John read the book in a single gulp, after his usual fashion, and decided he must meet Arthur Janov and undergo primal scream therapy without delay. A few nights later, Janov was telephoned at his California home by Yoko and asked to come to England to administer the treatment. He replied that he had a busy practice and could not abandon his other patients for the sake of just one, however famous. “Then afterwards when I told my two children, they said, ‘Are you kidding? That’s John Lennon!’” Janov remembers. Since generous travel expenses were offered, he decided to make it a family trip, taking both children out of school and including his then wife and professional partner, Vivian. In the usual spirit of togetherness, John wanted Yoko to have the therapy also, so it was agreed that Vivian Janov would take charge of her.
John’s psychological state came as a profound shock to Janov. “The level of his pain was enormous…as much as I’ve ever seen. He was almost completely nonfunctional. He couldn’t leave the house, he could hardly leave his room. He had no defenses, he was decompensating [falling apart], he was just one big ball of pain. This was someone the whole world adored, and it didn’t change a thing. At the center of all that fame and wealth and adulation was just a lonely little kid.”
To maintain professional distance, Janov stayed at the Inn on the Park hotel in London, traveling down to Tittenhurst each day with his wife by chauffeur-driven limousine. While Yoko’s sessions with Vivian took place in the main house, John elected to have his in the still-unfinished recording studio, hoping its insulated walls would muffle the noises he had to make. From the title of Janov’s book, he imagined himself rolling on the floor and shrieking uncontrollably, much like teenage girls had once done for the Beatles. “He told me he didn’t know how to scream,” Janov remembers. “He’d had to ask Yoko to give him lessons.”
In fact, the sessions merely consisted of long talks with a ruggedly good-looking, curly-haired man whose quiet voice and low-key questions stripped away his past, layer by layer, almost without his realizing it. “[ Janov’s] thing is to feel the pain that’s accumulated inside you ever since your childhood,” he would later recall. “In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life—it’s excruciating…. There’s no way of describing it…what you actually do is cry. Instead of penting up emotion or pain, feel it rather than putting it away for some rainy day. It’s like somewhere along the line, we were switched off not to feel things…. This therapy gives you back the switch, locate it and switch back into feeling just as a human being, not as a male or a female or a famous person or not famous person, they switch you back to being a baby and therefore you feel as a child does….”
They talked about his abandonment, as he saw it, by his father that sunny Blackpool day in 1946 when he had been forced to choose either Mummy or Daddy. They talked about Julia, her beauty and magnetism, about his feeling that she had never fully belonged to him and that she, too, had left him just when he needed her most. They talked about the two other great tragedies in his young life, the deaths of Uncle George and Stu Sutcliffe—to both of which at the time he could respond only with hysterical laughter but which both now encouraged healthy, healing tears. They touched on the sexual feelings he had had for his mother, which to Janov squared perfectly with his choice of Yoko as a wife. “I’d had other patients with very seductive mothers who ended up with non-Caucasian wives, so as not to be too close to the incestuous thing.” They talked about Mimi (“a lot,” according to Janov): about the magnificent care and protection she had given, but her lack of the quality John craved most. “He’d had a seductive mother who was more like a girl friend, a father he viewed as just a bum, and an aunt who did the right thing by him, but who always seemed very tough and unfeeling. There had been a terrible lack of softness in his life.”
They talked, too, about Brian Epstein, the fourth and last crucial figure whom John felt had, almost neglectfully, “died on him.” “He knew Brian had adored him, and there was a lot of guilt there about the way he’d depended on Brian yet mistreated him,” Janov recalls. They talked about John’s notorious Spanish holiday with Brian in 1963 and the (to John) insignificant physical encounter that had resulted. The more Janov heard about Brian, the more he longed to have had him as a patient. “God, that was a tragic story. There was someone who needed therapy even more than John did.”
The workmen still around the studio created intermittent noise and distraction, so after a few days John suggested moving to the house and continuing the sessions around the long rustic table in the kitchen. As their talk widened from his personal history into generalities, Janov was struck by his “amazing mixture of complexity and simplicity…. He could see right into people, the way some schizophrenics can. He was all right-brain [instinctive and intuitive, not analytical]. He would say, ‘What about religion?’ and I would say something like, ‘People in pain usually seek out religion.’ And John would say, ‘Oh—God is a concept by which we measure our pain.’”
John himself believed the most important service Janov did for him was to break down “the religious myths” he had been absorbing all his life, from St. Peter’s Church Sunday School in Woolton to the Maharishi’s Indian ashram. “You are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of someone up in the sky. It’s the result of your parents and your environment. As I realized this, it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit…. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it…[I started] facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of Heaven.”
The Janovs made it a firm rule not to develop personal friendships with their patients. But they both recall the trouble that John took to make their stay in England pleasant. “While Vivian and I worked with John and Yoko, our children were sent tickets to all the best rock shows that were on,” Arthur Janov says. “One day there was some mix-up over the schedule and I had to take my son, Rick, down to Tittenhurst Park with me. John was incredibly nice to him and took him out to play Frisbee in the garden.” After three weeks, even though the treatment was not nearly over, Janov felt he could no longer neglect his patients back in America. He urged John and Yoko, and they agreed, to complete it at his Primal Center in Los Angeles that summer.
On April 1, Great Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court ruled that John’s erotic lithographs of Yoko were not liable to “deprave or corrupt” under the letter of the Obscene Publications Act. In the artist’s defense, a lithograph and a catalog of drawings by Picasso were shown to the magistrates. The prosecution was so fatuous, and the verdict so predictable, that John did not have to testify or even attend the hearing. (Three decades later, a set of the lithographs would be on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) By now, no fan or journalist in the world mistook him for a Beatle, despite Apple’s vehement protestations to the contrary. “Spring is here!” began a rather desperate press release from Derek Taylor, “and Leeds play Chelsea tomorrow and Ringo and John and George and Paul are still alive and well and full of hope. The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops, that’ll be the time to worry. Not before.”
Though the Beatles were unable to work together anymore, they still had one major unreleased product, the album recorded early in 1969 under the title Get Back. Since Glyn Johns’s failed attempt to give its voluminous tapes some coherence, the project had been in limbo—and, with it, the “Beatles at Work” documentary film directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Such waste was anathema to Allen Klein, especially with a new Capitol contract entitling him to 20 percent commission. Unfortunately, even John, his strongest advocate in the band, could not be persuaded that Get Back was other than irredeemable “shit.”
Klein’s solution was to hire Phil Spector—a producer revered as much by Paul, George, and Ringo as by John—to attempt a further remix of the album. Spector worked on th
e tapes intensively at Abbey Road Studios for several weeks, adding extra vocal and instrumental effects to what in some cases had been barely more than run-throughs. When Paul heard the first pressing, he was appalled to find both his main vocal appearances melodramatically embellished with strings, brass, and celestial choirs. He registered an angry protest, but once again was overruled by the other three. To add insult to injury, the album was retitled Let It Be after one of those “Spectorised” McCartney tracks, an elegiac ballad built on a phrase all the Beatles had grown up with, and which now seemed strangely appropriate. In Liverpool, when small boys quarreled or nursed grievances, their parents would tell them (as Mimi often had John) to “let it be.” Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary received the same name, and album and film were finally scheduled for release in April.
Outvoted, marginalized, now widely believed to be dead, Paul had suffered a drop in self-esteem more vertiginous than any of his erstwhile colleagues could have guessed. His therapy—the only kind he would ever need—was to spend time with his new baby and start making a solo album of his own. In compensation for his loss of control on Get Back/Let It Be, this was a defiantly one-man enterprise, recorded in his private studio, with every instrument played by himself, and nobody else involved but his wife, Linda, on backing vocals (for which she received the same cobilling that John now gave Yoko). Titled simply McCartney, its front cover a head shot by Linda, the album was handed to Apple Records without reference to the other Beatles or Klein, and a release date set of April 10.
The trouble was that three other Beatle-related albums had been scheduled for around the same time: Let It Be, Ringo’s Sentimental Journey, and a compilation for the American market entitled Hey Jude. Since the most obvious mutually detrimental clash was between Let It Be and McCartney, one or the other would have to be postponed. With Paul refusing to talk to Klein, and no one at Apple Records possessing real executive clout anymore, it fell to John to deal with the problem. On March 5, he handwrote a note to Paul, with George as cosignatory, announcing that they’d told EMI to put back McCartney’s release date to June 4. “We thought you’d come round when you realised the Beatles album was coming out on April 24th,” the note continued. “We’re sorry it turned out like this—it’s nothing personal. Love John and George (Hare Krishna).”
The letter was delivered to Paul at Cavendish Avenue by Ringo Starr, normally an infallible pourer of oil on troubled Beatle waters. But this time, even Ringo’s emollience had no effect. Paul, understandably, could not bear his precious solo debut to be elbowed aside, particularly by a Beatles album containing work of his that he felt had been mutilated. His long self-schooling as Mr. Nice Guy forgotten, he lost his temper and ordered poor, blameless Ringo out of the house. Ringo, that unchangeable Mr. Nice Guy, returned to John and George and talked them into backing down. McCartney kept its April 10 release date while Let It Be, the album and film, were pushed back to May.
It says much about his demoralized state of mind that the Beatles’ former tireless PR man now shrank from doing media interviews on his own behalf. Instead, press copies of the McCartney album came with a printed Q & A sheet, put together in consultation with Derek Taylor, which vented all the resentments and frustrations of recent months and finally confirmed what had been so long suspected.
Q: Will Paul and Linda become a John and Yoko?
A: No, they will become a Paul and Linda….
Q: What do you think about John’s peace effort? The Plastic Ono Band? Giving back the MBE? Yoko’s influence? Yoko?
A: I love John and respect what he does—it doesn’t give me any pleasure.
Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
A: No….
As he would later explain: “I couldn’t just let John control the situation and dump us as if we [were] the jilted girlfriends.”
Just before the release of McCartney, he telephoned John and announced, “I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing and putting out an album. And I’m leaving the group, too.” John’s initial response was relief, that this most stubborn resuscitator of the band was finally giving up. If he felt anger with anyone, it was with himself for having heeded those appeals to his team spirit and kept his own exit under wraps so effortfully for so long. Now Paul had stolen the headlines yet again by grandly exiting a stage that John—and George and Ringo, too—had quietly left six months earlier. “[Paul] just did a great hype. I wanted to do it and I should have done it. I thought, ‘Damn, shit, what a fool I was.’…I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record.”
After all its travails, the Let It Be film won an Oscar, and a Grammy for best original music sound track, while the album went to number one in both the United Kingdom and the United States, eventually spending more than a year on the charts. To John, there was never any doubt that Phil Spector had been its savior. “If anybody listens to the bootleg version…, which was pre-Spector, and listens to the version Spector did, they would shut up—if you really want to know the difference. The tapes were so lousy…that none of us would go near them. They’d been lying around for six months. None of us could face remixing them, it was terrifying. But Spector did a terrific job.”
In interviews, he repeated that the breakup had been inevitable, that no one person or thing had been to blame, and that the worldwide mourners should keep a sense of proportion. “The Beatles were disintegrating slowly after Brian Epstein died, it was slow death and it was happening. It’s evident on Let It Be although Linda and Yoko were evident then, but they weren’t when we started it. It was evident in India when George and I stayed there and Ringo left. It was evident on the White Album. It’s just natural. It’s not a great disaster. People keep talking about it as if it’s the end of the earth. It’s only a rock group that split up. It’s nothing important….
“It takes a lot to live with four people over and over for years and years, which is what we did. We’d called each other every name under the sun…. We’d been through the mill together for more than 10 years. We’d been through our therapy together many times…It’s just that you grow up. We don’t want to be the Crazy Gang or the Marx Brothers being dragged onstage playing ‘She Loves You’ when we’ve got asthma and tuberculosis and when we’re fifty.”
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BEATLEDÄMMERUNG
Our job is to write for the people now.
In May 1970, John finally managed to get back into America. After long negotiations with the U.S. Embassy in London, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) waived the visa ban in force since his British drug conviction eighteen months earlier. Accompanied only by George and Pattie Harrison (and using the alias Chambers), he was permitted to fly to Los Angeles, then on to New York for business meetings with Capitol Records and Allen Klein. In July, he was again granted admittance to return to L.A. with six-months-pregnant Yoko for their second course of primal scream therapy under Arthur Janov.
Janov had warned that, to be effective, the therapy must proceed uninterruptedly for between four and six months—and in John’s case might take even longer. He and Yoko came fully prepared for this, clearing their joint schedule of all commitments until September and renting a house in the film-star colony of Bel Air. They attended the Primal Center almost daily, continuing their respective one-on-one sessions with Arthur and Vivian Janov and also joining in group discussion and self-exploration with other patients.
Aware how beadily the eyes were trained on him, John kept a low profile, giving no media interviews, avoiding anyone who might drag him into compromising headlines. One exception was Jann Wenner, twenty-four-year-old editor and publisher of San Francisco’s Rolling Stone magazine. Wenner was emerging as John’s doughtiest press champion: Rolling Stone had reproduced the Two Virgins album cover in the teeth of American conservative outrage, sympathetically reviewed every John-and-Yoko album, and backed their peace campaign to the hilt. Now he wanted John to do one of the extended interviews for whic
h his magazine was noted. That quest had already taken him to Britain, but, in the dark days just before meeting Janov, John could not contemplate such an idea. When Wenner arrived at Tittenhurst Park, Yoko said his prospective interviewee was “too paranoid” even to come downstairs and meet him.
Hearing that John and Yoko were receiving treatment at the Primal Center, Wenner invited them up to San Francisco for a weekend and gave them their first real tour of the city that first made peace a global buzzword. With Wenner’s wife, Jane, they also saw an afternoon showing of Let It Be in an almost empty cinema. “After the show—moved at whatever level, either as participants or deep fans—we somehow cried,” Wenner would remember.
Five or six more weeks with Arthur Janov convinced John that primal scream therapy was the Answer that neither God, rock ’n’ roll, nor the Maharishi had been able to give him. And, as usual, he felt a need to share his feeling of redemption with the whole world. “He came to me and said he wanted to take out a full-page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle, saying, ‘This Is It,’” Janov remembers. “I told him as politely as possible, ‘John, this stuff is serious. It doesn’t live or die on the approval of a rock musician.’”
Then, early in July, he suddenly announced that the INS was harassing him for overstaying his time, and he would have to leave America forthwith. He asked if Janov would assign him a personal therapist to continue his course in Mexico. “Just then, I had 5,000 applicants for treatment. I couldn’t possibly spare anyone from my staff to go off with him like that,” Janov says. “So the therapy had to end at what was a crucial point for John. We’d opened him up but we hadn’t had time to put him back together again. A lot more work needed to be done to get right down to the root of his anger. I estimated it would take at least another year.”
John Lennon: The Life Page 74