John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  Sadly, rock festivals could no longer boast their impressive record of nonviolence. On December 6, at a free concert by the Rolling Stones in Altamont, California, Hell’s Angels “stewards” had attacked spectators with pool cues, and a young black man been knifed to death a few feet from the stage. Undeterred, the organizers of the Toronto rock-’n’-roll festival were planning a follow-up event, “bigger than Woodstock,” to take place in Mosport Park, Montreal, over two days the following July. To distance it from the ugliness at Altamont, John’s participation was clearly a sine qua non. He agreed to make it in effect the John Lennon Peace Festival and, despite the imminence of Christmas, flew to Canada with Yoko on their third visit in six months to join in the planning.

  Their first stop was Toronto, where they stayed on a ranch belonging to the veteran rock-’n’-roller Ronnie Hawkins. Hawkins and his wife, Wanda, gave up their marital bed, and chefs were brought in to provide macrobiotic meals. “Despite the diet, I caught John and Yoko down at the fridge a couple of times in the middle of the night, having a quick slice of bologna,” Hawkins remembers. There had been thick falls of snow and, between conferences with the festival organizers, John spent hours dashing around the ranch on a six-wheeled open buggy called an Amphicat. As well as a depleted fridge, the Hawkinses were left with a collapsed living-room ceiling after their guests’ bath overflowed.

  To the reporters who dogged his every step, John repeated the mocking mantra that great world leaders like President Nixon were frightened of the acorn peace symbols he and Yoko had wanted to give them. Inevitably there were fresh waves of questions about his future with the Beatles and relationship with Paul, George, and Ringo. Still keeping his promise, he said he was merely “on holiday” from the band and there was no dissent between him and the other three, least of all over his peace crusade. “George is as big a peacenik as I am. Paul’s the same on a more intellectual level—and Ringo’s a living acorn.”

  He dismissed any idea that he was setting himself up as a figurehead, either for antiwar activists or insurgent youth. “I’m not a leader; I’m just John Lennon who happens to think this way.” And if President Nixon’s doors remained barred, other eminent “squares” were lining up behind Desmond Morris to acknowledge the extraordinary, and undeniably positive, influence he wielded. Before leaving Toronto, he and Yoko had a meeting with Marshall McLuhan, guru of the new science of communications, whose famous axiom “the medium is the message” might have been coined especially for them. Why choose Canada as their arena rather than London, McLuhan asked. “Whenever we’ve done anything, we’ve done it out of London, ’cause they don’t take it seriously in England,” John replied. “They treat us like their children…. ‘It’s that mad, insane guy,’ you know. ‘He should be tap-dancing on the Palladium rather than talking about war and peace.’”

  McLuhan observed that in the eyes of America’s government—especially the new Republican one personified by Nixon—anyone who inspired dissent on the scale that John did risked being branded “a long-haired communist.” “In Europe, it’s a joke, you know,” he replied, little dreaming how carefully his words were being monitored over the nearby border, nor how they would one day come back to haunt him. “I mean, we laugh at America’s fear of communists. It’s like, the Americans aren’t going to be overrun by communists. They’re going to fall from within, you know.”

  The climax of the four-day visit was a train journey to Ottawa on December 23 for a fifty-minute audience with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, at that time the youngest and hippest leader on the world stage. John was consumed with nerves beforehand and, as if at Aunt Mimi’s invisible prompting, wore a formal dark suit and tie. Trudeau proved to be a fan of his books as much as of Beatles music, and promised full support for the Montreal Peace Festival. Later, John commented drily that his only contact with Britain’s prime minister Harold Wilson had been a photo-op handshake at an awards ceremony in 1964.

  New Year’s Day 1970 found him and Yoko in Allberg, northern Denmark, where Yoko’s ex-husband, Tony Cox, was now living with Kyoko and a new Texan girlfriend named Melinda. The four spent almost a month together, in apparently perfect domestic harmony. A kitten named Miso was acquired for Kyoko, and John took special pains to prepare fish meals without bones that might stick in its throat. During their stay, he and Yoko both had their hair shorn down to matching crew cuts to mark what they dubbed “Year One for Peace.” John also abandoned his Old Testament beard in favor of a bristly, jaw-hugging model that restored the animation to his face, if never quite its old derisive smile. The symbolism was obvious: the Sixties were behind him, as unmourned as sweepings around a barber’s chair.

  He expected his Aunt Mimi to be pleased after all the years she had harangued him to get his hair cut. Instead, Mimi was appalled by what she called a “horrible skinhead style” and declared it was “too short.”

  If the Beatles or the Sixties had a message,” John would later say, “it was learn to swim. Period. And once you learn to swim, swim. The people who are hung up on the Beatles’ and the Sixties’ dream missed the whole point when the Beatles’ and the Sixties’ dream became the point. Carrying [it] around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That’s not to say you can’t enjoy Glenn Miller or the Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone.”

  Certainly the dawn of the new decade found him swimming at top speed into waters he had once thought way out of his depth. The previous year, his art adviser, Anthony Fawcett, had suggested he try his hand at creating lithographs, which could be both exhibited and sold in a limited edition. To save him the art-college drudgery of etching onto stone blocks, Fawcett supplied special drawing paper from which more patient hands could transfer his work onto sensitized zinc. By this method he had produced fourteen images, some of recent milestone events like his wedding and the Amsterdam bed-in, others erotic studies of a nude, recumbent Yoko. Three hundred sets were produced at £550 apiece, all signed by John, embossed with a personalized red seal, or “chop,” after the practice of Japanese artists, and packed in a white holdall inscribed BAG ONE.

  The lithographs went on show at the London Arts Gallery on January 15, before John and Yoko had returned from Denmark. There would be further exhibitions at the Galerie Denise Renée in Paris and at the Lee Nordness Gallery, New York, where Salvador Dalí attended the private view with a pet ocelot on a leash. In London, they had been on display barely twenty-four hours when uniformed police strode in and confiscated the eight Yoko nude studies (“arresting pieces of paper,” John called it) on grounds of an alleged complaint from a member of the public. Legal action was then taken against the gallery under the Obscene Publications Act. It was a ludicrous exercise; the images were not in the least obscene but skillful, tasteful, and rather touching, albeit adorned with forbidden bouquets of pubic hair. The result was to win huge publicity for Bag One and elevate John to the company of persecuted erotic geniuses from Gauguin to Aubrey Beardsley.

  He had made up his mind that nothing in the seventies would be as before, least of all the process of making records. On January 27, he telephoned George Harrison (with whom his relationship still remained good despite everything) and asked him to join yet another mission for the Plastic Ono Band. The idea was to change the traditional slow, painstaking lithography of Beatles studio sessions and postproduction into an impulsive lightning sketch. “[John]…said ‘I’ve written this tune and I’m going to record it tonight and have it pressed up and out tomorrow,’” George would recall. “‘That’s the whole point—Instant Karma, you know.’”

  Klaus Voormann had also been summoned to Abbey Road’s Studio Three that night, along with drummer Alan White and Billy Preston to play electric piano. “When I arrived, there was this little American guy in the control room, very busy, twiddling knobs and telling Alan, ‘Turn your cymbal up,’” Voormann remembers. “No one had told me who was producing the session and I didn’t know who this busy lit
tle guy was, except that on his shirt were the letters PS.”

  It was none other than Phil Spector, the first producer in pop history to become more famous—or, in his case, infamous—than the artistes he put on record. Since the mid-Sixties, Spector’s legendary Wall of Sound had been all but washed away by the successive tides of psychedelia and folk rock. After the failure in America of his masterpiece, Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High,” he had closed his Philles record label, married the lead singer in his girl group, the Ronettes, and been reduced to taking small film parts, like the drug dealer in Easy Rider. Even so, he was top of John’s wish list to mark the break from George Martin and all things Beatlesh. They had not met since 1964, when Spector had been among the copassengers on the Beatles’ first flight to America. However, Allen Klein knew him well and had no difficulty in bringing him to London for what would be as significant a fresh start for him as for John.

  “Instant Karma” was in the minimalist, sing-along style John had developed with the Plastic Ono Band, similar to “Cold Turkey” in tempo but far more relaxed and humorous. Indeed, one of the effects of Spector’s production was to give his voice a taut expressiveness it had not had since “Norwegian Wood.” The idea was quintessential Lennon—the age-old Buddhist law of cause and effect turned into something as modern and synthetic as instant coffee and, simultaneously, into a bogey under the stairs that can get you if you don’t watch out. Its warning, couched in the hippie catchphrase of the moment, was obviously not to be taken literally: “You better get yourself together / Or pretty soon you’re gonna be dead….” The chorus returned to peace campaigning and nonviolent, optimistic togetherness. Henceforward, any group of young dissidents, menaced by batons or water cannons, could draw strength and unanimity from its chant of “We all shine on / Like the moon and the stars and the sun.”

  The track was finished in just ten takes, with background vocals provided by Yoko, Mal Evans, and several complete strangers who, on a sudden whim of John’s, had been rounded up at Hatchetts, a West End club. It was released on Apple just six days later, with PLAY LOUD printed across the label. (The B-side, a Yoko vocal called “Who Has Seen the Wind?” was inscribed PLAY QUIET.) It went to number five in the United Kingdom and number three in America, becoming the first single by a solo Beatle to sell a million copies there. As John played it on BBC-TV’s Top of the Pops, Yoko sat beside him, wearing a white blindfold and knitting.

  This new epoch also saw John’s one-man crusade on behalf of the oppressed and disadvantaged increasingly focus on those rendered so by the color of their skins. It was perhaps the greatest of all mental turnarounds for someone raised on the idea of black people as comical inferiors, who not long since had been getting laughs at the expense of “Negroes” and “Mister Wabooba.” Part of the reason was the vicious racism that underlay so much public hostility to Yoko. A significant part was the rise of America’s militant Black Power movement and the emergence of highly articulate and literate demagogues like Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. Nearer home there was the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, a member of the British Commonwealth, which, despite growing condemnation and isolation, continued to send its all-white national sports teams on overseas tours. In February, heavy fines were imposed on a group of antiapartheid protesters who had disrupted a rugby match between a Scottish side and the South African Springboks the previous December. All the fines were paid by John.

  The gesture inevitably brought him into the sights of Britain’s nascent Black Power movement and its chief spokesman, Michael Abdul Malik, aka Michael X. Born Michael de Freitas in Trinidad, Malik had dominated black politics in Britain since the mid-Sixties, converting to Islam in emulation of his American counterparts and styling himself X after their charismatic young leader Malcolm X, who had been assassinated in 1965. A would-be writer and poet and a dedicated social climber, Michael X was adept at raising funds from affluent whites by playing on their guilty liberal consciences. This gambit paid off handsomely when he approached John and Yoko for money to support the Black House, a welfare center for delinquent teenagers that he ran in Holloway, North London. He announced that the Beatles’ music had “stolen the rhythms of black people,” and it was payback time. A remorseful John offered him an advance to write a book called A Black Experience and also agreed to help fund a soup kitchen at the Black House.

  After John and Yoko’s drastic barbering in Denmark, they had gathered up all their shorn hair and brought it home with them. Now they presented it to Michael X, to be divided into small portions, put into boxes, and sold in aid of the Black House. He in return gave them a pair of bloodstained boxing trunks allegedly belonging to another celebrity pal, Black Power Islam’s most famous convert, Muhammad Ali. They made an appearance together on ITV’s Simon Dee Show, and John was seen around the Black House so much that he took to calling it “Black Apple.”

  His major commitment in the first half of 1970 was to have been the two-day Montreal Peace Festival in July. With his personal endorsement, the festival promised to out-Woodstock Woodstock several times over. An audience of between one and two million was projected, to hear a roster of performers headed by John and some if not all of his fellow Beatles, plus Bob Dylan, even possibly the resurgent Elvis Presley. There was talk of a stage shaped like a giant bed, commemorating John and Yoko’s bed-ins, and of a “peace vote” in which every festivalgoer would register opposition to the Vietnam War.

  But by spring, the epic project had hit trouble. Though initially content for the promoters to charge reasonable admission—as several previous festivals had without detracting from their mystique—John suddenly changed his mind and insisted it must be free. With commercial sponsorship of rock events still unknown and merchandising only in its infancy, that virtually guaranteed a horrendous financial loss. In addition, Montreal’s city council had vetoed Mosport Park as a site, and no alternative had yet been found. The last straw was the involvement of two wacky friends of Tony Cox’s, who announced that, to vary the musical program, real flying saucers would land. John pulled out, and the festival was canceled forthwith.

  He and Yoko were both still struggling to stay off heroin, a relatively easy task amid bed-ins and prime-ministerial summit conferences when every moment brought its own “rush,” but harder now they had time on their hands. During March, the journalist Ray Connolly met up with them in London, while Yoko was briefly an inpatient at a Harley Street clinic. “She’s a junkie, you know,” John told a startled nurse who came in with some medication. Connolly deduced that they were both taking the heroin substitute methadone and that, for John at least, the rigors of cold turkey were being alleviated by his new connection to the Black Power movement. During the journalist’s increasingly off-the-record visit, Michael X arrived with a friend, bringing a large plastic bag of marijuana hidden in a suitcase. However, even Connolly did not cop the next printable Lennon headline, nor did anyone in Fleet Street. On March 29, John sent a telephone message of support to eight thousand people taking part in a nuclear-disarmament rally in East London. In the course of it, he revealed that Yoko was pregnant again.

  Sharing one’s history is a part of any new relationship, all the more necessary if the partners come from widely different cultures. But with John and Yoko, the process was almost entirely one-sided. After months together, he still knew almost nothing of Yoko’s early years in Japan, the privileged loneliness of her life surrounded by genuflecting servants, or the wartime hardships when she was left virtually alone to fend for two younger siblings as well as herself. She, on the other hand, knew every twist and turn of his infancy in gray, bomb-torn Liverpool: how his father had disappeared from his life when he was six, and his mother, Julia, had handed him over to Aunt Mimi, then gone on to have two children out of wedlock with John “Twitchy” Dykins.

  More than anything else, he talked about Julia: how beautiful, fascinating, and funny she was, how she had stayed close to him throughout his boyhood
yet never properly been “his,” and what a horrendous gap had been torn in his eighteen-year-old life when a car knocked her down just yards from Mimi’s front gate. To the unshockable Yoko he repeated a confession that had only ever slipped out once before, in conversation with his “Richmal Crompton woman,” Maureen Cleave. “He told me that when he was in his teens, he sometimes used be in Julia’s room with her when she had a rest in the afternoon. And he’d always regretted he’d never been able to have sex with her…. “At that point, I didn’t know that he needed so much therapy as he did. I knew there was a crazy side of him, but I was like Peggy Guggenheim—thinking Jackson Pollock is great because he’s crazy. At the opening of his show, Pollock would pee all over his painting or something. I didn’t think of John as someone who should be boxed in and get therapy. I thought that fame had relieved the pressure for him a little bit. But that Liverpool childhood was still very scary for him.”

  One late-March morning, the post brought a bulky packet from the American publishers G. P. Putnam’s Sons. It was a new book by a California therapist named Arthur Janov, which Putnam’s was circulating to various big names, hoping to garner some prepublication endorsements. Its title was The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, the Cure for Neurosis. When John saw the first three words, he instantly thought of Yoko’s vocal technique. “He passed me over this book,” she remembers, “and said ‘Look…it’s you.’”

  Janov’s thesis was that almost all neurotic behavior derived from the traumas of childhood. Adults who had been denied the child’s basic, crying need for love, security, and attention tended to blot out the memory, finding apparent consolation in the sweets of adulthood—fame, wealth, or sex. But as long as those long-ago, unfulfilled needs were suppressed, their behavior remained essentially unreal and thus prone to neurosis in every form. Primal scream therapy was designed to break down “the force of years of compressed feelings and denied needs” by taking the patient back to childhood to confront the pain, articulate it as “primally” as babies do on first leaving the snug womb for the cold world, and so finally be cleansed of it.