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

by Tim Riley

  These deals went forward as fans read the Beatles’ Playboy interview (in the February 1965 issue), which hit newsstands over Christmas 1964. This high-profile exchange included a prescient discussion of religion, with distinctions between “atheism” and “agnosticism” from all four. Are any of you churchgoers? Playboy asked. “Not particularly,” Paul offered. “But we’re not antireligious. We probably seem antireligious because of the fact that none of us believe in God.”

  Lennon assented: “If you say you don’t believe in God, everybody assumes you’re antireligious, and you probably think that’s what we mean by that. We’re not quite sure ‘what’ we are, but I know that we’re more agnostic than atheistic. . . . The only thing we’ve got against religion is the hypocritical side of it, which I can’t stand. Like the clergy is always moaning about people being poor, while they themselves are all going around with millions of quid worth of robes on. That’s the stuff I can’t stand.” The only sin worse than piety, Lennon argued, was hypocrisy. When the interviewer asked if Lennon was speaking for himself or for the entire group, he shot back: “For the group.” And George added, “John’s our official religious spokesman.”1

  Too bad for Hefner’s hot tub, these comments went unnoticed—the world was still too enamored of Beatle magic to take umbrage. And with four individuals, the entertainment wires had plenty to report. Ringo Starr married Maureen Cox in February at the Caxton Hall registry office, with Lennon and Epstein standing beside him, while Paul vacationed in Africa. Starr’s marriage echoed Lennon’s: Maureen gave birth to Zak Starr eight months later. Epstein still fretted about negative female reaction as a second Beatle gave up bachelorhood, to the point where even Harrison got quoted saying, “This means two married and two unmarried Beatles—two down and two to go.”2 The newlyweds honeymooned in a secluded spot near Brighton; but once again, the location leaked and fans swarmed their honeymoon.

  Increasingly, EMI’s Abbey Road studios became the Beatles’ island of control. Where the schedule pushed down on their time, sessions began lasting longer, and the number of takes per song swelled as needed. Sessions over the week of February 15–20 yielded eleven tracks toward the untitled sound track, beginning with “Ticket to Ride,” “Another Girl,” and “I Need You.” They still needed a title song, but remained productive enough to set aside two strong efforts. Ringo’s “If You’ve Got Trouble” burst forth in a single take (it would have made a dapper theme song for Ringo’s lead role in the upcoming film, but got held), before “Tell Me What You See,” in four takes. February 19 saw “You’re Going to Lose That Girl” in two basic takes plus overdubs, and they finished on the 20th with “That Means a Lot,” the second number from these sessions to get held, and handed to P.J. Proby for an overproduced, melodramatic single. This last track, however, had more potential—they returned to it after filming Help! in the Bahamas.

  The worldwide success of A Hard Day’s Night gave their second film a bigger budget, color stock, and more glamorous locations. Help! was arranged with some vacation in mind. Apart from easing the daily schedule, the Beatles’ accountant, Dr. Walter Strach, advised an offshore tax shelter to protect their earnings. Strach was installed in the Bahamas for a year to make this possible. Lester booked three weeks of shooting there, followed immediately by another three weeks in Austria. They would have to finish the sound track along the way.

  Spinetti, their Hard Day’s Night costar, remembers the Bahamas mainly for falling ill and for Lennon’s contretemps with a local British dignitary. He got right back into conversation with the band on the trip over. “You’ve got to be in all our films,” Harrison told him. Otherwise, he said, “me mum won’t come and see them, because she fancies you.” Each Beatle stopped by Spinetti’s room individually: Lennon performed German gibberish; George brought him milk and cookies; Ringo sat down and read him a good-night story; Paul poked his head in the door, asked if he was all right, and fled.3

  Lester ran a congenial set as the Beatles sneaked off to smoke joints; the cutting-room floor piled up with takes interrupted by rampant giggling. The maiden-voyage charge of making a movie had worn off, and work progressed with typical show-biz contours. Rumors flew about Lennon and costar Eleanor Bron. Ringo got thrown into the water before announcing he couldn’t swim. Spinetti noted how nonchalant the Beatles remained even as their world had begun to shrink.

  At the tail end of three weeks of shooting with no days off, Spinetti remembered there were location shots at a military camp—a makeshift hospital for the infirm and elderly. “We had been filming in this deserted army shack, a wooden frame with a tin roof, and all the doors and windows were closed, and all these kids inside, old people . . . it was just rotten, filthy. Dining on a royal feast that evening, John says to his host, ‘This morning, we were filming in this old deserted house, and we looked through the windows and saw all these sick kids and old people. How do you reconcile that with all this?’ And the man said, ‘Mr. Lennon, I am the minister of finance, and I have to tell you that I do this job voluntarily, I do not get paid for it.’ And John took a slow look round. ‘Well, you’re doing better than I’d have thought.’ ” BEATLES INSULT GOVERNOR, the headlines ran the next day. But Spinetti recalls the governor barely noticing, even though the other Beatles were nodding in assent to Lennon’s remark. “When we eventually left, we were virtually booed off the island.” 4

  Lennon later remembered this scene as a drunken rage: “The most humiliating experiences were like sitting with the Mayor [sic] of the Bahamas, when we were making Help! And being insulted by these fuckin’ junked up middle-class bitches and bastards who would be commenting on our work and commenting on our manners. I was always drunk, insulting them. I couldn’t take it. It would hurt me. I would go insane, swearing at them.” Spinetti warned Lennon about popping off in public. To the actor, Lennon seemed daft about how seriously everybody took him. “I’m only a songwriter, Vic,” Lennon told him, “I’m no fucking martyr.”5

  Harrison remembers celebrating his twenty-second birthday in Nassau (February 25). As he sat on the side of a road, Swami Vishnu-devananda approached him. “He was the first Swami I had met and he obviously knew we were there,” Harrison remembered. “He told me years later that whilst meditating he had a strong feeling that he should make contact.” He gave Harrison a book that he stowed away to read later on. Subsequently, he found it preached the same philosophy espoused by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.6

  According to Cynthia Lennon’s most recent memoir, Alfred Lennon paid John another surprise visit, this one to Kenwood, after Lennon returned from Austria, just as he had done the previous year on the Hard Day’s Night set. He introduced himself as “Freddie.” Rather than displaying the delight for which his father had been hoping, John flared up, asking, “Where have you been for the last twenty years?” “Freddie” stayed in the Lennon house for three days, until John and Cynthia became convinced that he had contacted his son for financial rather than sentimental reasons. After dismissing him, Lennon fell prey to guilt, and resumed his annual allowance after threatening to cut him off.7

  Another giant intrusion on Lennon’s consciousness took chemical form. In late March, John and Cynthia went out with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd for a dinner with the dentist they shared, one John Riley. They were already daily marijuana smokers, but in public, they preferred Scotch and Coke, and snuck joints in the bathroom. The Beatles made irresistible marks for Swinging London’s thrill seekers.

  Riley fancied himself a swinger, and dosed his guests with LSD. Cynthia remembered the room beginning to swim and Riley erupting in laughter. Harrison and Lennon scolded him and took Pattie and Cynthia out to Harrison’s Mini Cooper S as the drug was beginning to take effect. Cynthia recalled:

  The trouble was we were in central London, a good hour from home, and George had no idea which way up the world was. God knows how we made it, but after we had gone around in circles for what seemed like hours we eventually arrived at George and Patti
’s home. . . . The four of us sat up for the rest of the night as the walls moved, the plants talked, other people looked like ghouls and time stood still. It was horrific.8

  Her account doesn’t entirely square with what Pattie Boyd remembered in her memoir Wonderful Tonight (2008): “We were really keen to get away and John Lennon said, ‘We must go now.’ ” They had planned to catch Epstein’s new act Paddy, Klaus and Gibson (with Klaus Voormann, their Hamburg friend). “These friends of ours are going to be on soon,” Lennon told Riley. “It’s their first night, we’ve got to go and see them.” But Riley tried to keep everybody at the table. When he told them they had just been dosed through the coffee, Lennon erupted. “How dare you fucking do this to us?” he demanded. George and Pattie didn’t even know what LSD was, but Lennon had read about it in Playboy. “It’s a drug,” he told them. As its effects grew stronger, they felt even more strongly that they should leave. Pattie thought the doctor must have hoped for an orgy to break out. Somehow, they arrived at London’s Ad Lib club. They entered the elevator only to start hallucinating its red light setting it aflame. Inside the club, they bumped into Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Ringo, none of whom seemed to quell the increasing inner hysteria and the “elongating” tables. They drove home at a frantic crawl.

  Cynthia vowed never to take the drug again, but Lennon and Harrison were intrigued. “It was as if I had never tasted, talked, seen, thought, or heard properly before,” Harrison said. “For the first time in my whole life I wasn’t conscious of ego.”9

  Lysergic acid now began to mix with Lennon’s steady intake of alcohol and grass as the Beatles reentered the studio, and a new strain of dislocation slowly seeped into his muse. Back at EMI on the evening of March 30, the Beatles remade McCartney’s “That Means a Lot” with five more takes, but were still unhappy with it. As with Ringo’s “If You’ve Got Trouble,” this bespoke a pride they took in the rest of Help!’s sound track, only they never came back to it. This tells you something of their confidence, or of something more troubling—George Martin’s lack of authority, perhaps? How could a producer not hear “That Means a Lot” as anything but masterly?

  Crafting richly layered rock narrative under the guise of pop stars was one trick; consigning juggernauts to the vault while pounding out tracks for a movie, another. “That Means a Lot” finally came out on the Anthology in 1995, but it remains a stumper, a clue to how out of touch McCartney could be with his own strengths. Surely this was a track Lennon should have urged him to release—its melody alone trumps “The Night Before” or “Another Girl” or even “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” The lyric borrows heavily from ideas spun out first in “From Me to You” and “She Loves You,” as a lover measures his inner state against hearsay. Strung on a delicious guitar lick that settles gently down into understated rhythmic offbeats, punctuated by Ringo’s discreet snare, the groove itself is disarming. But it’s all an echoey bedding for McCartney’s rubbery vocal, which grows from purring self-reflection to damn-it-all revelation in one miraculous arc of feeling across two key areas (a ploy he revisits in “Here, There and Everywhere” and “Penny Lane”): “A touch can mean so much/When it’s all you’ve got.”

  Unlike on most of the other numbers from these sessions, the production is thick but detailed, with each individual line carefully etched. The recording admires “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” from a respectful distance; it’s an Englishman’s version of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, with heft but no fat. Here’s what Spector might have sounded like if he had but an ounce of British reserve. Its note of defeat (“Love can be . . . suicide”) gives much of McCartney’s preening self-regard, in this and many other songs, some measured respite. The other Beatles’ judiciously delayed vocal harmonies don’t answer the lead; they simply join it at the ends of phrases, a strategy used on this track alone and never again. And the swells in the middle eight expand in the fadeout as McCartney hints at “Hey Jude” vocal glories: his all-consuming yet restrained affection becomes giddy release into the fadeout. P. J. Proby’s rendition discards nuance and uncorks the emotion for a good example of sixties bathos: the melody was enough to make it a hit, but his recording sounds like a Johnnie Ray rerun.

  In advance of the band’s spring sessions, Northern Songs Ltd., the publishing company that held the rights to all Lennon and McCartney’s material, in February 1965 began its listing on the London Stock Exchange, opening with two out of five million shares at 9p apiece. Opening day was bumpy; the price dropped to below 6p, but shares were soon selling at 14p.

  The world grabbed brief glimpses of the band peeking from long hours in the studio, broken up by hastily arranged radio and TV spots. They did overdubbing and miscellaneous shots for Lester at London’s Twickenham Studios at the end of March, mimed “Ticket to Ride” and “Yes It Is” for Top of the Pops on April 10, and played five songs at the New Musical Express Poll Winners Concert at Wembley the next day. More film work took place on April 12 and 13, when Lester approached Lennon with a new title, to replace the film’s working title, Eight Arms to Hold You.

  In Lester’s mind, “Help!” suited the mock–James Bond caricature of the script, but it posed a special conundrum for the songwriter. Lennon tilted the lyric inward, which tweaked the movie’s burlesque tone with an imperceptible edge, as if the Beatles, looking down on their own project, had reservations. They went into EMI’s studios on April 13 to tape the title song, in twelve takes, with multiple overdubs. On the 16th, Lennon and Harrison appeared on the also newly retitled Ready Steady Goes Live! for an interview, promoting their “Ticket to Ride” single. The record came out three days later. At the end of that month, Peter Sellers visited the set of Help! to present the Beatles with their first Grammy Award, for Best Performance by a Vocal Group, for A Hard Day’s Night. Sellers called it a “Grandma” award. In America, the Grammy telecast featured a short film of the presentation on May 18.

  In advance of their second feature film release, more Beatle product clogged the cross-Atlantic muddle. Capitol Records finally won the rights to release the Swan and Vee-Jay material from 1962 and 1963 and put out The Early Beatles for the American market in March 1965, using Robert Freeman’s 1964 photo for the UK’s Beatles for Sale. This was quickly subsumed by April’s futuristic “Ticket to Ride” / “Yes It Is” single, a diagram of the gaping aesthetic distance traveled in two impossibly swift years. A backlog of songs quickly crowded the Billboard charts, an almost literal echo of the previous year: “Ticket to Ride” went to number one while The Early Beatles grazed the top twenty. It wasn’t until June that America got to hear the Beatles for Sale tracks that Britain had been listening to since the previous November, with a marketing mosaic called Beatles VI, which included two tracks they had dashed off at Capitol’s request: “Bad Boy,” which got filed on a UK title called The Beatles Oldies later that year, and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie,” which landed on the Help! sound track.10

  The wires noted how all four Beatles attended Bob Dylan’s Royal Festival Hall appearance, captured by D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back documentary. Dylan’s recent Bringing It All Back Home featured a side of electric rock, and this would be his last acoustic-only tour. Convulsed over Dylan’s identity, his British audience parsed every lyric, mistrusting his flirtation with rock ’n’ roll more for its flight from literary pretense than inexplicable lack of explicit social protest. The Beatles’ attendance conferred royal approval of Dylan’s vexing persona, whichever guise it took.

  With the publication of Lennon’s second book, A Spaniard in the Works, the Dylan rivalry intensified. Spaniard was both hastier than its predecessor and more ambitious, with more wordplay by the pound. In His Own Write featured several genre parodies (letters to the editor, school lessons, scripts). Spaniard took the genre stuff further, ranging out into mock sagas like the title tale and “The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield,” an account of Harold Wilson’s 1964 ascent to prime minister in “We must not forget . . . the G
eneral Erection,” a gossip-column parody in “Cassandle” (spinning off Cassandra’s narcissistic column in the Daily Mirror), a “Last Will and Testicle,” and several long poems, alongside a flurry of new drawings.

  Lennon wrote the poem “Our Dad” during at least two confrontations with Alfred Lennon in this period, but the verse lurches from autobiographical to fantastical. Instead of a seafaring ne’er-do-well, Lennon opens his ode with the verse:

  It wasn’t long before old dad

  Was cumbersome—a drag.

  He seemed to get the message and

  Began to pack his bag.

  “I’m old and crippled,” he says on his way out the door. “You’re bloody right, it’s true,” the family responds. It’s hard not to read Lennon’s own emotional defection from Cynthia and Julian here, seeing as he had long since packed himself off, with nowhere to go. (In another story, “Silly Norman,” mother is a “muddle,” both a revered elder and a common whore—as much a puzzling over Julia and Mimi as a peculiar intimation of Cynthia.) In “Our Dad,” Lennon sustains such brittle enmity through a hectoring, bouncing children’s rhyme for eighteen stanzas, only to crash down into a bitingly satiric reversal for the final lines: “But he’ll remain in all our hearts/—a buddy friend and pal.” This toys with exhausted British notions of the inertia toward “happy endings,” to which all such “odes” necessarily conform. Lennon’s verbal contortions accent the pathology of “normal,” as though anybody could “tidy up” such harsh, consuming hostility. No wonder he preferred venting through rock ’n’ roll: reading Lennon’s prose can feel halting, as if the energy behind the words suffocates their multiple meanings. Detonating conformity was one of the few themes Lennon’s pen mastered, but his drawings convey more emotional mayhem with greater elegance.