by Tim Riley
Leonard Gross, Look magazine’s European editor, visited Lester’s set and drew a very different portrait from Maureen Cleave’s just six months earlier. Getting off the treadmill had given Lennon a much needed respite and led to the gift of a once-in-a-lifetime song: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which he pursued slowly over six weeks, even though the more he worked on it, the more out of reach it seemed. The working tapes show him going over and over his key phrases, repeating them as if constantly questioning their resilience, and they survived many puzzled exams. Yet no matter how often he returned to the work, its uncertainties only deepened. The most complete compilation of the song’s formation comes on a bootleg disc with more than fifteen demos, first embryonic, then gaining in confidence even as its mysteries held firm. In one of the few examples of Lennon’s songwriting habits, it’s almost as if he converses with the song daily to see how it responds, if it suggests new words or melodic patterns as he nudges it forward. With his personal life disintegrating, and his professional life a quandary, his songwriting provided a distinct yet tremulous answer.
Leonard Gross became smitten by Lennon’s poise. “Lennon is not on; he is simply original,” he wrote. Lennon talked to Gross about everything, from his frustration with acting to his role as a Beatle to the youth movement gaining momentum around the world: “Everybody can go around in England with long hair a bit, and boys can wear flowered trousers and flowered shirts and things like that, but there’s still the same old nonsense going on. It’s just that we’re all dressed up a bit different.”23 Self-conscious about his influence, he was already vastly skeptical about political change.
In fact, Lennon’s remarks in the fall of 1966 foreshadow the combative tone of his famous late-1970 encounter with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, which seemed abrupt and callous during the Beatles’ breakup. Contrast those 1966 quotes (above) with Lennon’s “revelations” to Wenner in 1970: “The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same, except that there’s a lot of fag fuckin’ middle-class kids with long hair walking around London in trendy clothes. . . . The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything. It’s EXACTLY the same!”24
Like a punctured wound, Lennon’s language is more caustic in this later quote, but the sentiment is analogous. Taking a breather from the Beatles, his head was already weighing the cost of the celebrity grind.
When Gross questions Lennon about the “more popular than Jesus” flap, he incites an uncharacteristic defensiveness—about not religion but his public persona: “I’m not a cynic,” Lennon insists. “They’re getting my character out of some of the things I write or say. They can’t do that. . . . I’m slightly cynical, but I’m not a cynic. One can be wry one day and cynical the next and ironic the next.” There’s a difference between making remarks about politics and society on one day and his overall belief in “life, love, goodness, death,” Lennon argues.25 (It’s almost as if he’s saying: “Trust the art, not the artist.”) His cynicism, he insists, shouldn’t be mistaken for a larger worldview.
Lennon came home to one of London’s worst winters, only to slip back into his downward spiral of acid and late-night clubbing. Whatever level of sobriety he’d managed in Spain was quickly erased. At Kenwood, Lennon headed straight up to his attic to make a demo of his new song, which he played for McCartney. McCartney worked out the keyboard introduction on Lennon’s latest gadget, a Mellotron keyboard, which sat on his landing (too big for the attic doorway). Although he prepared a rough mix at Kenwood, when he played it for the others at EMI studios, Lennon sat alone with his guitar. His own early attempts to figure how to get the song down on tape had left him even more puzzled. He wanted to hear how his band reacted to it.
Returning to his regular haunts, he poked by the Indica bookshop and gallery, where John Dunbar was mounting an exhibit by a trendy New York Fluxus artist named Yoko Ono. The Fluxus movement grew out of Marcel Duchamp’s insouciant Dada style from pre–World War I and stressed performance and audience interaction with highly conceptual art pieces and installations. Yoko Ono’s early reputation flowed from her influential free-form concerts in Greenwich Village, attended by the avant-garde’s leading composer and theorist, John Cage, and Duchamp himself. She came to London with her second husband, Tony Cox, and their two-year-old daughter, Kyoko, to attend an international conference on modernism.
Ono had already met Paul McCartney. During an early gambit to secure rock-star patronage, she knocked on his Cavendish Avenue front door and asked him if he’d contribute an original manuscript to celebrate Cage’s birthday. Ono’s strategy combined two purposes: to flatter McCartney with her artistic credentials and introduce herself to a wealthy rocker who might invest in her work. McCartney declined but did refer Ono to his partner, Lennon, as “the artist in the group.”26 (This echoes the way Lennon had once sent Klaus Voormann to Stu Sutcliffe as the band’s “artist” back in Hamburg.)
Barry Miles had stocked Ono’s private publication, Grapefruit, a book of instructions that toyed with perceptions that resembled Zen koans. “She had published it herself,” Miles remembered, “so it was a very small press. And I’m sure she saw that I was one of the few shops who carried it.”27 The Indica bookstore had expanded into the space next door for a makeshift gallery, and they offered Ono an exhibition. Dunbar invited Lennon in as a potential sponsor the day before Ono’s opening—a millionaire investor who might want in on the ground floor of the next big thing. Lennon remembered meeting Ono there amid her art, and being at once intimidated and amused.
Beneath a mass of long and straight jet-black hair, Ono’s tiny frame and passive demeanor suggested a Japanese version of Andy Warhol. She had trouble taking Lennon the rock star seriously, but welcomed his interest in her work and politely led him through her pieces. In one room, he climbed up a ladder to look through a spyglass, where he found the word “Yes.” This surprised and tickled Lennon, who had seen his share of art-school pretension. “If it had said ‘No’ or ‘Up yours,’ I would have been put out.”28
He asked if he could pay her five pounds to hammer a nail into a piece of wood. Not before the show, she responded. (In this single gesture, Yoko Ono followed only Veronica Bennett Spector as among the few women in Lennon’s life as a Beatle to tell him no.) How about an imaginary payment and an imaginary nail? Lennon countered, and Yoko Ono smiled in recognition. But that first meeting, cordial and mostly professional, passed unnoticed. It has since entered Lennon mythology as a pivotal encounter, one in which Lennon’s entire worldview was thrown into question. But it’s not clear that the scene held any particular meaning for either of them at the time it happened. In his current frame of mind, wrestling “Strawberry Fields Forever” to the ground and falling back into the home life he had just escaped, Lennon took in Ono’s work as a happy blip in a fog. The blurry line between his drugs and Ono’s art must have been pronounced. She sent him a copy of Grapefruit as a thank-you, and he kept it by his bed.
When the four Beatles regrouped for the first time since Candlestick Park for an EMI session in Studio 2 on November 24, 1966, the familiar room became lit with uncertainty. Lennon didn’t look like himself. For the first time anyone could remember, he wore spectacles, which he had never done in public. He’d grown accustomed to his character Private Gripweed’s “granny” glasses and enjoyed seeing more clearly without the first-generation hard contact lenses he had struggled with. Cigarettes were lit, tea served, and expectancy hung in the air as John Lennon picked up his guitar and announced his new number: “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
There is no tape of Lennon’s first performance, but it’s grown into legend because of George Martin’s quote (and the working demos that have leaked since): “When John sang ‘Strawberry Fields’ for the first time, just with an acoustic guitar accompaniment, it was magic,” George Martin remembers. “It was absolutely lovely. I love John’s voice anyway, and it was a great priv
ilege listening to it.”29 Sung alone in front of the others, this mélange of surreal fragility must have had a quixotic effect coming from a tough hide like Lennon’s. Suddenly, their most reliable cutup had enchanted them with a reverie of youth, which somehow made him sound older—and made the others feel older as well.
Lennon’s narrative (“Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to . . .”) retreats to a childhood idyll, the grounds of Woolton’s Strawberry Field Salvation Army home. Both musically and lyrically, the song surpasses anything Lennon had written before, trumping even “Tomorrow Never Knows” from earlier that year. The lyrics were experimental, figurative, and nonlinear; the music had new color and fluidity, the slow-motion quality of listening to something underwater, and yet simultaneously a clear, visionary presence, as if the most hallucinatory images were tumbling from a subdued narrator waking up inside a dream. For the Beatles, the images evoked the backyard at Mendips, where Lennon had a treehouse, and his infatuation with the child’s frame of mind. It must have felt like eavesdropping on a close friend’s dream therapy:
No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
Although hesitant and uncertain, the music finds a curious inner calm: in real life, the Strawberry Field grounds were one step from an orphanage, and as an abandoned child, Lennon must have felt a strange identification with the children there. At age four, he watched his mother, Julia, give away a daughter he would never know; it would have been completely natural to fear himself just a step away from the same fate.
“I’ve seen Strawberry Fields described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place, but in the summer it wasn’t dull and grimy at all: it was a secret garden,” McCartney writes in his memoirs. Raised in a “proper” home by his aunt Mimi, he looked forward every summer to the marching bands that played the fêtes in its yard.
“John’s memory of it wasn’t to do with the fact that it was a Salvation Army home; that was up at the house,” McCartney says. “There was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in. The bit he went into was a secret garden like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he thought of it like that, it was a little hide-away for him where he could maybe have a smoke, live in his dreams a little, so it was a get-away. It was an escape for John.”30
McCartney’s sympathetic support followed on this understanding of his partner’s personal associations. That first evening they recorded a spare version with electric guitar, two Mellotron tracks (one of which often gets mistaken for a slide guitar), and backing vocals behind Lennon’s lead. Four days later they abandoned this version for a second, more band-oriented arrangement, featuring McCartney’s now-distinctive Mellotron introduction.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” sounds like a dream reassembled in a bottle, but it required elaborate postproduction work to capture its emotional fragility. The recording process itself resembled the jumbled lyric, with intense sessions followed by days of Lennon’s second thoughts. The song was delicate, but it also had grit, and Ringo’s lopsided tom-toms loosened it up (another track where Ringo’s left-handedness made his fills sound oddly spry). On the other hand, the band aimed for an ineffable tone it couldn’t quite hit, and the tempo kept accelerating with each take. Perhaps some outside instruments could shake up the sound and bring the words more color.
At this point in their studio work (late in 1966), remakes were not unusual. They had scrapped early takes of “And I Love Her” and “What You’re Doing,” and the feel of “Norwegian Wood” changed dramatically from first take to final mix. Only “That Means a Lot,” with its complex arrangement, had been abandoned after reconfiguring. But after a couple of weeks working on McCartney’s “When I’m Sixty-four,” Lennon asked Martin to draw up a new arrangement for “Strawberry Fields Forever,” with cellos and trumpets. That way he might get at the mysterious feel as he’d first imagined it—anyway, McCartney always got the high-class treatment from Martin. “He’d wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous,” Martin remembers. “He said, could I write him a new lineup with the strings. So I wrote a new score and we recorded that. But he didn’t like it.”
Working on these new tracks, Lennon got carried away again, adding backward tape loops, a wild percussion section, maracas, odd piano bits, and spoken lines like “Cranberry sauce” and “Calm down, Ringo.” Still, the track stumped him. Finally, in late December, Lennon asked Martin to join the two separate tracks, as he liked features from each, and felt that splicing them together might somehow split the difference. Martin sympathized with Lennon’s indecision.
“It still wasn’t right,” he remembers. “What he would now like was the first half from the early recording plus the second half of the new recording. Would I put them together for him? I said it was impossible.” Martin pushed back as a musician: the two tracks were in different keys, at different speeds, he said. “You can fix it, then,” Lennon chirped on his way out the door.31
Martin’s solution spliced the two pieces together using the Mellotron’s swooping guitar sounds to camouflage two edits (between the words “Let me take you down ’cause I’m” at 1:00 and “going to”). For the remainder of the song, Lennon’s voice has the oddly disfigured aura of somebody singing through a mental fog, the result of the slight tape warp to match the two different pitches. The result married an expressive fumbling with ingenious tape manipulation. Refrains limped alongside Starr’s wobbly drums; verses suspended percussion to peer myopically through horns and strings. There are two narrative angles in the song which blur together at different points: the first is the child, the aimless, thought-spinning boy whose mind wanders, and the second the adult who’s peering through this child’s frame, trying to see what the child’s eye sees. (This echoes and compresses the tension inside “She Said She Said,” where Lennon sings, “When I was a boy/Everything was right,” and steers the band right off its regular meter.) This doubling gets played out in the two opposing arrangements, band versus orchestral instruments, and the genius is how Martin engineers the track to travel these parallel planes at the same time. These narrative contortions also marked a profound break from the material Lennon had worked on with McCartney. “Strawberry Fields” may be an early attempt to compensate for this loss by forging a split voice—different angles (verses and refrains) seen through the same lens.
By February 1967, Epstein had caved to pressure from EMI and Capitol for more product, a single to fill the gap between albums: Revolver had been released more than six months earlier, and at the rate they were going, this new album could take at least that long again. The band kept trying to slam the brakes on their career: for four years in a row they had churned out two LPs a year—only in 1966 did they get away with the second of these being A Collection of Beatles Oldies, a compilation of hits. The band’s holing up in the studio didn’t give the label much leverage, but they did insist on releasing two of their finished tracks as a single: “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” This, in turn, shifted the evolving concept of the tracks that followed—from a self-conscious evocation of their childhood into something more universal on the state of their fame.
Because “Penny Lane” made the obvious choice for a single but “Strawberry Fields Forever” had masterstroke woven right through it, they issued the two songs to follow “Day Tripper”/“We Can Work It Out” as a double A-sided single, encouraging radio stations to play both sides. So it became another physical symbol of the increasingly disparate worlds Lennon and McCartney inhabited, with their differing views of childhood filtered through their differing views of songwriting. It was as if the self-contained argument of “We Can Work It Out” now split across two separate sides of the same single. “Penny Lane” sought out a majestic optimism that repeated listenings betrayed—McCartney’s buoyancy quickened with ironic verve; “Strawberry Fields” turned even
the act of radio listening into an intensely private experience, everybody eavesdropping on somebody else’s waking bad dream. (McCartney’s song also mirrored Lennon’s double narrative: his boyhood view of an “ordinary” bus roundabout gets overlaid by his sly adult’s commentary; where the boy thinks, “Very strange,” the grown man thinks, “And though she feels as if she’s in a play/She is anyway.”) That McCartney line forecasts the slippery tension between narrative voices in “A Day in the Life” and how reality haunts illusion throughout Sgt. Pepper. In a subtle way, it recalls that ingenious line Buck Ram wrote for the Platters in “The Great Pretender”: “Too real is this feeling of make-believe.”
Lennon’s song has more poetic intrigue: he sings “Strawberry Fields Forever” in the quietly time-frozen voice of John the boy, examining adult anxiety from the mind’s eye of his childhood. This new psychological vantage point goes deeper into the fear, grief, and alienation Lennon surveyed in “She Said She Said” and, before that, “If I Fell,” “I’m a Loser,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” and “Nowhere Man.” One of the world’s most famous men kept a public musical journal of estrangement.
Writing and recording “Strawberry Fields Forever” transformed Lennon’s creative arc: it hinted at the depths of his late-Beatles themes, staked out territory for his early solo career, and transformed the Beatles from performing moptops into studio hermits, from coming-of-age youths into nostalgic adults. Although psychedelic numbers like “Rain,” “Dr. Robert,” and “And Your Bird Can Sing” were influenced by the keening harmonies and ringing guitars of the Byrds, Lennon never sounded as if he were trading one style for another; as before with Chuck Berry, imitation only delivered him to a new level of originality. “Strawberry Fields Forever” expanded the hallucinogenic drone of “Rain” into layered colors that shifted when lit by his vocal inflections. The lyrical freedom of his free-form verse produced a supernatural calm. Tracks like “A Day in the Life” (his next song), “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and “I Am the Walrus” would soon spring from this same aesthetic impulse as his wordplay blossomed alongside his chord changes.