by Bryce Zabel
[Senator Edward Kennedy] “Well, uh, let me just say this about this particular issue you raise. I think it is clear, uh, that I do not support, well, behavior that is…What I mean is that protest is part of the American, I understand that this group you refer to are British, but…The point behind this that I’m not for any of that, that you refer to. I hope this clarifies the issue.”
Even so, the perception in the New York City where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived was that Richard Nixon was so evil, so venal, so unacceptable, that Kennedy would win anyway, whether or not he was a good candidate. He had the right name, and with his brothers gone, it was his turn.
On election night, John and Yoko went to a party being held in the Soho home of their Yippie friend Jerry Rubin. They arrived early, when hope was still alive, and the party was cooking with the likes of Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and their comrades. As the returns filtered in at an agonizingly slow pace, it became more and more clear that Nixon was going to win in a potential landslide. Within a couple of hours, the party was turning into a wake.
“People like my music all right,” Lennon told the party. “They just don’t want to hear the message.”
At about this time, Ringo showed up. John had invited him when he learned that he would be in New York seeing friends. When the Beatles drummer was told that Kennedy was going to lose, and big, he hailed a taxi to Jerry Rubin’s, intent on cheering up John.
Cheering up, in this case, meant that the two men began to drink tequila shots as a game. Every time Nixon won another state, they would take a shot. The problem was that Nixon was winning a lot of states. It was becoming clear that tarnished by scandal and tarred by the Republican charges, Teddy was likely to lose decisively.
For the anti-war left—basically everyone at the party—it was a devastating result. Lennon took it personally, and he took it badly. He felt that all of his activism over the past few years had backfired.
The more bombed John got, the more he directed his paranoia and rage at the other guests, accusing several of working along with the FBI to sabotage his career and crush him creatively. He told his host, Rubin, to his face that all the wiretaps and the surveillance tails he, Yoko, Ringo, and the other Beatles had endured convinced him that his friend was actually a CIA agent. “You’re nothing more than a cheap fraud who talks revolution, but you’ll betray anybody to save your own skin.”
“Really?” asked Rubin. “That’s funny coming from the man who said ‘you ain’t gonna make it with anyone, anyhow.’”
As the staggering size of Kennedy’s loss became clear and the party disintegrated further, Lennon made the one mistake that would haunt him for years. He began to flirt with one of Rubin’s female roommates, Carol Realini, a woman that Abbie Hoffman himself had slept with, and he did it right in front of Yoko. After kissing Realini, he took her to an empty room, and, to Yoko’s horror and to the amazement of the other guests, proceeded to have loud sex with her.
Having never warmed entirely to Yoko, even now, Ringo suddenly found himself sitting next to her and sharing her pain. “It was the only time I ever saw her break down in tears,” he said later. “It was awful. I knew I had to do something.”
Ringo gently placed his sunglasses on Yoko’s face so she could hide behind them. He offered to take her home, but she demurred. Hammered as Lennon by this time, with no more good ideas, Ringo started drumming loudly with a pair of kitchen spoons and tried to lead the group in “Give Peace a Chance,” hoping to drown out the lovemaking in the bedroom. As the sing-along fizzled, Lennon and Realini could still be heard.
Accounts differ, depending on who tells the story, but the predominant rumor was that Yoko nodded to Ringo and took his hand. Together the two of them left the party.
When Lennon finally emerged from the room and learned that Yoko had left with Ringo, he again became enraged. Fuming and unsteady, he went outside and hailed a cab.
When he got to the Dakota, he was greeted by Ringo, who was waiting in the lobby. “She’s asleep now, John. She says she wants to be alone for a few days and that we should go drink ourselves to death some other place.”
Only Ringo, his longtime friend, could have spoken this way to John. With anyone else, the interaction probably would have become a drunken fight. But John just shrugged. “I’ve fucked it up pretty good this time, huh?”
Ringo could only nod his agreement. “You’ve had better days.”
With that, the two men headed to Ringo’s suite in the Park Plaza and drank up all the liquor in the refrigerator, in a binge that would become a two-day bender.
Lennon could not break his TV habit, and so in Ringo’s living room he watched as the news reported the depth of the disaster. Nixon won the Electoral College in a landslide of Rooseveltian proportions, garnering 472 votes to Kennedy’s 65, with only 270 needed for victory. Kennedy won only his home state of Massachusetts, plus New York and Maryland. The popular vote was closer. Nixon received 42,168,710 votes to Kennedy’s 34,173,122.
As the sun came up on the third day, Ringo found John eating room service, drinking coffee from a French press, and smoking his Gitanes cigarettes.
“The Beatles don’t mean anything to me,” he said. “Even if you all want to continue, it’s my band, and I’m finished.”
Ringo wondered out loud if John should be making such big decisions under the influence of a killer hangover.
“The dream is over, Richie. Better get used to it.”
With that, John Lennon went back to the Dakota, his relationship with his wife at an all-time low, and told her that he was giving up on the Beatles and devoting himself exclusively to her.
In a later interview with Rockstar’s Booth Hill, Yoko Ono made her true feelings clear.
[Yoko Ono] “John thought that saying what he said made everything right. How could it make what he had done to me right? I thought. But I was also afraid. I did not think I could handle him all the time. I thought Beatles should do their share. John needs a lot of attention, you know.”
For the next few months, under the flag of an uneasy truce with both Yoko and his bandmates, Lennon went into hiding at the Dakota apartment. When Paul McCartney called to console him about the election results, John hung up on him. When George Harrison called to see what plans he might have for future Beatles projects, John said, “Ask Ringo” and hung up on him, too.
Yoko was miserable, so much so that when Linda McCartney called her while in New York for a meeting, she agreed to do lunch to get out of the Dakota and away from John’s mood. Candidly, Yoko had few female friends and had spent more time with Linda than almost anyone else. They may not have been close, longtime comrades, but they had something in common.
“The Beatles are just four men and we’re sleeping with two of them,” said Yoko, after they had finished an expensive Chianti. “What is it that we want?”
“I want the Beatles, even if they don’t,” answered Linda.
Yoko wasn’t nearly as sure. It had already been three years since her husband had announced his intention to leave the group. Staying in obviously wasn’t making him happy.
“Look, if you want to take care of John Lennon twenty-four hours a day every day, then you let him quit the Beatles,” said Linda. “I give you two months.”
Yoko could hardly argue the point, given that she was already being driven out of her mind by John’s current mood and her anger at his election night infidelity.
“Well, if we let them break up, you know the two of us will get blamed,” said Yoko as they ordered a second bottle.
Chapter Six:
BAND ON THE RUN (1973)
To Live and Let Die
1971 had been a great year for the Beatles, with the trifecta of Savile Row, The Lord of the Rings, and The Concert for Bangladesh. In 1972, the band could claim Imagine Another Day as another classic studio album, in addition to earning the Academy Award for The Lord of the Rings. In stark contrast, 1973 was not looking good at all, particularly sin
ce John Lennon had again taken the position that the end had come for the group.
“There hasn’t been a time in the last five years when John wasn’t talking about quitting,” McCartney told Australian journalist Lillian Roxon, who was writing her own drumbeat for doomsday for New York’s Sunday News. What would happen if John finally did leave, she wanted to know. “I’ll just tell everybody I quit first, and you can all write what you want.”
Given that Lennon was speaking to no one, publicly or privately, McCartney’s comment was the best the press could get. Articles continued to be written, as they had been since 1968, and the world showed no sign of tiring of the ongoing saga of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Part of the Beatles’ success was that, in an era before reality TV, they had become the genuine celebrities everyone thought they knew. Bad behavior made them that much more interesting and made their records that much more necessary to own. Even the public feud between John and Paul mesmerized fans worldwide and created some memorable music. In the moment, their enmity could seem profoundly ruinous for the survival of the group, but later, they would each act like it was all a charade the public did not understand. Some fans bought into a theory that John and Paul were still staunch friends but had created this feud to spark further record sales.
[Paul] “Next to everyone saying I was dead for a spell, I found this rumor that John and myself were just faking the whole thing to sell more albums to be a shocker. The things John said to me in public just devastated me, and yet there were people out there who just thought it was all an act. I decided it wouldn’t hurt so much if I just played along. But, no, John and I, we never talked about it as any big strategy or anything.”
No one knew more than Yoko Ono that the John Lennon everyone saw was the real thing, for better or for worse. Living with John’s issues had become more and more challenging for Yoko, and the chill between the once inseparable lovers had only deepened.
Even in the best of times, Lennon could be difficult to live with, but the upcoming second inauguration of Richard Nixon and the crushing surveillance he had brought down on the Beatles as a result, plus the ever-present immigration case, had turned Lennon’s world more sour than ever before.
[John] “I’d leave the Dakota to go somewhere and there were men in cars watching us. If we’d get picked up by a driver, these men would follow us. They weren’t even trying to hide it. They wanted us to know they were watching us. So I stopped going out.”
For months, Yoko tried to ignore the three televisions at the Dakota apartment that were always on, as well as the fact that her husband’s attention seemed perpetually focused on them and not her. John had been fascinated by a trio of breaking news stories in the past month—the final Apollo mission to the moon, the hard-to-accept ending of the Vietnam War, and the deepening of the Watergate scandal. He rarely spoke to Yoko about these events, but from time to time she would hear him talking on the phone to people whose identities she did not know.
On January 20, 1973, all three TV screens were broadcasting the same image: President Richard Nixon taking the oath of office for his second term. Lennon watched as long as he could, but when Nixon began to credit himself with “a new era of peace in the world,” he switched off all the TVs, unable to listen to another minute of the man who was making his life so difficult.
“Well, that’s that,” he said to his wife. He went into the back room, closed the door, and began to tune his guitar.
• • •
Indeed, the election had unleashed Nixon’s police state, and Watergate was in the process of making it uglier and more desperate than ever. Shortly after Nixon’s inauguration, two of his top aides—G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord Jr.—were convicted for their roles in breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Rather than shutting down operations, Nixon’s underlings were in full panic mode, trying to contain investigations that might point the finger of blame at the White House.
By now, all of the Beatles were also experiencing surveillance whenever they were in the United States and had come to believe they were being treated as “enemies of the state.” No one knew this officially, of course, but the Beatles felt it. They knew things were not right. Even Paul, a continent away, felt its presence.
[Paul] “The phone system in Scotland wasn’t that good in the first place, but during the 1972 election, we started hearing the noises. Every call sounded like it was being recorded. We started making a joke out of it. We’d get on the phone and say, ‘Hello there, Nixon people. We’re going to have a little chat with some friends, so you’ll probably want to turn on the tape recorders.’ The thing is, I think they actually did.”
On a visit to London, McCartney paid a visit to Harrison at Friar Park. Naturally, the conversation turned to Lennon and what he was thinking and doing on his New York retreat. Paul and George wondered if there was anything they could do to help him out. Maybe there was a way for the Beatles to protest about their treatment by the American government and show their contempt for the re-election of Richard Nixon. Harrison’s idea was that they should record their next official Beatles album in another country and tell the world that the group would not return to America until Richard Nixon was no longer president and the war in Vietnam had ended.
Paul and George rang up John in New York to talk about their idea but hit the familiar roadblock. “I’ve quit the Beatles for good this time, boys,” said John over the telephone. He wondered why this was not obvious.
The dynamic remained the same. Lennon seemed always poised to tear the group apart, while McCartney was ready to change and bend any way of doing business if it kept the Beatles alive. Paul thought recording the next Beatles album in another country and protesting their return to America would force the band members to work in yet another completely new way if they were to continue to play together. He dangled the magic word in front of his partner. “It’s experimental.”
“It’s daft,” Lennon replied. “I’m stuck in Nixon’s Hell, if you haven’t been paying attention. My lawyer says if I leave the country, I won’t get back in.”
It was a fair point. Both Paul and George had potential problems with drug run-ins of their own. George had a cannabis arrest on his record going back to March 1969, the one that had caused him to miss first Paul’s and then John’s wedding. Paul had an August 1972 arrest in Sweden over marijuana possession that had cost him only $2,000 but remained a part of a criminal record. Now, a year later, Scotland authorities had found marijuana plants on his property at the Mull of Kintyre. He had been convicted of illegal cultivation and fined £100.
The visas that got George and Paul into the country the year before had been granted with “special circumstance,” namely the shooting of The Hot Rock film and their appearance at the Academy Awards. They might not get so lucky again.
“So you stay in the U.S., John,” said George. “The rest of us will go someplace else.”
McCartney thought that using EMI’s many recording studios around the world might provide the inspiration necessary for the Beatles to produce yet another successful album. There was even a studio in Nigeria. “That should light up some sparks,” he reasoned.
“When I said someplace else, I wasn’t thinking of Africa,” said George, shooting down his own trial balloon.
With the energy dissipating, McCartney suggested the idea of recording the next Beatles album with each band member in a different country altogether. He called this idea A Band Apart, based on Bande à part, the 1964 New Wave film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. The French title derived from the phrase faire bande à part, or “to do something apart from the group.”
“We protest the war and all of us take a break from each other,” summarized George.
“Tell me how that could work,” demanded John. “How?”
As they argued the details, a framework emerged. Each Beatle would pick a corner of the world. With John entrenched in the United States, Paul would send his contributions in from Nigeria. Ri
ngo could work from his home-away-from-home in Monaco, the gambling capital of Europe. George would go back to India. Each band member would record tracks of their songs, pass them around at a preliminary stage, keep some, lose others. Those tracks that made the cut would be recorded under the supervision of George Martin with an individual Beatle or multiple Beatles contributing, and then master tapes would be sent around to other Beatles for their contributions.
John said it sounded like too much work but that he would think about it. He then ended the call and went back to working on his solo album.
That left Paul and George to call George Martin to get his opinion. Years later, he offered it, unvarnished.
[George Martin] “I thought it could never work. On the other hand, John and Paul were simply done with each other, again, at least temporarily. They needed space between them, and this might give them what they needed, and would keep it from becoming personal. Of course, for such a plan to have a chance, I’d have to take up residence at Savile Row, and commit Apple’s substantial resources to the task. We’d literally have to will it into existence.”
On the call, Martin stated in his usual reserve that he would do whatever the Beatles needed him to do. He thought it sounded nearly impossible. That, he concluded, also made it sound “interesting.”
• • •
If the music empire of the Beatles was interesting and complicated, their film empire was chaotic. Hollywood was never quite sure what lessons to take from 1971’s explosive hit Stanley Kubrick Presents J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Starring The Beatles. The problem could be seen in the elongated title itself. Was it Tolkien’s underlying material? Kubrick’s boldly creative director’s vision? Or the Beatles’ huge fan base and their soundtrack music?
