Lennon

by Tim Riley

  On that year’s Christmas message sent out to the Beatles’ fan club, the band ridiculed McCartney about “Yesterday,” lifting its sentimental skirt like sailors taunting a streetwalker. To hear these naughty schoolboys turn its melody into a sea shanty was the sound of parody sharpening some manic competitive edge. But by then, “Yesterday” had legitimized the Beatles as a mainstream product, and sent Lennon further into outsider status within the band he supposedly led. His response was aesthetically decisive: if Beatles for Sale showed the wear and tear of a schedule few could keep up with, Rubber Soul leapt over many of the same hurdles with ease and showed just how attuned Lennon and McCartney were to their audience and peers.

  By the end of 1965, Rubber Soul had set their previous work in a new context, absorbing the best from Dylan, the Stones, the Byrds, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Animals, and the Hollies. Yet despite its cheeky title (redolent of the R&B slag-off of white soul, or “plastic soul”), it remains succinct, even modest. Many cite it as the Beatles’ best work, and the effect was singular even though Americans got a thinned-out, ten-song version which began with the temperate “I’ve Just Seen a Face” instead of the sterling “Drive My Car.” Nobody else could have produced this work at this point, and it sent shudders through the pop industry—suddenly, the Beatles had outgrown the teen market that once defined them, and reshaped rock as songs with adult characters, situations, and inner lives. Rock ’n’ roll, shedding its teen identification, became rock as early as Rubber Soul’s track two, with the exquisite discomfort of Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood”: girl snubs boy, her stylish furniture a symbol of expensive regret.

  Chapter 14

  Another Kind of Mind

  With the Beatles, Lennon banged out a career of unprecedented creative consistency and success. But at home, his marriage to Cynthia flatlined, and his three-year-old son, Julian, took a number as Daddy hid in the attic doing tape experiments, hit the nightly club scene, and descended into an increasingly distant drug haze. In only three dizzying years, the Beatles had changed the world, but like all mythic figures they came due for a whopping backlash. Theirs could only be measured against the previous pitch of adoration.

  Working at the height of his creative powers while finishing Revolver during the spring of 1966, Lennon sank down into an emotional void that would last two years. He completed this mid-period masterpiece only to walk through a nightmarish world tour and then collapse. For the first time in his career, at age twenty-six, Lennon fled to the Continent, alone, to ponder what life after the Beatles might be like and what could possibly sustain him outside his band, the tightest of musical circles. In the classic addict’s slope, Lennon used softer drugs casually at first as a social lubricant and gradually found himself beholden to all manner of intoxicants. The Beatles’ status as supreme rock gods, surpassing all others, brought them the highest-quality grass and acid then circulating, and it was a point of pride with him that he could hold the most liquor and ingest the most chemicals. An unspoken studio ethic involved sneaking bathroom joints; but after sessions, hard drugs and clubbing into the wee hours became nightly rituals. Entire weekends got set aside for tripping at country estates.

  From the time he awoke in the afternoon until he collapsed early the next morning, Lennon’s system processed a jumble of uppers, downers, pot, and booze. The wonder is not just that the band did such solid work in this chemically naïve era, but that they survived some of the compounds passed along to them at all. Many, many other casualties in these circles fared far worse.

  The more Lennon attended to his professional life, the more his unfinished emotional business taxed his peace of mind. The loss he had carried around since Blackpool, his uncle’s death when he was fourteen, his mother’s death three years later, and his best friend’s death when he was twenty-one, mocked his outward success, creating a disconnect between his inner and outer worlds. Lennon’s subconscious was gripped between his celebrity songwriter status and the loss he armored with so much bluster. His misery often presented itself as cruelty, a bitterness that made no sense given his privileged circumstances.

  Ringo Starr provides a clue to some of this in Postcards from the Boys, a joyride with curlicue drawings and breezy puns that couch a few secrets: “I can say this now (if he was here John could tell you) but suddenly we’d be in the middle of a track and John would just start crying or screaming—which freaked us out at the beginning. But we were always open to whatever anyone was going through so we just got on with it.”1

  The studio, among his mates, was the only place Lennon felt comfortable enough to cough up his ghosts.

  At home, he slept throughout the day, then spent hours secluded in his Weybridge attic, making experimental tapes of his new obsession, Indian ragas George had played for him on his reel-to-reel machines. By the time the band toured to support Revolver in the summer of 1966, everything that once had seemed heady and euphoric about Beatlemania had suddenly given way to something more ominous: crowds careened closer to violence, and security intensified. The ravages of Beatlemania began to echo Lennon’s anxiety. A simple misunderstanding led to an international diplomatic incident in the Philippines; and in America’s Bible Belt the Ku Klux Klan began picketing their shows.

  McCartney’s old-school work ethic kept a professional check on Lennon’s excesses as they continued to write together. But this partnership began to shift: increasingly, they finished off each other’s lines or suggested endings or transitions instead of writing head-to-head, as they had in the glass-tiled foyer at Mendips. Epstein and Martin kept Lennon’s schedule humming, but he also grew apart from Epstein during this final tour and retreat. Epstein felt slowly edged out of some major band decisions and began a downward spiral of his own.

  In the midst of it all, the Beatles could barely hear themselves onstage, and this put a hex on the whole enterprise, made their first love of music-making ring hollow. Once the source of their power and ambition, live performances became a sequence of empty gestures for riotous fans who counted music secondary to the spectacle. Their faith in their ensemble, which had sustained them through so many bleak treks in Aspinall’s van, began to falter.

  Richard Lester had invited Lennon to Spain to work as a character actor on How I Won the War, and Lennon beached himself on this movie set to recover. This represented escape as much as diversion from the Beatle grind. Unlike his week with Epstein in Spain three years earlier, in late 1966 Lennon found himself alone on the island of Majorca.

  Lennon’s emotional state was no mystery to the other Beatles, and some of his private disorientation leaked into a public profile in the Sunday papers just as the band began work on Revolver. Cynthia Lennon’s memoirs report how Lennon napped away a lot of downtime early in the year, became increasingly aloof, and went off on eccentric shopping sprees to fill his mansion up with trinkets. This drift came into full view for Maureen Cleave, a journalist with whom Lennon spoke freely. If some earlier comments had made Lennon seem cantankerous and flippant, now he began to sound more and more as though even Beatle projects left him restless. “Christianity will go,” he told her. “It will vanish and shrink. . . . I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity.”2

  Cleave put this infamous quote into an article which ran in London’s Evening Standard on March 2, 1966, as “How Does a Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This.” She described a tour of Lennon’s Weybridge estate and a shopping trip into London at the tail end of John’s longest vacation—more than two months—since Beatlemania first swallowed up normalcy three years earlier, when “Please Please Me” reached number one. A lot of Cleave’s knowing detail, in the now-transparent guardedly intimate tone of a lover, hinted at Lennon’s crumbling inner life. Walking through rooms of model racing cars and electronic gadgets gave Cleave the impression of a bored eccentric. “One feels that his possessions—to which he adds daily—have got the upper ha
nd,” she remarked, noting the many tape recorders, television sets, telephones, and cars: a Rolls, a Mini Cooper, a Ferrari, which were in various stages of newly applied décor.

  Cleave noted how Lennon’s junk had the upper hand on his relationships, too. Julian followed them around the house carrying “a large porcelain Siamese cat.” The child would attend the Lycée Française in Kensington, Lennon assumed, since that’s simply where “privileged kids” go. To Cleave, Lennon’s detachment from his son seemed pronounced. “ ‘I feel sorry for him,’ ” John told her. And then out came this whopper: “ ‘I couldn’t stand ugly people even when I was five. Lots of the ugly ones are foreign, aren’t they?’ ” His wife, Cynthia, barely got a mention. John slept “indefinitely” and was “probably the laziest man in Britain.”

  Somewhere, Lennon’s head swam with the gleaming arrogance of “And Your Bird Can Sing,” the alternate reality of “Rain,” the shimmering cynicism of “Dr. Robert,” and the jagged psychic fault lines of “She Said She Said”—songs that extended the veiled personal metaphors of “Norwegian Wood,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “Nowhere Man.” The new numbers paraded a dazzling detachment between singer and song, with a subliminal intimacy that only grew over repeated listenings—they sounded like subtexts to Lennon’s epic, heaving subconscious, triumphant statues perched atop personal defeat. He led with the more experimental strain: the obsessively droning “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Rain,” which grew out of his homemade tape collages, became the first two songs he took into the studio for the Revolver sessions in the coming weeks. These required more time and more production ingenuity.

  By now, Lennon had perfected the role of precocious counterculture mouthpiece. Just another dotty pop star posing as an aristocrat, most Britons thought as they read Cleave’s profile, yawned, and turned the page. The “Jesus” comment became a yardstick of how differently the British and the Americans perceived both celebrity and religion—and still do. Lennon’s countrymen accepted his offhand spiritual remarks more as an attempt to describe how fame’s bubble felt from the inside than a critique of religion. Lennon was simply repeating remarks all four Beatles had made in Playboy thirteen months earlier with the same philosophical aplomb. His attitude gave off a luxurious anomie, the rock star padding around his mansion, slinging quotes to ridicule the stale Sunday-celebrity-profile cliché. In England, Cleave’s puff piece gave off not the slightest whiff of controversy.

  The material Lennon and McCartney polished off for Revolver confronted a radically shifting pop context. The more perplexing aspects of the Beatles’ influence had a counterintuitive effect, pivoting the pop scene toward new conundrums. The Beatles’ popularity unleashed inspired amateurs as much in love with idea as sound; pop became a high-stakes parlor game where ideology often trumped skill. So much ingenious trash began hitting the charts that being as good as the Beatles hardly mattered; the ambition to make the reach was often enough to put a band over. The attitudes driving hits from deities like the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan spread to frat boys like the Swingin’ Medallions and lowlifes like the Seeds, to obscurities like the 13th Floor Elevators and ? and the Mysterians. Retrospect still blurs how much chance and accident steered rock’s new adventurism. We now think of this as a golden period; at the time, the idea that a song like “Dirty Water,” a screed about Boston’s Charles River sludge by some punk Los Angelenos called the Standells, could become a Fenway Park Red Sox anthem seemed inconceivable.

  Coming from the most popular act in show business, the Beatles’ records suggested worlds within worlds, and everybody defined themselves against this new standard. Andrew Loog Oldham positioned his scruffy Stones to the left of the Beatles’ axis, dramatizing just how expansive rock’s center of gravity had grown. Beginning with the early Jagger-Richards songwriting breakthrough, 1965’s “The Last Time,” the Stones turned a careening guitar hook into one long sneer, a hooting inversion of Beatle charm. “Paint It Black” and “19th Nervous Breakdown” extended this sneer while broaching the “generation gap,” diagramming establishment hypocrisy (how could anyone over thirty denounce “drugs” while popping prescription pills?). Brian Jones’s sitar work on the former nodded toward “Norwegian Wood” as it pumped up the cynicism. In concert, Mick Jagger wagged his finger and taunted his audience to make Elvis look a prude, and Stones shows became symbolic of all the untidy heat and furor kept in check by the Beatles’ suits and bows. As the Beatles progressed, the Stones pushed hard against Lennon and McCartney’s formal ingenuity, and a new subgenre, garage rock, disavowed all “respectability” and “sophistication.”

  Garage rock spun out of surf instrumentals and doo-wop covers as an abbreviated swish of guitars, bass, and drums, and often an organ line leering from on high. A resounding movie image of the ethic gets enacted by John Belushi in Animal House, which takes place in 1962, when he smashes Stephen Bishop’s acoustic guitar against the wall after some unbearable folkie piffle (“I Gave My Love a Cherry”). If anything, it sounded as if rock ’n’ roll had devolved from slavish stylistic imitation down into a food fight; instead of whites “borrowing” black sounds, suburbanites attempted King-sized vocal heroics through Motown’s soul pop. That’s why Otis Day and the Knights’ Animal House set at the black club several scenes later, doing “Shama Lama Ding Dong,” crashes through like gangbusters: here was the forbidden hooch white ears craved.

  Just as technique seemed secondary to young actors like Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda, so, too, the skill behind the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan counted among the least interesting aspect of their records. Spurning polish, garage-rock players instead paraded accident as inspiration, inanity as triumph, and disorder severed from craft as a peculiar sophistication all its own. How could anybody possibly improve on “Louie Louie”? Who needed “pretension” when untrained teenagers proved so adept at creating noise so disdainful, contemptuous, and convulsive? The new style elevated guitar sounds, indecipherable lyrics, and hazy, uneven beats into a disarming amateurishness; at first whiff, the stuff smelled like rotgut.

  Layered on top of these racial crosscurrents came a dialogue between British and American tastes like never before, which took root in the pre-Beatle era through surf rock. A larger stylistic arc connects the Tornados’ “Telstar” in 1962 (UK), a tough, grainy instrumental, up to the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” (U.S.), a December 1963 patchwork of the Rivingtons’ “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” (August 1962) and “The Bird’s the Word” (March 1963). In between came the Beach Boys, with “Surfin’ USA,” “Surfer Girl,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” and “Be True to Your School” (throughout 1963) and “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen (peaking at Billboard’s number two in December 1963). As Beatlemania swept the world, the cross-the-pond dialogue continued, with songs like “Wooly Bully” by America’s Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and “Wild Thing” by Britain’s Troggs (June 1966). Souped-up jalopies like “Farmer John” and “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love” brought to mind the title of J. D. Salinger’s barbed short story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Two years into its heyday, nobody could imagine garage rock lasting beyond next month. Its doomed immediacy still gives the music a mischievous swagger.

  If not already inebriated, innocent listeners found themselves dumbfounded by the noise; and given the right combination of chance and opportunity, this raw energy gained momentum to deliver mysterious new realms of thought. Repetition acquired trance-like sophistication: at around the sixteenth repeat of the fuzziest guitar riff, new overtones emerged, sending new layers of sound and idea afloat above everything else. Sometimes, the song itself hung suspended atop the sound that had been set in motion (think of Them’s “Gloria” or Captain Beefheart’s “Diddy Wah Diddy”). As with jazz, key parts of this style were accidental; musicians came up with “alien” sounds they “made sense of” as they played. The glorious, unending laps players take around refrains in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” release even more energy than they gather up; the
more they hug the song’s corners to make sense of Dylan’s casual threats, the more his disdain hovers over them, tantalizingly out of reach. In such defining moments, a stylistic genie got released from its bottle, and many found new places for themselves just by chasing some of the same riffs atop their own beats. And all these trance-like motifs set up exotic, psychedelic contexts that sounded scripted for hallucinogens. It was a very short leap between Beefheart’s bluesy “Diddy Wah Diddy” and his avant-garde mural Trout Mask Replica three years later. An even shorter eighteen-month gap links Lennon’s minimalistic “Tomorrow Never Knows” with the sprawling “I Am the Walrus,” in the same vein. In this paradoxical way, garage rock seeded many an avant-garde impulse. Simply tracing where the music ended and the drugs took over was half the fun.

  The garage rock ethic pitted primitive defiance against radical experimentalism, a tension that found an unlikely plainspoken voice. It’s the sound of Andy Warhol’s blank-faced arrogance, or the bored audacity with which he silkscreened soup-can labels onto canvas. The same snarl fueled “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?” by the Barbarians or “Too Many People” by the Leaves. Repeated listenings unveiled layer upon layer of sound, accidental crossbeats of unspeakable fervor, music that couldn’t be bothered with self-consciousness; it only turned pretentious long after the fact.

  Garage rock followed a traditional rock ’n’ roll arc, derided at first and later exalted into a realm that supported entire careers, from Creedence Clearwater Revival and Cheap Trick to the Pretenders, the Replacements, Nirvana, the White Stripes, My Bloody Valentine, the Black Keys, and the genre’s Übermensch, Bruce Springsteen. The style dominated rock throughout 1965 and 1966 at least as much as pop ballads, and led directly to a new variant, “psychedelic rock,” which shot off in a different, more elaborate direction—the distance between Lennon’s “Rain,” which cast nature as a rich, abiding metaphor, and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “A Day in the Life,” which roamed the new spaces the style had opened up.