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

by Tim Riley

  As a post-Beatle landmark, parts of Imagine resemble a Lennon album in McCartney clothing, until “How Do You Sleep?” brings such fancies to a full stop. Lines like “The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday’ / And since you’ve gone you’re just ‘Another Day’ ” unleash a veiled, damningly faint praise of McCartney’s spring single.1 That line gives you pause: does Lennon really mean to compare “Another Day” with “Yesterday”? More likely, it’s a cheap shot that belies how closely Lennon watched his ex-partner’s work. Lennon lynched McCartney with unrepentant smugness, the same blunt edge that suggested the mock book title “Queer Jew” for Brian Epstein. George Harrison ladled “How Do You Sleep?” with acidic slide guitar to make it the great anti-McCartney diatribe. (McCartney limped back with “Dear Friend,” which he wrote after Lennon’s Rolling Stone interview, on December’s Wild Life.) Most of the world may have hoped a song titled “How Do You Sleep?” might be about warmongers like Nixon or Kissinger; Lennon sounded somewhat less heroic singing, “The sound you make is mu-zak to my ears / You must have learned something in all those years . . .” The contradiction seems to have eluded him: if he truly no longer “believe[d] in Beatles,” why devote his epic, two-part interview to snarling personal attacks and whole songs picking apart his former partner’s output?

  For all his charisma, Lennon couldn’t see the contradictions inherent in preaching peace from one side of his album and spitting vitriol from the other: “I wasn’t really feeling that vicious at the time, but I was using my resentment toward Paul to create a song. Let’s put it that way. It was just a mood. Paul took it the way he did because it, obviously, pointedly refers to him, and people just hounded him about it, asking, ‘How do ya feel about it?’ But there were a few little digs on his album, which he kept so obscure that other people didn’t notice ’em, you know, but I heard them.”2

  “How Do You Sleep?” gets answered by the disarmingly timid “How?,” where Lennon extends his doubts to the larger culture he speaks for. After questioning his own confidence and self-image in the first two verses, he leaps to the universal in the last verse: “How can we go forward when we don’t know which way we’re facing?” is the more honest and forthright question submerged in the vagaries of “Revolution,” drawing on all the emotional privation from his last record to raise bigger questions: how could personal neglect evoke such eloquence? The links between “How Do You Sleep?” and “How?” go beyond the combined word and question-mark alliteration. Lennon’s artistic gift—his raging compassion, his epic insecurities—binds up the personal with the political in a feat of understated vocal control. It’s enough to steal attention from those “invisible” strings.

  In the end, however, no amount of religious, political, or friendship betrayals can upstage Lennon’s romantic subversion. Among great songwriting tricks, the most dazzling may be making an unsympathetic subject sympathetic. Throughout Imagine, Lennon hitches the Beatles’ communal dream to his romance with Yoko Ono. The closing “Oh Yoko!” portrays Yoko as lovable even if her voice grated on every Lennon ideal; if this is what this woman meant to this singer, how could the world possibly resist? “Oh Yoko!” starts where Grapefruit leaves off, copping Ono’s strategy of taking everyday imagery to weave Zen-like riddles with warm, rippling embrace. “In the middle of a shave” becomes “In the middle of a dream” by the last verse, which harks back to “A Day in the Life” and “I’m Only Sleeping” as a metaphor for the imaginative possibilities couched in the ordinary. “My love will turn you on,” picks up on that “I’d love to turn you on” “Day in the Life” catchphrase for a flirtation aimed somewhere on the far side of romantic. Instead of being boastful, Lennon’s delivery steers this line toward coyly adorable. The refrain holds frighteningly innocent pleasures, and when Lennon holds out notes on repetitions—“My love . . . will . . . turn . . . you . . . on”—he pulls off a cornball sentimentality to make McCartney blush. Fading away by itself for the album’s curtain, Lennon’s harmonica sounds almost as joyous and carefree as it had in 1963’s “Little Child” or 1964’s “I Should Have Known Better.” Even to those who still found Ono unsympathetic, Lennon canonized her name for an irresistible track.

  Imagine came out with heavy promotional support alongside Yoko Ono’s Fly, on October 8, 1971, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic lauded Lennon’s return and the former Beatle’s pop gumption. Within weeks the title single dominated American radio and held firm at number three (stalled by Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” and Cher’s “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves”), his first top-five hit since “Instant Karma” (also number three) eighteen months previously. (No single came out in Britain.) The album quickly went gold in both Britain and America, combining what UK critic Jon Savage called “the best and worst of the man—the idealist and the ranter, the righteous and the vindictive anger.”3

  After he’d finished mixing and mastering the album, and sent the recording off for packaging, John and Yoko leapt into New York’s slipstream of activism and radical street theater. That Dick Cavett Show appearance in September, where they made late-night’s hippest host play catch-up, was just a prelude. As “Imagine” climbed the charts, they hunted for an apartment in the Village and spent every waking hour doing interviews, hitting sessions, catching bands, ducking into art shows, and giving celebrity gadflies fits keeping up with them.

  They watched in dismay as the Attica State Prison riot unraveled. Back on August 21, guards had killed an armed Black Panther and author, George Jackson, as he attempted to escape three days before his murder trial; two guards and two more inmates also died in the incident. On September 9, nearly a thousand of Attica’s 2,200 prisoners rioted, seized control of the grounds, and took forty-two corrections officers and civilians hostage. Tense negotiations huddled state law-enforcement officials in Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s office, where they agreed to twenty-eight of the prisoners’ thirty demands—reforms that included religious freedom for Black Muslims, competent medical treatment, and a framework for airing future grievances. Rockefeller responded by ordering the National Guard to storm the prison with tear gas on September 13, leaving thirty-nine people killed: twenty-nine prisoners and ten guards. The coverage blamed prisoners for slashing throats, but the medical examiner discovered that, in fact, the National Guard’s raid had slaughtered all ten hostages.

  This event galvanized political views, with leftists defending the mistreated prisoners, whose list of demands included more than one shower a week, and right-wingers becoming incensed at the lack of respect for law and order. Like the Kent State killings, and the overarching agony of the Vietnam War, the event underlined class and political fault lines. Now that Lennon and Ono had settled in Manhattan, they joined other New Yorkers in their outrage. And the riot completely reoriented Lennon’s political muse as his most popular album rose up the charts.

  The first indications of explicit political themes came as Lennon celebrated his thirty-first birthday on October 9, 1971, in Syracuse, where Yoko Ono had mounted an art show with John as “guest artist.” Footage from the opening party in a hotel room, by filmmaker and friend Jonas Mekas, shows friends milling about, a tape recording running, and a bunch of songs sung halfheartedly by denizens like Ringo Starr, Phil Spector, Allen Ginsberg, and Jerry Rubin. In There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Peter Doggett describes the scene where Lennon unveils a new song:

  Amidst the musical chaos, Lennon toyed with a new composition. “It was conceived on my birthday,” he confirmed later. “We ad libbed it, then we finished it off.” In its semi-complete state, the song sounded banal; it gained little in stature when Lennon and Ono completed the lyrics in subsequent weeks. But this coruscating revolutionary protest song sported a timely title: “Attica State.”4

  At the same time, Lennon worked on a holiday jingle. Richard Williams booked a Lennon interview at their St. Regis Hotel suite in Manhattan later that month, where they chatted about future projects while sorting through Lennon’s collection of Presley si
ngles to be installed on his jukebox in his new Greenwich Village loft. Lennon talked of a Plastic Ono Band tour with Nicky Hopkins, Klaus Voormann, and Jim Keltner. Yippie Jerry Rubin would play advance man, laying the groundwork for all kinds of music and political theater. And he spoke about doing more sessions with Spector.

  “I’ve got a lot to learn,” Lennon told Williams. “It’s been seven years, you know . . . but it’s important to get the band on the road, to get tight. It’s been fun just turning up at odd gigs like Toronto and the Lyceum and the Fillmore, but I’m sick of having to sing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ because we haven’t rehearsed anything else.”5

  Perhaps Spector talked about the work he and Harrison had done on the Concert for Bangladesh tapes; perhaps Lennon had ambitions to carve out his own charity cause. That evening, Williams took notes on the “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” session at the Record Plant on 44th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. “The ‘War Is Over’ bit’s in brackets, like the old American records,” Lennon announced proudly. When he first played the song for Spector, it reminded the producer of an old Paris Sisters song he’d made back in 1961: “I Love How You Love Me,” for Leiber and Stoller’s Red Bird label. The session musicians that evening included the young Hugh McCracken on guitar. When Lennon learned that McCracken had just played for McCartney’s Ram, he quipped, “Oh, so you were just auditioning on Ram, were you? Yeah, ’e said you were all right.”

  “Just pretend it’s Christmas,” John exhorted the musicians in rehearsal. “I’m Jewish,” Spector shot back over the intercom. “Well, pretend it’s your birthday, then.”6

  As the engineers got the equipment set up right for all the guitars, Spector came out to the studio floor and danced around the room with Lennon. Voormann’s flight from Germany was delayed, so one of the guitarists sat in on bass; they were too restless to wait. They kept going over the changes, with Spector running playbacks so the musicians could hear what they sounded like.

  The next night, John and Yoko invited the Harlem Children’s Choir down to sing the chorus of “Happy Christmas,” and tracked Yoko Ono’s “Listen, the Snow Is Falling.” Alongside Spector’s wide-screen rhythmic track, the sound of a boys’ choir on a Lennon record had a counterintuitive effect: it revived their billboard peace slogan with a gently rolling holiday message that has been a seasonal radio staple ever since. Here was a clue that Lennon and Yoko were actually writing together: she sang a marginal bridge lyric (“A very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year/Let’s hope it’s a good one without any fear”), and they claimed coauthorship of the song. But the overall effect was of a return to the “Give Peace a Chance” template, a “standard” but in a new rock idiom, not a chestnut like “White Christmas,” but a seasonal record that put their billboard campaign to a sing-along refrain. Before the vastly inferior Live Aid anthem “Feed the World,” the fledgling rock catalog knew few such classics. To his peace anthem (“All You Need Is Love”), anti-war hymn (“Give Peace a Chance”), and fist-thumper (“Power to the People”), Lennon now added a cathartic rock Christmas jingle (without mentioning Christ) as a coda to his defining agnosticism (“Imagine”). Largely through Lennon, rock began to define its audience’s rituals.

  By early November 1971, John and Yoko moved into former Lovin’ Spoonful drummer Joe Butler’s 105 Bank Street apartment in the West Village. The couple befriended neighbors, attended local concerts and parties, and developed political plans with activists who had their sights on the summer’s coming political conventions. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman hung out with them regularly. Both men had learned a lot from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the trial of the Chicago Seven. Now they set their sights on Republicans.

  These authority figures were so clueless, and so easily provoked, Rubin argued, that with a rock star like Lennon at the helm, they could mount a far more meaningful protest. John and Yoko expressed admiration for how the Yippies had cast the itinerant Chicago judge, Julius Hoffman, as the disintegrating establishment’s fuddy-duddy, garnering headlines for the movement and advancing the antiwar cause. Judge Hoffman proved his own worst enemy: he had Black Panther Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom rather than have him removed, and finally sentenced him to four years in prison for “contempt.” (Graham Nash referred to this outrage in his 1971 hit single “Chicago,” from Songs for Beginners.) In short, John and Yoko already admired the Yippies as creatives; the Yippies in turn had long seen Lennon as a nascent politico.

  With a name attraction like Lennon on their side, Hoffman and Rubin hoped to enlarge these Chicago courtroom pranks and spring them on Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. Since Lennon had already talked radical politics quite comfortably on late-night network talk shows, he made a charged symbol for the left’s antiwar efforts. Lennon gave generous contributions to Rubin and Hoffman’s Rock Liberation Front and took part in street rallies and spontaneous songfests in Washington Square Park. This loose-knit alliance of lefties carried off “media theater” just the way John and Yoko had hoped their bed-ins might inspire people to do. They never imagined that the only figure more paranoid than a rock star like Lennon was the president himself.

  Gradually, New York’s counterculture music world gathered around Lennon. Through some political friends, Jerry Rubin knew of a group, the Elephant’s Memory Band, who had just booked a residency at Max’s Kansas City. “Lennon heard about us, and came to hear us at the club,” guitarist Wayne “Tex” Gabriel remembers. “And he asked us if he could come play with us sometime. So we said, sure, you know, of course. And that first night he came in and we must have played seven hours together.”7

  The Elephant’s Memory Band gets a bad rap from most critics, but Lennon made strong commitments to the group and its work, signed the act to Apple, and helped members with their songs. Yoko Ono used the players for her Approximately Infinite Universe project, some of her best rock ’n’ roll after Plastic Ono Band. The Elephant’s Memory Band had an early breakthrough working on the rock score to Midnight Cowboy, and when Lennon found them they sported “Tex” Gabriel, a dandy new lead guitarist who had just landed in New York from Detroit.

  For this first jam session, they launched into the classics, “rock numbers, all the old Beatle songs and Beatle covers, anything we could think of,” bassist Gary Van Scyoc remembers. “And he was singing and sweating and working out, it was quite a session, I wish we had tapes of that evening.”

  A Village apartment, a Village band: now Lennon could get to work on a new record in his new home and push back against all those oppressive Beatle reunion rumors. Whatever the public perception, Lennon’s attitude with these musicians conveyed the utmost respect. Naturally, at first the musicians were intimidated to play with the former Beatle. But they quickly found the rock star quite personable. “It was pretty much like he joined the band,” Scyoc says. “It wasn’t like he had hired us to back him, he chose us to work with, and we just started working together. He sought out our input constantly, and had a very collaborative approach to rehearsing and getting tracks down on tape.”8

  To Lennon, the idea of joining a band meant acting like a band member. “I’ve worked with a lot of celebrities since then,” Gabriel confirms, “and Lennon had the least attitude by far of anybody I’ve ever worked with. It was all about getting it right, best idea wins, and he always wanted to hear what we thought of anything he brought in.”

  For these sessions, Yoko’s presence was a given. Gabriel remembers her having more of a sobering effect on her husband, while Van Scyoc has only praise for Ono, her material, and her working relationship with the band. “When John wasn’t around Yoko, that’s when you’d get the more jovial John, the joking guy,” Gabriel says. “When Yoko showed up, he’d be more reserved, less likely to be a cut-up. I never got a good feeling off of her; I’m not sure I trusted her, and she kept her distance more from us, much more than he did.” Van Scyoc remembers it differently: “John was simply attentive to Yoko and her material, I
wouldn’t say he was being ‘obedient’ or anything like that. I never noticed any difference in his behavior whether she was there or not. . . . I mean, when you were off getting pissed with Lennon, he was not holding anything back, even when Yoko was there.”

  Half the ease of this new situation stemmed from how John and Yoko came in as partners, without interrupting any previous relationships. “That whole Yoko Ono thing gets blown way out of proportion,” Van Scyoc points out. And contact with McCartney actually continued, even though the two stars maintained a very distant public façade. “The McCartney thing, too,” Van Scyoc says. “It was nothing for John to take a call from Paul right in the middle of a session and talk to him for ninety minutes while we took a break. And they were not fighting or arguing. They talked about family, about the search for Kyoko, Yoko’s daughter, about McCartney’s kids, trips they were taking. It was family stuff. And you would swear they were best friends.”

  The Dick Cavett Show appearances that September set off a ripple effect. Living and working in New York made John and Yoko a constant media presence, and Cavett had given them the TV bug. So, in addition to rehearsing new material with his new players, Lennon accepted some of the chat-show invitations that flooded in. On a brief trip to Philadelphia that fall, he and Yoko met an enterprising young TV producer named Michael Krauss.