The Walrus and the Elephants

by James Mitchell

  The questions being raised—of forcing a woman to choose between husband and child, of singling out a distinguished artist for exile—had now become part of the national discourse. Was the government being unmerciful? Editorialists wondered why Lennon seemed to be the target of a personal vendetta. “Unhand that Beatle,” demanded the Washington Daily News, noting that INS officials “must have better things to do” than deport John Lennon. There were more than a million illegal immigrants in America, “many of them taking jobs from citizens, committing crimes, or collecting welfare payments, and INS would do better to pursue them instead of Mr. Lennon.”72

  In late May Washington’s National Press Club hosted a press conference organized by Ken Dewey—a member of the New York State Commission on Cultural Resources—on behalf of the National Committee for John and Yoko. Dewey issued a statement openly challenging the Nixon administration’s use of executive authority: “If, as mounting evidence suggests, this couple is having difficulties simply because of their outspoken, sincere, and nonviolent opposition to the war in Vietnam and to related issues, then very serious questions about the misuse of governmental power must be raised.”73

  Speculation as to the government’s motives ranged widely; Rolling Stone was close to the general truth: “selective” prosecution was at work. Fellow Beatle George Harrison similarly had a marijuana bust in his past, and not only spoke of peace but embraced foreign cultures and religions while doing so, yet freely traveled and worked in America. Canadian rocker Neil Young had—with partners Crosby, Stills & Nash—in 1970 recorded the Kent State response, “Ohio,” which called the president out by name in its lyrics, but there’s no evidence that the Nixon administration interfered with Young’s travel plans.

  Maybe it was a personal thing. Lennon was not always well liked by the Bible Belt crowd, and in simplistic terms it seemed to Rolling Stone that the government caved in to conservative pressure in the form of “letters and phone calls from a lot of old biddies.”74

  Within legal circles the hearings posed procedural and ethical questions that begged analysis. New York Times law columnist Grace Lichtenstein took note of the sometimes-tearful pleas when Yoko addressed the court. “You’re asking me to choose between my child and my husband,” Yoko said. “I don’t think you can ask any human being to do that.” Lichtenstein, like so many others, wondered why the government was trying so hard: “Even if they weren’t John and Yoko, their case might warrant considerable attention as a challenge of American immigration laws.”75

  The effort to deport John Lennon had been put into a legal, bureaucratic machine that, if nothing else, could be a painfully slow process. The hearings ended inconclusively: Judge Fieldsteel gave Leon Wildes until July 1 to submit any additional motions or arguments. It was understood by veteran court watchers that, even if Fieldsteel ruled in favor of July deportation, Wildes would have the option to appeal and initiate another round of hearings. The New York Times explained, “Appeals could prolong this case for months, perhaps years. In which case the Lennons ironically would be forced to remain within the borders of the United States.”

  • • •

  If investigators wanted to keep an eye on Lennon, the daily newspapers provided numerous clues as to his whereabouts and the types of “radical” associates that seemed to be on his side, meaning declared opponents of President Nixon. Lennon was seemingly unaware of the true political motivations against him—to block him from performing concerts to unseat a president—and was convinced that his pro-peace/antiwar statements were the root of his green card problems.

  That belief didn’t silence him. Two days after asking the court for mercy Lennon joined a May 19 vigil in Duffy Square, one of dozens held in major cities that day. The events were organized, according to the FBI, “by peace groups demanding complete withdrawal of US troops from Indochina.”76

  A growing number of rallies were supported by a broader and more influential demographic than the hippies: established names including Joseph Papp, Arthur Miller, and William Styron endorsed a group called the National Peace Action Coalition; membership included “local politicians and trade union leaders,” as noted in full-page newspaper ads that announced the rally.

  While Lennon hid in plain sight, cloak-and-dagger tactics continued but strategies to force a quicker deportation failed. The combined resources of the FBI and NYPD couldn’t put a joint in Lennon’s hand—or at least the appearance of such to make a drug bust—as reported that month: “New York Police Department advised that his department has been unable to make a narcotics case on the Lennons. NYPD continuing.” A separate plan was to prove that Yoko’s claims of her ex-husband abducting Kyoko were false—allowing for a charge of perjury—and agents were sent to track down Tony Cox and the girl. That line of investigation quickly dissolved.

  The acting director of the FBI seemed a more cautious fellow than the man he replaced. Without openly stating that any laws were broken—at least not on a piece of paper that might be viewed—Gray reminded agents on May 24 to be careful about bureau involvement in what were decidedly INS matters, whether tracking down Tony Cox and Kyoko or encouraging a drug arrest for Lennon.

  “In view of possible court proceedings,” Gray wrote, “active investigations by FBI could result in FBI Agents testifying which would not be in Bureau’s best interest and could result in considerable adverse publicity.”

  Maybe it was the government’s turn to succumb to paranoia. Suspicions ruled the day at the White House and throughout Washington in the summer of 1972. In spite of Lennon’s televised assurance that he would not attend the August convention, some on Capitol Hill remained terrified of the prospect. On June 5 Gray advised the Miami office that Lennon was “planning a large rock concert in Miami during the convention, and that the rock concert was to be held in front of the convention hall.”

  What to do about Lennon was one of countless perceived problems to be put on the front burner by Nixon loyalists. A variety of sources—federal investigators, former CIA operatives, attorneys, and others—weren’t going to tolerate any disruptive activities from the worst of the hippie radicals. One crew, said to include G. Gordon Liddy, pitched the aggressive plan of abducting certain protest leaders and dumping them in a Mexican desert for the duration. Stories were told by insiders including Jeb Magruder and John Ehrlichman of a proposal to snatch and stash Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman; Attorney General John Mitchell successfully shot down unlawful imprisonment as a strategy.

  But the John Lennon case would soon be of limited interest to the press, the public, or within the White House administration, the members of which had far greater priorities waiting for them. Rather than kidnap the hippies, Liddy and E. Howard Hunt directed a crew of burglars who made their way into the Democratic National Headquarters offices in the Watergate Hotel.

  • • •

  The members of Elephant’s Memory shared a unique rite of passage in John Lennon’s career, that of a record being both a critical and commercial disappointment. Some Time in New York City proved to be everything that critics and the Nixon administration loved to hate. Released on June 12, the double-LP’s cover alone was capable of annoying Lennon’s Washington enemies: dominant on the newspaper-styled front page was a superimposed image of Richard Nixon dancing with Chairman Mao; both leaders appeared to be naked. Song titles were headlines, including prominent placement of “Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” An assortment of puns, jokes, and gags included a small picture of producer Phil Spector, captioned, To know him is to love him, and a nod to the New York Times’ slogan: Ono News That’s Fit to Print.

  The first of the double-album’s discs featured the studio work of Lennon and the Elephants, ten songs including “John Sinclair,” “Attica State,” “Luck of the Irish,” “Angela,” and “New York City.” The second disc—“Free Live Jam LP: John & Yoko and Star-Studded Cast of Thousands . . . yours at no extra cost”—was recorde
d at a June 1971 Fillmore East performance with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, and a 1969 Plastic Ono Band show at London Lyceum. The tracks included Lennon’s “Cold Turkey” and Yoko performing a long piece entitled “Don’t Worry Kyoko.”

  Was it the politics that prevented the album from reaching commercial success, or was there too much Yoko and not enough Lennon? Or perhaps the topics were too specific—one man’s marijuana woes, a black woman activist jailed by the man, British policies regarding Ireland—and Lennon’s was not the only name on the credit lines. The album was the work of “John & Yoko / Plastic Ono Band with Elephant’s Memory plus Invisible Strings”; the last being an inside joke referring to Spector’s wall of sound. Unlike Lennon’s previous post-Beatles albums, Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, on which he’d composed and performed the bulk of the material, Some Time afforded equal space to Yoko’s work: Of the album’s ten original songs only two—“New York City” and “John Sinclair”—were credited as Lennon compositions. Three songs were written by Yoko alone—“Sisters O Sisters,” “We’re All Water,” and “Born in a Prison”; the rest had dual Lennon/Ono bylines.

  The sale of 45s had taken a backseat to album-generated revenue by then, but hit songs still factored heavily in the commercial success of an LP. Lennon insisted on “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” as the lead single, a debut that challenged the album’s commercial prospects.

  Would the outcome have been different if another song had been chosen as the debut single? Gary Van Scyoc says that Lennon was doubly discouraged, both from the critical barbs and having “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” banned from mass-market play.

  “There were a lot of positive things about it at the time,” Van Scyoc says of the album, but the choice of its first single may have been too big an obstacle. “In the back of my mind I remember saying, ‘Man, I don’t know about this one.’ But he was hell-bent on that one as the single. The bottom line is, as a record, when they banned it that was it. John was devastated; that was a new one on him.”

  Lennon had expected a certain amount of resistance to the album’s political content. He also knew that the music press would be quick to pounce on Yoko Ono’s vocal work, as she sang lead on several tracks. Some Time generated the harshest reviews Lennon had ever received, lyrically and musically. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden described an album that could kill a lesser career: “What can one say when confronted with incipient artistic suicide? Issue a warning and then try to accentuate the positive?”77

  Holden did just that, and listed attributes including Lennon’s “solid as ever” singing, and rare praise for the album’s other vocalist: “Yoko’s caterwauling yodel” was “worth a listen” on “We’re All Water,” Holden said. Also in the plus column was the playing of Elephant’s Memory, “a terrific, hard-driving rock and roll band with a raunchy fifties sound . . . the strongest part of the album. Only Elephant’s Memory emerges unscathed, [with] some taut, funky backups that are well suited to the Lennons’ voices.”

  But the content of the songs met strong criticism: “Didactic political statements,” in Holden’s opinion, which did not properly address the issues at hand. As Lennon had previously observed, people wanted him to protest but also dictated the method and terms for doing so. “The tunes are shallow and derivative and the words little more than sloppy nursery rhymes that patronize the issues and individuals they seek to exalt,” Holden lambasted.

  The reviews were not unanimous, and some found elements to admire, particularly among New Yorkers. Newsday’s Robert Christgau argued that—quality of music aside—the album supported Lennon’s bid for US residency:78

  This new John Lennon album . . . proves conclusively that the ex-Beatle deserves to stay in America. My evidence is a line from a tune called “Attica State”: “Come together join the Movement.” No doubt the State Department, which persists in trying to deport him, thinks this makes Lennon a subversive, but I ask you, who but a true New Yorker would exhibit such chutzpah?

  Christgau wondered if Lennon’s effort was worthwhile, and echoed the sentiments expressed by Rennie Davis and others that the revolution’s golden years were now in the past: “Among my Movement friends the line seems to be that there is no Movement,” Christgau noted. “We want the world, but we’ll settle for George McGovern.”

  The reviewers wanted to like Lennon, to cheer the rebellious voice so beloved by a generation, but a cynicism was developing that a generation’s saviors weren’t likely to come factory-wrapped on vinyl. According to Christgau, “Unless the music business becomes a much stranger business than it already is, the violent overthrow of the US government is not likely to come in quadraphonic sound. It’s no accomplishment to boogie adolescents into youth rebellion any more. The hip young are rapidly turning into another interest group, like labor unions.”

  Credit was given for Lennon taking risks, but Christgau was among those who felt the album fell short of its lofty goals. The songs were “more direct,” which also meant they were “more risky. They attack issues so simplistically that you wonder whether the artists believe themselves. This time John appears to have plunged too fast.”

  Leaning on the hybrid term for artistic agitation and propaganda, Christgau cut to the chase: “Agitprop is one thing. Wrong-headed agitprop is another. Agitprop that fails to reach its constituency, however, is hardly a thing at all, and since Lennon’s forte has always been the communication of new truths to a mass audience, that possibility is very distressing. He isn’t exploiting his charisma this time, he’s gambling it.”

  Separate from the album itself, Christgau used the forum to criticize Lennon’s brief adoption of Washington Square Park’s favorite troubadour, and questioned if certain Village attitudes may have affected his art: “It’s bad enough to praise David Peel and worse still to record him. But imitating his thoughtless hip-left orthodoxy is worst of all.”

  The bandsmen of Elephant’s Memory said that the response—or reaction in some cases—weighed heavily on Lennon.

  “The problem was, he was really still on his own as an ex-Beatle, and still had a lot to prove,” Adam Ippolito says. “He still had the need to be successful; not financial but on a very basic and broad level.”

  In the United States the album Some Time in New York City peaked at forty-eight on Billboard’s charts; the single “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” topped out at fifty-eight. A modest success for average musicians; a harsh disappointment for Lennon. Ippolito says the record’s reviews and chart failure took a toll on John and Yoko, bringing to an end a period of artistic and political exploration.

  “They went into hiding for at least a week when it came out,” Ippolito says. The Elephants—and New Left leaders—had no idea what Lennon might do next.

  Footnotes:

  62Excerpts from The Dick Cavett Show broadcasts of September 11, 24, 1971 and May 11, 1972, copyright © Daphne Productions, Inc., used with permission of Mr. Cavett and Daphne Productions.

  63“John Winston Lennon,” FBI Records: The Vault, http://vault.fbi.gov/john-winston-lennon. Additional contextual and background information can be found in Jon Wiener, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

  64Ben Fong-Torres, “Lennon’s Song: The Man Can’t F**k Our Music,” Rolling Stone, February 18, 1971.

  65The Dick Cavett Show, May 1972.

  66Jon Wiener, Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (New York: Random House, 1990), 214.

  67Editorial, “Love It and Leave It,” New York Times, May 2, 1972.

  68Albin Krebs, “Notes on People,” New York Times, May 13, 1972.

  69From the book Talk Show by Dick Cavett. Copyright © 2009 by Richard A. Cavett. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  70Cavett, Talk Show, xvi.
>
  71“Lennon Makes Plea at Close of Hearing,” New York Times, May 18, 1972.

  72Editorial, “Unhand That Beatle,” Washington Daily News, May 9, 1972.

  73“John Lennon and Yoko Ono to Have Press Conference,” Rosslyn Review, May 4, 1972.

  74Ralph J. Gleason, “Perspectives: Fair Play for John and Yoko,” Rolling Stone, June 22, 1972.

  75Grace Lichtenstein, “John and Yoko: ‘If There’s Mercy, I’d Like It, Please,’” New York Times, May 21, 1972.

  76“John Winston Lennon,” FBI Records: The Vault; Wiener, Gimme Some Truth.

  77Stephen Holden, “’Que Pasa, New York?’ Indeed,” Rolling Stone, July 20, 1972.

  78Robert Christgau, “John Lennon’s Realpolitik,” Newsday, July 9, 1972.

  Chapter 6

  “We’ll Get It Right Next Time”

  “They were out to get him. It can be very spooky to be followed or wire tapped.” —Paul Krassner

  If anyone needed to get away, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were long overdue for a vacation in the summer of 1972. In San Francisco Lennon found a place similar to their now beloved Lower Manhattan. As with New York, Lennon wanted to believe he and Yoko could go about their business with little or no celebrity fanfare. They considered finding an apartment in San Francisco, a West Coast bookend to their Village loft. “We walked the streets all day, all over town and nobody hassled us,” Lennon said.79

  The underground newspaper publisher Paul Krassner met them for lunch in late July. Krassner had been introduced to Yoko several years earlier, and spent time with the Lennons in Syracuse at the September 1971 opening of Yoko’s Emerson Museum show. He was a kindred spirit in many ways with Lennon. They shared a playful sense of the absurd that was balanced and guided by compassionate intelligence. In the early sixties Krassner had turned local journalism into community activism; he interviewed a doctor who performed abortions and followed up by establishing an underground referral service. Krassner indulged a theatrical side and tried stand-up comedy after he edited Lenny Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Friends included some of the era’s most interesting and infamous, whether taking LSD with Groucho Marx, romping as a Merry Prankster with Ken Kesey, launching the Realist, or vying to unseat Nixon alongside Jerry Rubin and Rennie Davis; Krassner was among the founders of the Youth International Party and credited with coining the term Yippie.