubin was questioned about—among other things—his outrageous statements that did more to harm than help the cause. In a March 5 report, FBI informant Julie Maynard described a recent gathering of Yippie leaders in Rubin’s Prince Street apartment. The report did not specify everyone involved in the leadership intervention, but noted that Chicago Seven vet Stew Albert was among the participants. The session began with Rubin complaining that his so-called friends were responsible for the “bad press” he’d been getting lately, which “hurt him politically.”51

  Rather than the hoped-for sympathy, Rubin was called onto his own carpet.

  “They replied that they thought he was an asshole,” Maynard said of the response. The group proceeded to list their “bitches” with Rubin: He wasn’t a team player, and he had profited financially while theoretically raising funds for the cause. He had “a superstar ego which enables him to appear to lead . . . he does none of the work yet gets the credit.” As a final thought, Rubin was chastised on a personal level for “his b.o. and other bad habits.”

  Rubin had not only lost the respect of his colleagues on the Left, they also wondered if his reputation-saving trump card was still valid: word on the street said that Rubin’s friendship with John Lennon had ended. Lennon’s once-assured participation in an upcoming rally—let alone the August convention—was now a tentative commitment that came with qualifications. Lennon insisted on low-key involvement, and would not go along with Rubin’s any-means-necessary strategies for civil disobedience.

  The FBI now realized that Lennon was more than just a “drawing card” to be played at Rubin’s discretion; more like a wild card. Investigators didn’t seem to know from one day to the next where Lennon stood with the radicals or what his actual plans were, and their reports varied in accuracy and credibility. One dispatch said that the Lennon-fronted concert tour was ready to start, “the first to be held in Ann Arbor Michigan in near future.” By “near future” they may have meant several months earlier: the Michigan show was old news by then, as was Lennon’s relationship with the Detroit hippies; the report incorrectly suggested that Lennon and John Sinclair were working together to plan the August showdown.

  Another point of uncertainty offered a possible method to force Lennon’s departure, if reports of his drug use were accurate. A March 16 summary suggested that Rennie Davis, Rubin, and Lennon were “heavy users of narcotics,” and that the three were at odds with each other because of their unspecified drug use. Lennon’s consumption was said to be “excessive” and included pills “referred to in the vernacular as ‘downers,’” although specifics on that score varied. The memo dismissed Lennon’s passion for protest on the basis that he was too stoned to care: “Lennon appears to be radically oriented, however he does not give the impression he is a true revolutionist since he is constantly under the influence of narcotics.”

  There are varying accounts on Lennon’s actual drug use—and he was certainly no virgin to the drink, pills, hallucinogens, and even narcotics that had been tried by most of his contemporaries. At one extreme Lennon had admittedly tried heroin, and sang of withdrawal in “Cold Turkey.” Yet some unflattering biographies painted an exaggerated portrait of Lennon spending weeks at a time in drug-induced stupor—supposedly during periods when he maintained a rigorous schedule and was making credible public appearances. Elephant’s Memory bandsmen recall a time and place where smoking a joint was as casual as having a drink, but claim that Lennon fell far short of rendering himself unable to function. They all saw—and would sadly continue to see—too many of those types of cases not to know the difference.

  That Lennon used drugs was understood, but to what extent depended upon witness perspective and bias. The FBI may have been simply repeating rumors that the agents heard, but “constantly under the influence” was among many internal contradictions found in field reports, memos, and directives.

  There was an equal amount of confusion as to the various organizational names used by the Movement leaders—and their purpose. A collective People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice was said to represent more than one hundred “disruptive” groups nationwide; convention plans fell under the watch of the Lennon-funded Election Year Strategy Information Center. These people had a history of “using massive civil disobedience to combat war, racism, poverty and repression.”

  One thing the FBI reports agreed upon, evidence notwithstanding, was the plan of this particular organization: “To conduct disruptive demonstrations during the Republican National Convention.” In spite of the bureau’s own report the previous month that quoted Lennon as specifying peaceful—therefore legal—means of protest, J. Edgar Hoover declared that Lennon’s plans were not passive, thus allowing further investigation. According to Hoover, Lennon had an “avowed intention to engage in disruptive activities” at the convention.

  In turn, the bureau tried to prevent that by any means necessary. If Lennon was the “known drug user” they assumed, agents with evidence of that drug use should promptly report to the New York Police Department for an easy arrest. A subsequent directive informed the home office that the NYPD was “attempting to obtain enough information to arrest both subject and wife Yoko based on PD investigation.” And yet no such evidence was forthcoming. Maybe Lennon was more drug-free than some of the rumors suggested.

  • • •

  Word spread quickly when Lennon and the Elephants began a month’s worth of sessions in late February for Some Time in New York City at the Record Plant studio on West Forty-Fourth Street. The studio experiences were memorable far beyond the musical adventure for the bandsmen, with near daily reminders of just how famous their new friend John really was. Recording sessions often receive guests or friends of the musicians, but the Elephants were stunned at the variety of people who called on Lennon. Tex Gabriel remembers a visitor who probably wasn’t used to politely waiting a few minutes to see someone as she did for Lennon.

  “I remember having Jackie Onassis come down to the studio,” Gabriel says. “That was a big moment for me; I’ll never forget that.”

  A lifelong memory for the Elephants, who learned that time with Lennon was precious, as so many had sought what they casually enjoyed. Working with Lennon brought endless surprises, Gary Van Scyoc says, including time
-management and logistical challenges to productivity.

  “Talk about distractions,” Van Scyoc says. “One night Mick Jagger was there for a couple of hours. Rudolf Nureyev, all these people coming at John for various reasons.”

  Additionally, Lennon’s diplomatic skills were called into play with Phil Spector, contracted to serve as producer. Spector had met the Beatles in 1970 when he had been asked to salvage the scattered Let It Be tapes. The legendary producer’s signature on certain tracks—notably Lennon’s “Across the Universe” and McCartney’s “The Long and Winding Road”—had added something new and different to the Beatles’ repertoire: the multi-track, multi-instrument “wall of sound” he’d mastered with Tina Turner’s “River Deep—Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’,” and dozens of other classics.

  Spector’s reputation as a producer was matched by notoriety for his eccentricities. By the time Spector worked with the Beatles he had become something of a recluse and would only work with A-list musicians; to the Elephants he offered at best a cold shoulder.

  “He didn’t want anything to do with us,” Tex Gabriel says. “He did not want to deal with unknowns, and didn’t know why Lennon wasn’t working with Clapton. We weren’t stars; he liked to work with celebrities.”

  He met his match with John Lennon; Spector’s objections were overruled by one of the few musicians able to trump the producer’s clout.

  “John just told him how it was gonna be,” Gabriel says. “Lennon said, ‘These are my guys, they’re working with me, and I want you to treat them with respect.’ He really liked the band, and John could be very direct and forceful when he needed to be.”