John Lennon: The Life

by Philip Norman

  The solution was to employ a new therapist: himself. After his first sessions with Janov, he had begun work on a new batch of songs. These were polished, and new ones added, during his time at the Primal Center, and the minimum complement for an album—eleven tracks—finished off after his premature return to Britain. He had often written lyrics about himself, from “Help!” to “A Day in the Life,” but always hitherto cloaked their message in poetic imagery or punning wordplay. Now all that seemed part of the repression that primal scream therapy sought to break down. “I had to look into my own soul,” he would recall. “I wasn’t looking at it from a mystical perspective…or from a psychedelic perspective or being-a-famous-Beatle perspective or making-a-Beatle record perspective…. This time, it was just me in a mirror.”

  The result was his first named solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, recorded at Abbey Road Studios during September and October 1970. The Plastic Ono lineup this time was minimal, as if only trusted friends and colleagues could be allowed to hear the confessions in their raw state: Klaus Voormann on bass and Ringo Starr on drums, plus occasional keyboard contributions from Billy Preston. Production was credited jointly to Phil Spector, John, and Yoko, with Yoko receiving an additional credit for “wind.” At the same time, Yoko made an album of her own with the same musicians, to be released alongside John’s.

  For the very first time, he was singing on his own, without backup harmonies or any of the sonic embellishment and distortion he habitually used with the Beatles. “It used to get a bit embarrassing in front of George and Paul,” he would recall, “’cause we know each other so well: ‘Oh, he’s trying to be Elvis, oh he’s doing this now,’ you know…. So we inhibited each other a lot. And now I had Yoko there and Phil Spector there, alternately and together, who sort of love me, okay, so I [could] perform better. And I relaxed. The looseness of the singing was developed on ‘Cold Turkey’ from the experience of Yoko’s singing—she does not inhibit her throat.”

  The opening song went straight to the core of his deepest-seated misery: it was called simply “Mother.” By way of introduction, a church bell tolled slowly and sonorously, a summons to mourning rather than festivity. Though John had copied it from an old Hammer horror film, no sound was more evocative of the years that Janov’s therapy had forced him to relive. That slow, ominous chime might have been from St. Peter’s in Woolton, echoing through the silent winter Sunday evenings of his boyhood.

  The lyric was a blunt accusation leveled at both the parents, whom he believed had so grievously failed him: one by giving birth to him, then giving him away; the other by walking out on him when he was a toddler. “Mother, you had me / But I never had you…. Father, you left me / But I never left you.” The purpose of the song was what no one yet called closure—a final, liberating good-bye to the bewitching redhead who had loved him, but never quite enough, and the sailor who had always seemed to prefer the sea. Its ending was a repeated scream of panic that might have come from John’s six-year-old self that sunny day in Blackpool when Julia and the father then known as Alf had forced him to choose between them: “Mama, don’t go…Daddy, come home!”

  The whole album was the same mixture of dam-bursting anger and haunting vulnerability. In contrast to the blind terror of “Mother,” “Hold On” was a reassurance to Yoko, humanity in general, but, above all, himself, that “It’ll be all right…we’re gonna win the fight.” “I Found Out” bitterly ticked off every nostrum he had ever tried, from “dope and cocaine” back through “Hare Krishna” and hippiedom’s “brother, brother, brother” even unto wanking. “Isolation” owned up to the fear that he and Yoko often felt as “a boy and a little girl, trying to change the whole wide world,” while “Remember” reflected that, however bad things might get, at least he was no longer small. “Look at Me” echoed his demand to Yoko that she must never for one second lift her attentive, adoring gaze from him. “Love” was haiku-brief (“Love is touch / Touch is love”) sung in the wistful, fragile voice only previously used for “Julia” on the White Album—John with all his defenses down.

  After “Mother,” the most notable track, both for its self-lacerating emotion and its selectiveness with history, was “Working Class Hero.” This one was squarely aimed at Aunt Mimi, Mendips, and the strainingly aspirant middle-class world that had put his childhood on terra firma but also, he now thought, destroyed his self-confidence and joie de vivre beyond rescue.

  To repudiate this part of the past, he had turned to a genre he used to despise and written a folk song. He performed it alone with acoustic guitar, talking rather than singing the perfectly scanned rhyming triplets, resurrecting deprivations and grievances of twenty years ago (but forgetting the security, good cooking, and ample pocket-money): “As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small…They hurt you at home and they hit you at school…” Big business and the military each received a swipe, as did even the Sixties generation and their mirage of being “clever and classless and free.” But his iciest contempt was reserved for himself, as the fraudulent apotheosis of working-class “heroism” and dubious exemplar for all who aspired to it: “If you want to be a hero, well just follow me.” He also did for pop albums what Kenneth Tynan had done for television four years earlier, premiering the F word not once but twice. Such was the virulence of every other word, it barely stood out.

  His ad-lib to Arthur Janov, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” triggered the climactic rite of renunciation in a song simply titled “God.” Paradoxically framed in a slow gospel style, like the Anglican Creed in reverse, came a roll call of every once-awesome power he no longer believed in, Magic, I Ching, Bible, tarot, Hitler, Jesus, Kennedy, Buddha, mantra, Gita, yoga, kings, Elvis, Zimmerman [Bob Dylan], and finally, with almost audible nausea, Beatles. Spleen turned to softness again as he contemplated what was left: “I just believe in me / Yoko and me / And that’s reality.” The ending was a belated farewell to the world’s Beatlemaniacs, apologetic, a little sad even, but irrevocable: “I was the Walrus but now I’m John / And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on. The dream is over.”

  It might have seemed impossible for him to twist the knife in himself anymore, but he did. The album’s final, fragmentary track, “My Mummy’s Dead,” transposed his 1958 heartbreak into a nursery rhyme, sung in the voice of a dazed child and strummed on a tinny guitar that might have been the very Gallotone Champion Julia saved up to buy him. The broken words—“I can’t explain…so much pain”—were like some psychic message; indeed, his handwriting in the original lyric has the jaggedly chaotic look of dictation from beyond the grave.

  Like meditating in times past, the technique he had learned from Janov became part of daily life, converted into a verb: to primal. For Yoko, one positive effect was to curb his jealousy and possessiveness toward her. “If we were in bed and he’d start to accuse me of this and that, ‘Why were you looking at that guy, why were you smiling at him?’ he’d say ‘Give me a pillow’ and start to punch it…. It became a ritual for him to scream and shout. Then he’d immediately realise he was not angry at me but at something that happened long before he met me.”

  Yoko’s baby was due in October, around the time of John’s thirtieth birthday. They had stayed free of heroin and, with their cleaner and less frantic lifestyle of recent months, had every reason to hope this second pregnancy would be successful. Then, late one August night, an ambulance was called to Tittenhurst Park to rush Yoko to King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill, Dulwich. John went with her, and became so concerned by the bumpiness of the ride that a mile or so down the road he made the driver stop, then telephoned Les Anthony to bring the Rolls. As before, doctors ordered a blood transfusion, and Anthony had to round up donors whom Yoko considered trustworthy, like the disc jockey John Peel. But a couple of days later, she miscarried again. John was told that his sperm count could be part of the problem.

  Janov had been uneasy at halting John’s therapy before his reawakene
d anger over his early childhood could be fully laid to rest. The awful extent of this was revealed when, late in September, after an interval of more than a year, he heard from his father. Unconsciously adding insult to ancient injury, Freddie Lennon was no longer a rootless embarrassment but settled and happy with his young wife, Pauline, in the rent-free house provided by John in Brighton. After one miscarriage, Pauline had given birth to a son, David, granting Freddie an unexpected second try at fatherhood at the age of fifty-seven. His potential as a breadwinner being limited, Pauline went out to work while he—eerily foreshadowing his son’s future role—looked after the baby, did the cooking, and ran the home. The arrival of a half brother had not seemed to interest John, however, and his always irregular letters ceased soon afterward.

  Now Freddie had conceived the idea of writing his autobiography, and wanted John’s consent to begin work. He knew John had been receiving some kind of therapy but had no idea how crucially his own life story figured therein, as also in the album being screamed and sobbed out in group sessions with the Plastic Ono Band. The encouraging response was an invitation to pay his first visit to Tittenhurst Park, with Pauline and eighteen-month-old David, on John’s thirtieth birthday, October 9. Unaware that John had grown a beard since their last meeting, he took along a gift of aftershave lotion.

  Freddie’s hopes of a pleasant birthday reunion were soon dashed. On arrival at Tittenhurst, he and Pauline were stopped in the driveway as if they were trespassers and, their bona fides established, made to wait in the kitchen. When John finally appeared, he was utterly changed from the generally friendly, sympathetic person Pauline had known at Kenwood. His face, she recalls, was pale and haggard, the pupils of his eyes were contracted behind his granny glasses, his unfamiliar beard gave him the appearance of “a wild and primitive warrior,” and he barely seemed to notice his new half brother playing on the floor. What happened next Freddie would later describe in a four-page handwritten statement, which he then deposited for safekeeping with his solicitor. Though highly melodramatic in tone, it is corroborated in every detail by Pauline:

  …[John] launched into an account of his recent visit to America, and as the story unfolded, so the self inflicted torture began to show in his face, and his voice rose to a scream as he likened himself to “Jimi Hendrix” and other Pop Stars who had recently departed from the scene, ending in a crescendo as he admitted he was “Bloody Mad, Insane” and due for an early demise. It seemed he had gone to America, at great expense to have some kind of treatment through drugs, which enabled one to go back and relive from early childhood the happenings, which in his own case, he should have been happier to forget. I was now listening to the result of this treatment as he reviled his dead Mother in unspeakable terms, referring, also, to the Aunt who had brought him up, in similar derogatory terms, as well as one or two of his closest friends. I sat through it all, completely stunned, hardly believing that this was the kind considerate “Beatle” John Lennon talking to his Father with such evil intensity. But much worse was to follow, I had cause to restrain my Wife in her efforts to defend me, as I had perceived that she was only adding fuel to the fire, for I was by now, convinced he would do us an injury if we tried to thwart in any way, his evil intentions. It was when I once more alluded to the fact, that I had never asked him for financial help, and was quite prepared to manage without it, that he flew into another abominable outburst, and accused me of using the “Press” to force him to help me, and that, if I were to do so again, particularly about our present discussion, he would have me “done In.” There was no doubt whatsoever in my mind, that he meant every word he spoke, his countenance was frightful to behold, as he explained in detail, how I would be carried out to sea and dumped, “twenty—Fifty—or perhaps you would prefer a hundred fathoms deep.” The whole loathesome tirade was uttered with malignant glee, as though he were actually participating in the terrible deed. The week following this nightmarish interview with my son, furnished proof beyond doubt, that, not content with terminating the weekly allowance, he had already begun proceedings, to force me from the house we were living in, which I had presumed was already in my name, and was even prepared to pay for. This sort of action, I could fight, but the threat, left me with no other alternative than to leave this full account with my Solicitor to be opened only if I should disappear or die an unnatural death.

  Signed:

  Freddie Lennon

  By then, Freddie had received a letter from Apple, demanding that he sign a deed to transfer the Brighton house back to John. Also enclosed was his National Insurance card, which he had thought Apple was keeping supplied with regular contribution stamps. It bore not a single stamp, making him liable for some £300 in arrears. The lodging of the statement with his solicitor (and notification to John that he had done so) was no mere dramatic flourish. As Pauline recalls, he was genuinely in fear of his life—and so was she, given John’s recent highly publicized association with dubious characters like Michael X. That threat of a watery grave was particularly terrifying because, as Freddie now confessed, in all his years at sea, he had never learned to swim.

  The couple were not destitute, thanks to Pauline’s work as a freelance translator and a recent win of £2,500 in the football pools. Shortly afterward, John relented a little, offering them £500 to help pay for fixtures and furnishings at a new flat in Brighton. This was on condition Freddie sign back the house, gave no further interviews to the press, and sent his statement about the Tittenhurst meeting to Apple to be destroyed (which he did, while keeping a photocopy). He and John were never to meet again.

  On November 27, two weeks ahead of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (and Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band) George Harrison also came out with a solo album. Such was the backlog of songs he had been unable to place on Beatles albums that this debut took up three whole discs, packed in an Apple-chic box. Entitled All Things Must Pass, it converted George’s rather ponderous Indian mysticism into lush, uplifting soft rock, produced by Phil Spector, with star backup musicians, including Ringo, Eric Clapton, and Billy Preston. The keynote track, My Sweet Lord, an anthem crossing all religious boundaries, from “Hare Krishna” to “Hallelujah,” reached number one in America and spent thirty-eight weeks on the Billboard chart.

  John could not but feel somewhat upstaged by that former tag-along “bloody kid.” Despite the uncompromising bleakness of his own album, he intended it to be a commercial success and hoped a hit single would come from it. “I mean to sell as many records as I possibly can,” he admitted, “because I’m an artist who wants everyone to love me and everybody to buy my stuff.” “Working Class Hero” was obviously excluded from the singles market by its double fucking, while he thought “Mother” too raw and personal, and likely to fuel “suspicion that something nasty’s going on with that John Lennon and his broad again.” He considered releasing the evanescent “Love” but finally decided on “Mother.” Released only in the United States in January 1971, it barely scraped into the Top 50. The album did better, making number six in America and eleven in Britain (where EMI ordered the fuckings to be asterisked out on its lyric sheet). At Arthur Janov’s clinic in Los Angeles, it was played in full to an electrified gathering of patients, and thereafter became part of Janov’s lexicon, renamed The Primal Album.

  To promote it in the U.S. market, John went to New York, sat down with Yoko in ABKCO’s boardroom, and gave Jann Wenner the Rolling Stone interview that Wenner had so long pursued. What he had to say was momentous enough to run over two issues of the magazine, on January 21 and February 4. By this time, news had come from London that Paul McCartney had begun legal proceedings to dissolve the Beatles’ business partnership, so putting their breakup beyond all question. Time magazine headlined the double story with a nod to Wagner’s epic opera about the twilight of the gods: “Beatledämmerung.”

  John’s Rolling Stone interview was a further exercise in primal therapy, this time excavating a part of his life where the screaming had been don
e already. For the first time, he told what being one of the world’s four most adored and envied young men had really meant—the infantile mayhem that had progressively stifled their desire to do live concerts, the enforced kowtowing to insufferable dignitaries and officials, the ban on expressing a view on any grown-up topic whatever, the backstage sex orgies (“like Fellini’s Satyricon,” as he put it) belied by the front-of-stage squeaky-cleanliness, the sense of being trapped in ever-increasing, unstoppable madness. For the first time, he put on record that Brian Epstein had been gay, and how this and other uncomfortable “truth bits” about his childhood and his mother had been cut from Hunter Davies’s authorized biography. Wenner asked point-blank whether he and Brian had had an affair on their notorious Spanish holiday in 1963. “No, not an affair,” John replied. “…I watched Brian picking up the boys. I like playing a bit faggy, all that.”

  Now, too, he finally broke his silence about the two old comrades who had become his competitors. The massive success of George’s All Things Must Pass and its spinoff single was understandably galling, as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band moved rather effortfully up the album charts. “Every time I put the radio on, it’s ‘Oh My Lord.’…I’m beginning to think there must be a God.” What others were hailing as a masterpiece, John rated no higher than “All right…. At home, I wouldn’t play that kind of music…. George has not done his best work yet. His talents have developed over the years, and he was working with two fucking brilliant songwriters and he learned a lot from us. And I wouldn’t have minded being George, the invisible man, and learning what he learned. And maybe it was hard sometimes for him, because Paul and I are such egomaniacs, but that’s the game. So is George—just give him a chance and he’ll be the same. The best thing he’s done is ‘Within You, Without You,’ still for me.”