John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  “John said to me, ‘I thought maybe you could build this lighthouse in my garden,’ she remembers. I said, ‘It’s just an illusion, it’s not a built thing.’ He looked a bit disappointed: ‘Oh, OK—I thought the Americans had found out something we don’t have yet….’ I thought it was cute. I laughed about it. But that was just an excuse, I know. He wanted me to be somehow involved in his life, and that was one way he might have done it.”

  During these first months of 1967, however, John had little time for anything but writing and recording. The premature release of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” had taken all the steam out of the Liverpool concept album idea, leaving George Martin to wonder remorsefully forevermore how great an album it might have been. Yet the need remained to come up with something that would knock Bob Dylan’s, Brian Wilson’s, and the Byrds’ collective socks off.

  On a recent solo visit to America, Paul had been struck by the fad among West Coast rock groups for ironically long and nonsensical names: Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Pacific Gas and Electric Band. Also in his mind was swinging London’s current obsession with Victorian militaria, either picked up in original forms in Portobello Road antiques markets or mass-produced for a store chain called I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. The result was a McCartney song for the still-unfocused new album, mixing these two trends together with nostalgia for north-country brass bands and a touch of “Eleanor Rigby” melancholy; its title was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

  Not until the Beatles were developing the track at Abbey Road did their roadie Neil Aspinall finally come up that elusive “concept.” Why not record a whole album, not as themselves but under the alias of Sgt. Pepper’s band, giving it all the atmosphere and spontaneity of a live show? They had recently been amused to read that Elvis Presley was sending out his gold-plated Cadillac to tour America, confident that the same crowds would gather to view this symbol of himself as once had for his living presence. With the question still constantly in the air of when the Beatles would play live again, a make-believe theater show on record could be their own Elvis Cadillac; instead of returning to the road themselves, they could send the album.

  Keenly though they all embraced this idea, it soon bit the dust. Having recorded Paul’s overture number as Sgt. Pepper’s band with the atmosphere of a circus big top seething with excited spectators, they peremptorily abandoned their alter ego and returned to being the Beatles in real time and familiar order of precedence. A reprise of the overture near the album’s end would be their only other nod toward thematic continuity. Not that it would ever matter, as Ringo Starr later recalled: “A bunch of songs and you stick two bits of ‘Pepper’ on it and it’s a concept…. It worked because we said it worked.”

  Certainly, John’s most significant contributions had little to do with faux-Victorian fun and burlesque. They were products of yet another “trough,” as he himself termed the dives into despair and self-disgust that he took every year or so, unknown to almost everyone around him. He had emerged from one circle of Beatle hell only to find himself in another, less crazily hectic but no less arid and unfulfilling, from which the only escape seemed to lie in drugs. A few rare pieces of art turn the bleakest negatives into radiant positives, telling you life is not worth living in terms which reassure you that it is. So now from the most unpromising elements—indolence, passivity, a sense of time ticking uselessly away—John made his masterpiece.

  Lying on his undersize couch in the rear sun parlor at Kenwood, scanning newspapers and magazines with half an eye, watching almost-mute TV with the other half, he had absorbed two separate random news items. The first concerned a death among London’s innermost in-crowd, where the highest class now mingled democratically with the lowest. Just before Christmas 1966, Tara Browne, the twenty-one-year-old son of brewing heiress Oonagh Guinness and friend of the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, had inexplicably driven his Lotus sports car through a red traffic light in South Kensington, crashed into a van, and been killed. The second was a Daily Mail snippet of the “Just Fancy That” variety John had always loved. In Blackburn, Lancashire, the Borough Surveyor’s department had decided to count the number of potholes in its roads and announced there were exactly four thousand.

  Few song titles were ever more confessional: not “In My Life” or “A Day in My Life” but “A Day in the Life,” suggesting an existence almost too shameful to admit to. Here was the easily decryptable lament of someone who felt connected to reality only through newspapers and the media: reading about “the lucky man who…blew his mind out in a car”; learning only via the rushes of his own film that “the English army had just won the war”; speculating mindlessly, as in extreme stonedness or boredom, how many of the “4,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire” might equal the volume of London’s Royal Albert Hall. It was almost as if he were having an out-of-body experience, floating unseen above the wreckage of Tara Browne’s wrecked Lotus and the horrified onlookers.

  Early studio takes of “A Day in the Life” featured only Paul on piano, George on maracas and Ringo on bongos, John counting himself in by repeating “sugar plum fairy”—slang for a drug dealer. Those opening words “I read the news today oh boy,” with their huge weight of apathy, sent shivers down George Martin’s spine, as they would send shivers down spines ever afterward. He had told Martin to give him as much echo as Elvis had had on “Heartbreak Hotel”; as a result, his voice seemed to float from some cold, barren, lonely place, beyond the reach of all human help or comfort. He had written his very own “Heartbreak Hotel,” or maybe De Profundis.

  For his second great achievement on the album, he seemed to cut himself off completely from everyday things, retreating with relief into a mental hideout that for him long predated LSD. His two favorite books in all the world were still Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; indeed, using acid only sharpened his delight in the surreal fantasies that a nineteenth-century cleric apparently conjured from stimulants no stronger than weak China tea and cucumber sandwiches.

  “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” as John would later insist, was inspired by a specific scene in Through the Looking-Glass. Alice walks into a shop to find a talking sheep in a poke bonnet knitting behind the counter; then, all at once, the two of them are drifting downriver in a skiff, using the knitting needles as oars. The book’s verse epilogue also played its part: “A boat, beneath a sunny sky / Lingering onward dreamily…. / Still she haunts me, phantomwise, / Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes….” Filtered through yet another of George Martin’s electronic strainers, John’s voice took on an almost childlike quality, as if the seven-year-old who had first followed Alice into the White Rabbit’s burrow were speaking through him.

  Time being short as usual, other songs had to be improvised from any ingredients at hand. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” was suggested by a Victorian circus poster he bought in a Kentish antique shop while shooting a promotional film for “Strawberry Fields” in the grounds of a stately home called Knole. His lyric simply repeated the poster’s list of attractions, the trampolining Hendersons, “late of Pablo Fanques Fair,” the “hoops and garters and…hogshead of real fire,” adding an occasional grace note like “Henry the Horse dances the waltz.” The farmyard-themed “Good Morning, Good Morning” borrowed the slogan crowed by a cartoon rooster on Kellogg’s cornflakes packets. Though just “a throwaway” to John, it shed bitter sidelights on the Kenwood breakfast table (“…time for tea and meet the wife…”) and his own sense of intellectual sterility (“I’ve got nothing to say but it’s okay”). And of whom could he have been thinking in his obvious eagerness to be “in town…now you’re in gear…go to a show you hope she goes”?

  John was never closer to Paul than during these weeks. Though hotly competitive in songs they wrote individually outside the studio, they remained a matchless team within it, each working unselfishly
to set off the other’s latest brain wave at its best. Paul composed a piping intro for Lowry organ that established the drowsy riverbank atmosphere of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” before John had sung a word; he also contributed to the lyric, supplying “Cellophane flowers” and “newspaper taxis” to set alongside John’s “tangerine trees” and “marmalade skies.” A half-finished song in the McCartney bottom drawer became the urgent, real-world middle passage of “A Day in the Life” (“Woke up, fell out of bed…”) that is so inspired a contrast to its out-of-body languor. John and Paul together devised the lyric’s final touch: the drawn-out, syllable-stretching sigh of “I’d love to tu-u-rn you-ou-ou-ou o-o-on…” Paul remembers how at the microphone they exchanged a glance, as if to say “Should we really go on with this?” The “nice” Beatle was as sure as the “rebel” one that they should.

  Not the least of Paul’s contributions was realizing John’s typically apocalyptic but vague wish for “a sound like the end of the world” to link the song’s contrasting movements and also bring it to a climactic finish. This was achieved by a forty-one-piece symphony orchestra, playing under no directions but to go from the lowest note on their instruments to the highest—a conception worthy of Cage or Stockhausen. The recording session, on March 10, was a gala occasion, with the classical violinists and woodwind players decked out in carnival hats, red clown-noses, and gorilla-paw gloves, and Studio Two’s usually barred doors thrown open to a crowd of friends and colleagues, including Brian Epstein, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan.

  Lennon and McCartney still composed together, as in hotel rooms of old, for instance hammering out “With a Little Help from My Friends” as a vocal for Ringo (who otherwise spent most of the prodigal studio time learning to play chess). And the light and shade of their respective natures could still grab perfect harmony out of thin air. One day John happened to walk into the studio while Paul was at the mike, singing “It’s getting better…” “It couldn’t get much worse,” his partner ad-libbed in counterpoint, and the line stuck.

  Whatever John’s later opinion of Paul’s “soft” numbers, he threw his whole weight behind them now with backup vocals that remained totally faithful to their intent while adding a dash of vinegar to the honey. In “She’s Leaving Home,” his is the gently empathic voice of the parents who awake in horror to find that their daughter has eloped with the “man from the motor trade”: “We…sacrificed most of our lives…we gave her everything money could buy….” In “When I’m Sixty-four,” his responses to Paul’s George Formby-esque visions of “a cottage in the Isle of Wight” and grandchildren named Vera, Chuck, and Dave seem no less rapturous than their creator’s. “Lovely Rita” would not be half the song it is without John’s almost atonal background drone of “Lervly Rrrreeta Meetah-Maid!…” The same half-mocking, half-sleepy chorus echoes distantly in the finale of “A Day in the Life,” like the Cheshire Cat’s grin still floating in midair after every other bit of it has vanished.

  Ironically for an album that would be so much identified with LSD, the Beatles took almost no acid while making Sgt. Pepper. The sense of forging into new territory each day, and infallibly conquering it, gave a high that no drug ever could. The only lapse that John would remember happened purely by accident: one night he swallowed a tab of acid by mistake for an upper to keep him going. Later, while recording vocals for “Getting Better,” he suddenly felt overwhelming panic. George Martin noticed him looking “a bit peculiar” and suggested he got some fresh air. With fans besieging every street door, Martin had no option but to take him up onto the roof. The producer still knew nothing of mind-expanding substances, so could not understand why John should wax so ecstatic about a seemingly normal London night sky. When he rejoined the others, he had become atypically meek and reticent, telling them to carry on without him and he’d just sit and watch. It was the only time Martin ever saw him incapacitated in the studio.

  Since he was clearly in no condition to return to Weybridge, Paul took him home for the night to nearby Cavendish Avenue. Though by now also initiated into LSD (by that “lucky man,” Tara Browne, as it happened), Paul had never taken a trip with John, and decided this was the moment. John insisted that Neil Aspinall should also be there, but not turn on “in case of emergencies.” They stayed up most of the night, Paul remembers, and “hallucinated a lot…John [was] sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity…in control of it all.” Finally Paul decided to turn in, despite John’s warnings from long experience that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Sure enough, the visions pursued him into bed. Every so often, roadie Mal Evans came in like a night nurse to check that he was all right.

  For three years, Britain’s Establishment had looked on its frolicking youth culture with bemused indulgence. But by early 1967, things were starting to change. It had become clear that horrifying numbers of young people were turning on to drugs, encouraged ever more blatantly by the music they listened to and the musicians they idolized. Police forces up and down the land therefore began systematically targeting the main culprits, spurred on by savage envy of their quarries’ lifestyles and armed with draconian powers of search and entry. In February, an eighteen-strong task force raided a weekend house party given by Rolling Stone Keith Richards, from which Beatle George Harrison and his wife had departed just a few hours earlier. Richard and Mick Jagger were both charged with drug possession along with their friend, the art dealer Robert Fraser.

  Searching official scrutiny also fell on London’s underground press, whose whole raison d’être was the promotion of drug use, anti–Vietnam War protest, and sexual nonconformity. In December 1966, one of the founders of the International Times, John “Hoppy” Hopkins, was busted for possessing cannabis and subsequently jailed for nine months. The following March, John’s and Paul’s friends at IT printed an interview with the black American radical Stokely Carmichael, which included the word motherfucker. Police instantly swooped on the paper’s offices, confiscated documents and reference books (even telephone directories), and charged its editors under the Obscene Publications Act.

  To raise funds for their legal defense, a gigantic happening was held at Alexandra Palace, North London, on April 29. Billed as the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream and promising “kaleidoscopic colour and beautiful people,” the night-long mixed-media marathon featured music from bands like Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, the Move, and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, readings from poets like Christopher Logue and Michael Horovitz, films, lightshows, and the performance art of Yoko Ono. Thousands of hippies converged on the hilltop entertainment complex, paying £1 per shaggy head, and BBC television provided live coverage throughout the evening. John was watching with John Dunbar in Weybridge and on a sudden impulse decided to drive up to “Ally Pally” and take part.

  Yoko’s contribution was to have been Cut Piece, in which she sat or knelt motionless onstage while audience members cut off pieces of her dress. However, the sight of the deranged throng, ingesting everything from outsize “banana joints” to STP (a psychedelic even stronger than LSD), caused her an uncharacteristic fit of stage nerves. A female stand-in therefore did Cut Piece—with the snippers using scissors wired to an amplifier—while Yoko watched from the sidelines. John had no idea that she was there, and she did not see him. After mingling with the spectators for a few minutes, he and Dunbar retreated to the gardens outside to share a more secluded joint, then were chauffeured back to Weybridge. “Nobody told me he’d been in the place,” Yoko remembers. “People were too high, I’m sure, to care if a Beatle was there or not.”

  Throughout that portentous spring of 1967, John looked in several other directions to cure his boredom and restlessness. Just before the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, he had read that a tiny, uninhabited island off western Ireland named Dorinish was for sale at £1,700. The following day, as the culmination of an almost weeklong acid bender, he and John
Dunbar flew to Dublin, traveled by rental car to Clew Bay in County Mayo, then took a boat out to the rocky, wave-lashed outcrop that was available at such a bargain price. Fired by visions of a hippie existence close to nature, John used Dunbar’s sketchbook to draw a lighthouse-like structure, which he planned to build and inhabit, apparently alone. Dorinish duly became his, and he never set foot on it again.

  His Rolls-Royce provided another short-lived burst of enthusiasm. During the car’s visit to Almería for How I Won the War, its black paintwork had been ruined by abrasive sand particles. Prompted by Ringo, John had the idea of repainting it in psychedelic style, like a full-size gypsy wagon caravan that he had recently installed in Kenwood’s garden. Since the Rolls-Royce company itself would never commit such sacrilege, a private coachbuilder named J. P. Fallon in nearby Chertsey—where John’s chauffeur, Les Anthony, happened to live—agreed to undertake the work. The Rolls was resprayed pale yellow and its radiator covered with Art Nouveau tendrils of red and green. The side panels were decorated with rose clusters reminiscent of Aunt Mimi’s best chinaware, while John’s astrological sign, Libra, covered the roof. The final touch was a still-unusual personalized license plate, WEYBRIDGE 46676. Crowds lined Chertsey’s streets to witness Anthony collect the transformed vehicle—as many as ever flocked around Elvis’s touring Cadillac.

  For John, keeping boredom at bay required a constant turnover of people as well as things. This past year his favored sidekick had been John Dunbar, the most serious “art person” he had known since college days. Dunbar’s wife, Marianne Faithfull, had by now decamped to live with Mick Jagger and had been present at the Rolling Stones’ February drug bust. (A rumor was currently sweeping the country that, when the police arrived, Jagger had been licking a Mars bar lodged in Marianne’s vagina.)