Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life

by Tim Riley

  The final layer of Lennon’s daring may be his boldest stroke, and yet to most of us it’s still nearly invisible. Instead of straining to copy black vocal mannerisms, Lennon dumped them, acted as if they weren’t crucial. That whole moptops-in-suits pose may have been coy, but it didn’t begin to suggest the carnality Lennon leaned into here, somehow sidestepping the white envy of black virility that spooked most American parents. Compared with Mick Jagger, say, Lennon had no hangups about sounding completely white, even when pitting himself against the black standard. Only a Brit could have pulled the carnal thread from this song’s distracting racial knots, revealing it as something beyond a white author piggybacking on a Twist novelty for a black gospel act.

  The Beatles’ signature, those mounting vocal rave-ups, did something more than intensify the song. By rewinding its spring each time, they coiled up before setting things off just a hair beyond listeners’ expectations, and this incomprehensible delay yanked everything up again for another swell of feeling. Those escalating “Oh”s, stacked one by one, piling up Beatle upon Beatle into the final refrains the way they used to leapfrog over one another on the Reeperbahn, held back the energy like a human dam, until it spilled over into Lennon’s gusher lead (“Shake it up baby now . . .”). After goading the others steadily for the song’s first half, Lennon rode this bronco of a band while lashing it from above for one last victory-lap verse before it lunged to an exhausted finish. On top of all the takes they had given “There’s a Place” and “I Saw Her Standing There,” Lennon somehow hoisted the entire day’s work up beyond euphoria, to a place where greatness winks at every challenge. On this recording of “Twist and Shout,” the Beatles lay claim to a defining irony: fearsome originality wrought from somebody else’s pile of junk.

  The LP session in the can, the band rejoined the Shapiro tour, mimed “Please Please Me” for Thank Your Lucky Stars on February 17, and sat back down to write: “From Me to You” and “She Loves You” popped out of them in the back of a coach. “We weren’t taking ourselves seriously,” Lennon remembered, “just fooling about on the guitar. . . . I think the first line [of ‘From Me to You’] was mine and we took it from there.” Only after toying with all those “me”s and “you”s did Lennon pick up a copy of New Musical Express to see how they were doing on the charts: “Then I realized—we’d got the inspiration from reading a copy on the coach. Paul and I had been talking about one of the letters in the ‘From You to Us’ column.”20

  The last night of the tour, March 3 in Stoke-on-Trent, they yielded to public demand that they close the show’s first half. All the television and radio exposure had paid off; “Please Please Me” hit number one the next week. The force of its breakthrough quickened the cultural pulse, and the pace of their travels. Oldham had stood at the back of the stalls with Epstein at one of these Shapiro tour shows, nursing some prescient realizations. A “tangible sense of mad hysteria” began rising up through the crowd, he remembered, and when the Beatles appeared, something new opened up, a sound Oldham could only call “the roar of the whole world”:

  The noise that night hit me emotionally, like a blow to the chest. The audience that evening expressed something beyond repressed adolescent sexuality. The noise they made was the sound of the future. Even though I hadn’t seen the world, I heard the whole world screaming. The power of the Beatles touched and changed minds and bodies all over the world. I didn’t see it—I heard and felt it.21

  When Oldham looked over at Epstein, they both had tears in their eyes.

  On March 5, in between gigs at St. Helens and Manchester, the Beatles laid down three more songs: “From Me to You,” “Thank You Girl,” and, finally, “One After 909” (which stayed in the vault). Already, in the spring of 1963, the studio was becoming a refuge where they greeted familiar faces and got some actual work done—collecting themselves to pursue musical ideas.

  And they never seemed short of ideas. “From Me to You” sneers confidently at the very conventions it’s built upon (the unison vocals that unravel into harmony with each line, those perfectly placed “woo”s that greet each return of the verse). “Thank You Girl” rings out like the mirror image of “Misery,” so overwrought in its happy-to-hook-up that it verges on irony—and just where it starts to go overboard, it caves in to pleasure. And “One After 909” is an enduring puzzle; a great throwaway when it was cut, it never came to light until the dismal Let It Be sessions in January 1969, when it revived all their best ensemble impulses. (Apparently, Lennon was never happy with its stupid-inspired lyric—“Then I find . . . I got the number wrong!”—its most endearing quality.)

  This sudden jolt of new material airlifted the Beatles right out of Liverpool: they had played six Cavern gigs in January, three in February, and exactly none in March. This had the strange effect of increasing the town’s visibility on England’s map even as its favorite sons outgrew their testing ground. When Bob Wooler announced that “Please Please Me” had hit number one, an awful hush fell over the Cavern audience. The world had suddenly snatched them away from their hometown listeners: a jam-packed final August appearance would be their last. To this day, Liverpool’s pride in the band gets tangled up with loss.

  Epstein had always had his eye on the larger scene, and many long-term ambitions. He quickly diversified his holdings. After “Love Me Do,” he expanded his NEMS roster with Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas, the Fourmost, Cilla Black, and Tommy Quickly. Not all found success, but those that did were often propelled by Lennon/McCartney material, which literally swarmed the British charts in 1963. Even not counting the Beatles, these acts scored a total of forty-five weeks on Record Retailer’s top-ten charts. In all, Epstein’s office handled eighty-five top-ten records for the year.

  On April 14 Lennon met Del Shannon, the Michigan singer with the enormous range who had won a huge British audience with his 1961 debut song, “Runaway.” He joined the Thank Your Lucky Stars TV taping on a bill with the Dave Clark Five and did a double take when he heard the Beatles’ material. He promised Lennon he’d record “From Me to You” when he got back to America. (Shannon’s rather subdued version reached the U.S. top one hundred later that summer.) After the show, Lennon headed up to a Richmond club called the Crawdaddy with Andrew Loog Oldham to catch a new band, the Rolling Stones. Like Oldham before him, Lennon did his own double take: “They’re like what we used to be before Brian ponced us up,” he exclaimed. “I’m in the wrong band!”22

  On April 8, the day the Beatles performed in Portsmouth, Hampshire, John Charles Julian Lennon was born at Liverpool’s Sefton General Hospital. Like his own father, Lennon was away when his son was born, traveling back to London for a radio interview and an evening performance. This was only the most immediate signal that fatherhood had failed to change his priorities. He visited wife and child the next day before dashing off again—this time to Birkenhead, and then a Good Friday return to the Cavern for an eight-hour “Rhythm and Blues Marathon.”

  In a cruel replay of Julia’s own isolation with John, Lennon didn’t see Cynthia or Julian again until June. During John’s travels, Cyn’s mother, Lillian, flew back from Canada to help with the baby. The three of them moved in together with Mimi at Mendips. This spoke well enough of Mimi, but compounded family ironies: the woman who had refused to attend her nephew’s wedding now took in his wife and son as he pursued rock ’n’ roll stardom. Naturally, Cynthia quickly rediscovered Mimi’s “sharp tongue,” which she often aimed at Julian, “a screamer.” When Cynthia went out, Mimi often stashed the baby in his pram in the garden so as not to bother her paying lodgers.23

  For all the cultural shifts embedded in Lennon’s music, his own personal history repeated itself. His runaway career became one with his callousness toward his new family, which doubled as passive aggression at husband- and fatherhood. Seeing as his own experience was no better, he seems not to have dwelt much on Cynthia’s plight. On April 28, Paul, George, and Ringo went off together fo
r a holiday in Santa Cruz, Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Serenely contemptuous of Lennon’s situation, a lusty pop star with a perfect family front, Epstein booked a separate holiday for the two of them—the homosexual manager and the new father—in Spain.

  By singling Lennon out for a private vacation that spring, on the crest of the band’s first number-one single, Epstein tensed up a political knot at the band’s center. During a BBC profile of Epstein produced in 2003, McCartney said he was convinced Lennon went along to send Eppy the signal that he, John, was the leader of this band, the one with a direct pipeline to their manager.24 There was enough at stake to force this relationship, which both parties described as “intense,” into being a success.

  But very few acts talk about their managers in the terms Lennon did: “It was very intense—but it was never consummated.” And in retrospect, this trip looks simply bizarre. Consider Epstein’s motives: here was a businessman taking his brash young bandleader off to a hotel three weeks after his first son was born and expecting everybody, even Lennon’s wife, to look the other way—after all, he had provided lodging for the couple all during her pregnancy (in his Falkner Street “bolthole”). He was just beginning to see the fruits of almost eighteen months of toil: recognition was beginning to pour in, and suddenly his management office was flush with cash. So the invitation has a whiff of manipulative guilt, as if he could depend on whisking John away: “I put you lot up when you got married,” he seems to have bargained. “Stash your wife and kid and run off with me on holiday.” His staff had doubled, and his menagerie of acts now included Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Remo Four, Cilla Black, and the Big Three—and Lennon was half of the songwriting partnership whose material he was tapping for all of them.

  It wasn’t just that Epstein knew he had leverage on the young couple; it was that he used it with such selfish disregard. And why was Lennon so compliant? Surely, even at the time, many must have sensed his huge ambivalence about marriage, let alone fatherhood. There are numerous testimonies to his open womanizing in this period, in both England and Spain. And what did the hyperaware Lennon think when he flew off with Epstein—that people wouldn’t suspect a personal encounter of some kind? Could his bluster and rising popularity quell such talk?

  Young people have been known to make just such miscalculations, and Epstein had a track record for emotional jackpots. For Cynthia, the very shock of the news of John’s holiday inhibited protest, which tells you something about her inner, psychological twinset: don’t question the men, especially about their business. And her very complacency fueled Lennon’s lechery—he would need a much tougher woman to keep him in line. Was this a new mother’s trauma, postpartum depression, or simple denial—or all three? Cynthia’s demureness reflects the growing tumult around the Beatles’ career and how suddenly it altered everybody’s daily life. Cynthia barely felt “married” to Lennon as it was, keeping her status secret according to Epstein’s rules, giving birth without John there to support her. She nursed her colicky newborn at her in-law’s, listening to Lennon’s voice overtake pop radio while newspapers chased the Beatles’ every move and zealous fans and photographers inhibited her own.

  Epstein booked a suite at the Avenida Palace in Barcelona. Lennon seems to have opened up to very few people about the holiday, and Yoko Ono has never answered questions about it. But in 1991, Christopher Munch devoted an entire film script to the incident, called The Hours and Times, with a slaphappy performance by Ian Hart that gets at both Lennon’s sexual confusion and his blinding faith in the music. The Hours and Times catches the spirit of Epstein’s loneliness and Lennon’s faux worldliness, if not the particulars. When Lennon does broach the subject of their (mutual?) attraction, it only accents the discomfort: “I enjoy hearing about your conquests—this lorry driver, that docker,” he says. “Yes, well, that’s all very well,” Epstein replies, “but it’s when it comes closer to home—I just don’t know what to say when that happens.”25 Munch has Lennon invite a stewardess back to the hotel, “pulling a bird” to mock Epstein. But Munch throws a curveball: “Their union is consummated not by sex but by dancing to her prized new Little Richard single. It’s a delicious denouement,” wrote Richard Harrington in the Washington Post. The dance scene is the most liberating moment of the film.26

  Two closer-to-home accounts tell of this trip, one from Lennon’s close friend Pete Shotton and the other from Alistair Taylor. The two versions are similar enough to seem plausible. Shotton’s account has the sharp pang of honesty to it; Epstein’s come-on to Lennon was a mixture of dread and devotion. “Eppy just kept on and on at me,” John told Shotton, “until one night I finally just pulled me trousers down and said to him: ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Brian, just stick it up me fucking arse then.’ ” But Epstein surprised him by saying, “I don’t do that kind of thing. That’s not what I like to do.’ ” Instead, Epstein said, he simply wanted to touch John, “and so I let him toss me off.”27 This is more than Lennon told Taylor, who kept whatever confidences Epstein may have told him a secret:

  [Lennon] told me afterwards in one of our frankest heart-to-hearts that Brian never seriously did proposition him. He had teased Brian about the young men he kept gazing at and the odd ones who had found their way to his room. Brian had joked to John about the women who hurled themselves at him. “If he’d asked me, I probably would have done anything he wanted. I was so much in awe of Brian then I’d have tried a night of vice-versa. But he never wanted me like that. Sure, I took the mickey a bit and pretended to lead him on. But we both knew we were joking. He wanted a pal he could have a laugh with and someone he could teach about life. I thought his bum boys were creeps and Brian knew that. Even completely out of my head, I couldn’t shag a bloke. And I certainly couldn’t lie there and let one shag me. Even a nice guy like Brian. To be honest, the thought of it turns me over.”28

  Both these quotes have the feel of truth to them; this is what Lennon might have told each of these people, at different times, while still guarding other secrets. The full truth of the matter, only Lennon and Epstein knew for sure.

  Epstein could be manipulative, but he arranged things in order for Lennon to ridicule him—it gave him a jolt. Between cajoling him about his “nancy boys,” Lennon would sneak off for quickies with waitresses and dance-dates with a bravado that seemed to overimpress Epstein—which was likely Lennon’s motive. “She was friendly,” Lennon would report. From Lennon’s side, this is adolescent fiddling; “pulling birds” with Epstein displayed the same kind of gamesmanship as playing “king of the mountain” with the other Beatles. Making Epstein blush had already become gruesome sport, and the sexual humiliation coloring such scenes toys with something more menacing. Lennon looked up to Epstein, but needed to prove himself superior, and rub Epstein’s nose in his covert life. Humiliating his manager also spilled over into Freudian revenge. And Epstein’s enjoyment of Lennon, even at the cost of his self-respect, reveals something desperate, even debasing, about his own desires—not just obsessing after something he couldn’t have, but reveling in its rebuke each time Lennon told of a new conquest. In their codependent dance of mutual manipulation, Lennon rewarded Eppy with shame.

  Both Shotton’s and Taylor’s accounts came after Lennon’s death in 1980, and both seem plausible given the quotes each principal gave while he was alive. Where Pauline Sutcliffe suggests that Lennon had been intimate with her brother, she underlines it as speculation. Everybody who knew them together at art school and in Hamburg claims they were unusually close; but doesn’t it make sense for the young Lennon to be unusually close to one of his first and best adult friends, somebody who mediated and played out the intimate tension of his relationship with McCartney? By 1970, at least, Lennon had confessed to so many blasphemous secrets in interviews it’s hard to imagine he would have felt shy about a homosexual encounter. The Beatles may have called their Let It Be director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, a “fag” behind his back; but by the early 1970s, when he moved to New Y
ork City—perhaps with Yoko Ono as his moral guide—Lennon lent his name to all manner of gay rights causes and would have known the power any of his own homosexual experiences might have had in left-wing circles. In his early thirties, he would have had numerous conversations with peers who had experimented with alternative sexualities and been nonetheless manly for it. If there was an encounter, it was probably as Shotton described or as Munch portrays—a fumbling to express affection that was just out of reach.