Lennon

by Tim Riley

  This got the mighty Phil Spector kicked out of A&M Studios. Not one for elegance in his private life, Spector could already make Lennon’s legal status look breezy. Ronnie Spector, whom Lennon had chatted up before he ever came to America, had filed for divorce from Phil in 1972, and they now fought for custody of their adopted child, Donte. At first, Lennon agreed to speak as a character witness for his producer. When the time came for him to testify at the custody hearing, Spector couldn’t stop hurling obscenities at Ronnie in the courtroom, earning him numerous contempt citations. During one outburst, Spector didn’t even notice Lennon slip out of the courtroom. That would be the last time they saw each other.

  Spector became Lennon’s latest bad example. He may have been lost, unsure in his personal life, and groping toward his next career move, but Spector acted out the next stage of Lennon’s downward spiral, so Lennon veered sideways. Sessions unspooled, and since Spector had had the foresight to pay for studio time, he simply sat on the tapes as if they were his. Now Lennon confronted yet another phase of wasted time and studio work, while Spector, whom he had begged to work with, held his next record hostage. Lennon’s calls went unreturned. Then Spector crashed through the windshield of his Rolls in early February 1974 and suffered multiple head and body contusions. With this final act of bizarre self-destruction, Lennon’s dream of singing on a Spector recording fell into indefinite limbo.

  As he sang out his revived teenage fantasies in Los Angeles, the government ground away at Lennon’s immigration status. Separating from his wife at this point complicated his case, and Leon Wildes counseled them both to stay in the country even as the INS kept sending them thirty-day notices. If either of them traveled abroad, the chances of getting back inside the country were dubious. This crimped Yoko’s plans to tour Japan, which she weighed not just against her marriage and Lennon’s immigration status but her ongoing custody battle for Kyoko.

  This bicoastal separation required delicate press management more for these immigration and custody matters than Lennon’s career. If anything, his “lost” L.A. weekend only fueled his cocky image as a hard-living rock star. Since he knew he had a strong case against the government, Wildes simply filed for rolling visa extensions to the Immigration Appeals Board. By this point, it was also becoming clear that the U.S. government’s deportation threats were empty—harassing John and Yoko had become an end in itself.

  Wildes could scarcely believe the level of intimidation John and Yoko described to him. He could only see a cut-and-dried case that amounted to nothing more than a targeted Department of Immigration vendetta against a long-haired rock ’n’ roller. The idea that the whole weight of U.S. government bureaucracy was being put into force simply because Lennon was an outspoken peacenik didn’t make any sense, either.

  By the spring of 1973, Nixon’s Watergrate troubles had started heating up, and the press had started reporting on Lennon’s legal purgatory. In the Los Angeles Times, Phil Spector let loose to music writer Robert Hilburn: “Where is Lennon’s own generation? Where are all the rock stars who owe so much to Lennon’s influence? Where are all the people whose lives were so enriched by the Beatles’ music? Why aren’t they demanding that this outrage be stopped?”22 Prolonging the case only earned Nixon more bad press.

  The Los Angeles rock scene embraced Lennon as one of its own: this “single” former Beatle fit the perfect template of a celebrity—one who’s famous for being famous. And this period in Lennon’s life recalled his Hamburg exploits, only now his anxieties threatened his marriage, and any musical goals beyond his break from his famous band. The stress began to eat at him. For over a year, Lennon the rock star eclipsed plenty of movie stars for sheer celebrity heat, and he made the rounds making a fool of himself with too much time to kill. “We stayed good friends,” remembers Jack Douglas, a Spector engineer, who saw a lot of Lennon in this period. “We hung out, we drank together. I produced that Alice Cooper album, there, Muscle of Love [1973]. There was this whole scene at Lou Adler’s house in Bel-Air, and I used to drive a getaway car, me and [Jim] Keltner were the usual criminals for that particular job.”23

  A little of this went a long way, even for a titanic drinker like Lennon. So, early in 1974, he announced to Nilsson, “I’m going to produce you.” They set up camp at another rented house in Malibu where they could rehearse, and quickly descended into more profligate drinking. Rock ’n’ Roll had been a fallback project; now Lennon dabbled while waiting for Spector to release the tapes, and took on the Nilsson project just to stay distracted.

  Legend has it that one night, catching Ann Peebles singing “I Can’t Stand the Rain” at the Troubadour, Lennon returned from the men’s room with some Kotex taped to his head. Rolling Stone reported that “there were about eleven people in the party; he didn’t leave the waitress a tip, and in response to her scowl he said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re some asshole with Kotex on your head.’ ” Rolling Stone ran the quote, but it has since been disproved.24

  The Smothers Brothers incident, unfortunately, boasts numerous witnesses. The comedy act had booked the Troubadour for a comeback show and invited a roomful of luminaries for a new set of material. Seated at a table near Peter Lawford and Smothers Brothers manager Ken Fritz, Lennon downed brandy snifters and broadcast his inebriated comments to the room. Being a Hollywood crowd, most people recognized Lennon and tried to give him a pass—on any given night, at least a dozen drunken celebrities disrupt L.A. clubs, and Lennon was just the latest. But this elaborately staged evening packed in the press and a stream of notables for maximum exposure, including Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Flip Wilson, Helen Reddy, Lily Tomlin, and Pam Grier.

  Oblivious to the room’s mood, Lennon and Nilsson began heckling the headliners. Lawford complained to the management, and a waitress politely asked them to quiet down. This only nudged them further. Their conduct apparently became so obnoxious that Tommy Smothers stopped the show and got quoted as saying, “There’s a narrow line between bad taste and vulgarity, and you’ve managed to cross it,” the type of line Lennon probably heard as a dare.

  Then the trouble began. Fritz allegedly rushed over to Lennon’s table, grabbed him by the lapels of his Scotch plaid jacket, and told him he’d better be quiet. Some reports have Lennon punching Fritz in the face. When Fritz returned the blow, Lawford tried to pull a waitress out of the way, but not before Lennon’s second punch accidentally hit her in the ribs.25

  Outside in the parking lot, photographers framed Nilsson piling Lennon into his car. On a roll, Lennon heckled the car attendant with more of his moldy celebrity routine: “Don’t you know who I am? I’m Ed Sullivan!” The next day, new catchwords glommed onto Lennon’s descent: the greatest rock star in the world, the idealist who’d written “Imagine” and “All You Need Is Love,” was now just “some asshole with Kotex on his head,” kicked from clubs yelling, “Do you know who I am?!”

  When he answered to the incident in 1975 on the Old Grey Whistle Test show in Britain, Lennon played the Irish lout, blamed the alcohol, and chastised Nilsson for not playing the McCartney role of smoothing over his violent outburst: “I was with Harry Nilsson, who didn’t quite get as much coverage as me, the bum! He really encouraged me, you know. I usually have somebody there who says, ‘Okay Lennon. Shut up.’ And I take it. But I didn’t have anybody round me to say ‘Shut up,’ and I just went on and on. . . . I didn’t hit a reporter. She got one thousand dollars or some crap, because I had to pay her off. That’s what it was. She wasn’t a reporter, in fact.”26 According to Lennon’s morning-after rationalization, it’s okay to blame your absent minders for accidentally hitting a waitress as long as she’s not a reporter.

  Even for a cocaine-fueled Hollywood, this incident reeked of washed-up celebrity. It was as if Lennon was morphing into the jaded has-been he most despised. For a towering symbol of rock’s vanguard, leaning on Errol Flynn to excuse his behavior barely papered over the washed-up status he lamented so o
ften as a Beatle. And all the self-loathing and animal bravado only induced tirades, more rowdiness of the sort he hadn’t known since Hamburg—which to his middle-aged body must have felt desperately innocent, like degenerate salad days.

  Work on Pussy Cats began at the end of March in Burbank Studios, with all Lennon’s favorite boozers gathered at his Malibu rental, where they could “rehearse” for the Nilsson project. On a parallel track, Lennon had begun working on songs for a new solo project, hoping Spector might come around and his Rock ’n’ Roll tapes could be salvaged.

  One day, Lennon, Harry Nilsson, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, and assorted Malibu houseguests got surprise visitors: Paul and Linda McCartney. McCartney had come from London, where Yoko Ono had tracked him down for romantic advice. To Paul, this reminded him of Yoko’s approach to him in 1966 as an obscure wacky modernist collecting manuscripts for John Cage’s birthday present. And there’s a lingering sense of resentment to his quotes about this incident, as though he helped Lennon figure out his way back home without getting the credit he deserved.

  “Nobody knows how much I helped John,” McCartney said later. “Yoko came through London while he was in LA with Harry Nilsson having a crazy time. . . . And she was nice and confided in us that they had broken up. She was strong about it and she said, ‘He’s got to work his way back to me. He’s got to work at it.’ ” McCartney asked Ono if he should speak with John and deliver a message. “ ‘Would that be okay? I might see him around and I’d like to be a mediator in this, because the two of you have obviously got something really strong.’ And she said, ‘I don’t mind.’ So Linda and I went to California when they were doing Pussy Cats.”

  To McCartney, Lennon’s hideout with all these overgrown adolescents had a familiar ring, from Hamburg amphetamines to the weekend acid parties they’d attended at country estates with Epstein. Without quite putting himself above the scene, McCartney recognized Lennon slowly submerging into a familiar dead end. He described the beach house as “a crazed house” and “pretty wild,” but he made good on his promise to deliver Ono’s message. “I took him in the back room and I sat him down and said, ‘I feel like a matchmaker here, but this girl of yours still loves you. Do you still love her?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I do but I don’t know what to do.’ So I said, ‘Well, I’ve talked to her and she still does love you but you’ve got to work your arse off, man. You’ve got to get back to New York. You have to have a separate flat; you have to send her roses every fucking day. You’ve got to work at it like a bitch, and you might just get her back.’ ”27

  Here, in a back room of a rented Malibu mansion, the songwriting partners who had rescued rock ’n’ roll from the likes of Chubby Checker and Frankie Avalon, who had split in the most public way over their marital partners and then dragged both of their spouses onstage with them, concocted a John and Yoko reunion. McCartney may have been more anti-Klein than anti-Yoko, but he certainly understood the business complications of putting these two back together again. Behind all the McCartney-Ono business spats still to come lay strands of respect and sympathy for John and Yoko’s partnership.

  In the midst of McCartney’s grown-up reenactment of “She Loves You” matchmaking, some of Lennon’s paternal guilt reared up. He finally took May Pang’s suggestion to fly his son Julian, now ten, over for a visit. (Both Pang and Cynthia Lennon take credit for persuading him to do this.) The divorce-happy seventies witnessed a surreal visit to Anaheim’s Disneyland, with John and May acting like a steady couple to Julian, and Cynthia tagging along awkwardly at her son’s insistence, as Yoko Ono called John for updates. Cynthia stayed with Jim and Cyn Keltner, who spoke fondly of Pang and begrudgingly of Yoko. They told her Lennon “seemed to have a love-hate relationship with her, unable to tear himself away, yet constantly angry and resentful.”28

  Emerging from this blur of celebrity pool chat and hootch, Nilsson’s Pussy Cats feels like a dodged bullet. The album occupies a netherland in Lennon’s career: it’s neither a failure nor a triumph, with just enough swagger to keep you interested, and exactly zero production pretensions. The material, easily the album’s most compelling aspect, spans Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” to Jimmy Cliff’s “Many Rivers to Cross” and the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance For Me,” a portal into how much Lennon admired Nilsson’s pipes. The lone Lennon song, “Mucho Mongo/Mt. Elga,” has a harmless Caribbean feel and not much else. Lennon’s abject lack of pretension as producer becomes the strongest thing about the album: it’s a lesser cousin to the Rock ’n’ Roll project, but Lennon comes on like the anti-Spector, hiding behind all the terrific material and casual stakes.

  Lennon fled Los Angeles in June 1974 to finish Pussy Cats in New York (it came out in August). Over the next several months, he followed the reviews in the trades of Bob Dylan’s tour with the Band to support 1973’s Planet Waves. These celebrated 1974 shows, captured on a roiling double live album, Before the Flood, led to a mid-career aesthetic triumph, 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, a surge of musical inspiration following Dylan’s divorce from his first wife, Sara. Suddenly, the rock colleague Lennon felt most competitive with outside Paul McCartney surged to new career heights using themes Lennon himself had been chasing for almost three years. He must have longed for the same kind of critical embrace.

  Back in New York with May Pang, over that summer, some new songs took shape, and Lennon planned some studio sessions toward another solo album. One day a package arrived at Pang’s apartment: Capitol Records had finally settled the tussle with Phil Spector and paid him $94,000 for the master tapes to the abandoned Rock ’n’ Roll project. Lennon could barely stand to open them, never mind listen to what was there. He put them aside while he developed his new project, which became Walls and Bridges.

  It was an epic season of political dismay. Liberals had finally found justice in all their anti–Vietnam War demonstrations and pursuit of a criminal president. But by this point, the drama of a president hounded from office in constitutional disgrace seemed anticlimactic, given the endless antiwar crusade, the size of Nixon’s 1972 mandate, and the high cost in human life and political capital. At the end of July, Congress recommended the first of three articles of impeachment against President Nixon. He resigned the first week in August. And his successor, Gerald Ford, not only pardoned him but rolled forward in Vietnam. To the left, it seemed that even shaming a president from office couldn’t disrupt the war machine.

  Before the world ever heard Rock ’n’ Roll, it was an out-of-reach legend, a project between two masters that couldn’t possibly live up to the treasured idea it occupied in the rock ’n’ roll imagination. For now, even the hardest-bitten fans had to settle for Mind Games and Pussy Cats as mid-career signposts, the way Lennon would sound when passionate but without much to say, treading water, which was somehow more depressing even than going backward—at least an oldies album might have some spark of ideas from the Liverpudlian who had reinvented the form as a universal language. Pussy Cats didn’t sell well, or bode well for Lennon’s next release. Here was greatness frozen in place, stuck between purpose and commercial viability. But Capitol heard possibilities in the tapes Lennon submitted for Walls and Bridges in New York, especially the surefire hit with pop’s biggest radio product, Elton John. The label scheduled the new Lennon album for a late September release.

  Bob Gruen happened to drop by the Record Plant the night Lennon tracked “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.” “I came upon Lennon and Elton John doing this song,” Gruen remembers. “I knew John well enough to drop in to the studio spontaneously; he would just buzz me up. Sometimes I would hang out, sometimes I would get some pictures. Depended on the scene. This time, I walk in, and Lennon starts chiding me, ‘Where you been? Elton’s here and we’re making a record!’ And I said, ‘Well, nobody called me, so I didn’t know . . .’ ” Gruen shot them from behind, with Lennon leaning down next to Elton at the piano, talking to him intently about the next take. “I remember Elton asking John if he’d
join him onstage to play the song at Madison Square Garden that fall,” Gruen says. “John came back with a reluctant ‘Well, if it hits number one I’ll go onstage,’ like he would never expect it to hit number one.”29

  When it finally appeared in November 1974, Walls and Bridges went a long way toward restoring Lennon’s reputation, especially given the lowered expectations he’d been sowing in the tabloids. This record had the feel of hard-fought stability staring down certain doom, and turned ambivalence, loss, insecurity, and emotional foundering into humbled themes: “#9 Dream,” the second single, improved on the sweep and desire of “Mind Games” for a cinescopic expanse of sound, and “Surprise Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)” returned to Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step” riff for steady-rolling payback; it resembled “I Feel Fine,” “Day Tripper,” “Birthday,” and “I Dig a Pony” cut up and reconfigured as yet another puzzle in a larger mosaic. Alongside “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” and a juicy instrumental called “Beef Jerky,” it gave the record a rocker’s pulse that Mind Games lacked. “Bless You” balanced ache and adoration, undermining every line in May Pang’s book. Pang always took great comfort from “Sweet Bird of Paradox,” claiming it as Lennon’s song for her; it’s harder to tell how she reacted to “Bless You.” This narrator points himself straight back to his wife, if the song itself didn’t send her running back for him.