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

by Tim Riley

  “Half a dozen live shows—with no big fuss—in fact we’ve been doing what you’ve been talking about for three years! (I said it was daft for the Beatles to do it, I still think it’s daft.) So go on and do it! Do it! Do it!” Lennon listed all his live appearances: “Eg Cambridge (1969 completely unadvertised! A very small hall), Lyceum Ballroom (1969 no fuss, great show—30 piece rock band! “Live Jam” out soon!), Fillmore East (1971 unannounced. Another good time had by all—out soon!!) with the great David Peel!!! We were moved on by the cops, even!!! It’s best just to DO IT, I know you’ll dig it, and they don’t expect The Beatles now anyway!”

  Lennon probably projected a lot of himself into many innocuous stretches of Ram, but he knew exactly what he was on about with Imagine: “It’s ‘Working Class Hero’ with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn’t dig the words. Imagine! You took ‘How Do You Sleep’ so literally.” He signed off with “No hard feelings to you either.”16 Later that month, Lennon roared from the op-ed page of the New York Times about how Nixon made “an Audie Murphy–like hero out of Lieut. Calley [of the My Lai massacre]. People aren’t born bloody-minded.”17

  Early in 1972, White House counsel John Dean began subscribing to underground newspapers to keep tabs on radical activities that might threaten the coming Republican National Convention in San Diego. One quote jumped out: “For the past five months in New York City people have been feeling that the worst is over and that people are creating again and coming together again and something new is in the air. Somehow the arrival of John and Yoko in New York has had a mystical and practical effect that is bringing people together again.”18 Shortly after Dean came across this story, John and Yoko’s Mike Douglas Show appearance aired, staggered across media markets for maximum effect (because it was a syndicated show, local stations could run it according to their own schedules).

  Dean didn’t work in a vacuum; the White House responded to a February memo passed through the Justice Department, from Republican congressman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina: “This appears to me to be an important matter, and I think it would be well to be considered at the highest level . . . as I can see many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action be taken in time.”19

  In his expansive history of leftist activism and rock music, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Peter Doggett details how the Nixon administration placed Lennon within its sights: “Lennon was added to the list of dangerous radicals who required constant surveillance by FBI agents. As a British citizen with a conviction for drug possession, he was vulnerable to the whims of the U.S. Immigration Service, who had allowed him into the country on a series of temporary visas.” Hoover’s FBI sought to deport Lennon and defuse the “plot” against the Republican National Convention. “Ironically,” Doggett writes, “in another classic piece of White House miscalculation, the struggle to throw Lennon out of the country generated more publicity for his political sympathies than he could have mustered himself, and added to the impression that the Nixon administration was losing its senses.”20 But the wiretapping and harassment of the Lennons took its toll on their marriage.

  Their cherished status as New York City residents was already apparent as early as 1972. On January 8, 1971, the New Yorker welcomed them with a “Talk of the Town” piece by Hendrick Hertzberg. With a spacious West Village apartment, Lennon sounded like a Big Apple booster. Hertzberg spoke to him about the apparent contradiction of living like a rock star while singing about “no possessions” in “Imagine”: “I don’t want that big house we [re-]built for ourselves [sic] in England,” Lennon told him.

  I don’t want the bother of owning all these big houses and big cars, even though our company, Apple, pays for it all. All structures and buildings and everything I own will be dissolved and got rid of. I’ll cash in my chips, and anything that’s left I’ll make the best use of. . . . It’s clogging my mind just to think about what amount of gear I have in England. All my books and possessions. Walls full of books I’ve collected all my life. I have a list this thick of the things I have in Ascot, and I’m going to tick off the things I really want, really need. The rest goes to libraries or prisons—the whole damn lot. I might keep my rock-n-roll collection, but even that I’m thinking about.21

  Over in the UK, the Irish “troubles” boiled over enough to turn McCartney himself into a politico. He took to the stage on a college tour with Wings, and put out his own protest single, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” at the end of February. March brought Ringo’s “Back off Boogaloo,” and in May, John and Yoko returned to The Dick Cavett Show for a second run, this time sitting opposite Shirley MacLaine, and performing “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” and “We’re All Water.” Cavett had to fight his network bosses, too, to keep the incendiary Lennon lyric. The week Lennon sang “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” on Dick Cavett, McCartney put politics back on the shelf with his new Wings single, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

  The more paranoid the Lennons became, the more the FBI gave them reason to be paranoid. Bob Gruen told Lennon about a strange encounter in the dead of night, which was clearly meant to intimidate him. One evening Gruen emerged from his photography studio on Twenty-ninth Street with a friend, and caught a glimpse of someone across the street taking his picture. A second look confirmed two men in a car wearing “real old-school fedoras . . . and suits; they looked like G-men out of the movies, and one of them had a camera.” Then the car sped off. At first, Gruen was simply puzzled. “It became like just another New York moment, you know, where something happens for some weird reason. It was only later that we put together that it was the FBI that had been spying on Lennon and his known associates,” he says now.

  At another point, Gruen pulled his car out from its parking place outside the Record Plant on 44th between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and spotted a tail. “To get to my place in the Village,” he says, “you would have to turn a few times to hit Ninth going downtown, and then turn a few more times on 14th Street and Washington to get to Bethune Street.” This seemed curious to him at first, until he got downtown. “Once we got downtown, it was like 3 A.M. in the dead of night, there were no other cars, and it was really weird to get followed all the way home on this circuitous route I took. So when I pulled up to my apartment, I jumped out of the car to watch them make the last turn, and I’m standing there looking at ’em, and the men ducked in the car as they drove by and again I was left thinking ‘What was that? Who would want to follow me home?’ This really made absolutely no sense until much later, when we learned.”22 Naturally, the FBI wanted Gruen to spot the tail and tell Lennon about it, to intimidate him into leaving the country.

  Of course, this kind of thing only made Lennon more determined—if he left America, the country might not let him back in. He settled into work toward a new album with the Elephant’s Memory Band and pointed his new songs directly at the repressive forces harassing his every move. Phil Spector came in to produce, and Gruen and some of the band members fault the flow of tequila and harder drugs for creating the tracks’ self-righteous tone.

  One band member in particular picked up on some previously hidden Lennon ambitions. “He was like a mentor to me,” recalled guitarist “Tex” Gabriel, the Detroit native who had just turned twenty. “We used to sit for hours and trade licks, like guitarists do. Lennon always wanted to be a better guitar player, but he knew he never would be. He would ask me how I did stuff, and I would pick his brain about his rhythm chops, which were absolutely great.” Many other rock stars might have treated their players as hired guns; Lennon just seemed to be looking for companionship. “There was absolutely no rock star stuff going on there,” Gabriel remembered, “it was just two guitarists, working out parts the way they do in every band.”

  “What Gabriel won’t mention is that his mother had died recently before he got the Lennon gig,” Van Scyoc says now. “That was a big bond for those two, since Lennon had lost his mother when he was a teenager.” The two mu
sicians spent hours together, using guitars as a metaphor. “They sat cross-legged together for a couple hours while the rest of us went off to eat,” Van Scyoc remembers, “they had a special thing.” Gabriel continues, “He had this basic insecurity, you know, he really didn’t walk around with this ‘I’m John Lennon’ attitude, he really worked hard at his music and it came from a place of ‘What’s the best way to pull this off?’ ”23

  Like most musicians, even once they got a gig with Lennon, the Elephants held on to their day jobs to support their music, doing TV jingles and studio sessions. They came together in the evenings to work on their tracks. The Some Time in New York City sessions started most evenings around seven. “He’d write the song the night before,” Van Scyoc remembers, “come in at seven, work up a feel for it, figure out a tempo, we’d have dinner, talk about the track, then go back and get the balance figured out, bang on the drums, then start doing takes. And by seven the next morning we’d have a track—mixed. He liked to work fast. And when it came time to do Yoko’s album (Approximately Infinite Universe),” Van Scyoc continues, “he gave just as much, to every song, every part for three full weeks. He helped us with our material, our lyrics, too, and we could never convince him to take any credit for that. He was humble like that. Yoko Ono deserves far more credit than she’ll ever get.”24

  A radical broadsheet disguised as a rock album, Some Time in New York City was released in the summer of 1972 to mostly negative reviews. Its cover laid out the song lyrics as newspaper articles under a New York Times headline font. “Sisters, O Sisters” showed a photo of the band with Lennon on The Mike Douglas Show set, above a photo of Black Panther activist Angela Davis. John and Yoko appeared over the headline “Woman Is the Nigger of the World”; above Yoko Ono’s “We’re All Water,” a doctored photo appeared of Nixon dancing naked with Chairman Mao.

  For some, the imagery alone distracted from the music; for others, the music never lived up to its packaging. Critics tended to undervalue the material based on loftier expectations, but its sturdy, driving lead track, “New York City,” a fetching Chuck Berry tribute, and several standout numbers (“John Sinclair,” “Woman Is the Nigger of the World”) rebuff its weak reputation. A bonus album included some music from the Frank Zappa Fillmore East jams from 1971.

  Even when they agreed with the politics, many critics couldn’t defend the writing. In the August issue of Creem, Dave Marsh took apart the Irish message songs: “ ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ cuts McCartney’s ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ and it don’t even matter much that [Ringo’s] ‘Back Off Boogaloo’ is a better statement on the subject than either.” Marsh went on to note how Yoko Ono’s bridge muddied a potential marvel of a song, “Luck of the Irish”:

  Let’s walk over rainbows like leprechauns

  The world would be one big Blarney stone

  Without this intrusion, marred by Ono’s off-pitch delivery, Lennon could have released a classic rebellious statement in a beguiling, sentimental mode. But his indulgence of his wife’s pretensions compromised both his politics and one of the better songs in this sequence.

  “That isn’t just false, it’s racist,” Marsh notes, “in the same way that the insistence of John’s Yoko-hype is inadvertently sexist.”25 (Yoko Ono: she’s a lot of things, but she’s no Sinead O’Connor.) The British press, of course, had a harder time watching Lennon side with the Irish Republican Army. A beloved Brit who had settled in a former colony accusing the English (“the bastards”) of “genocide” had a bit too much condescension in it even for rock lefties. Ian MacDonald later reported in Uncut, “as FBI papers released in 1997 show, [Lennon] got involved with Irish Republicans in New York early in 1972, having toted a placard proclaiming ‘Victory for the IRA Against British Imperialism’ at an anti-internment rally in London the previous August. How did Lennon reconcile his pacifism with his support for the IRA? ‘It’s a very delicate line,’ he feigned, soon thereafter quietly discontinuing his romance with terrorism.”26 Being stalked by the FBI sorely tested Lennon’s commitment to nonviolence, although this appears to be his only brush with Irish revolutionaries.

  As critics wrung their hands, radio recoiled at the word “nigger,” and a potential single, “New York City,” didn’t get the chance it deserved. Out in California, a young deejay at KABC named Elliot Mintz had interviewed Yoko Ono, and he stayed friendly with her on the phone. They discovered they were both telephone freaks. Ono had ideas about the “purity” of the human voice removing prejudice, and Mintz suffered from chronic insomnia—they loved to gab through the night. Pretty soon, Lennon joined in. For kicks, Mintz played Some Time in New York City all the way through on the air the week before its release. It got him fired. Lennon found this hilarious. They invited him up to San Francisco, where they could continue their phone conversations in person, and Mintz became a lifelong friend. “Pack a bag and join the circus,” said Lennon.27

  As more and more political rallies and charity events came along, John and Yoko developed a deepening attachment to New York and American society at large. Geraldo Rivera, then a young reporter for WABC-TV’s Eyewitness News, took on Lennon’s immigration case for frequent updates on the evening news, regularly catching him outside the courthouse for quotes. Another Rivera story followed up on a public television exposé of the Willowbrook facility for special needs children on Staten Island, which documented the neglect and dismal living conditions of its patients. Rivera dubbed the facility “the Big Town’s leper colony” and stirred up outrage over the lack of care for the mentally ill. Since part of the inequity stemmed from up to fifty patients being supervised by a single staffer, Rivera launched a charity crusade called “One to One,” advocating for bigger staff budgets and better hygiene.

  In response, the Rockefeller administration restored a $20 million budget cut. Rivera persuaded John and Yoko to stage a charity concert at Madison Square Garden modeled on Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, filmed for television, dubbed the One to One concert. The bill featured Sha Na Na, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, and Lennon and Ono doing Some Time material with the Elephant’s Memory Band. Ticket demand added a second matinee show before the evening concert. Ono later repackaged this concert as John Lennon: Live in New York City, an uneven set bound together by his continuously inspired singing.

  For the show, Lennon boosted the Elephant lineup to thicken the sound for the huge Madison Square Garden venue. “Lennon wanted to hire Hendrix drummer Noel Redding for the gig,” Van Scyoc says, “but he wasn’t available.” So he hired Jim Keltner to double on drums (“Jim was his rock,” Gruen confirms), and Van Scyoc suggested the former Elephant bass player, John Ward, for the low end. “He hadn’t performed in a while, so he was a little nervous, and he had a sore throat that day,” Van Scyoc remembers. “But you’d never know it. It went very smoothly, we might have muffed one arrangement, but he muffed it with everybody else and we just kept going.” The band pushed Lennon to sing at least one Beatle number, and they settled on “Come Together,” which turned from delicate production piece to virulent antiwar blues.

  “Sitting next to him while he sang ‘Imagine’ has to be one of my all-time biggest moments as a rock fan,” remembers Bob Gruen. “It was one of those untouchable moments that sent shivers down everybody’s spine.” For the encore, they were having such a good time, Lennon pulled out “Hound Dog,” which they had never rehearsed. “He was really a huge Elvis fan,” Van Scyoc says.

  The concert has an uneven reputation, and made a better live experience than recording or film, at least according to those who were there. “That One to One concert was supposed to be the beginning of a world tour,” Tex remembers. “But the critics were so sour on that record, and it really took Lennon aback. We were all having such a good time and fighting the good fight.”28 It didn’t occur to them that the rest of the world might not hear it the way they did.

  The next week, as if affirming they wanted to become mainstream American celebrities, John and Y
oko showed up on the annual Jerry Lewis telethon, the all-day charity event to raise money for muscular dystrophy. Lennon sang “Imagine,” Ono did “Now or Never,” and together they did a reggae version of “Give Peace a Chance.”

  But the negative reviews and the generalized hostility that greeted Yoko sent Lennon back spiraling into insecurity about his solo career, and the musical value of political activism. In November 1972, the left watched with dismay as George McGovern lost to Nixon in a landslide, the second biggest electoral thumping in modern history to that point (Nixon carried every state except Massachusetts).

  This had a devastating effect on what remained of the antiwar left. For Lennon, it meant that on some level all his activism had backfired, and that once again everybody had lauded his music without listening to his message. At Jerry Rubin’s party on election night, Lennon monopolized the tequila and out came the self-loathing and abandonment issues: All the funny sounds on his phone and the blatant tails he spotted from his limo made him suspect Rubin was a CIA agent who had double-crossed him. After all, Rubin had induced the Lennons into the revolutionary fray, and now all their worst fears about leaving Britain were coming true.

  Unfortunately, no matter how far Lennon had grown as a musician, the bottle always dragged him right back down into his angry paranoid shtick. He berated his hosts and accused the activists of ruining his career. He blamed the legal process and the shadowy FBI characters who followed him everywhere for hampering his creativity. Meanwhile, Yoko Ono’s current songs were indictments of the male chauvinism with which Lennon was treating her.