There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll

by Robinson, Lisa

  Four

  On December 8, 1980, I was, uncharacteristically, watching Monday Night Football on television. Sometime around ten p.m., Howard Cossell interrupted the play-by-play to announce that John Lennon had been shot outside his apartment building—the Dakota, on West 72nd Street off Central Park West—in New York City. I immediately picked up the phone to call the Lennons’ close friend, photographer Bob Gruen. The line was busy. I frantically changed channels on the TV, searching for more information. Finally, one of the stations broke in with the news that John had been rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. I called my friends Loraine and Peter Boyle (Loraine was a music columnist and the first New York bureau chief at Rolling Stone magazine, Peter was the actor and John was best man at their 1977 wedding). Peter answered the phone. He was crying. Sometime after midnight, Bob Gruen came to our apartment. He was devastated, and I spent several hours consoling him. The city editor at the New York Post, where I then wrote a weekly music column, called to ask me for the Lennons’ home number. I said I didn’t have it (even though I did), and I didn’t answer the phone for the rest of the night.

  • • •

  The first time I was ever in a room with John Lennon was when Richard and I took one of our regular trips to London. It was around the end of 1969, or maybe early 1970. As the ’70s progressed, we went often, because Richard—who had very long hair for years—decided it was time to cut it short. He found a hairdresser he liked (which meant I liked) in London, so we went every few months for him to have a trim. Seriously. This was not as decadent as it sounds. The flights were cheap, the Portobello Hotel was cheap (we stayed in a tiny room the size of a ship’s cabin). Plus, he still had those record company expense accounts. He “needed” to look for new bands in London, and I “needed” to meet with my editor at Disc and Music Echo. It was on one of our very first trips that we had a drunken lunch with Derek Taylor, a friend who had worked with the Beatles throughout the 1960s and was currently the press officer at the Beatles’ Apple Records. Richard recalls that an interview with JohnandYoko (at that time, they were always referred to as one word) was offered to Richard, who hadn’t even asked for one. We assumed that Derek needed to deliver a member of the U.S. press to the couple, who were intent on getting out their message of Peace and Love. I accompanied Richard to the interview at the Apple Records offices in the famous white building on Savile Row. JohnandYoko sat behind a large desk in a large room on the main floor. Richard set up a tape recorder. But it was immediately apparent that Richard’s questions were pointless. For almost an hour, John babbled on about giving peace a chance. He was arrogant, slightly snide—in keeping with the way he’d been described by people who knew him when he’d been in the Beatles. He had his peace and love rap down pat. Yoko, who wore her trademark sunglasses, occasionally chimed in, murmuring something or other that reinforced what John had said. (Years later, it occurred to me that they might quite possibly have been stoned—on what, I have no idea. And it probably was one of the few times in my life that I sat in a room for an hour, listening to people talk without my saying one word.) I do remember thinking then, in that room in the Apple building with JohnandYoko, that if I ever did interviews, I needed to participate more. Just letting them go on and on was boring.

  *

  In 1971, JohnandYoko moved to New York City, to 105 Bank Street in Greenwich Village. Considering his great wealth, they lived modestly, in a fairly small ground-floor, two-room apartment. It might be hard to understand today, but John Lennon, at that time in his life, new to what he considered the New York City art and political scene, was fairly accessible. The post–flower power, anti–Vietnam War fervor was in full force. The world—at least our world, by which I mean young people in the music and art scenes who went out every night—was divided into two categories: us, and them. The longhairs, and the straights. The evil Richard Nixon was on one side—in the White House—and rock fans, students, liberals, Black Panthers and Democrats were all lumped together on the other side. People actually used words like “right on,” “dig it,” and “brothers and sisters.” JohnandYoko had been made fun of in newspapers all over the world for their bed-ins and their naked album cover for Two Virgins. They also were the targets of great anger over Yoko’s presumed role in breaking up the Beatles. Now, in New York City, they found a home. And not just a physical home, but an artistic, creative and political home. They took up with (or were taken in by) the likes of political activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and various political bands such as Elephants Memory and street singer David Peel—whose one “hit” song at the time was literally titled “I Like Marijuana.” At the urging of Abbie and Jerry, JohnandYoko traveled to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to perform at a benefit concert for John Sinclair, the manager of the hard rock band the MC5 and the head of the “White Panther Party.” This sounds absurd today, but at that time, and in certain circles, the White Panther Party was taken quite seriously. Sinclair had been jailed for ten years for giving an undercover policeman two marijuana joints. And such was the power of the Lennons that the day after the concert, Sinclair was released from jail. (Going out on a limb for John Sinclair appeared heroic at the time, but it might have surprised Yoko, who purported to be such a feminist, that communal living at the White Panthers’ house in Ann Arbor was marked by the women cooking food and rolling joints for the men.) But the Lennons certainly could command an audience, and they knew how to manipulate the media. And they appeared to be having the time of their lives living as beatniks/activists (albeit dilettantes) in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Despite having been the leader of the world’s biggest and best-loved band, John always considered himself a rebel and an outsider. He took Black Panther Bobby Seale with him on the Mike Douglas TV show—which today would be akin to something like the Ellen Degeneres show. John seemed ecstatic to be free of the Beatles and with the woman he adored at his side. Constantly at his side. The Lennons tried to do good deeds: on August 30, 1972, they performed with Elephants Memory at Madison Square Garden for the Geraldo Rivera–hosted “One to One” concert to raise money and protest substandard conditions at Willowbrook—a state facility for retarded children (and yes, you could use that word then). But because of John’s outspoken remarks, his newly discovered political fervor, and his association with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, he became a person of interest to the U.S. government. (Some of us, despite their good work in rabble rousing at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, considered Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman a vaudeville team. But it would take awhile for John to become disenchanted with them.) As bizarre as it sounds now, President Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, Senator Strom Thurmond and their ilk became semi-hysterical about John Lennon. They eventually wanted him thrown out of the country. In the Beatles, John was a witty and brilliant songwriter and performer. With Yoko, in New York City, he became a political threat. In the 1960s, the Rolling Stones were considered “dangerous”; they were overtly sexual, they had urinated in public at a gas station, and were portrayed by the press as filthy louts. They also had a clever manager in Andrew Loog Oldham, who took full advantage of a “lock up your daughters” marketing campaign. But the Rolling Stones were never a threat to the U.S. government. Mick Jagger, when in New York City, lived on the Upper East Side with his “socialite” wife Bianca and went to parties with the Ahmet Erteguns. A political “artist” was Neil Young singing “Four dead in Ohio” about Kent State. Or earlier, when Bob Dylan wrote “Masters of War”—despite his protests that he was not a protest singer. And, even though, as Gore Vidal noted at the time, “Give Peace a Chance” wasn’t exactly the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” it became a catchy, easy, singalong, anti-war anthem. It certainly wasn’t Elvis Presley, long past his prime, shaking Nixon’s hand at the White House. Excessive marijuana use may have had something to do with the all-pervasive paranoia of the day, but many of us suspected that there were FBI or CIA informants, or “narcs” (narcoti
cs agents) among us. We were concerned that they worked at record companies, joined us at parties, infiltrated the rock press. When John talked about being wiretapped at Bank Street and how J. Edgar Hoover was after him, we initially thought he was paranoid and/or naive. He turned out to be right.

  *

  It is also hard to imagine now, but not only was John fairly accessible in New York City, to those of us who were more into the New York Dolls, or Max’s Kansas City, or David Bowie, the solo John Lennon just wasn’t that big a deal. Notations in my journals from 1973 onwards, when I spent time with, or interviewed the Lennons, were fairly small. They were scribbled on pages that had—in much bigger letters—“Wayne at Max’s,” or “Dolls at Mercer,” or “Patti at Reno Sweeney’s.” Yoko’s shtick—the bed-ins, the bag-ins, the shrieking—seemed to be not much more than nutty cries for attention. She advertised herself as a famous avant-garde performer; but many of us who regularly attended performances of the Living Theater, or other “performance artists,” had never heard of her before she hooked up with John. The Lennons rounded people up to be in the Warhol-influenced, eight millimeter movies (Bottoms, Legs) that they made with filmmaker Jonas Mekas, and, depending on your point of view, the films were amusing or cringeworthy. The lawyer Nat Weiss, who had been a close friend of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein and had helped run the Beatles’ fan club in America in the 1960s, told me that John had asked him to help Yoko with her films. “She arranged for me to see this movie she had done, called Bottoms. I saw it at the Rizzoli screening room. Afterwards, she asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘Well, it’s not exactly Gone With the Wind.’ She never spoke to me again.”

  *

  Photographer Bob Gruen first set me up with the Lennons. Without Yoko’s stamp of approval, or a compatible astrology sign, you could not get to John, who clearly wanted to distance himself from the world of Billboard magazine. He didn’t want to hang out with Mick Jagger or Eric Clapton. In fact, when I got to know him better it was apparent that, aside from gossip, he wasn’t at all interested in any of the music being made by any of his contemporaries. I recall a party at Loraine and Peter Boyle’s house where Paul Simon brought his new album for us all to listen to in its entirety. Twice. John paid attention for as long as he could, but pretty soon it became an eye-roll moment. Despite his millions of dollars and his fabled past, John was living the life—or playing the part—of the bohemian artist with his woman in a garret. By 1973, I was writing for London’s New Musical Express as well as Creem, and I was editing Hit Parader magazine. I was plugged into whatever was going on in the rock scene. Bob Gruen’s then-wife Nadya was an assistant to the Lennons, and Yoko had an album (Approximately Infinite Universe) about to be released. It was, I was assured, her most “commercial” work to date; she sang actual words, in actual songs. She wanted to do some interviews. She wanted to do them with women. I was happy to comply. I had written some complimentary things about her singing—comparing it to the early stages of punk rock or some such—and, as this was not the majority opinion, she was pleased. So on January 8, 1973, I went down to Bank Street with my little Sony cassette recorder to talk to Yoko. It was made very clear to me that the interview was to be with just Yoko, not John, and we would only discuss her twenty-two song album.

  *

  The evening started out slowly. Bob Gruen sat in or was around during the entire time. There was a fire in the fireplace. There were a lot of books in the large living room. There were several phones and they were constantly ringing. John was nowhere in sight. We sat at a round table in the living room, and I asked Yoko questions about her album and about her singing career. I asked her if she felt people hated her because the Beatles broke up, and if she felt the antagonism towards her was racist because she was Oriental (yes, we could still say that then). But mostly, I talked about specific songs on the album. At first, she was guarded, but when she realized that I had really listened to all twenty-two songs, she warmed up to me and talked. And talked. She said that she had had early operatic training, but, she said, “It was not my bag.” She said she had always been eloquent (her word), but when she was going through a bad time in her private life, one day she started to sing. She had a tape recorder and she taped her singing and played it back. Much to her surprise, she told me, she realized she was out of tune. Also, she said, the microphone was so close to her mouth that the sound became distorted. “This should have upset me,” she said, “it sounded like a song sung by someone who was mentally deranged. Or someone at the limit of their emotion. But, it was very interesting.” After an hour or so of this sort of thing, she appeared satisfied that she had talked enough about herself, about the role of women in society, and her new album. Then she brought John out from the back room—like he was dessert. He came bounding out, seemingly pent-up and ready to talk. (For all I know, they were high—on what, I have no idea. But I’ve learned that except for groupies, drug dealers and Keith Richards, almost no one in the music world has ever been honest about their drug use while they were using drugs.) John seemed eager to talk about Yoko. “[At first] I put up as much fight as many other people about Yoko’s ideas,” he said. “I’m from the sticks, and when somebody keeps pointing to the light . . . I mean it’s all right to do it yourself, but when it’s somebody else doing it, well, it’s eye opening. On her new album, I like the rock songs, that’s my scene. But I also like the howling. I think she should have done more howling. I’ve been taking off the howling but now I want to go back to it. Because it was so new before, it was like the first abstract painting you ever saw. When someone starts going ‘WOOOOOOOGGGGHHH,’ I mean, you’ll accept Little Richard doing it in the 1950s, but someone who eliminates all the words altogether, it’s quite a trip. To write, that’s easy. But to bloody howl, that’s hard.”

  • • •

  In all of John Lennon’s career with the Beatles, he was part of a foursome that was mostly always “interviewed” together. They had “press conferences.” They gave sarcastic quips or sound bites. On his own, John had a forum to really talk. And, being as bright as he was, and having seen a lot of the world but now wanting much less of it, he was happy to have Yoko by his side, who nodded and smiled beatifically at every gem he uttered. Correction: he was determined to have Yoko by his side—in the studio, on his records, in his band—even when she just stood next to him onstage and banged on a bongo drum. It has been well-chronicled how mesmerized he was by her and what he perceived as her worldliness and her artistic sensibility. Because I was a woman who had been sympathetic to Yoko, I was allowed in. No less important was the fact that I wrote for a major British music weekly. And that I could gossip with John about the Stones, Zeppelin and Bowie—at a time when he was psychically removed from that scene. He always enjoyed a good gossip; they all do. And I kept secrets. When Yoko kicked John out of the house in 1973 because he allegedly had been sleeping with other women, I never wrote about that aspect of the estrangement. It was well known that John fooled around—including with, among others, a photographer who was the wife of a famous folk-rock singer. But I never would have written about that, nor would I have written about Yoko’s affair with musician David Spinozza. This is all ancient history now, and has been recounted elsewhere, but at that time, it was considered someone’s “private life.” When I was aware of drug use, I didn’t write about it. But to this day, unless people are practically nodding out in front of me, or babbling uncontrollably, I am the last person who can tell, or care about, or would report about, drug use. I never felt like a “combatant,” or a reporter; I felt like an ally. The writer Pete Hamill once said that rock journalists were like prosecutors, but I was the defense attorney. As far as I was concerned, we were on the same “side,” because our lives had all been so changed by the music. But also, I was unaware, for example, of the rampant heroin use in New York’s CBGB’s scene—much less that of the Lennons, who were rumored to be involved with the drug until Yoko got pregnant in 1975, when the
y cleaned up. No junkified musician will own up to drug use while using for two reasons: privacy and shame.

  • • •

  In the 1970s, no one from the New York music scene took Los Angeles seriously. With all that constant, bright sunlight and those palm trees, it seemed like a vacation spot. For English musicians, it was a sexual playground. If you had money, you stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel or the Beverly Wilshire. If drugs were your priority, you’d hole up at the Chateau Marmont. The lower rung of musicians stayed at the Continental Hyatt House (except for the spectacularly rich Led Zeppelin, who stayed there because they were allowed to run amok and they couldn’t get in anywhere else). Even lower was the truly seedy Tropicana Motel. There were clubs, of course; the Laurel Canyon and Sunset Strip scenes had such venues as the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go. Older Hollywood types had discos like the Daisy. But there was no restaurant scene like there is today. There was Chasen’s for the Reagans, and Barney’s Beanery and Duke’s for rock musicians. Or the coffeeshop at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where I once had breakfast at three in the afternoon with Chuck Berry who was “dating” Diane Gardiner. Diane was the publicist for the Jefferson Airplane, a friend of Jim and Pamela Morrison’s, and an old girlfriend of my husband’s. I met Jim Morrison only once, at Diane’s two-story bungalow in Los Angeles, at a later stage of his life. He was fat, bearded, drunk, and babbling about the blues—which, it seemed, he had only recently just discovered. He and Pamela lived upstairs from Diane, and they were, as usual, fighting. Pamela probably said it more than once, but I distinctly recall that Richard and I were there when she screamed at Jim that he always ruined her birthday. When I met Diane and Chuck Berry—or “Charles,” as Diane called him—Diane wore an orange minidress and white high heels. “Charles” wore white trousers, a white undershirt clearly visible underneath a black lace shirt, and white shoes. He had the biggest hands I’d ever seen. I recall there was a lot of discussion about “property”—Charles was telling Diane she needed to have some, and she was trying to get him to purchase some for her. He ate scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, hash brown potatoes, a chocolate milkshake, and apple pie a la mode. He let me pick up the check.