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

by Tim Riley

  As the screams intensified, a new fear crept into the Beatle camp. “I remember when George was in Germany he got a letter saying, ‘You won’t live beyond the next month,’ ” George Martin recalled. “And when they went to Japan they had such heavy guards they couldn’t move anywhere. The Japanese took those death threats very seriously.”9 After appearances in Munich and Hamburg, they flew straight into a storm that forced them to lay over for nine hours in Anchorage, Alaska. By the time they landed in Tokyo at three the next morning, the press had labeled the storm “the Beatle Typhoon,” the most rain Tokyo had seen in ten years. When asked about it at their press conference, Lennon remained blasé: “There’s probably more wind from the press than from us.”

  The storm had symbolic gust: the media sensed a mania edging toward violence, and editorial pages warned of possible riots all over the world. Reporters pitched surreal, inane questions that seemed out of touch with the scale of events and the pitch of the crowds. The day-to-day meetings with the press turned confrontational. At another press conference in Tokyo, a reporter asked the group: “What are you going to be when you grow up?” Lennon replied: “If you grow up yourself you’d know better than to ask that question.”10

  Rigid Japanese security prevented the Beatles from leaving their hotel rooms for their entire three-day stay, although Lennon managed to sneak out for some shopping, spending more than $20,000 to impress an astonished antiques vendor with his range and taste.11 When he was caught, the police threatened to withdraw their “protection” for the band, which felt more like detention. For their first and only performances on Japanese soil, they performed three evenings inside the Nippon Budokan Temple in central Tokyo.12 Outside the hall, protestors attacked pop music’s “desecration” of a sacred Japanese site.

  From Japan, the Beatles lurched into their bizarre encounter with Imelda Marcos, the Philippines’ first lady. Marcos, the former beauty queen who became the original Iron Butterfly, had enough vanity to match her husband Ferdinand’s corruption. They had been in power not quite a year when the Beatles came, and their effrontery could not be quantified.

  Ever since their MBEs the previous summer, a Beatle appearance had taken on the stature of a royal visit and conferred international prestige on a country looking for attention. The Epstein operation, however, while efficient in rock terms, lacked diplomatic finesse. The Manila Sunday Times greeted the Beatles’ arrival with the following story: “President Marcos, the First Lady, and the three young Beatles fans in the family, have been invited as guests of honor at the concerts. The Beatles plan to personally follow up the invitation during a courtesy call on Mrs. Imelda Marcos at Malacañang Palace tomorrow morning at 11 o’clock.” Epstein called the local promoter, Ramón Ramos, to wave off this distraction: his boys had a day off after the concert; there would be no scene at the court where some dignitary might clip Ringo’s hair. Unwittingly, Epstein slapped the Marcos regime in the face. Ramos had leaked the schedule to the press before confirming with Epstein, who strictly guarded his boys’ days off.

  Unaware of any problems, the band played two shows before a total of eighty thousand shrieking fans at the Rizal Memorial Football Stadium. There’s a finely tuned fictional account of their show from the novelist Eric Gamalinda:

  On the eve of the Beatles’ arrival, a young colegiala threatened to jump off the roof of the Bank of the Philippine Islands building unless she was granted a private audience with the band. . . . And when the Beatles finally opened with “I Wanna Be Your Man,” you could feel the excitement ripping through you, a detonation of such magnitude your entire being seemed to explode. I couldn’t hear anything except a long, extended shrill—the whole stadium screaming its lungs out. I looked at Delphi [his younger sister]. She was holding her head between her hands and her eyes were bulging out and her mouth was stretched to an O, and all I could hear was this long, high-pitched scream coming out of her mouth. I had never seen Delphi like that before, and I would never, for the rest of her life, see her as remorselessly young as she was that afternoon.13

  Epstein and the Beatles awoke the next morning to a TV nightmare: state television broadcast weeping children at the Marcos palace, newspapers blared “Imelda Stood Up,” and death threats swamped the hotel and the British Embassy. The Beatles had “rebuffed” the autocratic rulers and were abruptly requested to leave. Almost as soon as they realized their mistake, they worried about how to escape. The government withdrew its heavy security detail and Ramos sat on the gate receipts. Fleeing their hotel, they encountered more hostility at Manila’s airport, where a “tax commissioner” insisted on collecting a cash percentage from the show they had yet to be paid for. After tense negotiations, Epstein finally “filed a bond,” essentially a bribe, to assure their safe departure.14 A crowd of angry Filipinos saw them off, chanting: “Beatles Alis Diyan!” (“Beatles Go Home!”).

  They flew to New Delhi, but instead of respite, hundreds of screaming fans greeted their arrival because the media had leaked their whereabouts. Giving up on a couple of days’ peace, they flew back to England a day ahead of schedule, where they could at least enjoy fan assault on familiar turf. The BBC met them for quotes at Heathrow, and they lay low for the rest of the month. “We’re going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” George Harrison quipped.15

  Instead of Americans prepping to give them a victory lap around the States, their most popular turf, Beatle record-burnings erupted throughout the South as “Yellow Submarine” hit the charts, and Capitol Records went into crisis management. In late June, the label had released Yesterday and Today, bearing Whitaker’s “butcher cover,” the grinning Beatles looking out from beneath raw meat and limbless dolls. Retailers recoiled, and Capitol had to pull its product and issue a letter from vice president Ron Topper. It’s a classic “blame-the-Brits” corporate statement, without apology: “The original cover, created in England, was intended as ‘pop art’ satire. However, a sampling of public opinion in the United States indicates that the cover design is subject to misinterpretation. For this reason, and to avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to the Beatles’ image or reputation, Capitol has chosen to withdraw the LP and substitute a more generally acceptable design.”16

  The controversy vaulted the album to the top of the charts, as “Paperback Writer” and “Rain” clobbered radio. Revolver came out in early August 1966. Between Rubber Soul and Revolver, Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” quote got isolated, reframed, and used as a sensationalist headline on the cover of Datebook, a teen magazine, beneath THE TEN ADULTS YOU DIG/HATE THE MOST. Combined with the “butcher cover,” Lennon’s quote gave the Bible Belt conniptions. A deejay in Birmingham, Alabama, read Lennon’s quotes on the air while smashing vinyl. Thirty radio stations in eleven states followed suit. Southern pastors thundered for Beatle boycotts from their pulpits. Even the Vatican weighed in, although Lennon’s remarks were directed at the Anglican Church: “Some subjects must not be dealt with profanely, even in the world of beatniks,” said Pope Paul VI, simultaneously denouncing both Lennon’s comment and millions of Beatle fans. Before the band even set foot in America, most Southern radio stations had purged themselves of the demon Beatles.

  Concert sellouts had dropped off in 1965 largely because Epstein booked larger houses. This time, promoters were nervous, not just about selling tickets but preventing riots. With his sense of fatherly protectiveness, Epstein flew on ahead to New York to reassure American promoters about refunds should dates be canceled.17 After many phone calls to an obstinate Lennon, he convinced him that his remark had placed his fellow Beatles in real danger, and Epstein scheduled a press conference in advance of their opening concert.

  Arriving in Chicago from London on August 11, Lennon sat with the other Beatles, took questions, and issued an “apology” that wire stories carried around the world. He entered the hotel conference room crammed with reporters itching for a “gotcha” moment and, f
or the first time, had to spin something out of defeat instead of batting down the usual inanities. His face ashen, the Beatle who had never appeared anything but effortlessly self-confident, seemed beside himself with fear. His statement mixed grudging contrition with a piercing resentment at the malevolence his comments had uncovered: “If I had said television is more popular than Jesus,” Lennon sputtered, “I might have got away with it. . . . I just said ‘they’ are having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus.”

  Now the swoon lashed back, grabbed its humbled moment from rock’s great quote machine, and reveled in the sight of Lennon groping for words: “I’m not saying that we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever it is. I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong.”18

  To American parents who had yet to be charmed, this seemed like the Beatles’ just comeuppance. Finally, these cheeky Brits would get taken down a notch like some other ne’er-do-well freaks like Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. Beatlemania, far more intense and sweeping than the hula hoop or Elvis Presley, had also grown far more threatening to middle-class mores. To be honored by their queen and then remark so casually about how they had assumed the role of Christ in teenage life, well, this simply made Lennon too big for his rock-star britches.

  And throughout these political and religious controversies, the press kept inflating the bubble, even while asking about the inevitable burst. Lennon had trouble avoiding sarcasm at such moments. When asked if Lennon and McCartney might someday replace Rodgers and Hammerstein, he quipped, “We don’t want to be Rodgers and Hart, either.”19

  Despite Lennon’s Chicago “apology,” and subsequent press conferences in New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles, the controversy acted like fertilizer to the ignorant. In Alabama, two thousand teenagers tossed their Beatle vinyl into bonfires, drowning out a pro-Beatle protest across the street. The Ku Klux Klan picketed the Washington, D.C., show and threatened the band on television. At the evening show in Memphis later that week, a firecracker went off in the audience, and all the other Beatles instinctively turned their heads toward Lennon, presumed shot.

  Then the Beatle “typhoon” that had derailed their Tokyo trip two months before returned, this time to Cincinnati. The downpour forced them to reschedule Saturday’s outdoor show at Crosley Field on August 20, for Sunday, August 21, which might have been easy enough. But Epstein kept on schedule by jetting them 341 miles between afternoon and evening sets to make their appearance in St. Louis, where they performed for twenty-three thousand people beneath a giant rain tarp. For McCartney, this was the last straw: he finally capitulated to Lennon, Harrison, and Starr’s urging that this be their last tour. “We were having to worry about the rain getting in the amps and this took us right back to the Cavern days—it was worse than those early days. I don’t even think the house was full,” McCartney remembered:

  After the gig I remember us getting in a big, empty steel-lined wagon, like a removal van. There was no furniture in there—nothing. We were sliding around trying to hold on to something, and at that moment everyone said, “Oh, this bloody touring lark—I’ve had it up to here, man.” I finally agreed. I’d been trying to say, “Ah, touring’s good and it keeps us sharp. We need touring, and musicians need to play. Keep music alive.” I had held onto that attitude when there were doubts, but finally I agreed with them. . . . We agreed to say nothing, but never to tour again.20

  They couldn’t hear themselves play, their audiences were too busy screaming or protesting to care, and the havoc they had to march through to get on and off the stage had become far more trouble than any pleasure they might still glean from the music. Downpours only made Epstein push them harder, and the stage made Lennon feel like a walking target. Revolver, a new creative peak, had heightened the hysteria. But for the moment, they followed Epstein’s counsel and kept their decision to themselves.

  The Beatles took the stage at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29 with a collective sense of relief and finality. The audience, unaware of this unspoken farewell, embraced them with a deafening pitch, convincing them that Beatlemania had let loose spooks it was best to avoid. There was something in the crowd’s mood of careening, almost desperate, adoration that made the Beatles feel like the tail wagging a rabid dog. Harrison remembers putting timed cameras on the amps: “We stopped between tunes, Ringo got down off the drums, and we stood facing the amplifiers with our back to the audience and took photographs. We knew, ‘this is it—we’re not going to do this again. This is the last concert.’ It was a unanimous decision.”21

  In his nonfiction phantasm The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe used this concert to describe the warped, compulsive frenzy in the air. Wolfe built his narrative around novelist Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion), who had already led some early acid happenings on the West Coast with the Grateful Dead and Hells Angels. Kesey attended the show with his Merry Pranksters. After watching a thousand California teenagers trip to light shows, Candlestick Park struck Kesey as mania at its final stage of darkness, and echo of the band’s Ed Sullivan Show debut well into spoilage (he called it a “cancer”). Wolfe’s passage doubles as a portent of Altamont, the late 1969 speedway concert where the Hells Angels killed a black man in the front row during the Rolling Stones set.

  Just when the noise cannot get any louder, Wolfe writes, “it doubles, his eardrums ring like stamped metal with it and suddenly GHHHHHOOOOOOOWWWWW, it is like the whole thing has snapped, and the whole front section of the arena becomes a writhing, seething mass of little girls waving their arms in the air,” which he likens to “a single colonial animal with a thousand waving pink tentacles.” Kesey felt a twinge of fear watching the Beatles that night. As he watched them “play the beast,” delight in their God-like crowd manipulations, Wolfe describes how he also sensed their futility: “One of the Beatles, John, George, Paul, dips his long electric guitar handle in one direction and the whole teeny horde ripples precisely along the line of energy he set off—and then in the other direction, precisely along that line. It causes them to grin, John and Paul and George and Ringo, rippling the poor huge freaked teeny beast this way and that—”

  Here was a “vibrating poison madness,” Wolfe writes, that filled the universe with “the teeny agony torn out of them.” All around him, girls start to faint, as if the noise suffocates them, and the security staff starts carrying limp bodies to first-aid tents as the crowd surges. To Kesey, the scene resembles a disease, “a state of sheer poison mad cancer. The Beatles are the creature’s head. The teeny freaks are the body. But the head has lost control of the body and the body rebels and goes amok and that is what cancer is.”22

  Flying back to London, Lennon felt even more release fleeing the United States than he had fleeing the Philippines just a month before. The freakish democratic abandon of America seemed to hold no less peril than Ferdinand Marcos’s fascistic state security and media. The same musical forces that found elegance and structure in the studio had somehow turned violent and chaotic in concert. As the objects of late-stage Beatlemania, the Beatles were the first to duck an obsessive, all-consuming adoration. Rock celebrity had turned a perilous corner and gave their public appearances a fervor that was both tempting and hostile, euphoric and self-devouring.

  Their creative investment in Revolver had been total, but the world preferred to harass them for state dinners, rebellious humor, and religious quotes. At every turn, distractions upstaged the music. Their material, with its layered tape effects and intricate vocal harmonies, had already defied and outgrown live performance. Prompted by their studio work, the decision to stop touring turned from aesthetic breakthrough into survival mechanism.

  After this long break from Cynthia and Julian, which had followed hard upon three months of manic night-and-day recording, Lennon’s personal life was unspooling. The other Beatles had long suspected this,
given his frequent trysts, which only accelerated on tours. Arriving home at Kenwood, Lennon spent just a few nights with his family before setting off for Spain to film How I Won the War. Perhaps he hoped Spain would sober him up, disrupt his routine, and get him back on track. Like any self-respecting Englishman of that era, he packed a good read to help sort it all out: Nikos Kazantzakis’s semiautobiographical best seller, Report to Greco, since he’d been so taken with that author’s popular The Last Temptation of Christ. Perhaps he’d figure out something else to do now that the Beatles had decided to stop touring. Perhaps if he could get away from all the noise, he could think clearly.

  Instead, his detour from Beatle work bestirred a roiling subconscious. He traveled first to Hanover, Germany, with Neil Aspinall, and got National Health “granny” glasses and an army haircut, which made the international news wires just as Elvis Presley’s had back in 1958. In Lennon’s mind, perhaps, this marked an improvement on Presley’s career—at least he entered a fictional army instead of the real thing. After a short trip to Hamburg, Lennon and Aspinall met up with McCartney in Paris. Once filming began, Harrison went to India to study sitar with Ravi Shankar; Ringo stayed at home with his son, Zak; and McCartney returned to London to write the score to The Family Way. Then he hitched around France in disguise.