by Tim Riley
According to the Zappa biography by Barry Miles (the same figure who had carried Ono’s Grapefruit at his Indica bookshop and went on to cowrite McCartney’s Many Years from Now), the two rock stars met courtesy of the Village Voice columnist and radio personality Howard Smith. Smith, who mentioned a forthcoming interview with Zappa, was surprised to hear of Lennon’s enthusiasm for the California rock experimentalist: “Wow, I always wanted to meet him. I really, really admire him. . . . He’s at least trying to do something different with the form. It’s incredible how he has his band as tight as a real orchestra. I’m very impressed by the kind of discipline he can bring to rock that nobody else can seem to bring to it.”
Smith took Lennon to Zappa’s hotel room; the latter seemed slow to realize Lennon was not putting him on. His band “leapt up,” anxious to be introduced, and Lennon spoke deferentially, as if Zappa were the real artist and Lennon simply a pop star. Yoko, on the other hand, “acted like Frank Zappa had stolen everything he had ever done or even thought from her,” Smith says. Zappa ignored her. Howard proposed to Zappa that John and Yoko take the stage that night at the Fillmore East in the East Village.10
When they walked out onstage for Zappa’s encore, the New York audience gasped. Like the Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival, Lennon preferred these hastily arranged, unannounced gigs; they gave him less time to get nervous. “For those of you in the band who don’t know what’s happening,” Zappa said, “we’re playing in A minor.” Lennon had to wrestle with a twitchy amp, and he read his guitar chords off Zappa’s half the time. One of the singers from the Turtles put a bag on Yoko’s head, and she kept on wailing into her microphone. John and Yoko remained onstage, tweaking the feedback, after everybody else had left. It was an event, but nobody knew quite what to make of it, or whether it pointed more toward Zappa or John Lennon.
“We went down there and I did an old Olympics number,” Lennon said, “the B side of ‘Young Blood.’ . . . It was a 12-bar kind of thing I used to do at the Cavern. . . . It was pretty good with Zappa because he’s pretty far out, as they say, so we blended quite well. . . . We did a three- or four-hour gig and it was beautiful. There was no rehearsal. It’s much better like that. I’m sick of going on stage and being judged, you know.”11 Before the second show, Zappa, Lennon, and Yoko jammed in the second-level dressing room to an overflow crowd of Fillmore cognoscenti and hangers-on.
Compared to the relative isolation of Lennon’s British country mansion, New York’s Village scene swarmed with antiwar activists and countercultural creatives of all stripes. And John and Yoko’s timing had a certain clairvoyance, given the kind of material Lennon wanted to start writing: the week after they played the Fillmore, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s top-secret government report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam between 1967 and 1969. Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation military analyst, leaked the file as an act of conscience. Government war lies dominated headlines, slowly curdling the Pentagon’s official Vietnam narrative. The Nixon administration filed suit to block further publication, but in a celebrated First Amendment case, the Supreme Court ultimately intervened (this all happened during the month of June 1971). This scandal gave the lie to both Johnson’s and Nixon’s reckless military pursuits, and undermined a sitting president’s powers. Lennon’s live appearances in New York created new hope among peaceniks: after all, the war machine had started rotting from within. To Lennon, the energy surrounding the antiwar effort felt irresistible; three years after he put out “Revolution,” this cause didn’t know the meaning of ambivalence.
John and Yoko returned to Britain briefly that summer of 1971 to promote the new edition of Ono’s Grapefruit, and to invite the media to an “open house” at Tittenhurst on July 20. They blabbed quotes like buckshot, but the hate mail persisted. “Being misunderstood,” John explained to Steve Turner in Hit Parader magazine, “is being treated as if I’d won the pools and married a Hawaiian dancer. In any other country we’re treated with respect as artists, which we are. If I hadn’t bought a house in Ascot I’d leave because I’m sick of it. It’s only because it’s such a nice house that I’m staying. I’m a fantastic patriot for Britain. Ask Yoko—I never stop selling it! But she finds it hard to love England when they never stop shitting on her.”12
They flew back to New York in August, only to get pulled into Beatle reunion rumors. George Harrison’s mentor, Ravi Shankar, appealed to his rock-star student to mount a large charity event for the struggling nation of Bangladesh. The young country, which broke off from India and fought a civil war in 1970, had created a human rights crisis largely unreported by the Western media. Harrison, whose All Things Must Pass late in 1970 yielded a huge radio hit with “My Sweet Lord,” planned an all-star rock concert to donate ticket receipts and film and record royalties to the relief effort.
The Bangladesh conflict came after the massive Bhola cyclone hit the coast of East Pakistan in November 1970, killing five hundred thousand people. The government responded ineptly. To aggravate the humanitarian crisis, President Yahya Khan blocked Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from taking office, even though his Awami League won a majority in Parliament in the 1970 elections. Khan arrested Mujibur in March 1971 and launched a bloody assault on the Awami League separatists. This war aggravated the humanitarian crisis, leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths as Khan targeted intellectuals and Hindus. Ten million refugees flooded into India.
Harrison’s concert took shape with great urgency throughout July. He invited all three of the other Beatles to appear, and Lennon seemed open to the idea, at least for a time. Rumors lit up fan networks and radio shows. Only after Lennon showed up for a rehearsal did things fall apart: Yoko assumed Lennon would perform with her, since they were now a duo and had been performing together for three years. She felt even more strongly about this in her adopted artistic home of New York City. Lennon either didn’t anticipate this or failed to get it straightened out beforehand. A huge row erupted, and Lennon walked.
In fact, Harrison and Klein insisted that the Lennon invitation never included Yoko; Lennon couldn’t persuade Yoko that the fans would be expecting him without her. Differing stories circulate around McCartney’s invitation, but it’s likely Lennon also walked out over his fear of a “surprise” reunion. He didn’t want to hit the stage only to get blindsided by a prank, or simply a well-meaning surge of feeling from colleagues who couldn’t help themselves. Perhaps some Beatle rumors filtered among the musicians themselves. Either way, this open conflict with Yoko, in front of Harrison and other players, overwhelmed Lennon, who felt doubly embarrassed by his wife before other rock stars, and rarely entered into confrontations where he wasn’t the aggressor. Humiliated, he fled straight back to Tittenhurst without Ono.
The concerts went off as Concert for Bangladesh on August 1 (afternoon and evening shows), with Ringo Starr double-drumming next to Jim Keltner and an all-star band, including Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Klaus Voormann, Badfinger, and Eric Clapton. Reunion rumors evaporated the minute Harrison introduced Bob Dylan, who hadn’t performed widely in America since his motorcycle accident in 1966. Except for the Woody Guthrie memorial concert with the Band in 1968, Dylan hadn’t appeared on a New York stage since 1966, and he quickly upstaged everybody by reworking five songs that signaled a larger return to form. Once again, Harrison trumped expectations by bringing in a ringer.
British journalist Ray Connolly met up with a distressed Yoko Ono in New York days before the show, just after Lennon had left the country. Ono gave him the rundown, and he confirms how the rift between John and Yoko had more to do with billing than any tiff between Lennon and Harrison. Yoko told Connolly how Lennon tried to persuade her that his appearance onstage with his former Beatles would be what the audience expected, and that spotlighting the John and Yoko act would detract attention from the larger humanitarian cause. Ono’s younger sister Setsuko had flown in specifically for the occasion, and now Y
oko wanted to follow John back to England and skip the concert entirely.
“Yoko left me the keys to her car and told me to wear John’s clothes, and it was a pretty strange weekend,” Connolly remembers. “Setsuko got mistaken for Yoko all over town as we wandered around in the days around the big concert.”13
Even though this Bangladesh concert led to a falling out, the idea of living in New York, where he routinely walked around and ate in public without incident, as is the custom for celebrities in the city, had already seduced Lennon. After he and Ono were reunited back at Tittenhurst, they decided to decamp to New York for a longer stay, and they spent August packing up their belongings. Alan Smith of the New Musical Express interviewed Lennon this month about his new album, Imagine, and the way McCartney always dodged the issue of taxes when summarizing Beatle business affairs. Curiously, Lennon makes known his abundant affection for the Beatles by telling Smith that while he disagreed with McCartney’s methods, he agreed that the band had reached its end. “Look at us today,” Lennon argued. “I’d sooner have Ram, Plastic Ono Band, George’s album and Ringo’s single and his movies than Let It Be or Abbey Road.”
Asked if he’d listened to McCartney’s Ram, Lennon said: “Of course I did. A couple of times. The first time I heard it I thought, fucking hell, it was awful. And then, ahem, the second time I fixed the record player a bit, and it sounded better. In general I think the other album he did [McCartney] was better. At least there was some songs on it. I don’t like this dribblin’ pop opera jazz, y’know. I like pop records that are pop records. I know you yourself didn’t like it. I was really surprised when I saw that bit.” Then Smith talked to him about the differences between Glyn Johns’s Get Back and Phil Spector’s Let It Be, which Lennon defended. “I’m glad the bootleg [Get Back] is going about,” he said, “because it shows that Paul was wrong when he was putting down Spector.”14
By the end of August, John and Yoko had packed up all their belongings and posed in Tittenhurst’s “Imagine” living room, surrounded by memorabilia and trinkets, as if about to hold a garage sale. But in the ongoing PR show of their marriage, John and Yoko did more than relocate—they hunkered down on American network television.
The minute they hit Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel, they started calling friends and watching TV and making arty little movies, just as they had done in Britain. Talk-show host Dick Cavett, ABC’s hip late-night alternative to NBC’s Johnny Carson, took a phone call from Lennon one morning and visited their room, where they put him in a quickie conceptual film. Within a week of their arrival, this conversation spilled onto Cavett’s show.
Cavett, of course, was delighted with the booking. He was carving out a position to the left of Carson and had already welcomed Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to his couch. With the famous ex-Beatle about to release a major new album, his second solo effort, featuring John and Yoko as guests boosted Cavett’s countercultural cachet.
Lennon walked on chewing gum, wearing an ironic green army shirt, white pants, and black boots; Yoko strutted behind him in an orange velour minidress, black choker, beret, and black stockings. After a bumpy start, the couple came across as animated, curious, lively, and innately funny. Together they unveiled a new agenda, beyond marketing Lennon’s new record and talking back to Beatle rumors. Lennon spoke openly of the Beatles in the past tense, confronted Yoko’s image as a shrew, and extended his argument about all the great solo work the band was doing. Lennon sometimes fought back his inclination to interrupt Yoko to proclaim his newfound feminism. But the tape reveals him in very good humor, apologetic whenever he steps on Ono’s sentences, and generally disarming Cavett’s awe at his presence with mock hostility.
To Beatle questions, Lennon replied with tart but polite dismissals, and steered most queries back toward his and Yoko’s avant-garde films and recordings. Yoko mentioned how John learned the term “chain-smoking” while reading an article about her. Lennon chimed in, “Smoking kills. . . . It didn’t work, Janov. . . . It didn’t work, Arthur,” insinuating that Janov’s therapy promised to “cure” them of cigarettes.15 They both smoked nonstop.
When Cavett brought up Yoko’s image as a witch and dragon lady, they chuckled. Lennon said, “If she took them apart, can we please thank her for all the nice music that George made and Ringo made and Paul made and I’ve made since we broke up?” which got spontaneous applause. “She didn’t really know about us,” Lennon says. “The only name she knew was Ringo, ’cause it means ‘apple’ in Japanese.”
To finish their appearance, they opened things up for audience questions. Lennon answered one question about the “out” versus “in” versions of “Revolution,” explaining how there were three versions of the song, how he made up the Chairman Mao lyric in the studio, how he regretted that line since it might prevent him from traveling to China, and he wished he played Ping-Pong so he could go over there. Now he believed that courthouse theater (like the Chicago Seven) and the bed-ins for peace had a larger effect on the opposition. “The ‘establishment’ doesn’t understand them, so they can’t kill them off,” he said.
Then, a question about the recent Village Voice letter to the editor set Lennon off on a particularly revealing tirade from the man who twisted “Working Class Hero” into something far more poetic than literal: “I’m not an intellectual, I’m not articulate,” Lennon argued sternly. “I’m working class and I use few words, I use words that the people around me used when I was a child. So when somebody comes at me with a bunch of [bullshit], I just give them [bullshit] back, and there it is.” There’s an illuminating distinction: in Lennon’s mind, intellectuals by definition can’t be working class.
They closed with some snarky comments on the runaway catchphrase of the day:
CAVETT: “My definition of love is not having to read Love Story . . .”
LENNON: “Love is having to say you’re sorry every five minutes . . .”
Cavett made the era’s best possible choice to keep pace with rock’s great quote machine, but throughout the interview, he looked torn between reaching for his next question and paddling fast just to stay afloat. Lennon went from zero to caustic in no time, and it was all Cavett and his late-night format could do to keep up with him. Compared to Britain, where the press treated John and Yoko more like a cartoon, the American media embraced their political talk and treated the couple like substantive artists. The U.S. government, however, reacted quite differently.
Chapter 21
You Can’t Do That
Every successful songwriter writes a number that becomes his or her signature, and “Imagine” became Lennon’s musical autograph upon its release in the fall of 1971, for good and ill. This makes it a cousin to McCartney’s “Yesterday,” projecting only a slice of Lennon’s irascible calm, arguably the least revealing slice. Like “Yesterday,” “Imagine” comprises a blatant sop to commercial taste, although it avoids the romantic cliché. As Lennon admitted, it sponges off some “instructions” from Ono’s Grapefruit, although he wasn’t so far into the feminist camp yet as to actually put her name on the song (he gave lip service to this idea later on). Ironically, it was McCartney who made the first move, with Ram, putting “Paul and Linda McCartney” onto the songwriting credits, which caused consternation and disbelief from his publishing company when he began asking for separate royalty checks. Both these former partners had not only chosen American wives but insisted on dragging them onstage and having them coauthoring songs as part of their “solo” personas. This suggests how reliant Lennon and McCartney each were on collaborators, how each viewed the creative process as a form of intimacy, and how a wife replaced the other Beatle once the group sundered.
Whether it charms you or strikes you as philosophical cotton candy, “Imagine” could be Lennon’s most widely misunderstood song. A hushed vocal atop piano framing a stridently antireligious lyric, it’s “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” distilled into his own image. Instead of listing everything he doesn’t believe
in, Lennon gift-wraps his tirade at the end of “God” as a hymn to the most benign brand of secular pacifist humanism. In this respect, this gentle sleight-of-hand has a beguiling appeal: Lennon might as well be singing, “I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in nationalism, I don’t believe in capitalism,” as if sixties utopianism had not disappeared but gone mainstream, like the gentle lullaby of a baby-bath-soap commercial. Five years earlier, the Bible Belt had burned his records and sent death threats for such sentiments; by 1971, it was a measure of Lennon’s enormous effect on culture that such spiritual doubt seemed largely a matter of individual freedom—the song is sugarcoated agnosticism for the masses.
As the title track to the Imagine album, it traced a sea change in Lennon’s tone and production approach, airbrushing Plastic Ono Band’s anguish for a much larger hit. However, Imagine acquired a sunny reputation without soft-pedaling its thematic conflicts; the title track is the only song to “counterbalance” Plastic Ono Band’s ordeal. The emotional tone of Imagine lurches back and forth between Plastic Ono Band’s trauma (“Mother”) and heady utopian sentiment (“Love”). Given its scabrous opinions (“Gimme Some Truth”) and paranoid insomnia (“I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier Mama”), Imagine boasts a broader poetic reach—for a full two acts (these first two solo albums), Lennon sings convincingly as though the Beatles are behind him. And songs like “How?” “Oh My Love,” and “How Do You Sleep?” wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Plastic Ono Band.
“Imagine” also has an inimitable touch of Beatle magic to it, a clue that Lennon missed his band mates after heaping two years of constant scorn on them. The album and hit single returned “All You Need Is Love” gallantry to the top ten, convincing many critics Lennon might just be warming up for the great solo career of the four that everybody had fully expected. Even the throwaway tracks had evidence of the salty Scouser stirring up trouble. “Crippled Inside” straddled both skiffle music and ragtime while sidestepping both styles, a rewrite of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” that juggled knives. Jim Keltner’s lumbering beat built up a slow-swelling fear in “Soldier,” as Lennon voiced what boys pray to themselves alone at night, flummoxed by the Vietnam era’s blurred conceptions of “manhood,” “bravery,” and “patriotism.” In an unnervingly stilted and hazy tone, a superstar inverted his culture’s prevailing machismo to voice a universal fear of death.