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

by Tim Riley

  Punctuated by surprise and innuendo, a rash of hits thrived on vivid transatlantic contradictions. America embraced a mythical British Invasion while British ears caved in to American acts once again. In February 1966, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles had “Going to a Go-Go,” which one-upped the Stones; folk held steady with Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound.” UK acts counterbalanced professionalism with R&B smarts: Peter and Gordon scored with a McCartney number, “Woman” (a song idea Lennon would rewrite much later); the Small Faces got stone serious with an R&B ditty called “Sha-La-La-La-Lee.” In March, the Kinks sent up scenesters in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”; and come April, Lennon visited New York’s Lovin’ Spoonful—who were touring Britain to support “Daydream”—backstage at the Bag O’Nails Club. By the time Otis Redding covered the Stones’ “Satisfaction,” he revealed a peculiar and cunning soulful template beneath all the hype. It took Americans at least another year to embrace Redding into their rock mainstream; to the Brits, soul coverage like this had no higher authority.

  This revelatory conversation between UK and U.S. acts, and UK and U.S. listeners, achieved new force: the Byrds soared “Eight Miles High” on rocket-fueled guitars; the Troggs sliced open “Wild Thing,” with a two-note, kindergarten recorder, signifying way beyond its pay grade. Summer rolled in with the Kinks’ radiant “Sunny Afternoon” and Simon and Garfunkel’s folk-rock fake-out “I Am a Rock,” the Four Tops’ gritty pop “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever,” and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s pop-grit “Summer in the City.” You could typify the range and stylistic sweep of charts by the imaginary diagrams linking “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” by Motown’s Temptations with “With a Girl Like You” by the Troggs, which was as nothing compared to the gap between “Wild Thing” and “With a Girl Like You,” a distance that gave off supernatural Beatle echoes. By August, Otis Redding pumped “I Can’t Turn You Loose” and Peter and Gordon turned effete and provincial with “Lady Godiva” (there’ll always be an England). Come autumn, the Supremes wagged their fingers while winking all the way through “You Can’t Hurry Love.”

  This inimitable gust of top-forty hits between 1965 and 1966 has long since wallpapered our minds. But at the time, garage rock rebutted the idea that any pop need transcend its moment; each single crystallized a new “now” and raised expectations about what came next. With so much to hear and ferret out of three-and-a-half-minute tracks, this dense activity slowed time down. Ideas upstaged formulas, and garage rock stormed radio to become far more listenable than it had any right to be; most of this stuff made three-chord blues sound complicated. Boosting Lennon’s ethic of “fun” became paramount—the “narrator” of “Louie Louie” wandered around lost in his own world, perhaps even a different world than his band’s, but the effect simulated a drag-race game of chicken: the players were all responding to some imaginary ideal, with some giant invisible force drawing them forward, cutting them off, and whirring past again.

  Like the R&B, doo-wop, and surf novelties it sprang from, this junior-varsity R&B held up far better than suspected, and kept oldies radio formats aloft in millions of advertising dollars for generations to come. Captain Beefheart’s “Diddy Wah Diddy” held out a prankster’s promise: blues as abstract truth. The raw menace of his voice toyed with all the forbidden buzz in Bo Diddley’s encyclopedia of danger, “Who Do You Love?” Beefheart’s record tipped over into existential delight, the joy of making noise for noise’s sake.

  To Lennon’s voracious ear, garage rock reeked of potential—all this activity only confirmed the gambles he had made on the music since Hamburg. He helped tweak garage rock into psychedelic rock, where thickened textures wove colorful, elaborate lines of thought—ugly became the new beautiful, and chiming guitars conveyed new technical sophistication (Nazz’s “Open My Eyes”), encroaching on Eastern mysticism (“Rain” and the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night”), a dandy’s threads spun out as jangly guitars. In much the same way Muhammad Ali’s championship bouts played out as civil-rights sagas, each Beatle hit carried larger meanings for both rock’s style and its audience’s aptitude. The pop scene resembled a giant extension of the Merseybeat scene, with Beatle musical ingenuity lifting the world’s pop boats, confirming everybody’s appetite for sacred thrills, shared secrets, and collective mirth.

  Lennon and McCartney had joined this garage rock conversation as early as their Beatle covers of the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” and the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You,” and were keenly self-conscious about its implications. The tensions they mastered straddled Lennon’s experimental-philosophical with McCartney’s more traditional-romantic. But as progressive as their writing and productions were, their ethic of utterly simple yet compelling sounds defined and transcended garage rock to give this larger scene a giant forward thrust.

  Lennon and McCartney engaged this tension from different vantages: McCartney’s formalism supplanted Lennon’s experimentalism like a giant frame to rock’s momentum. As kingpins, the Beatles were both standard bearers and innovators, pop stars and creative eccentrics. Beatlemania became a larger metaphor for the idea of rock as it secured its hold on the mainstream imagination: each successive single built upon the last in a larger dialogue about the ideal of cool, how much style mattered, and how far the genre might go. A new way of hearing the Beatles rose up through this wider context: rock’s middle ground could be defined by the space between McCartney’s romance and Lennon’s abrasiveness, between the sweet of “Yesterday” (cynical craftsmanship) and the sour of “Run for Your Life” (craftsmanship exploiting cynicism). In the context of his notorious outbursts of “sick” humor, Lennon’s murderous threats (the homicidal misogyny of “Catch you with another man, another man, that’s the end-UH, little girl”) revealed more in the inward sighs that followed each utterance of “Girl” than did the deadpan schmaltz of “In My Life.” In such numbers, Lennon’s reserved sentimentality checked McCartney’s glib “sincerity.”

  By harnessing the larger ideas they heard at play in rock ’n’ roll on Rubber Soul, the Beatles’ tight ensemble ornamented thin writing (George Harrison’s “I Need You”) the same way compression, and varied repetition, brightened up their rhythmic workouts. The taut repetition on the single “She’s a Woman”—vocal calisthenics for McCartney’s larynx—became a lesson in withheld intensity, a salute to the delayed backbeats and roiling, understated tension of Stax’s Booker T. and the M.G.s on 1962’s “Green Onions.” Those clipped silences, looming between the offbeats of those opening guitar chords, amplified the illuminating stop-time breaks from the opening phrases of “Love Me Do,” “There’s a Place,” and “She Loves You” (after “with a love like that”). On the other hand, the relaxed confidence of Rubber Soul emphasized the band’s democratic roots. Many of their ideas went slumming just for kicks: Ringo’s charming singing on “What Goes On” flowed from an utterly democratic impulse (and ironically cemented his “lucky” image).

  Most healthy music scenes can be measured by their fringes, and one important garage-rock act of the period fused many of these contradictions to become one of the most important acts of all time: the Velvet Underground, former art students who lured a classical violist, John Cale, into concept rock. Warhol hired the act to perform for his “Light Shows,” which combined downtown flair with uptown chic. Even Dylan paid respects to the unfazed wizard at his Factory; it was as if a new court of aesthetics emerged whole from an overwrought mainstream. The Velvets produced obscure records that became at least as influential as the Beatles’, if nowhere near as popular, without even glancing toward McCartney-style “respectable” melodies. Likewise, there were no “cute” members of the Troggs or the Trashmen—or Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, who simply turned minority status (Sam was Hispanic) into a costume of comic menace and magic-house intrigue. Sam’s “Wooly Bully,” which might otherwise have been a novelty number, became a decisive piece of nonsense from April 1965—its silliness skated
across Dylan’s manic assault on reason. Borrowing a page from Dylan’s playbook, garage rock worked a baffle-your-enemies shtick instead of the usual outsmart-or-outplay-the-competition.

  Another measure of the scene’s health lay in heady regional outbursts. Portland’s Kingsmen were followed by the Northwest’s more ambitious Paul Revere and the Raiders, a swift-kicking band that scored hits like “Hungry” and “Kicks,” an antidrug song that circled back on itself: if kicks were so hard to find, how come these seemingly tossed-off hits kept colliding in the top ten?

  Some of this bravura trickled down onto mainstream television. The Beatles’ 1965 eponymous Saturday-morning cartoon show, spun off from A Hard Day’s Night, in turn helped inspire a weekly NBC 1966 sitcom following Help!, called The Monkees, produced by television’s Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, with Don Kirshner overseeing the music. These twin ripoffs pulled at Beatlemania from both ends: on the one hand, they siphoned off the cuddly and cartoonish aspects of the band’s popularity for an even younger, preteen audience, and the contrast gave the real-life band more heft. They also smoothed over and whitewashed any political relevance Lennon and the others began to display at increasingly bogus press conferences.

  Kirshner gave situationist theorists new grist for “discourse” and postmodernism: the Monkees, conceived and produced in Los Angeles as American-sitcom Beatles, became “authentic” pop product. On their weekly prime-time TV show, they amplified the mainstream impulses behind every teenager’s preoccupation with forming guitar chords, perfecting tom-tom swirls, and combing their hair just so to copy their heroes and impress girls. Kirshner backed up his puppets with sharp songwriters (Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Neil Diamond, Harry Nilsson, Gerry Goffin and Carole King) and in the studio, many of Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew: Hal Blaine on drums, Glen Campbell on guitar, Larry Knechtel (the pianist who went on to play “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on keyboards). And yet, where the Beatles could be reduced to cartoons, the Stones and Dylan couldn’t be, and it gave both these figures more leftist credibility—even though Lennon had been the earliest to speak out against the Vietnam War, in essence a prophet in 1964. McCartney professed himself a Monkees fan; Michael Nesmith showed up at the Sgt. Pepper orchestral party. And yet the Beatles had a lofty perch: they held court far above these commercial spinoffs and made them seem all but irrelevant, if mindless, fun. (This made for antic parlor games: the Monkees enjoyed an inverse curve to the Beatles; the more control they gained over their records, the more their music waned.)

  The ultimate test of garage rock came in how it felled a former giant like Phil Spector, who attempted two final production numbers, the first a delirious triumph, the second a sphinxlike masterpiece. The Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” stormed top-forty radio like a volcano of dismay and regret, while “River Deep—Mountain High,” from Ike and Tina Turner, scored only in Britain. Against all the new inspired amateurism, Spector bombast suddenly rang pompous. Pop’s great white whale of romantic desire reared up one last time, then submerged.

  Instead of sponging off their peers, the Beatles acted as if all the new sounds gave their material momentum. Embracing many of the new trends, they invented a few more. Lennon heard both rock’s essential underpinnings and its future in garage rock’s premise: that four unskilled boys with the simplest of setups (guitar, bass, drums) could attack the music with more depth and imagination, and make a bigger impact, than any “pros” involved at the same level of hit-making. This tension, between primitivism and sophistication, accident and calculation, mirrored Lennon’s emotional quandaries as the Beatles streaked through their middle period.

  Rubber Soul outlined how folk rock, and the Beatles’ embrace of group dynamics, enhanced their larger sense of pop; Revolver advanced this mode and brought in third-person address, and even subtler, more intricate technological solutions to questions few others were even asking (tape loops, multiple overdubbing, and bigger ideas stringing everything together). Bigger questions, political and philosophical, crept in: Harrison’s opening number cut the “Taxman” down to size, and concluded with death as a précis to McCartney’s ballad about aging and loneliness, “Eleanor Rigby.” The album worked in vivid images of privation and alienation (“She Said She Said”) among bursts of hubris (“And Your Bird Can Sing”) that reached toward some final, defining transcendence (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). Could a unifying force be gathered from all these threads? Could anyone connect the dots between conservative sugar-pop and wild-eyed anarchism to create a larger synthesis? Could Lennon resist such a dare?

  As they entered the studio in April 1966, the band’s work turned obsessive, the camaraderie uneven. McCartney was photographed about town with his chic girlfriend, the actress Jane Asher, and when she traveled, he played Swinging Londoner almost as if he knew he was in a play. Lennon’s closest musical friend led a charmed celebrity life, while Lennon’s wife and child wedged envy into their competitive partnership. The band started the year’s studio work with an overdub session for the August 1965 Shea Stadium concert. The final tracks included some composites from the Hollywood Bowl concerts, since Shea’s sound didn’t work.3 Then they scattered for time off and work on independent projects, and their first extended breather from three grueling years of nonstop touring and recording. With their MBEs, they had earned enough leverage with Epstein to demand more downtime, and the status to say and mean no to more and more requests for appearances. Beyond spring studio sessions and summer touring, they committed themselves only to keeping fall options open.

  In this curiously productive and compelling middle period, Lennon and McCartney kept collaborating as their voices veered apart. The world’s most famous songwriting partnership split into distinct halves, the cute one contemplating social isolation (“Eleanor Rigby”), the brute idealizing childhood (“She Said She Said”) and chasing relief (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). “We Can Work It Out” framed a lover’s argument as Lennon’s minor bridges tried to undermine McCartney’s major verses. In a larger context, they volleyed song themes back and forth between Rubber Soul and Revolver. McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” and “For No One” were not just extensions of “Yesterday” but elaborations on Lennon’s “Nowhere Man.” And while the vocal ensemble grew and flourished from Rubber Soul’s “Nowhere Man,” “You Won’t See Me,” and “Girl,” there were no Lennon-McCartney duets on Revolver that rivaled “There’s a Place” or “If I Fell” or “Ticket to Ride.” As an index of their friendship, their vocal duets grew more infrequent. This made their chemistry even more magical when it jelled.

  “Yesterday” had been the first McCartney solo track the previous year; these spring 1966 sessions yielded two more McCartney did without the group, one more isolated than the next. Lennon helped compose “Eleanor Rigby,” and George Martin scored it for doubled string quartet, or octet, to darken its mood. On “For No One,” the basic track sported keyboard and drums, overdubbed with McCartney on clavichord, Ringo on cymbals and maracas, and symphony player Alan Civil on French horn. McCartney’s sessions grew more elaborate, his partnership with Martin a natural outgrowth of his formal pretensions; Lennon produced more and more home demos in his Kenwood attic using two-track reel-to-reels, piano, and acoustic guitar. Now they touched up each other’s near-finished numbers more than they fed each other lines.

  Work on Revolver started with “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the most experimental track, with major progress made over the first two days of recording, on April 6–7. Norman Smith, Martin’s engineer throughout many of the Beatles’ early recordings, had been promoted, so the control desk brought a new face, twenty-year-old Geoff Emerick, to the party. His ears and technical curiosities would transform Beatle recordings for the rest of their career, and his memoirs account for much of the band’s internal dynamics and work habits.

  The Rubber Soul sessions had settled into a vaguely regular schedule of afternoons and evenings, while still leaving time for clubbing a
fter signing off between 10 P.M. and the early hours. The Revolver sessions grew more intense, lasting well past midnight from early on, and gave Emerick headaches about rides home after the Underground had shut down. Ten- to twelve-hour studio blocks marked the Beatles’ work schedule between April and June for six, sometimes seven, days running, from early afternoon into the early morning hours. Typically, they knocked off up to twelve takes for a basic track (rhythm section of bass, drums, and guitar) and then overdubbed lead vocals, harmonies, extra percussion, and the like for several days afterward to build the final mix.

  Lennon’s musical dabblings with Indian ragas came alongside readings in Eastern mysticism, trends influenced by the latent underground scene. McCartney introduced Lennon to his London friends Barry Miles and John Dunbar, who ran the Indica bookstore, a hub to London’s counterculture. Dunbar’s marriage to Marianne Faithfull (whom Andrew Loog Oldham signed to sing Jagger and Richards’s “As Tears Go By”) faltered on his heroin addiction and Mick Jagger’s designs on his wife. McCartney helped Miles and Dunbar paint their shop, and they passed along to Lennon Timothy Leary’s book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, then making the rounds as a “trip guide.” Tibetan mystics chanted the original text to achieve an intense meditative state; when acid still had “recreational” cachet, Leary, the ex–Harvard psychology professor, proposed his book as a mental gameplan. In these elite London circles, LSD tabs provided a “shortcut” to this ancient, transcendent experience. Why meditate for days or years to reach enlightenment when you could recite from a handbook as you popped a pill? Leary’s book gave drug culture a “legitimate” spiritual backdrop.