Lennon

by Tim Riley

  Another strand of Lennon’s cross-Atlantic thinking came into play here, right at the moment when the band’s sessions seemed shakiest and their company clearly needed a grown-up at the helm. Both Lennon and McCartney, in their inimitable ways, chose representatives who extended the more extreme aspects of their characters: each chose American wives and lawyers. Lennon took more heat for his choices, especially since his American wife had Japanese origins, and Klein outblustered even the man who declared himself “more popular than Jesus.” But McCartney came to some of the same conclusions as his songwriting partner: the British accountants who had handled their affairs until now were unimpressive, and these Americans expressed more confidence and spoke of far greater potential in their publishing catalog. Even as far back as 1969, it was clear to many that Lennon-McCartney songs would generate cash for generations to come.

  At this first meeting with Allen Klein, Lennon barely knew what he might be up against, but he knew what he didn’t want: any more suits from Denmark Street like Dick James.11 Nobody could have predicted that within weeks, James would pit Lennon and McCartney against some of the heaviest London financiers going for control of their catalog. Perhaps, as these latest sessions drew to a close, Lennon could sense the vultures gathering. Perhaps Ono convinced him that the Eastmans, who had a distinguished reputation for representing leading contemporary painters like Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns, required heavy armaments. In any case, the Beatles had outgrown Epstein, hadn’t they? Apple had at least taught them what they didn’t like and had no interest in learning: the complicated attentions required by a huge production company. Perhaps Lennon also reasoned that Klein’s shark reputation might intimidate British shareholders.

  Klein closed his pitch to Lennon by dangling a generous offer: instead of taking a percentage off the top, he would take a commission based only on increased Apple business, meaning he would reap only what he sowed. To Lennon, this seemed more than fair. He scrawled out a note to EMI’s chair, Sir Joseph Lockwood: “Dear Sir Joe—I’ve asked Allen Klein to look after my things. Please give him any information he wants and full cooperation.”12 Like the guilty plea Lennon had entered for his drug arrest three months earlier, it seemed the strongest position to take at the time.

  As EMI engineer Glyn Johns listened to all the January tapes, marking up the best ones for edits, and Starr filmed The Magic Christian, the Beatles squeezed in the odd session while this legal battle loomed. On February 22, they completed thirty-five takes for a new Lennon track, “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and John overlaid a guide vocal. On Harrison’s twenty-sixth birthday (February 25, 1969), he went into the EMI studios with engineer Ken Scott to lay down some new song demos: “Old Brown Shoe,” “Something,” and “All Things Must Pass.” McCartney worked on producing the follow-up to Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days,” and a new original, “Good-bye.” The next week the band gathered again for the two new Harrison songs: “Old Brown Shoe” and the first thirteen takes of a rough draft for “Something.” They filed this material toward some new project that might redeem January’s project, without concept or producer.

  As far as Lennon was concerned, he was free to dabble with his new partner as his band’s sessions inched fitfully forward. John and Yoko’s schedule conveys a persistence and daring that defies both heroin use and Lennon’s vaunted insecurities: in early March, he played guitar for Ono’s appearance at a Cambridge avant-garde music festival, which he released as “Cambridge 1969” on Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions in May. Lennon joked that the avant-garde crowd looked down on him almost as much as the rock crowd looked down on her. The album’s cover shot showed him slouched next to Ono’s hospital bed from the previous November; the black-and-white back picture caught him shielding Yoko from paparazzi as they left the police station after their drug arrest. Unlike the sweetly confrontational Two Virgins fracas, these images projected an intimate victimhood, with a strong subtext of how Sergeant Pilcher’s celebrity arrest—not drugs—had caused Ono’s miscarriage.

  Paul McCartney had been living with Linda Eastman at his Cavendish Avenue home since the previous fall. On March 12, he married his four-months-pregnant bride at the Marylebone Registry Office in Central London, with his brother Michael and Mal Evans as witnesses. Assuming Harrison would attend McCartney’s ceremony, Sergeant Pilcher’s Drug Squad chose that morning to raid his Esher house, only to come upon Pattie having breakfast alone (she immediately rang George, who raced home from his London Apple office). After being booked, they made their late arrival at McCartney’s reception at the Ritz Hotel, which Princess Margaret attended (the overzealous Pilcher would have loved to bust the queen’s sister as well, if he could have). Later that day, instead of whisking his bride off for a honeymoon, McCartney returned to EMI for more work on Jackie Lomax’s Coasters cover (“Thumbin’ a Ride”). Lennon and Ono were in another EMI studio mixing a “peace song.”

  The Harrison drug bust stole attention away from how none of the other Beatles was invited to Paul and Linda’s quickie nuptials. Here was a tabloid item that gave the Beatles new doubts about their status all over again: their music harnessed the cultural tensions of the day, but newspaper stock surged with news of the last Beatle—England’s longest-running, most eligible millionaire—taking his bride. British fans lamented an American interloper, and heckled Linda dearly, both by mail and through personal affronts at their London home, for usurping their most cherished bachelor. American fans simply mourned from afar. Most picked up an item that Eastman was heir to the Eastman Kodak concern, which was false.

  Splashed across newspapers above the fold, McCartney’s wedding pricked Lennon’s competitive nerve. Like a brother jockeying for more attention, he determined to marry Ono as quickly as possible. Aides scrambled to find the perfect publicity venue. First they flew off to the august Plaza Athénée in Paris on March 16 for a spur-of-the-moment ceremony, only to discover that they couldn’t marry in France unless they stayed in residence longer. Disappointed, they returned to London. Four days later, they tried to get married on the cross-channel ferry but were refused permission to board The Dragon at Southampton because of “inconsistencies in their passports.” Peter Brown, under Lennon’s directive to find the most amenable spot, discovered they could get married on the British-governed island of Gibraltar off Spain. They booked a private jet and flew down with Brown and photographer David Nutter. The British consulate opened at 9 A.M., and there, registrar Cecil Wheeler married them with Brown and Nutter as witnesses. After an hour in Gibraltar, they flew back to a luxury Paris hotel suite.

  “We chose Gibraltar because it is quiet, British, and friendly,” Lennon told the press, spinning hasty coincidence into myth. “We tried everywhere else first. I set out to get married on the car ferry and we would have arrived in France married, but they wouldn’t do it. We were no more successful with cruise ships. We tried embassies, but three weeks’ residence in Germany or two weeks’ in France were required.”13 In Paris they lunched with Salvador Dalí and then drove up to Amsterdam to stage their honeymoon.

  Of all the publicity stunts John and Yoko pulled, their two “bed-ins” stick out as defiant Goon Show exercises in media manipulation, the closest any Brits came to Yippie media theater. This first affair came via their Amsterdam Hilton suite, billed as a “Bed-In for Peace” that last week in March. They simply booked a room, tacked some homemade posters on the wall, and summoned reporters. Propped up on their pillows, John and Yoko baited the press as nudist wacky artists holding forth on politics. Reporters seemed as stunned by the couple’s giggling hubris as their hosts were to be attended so fawningly—they sat angelically, acting miffed when reporters expected something more than sloganeering. Half the giggles stemmed from how many journalists actually fell for the bait; the other half came from watching how vexed the press became at what a “happening” might mean in news terms. The situation quickly morphed into one of those sixties scenes that stopped reporters co
ld, and turned tabloid scribblers into a press conference on the subject of the West’s war-mongering. It was uncanny: John and Yoko had suddenly put the lightest comic touch on the street theater that had seen antiwar protestors gassed and beaten in the Chicago streets the previous summer. Tricking the world into a public honeymoon turned into an even better gag than putting out a naked album cover.

  Lennon, a marathon talker, performed wall-to-wall interviews in his bathrobe with anyone and everyone, with a new glint in his eye after so many years answering to “what-will-you-do-when-the-bubble-bursts?” absurdities. Here was celebrity completely reimagined as comic flourish in the service of the antiwar movement, deflating pretention and privilege with an utter lack of sobriety. All through the Beatles’ tours, Epstein had set the band up in hotel meeting rooms with a table and microphones. Now Lennon recast reporters like the BBC’s David Wigg as mere conduits for his mishmash of profundities and throwaways. The circus atmosphere made the “Jesus” fracas seem hopelessly old-fashioned: “It doesn’t help murderers to hang them, it doesn’t help violent people to be violent to them. Violence begets violence. You can’t kill off all the violent people or all the murderers or you’d have to kill off the government.” Fans familiar with Lennon’s 1965 Playboy quotes on religion recognized this patter: “I don’t need to go to church, I think people who need a church should go, the others who know the church is in your own head should visit that temple ’cus that’s where the source is.” In the same breath, Lennon defended drug use, saying, “I don’t regret drugs because they helped me—I don’t advocate them for everybody because I don’t think I should, you know, but for me it was good.” And he reflected on his retreat in India without the hostility he had first vented through “Sexy Sadie”: “I met Yoko just before I went to India, and had a lot of time to think things out there, three months just meditating and thinking, and I came home and fell in love with Yoko, and that was the end of it and it’s beautiful.”14

  “We’re staying in bed for a week, to register our protest against all the suffering and violence in the world,” Lennon told them. “Can you think of a better way to spend seven days? It’s the best idea we’ve had.” He conveyed this seemingly irrefutable vantage with the gentlest authority. The coverage, especially in Britain, reeled back in horror, but effrontery only scanned as easy cynicism—Lennon had finally trumped the media at its own game by turning a roomful of press into a giant antiwar noise machine.

  Even when pressed to defend his motivations, Lennon seemed giddy:

  QUESTION: You see this whole roomful of reporters, photographers, and filmers . . .

  JOHN: I think there’s something beautiful about it because on all the Beatles tours there’s always people who had laughs! The field reporters had a good time when they got the right photograph or the right or wrong picture, or something. It’s a happening.

  YOKO ONO: And there’s plenty people in the world who are sensitive enough. When you report, they will see what we’re doing and it’s good.

  JOHN: But it means this is a madhouse. Everything’s too serious.

  Both the setting and the absurdity of the “honeymoon” as a happening allowed Lennon to confront the perception of his cynicism, especially when it came to love. He even made his treatment of Cynthia and Julian, and Ono’s walkout on Tony Cox and Kyoko, seem whimsical:

  QUESTION: What do you see in a conformist institution such as marriage?

  JOHN: Intellectually, we know marriage is nowhere. That a man should just say, “Here, you’re married,” when we’re living together a year before it. Romantically and emotionally, it’s somewhere else. When our divorce papers came through, it was a great relief. We didn’t realize how much of a relief it was going to be until Peter Brown came up and said, “It’s over.” It was only a bit of paper. . . . It was very emotional, the actual marriage ceremony. We both got very emotional about it and we’re both quite cynical, hard people, but very soft as well. Everyone’s a bit both ways. And it was very romantic.15

  A newspaper headline dashed John and Yoko’s fanciful mood when Lennon came across an item about Dick James, his Northern Songs publisher. James had sold his majority of company stock to a company called Associated Television Ventures (ATV) without consulting either Lennon or McCartney. Incensed at suddenly losing control of his songs, Lennon immediately used his bed as a megaphone to answer the duplicitous move from a man to whom he had entrusted his publishing fortune: “I won’t sell. They are my shares and my songs and I want to keep a bit of the end product. I don’t have to ring Paul. I know damn well he feels the same as I do.”16

  Dick James never did have a sense of humor. Apparently, he didn’t have much sense of loyalty, either: he cut his deal just after both songwriters had wed, and while Lennon was out of the country. James had been the first to express interest in Brian Epstein’s Beatles, and he signed up the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team with publishing contracts just as EMI’s George Martin signed them. That company, Northern Songs, had traded publicly on the London Stock Exchange since 1965, which now seems absurd—anyone with any confidence in this material would have held the company privately from the start. Once Lennon and McCartney conferred, they wrote a letter to EMI on behalf of the Beatles demanding the company pay their banker, Ansbacher, all royalties, rather than assent to the deal. Instead, EMI froze their assets until the legal complications could be sorted out. At the same time, Triumph Investment Trust, a city merchant bank, began buying up 70 percent of NEMS (and its subsidiary, Nemperor) holdings. Both Northern Songs and Epstein’s NEMS Enterprises had been blindsided by corporate takeovers, bringing the Lennon-McCartney songwriting catalog into play.

  The bed-in had been a lark, but the public had trouble digesting all these events as a single entity—Lennon seemed to be straying from his minders. How to reconcile the pictures of these daffy hippies in bed with the premiere of Ono’s ominous new film, Rape, which they attended on their way home at the Vienna Film Festival? For this April Fools’ Eve appearance, John and Yoko took the stage inside a large white bag, telling the assembled press that this way there could be no “prejudice” in their communication. When they returned to London, the Financial Times on April 5 followed up on the Northern Songs story, reporting, “It appears that Dick James, managing director of Northern Songs, has failed to persuade Beatles Lennon and McCartney to accept the £9 million bid for Northern from ATV.”17

  Preoccupied with matrimony and peace, Lennon and McCartney began to lose control of Northern Songs. And yet their lawyers agreed: there were still more deals to be cut, more legal options to pursue. For all outward appearances, they were still in the middle of the most successful careers in show business history, with a documentary film and its all-original soundtrack in the can. None of the Beatles could stomach sifting through all the footage, but if they couldn’t get a TV special or a film out of January’s work, they might as well try for an album. Since Glyn Johns had attended most of the sessions while George Martin puzzled over the band’s mixed signals (did this project even have a producer?), his ears were probably the best choice to broach the mass of takes for a projected album, and he had been working on the tapes already. McCartney had Johns spend the spring cleaning and editing all those unfinished tracks into a rough approximation of a full-length recording. The tapes forced Johns to fudge the original “back-to-basics” concept: a lot of this material sounded too shaggy, and the first step involved logging numerous takes into their most workable moments, then assembling it all into a huge editing project. Both the album and the movie filtered out oceans of meandering and halfhearted run-throughs that typified this month’s work.

  McCartney jumped back into the weeds to remix “Get Back” for the single, backed with “Don’t Let Me Down.” He wrote up über-coy press copy after its radio debut on April 6:

  “Get Back” is The Beatles’ new single. It’s the first Beatles record which is as live as live can be, in this electronic age. There’s no electronic whatchamacal
lit. “Get Back” is a pure spring-time rock number. On the other side there’s an equally live number called “Don’t Let Me Down.” . . .

  P.S. John adds, it’s John playing the fab live guitar solo. And now John on “Don’t Let Me Down”: “John says don’t let me down about ‘Don’t Let Me Down.’ ”18

  On one level, this single reaffirmed everybody’s best hopes about the band and its productivity; on another level, it became a crucial argument about the golden Lennon-McCartney touch, and the band’s stake in these negotiations with new financiers.

  Almost as if January hadn’t happened, and expressing faith in their continuing partnership, when he returned from Amsterdam Lennon telephoned McCartney to collaborate on a new song that narrated the previous month like a teletype: “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” Sometimes, it was like riding a bike with these two: in one long afternoon-evening session on April 14, at EMI’s smaller Studio 3, they laid down basic tracks, with Lennon on guitars and McCartney backing him up on bass, drums, and harmonies. McCartney helped give Lennon’s buoyant self-parody just the right bounce—a musical echo of McCartney’s Two Virgins dedication.

  The material, however familiar, struck at some imaginary genre in the gap between Woody Guthrie’s talking blues and Richie Valens’s “La Bamba,” with a faint air of mid-tempo Tex-Mex at once familiar and ingeniously original. Lennon’s song reworked a Chuck Berry melody from “You Never Can Tell,” about a “teenage wedding” where the “old folks wished them well,” with a deliciously knowing refrain: “ ‘C’est la vie,’ say the old folks/it goes to show you never can tell . . .”19 (McCartney answered its guitar lick on his first solo album with an instrumental called “Hot As Sun / Glasses.”)