Lennon

by Tim Riley

  After Lennon agreed to let “Hey Jude” win the A side of the band’s summer single, backed with the revised, faster version of “Revolution,” the battles over sequencing during this marathon twenty-four-hour session included Lennon’s snarky title to “Yer Blues,” despite McCartney’s arguments that the track deserved better. But there was no doubt in Lennon’s mind about commanding three studios at once and every engineer who was available to help him mix and master “Revolution 9,” and staring down McCartney to insist on its inclusion against everybody else’s wishes. This last one proved him not just right but prescient in ways McCartney still doesn’t seem to understand. It’s possible Lennon used “What’s the New Mary Jane” as a negotiating chip to keep “Revolution 9” in track sequence—he’d give McCartney “Wild Honey Pie,” but insisted on concluding with “Revolution 9.” (Did McCartney answer this by placing Lennon’s “Good Night” afterward as a hushed coda? Or was that Lennon’s insecurity, leaping into the void and then pulling back?)

  Emerick’s memory of how “Revolution 9” made the final cut has the sting of resignation: “I heard through the grapevine that John and Paul ultimately had a huge row over ‘Revolution No. 9,’ Paul absolutely did not want it on the album, and John was just as adamant that it would be on there. In the end, of course, he got his way.”21 McCartney can still give reporters quotes about wanting credit as the “true” avant-garde Beatle when he’s never talked about “Revolution 9,” or defended it alongside his vaunted affection for John Cage and Edgard Varèse.

  Perhaps “Revolution 9” makes the most “sense” as an audio collage in the same way Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) worked as a visual collage of American magazine advertisements. Since his splash at the Independent Group’s 1956 This Is Tomorrow show, Hamilton had inspired many pop art imitators. He went on to become an influential instructor at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with students who included Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. Robert Fraser suggested Hamilton for the White Album design, and the choice extended the Beatles’ identification with the pop-art movement and its principles.

  As Eduardo Paolozzi did in I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything from 1947, Hamilton’s “Just What Is It . . .” compiles all the hoarier aspects of consumer culture into an “idealized” living room haunted by Al Jolson from the window, trying to “make sense” of all the competing modernist images of perfection, unity, and art. What kind of “art” hangs on the wall of the future? A cartoon-book cover next to an old-fashioned portrait of a dignitary above a woman (wife? mother?) sitting on the couch dressed as a stripper, touching her left breast, with “pasties” on her nipples. The dad, “Mr. Universe,” flexes for the camera with a huge Tootsie Pop obscuring his undies.

  For the Beatles, Hamilton aimed to create something as iconic as Sgt. Pepper, only completely different, and he sold them the sheer white sleeve by saying it would “stick out” in crowded record shops. In Hamilton’s hands, however, this simple gesture transformed a “high”-art device with a Dada conceit: the cover “photo” was a blank white space, with the words “The BEATLES” stenciled at an angle off-center above a serial number. The idea merged the “limited edition” lithograph or etching category with the mass-produced pop album, the blank projection screen of a band so famous they needn’t appear on their own album with the pretense of printing a limited number of copies for collectors.

  It’s not clear whether Hamilton heard “Revolution 9” before conceiving his poster design, but the collage and pop-art conceits play off Lennon’s extended sound quilt—the parallels are striking enough that Hamilton’s fold-out print probably made “Revolution 9” more accessible to more listeners. In the poster, Hamilton mirrors Lennon’s aural ideas through visual imagery. Like a good art student, Lennon uses appropriation, ironic quotation, and commodity fetishism, editing together the chaos of Beatlemania (wild screams) with found sound (from radio, TV, and crowd noise) and transforming them into a larger, fully realized theater of the mind. If “Revolution 9” was a dreamscape, Hamilton’s collage suggests a formalized, static snapshot of its images in motion. As an experiment in the same line as “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus,” “Revolution 9” is a pure exploration of how Lennon’s bugged subconscious sounds, or at least how he imagined it might.

  Finishing off this giant album, the single biggest project in the Beatles’ career, might have felt like relief to Lennon and Ono. But their increasingly active public profile hid some explosive secrets. Already, they faced a harsh British conservatism for the way they snubbed marital convention and parenthood. Kyoko, Ono’s daughter, had stayed with her father for the interim, but Ono was preparing for a custody battle. Beyond this, Lennon grew his hair down to his shoulders, and Ono confronted far more prejudice and hate mail for being a rock star’s Japanese girlfriend than she had ever confronted as an avant-garde artist. On top of all this, John and Yoko broke two more giant taboos that only aggravated everything else.

  Ono had become pregnant as early as May 1968, and must have known her condition by June, or July at the latest. This means Lennon accused Cynthia of adultery at Kenwood in June while fathering a new child with Yoko—a child they desperately wanted. It makes his confrontation both more abusive and glaringly hypocritical. Second, Cynthia’s remarks about John looking thin and “gaunt” hint at heroin abuse as early as June, and the Beatles knew of his new proclivity even sooner, and probably swapped junkie readings of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” behind his back when they recorded it in July (“I need a fix ’cause I’m goin’ down”). So beyond upsetting his divorce settlement, Ono’s pregnancy threatened their recreational heroin sniffing. And only a deeply addictive and disorienting narcotic like this explains why they still portrayed themselves as victims of both Lennon’s band and his larger circle even as McCartney and Starr gave them shelter.

  Other forces allowed Lennon to present a much more sympathetic picture to the world. On Friday afternoon, October 18, barely twenty-four hours after John got home from his epic White Album mixing session, he and Yoko awoke to a loud banging on their front door. The London Drug Squad, led by Sergeant Norman Pilcher, ordered them to allow police dogs in for a drug raid. Ono answered the door, but seeing police, and dressed only in a vest, she bolted it shut again and returned to bed with Lennon, who called his solicitors. Sergeant Pilcher later reported that “An attempt was made to enter the premises by way of a rear ground floor window but this was prevented by Lennon who held the window closed.” The detective sergeant claimed Lennon had said: “I don’t care who you are, you’re not bloody coming in here.” A struggle ensued for eight minutes as they tried to force open the front door. Lennon finally relented and let them in.22

  He had known he was in Pilcher’s sights. His friend Don Short from the Daily Mirror had tipped him off. But coming off that final White Album marathon, Lennon was caught off guard. Once the police established that the twenty-eight-year-old Beatle and thirty-five-year-old Ono were alone, they all waited half an hour for two search dogs, Yogi and Boo-Boo, to sniff out the four large rooms. By that point two lawyers and several press photographers had also arrived, as word spread of Lennon’s troubles. Although the dogs discovered only 219 grams of cannabis resin, about two ounces, hidden in a leather binoculars case, they hauled John and Yoko into custody amid a squall of paparazzi. (Starr had taken over the flat from Jimi Hendrix, who had a ghastly dope reputation even then, so Lennon had scoured the place for drugs when he and Yoko moved in after their awkward stay as guests of McCartney’s in St. John’s Wood.)

  No account of London’s upper tier of law enforcement would be complete without Norman Pilcher, who climbed to the rank of detective sergeant by arresting Donovan in 1966 and the Rolling Stones in 1967. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards actually did time in jail, a miscalculation that brought enough notoriety to earn Pilcher a veiled sneer in Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” (“Semolina Pilchard . . .
climbing up the Eiffel Tower”). Busting Lennon suggested that Pilcher understood rock’s rough pecking order—nobody brought bigger headlines. John and Yoko were taken to Paddington Green police station and charged with possession and “obstructing the police in the execution of a search warrant.” The next day at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, the couple was remanded on bail and their case was scheduled for November 28.23 A picture snapped outside the courtroom showed Lennon sheltering a distraught Yoko from baying paparazzi. (They used this shot on the back of Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions.)

  Lennon’s arrest renewed the war of public relations between the fading cultural values of those in power and the new ethic of subversive pleasure from the young. Jagger and Richards had been sprung from jail the previous summer. But tabloids like the News of the World still fueled negative opinion by reporting on elaborate rock parties, even tipping off officials in exchange for headlines. In this heated atmosphere, John and Yoko were engulfed in a press frenzy.

  The next week, they stirred more outrage by announcing that Ono was carrying Lennon’s child, due in February 1969. Suddenly, it was clear that Yoko had become pregnant before Lennon left Cynthia the previous May, and this trumped even his marijuana bust. History condemns them further, now that we know of Ono’s heroin use during this period.24 To the public of that era, though, the event underscored how even as the Beatles soared back into favor with a hit single and pending album, they were no longer untouchable. In the establishment mind, Lennon deserved scorn for abandoning his first wife and Julian, who had turned five. As the court papers put it, Lennon’s was an “offense of moral turpitude.”

  Within a fortnight, Ono was admitted to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in Mayfair. Between five and six months pregnant, she showed symptoms she might miscarry, and doctors urged hospital bed rest to save her baby. With the timeline of Lennon’s extramarital love affair now a public matter, his first wife was granted a swift divorce, and sole custody of Julian, on November 8. At month’s end, Apple Records released John and Yoko’s first album, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, a series of tape experiments recorded the previous May in Lennon’s attic, packaged between full frontal (and rear) naked photos of the couple holding hands, eyeing the camera with bemused indifference. Even as the musical Hair shocked Broadway audiences with its nude cast, for the prudish Brits (“No sex, please”), this image was roughly ten times as mortifying.

  “Originally, I was going to record Yoko,” John said, “and I thought the best picture of her for an album would be naked. So after that, when we got together, it just seemed natural for us both to be naked. Of course, I’ve never seen my prick out on an album before.”25 EMI’s CEO, Sir Joseph Lockwood, refused to distribute the record, saying both parties looked “ugly.” In some ways, because neither John nor Yoko possessed “conventional” Hollywood beauty, their celebration of their natural bodies was a revolution in itself. Track Records, an independent label, stepped in to handle the product in the UK. In America, Tetragrammaton handled distribution by papering over the nudity with a brown paper sleeve, with only John and Yoko’s heads peering from behind an oval cutout. Officials in New Jersey weren’t having any of it: they seized the product as “pornographic.” “When two great Saints meet it is a humbling experience,” McCartney wrote in his understated yet revealing dedication. “The long battles to prove he was a saint.”26

  Public outrage was sudden and irreversible: the sharp-witted Lennon, the “engine room of the Beatles,” who had presided over the English music scene for the past five years, honored guest in 1965 at Buckingham Palace for his MBE, had suddenly morphed into a busted hippie and faithless husband. This was a fate far worse even than Magical Mystery Tour. At least that was simply daft—a pretentious home movie posing as a Christmas TV special. Lennon had not only abandoned his child and wife but—worse still—begun dabbling in wacky art projects with an Oriental consort, a Japanese hippie turned concubine with strange first and last names. All this counted against Ono even before her outspoken (then radical) feminism.

  To the older generation, Lennon’s crime lay in taking a lover and abandoning his family. Add to this the token racism of Anglo-American society, which viewed Yoko as a foreigner, an Asian seductress. And to Lennon’s fans, it was hard to figure which offense was greater: setting up shop outside the Beatles, or this strange new companion, a far-out “conceptual artist,” a New York “intellectual,” who in addition to being foreign was downright alien. Wasn’t Yoko Ono another one of those arty, pretentious sophisticates Lennon enjoyed mocking? In the wake of 1967’s Sgt. Pepper and “All You Need Is Love,” it almost seemed as if he were flushing all the Beatle goodwill down the toilet. In America, a novelty song by an unknown nineteen-year-old singer named “Rainbo” voiced what many fans were thinking: “John, You’ve Gone Too Far This Time.” “Rainbo” was a pseudonym for future Oscar nominee Sissy Spacek.

  Hounded by the press, separated from Julian, and finished with his latest Beatle epic, Lennon moved into Ono’s hospital room, preferring the confines of a healing chamber to the Beatle bubble. He slept at her bedside for two weeks, on the floor first and then, when the hospital relented, an adjacent cot. The two of them filled time by making tapes on a portable cassette recorder, writing poems, reading the papers aloud, and singing songs (“No bed for Beatle John,” Yoko ad-libbed). With the drug hearing still ahead of him, Lennon distracted himself with a cartoon called “A Short Essay on Macrobiotics,” for the underground magazine Harmony.

  As Yoko’s condition worsened, they placed a microphone on her womb and recorded the child’s heartbeat. Having weathered their first eight months together, they desperately hoped a child might bring them the comfort the rest of the world withheld, and sanction their affection with the promise only babies bring. Here, something inside Lennon found its voice: insisting on staying with his lover instead of fleeing toward his manager or his band, he fought the hospital authorities to sleep on a cot if that’s what it took. He didn’t seem to care if his label rejected his experimental noise or the law hassled him for drugs or nudity; his goal was to comfort Yoko and secure her strength for a healthy baby. Cynthia could only wonder how such a forbiddingly small and intense woman brought about such a gallingly decent reversal in Lennon’s behavior, although you could analyze this gesture as compensating for the child he had abandoned.

  No heroic measure, by Ono, Lennon, or medical authorities, could ultimately prevent what increasingly appeared as inevitable. Yoko, who had already suffered miscarriages with Anthony Cox, finally lost Lennon’s child on November 21. The child was buried quietly at a secret location; no paperwork has ever surfaced.

  Given no time to recover, Lennon appeared the next week in court on drug charges. His solicitor told the judge that Yoko had miscarried as a result of the arrest and surrounding press storm. Beyond their loss, there were fears about how a conviction might affect Yoko’s visiting visa status, as well as her custody of Kyoko. All charges against Yoko were dropped; Lennon pled guilty only to cannabis possession.27 In exchange, the court waived the obstruction charge. Lennon paid a fine of £150 plus 20 guineas in court costs. It seemed like a good deal at the time.

  That fall, as Lennon lunged from crisis to metaphysical trauma, The White Album flew out of record shops, its all-white cover an instant talisman that mixed hip nonchalance with austere craftsmanship. Two Virgins followed and flopped, but not because of any outrage its cover inspired. Those who picked it up bought it for its cover, and treated the record’s experimental sounds as a mild curiosity, something to be listened to once and filed away.

  By the end of the year, political obsessions loomed so large that they distorted the personal tragedies of John and Yoko. Jonathan Cott’s landmark Rolling Stone interview ran in the issue dated November 28, 1968, with John and Yoko’s naked bums on the cover (anticipating Two Virgins), and a series of letters appeared in the Black Dwarf about listeners’ lost faith in the “Revolution” single: “An Open Let
ter to John Lennon,” signed by columnist John Hoyland, criticized the Beatle of naïveté, and denounced his dabbling in political themes without understanding the street’s-eye view of the organizer: “Recently your music has lost its bite. At a time when the music of the Stones has been getting stronger and stronger. . . . The Stones have understood that the life and authenticity of their music—quite apart from their personal integrity—demanded that they take part in this drama—that they refuse to accept the system that’s fucking up our lives. . . . There is no such thing as a polite revolution.” The letter reflected a political intensity so profound that only those alive at the time can understand Hoyland’s criticism and his recognition that the political violence of this period had now made the Beatles seem staid.

  Such criticism understandably had an effect on Lennon. His printed response touched on themes he would stick to even through his most radical phase in the early 1970s, when he joined up with politicos Hoffman and Rubin in Greenwich Village. He was adamant about nonviolence, and how the concept of any “revolution” rang hollow without a clear plan for what new society might replace the old:

  Dear John,

  Your letter didn’t sound patronizing—it was. Who do you think you are? What do you think you know? . . . I know what I’m up against—narrow minds—rich/poor. . . . I don’t remember saying that “Revolution” was revolutionary. . . .

  Lennon zeros in on the key point about destroying what’s wrong with the existing political systems. Of course there’s something wrong with a system that inspires such a destructive response, Lennon argues, since it would only reinforce the existing violent pathologies.