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

by Tim Riley

  The reviews tended to be uninformed raves, but Robert Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” capsule in the Village Voice spelled out some of the larger aesthetic feats everybody sensed in the sound: “Of course the lyrics are often crude psychotherapeutic clichés,” he noted. “That’s just the point, because they’re also true, and John wants to make clear that right now truth is far more important than subtlety, taste, art, or anything else.” Even in its reductionism, Christgau heard expressive technological metaphors: “John is such a media artist that even when he’s fervently shedding personas and eschewing metaphor he knows, perhaps instinctively, that he communicates most effectively through technological masks and prisms.”24

  In retrospect, it’s difficult to emphasize the shattering effect this renunciation had on Beatle listeners. After two years of nonstop defiance with this new avant-garde wife, Lennon pissed on everybody’s fondest hopes. As he slammed the door on his own cage, he denounced the idea that he was shattering any larger symbolic ideal, and in this way only insured that he did so. That the Beatles survived the slam suggests both the band’s indomitability and Lennon’s parochialism. Only rock’s most famous man could renounce his fame while insisting such moves didn’t make him even more mythical.

  Lennon remained sympathetic and almost heroic even as the swelling tide of “God” swept his Beatle persona, perhaps because Ringo was right behind him on drums and the gentle doo-wop cadence that brought the song home (I-vi-IV-V) had a jaunty, rakish self-deprecation. The chord progression that scaled a junkie’s self-ridiculing torment in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” now connoted reassurance, even redemption, of the type only Lennon’s cherished fifties records could.

  Except for “AOS,” Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band album was recorded at the same sessions, and comprises some animated Lennon guitar work to cross avant-garde ideas with rock ’n’ roll forms. On “Why” and “Why Not” this same ensemble inverts the Lennon hard-core formula for an unconscious descent, a wordless trip built on Ono’s virtuosity disguised as vocal chatter. Think of “Revolution 9” as a straight “performance piece”—something musicians might attempt onstage—and Ono’s fingernail-across-chalkboard glottal attacks take root as noise for noise’s sake. It takes repeated listening, and a forgetting that reverses most pop listening habits, but the payoff reaches a parallel emotional intensity to Lennon’s confessional barbs.

  In a little-known but probing Creem review several months after both these records came out, Dave Marsh dubbed Ono “the first rock scat singer” and favored her record even above Lennon’s. “And she’s done it without a backbeat,” Marsh marveled.

  A major portion of her increased validity must be credited to the fact that she works on one cut (“AOS”) with the Ornette Coleman group. Coupled with the fact that this cut was recorded several years ago, long before it became “hip” in the youth community to be involved with avant-jazz figures, one begins to get a real feeling that it is Yoko who was brought artistically downward by her Beatles’ involvement rather than vice-versa. . . . She uses her voice here much as John Coltrane used his horn; that is, in order to explore every possible nuance of the word-sound (chord) she scats about, using the word as a base for all but never quite saying it simply.25

  Lennon’s absolute faith in his new partner’s aesthetics struck most people as balmy at the time. “Yoko’s album complements mine for people who are interested in that kind of thing,” he told Howard Smith of WPLJ in New York. “Hers is a kind of, er, well, I call mine like a literate version of what we went through in the last year or so and Yoko’s is a sort of a sound picture, rather than a word picture. . . . I was dancing around with the guitar in front of her, sort of catching her eye and she was screaming back at me. It was a fantastic scene. There was just the four of us there, Klaus Voormann on the bass and Ringo on the drums, me on the guitar and Yoko on voice and we just knocked it off you know.”26

  By contrast, the British press, predictably, mostly dismissed Ono’s material, as if avant-garde devices and strategies were still beyond the realm of most rock critics there: “John’s material is predictably mysterious and way-out, with him singing in the persuasive suggestive style, and appearing to enjoy every moment. . . . But, it’s senseless to try and define Yoko’s efforts. They are simply a wicked waste of wax! Lennon—four stars. Yoko—no rating,” complained one unsigned Disc and Music Echo review.27

  John and Yoko’s creative largesse lay at some distant pole from Janov’s traumatic therapy. Long before there was rock ’n’ roll or a group to belong to, there was a father who had abandoned his son, who kept popping up at odd intervals, asking for money. Shortly before Lennon put Plastic Ono Band to bed, his Apple office passed along another note from his father. Alf’s timing could not have been worse.

  They had not seen each other since early in 1968, when Alf stayed for a couple of days at Kenwood. Since then, Alf had remarried and settled in Brighton. His young wife, Pauline, had given birth to a son, David, and they wanted to wish Lennon a happy thirtieth birthday. Lennon invited Alfred and Pauline to come down for a visit to Tittenhurst on Friday, October 9. They brought David along to meet his famous stepbrother.

  Lennon seems to have had a long speech planned. And the force of this tirade carried all of the anxieties he had been channeling in therapy and song throughout the year. When Alf and his new family arrived, they were shown by an aide into the back kitchen, where they waited in silence. Then a grim-faced Lennon appeared, followed by Yoko, and they suddenly realized this was not going to be a happy reunion. Pauline describes Lennon’s flaming red beard, which made him look “like a fierce and primitive warrior” and rendered their birthday gift of aftershave “laughably inappropriate.” Once he began ranting, they got the impression he was stoned.

  This may have been true. Or cutting his Janov treatment short may simply have left Lennon’s wounds too tender to enter such a confrontation with any semblance of balance or purpose. “I’m cutting off your money and kicking you out of the house,” Lennon snapped for his opening. He quickly took a seat and launched his harangue. Turning to Ono for support, Pauline was struck both by her beauty—“flawless skin”—and her air of detachment. Alf tried to speak calmly in answering Lennon’s accusations: “I’ve never asked you for money—it was your choice to give me an allowance.” This time, Lennon had no patience for his father’s excuses. Yoko remained poised but completely silent, supporting her husband by simply sitting at his side.

  Engaging with Lennon only made him angrier: “Have you any idea of what I’ve been through because of you?” Lennon continued. “Day after day in therapy, screaming for my Daddy, sobbing for you to come home. What did you care, away at sea all those years.” “You can’t put all the blame on your Dad,” Pauline interjected. “Your mother was just as much to blame for your problems.” This stirred a vehement rant against Julia, which struck Alf and Pauline as even more alarming. Lennon told them Julia was someone “he reviled in the most obscene language I had ever heard, referring to her repeatedly as a ‘whore.’ ” In this storm, no character could be safe. But Lennon certainly never wrote a song called “Alfred.”

  John scolded Alf. “Do you know what it does to a child to be asked to choose between his parents? Do you know how it tears him apart, blows his bloody mind?”

  Finally, Lennon felt the need to threaten Alfred should he ever try to make money off his famous son: “As for your life story, you’re never to write anything without my approval,” he insisted. “And if you tell anyone about what happened here today. . . . I’ll have you killed.” Pauline describes the look on Lennon’s face as one of “sheer evil” as he went on to explain “in extraordinary detail the procedure by which he would arrange for his father to be shot.”28

  Pauline tried to intervene to defend her husband, but Lennon controlled the scene. When he finished, he simply left the kitchen with Yoko. Freddie, Pauline, and their little son went back to their car and drove home to Brighton. Father and son would nev
er see each other again.

  According to Alf’s book, Lennon was more agreeable in dealing with the sale of their home than they’d expected, but he was true to his threat about cutting them off. It’s hard to tell if Plastic Ono Band gave him the courage for this scene, or if Lennon had imagined such a confrontation for so long that it had formed the subtext and secret script for those songs. Alfred raised two boys with Pauline and seems to have had a happy, settled second family much the way his son would. They would speak again, but only by phone, some six years later.

  On December 8, 1970, at the ripe old age of thirty, Lennon sat down with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine for one of the great performances of his life, a sprawling interview later published as Lennon Remembers.29 His muscular talk counterpoints Plastic Ono Band, offhanded brutality as rock star candor. After this rant was published over the 1970 Christmas/New Year’s holidays, nothing about Beatlemania would ever be the same. With too much of the Let It Be film and album still hanging in the air, feeding the Beatle beast, Lennon had to get literal on his audience. Despite its frequent exaggerations, false claims, misremembered history, and prickly outbursts, this Lennon sit, brilliantly orchestrated by Wenner, became a central part of rock lore, the venting every rock star would later claim for granted, even though nobody can hold forth like Lennon. It almost made you wonder why in the world McCartney provoked him.

  Many listeners picked up the album before they read the interview (release date: December 11, 1970). Like leaked testimony from a bitter custody battle for the soul of a group’s mystique, Lennon’s use of the word “divorce” suddenly took on added weight: feelings this fierce could only stem from an intimacy that rivaled marriage. Early on, Wenner asks, “Would you take it all back?”

  “If I could be a fuckin’ fisherman, I would, you know,” Lennon responded. “If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It’s no fun being an artist. You know what it’s like, writing, it isn’t fun, it’s torture. . . . I resent performing for fucking idiots who don’t know anything. They can’t feel; I’m the one that’s feeling because I’m the one expressing. They live vicariously through me and other artists. One of my big things is that I wish I was a fisherman.”30

  That kicked off a windy yet absorbing descent into Lennon’s deconstruction of his own fame, how the Beatles had lost control of their story, and how complicated popular success became when it stemmed from—and often blurred—aesthetics. Wenner ran the interview over two separate issues, and each paragraph held more outrage than the last. The insecurities Lennon sang about seemed as nothing compared to the supersize ego they came packaged in: “People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine. I always wondered, why has nobody discovered me? In school, didn’t they see that I was cleverer than anybody in the school? That the teachers were stupid, too? That all they had was information I didn’t need? I got fuckin’ lost being in high school. I used to say to me auntie, ‘You throw my fuckin’ poetry out and you’ll regret it when I’m famous.’ And she threw the bastard stuff out.” The resentment in Lennon’s voice as he says these things (recently more widely circulated once Rolling Stone made the tape available as a podcast in 2006) has a bitterness that can only be explained as carryover from his therapy. In fact, one of the reasons this interview proved so explosive was the way it exposed Lennon’s confusion between confessional interview and therapeutic gush. He goes to such pains to denigrate his audience, and the many petty humiliations of celebrity, that half the time it’s not clear who Lennon thought he was talking to—Wenner, Janov, his readers, the Beatles, or rock history itself:

  It just built up; the bigger we got, the more unreality we had to face and the more we were expected to do. They were always threatening what they would tell the press about us, to make bad publicity if we didn’t see their bloody daughter with the braces on her teeth. And it was always the police chief’s daughter or the lord mayor’s daughter—all the most obnoxious kids, because they had the most obnoxious parents. . . . One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. It just happens bit by bit, until this complete craziness surrounds you and you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand—the people you hated when you were ten.

  But he saves his biggest resentment for the Beatles themselves, who set off daggers of invective, mostly against McCartney: “After Brian [Epstein] died, we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.”

  Lennon’s talkathon suddenly gave shape to years of withheld tension and made twisted sense of his Let It Be passivity. At the end of 1970, this historic interview appeared as blowback to McCartney’s own passive resistance during his Scottish retreat. If his ex-partner persisted in his charm offensive, Lennon retaliated with a barrage of self-righteous umbrage. Here was the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership reduced to verbal one-upmanship. Lennon had the smarts, the wit, the guile, and a fearless urge to pontificate, but the subtext of all his posturing leaked through the bravado: How could any band contain the likes of Lennon? How had the Beatles possibly stayed together for so long? It made McCartney’s patience and forbearance seem Herculean.

  And in the other corner, Lennon made this interview style so garishly primal, he opened himself up for vicious parody. Tony Hendra’s hooting National Lampoon satire (“Magical Misery Tour”) came at the end of side one on 1972’s Radio Dinner. The comedy troupe cynically predicted Nixon’s demo-derby landslide as all but inevitable and wove Beatle mythology through bowling-alley stoner talk and game show farce. “Genius is pain!” Hendra howls into the fade-out, as if a thousand spikes had been driven through his privileged rock-star senses. With every line a direct quote from Lennon’s Rolling Stone interview, Hendra commits the great Lennon deflation of the Lennon deflation, affectionately ripping every Plastic Ono Band pretension to shreds.

  Critics lauded Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band as genius, but his brash interview stole some of its thunder. A lot of Beatle reactions coupled regret with affection: “It was so far out that I enjoyed it actually,” McCartney told Life magazine when promoting his new single, “Another Day,” in early 1971. That would have to be the attitude of the man who had stuck with Lennon through tirade after tirade, and knew how to filter obnoxiousness through a keen understanding of Lennon’s insecurities: “I ignored John’s interview in Rolling Stone. I looked at it and dug him for saying what he thought, but to me, short of getting it off his chest, I think he blows it with that kind of thing. . . . I know there are elements of truth in what he said and this open hostility, that didn’t hurt me. That’s cool. That’s John.”31

  In London, McCartney filed suit against the other three Beatles in the High Court of London on the symbolic date of December 31, 1970. John and Lee Eastman had demonstrated to him that with Klein in charge of Apple, the only way to deal with Epstein’s final contract from 1967, which bound the Beatles’ fortunes together through 1977, was to dissolve the partnership. McCartney reasoned he couldn’t pursue his solo career while still operating as a collective with the other three. The sixties, a splatter-painting era prone to oversimplifications, needed several curtain-closers for its outsize ideals. The McCartney album, Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, his revenge interview, and a stream of legal headlines became successive fake endings as the uncertain post-Beatle era finally took hold.

  Chapter 20

  I’ll Cry Instead

  McCartney’s suit against Apple, during the last two days of 1970, neatly bookended the Beatle era as Fleet Street’s biggest story since the Profumo scandal in 1963. The writ, issued in the Chancery Division of the High Court, sought to dissolve The Beatles and Co.1 John and Yoko saw the headlines at Tittenhurst and became newly wary. This legal expedition smelled like one more savvy public-relations move from cheery Paul. McCartney’s press quotes waved off the intricacies of taxes, publishing, and
royalties with panache: “If the three of them want, they could sit down today and write a little bit of paper saying I’ll be released . . . that’s all I want!”2 The partnership’s one-upmanship had simply moved venues, from competitive collaboration to high command of the great Beatle myth.

  Unbowed by Klein’s Apple housecleaning and back royalties negotiations, McCartney’s suit requested appointment of a receiver for Apple until the settlement and charged Klein with mismanagement of Apple funds. The numbers attached to the case were sobering: credit to the four individual Beatles stood at £738,000, of which £678,000 was due in taxes, leaving £60,000. When the news hit the papers that first day of 1971, the whole “end-of-era” hook proved irresistible for too many gadflies, even though they had already worn it out the previous New Year’s. But they needn’t have worried: the Beatle mystique was built for the ages, and the era of reissues had not yet dawned.

  Because the Beatles had dominated the center of cultural life for so long, their unraveling was traumatic for everybody except newspaper accountants. If the band held the keys to British cultural identity, what did it mean once they went at one another’s throat? Was the promise of the band’s magic mixture of beat and melody too good to last? Or had the audience simply invested too many hopes in rock musicians who came of age only to be as perplexed as anybody else about moving on from the delirious sixties? All of the Beatles’ cultural triumphs gave way to new questions in Lennon’s mind: how best to transform sexual liberation, creative triumph expressed in popular terms, and a global peace movement into meaningful political change? As top forty radio put George Harrison’s smash single, “My Sweet Lord,” on a relentless tape loop, John and Yoko read the newspapers aloud to each other, as they had done in their Amsterdam and Montreal honeymoon beds, and tried to laugh about it. Maybe this year they would get lucky and have a child. Lennon was a big boy, he could outtalk McCartney any day, and he still had plenty in his arsenal for the ongoing PR war.