by Peter Brown
When we returned to 3 Savile Row, I signed over the lease of the town house that Klein wanted so badly to Ron Kass. Klein never forgave me, and that was probably the moment he put me on his hit list, but it didn’t matter. I got supreme pleasure in seeing Kass get that town house. He lives there to this day with his wife, actress Joan Collins, and their two daughters.
Another poignant redundancy that day was Alistair Taylor, who had been at Brian’s side the first moment he laid eyes on the four boys in the Cavern Club. Alistair had not only been a loyal friend and supporter, but he was probably the most frugal of all their employees. When I broke the news to him he choked back tears. At first he refused to believe it and spent the rest of the day on the phone in his office trying to reach Paul or John to hear it from them directly, but neither of them would take his calls. Alistair never heard from or saw any of them again, except indirectly through an article in the Daily Mail. A reporter came to 3 Savile Row to interview Alistair as he cleaned out his desk. “It was a hell of a blow,” he said, shaking his head. When Paul was asked for comment, he said, “It isn’t possible to be nice about giving someone the sack,” and I wondered how he would know since I was the one who was doing it.
Klein’s number-one man, Peter Howard, moved into 3 Savile Row and took over financial expenditures. The waiting room was cleared of loonies and eccentrics, and the feeling of joy that had once pervaded the building descended into gloom. All the employees were now asked to sign in and out on time cards. When Klein and his staff would pull up at the front door in his limousine, the Apple Scruffs would stick their heads through the front door and yell, “Mafia’s coming!”
An associate of Kass’ named Jack Oliver was named head of Apple Records. Shortly after, Peter Asher resigned his position, taking James Taylor with him. Asher went on to become one of the music business’s premier record producers, noted in particular for his work with Linda Ronstadt.
Three Savile Row had turned into a mausoleum just waiting for a death.
chapter Eighteen
Yeah, sure I know John thinks we hate her and that we’re all a bunch
of two-faced fuckers running around behind his back sniveling and
bad-mouthing her, sticking pins in our homemade Yoko Ono voodoo dolls,
but you know and I know what’s happening, and that’s not happening at all.
No one in this building hates her. Hate! That’s a very strong accusation
and an extreme assumption. I can’t say as I blame him for thinking that
sometimes, but the reason he feels that way is because we don’t love her.
—Derek Taylor
1
Through all this, through the in-fighting and the hectic meetings and the fiascos of Nemperor and Northern Songs, John and Yoko managed to keep involved in a myriad number of astonishing projects. These included recordings of experimental music, 16 mm films, and the continuation of their peace campaign in which acorns were solicited from fans all over the world and mailed to the heads of governments. There was also more baggism, in which the couple appeared inside large canvas bags and made noises at public events, and the purchase of an island called Dornish, intended as a retreat but quickly given away to a band of traveling hippies to use as a commune. Also during this time, on April 22, 1969, John changed his name from John Winston Lennon to John Ono Lennon in a brief ceremony on the roof of 3 Savile Row presided over by the Commissioner of Oaths. John happily told an attending reporter. “Yoko changed her name for me; I’ve changed mine for her... It gives us nine O’s between us, which is good luck... Three names is enough for anyone, four would be greedy.”
John and Yoko also formed their own company called Bag Productions and took over what had been Ron Kass’ ground-floor office. The once shining white room was slowly transformed into a messy assemblage of magazines, newspapers, memorabilia, gifts from fans, spilled coffee, and butt-filled ashtrays. The white walls were strewn with handwritten signs saying “Peace,” “Hair Peace,” and “Baggism Peace.” In this office they continued to welcome the curious press and were available to any qualified journalist providing them a platform from which to further their dogma. John’s hair grew longer and stringier, and at times he and Yoko looked like refugees from some poor hippie commune.
On May 9,1969, on the small Apple subsidiary label called Zapple, John and Yoko released Unfinished Music No.2—Life with the Lions. This album was presumably the next edition in the musical diary of the couples’ adventures, this installment covering the time from her first miscarriage up to the present. It had another unfortunate cover. The front was a dismal shot taken in the Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital, with John lying on the floor next to Yoko in her hospital bed. The back cover was the pitiful photo of them surrounded by police after their drug court appearance. The album inside was no less unpleasant than its package. The first side featured a twenty-six-minute live recording of John and Yoko’s performance at Mitchell Hall in Cambridge the previous March in which Yoko yodeled and shrieked in counterpoint to John’s syncopated guitar feedback. It also included the debut of what was to become Yoko’s signature piece, the astonishing “Don’t Worry, Kyoko, Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow,” written for Yoko’s daughter. Side two included Yoko singing stories from a newspaper, with John chanting in the background, and a four-minute segment of the heartbeat of the baby that Yoko miscarried. The album was scathingly reviewed and largely ignored by the public, except as a curiosity. The other Beatles, although they obviously hated it, kept silent.
The following month John and Yoko indulged themselves further by releasing yet another musical tale about their adventures, this one a commercial single called “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” This lyric drama about their tribulations was practically a solo recording by John. When John wanted to go into the studios to record it, George was conveniently busy recording chants with the Radha Krishna monks, and Ringo was pursuing his movie career, co-starring with Peter Sellers in The Magic Christian. Paul was the only one still gracious enough to come to the studio to help John record. He played the drum part, the only instrument John could not play himself. Aside from the vanity of the subject matter. “The Ballad of John and Yoko” was a good old-fashioned Lennon rocker and an instant hit. I was immortalized in the verse that goes. “Peter Brown called to say/you can make it okay,/You can get married in Gibraltar near Spain.”
Unfortunately the refrain of each stanza, “Christ you know it ain’t easy,” caused the song to be banned on the BBC, as well as on several Bible Belt stations in America, all in light of John’s previous “Jesus” statements.
Without pausing to take a breath, John and Yoko decided to pursue their peace campaign by staging another bed-in. The perfect opportunity presented itself when Pattie and George and Ringo and Maureen booked passage on the Queen Elizabeth II to America. Ringo was scheduled to shoot additional scenes for The Magic Christian on board during the crossing. John and Yoko decided to join them on the journey, after which they would open their peace campaign in New York where it could reach the widest, most receptive audience.
But John and Yoko were in for a nasty shock when they arrived at the Southampton pier accompanied by Kyoko, Derek Taylor, their new personal assistant Anthony Fawcett, a two-man film crew to record all of their activities, and twenty-six pieces of luggage; John was refused a temporary visa to the United States because of his 1969 drug conviction. He was turned away from the boat, rejected as a criminal. Disappointed and bitter, John was convinced this was just a simple matter that Allen Klein and the immigration laywers could clear up. Refusing to be totally defeated, he and Yoko went directly to I Icathrow Airport from the pier and boarded a flight for Freeport in the Bahamas, twelve hundred dollars overweight. The Bahamas were chosen because they were in the British Commonwealth, and John could not be refused admittance. They were also selected because the Bahamas were close enough to the United States, John thought, for them to have access to the American media.<
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But the Bahamas didn’t turn out to be the most readily accessible place to stage a bed-in. Its proximity to the U.S. still didn’t make it a hub of international journalism, and most American newspaper editors were not about to come up with airfare for reporters and photographers to go look at John Lennon and his wife sitting in bed. Worse, the hotel only had rooms with twin beds cemented to the floor with a three-foot gap between them, a distance the size of the Grand Canyon to John and Yoko. As it turned out, sitting in bed all day when it was so beautiful and sunny outside was just a trifle too perverse, even for them, and two days later they were off to Toronto with all twenty-six pieces of luggage and their entourage.
Again, at the Toronto airport, John was detained by immigration officials for almost four hours before he was allowed to enter the country on a provisional visa. After one restless night in Toronto, while Allen Klein made a last-ditch effort to get John into the United States, they moved on to Montreal where they began a ten-day bed-in at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. This one was more of a circus than their Amsterdam stint. The easy access of the American press did bring scores of reporters to their bedside, as well as such luminaries as poet Allen Ginsberg and cartoonist Al Capp who came to heckle them. They gave some sixty interviews in those ten days, including many live radio broadcasts beamed to a large American audience. Again, the press treated them with amused curiosity, but no one doubted the sincerity of their convictions.
The Montreal bed-in climaxed with a Saturday night sing-in, attended by, among others, Tommy Smothers, Timothy Leary, Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, and the entire Canadian chapter of the Radha Krishna Temple. The event was photographed by three camera units, one from the BCB, one from the BCBC, and one from Murray the K’s production company, in addition to John and Yoko’s own crew. A new song written by John called “Give Peace a Chance” was recorded live in two sessions in the hotel bedroom on a Nagra tape recorder. “Give Peace a Chance” was later released on Apple, credited to Lennon-McCartney under the musicianship of something called the Plastic Ono Band. The song became the utopian theme music of the era, replacing “The Ballad of John and Yoko” on the record charts as the world continued to tune in on what was becoming an international soap opera.
2
The summer of 1969 was the last big whimper of the sixties. That summer seemed to sum up all we had learned and all our dashed dreams. In the summer of ’69 half a million disciples of the rock generation assembled on Yasgur’s farm in Woodstock in a three-day celebration of music and love. U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. In London, Brian Jones, the former member of the Rolling Stones who was coldly ostracized by Mick Jagger, was found floating dead in the swimming pool behind his mansion, bloated with barbiturates and booze. In Los Angeles, having heard what he believed was a call to destruction on the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” from the White Album, Charles Manson and his gang of lunatics slashed their way into infamy with the Tate-LaBianca murders.
That summer was also a turning point for John and Yoko. Worn out from their bed-ins, which might have looked like restful experiences but were actually exhausting, they decided to get away from it all and take a real vacation. They invited Kyoko and Julian to go with them and rounded the children up from Tony Cox and Cynthia. It was John and Yoko’s earnest hope that the two kids would get to know and like each other, and then they could all be together like a modern-day nuclear family. They decided on a simple motor trip to visit one of Aunt Mimi’s sisters in Scotland. Although John never drove himself because he couldn’t see much beyond the hood of the car, he insisted on driving all the way to Scotland in an Austin Mini. I tried to dissuade John from this, but it was no use, they were off. Three days into the trip I got a call from John asking me to arrange for his chauffeur, Les Anthony, to deliver a larger car, an Austin Maxi, to John somewhere on the road. A day later I received a most alarming call; John had driven the car off the road headfirst into a ditch. All of them had been injured and had been rushed to a hospital in Scotland. John was the most severely gashed and received seventeen stitches. Yoko received fourteen and Kyoko four.
Within an hour it was on the wire services and a very concerned Cynthia was on the phone. I agreed to take her with me up to Edinburgh the next morning so she could fetch Julian, but by the time we arrived, he was already gone; Aunt Mimi’s sister had collected him and taken him to her house in Edinburgh. Cynthia was a pitiful sight in that hospital corridor, her injured child having been snatched away from her like that. She asked to see John and Yoko, but a nurse returned from their room saying they didn’t want to be disturbed.
Yoko, whose back was severely wrenched in the accident, was taken by stretcher to a private helicopter on the hospital lawn. From there she was transferred to a private jet John had rented for her and transported to Heathrow. Another helicopter completed the trip home to Weybridge. The Austin Maxi automobile, complete with Yoko’s and John’s blood-stains still on the front seat, was crushed into a cube and shipped to Kenwood, where it was put on a platform and displayed in the garden as sculpture.
Later that summer, still recuperating from the accident, John and Yoko moved into their real first home, “Tittenhurst Park,” a £150,000 estate John had purchased just outside of Ascot. This stately white mansion was situated on seventy-four acres of prime wooded hills and gardens, featuring its own lake and over fifty varieties of exotic trees and flora. Even before they moved in, massive interior renovations were undertaken on the house, including a large, modern kitchen and a well-equipped, sound-proofed professional recording studio. All the business areas of the house were repainted and carpeted in black; all the living areas were done in pure white. John and Yoko also had a small island with a gazebo on it built in the middle of the lake, so they would have somewhere to row on sunny summer afternoons and eat a picnic lunch.
Except they didn’t do much picnicking that summer. After moving to Tittenhurst they virtually disappeared, not just from public view but from everyone. This sent the press office at Apple into a tailspin, as they were publicizing the “Ballad of John and Yoko,” which was making a strong showing on the charts. They had disappeared like this once before, at Montague Square, and that meant only one thing: heroin again. Told here for the first time, Yoko says it was the accident that put them back on heroin, as an antidote to the back pain. They sequestered themselves in the master bedroom of Tittenhurst Park and never came out. They took all their meals in the room on trays. The only messages in or out were transmitted by Val, the cook; Anthony Fawcett, their new assistant; or Yoko’s friend Dan Richter, who was now living at Tittenhurst in one of the guest bedrooms.
It was Paul who finally compelled John to come out of that bedroom in Tittenhurst Park. Paul with his irrepressible enthusiasm for the Beatles had gone ahead with plans for a new album, to be titled Abbey Road. Despite the fact that their kingdom was crumbling down around them, despite almost unbearable acrimony among them as a group, Paul had managed to assemble all the weary Beatles, plus George Martin, Neil, and Mal, into the studios for one last hurrah.
Yoko was there, too. She was pregnant again, it was announced, and in delicate health. John refused to be separated from her, so a bed was moved into the studio, where she napped or read or knitted while John worked with Paul.
Back at Tittenhurst Park by August, John and Yoko decided they had better get off the heroin before they got even more deeply addicted. They decided to do it alone, without any help at all—“cold turkey” as the addicts call it. “We were very square people in a way,” Yoko says. “We wouldn’t kick in a hospital because we wouldn’t let anybody know. We just went straight cold turkey. The thing is, because we never injected, I don’t think we were sort of—well, we were hooked, but I don’t think it was a great amount. Still, it was hard. Cold turkey is always hard.”
John and Yoko’s intimates that summer, particularly Magic Alex, Ray Connolly, and Neil Aspinall, remember the events of this summer dif
ferently from Yoko. They remember visiting John and Yoko at the London Clinic, where they say both of them were undergoing treatment for heroin withdrawal. Alex, who was around Tittenhurst Park a great deal, also remembers seeing syringes in the house.
In any event, it was all over by the morning of August 24, when John composed the song “Cold Turkey” in one creative outburst. He rehearsed it all afternoon and recorded it that evening, with Ringo and Klaus Voorman assisting. The song was appropriately harrowing, and John got right to the heart of his subject matter with his usual simple clarity: “Temperature’s rising/Fever is high/Can’t see no future/Can’t see no sky/My feet are so heavy/So is my head/I wish I was a baby/I wish I was dead.” John naively suggested to Paul that “Cold Turkey” be released as the Beatles’ next single, and Paul was understandably incredulous. John said, “Well, bugger you,” and he released it himself as a product of the Plastic Ono Band. The critical response was predictable, and John was lambasted for “Cold Turkey.” Ironically, while “Cold Turkey” may have been musically abrasive and not the happiest subject for a pop song, it was again another example of John’s bravery and honesty, an attempt at making his work into a reflection of his life, just like any painter or writer. The public didn’t buy it though. It was banned from airplay by the BBC, and in America it struggled its way up the charts to number thirty before dropping off. In England loyal but confused fans brought the single into the top twenty before it disappeared altogether.
3
In early September John received a telephone call from concert promoter John Brower who was holding something called the Toronto Rock and Roll Festival in Canada on September 12. Brower was only calling to ask if John wanted to attend the concert as part of the audience; on a whim John agreed to accept Brower’s offer of free plane tickets only if he and Yoko could appear on stage. John almost immediately regretted this offer, since he had no backup band, no material rehearsed, and he was still very sick from drugs. Nevertheless, with Eric Clapton’s encouragement, John rounded up several musicians, including Klaus Voorman, and went to Toronto. Because they missed their original flight, they arrived at the Varsity Stadium in Toronto a scarce half hour before they went on. There . was no time for anything more than a tune-up session. John, nervous and sick to his stomach from drugs, vomited profusely backstage before the impromptu group went on. He knew as he went on stage that he would be heavily judged for this performance; it was the first time that any Beatle had appeared in a solo performance and the first performance by any Beatle since the rooftop set for Let It Be.