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

by Tim Riley

  The material, however familiar, struck at some imaginary genre in the gap between Woody Guthrie’s talking blues and Richie Valens’s “La Bamba,” with a faint air of mid-tempo Tex-Mex at once familiar and ingeniously original. Lennon’s song reworked a Chuck Berry melody from “You Never Can Tell,” about a “teenage wedding” where the “old folks wished them well,” with a deliciously knowing refrain: “ ‘C’est la vie,’ say the old folks/it goes to show you never can tell . . .”19 (McCartney answered its guitar lick on his first solo album with an instrumental called “Hot As Sun / Glasses.”)

  McCartney’s upper duet on the last verse (“Caught the early plane back to London”) unveiled the first of several twilight vocal duets they had already taped (“Two of Us,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” and “I’ve Got a Feeling”) and the Abbey Road series yet to come. Although Lennon and McCartney had long since veered apart aesthetically, the gravitational pull of their partnership exerted an embracing symbolic power. The session was so serendipitously productive it inspired them to grab Harrison’s “Old Brown Shoe” from the vault and make the two songs their next Beatles single: a hop-along, hard-luck narrative about Lennon’s marriage, supported by his band mate and songwriting partner, which hit number one in the UK (number eight in the U.S.) at the end of May. (The label credited the Beatles, but Harrison and Starr were not on “Ballad.” The song served as the third layer of Lennon’s campaign to upstage McCartney’s nuptials that began with his own Gibraltar elopement and the bed-in.) This time, most of the world yawned at Lennon’s Christ analogy, and the number made a feisty opening blast as the partnership prepared to fight for control of their song catalog. Conceived as a wedding jingle, it became ironic prelude to the impending Lennon-McCartney legal feud. The audience latched on to it as a talisman against all other indications—and wildfire rumors—that the Beatles might never record again. Nobody wanted to consider such a thing.

  An initial confrontation between Allen Klein and John Eastman (then twenty-nine), Linda’s older brother, resulted in a short-term compromise: Klein had convinced Lennon, Harrrison, and Starr to sign a management agreement, while McCartney refused. Klein was installed as the band’s manager, and the Eastman father-and-son firm was designated as the legal counsel. As both sides returned to their corners to plan future moves, an unsteady truce steered Apple affairs. Breakup rumors came and went as “Get Back” and “The Ballad of John and Yoko” bounded up the charts; but Lennon kept right on behaving as though he had bigger plans. In between these scattered spring sessions, he sold Kenwood and scouted out a new home with Yoko. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr kept shoving Klein’s contract in front of McCartney, who kept pushing it back unsigned, saying, “We’re massive, we’re the biggest act in the world, he’ll take fifteen percent.”20 The rift seemed insoluble. And more and more, Lennon’s shenanigans with Yoko seemed geared to turn the band’s seismic chapter in music history into a mere footnote.

  For starters, Lennon began formalizing his post-Beatle identity. On the overcast, windswept day of April 22, 1969, a month after they married, John and Yoko dressed in black leather and climbed back up to Apple’s rooftop, site of the last Beatles concert. Señor Bueno de Mesquita, the bald, bespectacled local commissioner for oaths, oversaw a simple ceremony (called a “deeds poll”) and presented the paperwork for Lennon’s signature. Henceforth, Beatle John, christened John Winston Lennon by his mother Julia back during the blitz, assumed the name “John Ono Lennon.” (He dropped the Winston informally; legally, it stayed attached.)

  “Yoko changed hers for me, I’ve changed mine for her. One for both, both for each other,” he said. “She has a ring. I have a ring. It gives us nine ‘O’s’ between us, which is good luck. Ten would not be good luck. Three names is enough for anyone. Four would be greedy.”21 They posed for some photos before running down into the basement for an emotional all-night recording session.

  The result has grown more poignant over time. Over a tape of their own heartbeats and that of their miscarried baby, John called “Yoko” and Yoko answered “John” for the entire first side of their Wedding Album (released on November 2, 1969). The elaborate packaging made it a commercial failure, and it received scant critical attention, but today those twenty-two minutes (“John and Yoko”) project a searing intimacy. Instead of predictably dull and remorseless, this track gradually becomes oddly mesmerizing, their call-and-response touching in a lighthearted, almost fanatical way, a requiem and a goof, a broadside of shifting emotions mysteriously carried by two names echoing in the blank space of their dead child’s heartbeat.

  Lennon’s name-change goes unmentioned in the Beatles’ own oral history, The Beatles Anthology (2000). At the time, changing his middle name from the dowdy, patriotic Winston to Ono stripped Lennon of much British history and tradition—and the very idea of class “respectability” he held in such scorn. Americans still discount how vexed the British were by the audacity of this gesture. To willfully alter your Christian name was itself a kind of scandal, and to drop Britain’s great World War II prime minister in favor of a Japanese who represented, in the minds of many, cruel aggressors in that same war, smacked of insolence. The act crystallized a keen sense of cultural betrayal: in marrying Ono, Lennon became a traitor to his fans and his countrymen, an idea that lay just below the surface of all the ink spilled on the Beatles’ breakup and his marriage from that point forward. The only way he could have ruffled more staid British feathers would have been to take the middle name Adolf.

  To his fans, taking Yoko’s middle name became just another piece of his wacky multimedia romance and increasingly eccentric behavior. With one of his feet still in the band and several other feet dabbling in political whimsy, solo recordings, gallery openings, and avant-garde tape reels, the ceremony that altered Lennon’s identity for the last eleven years of his life flickered past, another in a dizzy series of public acts. It was quickly overtaken by a second bed-in in Montreal, an obscenity suit for erotic lithographs, bag-ins, and looming Beatle feuds.

  In hindsight, though, this rooftop ceremony stands out as a defining moment in the evolution not just of John Lennon the man but of John Lennon the persona, symbol, and bearer of rock ’n’ roll values. Beatle business affairs had deteriorated into arguments and hostile standoffs since Ono attached herself to Lennon and he insisted on her constant presence—in the studio and in the boardrooms and bathrooms of Apple headquarters. By marrying Yoko and changing his name, Lennon signaled his nascent feminism and formalized a year’s worth of defiance toward McCartney and the other Beatles.

  Also that day, Lennon and Yoko announced the formation of their new company-within-a-company, Bag Productions Ltd., to handle financing and publicity for their various art projects. Ono now assumed the combined roles of the other three Beatles: primary business partner, de facto family, best friend, and musical collaborator. Months before he recorded Abbey Road with the band, Lennon stepped over a line that separated his Beatle years from everything that came after.

  Throughout April and May 1969, recording sessions advanced on “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” a new guitar solo for “Let It Be,” and the revival of “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” first tracked in 1967, now edited down, omitting a charming ska section, for a possible B side. On May 2, “Something” received a makeover with thirty-six new takes. This new track included McCartney’s exuberant bass line, which Harrison would duet against when he cut his guitar lead during the orchestral overlay in August. A long medley also began to take shape with a song called “You Never Give Me Your Money,” in another thirty-six takes at Olympic Studios. Glyn Johns invited the band to listen to a mixing session for the Let It Be material, and they were pleased enough with his work to book a photo session at EMI, replicating their Please Please Me cover leaning over the balcony for the proposed new album, Get Back. But with so many new songs taking shape, and so many other balls in the air, they stopped short of putting it out.

  In early May,
Lennon and Ono finally bought a property called Tittenhurst, seventy-two acres of land surrounding a Georgian mansion in Sunningdale, near Ascot in Berkshire, once owned by tycoon Peter Cadbury, for £145,000. Ironically, Lennon had once considered buying the house with Cynthia. Cynthia wrote that she knew it “because John and I had been to look at it with the other Beatles couples a year or two earlier. It was beautiful, with extensive grounds including its own market garden. For a crazy moment we’d considered buying it and all moving in together, in a kind of Beatles commune.”22

  Not that moving into a new home slowed them down. Besotted with their first honeymoon’s media triumph, John and Yoko couldn’t wait to get back at it, and they set their sights on America. But immigration authorities refused their visitation request because of the previous year’s marijuana arrest and their subversive peacenik reputation. Instead, they headed for Montreal, took a suite at the Hôtel Reine Elizabeth, and were granted a ten-day stay from the Canadian government. They snuck out on the third day to apply for a U.S. visa, which never came through. But the strategy worked: from Montreal, they captured a lot of U.S. broadcast attention. This time, Lennon came armed with another new song, “Give Peace a Chance,” to record right in the hotel room with their guests, who now comprised both journalists and various celebrities: LSD guru Timothy Leary, comedians Dick Gregory and Tom Smothers, even “Downtown” singer Petula Clark (making some publicist’s day). They all crowded around the bed among photographers, news cameramen, and overhanging radio microphones as Lennon led them through the helplessly catchy refrain, encouraging people first to clap on the off-beats, and then the on-beats, which worked better (this being Canada). The debt to Chuck Berry’s run-on lines in “Too Much Monkey Business” rang out palpably; as a result, Lennon sang (and faked) the wordy verses while everyone else joined in on the chorus.

  Radio calls came in from all over. One from San Francisco’s KYA-AM survives, inviting Lennon to hold a bed-in in the “city of love.” Another station, WNEW, asked:

  QUESTION: Do you condemn civil rights demonstrations?

  JOHN: I don’t condemn them; I’m with them. I’m just saying: Isn’t it about time they thought of something else? There have been marches for sixty years. It’s ineffective. Someone asked us what would you suggest we do? I said you’ve got women, use sex. Every day in the popular papers, they have bikini-clad girls. Use sex for peace!23

  In June 1969, Rolling Stone magazine ran a report from Ritchie Yorke, who was organizing the Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Festival and hoped to mount another free rock festival there the next summer. Yorke emphasized Lennon’s commitment to nonviolence as a way of papering over his surface takes on Russian and European history:

  “We’re trying to interest young people in doing something for peace,” Lennon said, toying with a white carnation. “But it must be done by nonviolent means—otherwise there can be only chaos. We’re saying to the young people—and they have always been the hippest ones—we’re telling them to get the message across to the squares.”

  No matter how far out he wandered, Lennon had a gift for following up piffle like that with disarming logic:

  What about talking to the people who make the decisions, the power brokers? suggested a cynical reporter. Lennon laughed. “Shit, talk? Talk about what? It doesn’t happen like that. In the U.S., the government is too busy talking about how to keep me out. If I’m a joke, as they say, why don’t they just let me in?”24

  By this point, Lennon and Ono were taking heat from leftist papers that criticized the flippancy of sitting in bed as meaningful protest. They answered this charge directly to Rolling Stone, and while many remain unconvinced, their argument didn’t lack for logic. “We worked for three months thinking out the most functional approach to boosting peace before we got married,” Ono told Yorke, “and spent our honeymoon talking to the press in bed in Amsterdam. For us it was the only way. We can’t lead a parade or a march because of all the autograph hunters. . . . Bed-ins are something that everybody can do and they’re so simple. We’re willing to be the world’s clowns to make people realize it.”25 By admitting to their clownishness, they trimmed off critiques from all sides.

  And they were not just interested in preaching to the converted. For years the Beatles had been forced to meet with town mayors and their daughters for autographs and phony chitchat before or after concerts, part of the duty they paid on their fame. Lennon had always hated being led through such charades. This time, determined to shed his Beatle reputation, he gleefully confronted some of the bigwigs who dropped by to ride his publicity coattails. Cartoonist Al Capp, hardly a conformist himself, entered the suite for an on-camera chat, and he brought along his copy of Two Virgins (this sequence appears in the John & Yoko’s Year of Peace DVD).

  “Only the shyest people in the world would take pictures like this,” Capp said, holding up the cover as if it proved his point conclusively. When John and Yoko started talking back to him, he looked as if he’d been caught unawares. “What, you don’t think shy people ever get naked?” Lennon asked.

  “If that isn’t a picture of two shy people I’d like to know what ‘shyness’ is,” came Capp’s feeble reply. While contending that he “denounced” people who called the picture “filth,” Capp clearly viewed it as poor taste at the very least, somewhere out there beyond decency. “I think everybody owes it to the world to prove that they have pubic hair, and you’ve done it! And I applaud you for it.”

  Then Capp tried to confront Lennon with his latest Christ quote, from “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” but he misquoted the lyric. “Rubbish, I didn’t say that,” Lennon shot back, correcting him. “The way things are going they’re gonna crucify me—and you, baby (laughs),” Lennon scolds him. “And all of us.”

  At another point, Capp winced at Yoko and let loose a misogynist slap: “You’ve got to live with that? I can see why you want peace, God knows you can’t have much.” In the end, Capp walked away grinning to himself, and Lennon’s press agent, Derek Taylor, looked appalled. Lennon seemed elated. Finally, after years of politely shaking hands with the locals as a Beatle, he talked back to these “elders” and controlled the conversation. What was it about his music that made people expect him to be “polite” while they insulted his wife, anyway?26 “I think John behaved very well there,” Paul McCartney commented many years later, “because the guy is actually slagging off Yoko—and that’s one thing you don’t do. You don’t slag off someone’s missus—that’s tribal time, isn’t it? I think John was very good. It was: ‘Let’s not sink to his level.’ ”27

  As the latest chapter in John and Yoko’s press charade aired around the globe, six-year-old Julian happened to catch his father on television. “What’s Dad doing in bed on the telly?” he asked his mother. “Telling everyone it’s very important to have peace,” Cynthia answered between “gritted teeth, . . . all too aware that John had found it impossible to allow for peace between us and that the small boy asking the question was paying the price.”28

  Lennon’s private interactions with Cynthia and Julian posed a sharp dissonance to his buffoonish peace theater. Soon after John and Yoko settled at Tittenhurst, Peter Brown relayed an invitation through Cynthia for Julian to join them in their new house for the weekend. Warily, Cynthia consented, and heard mixed feedback from Julian. Her son reported his fear of the dark house at night, as he slept in a separate wing from his father, and that “John sometimes had angry outbursts toward him, shouting at him for the way he ate or being too slow, which had made Julian nervous. He was afraid of provoking John, who switched very quickly from playful to furious.” But Cynthia delighted in Julian’s new nickname for Yoko: “Hokey-Cokey.”29

  On his next overnight, Lennon, Ono, Kyoko, and Julian all went up to Scotland to visit John’s aunt “Mater” Stanley in Golspie (Julia’s sister Elizabeth), to romp around his favorite summer vacation haunts and introduce his new family, including Kyoko, now five, to his older cousin Stanley. This was the sa
me Stanley who rode the bus with young John up to Scotland on holidays as a child. Unfortunately, on July 1, while driving with both kids in the car, Lennon veered off the road, overturning the car and landing him and Yoko in the hospital for stitches. Cynthia found out about it from the television—she didn’t even know Julian had left Tittenhurst. In the confusion about how to get Julian back to his mother, Peter Brown accidentally booked Cynthia a flight to Belfast, so it took her an extra day to return to Edinburgh, and the hospital informed her that the family had already picked up the children. But she remembers Aunt Mater’s reaction to Yoko, and the whole sorry business of Julian and Kyoko.

  “Mater regaled me with hilarious tales of Yoko’s refusing the roast dinner she had prepared and taking over the kitchen to steam bean sprouts for herself and John. ‘She looked like a witch hanging over a cauldron with all that hair,’ Mater said.” Each instance of Yoko’s defiance—to McCartney, Harrison, his aunt Mater, Cynthia—seems only to have endeared her more to Lennon. She did not fit into any mold of British woman he had ever known. According to Cynthia, John told his aunt of his intentions to take Julian away from Cynthia, which provoked a stern lecture from Mater. And again, just as she had sized up Lennon’s mercurial role within the group, Cynthia pinpointed Lennon’s wayward behavior with his subliminal goals: “Ultimately, of course, it was John who broke up the Beatles, just as he had formed them in the first place. He had moved on in his life, not just from me but from Paul, the other person who was closest to him throughout the sixties.”30

  During the first weekend in July, on the fifth, the Rolling Stones held a free concert for 250,000 fans in Hyde Park, their first with the new guitarist Mick Taylor, just two days after Brian Jones died in his swimming pool. Paul McCartney watched Jagger read Percy Shelley’s “Adonäis” and release thousands of butterflies into the air in Jones’s name. Introduced with a fair amount of cheek as “The greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world,” the band debuted their new single, “Honky Tonk Women.” The Beatles were finishing a new album, and yet the Stones suddenly seemed ascendant.