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

by Tim Riley

  This material also sits outside their catalog in ways that make its frame not just anachronistic but anomalous. Let It Be’s ensemble and attitude situates it decisively between The White Album and Abbey Road. But by dumping it on the market in 1970, Klein gave Let It Be an after-the-fact brilliance that worked in its favor. A throwaway like Harrison’s “For You Blue” or Lennon’s “Dig It” (cut down from its original nine minutes) sounded like lost treasure, Beatles filler that would count as inspired moves from lesser groups. That they were so determined to film themselves at this chaotic point in their collapse only underlined their musical bonds. Only a world-class act could get away with that, and the footage told a Sisyphean story of how songs take shape from the ground up. Even the best band in the world starts with song fragments and loose arrangements. Bringing the music in for a landing on the roof restored both their musicianship and their collective self-respect.

  The world heard Let It Be as a contemporaneous experience, but the sixteen months between its filming and release seemed like a trek across an emotional Siberia to each Beatle. As Lennon retreated into private superstar therapy, more Beatle fumes enlarged the myth. McCartney projected an imperious whimsy on the band’s close that hinted at extreme form of denial.

  In aesthetic terms, none of this fazed Lennon. Except for “Instant Karma,” Lennon remained secluded for the first half of 1970, in direct contrast to his nonstop posturing on the world’s stage throughout the previous year. As the band’s magnificence drew to a close, the end became as hard for its members to accept as for its audience. In the quiet zone before he came out with his divorce record to proclaim his independence, Lennon set new standards that he himself, and the others, would never quite live up to again.

  At the end of April 1970, Lennon and Harrison flew to Los Angeles for business meetings at Capitol Records, and then back to New York. The Immigration and Naturalization Service issued Lennon waivers for such short visits, but the trip shows up in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI file. Hoover had already collected letters about Lennon’s “pornographic” Two Virgins album cover and begun tracing his cross-continental trips as a matter of routine government business. A known “narcotics user” and “radical,” Lennon inspired more fear from the establishment than he knew: the FBI files for the April trip open with an entry detailing Lennon and Harrison’s visit, visa status, and business locations.

  A book had arrived in Ascot’s mail that spring. The title caught Lennon’s eye: The Primal Scream, by a California therapist named Arthur Janov—and then he couldn’t put it down. The opening passages described patients who quickly and permanently purged their neuroses by revisiting their most traumatic childhood separations. These intense personal stories pushed all Lennon’s emotional buttons, as though all the experimenting he had done onstage with Yoko suddenly had therapeutic potential—wouldn’t trying make it so?

  That sex-change ruse had a code meaning: John and Yoko enrolled in a four-week course of primal therapy with Dr. Janov, first in Ascot, then in London. Lennon gave it a serious effort throughout much of 1970, as his multiple anxieties proved too cumbersome to cope with.

  He committed to a series of private sessions, and a further four months of group sessions in California. Yoko Ono agreed to the same regimen. While Janov visited, they stayed in separate wings of the Tittenhurst mansion. Janov insisted on separating John and Yoko as a key aspect of his treatment:

  I mean, Yoko’s been screaming for a long time. Just the words, the title, made my heart flutter. Then I read the testimonials, “I am Charlie so-and-so, I went in and this is what happened to me.” I thought, “That’s me. That’s me.” We were living in Ascot and there was a lot of shit coming down on us. And these people say they get to this thing and they scream and they feel better, so I thought, let’s try it. They do this thing where they mess around with you until you reach a point where you hit this scream thing. You go with it, they encourage you to go with it, and you kind of make a psychical, mental, cosmic breakthrough with the scream itself.18

  Lennon had to persuade Janov to accept him as a patient after several rebuttals. Janov recalled that he “initially refused to go to England to treat Lennon, but later when my kids found out that I had refused to go they just went nuts and made me call back and agree.”

  The Lennons’ personal assistant, Anthony Fawcett, describes these visits in his book One Day at a Time. Janov came to Ascot and laid down a strict protocol: “They were to be separated from each other twenty-four hours before the first session, completely alone in a room with no TV, radio or phone, only pencil and paper. Yoko stayed in the bedroom and John went to the other end of the house and took over the half-completed studio. This was the first time they had been apart from each other for well over two years, since perhaps May of 1968.”19

  Fawcett describes John and Yoko being surprised by Janov’s warmth and youthful appearance, how, like a lot of other California psychiatrists emerging in this era, he exuded Hollywood charisma. Lennon became the star-struck patient. Janov’s early phase of private treatments took up three weeks, with separate daily sessions. “We did a lot of it in the recording studio,” Janov told Mojo magazine in 2000. “While they were building it. That was kind of difficult. But it went very, very well. John had about as much pain as I’ve ever seen in my life. And he was a very dedicated patient. Very serious about it.”20

  Soon, Lennon and Janov took a suite at the Inn on the Park Hotel in London, and Yoko went to the Londonderry Hotel. After another three weeks, Janov praised Lennon’s progress and urged them both to continue at his Primal Institute in California. This would take another four to six months, Janov explained, and he would combine private sessions with group therapy. Only if they finished this round properly, he insisted, would they see the results they were looking for. In private, Janov thought Lennon would need at least another year. While the Primal Institute stressed group sessions, Lennon apparently did not receive rock-star treatment as a group member. “The thing in a nutshell,” said John, “is that Primal Therapy allowed us to feel feeling continually, and those feelings usually make you cry. That’s all. Because before I wasn’t feeling things. I was blocking the feeling.”21 There was only so much Lennon could block, however.

  The sudden dash to America overlooked his immigration status: his visa allowed a limited three-month stay. Attending to this matter became all-important: Yoko had been granted custody of Kyoko, but Tony Cox had gone into hiding with her. Upsetting his visa status meant Lennon might complicate reuniting Yoko with her daughter. They had already suffered non-entry dictums from the U.S. government when they tried to mount an American bed-in the previous spring.

  Although he never finished treatment, Janov’s ideas went straight to Lennon’s head, feeding a musical impulse that sent him back to pre-Hamburg guitar rock to express triumphant anger and redemptive ardor. Approaching thirty, he never got closer to the dual passions of childhood. As he returned to Tittenhurst, songs started pouring out of him.

  Like the Rishikesh meditation trip two years earlier, Lennon’s California retreat fed him a surfeit of material. He quickly booked EMI’s London studios with Phil Spector, and staff engineers Phil MacDonald and Richard Lush, for four weeks of sessions that led to the Plastic Ono Band. Lush remembers the sessions as agreeable, even pleasant: “Those were really good sessions, I remember. I always got along with Phil, he was good fun to work with. And we did it all very quickly, because Phil MacDonald did the first two weeks, and I came in for the last two, so it was about four weeks work total. And everything went very smoothly.”22

  Ringo Starr spoke even more fondly than Lush about these sessions: “It was fantastic! It was such a heavy album for me. I was on it so maybe I was just getting off on it because of that, but the songs were so great and there were three guys and the cuts are really terrific.”23 If the sessions were as giddy and professional as everybody remembers, the angst in Lennon’s voice came as release. Even to this day, the album makes for acid liste
ning and scopes out a defiantly primitive sound that would make fiercest punk sound thin. In a perversely professional way, this also signals how well EMI had trained engineers like Lush, who separated pure sound from meaning as a matter of technical expertise.

  Lennon’s vocal attack vents the emotional spoilage motivating these songs. On tape, this material sounded as if it had been marinating far beyond what a healthy person might carry around. In person, somehow, it sounded less agonized than triumphant.

  This dual quality hints at Lennon’s preoccupations: the seductive yet hollow Beatle myth, and the awful relief made possible by rock ’n’ roll. At the time, Plastic Ono Band was the kind of early seventies work that gave people the shivers—like the movies Last Tango in Paris or The Godfather, its confrontational tone gave listeners plenty to think about for the first hundred listenings or so: so this is what it felt like to lead the world’s mightiest band. Its contours have grown familiar, but the album’s opening church bells still toll for the band and its era, the farewell of an obsessively distracted eccentric, emphatically dismissing years of great work just to clear his palate. Even for Lennon’s career, already studded with hyperbole, Plastic Ono Band remains one of the great self-deflating gestures in the history of pop culture. Its emotional glare defies everybody’s fondest illusions about Lennon. “The Beatles were an act,” he says with a glower: “now I get to be John Lennon.”

  Yoko Ono’s indefatigable presence in the sound is palpable, even though she’s nowhere to be heard. Everywhere and in every way, the music binds the intensely inward with the defiantly exhibitionist, as the awkward in Lennon stares down the brash. “Mother,” the opening track, peels the submerged motivations of “Strawberry Fields Forever” away as primal anxiety. The agony of “Mother” gives way to the Sesame Street yelp of “Cookie!” shortly into track two, “Hold On.” Chastened yet monomaniacal, the authority in Lennon’s Beatle persona shrinks inside these two tracks. New tensions define new poles of Lennon’s sensibility: the sheer ambition of the sound, the dry-ice rockabilly of “I Found Out,” cuts loose all kinds of fiction with irrefutable force. Lennon doesn’t expect anybody to buy the line “They didn’t want me so they made me a star” except as the crudest possible metaphor for abandonment—how the world’s adoration can’t compete with childhood loss.

  Like eavesdropping on a hero’s therapy session, the scalding anxiety in these grooves cues off Lennon’s private yet direct vocals. Lennon’s confessional mode transforms his platitudes and ranks with anything he’s ever done, from “Cold Turkey” back to “This Boy” and all the compressed fury tamped down into the Please Please Me Shirelles’ cover, “Baby, It’s You,” where male anxiety took a shower. But there is no Beatle precedent, no brilliant pop trigger lying in wait behind these tracks the way there is throughout a lot of McCartney and Ram. The whole thing might sound like a parody of Primal Scream pretensions if Lennon’s stabbing attacks didn’t slice with such emotional precision. These performances eliminate the distance between singer and song to wed form with content. McCartney has great vocal moments, but here Lennon makes McCartney sound like a performer who’d invest himself in almost anything—it’s an album McCartney could never make.

  The opening funereal church bells at the top of “Mother” descend straight into Freudian reverie. Those somber, quiescent chimes bear down with irrepressible force. Lennon’s emotional tone is immediately raw and explosive; his voice threatens and then cracks with each chord change. The frame, an agonizingly slow nursery rhyme, becomes an avant-garde rant, as if “Yer Blues” and “I Want You” and “Cold Turkey” had sprouted an album of harrowing footnotes. Just as Lennon’s starkly roiling delivery breaks the spell, a fearsome, tightly coiled ensemble steps in beneath him, chasing his outbursts warily, scared of what they might yield.

  The standard nursery rhyme slows to an ancient blues pattern, its harmonies tracing circles through each verse toward a massive, repetitive wheel of a coda (“Momma don’t go/Daddy come home!”), which turns of its own sluggish momentum. Somehow, this airtight piano-bass-and-drum trio yields vast orchestral effects; the solo vocals, often doubled in unison, convey a keening intimacy, as if struggling to keep up with the voice in his head.

  “Working Class Hero,” a ruthless Dylan parody that also works as a scathing smack-down of the luckless Scouser mystique, has the same bitter, stony-faced irony of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” or “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” It walks a frightening line, and too many people still hear it literally. This attack is anything but first-person revelation—the first thing Liverpudlians still resent about Lennon’s persona is his solid middle-class upbringing and schooling; any talk of his “working-class” background connotes sheer ignorance. And yet the more you understand about Lennon’s boyhood, the more poetry leaps out of this lyric: the orphaned father, Alfred, who orphaned Lennon; the wrenching Blackpool choice between his two parents; the ongoing betrayal of living with an auntie just two miles from his mother’s home without ever knowing her proximity; and the irony of growing up in poncy Woolton while taking in student lodgers to make ends meet, squeezing two students in a house with only two bedrooms. How can such an economically and emotionally perplexing upbringing in Woolton be reduced to “middle-class”? Just where does such abandoned penny-pinching in a “posh” British golf course neighborhood fit in that culture’s scrupulous class distinctions? On another level, Lennon defines showbiz as the new escape hatch for “working-class” strivers. Like art college, pop music became one of the few release valves Lennon devised for outsiders in a closed system.

  Tracks like “Mother,” “I Found Out,” “Working Class Hero,” and “Well Well Well” scan like excerpts from your best friend’s private diary; you hang on every word while squirming through their revelations. When he surfaces for a romantic sketch like “Love,” the mood shifts like a dropping breeze. The Times classical critic, William Mann, made pedantic comparisons to Lennon-McCartney “Aeolian” cadences in “Not a Second Time,” which always gave Lennon fits. It seemed supercilious that the highbrow snobs deigned to give Beatle popularity some sham intellectual respect. If anything, Lennon’s command of musical irony in a song like “Love” resembles the way Schubert brings back a minor theme in the major mode. Like Schubert, the contrast alive in Lennon’s fragile hope lurches toward the tragic, as if the minor statement mocks the major mode from below. “Love” subsumes its bleak surroundings to catch sunbeams.

  Throughout the record, consolation vies with desperation, the way “Hold On” mops up after “Mother,” for example, or the way “Look at Me” seeps from the tormented cracks of “Well Well Well.” Side one ends with the simple piano-ballad reassurance of “Isolation” as balm to the wounds inflicted in “Working Class Hero”; side two rears back into the frantic, odd-meter “Remember,” which dissolves into the eerie calm of “Love.” By the end, Lennon’s vocal tour de force redeems the hoariest of seventies “inner self” clichés and surges toward the divine on the concluding “God.” The Beatles had perfected the album closer as “big statement” with “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “A Day in the Life,” and the black hole of “Revolution 9” and “Good Night.” Now Lennon ushers in the pop apocalypse: everything you think you know is wrong, Beatle people. Stay tuned for the Great Revelation.

  “God” quickly veers toward vengeful parody of the lopsided coda to “Hey Jude,” placing both the band and its rock mystique up there with Gandhi and Buddha and Hitler and the inexplicably missing Churchill—smashing busts in the pantheon of twentieth-century culture’s museum of heroes and antiheroes with an implicit ellipsis near the end to extend the notion of heroes itself on toward futility. When Lennon lands on the jugular, “I don’t believe in Beatles,” spitting out the name with rancor, the whole tirade doubles as a pretty good shaggy-dog joke, despite its pretensions. Having shot down his own Beatles alongside class hypocrisy and religious fraud, Lennon’s final swipe topples the Sgt. Pepper celebrity parade.

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p; And “I don’t believe in Beatles” had the weird effect of confirming everything Lennon was pushing up against—just another celebrity inflating his stock by railing against the system. But like “Nowhere Man,” or “Revolution,” or the longer-form works—Tommy and “We Won’t Get Fooled Again”—that used rock to denounce rock pretensions, the energy behind the naïveté replenished a lot of Lennon’s “pronouncements” and made the reach admirable while magnifying the problem. With this kind of passion, Lennon could have made the phone book sound defiantly enchanting; his delivery here made his most extreme vocal leads (“Yer Blues,” “Hey Bulldog,” or “I Want You [She’s So Heavy]”) sound like auditions, a humbled rock original fighting for his sanity.

  Perversely, “My Mummy’s Dead,” a homemade demo tagged on after “God” like an afterthought, detracts attention from Lennon’s bigger subject—his disfigurement at the demise of his band (“bigger than Elvis!”) has the tug of an unfathomable dilemma, the one beast he might never slay. By this point, Elvis himself was famous for shooting out TV sets in his Las Vegas hotel room. Lennon put television to better use: he stole from it shamelessly and bragged about working with the set on. Instead, he takes aim at the cultural mirror, and indicts everybody who holds on to inflated Beatle hopes that lie somewhere beyond human understanding or, in sixties parlance, confusing hero worship with “faith in the human condition.” Such expectations—from rock ’n’ roll, never mind its performers—can be even harder on romantics than on natural-born cynics.