by Bryce Zabel
John Lennon wanted “More Doll, Less Mountain.” By that, he simply meant that the group should embrace the musical anarchy from A Doll’s House over the polish and precision of Everest. And the Band Plays On was not even part of the discussion in Lennon’s mind. In an interview with Rockstar at the time of its release, he had called it “puerile.”
Paul McCartney actually had a great deal of affection for the tuneful And the Band Plays On effort. In many ways, he viewed it as the perfect compromise between the raw 1968 double album and the 1969 studio sound. Still, McCartney saw the greatest value in keeping the Beatles together.
“I’m with John,” McCartney told Harrison and Starkey. “It’s every man for himself, and we back each other up whenever we need to.”
This, of course, was the essence of the Grand Bargain’s understanding: to put out one Beatles album each calendar year, no exceptions. The process itself did not have to be pretty. The work just needed to get done.
Harrison had gone almost entirely silent since the Thompson-inspired acid-fueled blur of the past few days. He had said nothing at all in the studio while Lennon and McCartney held forth.
“What do you say, George?” asked Ringo. “All good by you?”
Harrison peered over his sunglasses, which he had taken to wearing both outside and inside. “So long as I get my songs,” is all he said.
Eighteen songs were worked up during the sessions, and when the album sides were laid out, fourteen made the cut, leaving the tally Lennon five, McCartney five, Harrison three, and Starkey one. But Ringo’s was “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” that had been written for him by Paul. In any case, McCartney had decided that whatever Lennon wanted on the album would be fine with him. He had seen that look in his partner’s eyes before. He was looking for an excuse to bolt. Again.
Harrison obviously did not see things the same way. He was outraged that he had only three songs. Lennon shot back that Harrison had “hijacked” the soundtrack album for The Lord of the Rings, stacking it with his own material. This, of course, was so fundamentally true that even Harrison had to concede. In the end, Lennon backed down, shelving his jaunty “Crippled Inside” to make room for Harrison’s “I Dig Love.” McCartney and Lennon had their parity, Harrison had his dignity, and Starkey just did not care, happy to extend his streak of ocean-based songs that began with “Yellow Submarine” and “Octopus’s Garden” by including the “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” confection, which he cheerfully said “sounded like two songs anyway, the way Paul has written it.”
The process itself was business-like. Since Lennon and McCartney had both insisted in the Grand Bargain that neither of the former writing partners should be able to veto the other’s work, McCartney forced the inclusion of “Another Day” to answer Lennon for his unkind reference in “How Do You Sleep?” on the Savile Row album.
Even with this pettiness still in play, McCartney still knew Lennon’s peace-dream “Imagine” was the foundational masterpiece of the album, destined to become a classic. Side One’s beginning with “Imagine” was considered the bedrock that could not be moved. The question for weeks had been which song would follow it. When George Martin argued that “Another Day” should get the position, it was Lennon who quipped instantly that the album title needed to be Imagine Another Day. No one could come up with a better idea, and so it was that, despite tensions, Imagine Another Day, a cheeky title created by mashing up a Lennon tune with a McCartney tune, became another Beatles classic.
Coming from the widespread relief that the crisis of breaking up had been averted (at least temporarily), this record quickly became a personal favorite of many fans due to its strong collection of catchy hooks and emotion. Reviewers had a harder time with Imagine Another Day, many finding it at least as disparate as A Doll’s House but without its energy and charm. Rockstar’s own Booth Hill found himself both impressed and disillusioned by it.
[Booth Hill] “The album doesn’t gel the way Everest did, but it also doesn’t have the raw power of A Doll’s House. It has been put together by a committee. Granted, that committee’s most powerful members are the Beatles themselves, but they are bending and stretching their own material to fit the outcome of their own negotiations. The so-called Grand Bargain looks less grand than it ought to.”
The album, based on the testimony of those who participated in it, was created with Paul McCartney working in one Record Plant studio and John Lennon working in another on the vast majority of days, with George Harrison and Ringo Starr each contributing to all the songs, but John to only one of Paul’s, and Paul to just two of John’s.
Whether the critics agreed, Imagine Another Day was still a huge success, breaking sales records and cementing the Beatles once again as the world’s most popular rock band. While the album’s popularity did not exactly consign The Concert for Bangladesh to record store nostalgia bins, it did erase any doubt that might have lingered among rock critics that the Beatles, together, were as good as it gets.
• • •
When the recordings for Imagine Another Day had finished, it had become more obvious than ever that Senator Kennedy would be the Democratic nominee. Kennedy had defeated Humphrey in California, but by a mere two points. Lennon shrugged off the closeness, calling it “two more points than absolutely necessary.” He was right, given that California was a winner-take-all state when it came to delegate allotment.
Lennon was keen to fold the Beatles into a movement that would sweep the hated Nixon out of office once and for all.
“We can’t even vote, John,” reminded Ringo. “Not being American and all.”
“Maybe we’ve done enough,” said Paul. “We could all go home and take a bit of a vacation from it all.”
“You can fucking go home. I can’t leave this country or I never get back in. Nixon has to go.” John had that look that they hadn’t seen for a while. He was drug-free, at least for the moment, and he was fired up.
Lennon argued that because of the new album’s political content, it should be rushed into a summer release. Even though the Apple marketing team would have liked more time, the general feeling was that a Beatles album always seemed to market itself anyway. Imagine Another Day was hurried into production and scheduled to come out July 8, two days before Democrats would nominate Kennedy to run against Nixon.
Many of the delegates to the Democratic convention plugged stereo components into the electric sockets of the hallways of the Miami Beach Convention Center and listened to the album over and over, drawing large crowds and turning the songs into the soundtrack for the event.
Inside the actual hall, spontaneous singing broke out prior to the nomination of Kennedy. Even though “Imagine” was considered the strongest song, the track of the hour was “Power to the People”—it fit the mood of the fight against Nixon, and, candidly, the words were much easier to remember.
While this sloganeering might have been a positive for attracting the youth vote, the fact of the matter was that the newly empowered 18–21 crowd was not watching televised convention coverage. Most of them were out enjoying the summer, drinking beer, smoking pot, and having sex with their friends. It was their parents who were watching. And, for the older generation, there was something unsettling about these slogan songs and the fact that the men who wrote them were not even Americans.
The numbers for Kennedy still were not good. He prevailed at the convention, just barely, by a vote of 1523 delegates to 1459 for Humphrey. A Gallup poll conducted after the nomination was secured by Kennedy showed he was still behind the incumbent in the White House by a 48 percent to 39 percent margin.
Urged on by his friends in the radical left, Lennon made plans to stage a protest concert at the Republican National Convention, which was to take place in Miami, in the same convention center, just forty days later. The idea was to play a free outdoor concert for youthful protestors in Miami’s Bayfront Park at the exact same time that Nixon was being nominated. It would steal away press coverage a
nd present the alternative point of view. Lennon intended to perform “Ready Teddy” and asked McCartney to work up his “Teddy Boy” into versions that would promote the fortunes of Teddy Kennedy.
When the city of Miami refused the concert permit, stating that security would be impossible, the park was too small, and time was too short, TV viewers were spared the split-screen of the responsible leadership of Richard Nixon being validated on one side, and the chaotic, stoned hero worship of the Beatles on the other side.
The two songs, however, were recorded as solo efforts by Lennon on the A-side and McCartney on the B-side and released with profits to be donated to the Kennedy campaign. As it turned out, like the Concert for Bangladesh charity angle, by the time the money from the single was accounted for, the election was long over.
• • •
George Harrison was the most adamant Beatle about not performing any protest concert in Miami that summer. It wasn’t about the politics—he saw Nixon as a warmonger as much as the others. Harrison opted out because in his mind, he had already given the Beatles more than enough of his time that year. He had made peace with the notion that he would put up with the nuisance the Beatles had become but vowed to only do so six months of each year. The other half of the year belonged to him.
Among the things that Harrison did to keep his mind off the Beatles in the off-season was to indulge his love of Formula One racing. He had followed it since he was twelve years old, when he saw Liverpool’s first British Grand Prix. As the Beatles took over his life in the 1960s, he caught a few other races, mainly in Monte Carlo, where he often hung out with Ringo.
After the Grand Bargain had been reached, he began to do what many people do to hide their pain or discomfort—he bought things. For Harrison, it was cars. By 1972, when Lennon was talking about giving all his possessions away, George already had a Jaguar XK-E, Ferrari 365 GTC, and an Aston Martin DB4. In February, he’d crashed his Mercedes into a lamppost at ninety miles an hour, sending his wife Pattie Boyd flying into a windshield. She spent the next few weeks recovering from a concussion. George lost his license for that one, the second time he had it taken away for speeding.
[George Harrison] “People think it’s odd for me to care about fast cars. They think I’m too pious for that, but they’re wrong. Cars can be meditative, even spiritual. When you drive a racing car to both its limits and yours, your senses are as keen as they ever will be. Heightening of the senses can happen in a car, or it can happen with a guitar. Besides, when I’m driving as fast as these cars can go, there’s no time to think about Beatley things. If I think about what Paul did yesterday, or John did last week, I could get myself killed, you know?”
Immediately after the Beatles concluded production of Imagine Another Day, Harrison returned to Britain and attended the British Grand Prix in Brands Hatch. He followed that by attending the German, Austrian, and Italian Grands Prix throughout the summer into the fall.
Meanwhile, Lennon and Ono had gone ahead and negotiated the purchase of an apartment in the Dakota, a gothic building situated on Manhattan’s West Side overlooking Central Park. It was the same place that Roman Polanski had filmed Rosemary’s Baby. Lennon and Ono hoped that the purchase would help show their commitment to living in the United States.
The FBI was still trying to come to grips with Lennon as an adversary. One information sheet the organization compiled listed his birth date wrong. Another showed a photo of a guy with long hair and granny glasses, thought to be Lennon. It was David Peel, one of Lennon’s New York radical friends.
During this period, however, the FBI did initiate one of the strangest attempts to gather intelligence on John and Yoko. They reached out to Elvis Presley, the rock legend who had previously offered his help to Richard Nixon, and asked him to approach the Lennons, befriend them, and report back on their plans for illegal activities.
[John Lennon] “My phone rings one day. At this point, we’re suspicious of anything we hear because we know we’re bugged. And this voice says, ‘John, it’s your old friend, Elvis Presley.’ I thought it was a gag so I told him to bugger off and hung up. A minute later, some woman calls back, gives me a number in Memphis, Tennessee, says it’s Elvis’s number and tells me to call him. So, I did, and it was him. Can you believe it? He said he was coming to New York and wanted to know if I wanted to hang out. I said, sure, but Yoko’s coming, too. He said no problem, that he was a big fan of hers. Of course, that’s when I knew he was full of shit.”
As it turned out, John and Yoko had become attached to a young reporter for WABC-TV’s Eyewitness News named Geraldo Rivera. He had been covering the Lennon immigration case, catching John for a sound bite on the courthouse steps more than a few times. Rivera had launched a charity crusade called “One to One,” designed to improve living conditions for Staten Island children with special needs. Lennon and Ono had agreed to appear, along with Sha Na Na, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, and a local New York group known as Elephant’s Memory.
Elvis’s arrival in the city, on August 29, coincided with the time of the concert, scheduled just one day later, a fact Lennon used to coerce Elvis into performing with him. The superstar was in the middle of his “comeback” period but had officially filed for divorce from his wife, Priscilla, just ten days earlier. He said he needed to get out of Graceland for a while because it was full of “too many memories.”
Ironically, Presley had come to New York to sabotage a man he felt was a bad influence on young people because of his drug use at a time when he was heavily into drugs himself. Elvis was taking strong doses of barbiturates and had been doing so for years. He fell asleep on the couch in the Lennons’ Dakota apartment. “I thought he was dead,” said Ono. “I put my head on his chest to see if his heart was still beating.”
It was. In the middle of the night, Presley regained consciousness, took some unidentified pills, and then woke up Lennon, demanding they rehearse a song. Lennon suggested “Hound Dog,” and Presley argued for “Burning Love,” his latest top ten chart hit. They agreed to double the anticipated output for the concert and perform them both. Presley taught Lennon the words and guitar licks for “Burning Love” while Ono made a second pot of coffee.
As had worked so successfully for The Concert for Bangladesh, two concerts took place that day—one in the afternoon, and another in the evening. Elvis was fine for the midday concert but was slurring his words badly by the next one. Lennon told the mixer to pot down Elvis’s voice and bump his own up, and Lennon carried both tunes for an audience that never seemed to notice the difference.
By the time the concert was over, the Elvis Presley security team, led by Red West, had located the artist in the backstage men’s room, bundled him away into a limousine, and warned Lennon that “if you talk about this, there’s going to be trouble.”
John felt it was one of the most uncomfortable moments of his life. “Seeing Elvis like that,” he told Paul McCartney later, “it’s enough to make you give up drugs for good.”
Still, Apple was impressed enough that they later approached Elvis’s label, RCA Records, about jointly releasing the “Hound Dog” and “Burning Love” songs as a single. RCA replied that they would consider it but would only share the proceeds 90/10, seeing as how the songs were Elvis songs. Apple was open to giving the matter some thought, but Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, vetoed the deal as soon as he heard about it.
As it turned out, Elvis did report back to his FBI handler, telling him of Lennon’s ardent support for Senator Kennedy, which the FBI already knew. Nonetheless, this information worked its way up the chain of command, into the office of Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, and, ultimately, into the Oval Office with President Richard Nixon. The White House team had been debating the Beatles all summer long, fearing this possibility of a protest concert, and, at the same time, ridiculing the political potency of these “degenerates” whose music was being lauded by the Democrats at their own convention.
In fact, President Ni
xon and Chief of Staff Haldeman had discussed the Beatles on the afternoon of June 20, 1972, and Nixon had ordered Haldeman to use the force of the FBI and the INS to “squash them like the bugs they are.” At the moment, only the men in the meeting knew this, but that would soon change.
• • •
After Labor Day, when the presidential campaign began in earnest, John Lennon followed it in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post. He also watched the news on all the networks. During those two months, all three of his television sets were on night and day.
Ultimately, what he saw was not encouraging. The Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) had gone after Kennedy with a vengeance. Nothing was off-limits. There were commercials about the Chappaquiddick scandal with haunting pictures of Mary Jo Kopechne, the woman who had died when Kennedy drove his car, with her in it, off Chappaquiddick’s Dike Bridge in 1969. Kennedy got out alive, but Kopechne drowned.
The commercial that affected Lennon the most, however, came from the batch conceived by the Committee to Re-Elect the President to portray Senator Edward Kennedy, the brother of the beloved President John Kennedy, as nothing more than a radical left-wing extremist who was incompetent to serve as president.
The ad in question—“Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion”—had a tone of derisive mocking. “The Democrats say that Teddy Kennedy has a Triple-A rating with the ACLU. Maybe that’s right. If by Triple-A, they mean Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion.” The audio was paired with film images of marginalized protestors—young or black or women, or some combination of the three—who all looked angry and unpatriotic. It also included three particularly unflattering shots of the Beatles from photo shoots for their albums, one of which depicted Lennon flashing the peace sign at the Bangladesh concert.
Kennedy turned out to be not nearly as strong of a candidate as the Democrats had hoped—a fact that even John Lennon, one of the most staunch Kennedy supporters, was aware of. In a sit-down interview, Walter Cronkite asked Kennedy to respond to the ad and to the lifestyles of the Beatles who were portrayed in it. Kennedy’s reply was incoherent and hurt his campaign badly.