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

by Tim Riley

  Within days of the new legal battle, both ex-Beatles fled the country. McCartney flew to New York to hire musicians for his next recording—Ram. The Lennons hopped into their limo and headed to Liverpool, where John gave Yoko a tour of childhood landmarks and the Cavern, before they boarded a boat to Miami. From there, they flew to Toronto for interviews with the CBC, and then returned to Miami for a flight to Japan.

  From Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel, they rang up Yoko’s parents to arrange a surprise visit. Ono’s mother remembered the meeting with affection, remarking on the rock star’s good manners and “quiet” disposition. To Lennon, it was not just important to make a good impression on the Ono family—it felt like he had married into Japanese royalty. And in some ways, he had. Ono’s mother remembers a perfectly compliant young man, eager to please, who had no trouble adapting to a class system so similar to his own: “John made his own concession to our custom by taking off his white tennis shoes and leaving them at the door. We offered them tea at a table with chairs but John said it would be more appropriate to behave in the Japanese style. I thought that was very charming.”3

  They talked about Yoko’s family, her brother and two sisters, and the Lennons’ home in England. But they ultimately couldn’t escape the court case that had hounded them from Britain. When Mr. Justice Stamp brought the case to order in London’s High Court on January 19, he heard David Hurst QC, representing McCartney, argue that the Beatles’ affairs were in a “grave state,” estimating there were not enough funds even to pay taxes. A London solicitor tracked Lennon down in Japan, though Lennon tried hard to avoid the call: “I got to Japan and I didn’t tell anybody I’d arrived,” Lennon complained. “Then suddenly I got these calls from the lawyer. Fucking idiot! I didn’t like his upper class Irish-English voice as soon as I heard it. He insisted that I come home. I could have done it all on the fucking phone!”4 This prompted the couple’s early return to England on January 21, to disappointing chart news: John’s Plastic Ono Band was the kind of hit record that didn’t sell very well. It peaked first in America, at number three, over Christmas week, for a thirty-week run. But even the Christmas season couldn’t nudge it past number eleven in Britain, where it took only ten weeks to stall out. To cap it off, BBC-TV broadcast A Hard Day’s Night after Christmas, which sent its soundtrack back into the UK top forty. In the public mind, no mere court case could kill the idea of this almighty band.

  The political impulse that had been bugging Lennon since the “Revolution” controversy tugged him in opposing directions: one half yearned to join with fringe radical causes; the other half still idealized music with broad, Beatle-size appeal. When they returned from Japan, Lennon sat down with Tariq Ali, editor of the Red Mole, for his most political British interview to date. Ali had run Lennon’s letter back in 1968 defending “Revolution” and pursued Lennon as a prominent leftist ever since. Now Lennon determined to backtrack and clarify his earlier positions, as well as deal with some of the fallout from his Rolling Stone tirade.

  And McCartney’s suit likely pricked Lennon’s political conscience—surely there were more important things to talk about than how all the bean counters were getting on. Yoko Ono had obviously been chatting with him about art and her storied past as a downtown artist who ran with like-minded freethinkers in the early 1960s. Marcel Duchamp had attended one of her loft concerts even before the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, and modernism’s great provocateur intrigued Lennon. His remarks to Wenner in the Rolling Stone interview revived his inner art student, especially when he said:

  All I ever learned in art school was about fuckin’ Van Gogh and stuff! They didn’t teach me anything about anybody that was alive now! They never taught me about Marcel Duchamp, which I despise them for, and Yoko has taught me about Duchamp and what he did, which is just out of his—fantastic! He got a fuckin’ bike wheel and said, “This is art, you cunts!” He wasn’t Dali. Dali’s alright, but he’s like Mick.5

  All modernists are poseurs . . . like Jagger. To Lennon, these art movements resembled nothing so much as another version of rock history. Dada, after all, had been a bohemian response to Europe’s descent into World War I, and its strategies overlapped with rock ’n’ roll’s: self-published magazines, a fascination with typography, advertising, and humor, subtle plays on gender identity, and a constant fluidity between form and content. Most of all, rock music resembled Dada as anti-art, the impulse to kick sand in the official version of reality and invest minimalism with ideas that couldn’t be ignored. Think of Duchamp’s signature acts: placing a toilet in a museum exhibition (signed “R. Mutt”), complete with female pseudonym (“Rrose Sélavy”), or painting a mustache on da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Richard Hamilton, who designed the White Album’s “limited edition” bare cover, had worked with Duchamp reconstructing some of his major pieces, including The Bride Stripped Bare . . . ; and art schools, once an outpost, now teemed with students who admired the Beatles’ sophisticated sense of design.

  Under Ono’s influence, Lennon began making connections between rock’s popular breakthroughs and Dada, surrealism, and pop art. He became intrigued by how rock ’n’ roll played into every aspect of modernism’s mission—to disrupt the “petty morality” of middle-class mores and challenge everybody’s assumptions about oppressive political systems, especially during wartime, when third world civilians were bombed and gassed in the name of “honor.” The connections Lennon had been trying to make in his music since “Revolution” now steered him toward more radical gestures. Promoting his most personal record, he shifted gears again back toward the political.

  Much of his Red Mole interview reframes a lot of his embittered Rolling Stone quotes, and maps out issues that would concern Lennon for the rest of his life. But since it ran in a political fringe publication, not many Americans are widely familiar with his extended ruminations on these topics. He began by trying to clarify the “Revolution” contradictions: “On the version released as a single I said ‘when you talk about destruction you can count me out.’ I didn’t want to get killed. I didn’t really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know.”

  This may be another case of trusting the art—the song makes Lennon’s verbal explanation seem clunky. The quote is delightful if only for his use of the word “unsubtle,” which is rich coming from Lennon; it would get attached to his own political songs. And he could have gone further: Mao had become a fashionable radical-chic totem in Europe long before Tom Wolfe branded Leonard Bernstein with the epithet at his Dakota apartment party for the Black Panthers. New Wave French director Jean-Luc Godard had spoken highly of Mao, even after the Chinese leader’s crimes against humanity were public knowledge. In leftist terms, Mao had already become the new Stalin, the crowbar figure in defining your attitudes toward socialism.

  “I’ve never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around ’65 or ’66,” Lennon continued, “and that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit—religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, ‘Well, there’s something else to life, isn’t there? This isn’t it, surely?’ ” Lennon credited psychologist Janov with the notion of “religion as a form of madness,” and the therapy itself as a way for Lennon to dissolve “the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” The discussion continued into practical concerns of how to empower the working class, how the Communists failed to take advantage of the 1968 strikes in France, and how corporate entities still controlled everybody’s access to information. “We tried to change that with Apple but in the end we were defeated,” Lennon argued. “They still control everything. EMI killed our album Two Virgins because they didn’t like it. With the last record they’ve censored the words of the songs printed on the record sleeve. Fucking r
idiculous and hypocritical—they have to let me sing it but they don’t dare let you read it. Insanity.”

  And then a new theme emerged from all this rhetoric, the veiled class shame Lennon hid behind. As Aunt Mimi’s proper middle-class schoolboy, he identified so strongly with “working-class” music that he bent over backward so it might define him, even if he had to fudge the fact that he was the only Beatle with indoor plumbing. And a new feminism lurched out as the key hypocrisy behind many competing revolutionary notions. Lennon praised Yoko for calling his bluff early on over this, when he thought he was simply behaving normally. He mentioned the Ono phrase “Woman is the nigger of the world” for the first time. “If you have a slave around the house,” Yoko asked, “how can you expect to make a revolution outside it?”

  Tying his new direct song language in to his interest in Japanese haiku, Lennon closed by articulating an artistic motive behind his political ideals: “The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.”6 This formed the exact opposite musical tack he would take on his follow-up to Plastic Ono Band.

  The very next day Lennon called Tariq Ali to play him a new song over the phone: the interview had fermented overnight into “Power to the People.” It stuffed all the “in-out-in” ambivalence from “Revolution” back in its hat, quoting his original lyric and declaring, “You say you want a revolution/We better get it on right away . . .” Almost as quickly as Lennon wrote it, he tracked it with his usual crew (Alan White and Klaus Voormann) and had it ready as a single (backed with Ono’s “Open Your Box”) on March 12. This single marked an end to running into London to record at EMI: with major work on the Tittenhurst home studio nearing completion, Lennon was eager to record his entire next album there.

  After he finished off a few more songs, he called on Phil Spector to produce again and began inviting musicians over to rehearse as “Power to the People” stalled out at number ten. Klaus Voormann returned on bass, with Nicky Hopkins on keyboards, and Alan White instead of Ringo Starr on drums (with Jim Gordon drumming for “It’s So Hard” and Jim Keltner doing “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama”). George Harrison was invited in for slide guitar work (notably on “How Do You Sleep?” “Crippled Inside,” and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama”).

  As Lennon recorded and filmed these Imagine sessions, the McCartneys snuggled up on the cover of Life magazine for a Richard Merryman profile to promote their new single, “Another Day,” which competed for radio time with Ringo’s “It Don’t Come Easy.” McCartney held to his PR campaign of being blameless in the Beatles’ bust-up. He singled out the Epstein contract the four of them signed in 1967, talking around and through all the Klein-Eastman wrangling. “You see, there was a partnership contract put together years ago to hold us together as a group for 10 years,” McCartney explained. “Anything anybody wanted to do—put out a record, anything—he had to get the others’ permission. Because of what we were then, none of us ever looked at it when we signed it. We signed it in ’67 and discovered it last year. . . . But the trouble is, the other three have been advised not to tear it up.”

  In his view, the other Beatles forced him to play fate’s reluctant emissary, as he hid out in the Scottish Highlands: “My lawyer [and brother-in-law], John Eastman, he’s a nice guy and he saw the position we were in, and he sympathized. We’d have these meetings on top of hills in Scotland, we’d go for long walks. I remember when we actually decided we had to go and file suit. We were standing on this big hill which overlooked a loch—it was quite a nice day, a bit chilly—and we’d been searching our souls.” The only alternative, as McCartney and Eastman could see it, was seven more years of phony partnership.7

  Nobody to this day talks about the glaring conflict of interest McCartney pricked by choosing his brother-in-law for representation. Given the tangle of alliances and sensibilities that made the Beatles so magical, how could the other three possibly side with McCartney when he’d been buying up shares of Northern Songs behind Lennon’s back and then balked at Klein for a manager with Eastman as his only alternative? Once his band mates got a whiff of the legal empire McCartney had hitched his wagon to, Klein seemed just the streetwise tough they might need to clean house and fight for their interests. Innumerable takes of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” for the sake of Beatle cheer, perhaps; an army of lawyers attached to the cute one’s wife meant long-term trouble.

  Journalists never asked McCartney how he might have reacted if Yoko Ono’s banking family were pitched to manage their finances. And the press never asked why he felt so strongly about bringing out his first solo album, McCartney, right alongside Let It Be, creating a retail bottleneck and snubbing the others’ efforts to bail Apple out. From Lennon, Harrison, and Starr’s viewpoint, they had a renegade in their midst who would stop at nothing to sabotage the company they had formed together. But McCartney’s PR charm ran on irresistible hooks: family values and an irrepressible nonchalance that said, “How can you possibly take anybody else’s side in this?”

  Unlike Lennon’s confessionals, “Another Day” resembled McCartney in the “life-passing-him-by” voice of the character from “A Day in the Life,” minus the tragic frame. The B side, on the other hand, featured a chilling rock vocal on a throwaway called “Oh Woman, Oh Why,” told by a man who’s just been shot by his lover (“What have you done?!?”); McCartney sang it like he was bleeding from his gut. In the great back-and-forth between former songwriters, McCartney condensed all his post-Beatle anxiety into a mini–Plastic Ono Band, a novelty with a vocal passion that rivaled “Hey Jude”; but as an obscure B side, it never made it onto an album.

  The Royal Courts of Justice handed down their opinion in McCartney’s Apple suit on March 12, 1971. The official forty-five-page opinion by Mr. Justice Stamp furthered McCartney’s narrative and began a public demonization of Allen Klein and his company, ABKCO.8 Every Beatle except for Paul McCartney had signed with ABKCO, and the Apple board had approved a broad arrangement giving Klein discretion over numerous scattered Beatle accounts. Since McCartney had never consented to this arrangement, he asked the court to nullify it. His lawyers presented paperwork supporting McCartney’s claim that Klein was unfit to supervise the band’s affairs and had mishandled the Apple accounts for the year he had been at the helm.

  The judge was quick to find fault with Klein’s bookkeeping, especially given the “generous” terms with which he lured Lennon into his initial signing. “On the figures before me what has been charged is not less than three times the amount chargeable under the old agreement, and the excess is at least something over half a million pounds. ABKCO has also charged commission at the rate of ten percent on the royalties still payable under the EMI agreement; that is to say, in respect of the records sold otherwise than in North America. The amount of this charge, according to a schedule produced by Mr. Klein, is £123,871, of which 114,000 has been paid.” In other words, Klein not only overcharged, he cost the band three times the amount they would have been charged under the existing agreement with Brian Epstein.

  Furthermore, the judge noted, Klein’s stewardship of Apple had been anything but professional: “Messrs Arthur Young & Co. [the court-appointed accounting firm] found a state of confusion, papers missing or in confusion, and necessary information lacking. As between the Plaintiff [McCartney] and Apple, the managers of the partnership business, Apple had, for one reason or another, fallen down and failed in its duty.”9 To settle matters, the judge appointed a receiver to “receive the assets and manage the business.” This part of the decision froze all of the Beatles’ publishing, royalty, and earnings accounts until a new settlement could be reached. “It will be many months before the parties are ready for trial, more before the action can be heard,” the judge concluded.

  In order to stay afloat, and live to fight another day for m
onies rightfully theirs, McCartney had forced the others’ hand. Now the best they could do was to keep releasing solo albums, and perhaps tour under their own steam, to refill their coffers to pay more lawyers to settle these matters at some future date. It would take another four years of wrangling to finally reach settlement and close the Beatle books.

  In the PR sweepstakes over who controlled the Beatle narrative, this decision scored in McCartney’s favor. The previous year, his aw-shucks McCartney debut and prodding attitude in Let It Be vied with Lennon’s howling finale to “God” (“I don’t believe in Beatles”) and venomous quotes in Rolling Stone. Now he had taken his band mates to court and proven their alliance with Klein something of a disaster. McCartney made sure to show up in court himself, as plaintiff, which impressed the judge; the other three never set foot in the door. By way of response, Lennon started writing a new batch of songs.

  Alan White remembers Yoko Ono being very influential during the Imagine sessions—her experience reading and writing music facilitated Lennon’s concepts with his players. This new partnership gave John his head and helped his musical fluency. But even though their house and grounds had been upgraded, the Lennons complained about the continuing stream of hate mail they opened. The more Ono talked to him about her downtown art scene in New York, the more Lennon wondered what daily life would be like there. They planned a trip in early June 1971, and seemed smitten by the city’s pace the minute they arrived.