The Walrus and the Elephants

by James Mitchell

  Some appointments had to be kept, like obligations as producer of the Apple-issued Elephant’s Memory album. Lennon tried to sidestep the spotlight when Apple introduced the band and album at an early October press party. Special guests included Mignon, a six-month-old baby elephant that roamed the room, “painted up like a Lower East Side groupie for the occasion,” Rolling Stone reported.91 The Lennon connection, however, remained prominent; the band was introduced as “the working-class heroes we’ve all been waiting for.” Lennon’s actual presence on the record was limited to some backing vocals and rhythm guitar work, but his shadow remained too large to ignore, and not necessarily to the band’s benefit. Apple hosted the one event and scheduled brief tours of the Midwest and in California, but with Lennon unable to headline a series of concerts, bassist Gary Van Scyoc says that neither the producer nor label seemed able to give the time and attention needed by a relatively unknown band. It wasn’t a problem Lennon had experienced in recent memory.

  “Being on Apple was a big thrill for the first month,” Van Scyoc says. “Until we went up there and started looking for the promotion department. There was no promotions department. The Beatles put out an album and it just sold and sold. But the Elephants needed help. Basically we signed with a label that had no facilities to promote us. It was a good thing, but it wasn’t going out.”

  Elephant’s Memory was very much the band’s creation—but Lennon had enthusiastically put backing vocals and rhythm guitar on some selections; he added a piano piece to Van Scyoc’s “Wind Ridge,” a collaboration the bassist fondly recalls.

  “John loved my tune, ‘Wind Ridge,’ and wrote piano lines,” Van Scyoc says. “On the record it’s just John, myself, and Jim Keltner on the track. He sent the rest of the Elephants home that night.”

  The album cover itself painted a grim picture, with a moody black-and-white landscape that contrasted with earlier hippie-era imagery. Founders Stan Bronstein and Rick Frank wrote the bulk of its songs—other than “Wind Ridge” and “Life” by Tex Gabriel—which mixed autobiography with the band’s signature politics. The group’s identity was addressed in a semidefiant song by Frank, “Local Plastic Ono Band,” and the guitar-driven “Chuck ’n’ Bo,” a salute to Berry and Diddley after the two legends had shared stage time with the band.

  The band’s reputation may have preceded the album, regardless of the quality of the music. By late 1972, political rock had lost much of its edge, and Apple’s promotion of “working-class hero” musicians—well represented in “Liberation Special” and “Power Boogie”—made them difficult to market. Some tried to champion the Elephant’s talent.

  “Forget the bullshit and listen to the music,” advised Melody Maker: “They pour beautiful guitar from Wayne Gabriel and wild sax from Stan Bronstein. Listen to Gabriel take off like a sky rocket on ‘Chuck ’n’ Bo.’”92

  The consensus was that Lennon’s faith in the band had been justified: New York writers familiar with the group wanted to like the album, although they too wondered if revolution rock was still relevant, or would be again. Village Voice writer Richard Nusser said the sound may not have hit the right notes for the times: “A thundering expression of rage that’s either four years too late, or four years too early.”93

  The critics favored Lennon’s “discovery,” but magazine writers don’t buy all the records. Cash Box speculated on the album’s sales potential: “This album will be testing grounds for their live excitement translating itself to record sales.”94

  The translation fell short. The LP briefly approached but couldn’t crack the Billboard Top 200, and no single caught the fancy of the record-buying public. Was Lennon’s endorsement of the band as rockers for the revolution a mixed blessing? Gabriel says the sudden national exposure was built on two associations—the Yippies and Lennon—that came wrapped in the same package.

  “Sometimes I wondered about that, but if we hadn’t been such a political band would Jerry Rubin have been involved?” Gabriel asks. “Would Lennon have been interested if we were just another rock and roll band? Our political outlook had a lot to do with all of it happening.”

  Maybe music for the masses had already had its share of hippie history. Cynical minds said that music just didn’t matter anymore. Rock and roll had sold out, Rolling Stone’s Nick Tosches said, and everyone might be better off remembering that when listening to the album.95 It was “completely ludicrous” to think that the music mattered as a sociopolitical force.

  “Elephant’s Memory is just a fuckin’ band and the album is just plain old fuckin’ music,” Tosches concluded. “The artists and media of rock’s aging counterculture have been so comfortably incorporated into the bloodstream of traditional big business economics as to render the mere concept of any viably revolutionary nature absurd.”

  If “Movement music” was passé, Lennon’s blessing of the band may have been trumped, Tosches said, by their alliances with “such color sergeants of the revolution as Jerry Rubin . . . and renowned stupid person David Peel. Elephant’s Memory are commonly thought of as being part of the great revolutionary consortium’s going-out-of-business-sale.”

  Whatever the band was, in the eyes of many fans the stage area near Lennon was forever reserved for other musicians. In the wake of the critical response to the Madison Square Garden shows, Lennon realized that his onstage collaborations—with Yoko or the Elephants—were destined to be measured against a particular standard.

  “I’ve got used to the fact—just about—that whatever I do is going to be compared to the other Beatles,” Lennon said. “If I took up ballet dancing, my ballet dancing would be compared with Paul’s bowling. But I’ve come to learn something big . . . I cannot let the Top Ten dominate my art. If my worth is only to be judged by whether I’m in the Top Ten or not, then I’d better give up.”

  By November 1972 Lennon’s immersion in radical politics wasn’t the same as it had been a year earlier. He didn’t change his pro-peace views—and didn’t back down from fighting for the chance to perform political songs. Another time, another year, and the partnership with Elephant’s Memory might well have continued to evolve along with current events, the musicians exploring a sound as well as a message, but too many extenuating factors stood in the way. Reflecting on it years later Lennon said the two motivating factors went hand in hand.96

  “The last thing on earth I want to do is perform,” Lennon said. “That’s a direct result of the immigration thing. In ’71, ’72, I wanted to go out and rock me balls off onstage and I just stopped.”

  And his role in the Movement? His revolution-inspired forays into writing as if on assignment as self-proclaimed musical journalist ran contrary to his artistic vision. “The art is more important than the thing and sometimes I have to remind meself of it.” The year he’d spent with the Yippies and the Elephants had been productive by output standards, but lacking in Lennon’s own self-assessment.

  “I was still putting out the work,” Lennon said. “But in the back of me head it was: What do you want to be? What are you looking for? I’m a freakin’ artist, man, not a fuckin’ race horse.”

  • • •

  Election night, of November 7, 1972, was not—by all accounts—one of John Lennon’s finest. So many things came to a crashing halt with the president’s overwhelming reelection win with the thought of four more years under Nixonian rule, there was no reason to think Lennon’s life and career shouldn’t follow suit.

  John, Yoko, and the Elephants were in the studio that fall to record Yoko’s ambitious two-disc LP, Approximately Infinite Universe, the final piece of their three-part contract with Apple. Since it was election night, sessions had begun early, half-hearted renditions at best, and came to an early end. Nobody felt like playing music: a recording session suddenly seemed pointless, as did a lot of things.

  There had been little suspense that Nixon would win as he claimed more than 60 perce
nt of the popular vote, one of the largest victory margins in presidential history. In the electoral contest Nixon all but swept the national board by winning every state except Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. A generation felt defeated, and Lennon had some renewed personal concerns: given what seemed a mandate of the people, would the president’s men decide now to finish the deportation process?

  Gary Van Scyoc recalls a disgusted Lennon calling a halt to playing. An election-night blowout at Jerry Rubin’s Village apartment seemed an appropriate place to drink away the evening’s sorrows.

  “It was really deflating,” Van Scyoc says. “A whole lot of drinking going on, even before we left the studio. John’s not a great drinker, as everybody knows. The party was already a disaster waiting to happen.”

  As recounted in Jon Wiener’s Come Together and recalled by the Elephants, Rubin answered the door to a John Lennon “crazy with rage,” cursing and screaming.97 Lennon took in the apartment filled with would-be revolutionaries; he considered his host, whose leadership of a movement was now a memory.

  Lennon ranted, a drunken tirade of class warfare and lost causes. He had grown tired of the politics as preached by Rubin—by a lot of people—and frustrated by that old familiar feeling that he was being used. And for what? There was no hope, Lennon said; these people couldn’t do anything, couldn’t protect themselves against the forces of Nixon and the man.

  Who was gonna do it? Lennon asked. Was anyone in that room ready to take responsibility for their lives, or were they waiting for some savior to show them the way?

  Their answer was: Lennon. In spite of Nixon’s victory, Stan Bronstein said it was up to Lennon to revive the Movement.

  “You, John,” Bronstein said. “They’ll listen to you.”

  That may have been the final straw, an echo of demands that began early in Beatlemania, of fans wanting more than just music. There had been times when parents brought ill or disabled children to concerts and begged for backstage access in hopes that a touch from a Beatle might—somehow, in some way—provide more than just hope. Lennon—the leader of the Beatles—was expected to have all the answers for a generation: What clothes should we wear? they asked. How long should our hair be? What drugs were okay? What religions were okay?

  In New York he wanted to be just one of the crowd, but he was never just one of the crowd. He was John Lennon, head of the most influential entertainment force in history. Revolutionaries from every movement and cause wanted more than a casual endorsement: they wanted Lennon to lead them in the march to a better future. He’d given his time, money, and fame to Rubin, the Yippies, John Sinclair, and in return had telephones tapped, threats of deportation, and life spent under federal watch. The Movement, Lennon said, needed another solution.

  “They haven’t been listening to me,” Lennon scowled.

  Lennon was not a happy drunk, and Van Scyoc recalls a bad scene in the making. “John was making a lot of noise and being generally unruly,” Van Scyoc says. “I was glad to get out of there, to be honest.”

  The party crowd thinned past midnight. Lennon drunkenly flirted with a woman he soon took into a bedroom, his actions no secret to anyone in the room, including Yoko. The closed door did not block what obviously took place.

  Bronstein discreetly turned up the radio’s volume to mask the noise; Tex Gabriel sat at Yoko’s side, gave her his sunglasses to hide tearful eyes, and made small talk while the party came to an ugly end.

  The country seemed destined to four more years of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Far less certain was the state of Lennon’s residency, John and Yoko’s marriage, his partnership with the Elephants, his career, and his mental state.

  • • •

  While Lennon shared album space with Yoko Ono on Some Time in New York City—a near fifty-fifty songwriting partnership—Approximately Infinite Universe was very much Yoko’s solo album; Lennon’s involvement was limited to a few backing vocals, some guitar work, and a producer credit. The early recording sessions that were interrupted on election night stayed in limbo for several days as Lennon scrambled to apologize and repair a seemingly broken marriage. The bulk of the album would be recorded at New York’s Record Plant studios, but by Thanksgiving Elephant’s Memory had flown to California for several performances and John and Yoko split time between Texas—and the ongoing search for Kyoko—and the West Coast, where some sessions for the album were held.

  Musically, the Elephants enjoyed the creativity of putting blues-based backup to Yoko’s feminist poetry. Gary Van Scyoc calls Yoko “one of the most interesting artists I ever worked with,” and that it was her guidance—not Lennon’s—that aimed for a more pop-rock approach than her previous experimental tracks.

  “We revamped the chord structures to be more Elephant’s Memory compatible,” Van Scyoc says. “It was actually a fun project, and the bottom line was that Yoko really did have a vision of what she wanted.”

  Lennon believed the Elephant’s capable of the project, one that could have tested the talents or patience of other musicians. Tex Gabriel told Calliope Kurtz, sometime music critic and feminist who wrote “The Feminist Songs of Yoko Ono,” that the band was able to meet both producers’ expectations.98

  “John had faith in us to do it,” Gabriel says. “We were pretty experienced by that time, and Yoko had faith in us, too.”

  In Los Angeles the bandsmen were provided with accommodations at the Century Plaza Hotel. Good times in sunny California for the boys, who compensated for holiday homesick thoughts by inviting more than fifty people to a Thanksgiving blowout. Gary Van Scyoc proudly says the Elephants “were the only band to run up a bigger bill than the Rolling Stones.”

  Lennon was around for several tracks, Van Scyoc says, but it was clear that the relationship was fading and that they would never again share a stage. He was there in spirit as supportive friend, though. Van Scyoc recalls a memorable show the Elephants played at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a bill that included the Bee Gees, Cher, and Sly and the Family Stone, which featured an onstage boost from Lennon.

  “John and Yoko called in to introduce us over the PA system,” Van Scyoc says. “The crowd went crazy. That’s a heck of a way to start a set: had them in our pocket before we even played a note. It was great.”

  Lennon wanted to be there, Van Scyoc says, perhaps join the band onstage, but the timing for Lennon and the Elephants was not in the cards. During the five weeks the Elephants spent in California, John and Yoko were again tracking down possible leads as to Kyoko’s whereabouts and scrambled between New York, Texas, and Los Angeles.

  Lennon’s parting with the Elephants was, if not inevitable, perhaps mutual in some regards. The band struggled, in odd ways, under a Lennon-generated spotlight. Critics may have advised that the band’s own album was worth a listen, but media attention inevitably circled back to Lennon. The three younger bandsmen fully hoped to capitalize on the professional opportunity, but Bronstein and Frank retained some feelings that being too famous meant being a sellout. Their respect for Lennon stopped short of sucking-up to a star, and the band hadn’t tried to abuse Lennon’s friendship; the end of the ride had nothing to do with how they related personally.

  The band’s political identity seemed to be fading as well. Their association with Jerry Rubin seemed too dominant in Frank’s assessment of their future, and relations had cooled considerably between Lennon and the Yippies, and within the radical ranks, to include its long-loyal troubadors.99

  “There is no Movement,” Frank snarled. “We were bozoed on that. I’m not into endorsing any political groups at all.” Everyone was at odds with each other, Frank said, and when the Elephants played benefits they found support from some—the Black Panthers or Young Lords—yet scorn from others.

  “The women’s libbers would yell, ‘Sexist, macho bastards,’ and we’d get pissed off,” Frank said. “That’s just where the ‘Movement’
was at.”

  Frank and Bronstein told Rolling Stone they wanted to be “more than a Plastic Ono band,” but a possible direction forward remained unclear. The opportunity was exactly what the younger players—Gabriel, Van Scyoc, and Ippolito—had hoped for, but Cavalier’s Lenny Kaye wondered why founders Stan Bronstein and Rick Frank seemed reluctant to cash in.100

  “They’re a funny group, the Memory,” Kaye observed. “Proud and not a little hard-headed, and where most other bands would be content to bask in the reflected stardom of the Lennons, the Elephants have steadfastly held to the concept that they’re nobody’s band but their own.”

  The Elephants ended their recording work on Approximately Infinite Universe as 1972 drew to an end. The third and final piece of their Apple contract didn’t improve the band’s chances to ride the Lennons’ waves to success. The album was released in January 1973 to limited sales—sneaking into the Top 200 at 193—and the predictable harsh reviews published in February and March. The band earned kudos, but Yoko’s vocals once again proved too challenging for critics, as did lyrics that ranged from feminist issues to attempts at a more commercial sound. Lennon seemed resigned to few critics paying attention to his wife’s work, with those that did offering mostly unsympathetic commentary. In another era Yoko’s music would be better appreciated—her musical influence was seen a decade later in postpunk bands such as the B-52s, who freely acknowledged that the origins of their unique sound included Yoko’s work.

  Perhaps more telling in Nick Tosches’ Rolling Stone review was an increasingly common feeling among cultural observers that it was perhaps time to mothball the spiritual-Aquarian overtones of a now-bygone era.101