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

by Tim Riley

  Long before he posed naked with Yoko Ono, Lennon posed naked with the Beatles, in antique Victorian band uniform and mustache. His chillingly understated vocal on “A Day in the Life” ranks with the overt anguish in “Cold Turkey,” Plastic Ono Band, or the competing voices that crowd the consciousness of “I Am the Walrus.” The detachment of “Strawberry Fields Forever” turns sorrowful here, a confessional of not just the elaborate Sgt. Pepper charade but also its necessary Beatle counterpart. As the detached yet infinitely sensitive narrator, Lennon sings for everyman, for how technology isolates us from the modern world, how mass-produced newspapers and media can’t save dying industrial towns, and how the very technology used to capture his intimate ache (“Oh boy—”), the most elaborate Beatle recording (complete orchestra performing without a score), expresses merely the utter futility of human progress—including Lennon’s greatest invention of all, the Beatles.

  Knowing that Lennon had willingly trapped himself in this Beatle role, with the compound interest he collected on the loss of the three people he loved most, it’s easier in retrospect to hear all this gathered up in his voice. At the time, it simply worked as a sober free fall sealing off a dazzlingly colorful musical trip. Where Revolver came cased in black-and-white, Sgt. Pepper radiated color in both its cover confection and its rococo production; stretching two four-track recorders toward primitive eight-track recording techniques opened up the Beatles’ sound with new clarity and definition. Each instrument occupied its own special place in the sound, giving each incidental touch of tambourine and maracas its own glow, and their famous group harmonies a luminous sheen. On tracks like “With a Little Help from My Friends,” Sgt. Pepper made the taut, sardonic boys choir in “Dr. Robert” sound even more compressed.

  In the larger sequencing story of how the Beatles bookend their album sides, “A Day in the Life” sits at some distant emotional pole to “Within You Without You,” George Harrison’s deadpan dive into Eastern mysticism. Harrison’s ode is a downer prayer, a list of all the connections people miss in life, all the unfulfilled spiritual potential. The laughter he tacks on at the end underlines its dour tone (it only comes to life in the instrumental refrain with Martin’s orchestra). “A Day in the Life” is the sentiment that’s too costly to utter even as it comes pouring out, as if Lennon had tried to unpack McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” refrain: “All the lonely people/Where do they all come from?” and came up short. If so many Beatle fans were so hungry for Beatle music, what did that say about the state of their inner lives?

  In one colorful flourish, the rock world entered a new era: the psychedelic scene perched on the edge of an unforgettable summer of new sounds, new acts, the Monterey Pop Festival, and the advent of “mass bohemia.” The excitement extended and broadened the Beatles’ appearances at the Royal Variety Show Performance in November 1963, or The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. Now they huddled together for an even bigger spotlight: a worldwide satellite TV hookup Epstein had booked for June 25, 1967. The Sgt. Pepper launch got a giant booster shot in London from Seattle’s Jimi Hendrix, who opened a Saville Theatre show that week with the title song, giving McCartney one of his favorite career moments. McCartney greeted Hendrix at the party afterward with a huge joint, saying, “That was great, man”22 (The supporting acts were Procol Harum, who did their austere rewrite of a Bach choral prelude, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” a new Lennon obsession; the Chiffons; and future McCartney Wingman Denny Laine.)

  Dropping Sgt. Pepper on the market, after so many months of rumors and anticipation, might have been enough for some bands. But you don’t mess with a hitting streak, and the Beatles kept their heads down. After a rough master of “You Know My Name (Look Up My Number)” got assembled, McCartney went into the studio with his brother, Mike (calling himself Mike McGear), to produce McGough and McGear. Already “You Know My Name” had sprung from an early hours wrap party that got goofier with each refrain, suggesting the Marx Brothers on hash. It’s also a warm-up for that winding, grandiose fade-out to “All You Need Is Love,” which carried listeners off into a netherworld of Glenn Miller (“In the Mood”) and an early Beatle signature as out-of-the-blue nostalgia (Lennon’s parroting “She loves you yeah yeah yeah . . .”).

  They talk about “Love” as a whimsical throwaway, but the band worked on the track throughout June in complicated sessions and rehearsals for the live broadcast. The program, called Our World, featured performances from eighteen countries around the world in the first global satellite hookup ever mounted. With the entire world basking in Sgt. Pepper, the new Lennon track became its sing-along coda, almost as if he had second thoughts about unleashing “A Day in the Life”: on June 14, they prepared a foundational rhythm track in ten takes, and on June 19, they put down multiple vocal overdubs with backing drums, piano, and banjo. (That same day, across town, in an attempt to oust their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones recorded “We Love You.”)

  Then McCartney threw a wrench into the works with an interview that aggravated the recent Rolling Stones marijuana controversy. In his back garden in St. John’s Wood, he sat down with an ITV interviewer and revealed that he had “experimented” with LSD several times. “It seemed strange to me,” remembered George Harrison in the Anthology, “because we’d been trying to get him to take LSD for about eighteen months—and then one day he’s on the television talking all about it.”23 Not only was McCartney unapologetic, he proclaimed how LSD had opened his mind and made him a “better person.”

  Immediately after the revelation, McCartney took a patronizing position with the reporter, scolding him for not only asking such a question but also broadcasting it. “I’m going to get the blame for telling everyone I take drugs,” McCartney proclaimed. “But you’re the people who are going to distribute the news.” This showed a well-heeled propensity for public relations: days before the band performed before its largest audience ever, editorial pages were aflame denouncing McCartney’s influence on his audience. Only a year after Lennon pronounced the band “more popular than Jesus,” McCartney got roasted for the chemicals Lennon had been sprinkling on his cereal for nigh on a year.

  “All You Need Is Love” completed the musical arc they had started with “Strawberry Fields Forever” back in December 1966, and after Ringo laid on his snare drumroll opening ( just before the head-fake French national anthem) for the mono mix, they put it out as a single on July 7. Then they began scheming as to how to shape their post–Sgt. Pepper empire, and whether to continue with Epstein as manager. A concept for a new umbrella company took root during the summer of Sgt. Pepper, when, for one last season, the Beatles seemed invincible. Woven in through a variety of business and personal escapades, Epstein got the distinct message that he would not be a party to the new venture; whatever his role, he wouldn’t be full partner. With the Our World live show, he had just booked the Beatles on the biggest stage of their—or any—career, to an audience of half a billion people linked via satellite. But their plans for the future maintained an exclusive tone. Even if they were still on friendly terms, this new “Apple” talk didn’t feature Epstein at the helm. If anything, to him it probably looked more like an end run around renewing his contract.

  To Epstein, the Beatles began hanging out with suspicious flakes. The Dutch designers The Fool were already a part of the Beatles’ plans for a clothing store, either as graphics wizards or fashion designers or both. And Lennon became personally attached to an electronics gadget freak named Alex Mardas, from Greece, who was quickly dubbed “Magic Alex” and sent off to invent a master mixing board boasting seventy-two tracks, wireless speakers, and a thousand miraculous eccentricities to dazzle his new patron. Alex persuaded the band to buy a Greek island where they could retreat to make music and take as many drugs as they pleased without the bother of taxes or unfriendly police. “It will be amazing,” as Chet Flippo, one of Paul’s biographers, quotes Lennon as saying. “We’ll be able to just lie in the sun.”

 
It was some indication of the power the Beatles actually possessed that they were able to get a special tax dispensation from Chancellor of the Exchequer James Callaghan. They bought a little cluster of six islands in the Aegean Sea for £100,000. They visited it once, tired of it immediately, and the Beatle paradise was later sold.24

  “They returned a couple days later having funneled wads of money on their way in and back out,” Barry Miles recalled. “It was the typical Beatle story: some real-estate deal where they came back fantastically rich.”25 Epstein was not consulted. Insiders spotted the Beatles at key London clubs, catching bands and doing session work. John and Cynthia, keeping up appearances, caught the Marmalade at the Speakeasy (“I See the Rain”); Paul contributed piano and vocals to the Chris Barber Band’s “Catcall,” a revision of Paul’s song “Catswalk.”

  The Greek island had been a weekend distraction from their larger idea: to set up their own company, beyond the Beatle trinkets Epstein once suggested. Brainstorming continued throughout the summer: surely they had earned the power to publish their own material by this point. And reinvesting their wealth meant they, as ambitious creatives, could pursue all of rock culture’s exploding new mediums: films, recordings, and artist development. Here was a chance to reinvent themselves on a variety of levels, not just in Epstein’s image. Since they practiced songwriting and recording like championship dabblers, these new possibilities reignited old enthusiasms.

  From the Beatles’ standpoint, Epstein’s business activities had sent conflicting signals, and his anxieties only inspired more suspicion. He didn’t respond to all the new possibilities in the air, and he had been spending a lot of time in the Priory Clinic of late. While overseeing the Saville Theatre, Epstein had already transferred his holdings and title to Robert Stigwood. In fact, during the last weeks of summer, he consummated all this by selling his company behind the Beatles’ backs almost as if certain they might turn against him at any moment. At contract negotiations that fall, he may well have simply announced his retirement to hand the whole business over to Stigwood.

  Stigwood had bounced around London’s management circles for years and finally come up swinging with the Bee Gees, the tuneful and fey Australian outfit that had turned his fortunes around. Compared to Epstein, “Stiggie” was hard to fathom as any kind of threat.26 But between the enchantments set off by the music, and the drugs that had become second nature, that summer was lousy with diversions. Many business details went unattended. The band’s engrained trust in Epstein, and the resounding success of Sgt. Pepper, held sway. Even as they sought greater control over their interest, none of them seemed overly worried that this Stigwood deal might clog up their other plans. And Epstein had grown wary with how easily his boys could be distracted.

  The biggest distraction yet took the stage at the end of August, when Pattie Harrison, a convert to meditation, invited George and the other Beatles to hear the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi speak at the London Hilton on Park Lane. The Maharishi had gained notoriety by watering down Hindu principles into a generic practice known as “Transcendental Meditation.” Its appeal was broad-based: you didn’t have to believe in any type of god or deity; the simple practice of meditation calmed the mind and made modern life’s anxieties easier to manage. At workshops and retreats, his lectures were punctuated with delirious, high-pitched giggles, lest anybody take him too seriously. In that manner that now seems almost like a parody of New Age good intentions, he linked the best of Buddhism’s here and now to the respectability of ancient Indian teachings.

  As a successor to Epstein, this Maharishi won over Lennon with a ticklish sense of humor and the promise of inner peace. On another level, as a hounded celebrity, Lennon found that the idea of peace and quiet, and of the untapped healing qualities of the human mind, provided an appealing contrast to his drug burnout. Even if they sensed some of the weightlessness in the Maharishi’s teachings, the other Beatles may have urged Lennon in this direction for chemical reasons alone.

  The band was impressed enough with the Maharishi’s gentle calm to sign on for a retreat at University College in Bangor, North Wales, over that last weekend in August. They invited Epstein to follow them when he could. But the Maharishi’s naïveté was somehow contagious: they set off for the train to Wales as their training entourage floundered. As they clambered aboard the train at Paddington Station with their wives, Cynthia Lennon got held back with the mob by a policeman as the train pulled out from the station. Like Pete Best missing the bus home from Birmingham in 1962, the moment registered in her mind with a dull thud of recognition. She caught up with them on a later train. The day after arriving in Bangor, they announced to the world’s press that they had quit drugs to adopt the Maharishi’s principles of Transcendental Meditation.

  For a brief moment, Lennon seems to have been auditioning the Maharishi for Epstein’s role of father protector. As the Beatles left for Bangor, Epstein planned a big party at his country house in Richmond while still holding out promise of joining the Beatles in Wales. Another up-and-coming manager, Simon Napier-Bell, entered the picture at this point, just as Epstein suspected the worst in Lennon’s new mentor. Napier-Bell ran a band called John’s Children and cowrote Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” which served as the title to his 1983 memoirs. He remembers that Epstein was bored and depressed by running NEMS and made the deal with Stigwood to get rid of the day-to-day headaches of managing his own company. If Napier-Bell wrote himself into the saga immodestly, he’s too entertaining a figure to leave out.

  His memoirs recount a sexual demo derby of London pop management, the petty one-upmanship and street scams that made rock’s backstage at least as beguiling as any of its superstars. Napier-Bell’s distinctly British gloss on the Beatles’ relationship with Epstein, though, betrays too much sympathy with Epstein’s point of view:

  It was impossible to meet Brian Epstein for the first time without puzzling over the Beatles’ success. So much of it had depended on that fantastic intimacy they projected in their stage act which made all the kids in the audience long to know what they were saying to each other, what secrets were behind those intimately exchanged glances. But the main secret The Beatles shared was how four tough working-class lads had come to accept the benefits of acting coquettishly for a wealthy middle-class homosexual.27

  Unintentionally, this “British” viewpoint gets lost in the particulars of class distinctions; everyone sees what they want to see. “Brian was playing games all the time, with himself as much as anyone else,” Napier-Bell writes. It was during this season of dabbling in retail clothing and surfing on psychedelic philosophies that Epstein began chasing Napier-Bell. When asked by Napier-Bell about his relationship with the Beatles, Epstein replied: “There’s real love between the five of us.” What about the “giggling guru”? Brian professed acceptance, with giant exception clauses: “I never minded other people being around. I’m not jealous. Not of girlfriends, wives, even other boyfriends, but the Maharishi seems to want to kill their affection, not for anyone specific, but affection in general.” Epstein seemed most disturbed by the guru’s effect on Lennon. “At the moment I feel I’ve completely lost him.”28 Epstein had no illusions when it came to Lennon’s rapture over this new older man. One week he was the Beatles’ manager; the next week Lennon took on a new confidant, threatening Epstein’s power, feeding his paranoia.

  If Napier-Bell can be trusted, they shared confidences about Beatlemania’s sexual thrills, how overwhelming and seductive the crowds were. Epstein told him a story:

  “One night I pushed my way into the middle of ten thousand screaming kids, right into the middle of the chaos, and let myself go in a falsetto voice. I went absolutely berserk and it was the most erotic thing I ever did in my life. Like the first time I got to kiss John after I’d been crazy about him for ages, but afterwards I was incredibly ashamed of myself. I felt really guilty, as if someone might find out.”

  Epstein took Napier-Bell back
to his Belgravia home that evening after their dinner talk, but Napier-Bell refused his physical advances and left him alone, “lost in a private sadness, his lips slightly pursed, his eyes unfocused,” trailing off into a “gloomy trance.”29

  On the Sunday morning of that same weekend late in August 1967, Alistair Taylor took a call from Epstein’s secretary, Joanne Newfield. Epstein’s servants couldn’t get him to respond to knocks on his locked bedroom door. By the time Taylor arrived, Joanne had called a doctor, who forced his way in, to find Epstein’s body sprawled across his bed, eight different pill bottles on his table. “All the bottles had their caps properly in place and all of them were still quite full of pills,” Taylor remembers. He insisted to anyone he talked to for many years that Epstein would never have committed suicide. “There was no empty bottle that I could see. By the side of the bed there was a pile of correspondence that he had obviously been going through. . . . There was no sign of a note or a message, no blood, no disturbance of the bedclothes. Brian just seemed to be asleep with the bedclothes over him.”30 The coroner ruled Epstein’s death an “accidental homicide” from the cumulative effect of bromide in Carbatrol. He was thirty-two.

  Napier-Bell got the call on Sunday afternoon while in Scotland with journalist Nik Cohn, and made connections only insiders seemed privy to. Back at home, his answering machine was stuffed with messages from Brian. “And in North Wales,” Napier-Bell writes, “the giggling guru was stealing the last vestiges of his influence over the person who’d meant most in [Epstein’s] life. I wasn’t the only one who’d gone away that weekend. . . . Perhaps it was just that I had an answer-phone and the Maharishi’s holiday camp didn’t.”31