Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music - the Definitive Life
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27. Author interview with Barry Miles, May 2008.
28. Badman, 246.
29. BA, 237.
30. MYFN, 306–7.
31. George Martin, All You Need Is Ears (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 204.
Chapter 15: In a Play
1. BJY, 143.
2. Greil Marcus, Interview magazine, March 1, 2000, http://www.beatlemoney.com/paul6467.html.
3. BA, 255.
4. CLJ, 183.
5. Ibid.
6. Mitchell would later collaborate with Lennon and Victor Spinetti on In His Own Write’s stage production in 1968.
7. Most Americans recognize Bach’s third “Allegro assai” movement from this Brandenburg Concerto as the theme music to William F. Buckley’s Firing Line interview show on PBS.
8. BA, 247.
9. Ibid.
10. Bramwell, 191. Bramwell’s film still makes the rounds in various forms, for documentaries and among bootleg collectors, but the BBC banned the broadcast of the footage since the song itself had been banned for “drug references.”
11. Winn, That Magic Feeling, 100.
12. Ibid, 103.
13. Bramwell, 200.
14. Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head, The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 192.
15. Davies, Beatles, 266–67.
16. Alistair Taylor, Yesterday: The Beatles Remembered (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited, 1988), 108.
17. Simon Napier-Bell, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (London: Ebury Press, 1998), 129.
18. Bramwell, 200–201.
19. Robert Christgau, Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967–1978. (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 42.
20. Richard Goldstein, “We Still Need the Beatles, but . . . ,” New York Times, June 18, 1967, 104.
21. Bramwell, 191. Even the iconic Pepper album sleeve, shot by Michael Cooper and with art direction by Peter Blake and Robert Fraser, from McCartney’s design concept, was outrageously expensive. The final costs came to a staggering £2,867, a hundred times more than most album covers, and burst EMI’s “sleeves” budget. But Lennon insisted that art was beyond price. He cracked, “If you can’t stand the art, get out of the kitschen.”
22. Charles Cross, A Room Full of Mirrors (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 322.
23. BA, 255.
24. Chet Flippo, Yesterday: The Unauthorized Biography of Paul McCartney (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 242.
25. Author interview with Barry Miles, May 2008.
26. Many people close to Epstein in this period strongly infer a romantic link without wanting to go on the record. The business deal was far too lopsided to make any other kind of sense.
27. Napier-Bell, 118.
28. Ibid, 120.
29. Ibid.
30. Taylor, With the Beatles, 187.
31. Napier-Bell, 124.
32. Marianne Faithfull, Faithfull: An Autobiography (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 135.
33. BA, 264.
34. Wenner, 25.
Chapter 16: I Should Have Known Better
1. One of the best parodies of “All You Need Is Love” as a swollen sixties bromide came with Nick Lowe’s breezy “What’s So Funny ’Bout Peace Love and Understanding?” which Elvis Costello transformed on 1979’s Armed Forces with reverse irony.
2. Tariq Ali, Street Fighting Years (New York: Verso, 2005), 361.
3. BA, 285.
4. Ibid.
5. In A Twist of Lennon, Cynthia Lennon reports occasional brief contacts from Alf, including an appearance at the Magical Mystery Tour wrap party, 178.
6. CLJ, 206.
7. Ibid, 182.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid, 207.
10. Ibid, 206.
11. Ibid, 207.
12. Lewis H. Lapham, With the Beatles (Hoboken: Melville House Publishing, 2005), 63.
13. Ibid, 71–2.
14. Ibid, 78.
15. Mia Farrow, What Falls Away (New York: Bantam, 1997), 137.
16. Ibid, 132–33.
17. Lapham, 84.
18. BA, 291.
19. Ibid.
20. CLJ, 208.
21. BA, 284.
22. CLJ, 209.
23. Ibid, 210.
24. Ibid, 285.
25. Ibid, 211.
26. Ibid, 212.
27. SS, 168.
28. Ibid, 169.
29. CLJ, 213–14.
30. Alexandra Munroe with Jon Hendricks, Yes Yoko Ono (New York: Japan Society and Harry N. Abrams, Publishers, 2000), 15.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid, 17.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. CLJ, 221.
37. Lennon’s theatrical piece opened June 18.
38. CLJ, 222.
39. Ibid, 223.
Chapter 17: How?
1. Peter Carlin, Paul McCartney: A Life (New York: Touchstone Books. 2009), 232.
2. CLJ, 225. Also Carlin, 232.
3. Ibid.
4. Spitz, 320. Many years later, band biographer Bob Spitz tracked down McCartney’s steady and sometime roommate of Cynthia Powell, Dot Rhone, who claimed McCartney backed out of his informal commitment to her in 1962 after watching Lennon get hitched. She eventually miscarried.
5. Winn, That Magic Feeling, 187.
6. Author interview with Victor Spinetti, 2007.
7. Richard Dilello, The Longest Cocktail Party: An Insider’s Diary of the Beatles, Their Million-Dollar Apple Empire, and Its Wild Rise and Fall (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2005). The best book on the Apple office atmosphere from one of Derek Taylor’s lackeys.
8. Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey, Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles (New York: Gotham, 2007), 246–47.
9. Ibid, 225.
10. BJY, 384.
11. Bramwell, 189.
12. RTB, 489. Trident’s playback speakers were both trebly and loud, and the American recorder hadn’t been tweaked to reproduce properly on EMI’s setup.
13. Emerick and Massey, 262. Also BRS, 147. Emerick remembers Lennon, Lewisohn cites McCartney for this quote.
14. Ibid, 260–63.
15. Eric Clapton, Clapton: The Autobiography (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), 99–100.
16. RTB, 496.
17. Author interview with Chris Thomas, November 2006.
18. Jon Wiener, Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 61.
19. Editors of Rolling Stone, The Ballad of John and Yoko (Garden City: Doubleday Dolphin, 1982), 55.
20. Author interview with Chris Thomas, November 2006.
21. Emerick and Massey, 244.
22. Alan Travis, “The Night Yogi and Boo-Boo Helped Semolina Pilcher Snare a Beatle,” The Guardian, August 1, 2005.
23. Ibid. Five months later, when Pilcher raided George Harrison’s Esher estate, he timed his raid to coincide with Paul McCartney’s marriage to Linda Eastman, assuming Harrison’s house would be empty. Pilcher’s name became synonymous with London police corruption. In 1972, he was convicted of “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice” and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
24. Author interview with Barry Miles, 2008.
25. Miles, Diary, 314.
26. The period teems with activity: Lennon’s You Are Here art show opened at the Robert Fraser Gallery in July, as did the movie animated feature, Yellow Submarine. The movie opened to mixed reviews on November 13 in New York City. Two avant-garde films shot at Lennon’s Kenwood home in August, Smile and Two Virgins, were shown at the Chicago Film Festival during this same month. John and Yoko were also plotting the more ambitious seventy-five-minute Rape, which followed the twenty-one-year-old Hungarian actress Eva Majlata around the streets of London.
27. Clayson, Lennon, 170. Based on the 1966 Dangerous Drugs Act, Section 42.
28. Peter Doggett, There’s a Riot Goin
’ On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and the Rise and Fall of the ’60s (London: Canongate, 2008), 200.
29. Winn, That Magic Feeling, 249.
30. CLJ, 235.
Chapter 18: Thank You Girl
1. Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt, Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 169.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, 181.
4. Ibid, 199.
5. Ibid, 169.
6. Preston also likely knew Allen Klein, who had counseled Sam Cooke when he formed his own company in the early sixties.
7. Another layer of Sulpy and Schweighardt’s research for Get Back involves the innumerable musical fragments the Beatles scatter throughout their rehearsals, not just oldies run-throughs but stray lyrics from old radio hits and appreciative romps through work by sixties contemporaries. Harrison and Lennon attempt John Sebastian’s hit with the Lovin’ Spoonful, “Daydream,” their first morning reunited on January 22 (206), and during a rambling blues improvisation on January 9, they start calling out names to each other, diagramming their Quarrymen heroes. McCartney calls out “Cassius Cleavage,” Lennon responds with “Deirdre McSharry,” a magazine editor, McCartney answers with “Humphrety Lestouq,” the Whirligig children’s TV show host. The list continues on through Betty Grable, comedian Ronnie Corbett, Radio Luxembourg deejay Emperor Rosko, and many others. This banquet of inside jokes and adolescent references gives a clue as to how they free-associated as they hunted for song ideas, swapped character names, and killed time while songs took shape. An outline of secretly shared pop history, these references map Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting unconscious, and the sheer number of song titles they drop deserves its own compilation.
8. BA, 321.
9. Starr, 25.
10. Author interview with Barry Miles, May 2008. Also Carlin, 95.
11. In the UK, Denmark Street is roughly analogous to “Tin Pan Alley,” a literal address where Epstein knocked on Dick James’s door in 1962, but also a frame of reference for the older pop tradition it housed.
12. BA, 325.
13. Miles, Diary, 337.
14. BA, 286.
15. Lennon quotes from Amsterdam hotel bed; see http://holysmoke.tripod.com/amsterdam.htm/.
16. Miles, Diary, 338.
17. Ibid, 339.
18. Ibid.
19. Quentin Tarantino uses “You Never Can Tell” for John Travolta and Uma Thurman’s twist contest at Jack Rabbit Slim’s in 1994’s Pulp Fiction. Nick Lowe returned to Berry’s tune for “I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)” in 1985.
20. MYFN, 548.
21. Anthony Fawcett, John Lennon One Day at a Time (New York: Grove Press, 1976), 74.
22. CLJ, 234.
23. Winn, That Magic Feeling, 294.
24. Rolling Stone, June 28, 1969, 6.
25. Ibid.
26. Andrew Solt, director, Imagine: John Lennon (Warner Home Video, 1988), DVD.
27. BA, 334.
28. CLJ, 234.
29. Ibid, 236.
30. Ibid, 243.
31. Unpublished Alan White interview, transcript at http://www.quipo.it/mccartney/specials/alanwhite/.
32. Clapton, 118.
33. BA, 184.
34. Ibid, 347.
35. Wenner, 31.
36. Author phone interview with Kim Fowley, 2006.
37. Southall, 81–3.
38. Peter McCabe and Robert D. Schonfeld, Apple to the Core: The Unmaking of the Beatles (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 152.
39. The Northern Songs publishing fortune, centered around Maclen, the Lennon-McCartney song catalog, is considered the most valuable property in rock publishing. It differs from Beatle recording royalties in that it earns money whenever somebody performs a Lennon-McCartney song. It finally fell into Michael Jackson’s hands in 1983, after he sought business advice from McCartney himself.
40. David Leaf, director, The U.S. vs. John Lennon (Lions Gate, 2006), DVD.
41. Richard Robinson, “Our London Interview,” Hit Parader, August 1970 (http://www.instantkarma.com/magarchive1_99.html).
42. Interview with Desmond Morris for BBC-TV’s Men of the Decade (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/carousel/pob02.html).
Chapter 19: Just We Two
1. Mark Moses, “The Late Beatles: Carry That Weight,” Boston Phoenix, December 4, 1987, 11, 15–18.
2. Braun, 52.
3. Richard Williams, Out of His Head: The Sound of Phil Spector (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1972), 149.
4. Cox hung onto the film for another twenty-six years, until several collectors formed a consortium and bought the material from him. Yoko Ono successfully fought to prevent its release in 2008.
5. PB, 216.
6. Williams, 153.
7. Ibid.
8. Miles, 345.
9. BA, 350.
10. Keith Badman, The Beatles: After the Break-Up 1970–2000: A Day-By-Day Diary (New York: Omnibus Press, 2000), 4.
11. Ibid, 15.
12. Ibid, 4.
13. Author interview with Ray Connolly, May 2008.
14. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 630.
15. Wenner, 23.
16. Williams, 156–58.
17. Ibid, 159.
18. PB, 104.
19. Fawcett, 109.
20. Arthur Jano to John Harris in Mojo, 2000, http://primaltherapy.com/SED/john-lennon.shtml.
21. Wenner, 24.
22. Author interview wth Richard Lush, November 2006.
23. Badman, After the Break-Up, 24.
24. Christgau, Rock Albums of the Seventies (New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1981), 242.
25. Dave Marsh, “John Lennon—Plastic Ono Band, Yoko Ono—Plastic Ono Band,” Creem, March 1971, http://beatpatrol.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/john-lennon-john-lennonplastic-ono-band-yoko-ono-yoko-onoplastic-ono-band-1970/.
26. Howard Smith, WPLJ interview. See: http://tittenhurstlennon.blogspot.com.
27. Badman, After the Break-Up, 25.
28. DCH, 177–81. This is the only account of this scene in the entire span of Lennon literature, and therefore the only quotes of Lennon discussing the choice his parents had him make in Blackpool twenty-five years before. Naturally, the narrative is slanted in favor of Freddie, who behaves with a dignified calm, and against Lennon, even though Pauline recognizes that “following psychotherapy, to experience a death wish towards a parent is part and parcel of the process of freeing oneself from childhood trauma. What was unusual in John’s case was the method whereby he had visualized killing his father. By imagining him dumped deep in the ocean he was finally enacting his revenge on his father for the years he had spent at sea while he was a child.”
29. The date of this interview assumes prophetic significance. Excerpts from the longer interview are available in BJY. The complete text, along with a new introduction from Ono, came out from Verso publishers in 2000.
30. Wenner, 106.
31. Paul McCartney in Life, April 16, 1971, 56.
Chapter 20: I’ll Cry Instead
1. Badman, After the Break-Up, 19. “A declaration that the partnership business carried on by the plaintiff and the defendants under the name of The Beatles & Co., and constituted by a deed of partnership dated 19 April 1967 and made between the parties hereto, ought to be dissolved and that accordingly the same be dissolved.”
2. Ibid, 27.
3. Ibid, 32.
4. Ibid, 24.
5. Wenner, 140.
6. Ali, 381.
7. Badman, After the Break-Up, 4.
8. Transcript from the Apple case, the High Court of Justice, Chancery Division, 10:B.
9. Ibid, 26:A.
10. Miles, Zappa, 3.
11. Andy Peebles, The Lennon Conversations (London: BBC, 1981), 46. The Olympics number was “Well (Baby Please Don’t Go),” the B-side to “Western Movies.”
12. Badman, A
fter the Break-Up, 55.
13. Author interview with Ray Connolly, May 2008.
14. Steve Sutherland, “John Lennon: The Beatles and Beyond,” NME Originals, Vol. 1, Issue 113, 2003, 84–85.
15. The Dick Cavett Show—John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Shout DVD, 2005. Paradoxically, this comment foreshadows the hypnosis treatment Yoko will use to lure Lennon away from May Pang in Los Angeles some three years on.
Chapter 21: You Can’t Do That
1. “Another Day” revives McCartney’s “A Day in the Life” character as a Professional Skirt on the A-Side, with a hard-boiled Lennon pulp novel on the B-Side, “Oh Woman, Oh Why.” Instead, most commentators remark on “Let Me Roll It” as McCartney’s best Lennon impersonation.
2. Badman, After the Break-Up, 24.
3. Jon Savage, “Imagine” review, Mojo (158, 2007), 287–29.
4. Doggett, 454.
5. Williams, 2.
6. Ibid, 4.
7. Author interview with Wayne “Tex” Gabriel, August 2008.
8. Author interview with Gary Van Scyoc, August 2008.
9. Author interview with Michael Krauss, July 2008.
10. Alan Parker and Phil Strongman, John Lennon and the FBI Files (London: Sanctuary Publishing, Ltd., 2003), 48.
11. Ibid, 39.
12. Author interview with Bob Gruen, 2008.
13. Wiener, 200.
14. Doggett, 462.
15. John Blaney, John Lennon: Listen to This Book Guildford: (Paper Jukebox, 2005), 89.
16. Ibid.
17. John Lennon, “Peace and Love,” Letter to the Editor, New York Times, December 28, 1971, 28.
18. Doggett, 470.
19. Parker and Strongman, 165.
20. Doggett, 470.
21. “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, January 8, 1972, 28.
22. Author interview with Bob Gruen, 2008.
23. Author interview with Tex Gabriel and Van Scyoc, August 2008.
24. Ibid.
25. Dave Marsh, Cream, August 1972.
26. Ian MacDonald, Uncut, December 1998 (see Rock’s Back Pages online archive, http://rocksbackpages.com).
27. BJY, 172.
28. All quotes from author interview with Gabriel and Van Scyoc, 2008.
29. Ibid.
Chapter 22: I’m a Loser