The Walrus and the Elephants

by James Mitchell

  The Apollo show marked the third public performance by Lennon in barely a week’s time, appearances that were kept brief and in which John appeared almost apologetic. Lennon again explained the shortcomings to the audience.33

  “Some of you wonder what I’m doing here with no drummers and nothing like that,” Lennon said. “Well, you might know I lost my old band, or I left it.” He’d been trying to put a band together, he said, but he’d been busier than expected in recent weeks.

  Lennon never cared if some people misunderstood his art or politics, but subpar music was unacceptable no matter how amusing he found David Peel. After the Apollo show Lennon made it a top priority to identify the right group of musicians for the ambitious plans now underway. Lennon’s new friend Jerry Rubin said he had just the band in mind, straight from the heart of Greenwich Village.

  • • •

  Bob Prewitt says he was warned ahead of time to keep John Lennon’s meeting with Elephant’s Memory a low-profile affair. The warning probably wasn’t necessary. The Elephant’s Memory band members were as serious about the music as John was.

  As a musician Lennon was equal parts avid fan and perfectionist artist. He enjoyed, encouraged, and celebrated creative people, even the often-amateur quality of Village dreamers and dabblers, but held his own performances to elite Beatles’ standards. He’d soldiered through the Ann Arbor, David Frost, and Apollo sets with Peel’s Lower East Side band and the percussion talents of Yoko and Jerry Rubin, but there were bigger plans in the works: television appearances, studio recordings, and taking the show on the road. The man needed a band.

  Rubin had played a recording of Elephant’s Memory for Lennon—a performance broadcast on Long Island’s WLIL-FM (a show that also featured a young piano player from Oyster Bay named Billy Joel). The sounds of Stan Bronstein’s blistering saxophone and Wayne Gabriel’s sharp-edged guitar work impressed Lennon, who agreed to a meeting at Magnagraphics.

  The members of Elephant’s Memory had no idea what to expect, and quickly learned that Lennon was not as easy to define as many assumed. On their first meeting, Lennon did what he often did—he used humor to break the ice, to deflect the standard “Oh my God, it’s a Beatle” reaction. Lennon turned it around and expressed amazement at meeting the Elephants.

  “Are you them?” Lennon asked, saying he’d heard so much about the group. “Are you really them?” Playing it for laughs was an approach he mastered whether the room was filled with hippies or heads of state, rockers or royalty.

  “Yeah,” chuckled drummer Rick Frank. “Are you really him?”

  The band kept it cool, being the sophisticated, hip players they were. While they weren’t complete strangers to the world of A-list musicians, Prewitt recalls that “seeing him in the flesh for the first time was kind of a shock. All these thoughts start running through your head: Jesus, that’s actually John Lennon! I didn’t want to stare, but the gravity of it struck me—the possibilities were endless.”

  No freak show, but a certain circus atmosphere filled the air: Lennon wore what appeared to be the white suit from Abbey Road; the beard was gone, his hair was cropped shorter than the Jesus-twin of the Beatles’ swan song; but the image he presented still invoked memories of the surreal sixties.

  Light banter gave way to common ground—music—and that’s where the deal was clinched. They played for hours, running through dozens of rock and roll classics: “Hound Dog,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” some Chuck Berry tunes. By evening’s end the Elephants had the gig of a lifetime.

  “Both John and Yoko were very impressed,” Gabriel recalls. “He said we sounded great, and that he really liked us a lot. Of course, we already kind of loved him.”

  Prewitt’s control-room vantage point took in the scene, an admittedly rough-around-the-edges band playing with a legend. Drummer Rick Frank, who once called himself “Reek Havoc” and pounded through life in the Keith Moon–worthy tradition of lunatic percussionists, scaled down his savage act in front of Lennon. “He was a wild man,” Prewitt says of Frank. “To see him subdued and respectful, like a little kid, it was interesting.”

  A contract was offered: Elephant’s Memory was put on retainer and began rehearsals to learn a concert’s worth of Lennon songs. There were meetings with Apple Records to schedule a Lennon-produced Elephant’s Memory album along with the Some Time in New York City sessions. Lennon’s 1972 calendar—with or without the Yippies—promised to be busy.

  “He mentioned a TV show coming up,” Gabriel says. “And that he wanted us to meet Phil Spector, who would produce an album we were going to do.”

  Plucked from comparative obscurity, this one-in-a-million shot brought as much pressure as promise; playing with Lennon was a chance for the Elephants to prove their musical worth.

  “They were proud of being a good band,” Prewitt says. “They had a great sound and were very competent musicians.”

  Emotions were mixed: excitement over meeting a Beatle, disbelief over the prospect of working with one. In show business terms it was very much a double-edged opportunity.

  “Our careers were basically on the line,” says Van Scyoc.

  • • •

  John Sinclair knew what his priorities were when he walked out of prison in early December 1971. He cheerfully told reporters that, first, “I’m gonna go home and smoke some joints, man.”

  The second thing was to pay a thank-you visit to the man he considered responsible for his release.

  “Because John Lennon came, it sold,” Sinclair says. “They made the connection that, Jesus, ‘If a Beatle thinks this guy is all right, we should let him out.’ That’s the mass mind turning when John Lennon said he was coming.”

  The court approved Sinclair’s bond for a number of reasons—including the state legislature reducing pot possession from a felony to a misdemeanor—but it was Lennon who made it happen as quickly as it did. Sinclair wasn’t alone in believing his release represented more than one man’s freedom: “Here’s this guy in prison for marijuana and we got him out three days later. That’s the mythology to build on,” he says.

  Celebrity endorsements were nothing new—famous faces have a long history of plugging everything from breakfast cereal and cigarettes to candidates—but the politically minded hippies and Yippies knew that Lennon’s influence was something much bigger. Might the Jesus-effect that had forced open the prison gates for Sinclair tilt the scales against Nixon in the upcoming 1972 presidential election?

  “It was a great example,” Sinclair says. “See what would happen if the people whose records you liked would also support the other people you like. This could create a thing across the country that people could rally around.”

  In the final week of 1971 John and Leni Sinclair flew to New York and brought a celebratory atmosphere to an increasingly popular and crowded Bank Street apartment. Jerry Rubin had been spreading the word of the Lennon-Yippie alliance in the media, and had promised to take John and Yoko “to the center of the revolution.” Bank Street became that hub. Guests that month included the famous and not so famous, the celebrated and notorious. For every musical guest—Lower East Side players or wandering Elephants—there was an activist, including Rubin, Rennie Davis, Stew Albert, Black Panther founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, feminist Kate Millet, poet Ed Sanders, and countless others.

  This was the Movement. These were radical leaders fighting to shake up the system and take down the establishment, the same ones as put fear in the hearts of conservative Americans who worried that the longhair freaks represented a Communist threat . . . or worse. During one gathering Rubin played a tape he thought Lennon would enjoy, a fire-and-brimstone sermon by evangelist Jack Van Impe on the evils he found in Rubin’s book, Do It. Rubin’s pages not only contained “178 four-letter words,” it foretold a perverted revolution, pure Sodom and Gomorrah in America: “Sex in the streets of every major city from coast to
coast!”34

  Van Impe’s outrage put the blame where he thought it should be for the proposed national orgy, a sexual frenzy driven by sinful songs: “The music they are planning to use to crumble the morals of America is the rotten, filthy, dirty, lewd, lascivious junk called rock and roll.” Van Impe remained unconvinced by young congregants who claimed that many rock songs held spiritual offerings of peace and love. A false front, he said. “God help compromising preachers who allow this rock beat into pulpits just because it has ‘Jesus Saves’ tied to it,” Van Impe said. “It isn’t just the words, it’s the beat.”

  Lennon laughed. He’d heard the cries of rock and roll as the devil’s music for as long as he’d played electric guitar. Ironically, people like Van Impe actually underestimated rock’s potential power, at least as wielded by a Beatle. There were bigger ideas being kicked around Bank Street than Rubin’s antic predictions of sex in the streets: Could the same type of concert that freed a man from prison be taken on the road as a political tour?

  The Sinclair concert was the prototype, the test-run for a national caravan in tandem with the 1972 political campaigns. A roaming cast of activists, poets, and artists gathered with local players and politicians to raise money for local causes, encourage voter registration, and frame a political agenda for the eighteen-to-twenty-year-old rookie voters ready to make important electoral choices. Bank Street speculations were confirmed when the principal planners met in late December at the Peter Stuyvesant farm in Allamuchy, New Jersey. At the Allamuchy meeting Rennie Davis made a concrete offer to Lennon.

  “I proposed to John that we go to forty-two cities that had been selected strategically; each city was going to have one focus or issue,” Davis says, a momentum that would build and peak at the Republican convention. “I was very positive about what this could mean, but I didn’t really know for sure if we could pull it off. We were declining, and John coming in was pulling us out of this swamp. I was curious about how this was going to work.”

  Any disbelief or apprehensions gave way to enthusiasm when the idea received John’s official blessing. Jay Craven, a Boston University activist who had been serving as Davis’s right-hand man since the two met when Davis visited the campus, represented the next generation of activists. Although only a few years behind Rubin, Davis, and Hoffman, Craven and his contemporaries considered themselves more practical-minded than their predecessors.

  “We weren’t the flower children, who were the children of the Beatles in some ways,” Craven says. The big battles of the civil rights movement had already been fought, and he preferred local activism. “That generation of Rennie and the Chicago Seven never really opened the door to my generation. We weren’t in SDS, we didn’t have the same noble-esque views of organization.”

  A national tour starring John Lennon would take more than a little organizing to pull off; ready or not, the plan became real at the New Jersey meeting.

  “I was taken aside by Rennie and Jerry Rubin,” Craven recalls. “They said John Lennon and Yoko Ono want to work with us, and they’re prepared to go on the road and do whatever in a bus with a boogie band.”

  Lennon would headline and attract the musicians; Davis was to line up speakers and causes. Each show would feature an unannounced surprise guest, as Ann Arbor did with Stevie Wonder, building to an August finale pairing Lennon with Bob Dylan. The idea seemed every bit as “brilliant” as Sinclair imagined, but Davis had seen inflated expectations fall victim to apathy or disorganization. He wanted to make sure that there would be the sustained effort and dedicatin required to make the tour a success.

  The logistics of the tour would be handled by Davis and Craven, who understood the mechanics of organizing something as massive as a twenty-city political-musical tour. There were increasing doubts about the effectiveness of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who both were more into their own writing projects by this time and probably distracted more than a little by their own celebrity. Hoffman debuted as an author in 1971 with Steal This Book, which promoted a life of not spending money, and was working on the 1972 effort Vote, coauthored with Rubin and Ed Sanders.

  “Jerry and Abbie were writing their books, doing their thing, occasionally invoking the Yippie creed in action or comment,” Craven says. They were highly quotable media darlings, but had little involvement in the nuts-and-bolts of planning effective demonstrations. Davis was a strong organizer, but had been fighting the fight for a long time by then.

  “Rennie was pretty burned out, exhausted,” Craven notes. “He felt that the Movement had just peaked and essentially deflated.”

  As 1972 began, Craven was set to be the advance man. The strategy was to have the caravan follow the election cycle beginning in states with the earliest primaries and largest populations. The tour would support a number of causes, but according to Craven there was to remain a singular focus: “Making the war the central issue of the 1972 election. Any candidate who did not clearly oppose the war would be isolated and go down in defeat. Nixon [had] continued the war and had to pay the price for it.”

  On paper, the idea was an ambitious yet achievable plan. Lennon told Rolling Stone it was all set for ’72.35 Politics aside, Lennon was eager to play benefit concerts that would promote local causes such as day care centers, food co-ops, and health clinics. The real perk for John, however, remained that this would mark his return to the musical spotlight:

  I just want to be a musician and transmit some love back to the people. That’s what excited me the most, getting to play with a band again. It will be the regular scene without the capitalism. We’ll pay for the halls and the people will have to pay to get in but we’ll leave our share of the money in town where it can do the most good. We want it to be the regular scene except we also want to raise some consciousness.

  Some of Lennon’s ambitions—to be just another New Yorker, just another guy on the street, or to be just another player in the band and not its shining star—bordered on naïveté, but in a spirit he carried off with playful innocence as he fell in love with Manhattan and his new band. He hinted that his work with Elephant’s Memory would be long-range and artistically inclusive. He told the Village Voice the relationship would more closely resemble “Dylan and the Band rather than McCartney’s Wings,” both an idealistic statement and an open shot at his former bandmate’s new project.36

  And so the free-for-all circus on Bank Street and in New Jersey welcomed all comers to the cause. Planning meetings included a young woman who took the minutes with a steno book but was not, Leni Sinclair recalls, part of the Movement; she instead turned out to be an informant. The FBI had for some time kept their eyes and ears on Rubin, Davis, and their associates. Heading into 1972, they added former Beatle John Lennon to the list.

  • • •

  Lennon may have been uncertain about—and soon started to demonstrate caution toward—his new political friends, but as always he took solace in the music. Forming new relationships with musicians perhaps made the thirty-one-year-old nostalgic for the salad days when the Beatles were still a yet-unrealized dream.

  Lennon enjoyed simply jamming with his new band; playing music in the studio, at clubs, even on the occasional street corner—which they did one evening—made him feel at home and were all equally suitable venues. It was a simple pleasure that had been lost to Lennon once the screaming girls drowned out the melodies at Beatles’ concerts. And the music itself was more than just the music: they hung out together, jammed for a while, got to know one another. “The inner workings of a band,” Van Scyoc calls it. “Like being married to four other guys.”

  Lennon tried to ignore the pressure he and those connected with him must have felt in writing a sequel to the Beatles. Although it was obvious to everyone in the room that the Elephants were auditioning to be supporting players, Lennon tried to put them at ease with tongue-in-cheek goofiness.

  “John asked if he could join our band,” Van
Scyoc says. “We looked at each other saying: ‘What the hell? That’s not going to work! What do we call it? What’s the media going to say?’”

  As if Lennon gave a damn about the press reaction to his decisions—a man who held a press conference while wrapped in a bag with his wife. At the same time, there were things about which Lennon cared very much, primarily the music. Most everything else was a lark: the Beatles admitted that their forays into movies were largely done for a laugh, their concerts had become a noisy joke, and press conferences were an excuse for British silliness in the Goons–Monty Python tradition. Yet few bands ever treated recording sessions with such dedication, nor acted stronger as a team with a shared respect for the final product.

  Could that happen again in New York? Lennon approached his new life in Manhattan with the same cheerful gusto so many experience when moving there. Lennon marveled at the change in atmosphere between Greenwich Village and Times Square, from Wall Street’s concrete canyons to Central Park. He described the neighborhood seen from behind his circular glasses to Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker: “It’s like a quaint little town . . . like a little Welsh village, with Jones the Fish and Jones the Milk and everybody seems to know everybody.” He pedaled a bicycle through narrow downtown streets, dropped in without fanfare at the outrageous Village shops and happening places. Tex Gabriel recalls casual times with Lennon, just wandering Manhattan, maybe stopping for breakfast at the Pink Teacup restaurant on Grove Street.

  “He wanted to be out walking the streets, which we did many times,” says Gabriel. “For the most part nobody bothered him. Of course, people did come up to ask for an autograph, and he would graciously abide.” There were times when the attention was too much, too strong, and Lennon would politely say “that’s all,” and walk—not run—away, but Lennon was generally friendly and appreciative when encountered by fans.