George by contrast, despite long marinading in soft-tongued Buddha-speak, was his most bluntly charmless. “[He] insulted [Yoko] right to her face in the Apple office,” John would remember. “Just being straightforward, that game of ‘Well, I’m going to be upfront because this is what I’ve heard, and Dylan and a few people said you’ve got a lousy name in New York and you give off bad vibes.’ That’s what George said to her and we both sat through it. And I didn’t hit him, I don’t know why.”
To include all the material that had been recorded, the album would have to be in the new and still relatively unusual double-disk format. George Martin was opposed to the idea, arguing—in vain—that its several undoubtedly first-rate new songs should be arranged into a single-disk suite that would certainly be the equal of Revolver, if not quite Sgt. Pepper. The Beatles were agreed on one point at least: everything had to go in. For Martin, one track above all represented this unfamiliar spirit of indiscipline and self-indulgence. John had taken the extended finale to his original slowish performance of “Revolution” (now known as “Revolution 1”) and, with Yoko’s help, turned it into an eight-minute mélange of tape-looped sound effects, shrieks, moans, and random voices, including Yoko’s command (or warning) “You become naked.” The overall effect was rather like tuning a radio dial to a series of incomprehensible foreign radio stations. To distinguish it from its parent track, and acknowledge his approaching October birthday and overall lucky number, John called it “Revolution 9.”
As the sessions continued fitfully into the summer, Yoko discovered that she was pregnant. The timing was not good, with divorce proceedings under way against Cynthia on grounds of her alleged adultery with Roberto Bassanini, and matters between Yoko and Tony Cox, specifically over custody of Kyoko, as yet unresolved. John, however, reacted with a joy and excitement that would have brought a sour smile to Cynthia’s face, remembering his gloomy resignation before Julian’s birth back in 1963.
Ringo had always been the glue that bonded the Beatles, and so—albeit in a negative sense—it still proved. One day, he went to John with the amazing news that he wanted out. “I said, ‘I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it and you three are really close.’” he later remembered. “And John said, ‘I thought it was you three.’ Then I went over to Paul’s…and said the same thing…and Paul said, ‘I thought it was you three.’” Assuming his career as a Beatle was over, he took his family on holiday to Sardinia. The other three, genuinely mortified, put aside their conflicts with one another and sent a telegram after him: “You’re the best rock ’n’ roll drummer in the world. Come on home. We love you.” When Ringo returned to Abbey Road a few days later, he found his drum kit covered with more flowers than the Sgt. Pepper cover. The episode concentrated everyone’s minds, and from there on they buckled down until the job was finished.
On October 13, John recorded the album’s thirty-second and final song, its most individual and independent piece of work—in effect, his first-ever solo track. It was a ballad called “Julia,” after the mother he had never stopped thinking of since her death ten years before—and who had recently been conjured up afresh through the memories of old friends like Pete Shotton and Nigel Walley in Hunter Davies’s biography. Indeed, it was less song than séance, with John alone in the studio but for his acoustic guitar, his voice free of any technical distortion, speaking rather than singing to that flighty auburn-haired spirit. Grief, yearning, shyness, and self-knowledge came together in language of which any contemporary “serious” poet might have been proud: “When I cannot sing my heart / I can only speak my mind….” But in the months since he had made “Yer Blues,” anguish and fury had softened into gossamer dreaminess, the former King Lear cataracts and hurricanoes dwindled down to the softest sea-shell sigh. For Julia now had an alter-ego—Ocean Child, the English translation of the name Yoko.
Five days later, John and Yoko’s borrowed flat at 34 Montagu Square was raided by a seven-strong police task force, comprising two plainclothes detective sergeants, two detective constables, a policewoman, and two sniffer-dog handlers. At their head was Sergeant Norman Pilcher, an officer who already had several notable scalps to his credit in the war against drug-using pop stars.
It happened just before noon, as John and Yoko lay in bed together, clad only in skimpy undershirts. When Yoko refused to open the front door, the officers found their way to a rear window, which John initially tried to hold shut against them. He then agreed to admit them via the front door after warnings that otherwise it would be broken down. The sniffer-dog handlers did not have their dogs with them—the only two currently at the Drug Squad’s disposal—and there was a half hour wait while the animals were sent for. Fleet Street had been tipped off in advance about the raid, and within a few minutes a crowd of photographers were baying outside. John was allowed to make one telephone call, and phoned Neil Aspinall at Apple. “Imagine your worst paranoia,” he told Neil. “Well, it’s here.”
The bust was a shock but hardly a surprise. Some weeks earlier, John had been tipped off by an old Fleet Street friend, Don Short, that the police were out to get him. Ironically, when the raiders burst in, he and Yoko both considered themselves “very clean and drugless.” Prior to their tenancy of the flat, it had been rented to Jimi Hendrix, a musician whose epic consumption of drugs was matched by his carelessness about hiding them. John refused to move in until the whole place had been scoured for Hendrix’s leftovers, then thoroughly spring-cleaned to vacuum up the smallest residue.
Believing the Montagu Square flat to be clean, John was dumbfounded when the police told him that the two dogs, Yogi and Booboo, had found cannabis in various hiding places, such as a binoculars case, a film can, and a cigarette roller, totaling 219 grains (about half an ounce) in all. Though the substance had nothing to do with him, he reacted almost with relief, thinking of what harder stuff the raiders could have found. By the time he and Yoko arrived at Marylebone police station to be formally charged, he was back to his usual flippant self, answering as “Sergeant Lennon” when a phone call was put through from the chairman of EMI, Sir Joseph Lockwood. “It was better when it happened,” he would remember. “It [had been] building up for years. The Beatles thing was over. No reason to protect us for being soft and cuddly any more—so bust us.”
For “Sir Joe,” as John called the stately Lockwood, aghastness was only just beginning. Aside from the Beatles’ imminent double one, John had a new album of his own to be released on the Apple label and distributed by EMI. It consisted of the tapes he and Yoko had made together at Kenwood during their first night together: a miscellany of the same electronic and vocal effects that eventually made up “Revolution 9.” In a combination of Yoko’s art-catalog style and Lennon irony, it was to be called Unfinished Music No. 1—Two Virgins. As well as being its sole performers, producers, and engineers, they also furnished the image for its cover: a realization of Yoko’s “You become naked.” Using a delayed action shutter, John had photographed the two of them nude, standing together in the Montagu Square flat with their arms wrapped around each other. The back-cover shot showed them similarly in the buff but turned around and looking over their shoulders.
John’s aim, so he later said, “was to prove we are not a couple of demented freaks, that we are not deformed in any way and that our minds are healthy…. What we did purposely is not to have a pretty photograph, not have it lighted so that we looked sexy or good. There were a couple of other takes…when we looked rather nice, hid the little bits that aren’t that beautiful…. We used the straightest, most unflattering picture just to show that we were human…. We felt like two virgins because we were in love, just met, and we were trying to make something…. People are always looking at people like me, trying to see some secret. ‘What do they do? Do they go to the bathroom? Do they eat?’ So we just said ‘Here.’”
By 1968, the age-old British concept of “private parts” was fast disappearing. W
ith the end of theater censorship had come the opening of an American rock musical called Hair, its title embracing both the cranial and pubic variety, as its young, hippie-ish cast appeared full-frontally nude. But a recording artiste and his woman friend exposing themselves on an album cover was still an altogether different matter. EMI agreed to press Two Virgins but refused to have any part in marketing it, as did American Capitol. In Britain, its distribution was handled by the Who’s record label, Track, and in America by a company called Tetragrammaton. The offending picture had to be concealed under a plain brown paper cover—something, ironically, that Brian Epstein had once proposed for the Sgt. Pepper album. Even in this form, they remained vulnerable to the forces of old-fashioned prudery. Thirty thousand copies being stored in a New Jersey warehouse before shipment were seized as “obscene material” by the local police.
The Beatles’ double album was also having prerelease problems, of a less dramatic kind. Its original, Ibsenesque title, A Doll’s House, had to be dropped when a rival British band, Family, put out an album called Music in a Doll’s House. Working to that brief, Apple’s pet designer, Alan Aldridge, had planned a cover like an Advent calendar, each window opening on a different image from the songs. When Aldridge’s design proved too complex and costly for mass manufacture, the commission was handed over to the Pop artist Richard Hamilton, who encased the two discs in plain white, crookedly die-stamped with “The BEATLES” and with a serial number suggestive of some limited-edition print. Though never officially so called, the collection thus became known to posterity as the White Album.
It was, in fact, a blueprint for breakup. Track after track revealed Lennon and McCartney pursuing their own divergent paths: John with “Yer Blues,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” and “Revolution” (the slower, “count me in” version); Paul with “Martha My Dear,” an ode to his old English sheepdog, the sing-along “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the sighing “I Will,” the almost Elizabethan “Blackbird.” Yet the two could still switch personalities, and in doing so make the whole band sound united and carefree once again. Paul’s “Helter Skelter” and “Why don’t we do it in the road?” were rockers as raw as John could wish, and his “Back in the USSR,” a mixture of Chuck Berry, Soviet Russia, and the Beach Boys, was as wittily surreal. Conversely, there could not have been a more Paul-sounding track than John’s “Good Night,” a lushly orchestrated lullaby in the tradition of Jolson’s “Sonny Boy,” written for his own son Julian in who knows what burst of affection or remorse (but here vocalized by Ringo).
George Harrison’s stronger-than-usual presence was a further sign of changing times. Since Revolver, spurred on by the two super-talents he was lucky enough to play with, George had made increasing strides as a writer. Four songs on the White Album were his, the best three in different ways pointing to the same mentor. “Piggies” had John’s venom (remember “pigs from a gun”); “Savoy Truffle,” listing the flavors in a box of Good News chocolates, had John’s eye for mundane exotica; “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”—on which George brought in his own outsider, Eric Clapton, to play lead—had John’s love of exact rhymes and John’s melancholy.
The release date was November 22. As John geared up for a round of promotional appearances, Yoko’s pregnancy developed complications, and she was admitted to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in Hammersmith. Unable to be separated from her, he put on a pair of pajamas and climbed into the vacant bed next to hers, clasping her hand tightly across the gap. When the bed he had commandeered was needed by a genuine patient, he slept beside Yoko on the floor. To spare them the horrors of hospital food, Greg Sams delivered macrobiotic dishes from the Seed restaurant, while John’s actor friend Victor Spinetti smuggled in Craven A cigarettes. Yoko’s condition continued to give such cause for concern that her doctors ordered a blood transfusion. To ensure that the blood would be as wholesome as possible, she stipulated that it should come from somebody on a macrobiotic diet. Sams toured London in John’s Rolls, rounding up Seed’s half dozen best customers, of whom one proved to share her blood type. But all in vain. On November 21, she suffered a miscarriage at six months. John’s thoughts may have been dominated by his mother, but he could not stop his life running eerily in parallel with his father’s.
The White Album’s release the following day brought no sense of impending doom to the Beatles’ world public. It sold in vast quantities and received reviews, if possible, even more ecstatic than had Sgt. Pepper. The British critic and TV producer Tony Palmer wrote that Lennon and McCartney’s only songwriting peer was Schubert, unmindful that no Schubert song exactly tripped off most people’s tongues. Wherever questioned, John allowed himself more praise than for anything he had done before. “[It’s] a complete reversal from Sergeant Pepper…. The music is better for me—because I’m being meself. I’m doing it how I like it.”
On November 28, he and Yoko appeared at Marylebone Magistrates Court, charged with possessing the 219 grains of cannabis. Though no suggestion of planting evidence was ever made, the raid’s dubious circumstances had not gone unnoticed in official circles. Its main arresting officer, Sgt. Norman Pilcher, subsequently had to explain to the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, why such heavy police resources had been deployed for so very modest a haul. Pilcher replied that pop-star premises were often full of people holding “unusual parties,” implying he had expected to bust an orgy rather than a married couple in bed. It was also widely asked who had tipped off the press to arrive at exactly the same moment. There, alas, the good sergeant could shed no light.
The possession charge against Yoko was dropped, after John—in a move that was to have repercussions for him for years afterward—elected to plead guilty and take sole responsibility. “[The prosecutor] said, ‘I won’t get you for obstruction if you cop a plea,’” he remembered. “And I thought, ‘Oh, it’s a hundred dollars or whatever. It’s no skin off my nose.’ And he said, ‘I’ll let your missus go.’” Yoko being a foreign national, there was a risk that if convicted she might face deportation. The magistrates imposed a fine of £150 with 20 guineas (£21) costs. Still weak and shaken from her miscarriage, Yoko was mobbed outside the court building, one female spectator taking the opportunity to give her hair a vicious yank.
The following day Unfinished Music No. 1—Two Virgins was released in the United Kingdom, adding an unofficial charge of indecent exposure to John’s indictment. The brown paper cover had an allure long proven in the dirty book trade, and thousands rushed to buy the album, not to hear what extraordinary new sounds the Two Virgins had created on their first night together, but for a look at her tits and his dick. To modern eyes, so assailed by manipulative sexual imagery, it is hard to believe what transports of disgust and derision their self-portrait unleashed. The effect is not smutty or suggestive, but strangely innocent and vulnerable. Even at the time, an Anglican clergyman, more humane than others of his calling, was moved to quote the Old Testament’s Genesis: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”
The revelation of Yoko’s pregnancy put an end to John’s divorce petition against Cynthia for alleged adultery with Robert Bassanini. Cynthia countersued on the same grounds, citing Yoko as corespondent, and was granted an uncontested decree nisi, with custody of Julian. As a financial settlement, John first offered £75,000, the mythical “first dividend” jackpot of Littlewoods and Vernons football pools. Although advised she could claim half his assets, Cynthia could not face a drawn-out and ugly legal fight, and agreed to £100,000 (£1 million in today’s values) of which £25,000 was to buy a new house and the rest to support her and Julian until he reached twenty-one. A further £100,000 was put into a trust fund for Julian with a proviso that if John had any further children, the money would be shared with them.
At the same time, arrangements were discreetly made for Yoko’s divorce in a suitably faraway spot, the American Virgin Islands. John had not grown any less insecure where Tony Cox was concerned and, despite all Yoko’s pr
otestations, still half expected her to go back to Cox at any moment. Cox was amenable to walking away without a legal battle but expected a cash settlement for the loss in income it would entail. He accepted £6,000, plus payment of his legal expenses and a supply of macrobiotic food from the Seed restaurant. Custody of Kyoko was to be shared between her parents, although, as Cox had always done the greater share of child care, she continued living with him. “We shared custody because that was the hippy thing—sharing,” Yoko says. “Tony thought John had been an easy touch, but John could be tough over money. Once the custody thing was settled, he refused to pay Tony’s legal expenses.”
If John’s public was appalled and mystified by his new partnership, fellow musicians seemed to have much less of a problem with it. On December 11, he and Yoko took part in the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, a putative TV special transparently inspired by the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. Filmed under a circus big top with a live audience, the Stones headed a bill featuring the Who, Jethro Tull, Marianne Faithfull, and bluesman Taj Mahal in alternation with deliberately passé trapeze artists and tumblers and facetious chat by Mick Jagger in a ringmaster’s tailcoat. John, as “Winston Legthigh,” did a cross-talk act with Jagger, eating mush from a bowl with chop-sticks and reminiscing in fruity American tones: “Those were the days…I wanna hold your man….” Later—prophesying a familiar figure at political conferences and public speaking events—he announced the Stones in put-on sign language.
A more relevant prophecy was in his appearance onstage without the three musicians from whom he’d been inseparable since 1962. He performed “Yer Blues” fronting an ad hoc band called the Dirty Mac (traditional garb of the sexual pervert), comprising Keith Richard from the Stones, Eric Clapton from Cream, and drummer Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, with Yoko beside them concealed inside a black sack. For their second number, “Whole Lotta Yoko,” she came forth to scream and ululate into the microphone, accompanied by the virtuoso Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis, while John and the two guitar giants behind her just played along.
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