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

by Tim Riley

  The next morning, on Lennon’s twenty-fourth birthday, they launched a seven-day tour of Britain opening in Bedford and finishing in Hull. October 18 found them back at EMI to work on “Eight Days a Week,” “Mr. Moonlight,” “Kansas City,” and five new numbers, two of which were originals: Lennon’s “I Feel Fine,” and McCartney’s “I’ll Follow the Sun.” The others were Carl Perkins’s “Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” and, finally, Buddy Holly’s “Words of Love.” This streak finished off product for the Christmas market deadline and measured their determination at turning so many bullet points into solid work (even if slightly less pronounced than the Hard Day’s Night all-original breakthrough). And still they kept moving: the next day they mounted another week-long UK sprint, opening in Edinburgh and landing in Brighton. When they returned, they laid down “Honey Don’t,” remade “What You’re Doing,” and tore comic holes in the Christmas-record script that Tony Barrow had prepared for their fan club. Then they hit the stage again for a two-week tour, from Exeter through Dublin and back to Bristol. November eased up a little, but included three TV appearances—on Thank Your Lucky Stars, Top of the Pops, and Ready Steady Go!—a BBC radio taping, and Lennon’s appearances to publicize his now-best-selling book, In His Own Write.

  In the UK, some of the biggest aftershocks from Beatlemania coursed through the unlikely world of high literary culture. To this crowd, a pop star making girls scream had fairly obvious apocalyptic overtones. But a pop star setting off debate about modern verse—now, that was something so far beyond the establishment’s grasp that their embrace seems almost craven. Michael Braun had became intrigued with some pages Lennon passed along to him during 1963 and showed them to his editors. The punning title gathered a sprawling assortment of absurdity through disjointed prose, cartoons, and verse that cleared the low hurdle of a quickie riding on its author’s notoriety.

  Perhaps because the Beatles commanded enormous space across the country’s newspaper real estate, Bob Dylan seemed the far more likely music figure to assume the mantle of bard, or at the very least start issuing volumes of poetry. Already, Dylan attracted British esteem as a “poet,” long before this debate started up in America, and allowed skeptics to disdain Lennon as a mere pop star while Dylan still wore his acoustic folkie halo. Many writers gloss over how Dylan’s leap to rock ’n’ roll during the coming season came as a far greater shock to British sensibilities than it did to American ears. For Lennon to issue verse in book form ahead of Dylan had a kind of weird British advance revenge to it, as though they could not just conquer American music but best them at the word game as well, and who better to do so than the giant pop star whose brains were obviously way too advanced for this rock stuff he would surely grow out of?

  Lennon and Dylan began to spar in the British imagination, the antic Scouser who always threatened to go round the bend against the oddly prolific American whose epic abstractions quite nearly absolved him of being Jewish. Since In His Own Write’s release on April 7, 1964, reviewers had gone overboard to praise Lennon’s unlikely literary success while conservative scribblers—like that old man on A Hard Day’s Night’s train—lambasted yet another example of youth’s ingratitude. In His Own Write became another Beatlemania sideshow that gave Lennon’s pop stature heft.

  As it had in Bill Harry’s Mersey Beat, Lennon’s verse boasts such a loopy, scabrous energy people overlooked how much subversion lay embedded in its cryptic asides. Two quotes followed this first publication around. The first came from a review from London’s Times Literary Supplement: “It is worth the attention of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language and British imagination.” (Not many read the succeeding phrase: “Humorists have done more to preserve and enrich these assets than most serious critics allow.”)35 The other comes from Lennon himself, who arrived hungover to accept the Foyles Literary Prize at a luncheon, unaware that he was expected to give a formal speech. “Thank you, you’ve got a lucky face” was how the press quoted his mumbled thank-you, and the fiasco, a narrowly fumbled embarrassment, scored as a win.

  McCartney wrote the dedication, declaring that absolutely none of it made much sense, and didn’t need to. In a blur, the term “Joycean” became attached to Lennon’s prose, as if he were somehow the great Irish bard’s bastard son, when the truth was Lennon had never so much as read anything by Joyce. When he finally did, his quote was priceless: “It was like finding Daddy.” Lennon and Joyce make a pair in how they contort many of the same techniques and treat language as a rubbery material through which they stretch their thoughts. But the Joyce label does a disservice to Lennon precisely because it springs completely unburdened by the influence; and while the means can be similar, the ends are completely different.

  Paradoxically, an American Joyce scholar, James Sauceda, turned in the best analysis of Lennon’s prose in a book called The Literary Lennon: A Comedy of Letters (1983). Sauceda has a good feel for Lennon’s tactics and knows how and when to make the more enlightened Joyce comparisons. Lennon’s prose has the unusual quality of begging for more attention and threatening to suffer from overpraise. He clearly addressed many of these ideas better through music, even when you wish he’d written a “Dead Dog Walking” song. (The best musical analogy to “Unhappy Frank” might be “I Am the Walrus,” which is a good deal more oblique and less cunning.)

  Tortured spellings turn into puns, and word mashing creates poetry out of unlikely collisions. Instead of “witty,” Lennon writes “writty,” mashing “witty” and “writing” or “written” into a single pregnant word. Sauceda notes how a lot of this overlaps with some of Joyce’s own wordplay, including some key words like “bored” for “born” in Finnegans Wake, so the serendipities can be striking. But they are only serendipities. Similarly, in “All Abord Speeching,” “abord” can mean both “about” and “aboard,” and “speeching” enfolds both “speaking” and “teaching.” Sauceda notes how many details Lennon gets correct in his gibberish back-cover autobiographical sketch, “About the Awful,” like Hitler’s single testicle (which Lennon calls a “Heatlump,” neatly combining the physical attribute and the reverse reproductive imperative).

  Sauceda’s keen insights, however, don’t plumb the biographical aspects of Lennon’s work here; and now that Aunt Mimi’s pedantry and John’s Oedipal rage become clearer, several themes leap out. The first is Lennon’s fondness for dogs, both as a symbol for the Beatles (in the drawing on page 11, “Drawing Two”) and in morbid tales like “Good Dog Nigel.” In “Nigel,” he uses the name of his Quarry Bank mate Nigel Walley—the only witness to Judy’s death—for a sick verse about a happy dog who’s about to be killed, just as Mimi put his dog, Sally, down one weekend while he was away at Julia’s. To the Beatles and their circle, these references would have been sharp, piquant to the point of tragic.

  Only McCartney would have identified with how bent humor can express the utter futility that follows losing one’s mother in adolescence. “Unhappy Frank” also doubles as a screed against “mother,” both Mimi and Julia, for overprotection and lack of attention, respectively: “Wart am I but a slave tow look upon with deesekfrebit all the peegle larfing and buzing me in front of all the worled.” Injecting pidgin German into this rant only magnifies the regimented enslavement portrayed as boyhood.

  Having squeaked through the Foyles luncheon with a deathless misquote, Lennon agreed to appear with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on their experimental new television show, Not Only . . . But Also, at the end of November 1964. They set it up as a twist on the tired cliché of the author making a guest appearance merely to read from his book, and Lennon seemed relieved at not having to wear his Beatle mask. Moore prefaced Lennon’s appearance with an anticlimactic apology, as if readying the TV audience for some audacious experiment it couldn’t be trusted to enjoy, especially at a phase when rock stars couldn’t possibly put two sentences together. “Poetry and music,” he intoned drily, “t
his uneasy marriage of the arts has caused a lot of controversy for a long time; many opinions are for and many against. We leave you to judge for yourselves. . . . What we’re going to show you is a visualization and ‘musicification’ of a poem of a young poet named John Lennon. The poem is called, quite simply, ‘Deaf Ted, Danoota, (and me).’ ” Then Lennon began to read from In His Own Write, with the camera crosscutting to several different readers, with awkward pauses and miscued laugh lines going south—none of which distracted from the rhythmic authority of the verse. On the line “Sometimes we bring our friend, Malcolm,” actor Norman Rossington appeared with “Malcolm” scrawled across his forehead. Additionally, Rossington and Moore read “Unhappy Frank.” Right at the end of the program, as the credits were rolling to Moore’s signature tune “Goodbye-ee,” John flitted maniacally in front of the camera, as if escaping from his minders.

  Chapter 13

  Watching the Wheels

  At the beginning of 1965, a new Beatles stature settled in over the rest of pop, and it’s worth stepping back to view the larger frame to see how broadly their influence stretched. An onslaught of 1965–66 hits, from both sides of the Atlantic, now form the core of “Classic Rock,” that slippery conundrum of a style that was all about the Ongoing Now. While the Beatles set this boom in motion, competing talent created new substreams, many of which quickly expanded into new genres. All of it worked as metaphor for the ideas and attitudes the songs reflected, a social upheaval that seemed to dance.

  Ascendants like the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan turned in defining skyscrapers (“Satisfaction,” then “Like a Rolling Stone”); a thriving middle class set up shop in the musical suburbs (the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Hollies); and a staunch underground yowled of unrest still to come (the Animals, the Kinks, the Who, the Sonics). Week after confounding week, early Beatle promise became manifest in single after dazzling rock single, tracks that would dominate radio playlists for decades. And while reigning over the pop world in 1965 with four singles (“Eight Days a Week,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Help!,” and “We Can Work It Out”/“Day Tripper”), each a powerhouse of a different stripe, the Beatles created ripples that were often as tempting as the hits themselves.

  The larger irony of Lennon’s creative arc resides in how this emerging middle period—Rubber Soul in late 1965, Revolver in 1966, and Sgt. Pepper in 1967—drew from all this chart activity to harness a new authority: through his ears, and the Beatles’ ensemble, the rock album grew more conceptual than a mere sequence of discrete songs. The historical nuances steering this larger story touch on all the extremes the Beatles toyed with in their sound.

  Hindsight deprives contemporary listeners of the Pervasive Now that that season’s hits encircled, one of those thrillingly rare collisions of artistry with popular taste that ranks with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels in the 1920s and 1930s, Charlie Chaplin’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s films, or the rash of subversive TV sitcoms like Roseanne and Seinfeld throughout the 1990s. Top 40 radio streamed intoxicating musical perfumes. Nearing fifty years later, simply scanning these charts can give you tingles: in December 1964, Phil Spector released his last great micro-epic from the Righteous Brothers, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” a huge international hit, which zipped past the Zombies’ “Tell Her No,” a refusal so enticing that Lennon approached the band about producing. March brought Motown’s lithe, ethereal “My Girl” by the Temptations, which seemed to glide on an idealized plane summoned by the civil rights movement. Listeners got lost in such delirium, but there were too many distractions to linger: “My Girl” got bumped aside by “Eight Days a Week,” atop for two weeks, and then by the commanding cry of “Stop! In the Name of Love” by the Supremes. “The Last Time,” the Rolling Stones’ first Jagger-Richards original Stones hit, came careening around the next corner, a guitar’s dagger to the heart of disaffected cool. Come May, Lennon’s cunning “Ticket to Ride” held firm atop Ringo’s white-hot delayed drum patterns, alongside “Help Me, Rhonda” by the Beach Boys, a Rubik’s Cube of vocal harmonies.

  This was all foreplay for that summer’s avalanche, each hit more tantalizing than the last, variety chasing experiment. June alone brought a lusty “Back in Your Arms Again” by the Supremes, the confessional “I Can’t Help Myself” by the fiercely proud Four Tops, and a shimmering, magisterial incantation of Dylan as electric prophet in “Mr. Tambourine Man” from the Byrds. You could have freeze-framed rock history right there and called it a golden era. But July served up two giant set pieces: the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (rock as carnal unrest) and Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” (rock as bottomless, implacable, leering social unrest).

  For Dylan, this electric assault threatened to suck the air out of everything else, only there was too much radio oxygen to suck. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the giant, all-consuming anthem of the new “generation gap” disguised as a dandy’s riddle, a dealer’s come-on. As a two-sided single, it dwarfed all comers, disarmed and rejuvenated listeners at each hearing, and created vast new imaginative spaces for groups to explore both sonically and conceptually. It came out just after Dylan’s final acoustic tour of Britain, where his lyrical profusion made him a bard, whose tabloid accolade took the form of political epithet: “anarchist.” As caught on film by D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, the young folkie had already graduated to rock star in everything but instrumentation. “Satisfaction” held Dylan back at number two during its four-week July hold on Billboard’s summit, giving way to Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry the Eighth, I Am” and Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” come August, novelty capstones to Dylan’s unending riddle. (In Britain, Dylan stalled at number four.) The ratio of classics to typical pop schlock, like Freddie and the Dreamers’ “I’m Telling You Now” or Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual,” suddenly got inverted. For cosmic perspective, yesterday’s fireball, Elvis Presley, sang “Do the Clam.”

  Most critics have noted the Dylan influence on Lennon’s narratives. Less space gets devoted to Lennon’s effect on Dylan, which was overt: think of how Dylan rewires Chuck Berry (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”) or revels in inanity (“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”). Even more telling, Lennon’s keening vocal harmonies in “Nowhere Man,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “Dr. Robert” owed as much to the Byrds and the Beach Boys, high-production turf Dylan simply abjured. Lennon also had more stylistic stretch, both in his Beatle context and within his own sensibility, as in the pagan balalaikas in “Girl” or the deliberate amplifier feedback tripping “I Feel Fine.” Where Dylan skewed R&B to suit his psychological bent, Lennon pursued radical feats of integration wearing a hipster’s arty façade, the moptop teaching the quiet con.

  Building up toward Rubber Soul throughout 1965, Beatle gravity exerted subtle yet inexorable force in all directions. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds spoke ecstatically about leaving A Hard Day’s Night determined to form a band, and built his sound around Harrison’s jangling Rickenbacker electric twelve-string, used in the title song’s delirious opening chord and closing arpeggio—which seemed to imply all things to all listeners. Within a year McGuinn had steered his folkie taste into folk-rock, turning Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” into a space-age duet threaded between neon guitars. Everywhere there was inexorable melody; everywhere there was booming, luxurious beat.

  Remarkably, Lennon and the Beatles surveyed this vast new world of sound and ideas under expert cover as bubblegum pop stars. The previous fall, of 1964, had seen the band turn sideways (with Beatles for Sale), but only in the way comets dip from view. In this new climate, they absorbed their surroundings and pushed back with better material, more ideas, and a newly relaxed confidence even as their schedule hastened forward. No matter how relentlessly Epstein packed their calendar, their minds always seemed to be leaping out ahead.

  After finishing the group’s second annual Christmas Show at the Odeon on January 16, 1965 (capping three weeks of nearly twice-daily perfor
mances), John and Cynthia Lennon flew off to Switzerland with George Martin and his soon-to-be second wife, Judy Lockhart-Smith, leaving Julian with their new housekeeper, Dot Jarlett. Only the Alps would do for Lennon to practice skiing for ten days in anticipation of the next movie’s Austrian sequences. One night, Lennon broke out for Martin a new song he had been working on to cheer the producer up after an injury. It bore the working title “This Bird Has Flown.” The rest of the time he scribbled to meet a publishing deadline for the literary followup to In His Own Write. He returned to six weeks of filming and a summer of touring the world’s stages. Epstein had mapped out another European tour for July, with a live TV broadcast from Paris, followed by another major American tour in August and at least one concert in Mexico (which was later scrapped).

  It’s telling that Lennon sat on this song, “This Bird Has Flown,” for several months. The band began recording material for its second film as director Dick Lester rewrote the script to accommodate some vacation, with sequences set in the Bahamas as well as in Austria. The plot leapt unevenly from life inside the Beatle bubble to broad James Bond parody. As the Beatles recorded and Lester preproduced, Epstein flew to New York to arrange the August tour schedule, under strict instructions about how their second U.S. tour would scale back from the manic pace of the first. Although amenable, he couldn’t resist making trade-offs in the number of dates versus larger venues. One of his earliest bookings came from a Manhattan meeting with Sid Bernstein, who was anxious to follow up 1964’s Carnegie Hall dates at a more profitable space. The year before, Bernstein had walked Epstein down to Madison Square Garden for a look-see. Now he suggested an even bigger venue.