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

by Tim Riley

  The more provocative signals Lennon was sending by going away with Eppy were to his wife and his band. Cynthia, shell-shocked from childbirth and hounded by fans, barely registered Eppy’s maneuvers; McCartney, Harrison, and Starr were probably suspicious of Lennon’s power play, if not feeling outright ditched. Lennon returned with a song, “Bad to Me,” not up to Beatle snuff, which he finished with McCartney and dumped on Billy J. Kramer for a left-field hit that summer. After snubbing Epstein on holiday, he snubbed him again with a subpar song.

  In May, the Beatles played the Liverpool boxing stadium on a bill with Gene Vincent in between Cavern gigs, and then joined the Roy Orbison tour with Duane Eddy, Ben E. King, and the Four Seasons, who all had dropped out by the end. Orbison had started out in Wink, Texas, recorded “Ooby Dooby” at Sun Records in Memphis back in 1956, and gone on to write “Claudette” in Nashville for the Everly Brothers. But his early 1960s singles on the Monument label were surging operatic melodramas that cast him as a gloriously doomed loner in shades: “Only the Lonely (Know the Way I Feel),” which Orbison originally wrote for Presley, followed by “Running Scared,” “Crying,” and finally that spring’s “In Dreams,” an avalanche of self-pity redeemed by his epic resolve. The British embraced Orbison as a demigod the way they had Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly: as one of their own, as if his heroic insecurity made him a royal subject. But by the end of this tour, even the mighty Orbison bowed to Beatlemania: screams for “Please Please Me” began to win the nightly battle, and by the last week Orbison let the Beatles close the show. With seven years behind him in the business, as both performer and writer, Orbison befriended the inquisitive young Beatles, admiring their ravenous curiosity almost as much as their music. “You can’t measure success,” Lennon would later say, “but if you could, then the minute I knew we’d been successful was when Roy Orbison asked us if he could record two of our songs.”29

  The Lennon-Epstein trip to Spain remained “quiet” until June, when it surfaced at Paul McCartney’s twenty-first birthday party on June 20. With their debut album in the middle of its thirty-week reign at the top, the Beatles held court as musical kingpins at a relative’s home in Huyton to slip the fans who already hung around their houses. Billy J. Kramer remembers the liquor flowing, and Lennon getting pissed, literally and figuratively.

  “So, Lennon, how was your honeymoon?” Bob Wooler cracked, meaning Spain, publicly humiliating the top dog in the salty Scouse manner. The Cavern compere, whom Lennon once introduced to Epstein as his “father,” knew just which Lennon scabs to pick. Beside himself at Wooler’s innuendo, Lennon began pelting the smaller man with punches, to the point where Kramer and the Fourmost’s Billy Hatton had to pull him off. Wooler lay bruised and bleeding on the lawn as Lennon shouted and glowered. Somebody piled Wooler into a car and took him to a hospital emergency room.

  “It wasn’t nice,” Kramer emphasized many years later. “[John] was, uh, very abusive and told me how I was fuck-all,” Kramer said. “And I’ll tell you the truth, I had a very good relationship with John. . . . I mean, the next time I saw him after that incident there, he came around to shake hands and apologize. And he said, you know, he was fucking pissed.”30

  And Wooler’s remark inflamed something far scarier in Lennon than simple homophobia. By this point, chatter about Epstein’s designs on John whisked throughout Liverpool, and the strict macho code required a public brawl at any hint of homosexuality. As the leader of this volcanically successful band, this newly married, renowned womanizer feared the damage to his growing reputation more urgently than ever—especially if it came from someone as close as Wooler. If he could pound it down somehow, perhaps he could frighten away the very idea of it. Somewhere inside, Lennon also pummeled at Alf, his own father, who abandoned him and his mother back in 1940.

  Wooler got stitched up, and the next day Lennon made amends through Epstein’s NEMS office in the form of a £250 payoff and a note of apology. (This was fifty pounds more than what Epstein handed out to the parents of pregnant fans.) The scene, with its echoes of Lennon’s lashing out at Sutcliffe in Hamburg, reminded everybody of the terrifying darkness that seeped from Lennon when he drank, complete with memory lapses and remorse. London’s Daily Mirror ran an item on the scuffle, which included Lennon’s public apology. No other Merseysiders commanded such coverage.

  This tabloid coverage, and the transaction finessed through Brian Epstein, signaled a new machinery to Lennon’s persona, whose blackout violence could not be kept from the world any longer. His only tack was to overcompensate. Even his wedding smells of loss, the shotgun cliché: his compulsion to do right in this situation brooked only narrow choices. To the world, the hell-bent mop top concealed a grief-ridden adolescent, sublimated for years at great emotional cost behind a bipolar muse.

  Chapter 11

  Thick of It

  Beatlemania became an all-consuming media frenzy in Britain over that summer of 1963, reshuffling everybody’s long-held assumptions about class, pop, and good manners. Yet the Beatles’ appeal remained oddly provincial even as they ascended to the upper ranks. As familiar faces in the major music papers, even the London dailies began running their quotes and noting their habits. Each week, the BBC featured a new program, either Pop Go the Beatles (which ran for fifteen weeks) or Saturday Club with Brian Matthew, with a stream of songs that combined the band’s stage show with their enormous Hamburg song archive. By August, with “She Loves You,” it was hard to imagine how they could get any bigger. And still the giant American market resisted.

  Guilelessness typified their manner. At a brief television interview, McCartney and Lennon sparred gamely to the usual questions about their upcoming Royal Variety Performance. In the days leading up to this November show, Conservative politician Edward “Teddy” Heath had derided the band for their northern accents, saying their speech patterns were “unrecognizable as the Queen’s English.” This struck Lennon as overt class snobbery, the kind Scousers reveled in exposing, and he replied by saying he couldn’t understand Heath’s accent:

  Q: John, in this Royal Variety Show when you’re appearing before royalty, your language has got to be pretty good obviously—this thing about Teddy saying that he couldn’t distinguish your . . . the Queen’s English.

  JOHN: (mock sophistication) I can’t understand Teddy! I can’t understand Teddy saying that at all, really. (He smiled, paused, and looked seriously into the camera.) I’m not going to vote for Ted.1

  Since there was no china shop Lennon wanted to streak through more, the queen’s stage was set for more than music. Now that they were performing for royalty, they would certainly have to tidy up their act more than with their mere matching suits. But in Lennon’s mind this was simplistic: they hadn’t been invited just to sing, had they?

  Earlier in September 1963, after drinking their way through a Variety Club awards luncheon at the swank Savoy Hotel on the Strand, Lennon and McCartney had jumped out of a cab near Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 jazz club off Charing Cross Road and spotted Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham had left Epstein’s employ and had been pouring his street smarts and fashion bravado into the Rolling Stones. He had just walked out of a club rehearsal in despair at finding the right follow-up to “Come On,” the Chuck Berry number that gave the Stones their first hit—something better than another American oldie. Oldham juggled several agendas: pushing journalists to see the band, wrangling studio time, cajoling engineers, playing at producing, and molding Jagger, Richards, Jones, Wyman, and Watts into the force he knew they could become. It’s a measure of Oldham’s pluck and self-possession that he served as producer of these early Stones singles even though he had never before set foot in a studio.

  Oldham hadn’t seen the Beatles since he’d lit out from under Epstein to launch his Stones crusade. He tried to hide his mood, but Lennon and McCartney could tell he was fretful. “They smiled at each other,” Oldham wrote, and followed him back down toward the basement rehearsal:

  Once
downstairs, the boys quickly got to work teaching the Stones “I Wanna Be Your Man.” Yeah, they gave us a hit, which was certainly my oxygen, but more than that they gave us a real tutorial in the reality they were forging for themselves; lesson of the day from John and Paul. I went from downed to reprieved to exalted as the two Beatles ran through their gift for the open-mouthed Stones.2

  “The whole procedure took about twenty minutes,” recalled Rolling Stones insider James Phelge, “and the result was that the Stones no longer had a problem regarding their next single.”3 To the relatively younger and less experienced Stones, this was an act of creative bravura: “the north and south of musical life,” as Oldham described it, both an open lesson in songwriting and an act of generosity from pop royalty to their budding rivals. “At that rehearsal, an inspired Brian Jones added the roar of his slide guitar, John and Paul enjoying as much as the Stones and I the spontaneity of the moment.” The “unfinished bridge was finished there and then in front of everybody, proscribing in your face.”4

  The next day, the Beatles turned around and made their own recording of the song, as part of their ongoing sessions for the second album, which had begun in July. On August 3, they had given their last Cavern appearance; later that month, Robert Freeman shot the cover for the new album in Bournemouth, where they settled in for a six-night run at the Gaumont Cinema. In the midst of all this, John and Cynthia finally left Julian with Lillian and took a honeymoon, thirteen months late, to Paris, where they met up with Astrid Kirchherr.

  Over in America, England might as well have been another planet. It’s difficult to underline the slower pace at which culture traveled in this pre-Beatle era, a time with no Internet, when even international phone calls were saved for dire emergencies. As John and Cynthia decamped to Paris, George Harrison traveled to Benton, Illinois, with his brother Peter to visit their older sister, Louise, who had settled there with an American husband and wrote letters home from Chuck Berry’s fabled paradise of hamburgers, drive-ins, and movie stars. They stopped by the local record shop and were disappointed to find no Beatles records and no name recognition. Some Americans have vivid memories of hearing the band for the first time before their Ed Sullivan appearance and wondering when they would hit: budding producer and impresario Kim Fowley heard a stray California deejay play the Beatles singing “From Me to You” on the radio that summer and thought to himself, “That sounds like the Everly Brothers with three-part harmony!”5

  Two television appearances that fall sealed Lennon’s “lovable scoundrel” persona. The first came on the Royal Variety Performance before the queen mother and Princess Margaret at the Prince of Wales Theatre on November 4. Backstage before their appearance, when Epstein asked them for samples of their between-song repartee, Lennon threatened to introduce “Twist and Shout” by instructing the royals, up in their tony boxes, to “rattle their fuckin’ jewelry.” As if a button had been pushed, Epstein went red. (Screenwriter Alun Owen picked up on the way Lennon ribbed Eppy, toned it down, and desexualized it for an ongoing bit in his script for A Hard Day’s Night.) Once he stepped to the mike onstage, however, Lennon simply cut the profanity and turned his threat into a beguiling bit of charm, topping even McCartney’s remark that Sophie Tucker was their “favorite band.” “Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands,” Lennon began, emboldening himself for the punch, “and the rest of you, if you’d just rattle your jewelry.” And then he smirked as if he’d just pulled down the queen mother’s knickers.

  Lennon’s smirk betrayed all innocence, the way the music betrayed any notion of sobriety: the intrigue lay in the barely concealed coarser subtext; the entire act had just enough juice to be beyond description, with enough cheek to glide beneath the establishment’s radar. If McCartney was cute and a bit plucky, Lennon came across as caustic, impatient, an impudent comic shredder of pretension and hypocrisy. Lennon didn’t have to use any swear words to get his point across. To the younger generation, his arrogance and defiance shone right through; for the staid upper classes, it was easier to pretend he didn’t really mean it. Cheek could be tolerated; vulgarity might have sunk the whole enterprise. Anyway, “Twist and Shout” went beyond vulgar; it was more like a previously private pleasure made public—nobody needed a diagram connecting “Twist and Shout” to the birds and bees. Doing the shimmy in suits only gave the whole thing a biting subversive glee.

  That sense of duality, of outrage posing as decency, tickled the band’s sound, gave the music an irresistible kick. Of course, you could also hear the tension in the band’s set list and ensemble, with McCartney carving out the old-school sentimental corner in a way that gave the harder material imaginary historical weight. Epstein had half-framed the Beatles as “all-around” entertainers, but nobody could really make any sense of this in the new context of a rock ’n’ roll act, a band that swerved gamely between Meredith Willson and Chuck Berry, laced with originals on parallel planes, from “P.S. I Love You” to “I Saw Her Standing There.” Here was something perhaps only Britain could embrace: not kids aping American idols, but something better, retranslating the rebel pose as something beyond John Osborne’s angry young men and the new working-class pride. American music done this well, performed by northerners, became something glamorous in and of itself: the simple joy of music shot through notions of class, gender, race, regionality, and even nationality, popping up straight as a youthful phenomenon in a world apart, played out as some waking dream of ambition, possibility, and generational solidarity. “You can rattle your jewelry,” Lennon seemed to say, “for all the good it’ll do you.”

  Lennon’s second defining TV appearance was taped on December 2 (for broadcast on April 18, 1964), with the beloved comedy team of Morecambe and Wise, who had roughly the same Sunday-night status as Ed Sullivan had in America. The duo started back in 1951 as part of a Parade of Youth series when they were both older than the Beatles were now (this bit gets reprised on the Beatles’ Anthology video). By 1963, Morecambe and Wise ruled British TV comedy as establishment fixtures. The Beatles sang “This Boy,” “All My Loving,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in front of a small studio crowd, and then closed the show with scripted shenanigans. Eric Morecambe—the tall one with glasses—greeted them as the “Kaye Sisters,” a popular British singing group from the 1950s, with Ernie Wise correcting him. “Hello, Bungo!” Morecambe shouted to Ringo back on his drum stand. “No, that’s Ringo!” Wise corrected again. Then they went into a stale routine redeemed by Beatle cutups and surrealist body movements.

  “Do you like being famous?” Morecambe turned to Lennon and asked. Lennon shifted from goonish to mock serious and retorted, “Oh, it’s not like in your day, you know.” With this, he gave his taller host a perverse once-over with his eyes, up and down his frame, sizing him up flirtatiously, concluding with disgust. Morecambe barely recovered, and the audience came apart. In a dazzling, transformative moment, Lennon’s once-over cemented everything their music hinted at: his manner simply dismissed this tired, silly-straight duo as passé.

  “What?” Morecambe said, turning to Wise. Lennon had just written him off, on his own TV show, in ways he didn’t quite understand. “Ah, that’s an insult,” he concluded, waving it off as his partner dissolved into giggles. Then he turned back to Lennon: “What do you mean, ‘not like in my day’?” “Oh, my dad used to tell me about you,” Lennon replied, his hand indicating, “when I was knee-high.” “You’ve only got a little dad, have you?” Morecambe shot back, cracking Lennon up. “That’s a bit strong, init?” Morecambe complained again to Wise.

  Suddenly, Lennon had turned Morecambe into an outsider on his own set. “There, that’s it I’ve had enough. I won’t be insulted,” he told his straight man. Wise suggested they do a song. “Oh, yes!” Morecambe responded, “one that my dad will remember,” adding, to Lennon, “. . . that I used to do with your dad.” Lennon suggested “Moonlight Bay,” the 1951 Doris Day hit, and the Beatles went off to get seersucker jackets and
boaters and straw hats. Morecambe returned in a Beatle wig. They all launched into barbershop harmony as Morecambe interjected “Twist and shout!,” “I like it!” (from Gerry and the Pacemakers’ hit) from behind them, getting older every second.

  The routine was stock variety-era setup-and-punch-line, anchored by Wise and Morecambe’s familiar patter. But Lennon’s readings tore holes in his script and brought both random comic sparks and a defiant abruptness to it all, as if to say, “In your day show business went along just so. Now you don’t know what we’ll do, do you?” Infinitely tamer than Lennon’s crack at the Royal Variety Performance, the scene still caught Lennon’s slippery absurdity; his attitude made propriety squirm. “The show won’t be aired for a couple of months,” somebody overheard the TV producer say. “Let’s hope they’re still popular then.”6 Standing atop these two comic giants, the Beatles—Lennon especially—made them seem infinitely smaller. In Britain, this appearance conferred national stature on the Beatles as inspired clowns; in America, nobody saw it until it was released on the Anthology DVD in 1995.

  At the top of this show-business ladder, the Beatles wound up socializing with some of the same people who had turned them down on the way to Parlophone. One of these was Decca’s Tony King, a promotional agent who was tight with Andrew Loog Oldham. In January 1964, the celebrated American producer Phil Spector brought over his “Be My Baby” girl group, the Ronettes, for a UK tour with the Rolling Stones, and King went along to “look after them.” This meant steering Spector’s girlfriend (and future wife), Veronica (“Ronnie”) Bennett; her older sister, Estelle; and their cousin Nedra Talley away from the guile of Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger.7