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

by Tim Riley

  The Sullivan audience, and fans who ran out to pick up Capitol’s Meet the Beatles, heard galloping embrace, from swooning doo-wop (“This Boy”) to rakish R&B (“I Saw Her Standing There”—an original in the Chuck Berry mold—and Arthur Alexander’s “Anna”). Alongside their Little Richard and Carl Perkins covers, they slung Motown (Barrett Strong’s “Money,” Smokey Robinson’s “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”), girl groups (the Marvelettes’ “Please Mister Postman,” the Shirelles’ “Boys”), and soul raves that threw off giddy, intractable sparks. The Beatles were already tinkering with the style—exploiting new cracks in the sound, writing songs that implied even more than they delighted—the crashingly coy understatement of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” for example, or the way Lennon’s attack on “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” was as much about love as it was about white regard for black, or British for American, style.

  It has taken history to clarify how far the basic idea, the seed of all the mania, was actually borne out in the music itself, a point missed by too many scandal-driven biographers. As early as shows and radio appearances supporting “Love Me Do,” listeners heard something new in the Beatles that few other pop groups had. It was far more radical than the simplistic explanations of white British “working-class” youth performing sturdy R&B. (This claim must always be qualified by Lennon’s insistence on his grammar-school status—the American equivalent of a prep-school boy.) And while the R&B element in their sound was cued to the seasoned interplay between McCartney’s bass and Ringo’s teasingly expert offbeats, “Love Me Do” is richer even than this. The vocal harmonies on the word “Plea—ee—ee—ease” not only evoke the Everly Brothers, but raise an intriguing question: What if the country-duo-group tradition got hooked up with the Chicago-electric-blues tradition? What if this new band seemed “exotically” foreign, safe, and accessible enough to make the aesthetic argument seem not just persuasive but inevitable?

  Range only began to make sense of how the Beatles were reframing American music. The Chuck Berry chassis that anchored songs like “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Please Please Me,” “She Loves You,” and “I’ll Get You” was offset by a softer, less pressing impulse, and some of these soft-pedaled songs even bore Lennon’s fingerprints, especially “Ask Me Why,” “All I’ve Got to Do,” and “From Me to You.” Chuck Berry wouldn’t be caught dead singing such romantic pap. But the idea of Berry with a gang of buddies, maybe even a songwriting partner, made a different kind of musical sense, and only made Berry’s impulses sound more contemporary.

  In other words, the Beatles became symbolic of something much larger than themselves almost as quickly as they became surpassingly famous: toward a unity, a cross-fertilization and commingling of previously distinct musical strands. Almost as quickly as they became stars, they embodied an idea, a new myth about the music itself and how it might grow. Nobody had made these connections before, and now the future was whirring past in a blur of swaggering offbeats and enticing backup harmonies.

  So the context of Kennedy’s memorial to youth gave way to a new exhortation of youth on a grander scale, four-headed and beatific, arty yet giddy, foreign-looking yet somehow familiar-sounding, hilarious on the surface with strong undercurrents of seriousness, lust, and resolve, a sense that enormous shifts had already happened. There is no question that Beatlemania answered the Kennedy assassination, that there are ways in which these two events played off each other, required each other, just as Profumo sought a British antidote to scandal.

  Not only was rock ’n’ roll a vital, healthy style which many had taken for dead; it was abruptly redeemed—even better, most parents still despised it, making it a revolution in plain sight. From now on, and for at least the next decade, rock ’n’ roll carried a subversive force within the mainstream that made it seem like truants were the new power brokers. As world politics grew increasingly complicated and interdependent, it brought the Beatles immense cultural prestige.

  That this renewal came as a British import made even less sense, which in turn made it irresistible. It gave the Beatles their halo effect. Rock’s second act began on a familiar stage with a transformational new context: these British youths, brash yet enchanting, new yet instantly recognizable, held up an astonishing cultural mirror to Americans. Their command of rock ’n’ roll made it seem like they’d always known us, grinning strangers who had cracked our aesthetic DNA and were suddenly, inexplicably, lifelong friends.

  After a day off, as the papers reported the record-breaking Sullivan Show, the Beatles got on a train to Washington, D.C., for their first American concert, at the Washington Coliseum. Ringo, the new kid in Beatletown, was suddenly a star alongside the rest of them: “Being cheeky chappies saved our arses on many occasions, especially then, on the train to Washington, because the guys from the press had come to bury us. These reporters, being New Yorkers, would yell at us, but we just yelled back. . . . That’s what endeared us to them.”15

  The Coliseum seated eight thousand fans and placed the Beatles on a stage in the center, like a boxing ring. Unaccustomed to their setup, they simply used their Vox amps and the house’s public address system. There were no stage monitors and no sound check, so they had to balance their ensemble and vocals as they went along. Ringo had to turn his drum set around after every three songs when stagehands rotated the stage. And despite all this, the set is all conquest and hunkering down for the future—old scores are torn to shreds, and raw potential seeps out of every number. (The Maysles brothers include the set in their film.) If promise was a sound, it was the sound of that scream that Epstein and Oldham first marveled at the year before. They may not have been able to hear themselves, but rock tunesmith Marshall Crenshaw holds this set among his favorite Beatle moments: “They played as if they still had something to prove, which of course they did. . . . but nobody expected how much or how sure of themselves they already were. That sound has such thump to it, such force, it really is a proving ground for the Beatles as live musicians.”16

  Just as the royals had attached themselves to channel some Beatle heat, so, too, did political functionaries as the band passed through Washington. This kind of thing made Lennon feel like a trained seal: “We were supposed to put up with all sorts of shit from Lord Mayors and their wives, and be touched and pawed like in A Hard Day’s Night, only a million times more. At the American Embassy or the British Embassy in Washington, some bloody animal cut Ringo’s hair. I walked out, swearing at all of them, I just left in the middle of it.”17

  In Miami for the second Sullivan Show, the band hung out at their beach hotel, waved to the girls from their windows, and got photographed breaking out into song in the swimming pool for a famous Life photograph. It was the week before Sonny Liston fought the fast-talking Cassius Clay, and photographer Benson got the Beatles to do a publicity stunt with the young fighter.18

  Here’s an early peek into celebrity one-upmanship: who was rubbing up against more heat? Who would benefit from the publicity more, the Beatles or Clay? And the photos turned out to have a much bigger historical impact than anybody might have guessed at the time: peering back into February of 1964—with Clay not yet Ali, and the Beatles at the symbolic dawn of the 1960s—the civil rights movement, counterculture, and anti–Vietnam War sensibilities come alive in these pictures. It’s an image of youth rebels mugging madly at stale institutions like segregation—and the only known photos of Lennon and Ali smiling across the canyon.

  They also hit the clubs, one night catching insult comic Don Rickles, who brought the spotlight down on the band and cut loose, which made their awestruck British souls recoil. “If we’d had him on our own terms we could have made mincemeat out of him,” Lennon said. Ringo remembered another cherished act they caught, and the gap they began to notice between their view of the style and America’s: “We went out to see the Coasters, who were heroes with ‘Yakety Yak.’ People were dancing to them in the club, and I just couldn’t understand it. These were roc
k-’n’-roll gods to me, and people were dancing! I was just so disgusted.”19

  A homecoming crowd swarmed their London arrival, far outnumbering the three thousand Americans who had greeted them in New York. British fans couldn’t claim any self-respect if they let American fans out-obsess them simply by dint of population. The BBC filmed it as a news event and broadcast the return to triumphant prose during its Saturday-afternoon sports show Grandstand. “What did you think of America?” David Coleman asked. “ ‘It’s bigger,’ said Ringo.20

  The American debut proved a watershed, but the Beatles kept moving. Epstein had them tape a Big Night Out performance for broadcast on February 29, and then pointed them back into the studio to finish the sound track for the feature film they would begin shooting in early March.

  Their recording schedule registers a slew of new numbers, and a swift new authority in the studio. On the morning of February 25, George Harrison’s twenty-first birthday, they laid down vocal and guitar overdubs for McCartney’s “Can’t Buy Me Love,” the next single, which they had started recording in Paris, before nine takes of Lennon’s “You Can’t Do That,” which was slated for its B side. In the afternoon they recorded McCartney’s “And I Love Her” in two takes and “I Should Have Known Better” in three. Martin dressed up “And I Love Her” with a key change for Harrison’s flamenco acoustic guitar solo, and it sounded like the virgin offspring of “Till There Was You” and “P.S. I Love You,” a choice weave of devotional lyric and worried melody that remains an early peak. Lennon ranked it among his partner’s later classics like “Yesterday” and “Michelle.” These sessions rang out with new vigor, as if all the hints dropped on their first two records had sprouted full-blown tracks.

  Lennon and McCartney felt the pressure, and the songs made the necessary leap; heaps of adulation fueled grand creative gestures. All this new material would support their next venture, the full-length film Epstein had set up with comedy producer Walter Shenson. Shenson had come off two successful British comedies, 1959’s The Mouse That Roared, with Peter Sellers, and its 1963 sequel, The Mouse on the Moon. This was the typical deal for a pop group: shoot a quick movie to cash in on its sound track. To hedge their bets, they hired a Beatles favorite, Wilfrid Brambell, from the hit TV series Steptoe and Son, to play McCartney’s wayward grandfather.21 On Steptoe, Brambell’s son was always chiding his father for being a “dirty old man.” Brambell was also Irish, an honorary Liverpudlian to British viewers. This sop to the TV audience meant the movie might at least break even. Epstein and Shenson brought in an American director who had worked in UK commercials, named Richard Lester, who had made a film with Sellers and Spike Milligan called The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film. He’d also directed Mouse on the Moon and It’s Trad, Dad. The Goon connection won him Lennon’s approval: “We didn’t even want to make a movie that was going to be bad, and we insisted on having a real writer to write it.”22

  Lester led them to Alun Owen, a Liverpool playwright who wrote scripts for television’s Corrigan Blake and Armchair Theatre. Owen had the aura of a Scouser’s John Osborne, a working-class type who had popularized dissent onstage with the West End’s Progress to the Park and The Rough and Ready Lot, and with No Trams to Lime Street for TV. Like Michael Braun, the American writer who scribbled down Beatle dialogue to drive his Love Me Do! paperback, Owen went on the road with the band in the fall of 1963 to observe the crowd phenomenon and write specifically for the band’s situation; since they had never acted before, there was a great effort made to make them comfortable with lines and dealing with other actors on a film set. Casting them as themselves in a familiar situation (“a day in the life”—arriving in a town by train, rehearsing for a TV show, and making an escape) might help them over the most obvious imaginative hurdles.

  Owen has never gotten the credit he deserves for capturing Lennon’s character, from which the cruelty, womanizing, and homoerotic danger all seep out subtextually. This was the first fictionalization of “Lennon,” and it went a long way toward introducing him in ways that still make more sense than not. As the seed to his ongoing persona, he couldn’t have asked for better lines. As Braun had, Owen wove key ingredients of Beatles charm into the narrative. Lennon’s character spars with Norm (Norman Rossington) cued by the Epstein chemistry, minus the sexuality. But in so many ways this “Lennon” character works as a soft-core version of the real thing, something he could upstage in real life. It’s his “rattle your jewelry” line done up cinematically, and it signals his harsh side without indulging it. Owen rubs Lennon’s edges down, but only metaphorically.

  In the final cut, Lennon’s presence is almost manically subdued. He plays “Lennon,” the smartest, most impatient band member, while “Ringo” gets corraled by the grandfather’s grandstanding. This version of Lennon has no need to break out and go “parading,” he’s keelhauling the parade from the inside. While Lennon went on record many times denouncing what he read as a watering-down of his sensibility, the movie’s reputation rests even more on the script than on its direction. The music alone would have made it a huge hit; the dialogue made it a classic. “Give us a kiss,” he tells the stiff old bag whining about his rights in the first-class train cabin. “I hereby declare this bridge . . . open,” he opines in a campy falsetto, snipping a wardrobe fitter’s tape measure. Disparaging the script rang of protest-too-much refusal: “We were a bit infuriated by the glibness of it. It was a good projection of one façade of us—on tour, in London and in Dublin. It was of us in that situation together, having to perform before people. We were like that. Alun Owen saw the press conference so he recreated it in the movie—pretty well; but we thought it was pretty phoney, even then.”23

  This leap to film made all kinds of career sense, but it made Lennon wary in ways that puzzle most Americans. “The trouble is,” Lennon told Braun after reading Owen’s draft, “. . . it’s only us who can write for us.” His first line in the script had him saying, “Uh, who’s your friend, Paul?” “I wouldn’t say that,” Lennon told Braun. “I’d just say, ‘Who’s the old crip?’ ”24 This quote came before Lennon met with Lester, who, unlike many other directors, encouraged improvisation on his sets. Just observe Owen’s scathing indictment of the nameless TV director in a tacky sweater, whom Victor Spinetti plays with imperious precision.

  Owen casts Lennon as the wayward brain lost in a world of puffery. It’s all here: the political indignation, the absurdity, the contempt for class distinctions, the offhanded attitude toward all manner of authority. Rock critic Lester Bangs ranted contrarily about the absurdity of Owen’s “generation gap,” how, in a way, Brambell would make more sense as Lennon’s grandfather. “The Beatles were four yobs, or rather three yobs and a librarian named Paul,” Bangs wrote. “Fuck the Beatles, fuck the songs, fuck the cute direction and Marx Brothers comparisons: it’s BLATANTLY OBVIOUS that the most rock ’n’ roll human being in the whole movie is the fucking grandfather! That wily old slime of Paul’s! He had more energy than the four moptops put together! Plus the spirit! He was a true anarchist!”25

  But Bangs overlooks how his critique is at odds with Lennon in the rest of the film. Owen has Lennon confront the grandfather for an even better story. This grandfather, teeming with unsolicited candor, teaches our heroes how to sneak into restricted gambling clubs and pick up rich women. (“I’ll bet you’re a fine swimmer,” he says to a heaving cleavage.) Even so, Lennon gets the last word, after they rescue him from the police station with Ringo, the film’s climactic chase scene. “But I’m clean,” he confides to Lennon, after a thousand retorts about how his hygiene somehow makes him “respectable.” His parading over, he looks to Lennon for absolution. “Are ya?” Lennon shoots back, unfazed—he’s had the old man’s number all along.

  And he’s mocking every pretension in every scene while slipping straight-faced into poetically charged ballads like “If I Fell,” looking on facetiously as McCartney sings “And I Love Her” even as he supports him, and radi
ating goodwill and infectious high spirits during filler like “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” and “Tell Me Why,” numbers that would be peaks in anybody else’s set.

  British audiences saw all these characters drawn with utmost scrutiny to class distinctions—how these “working-class” northerners tickle staid entertainment-bizzers to death. Spinetti’s director is the kind of arrogant prima donna who’s worked his way up to a “respectable” position and can’t help dropping his class resentment into every conversation. “I’ve won awards, you know.” “I could listen to him all day,” Owen has Lennon say.

  Spinetti remembers Lennon and the others as fit, game, and more winning than most through sheer charisma. “Lennon came up to me after our first day on the set together and said, ‘When Dick shouts “Action!” the other actors jump up and become different people, but you stay the same. Does that mean you’re as terrible as we are?’

  “The banter that I heard on my first day never stopped,” Spinetti recalls. After catching on to how scenes get wrapped and people hang out, the band became regular players in a floating crap game of conversation. “Soon I found myself sitting with these four young men, talking to them as if we had known each other our whole lives. It was something to do with all of us being provincials. I’d come up from Wales and they’d come down from Liverpool. I’ve made lots of films, but I’ve only met two other people like that—Richard Burton and Orson Welles.”26