Let’s
begin with some music…
TWIST & SHOUT
Outside of Liverpool, not many people knew who The Beatles were when
they recorded ‘Twist And Shout’, with John Lennon on lead vocals, at Abbey Road
Studios in north London on February 11, 1963. It was a busy day for them. They
recorded nine other songs that day which, together with four recorded earlier,
made up their first album which was released in March.
Nowadays groups can take weeks, months, even years to record an album
but The Beatles, who’d driven down from Liverpool the night before, were
allowed just one day because the next day they were due to do two shows in one
night, one in Sheffield, promoted by Peter Stringfellow as it happens, and
another in Oldham.
It was 10.30 in the evening when John sang ‘Twist And Shout’ and having
sung all day and nursing a heavy cold, his voice was wrecked. He knew he had
only one shot at it before his voice went completely so he sucked on some
throat pastilles, stripped to the waist, and went for it, and at the end, after
he’d nailed it, the engineers in the control room broke out into a round of
spontaneous applause.
By a wide margin, ‘Twist And Shout’ by The Beatles was the most frenzied
piece of pop music ever recorded this side of the Atlantic. It was the sound of
revolution, the old order toppling and making way for a new one. It marked the
beginning of the end of the domination of popular music by ballad singers in
their suits and ties, the dawning of a new age in British pop. John Lennon, who
more than anyone else brought this about, was just 22.
So who was he, this man who for the next 18 years would make headlines
everywhere, whose assassination caused worldwide grief, and who in 2002 was
named by the BBC as eighth in their list of the 100 Greatest Britons ever,
beaten by the likes of Churchill, Shakespeare and Princess Diana but one place
above Admiral Nelson and two above Oliver Cromwell. Who was he?
Well, he was
christened John Winston Lennon and born in Liverpool during the Second World
War, on October 9, 1940, and his ancestors mainly came from Ireland, as did
those of his future bandmate Paul McCartney.
His mother Julia was
the youngest and flightiest of five sisters, and his father Alfred, a ships
steward, was away at sea, where he would remain for much of John’s childhood.
When Fred’s cheques to Julia stopped, the marriage more or less ended and Julia
took up with another man. There was a bit of a tug of war over the infant John,
with Alfred returning home at one point and threatening to take him to New
Zealand – which would have put the kibosh on The Beatles – but Julia was having
none of it, so Fred backed off and wouldn’t be heard from again until his son
was famous.
In the end, Julia’s
second husband was unwilling to raise another man’s child so John went to live
with one of Julia’s older sisters, his Aunt Mimi, a very respectable lady with
no children of her own, and Mimi’s husband, who was a milkman.
Young John, of course, was horrified
by all this - the fact that neither of his parents seemed to want him. Although
he would develop a relationship with his mother in his teens, it certainly left
him feeling insecure and unloved, with a chip on his shoulder and a feeling of
resentment towards the world. From an early age he knew that love was not
something he could count on.
He did inherit some musical
blood from his absent parents. Fred had a bit of a signing voice and with a few
beers inside him would get up and sing in dockyard pubs, and Julia played the
banjo and had a bit of singing voice too.
It probably comes as no
surprise that John, although by no means a dunce, didn’t get on well at school.
He was lippy with his teachers, a natural rebel and Mimi was called in many
times over his bad behaviour. But he had a talent for writing and a talent for
drawing and loved fantasy writing like Lewis Caroll’s Alice stories and the
nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear. John combined all these into a series of comics
he produced called The Daily Howl which he gave out to his friends. When a copy
went up on sale at Sothebys in 1988 Yoko paid £12,000 for it.
John progressed from
Dovedale Primary School, which was next to a piece of land called Strawberry
Fields, the site of an orphanage, to Quarry Bank High School, and it was while
he was there, around 1956, that he first heard the music that was to change his
life.
ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC (brief snatch)
In 1957 Mimi bought John a
cheap guitar and he formed his first group, a skiffle band he called the
Quarrymen with four friends from Quarry Bank High School. In the days before
rock and roll, skiffle was a sort of DIY music that could be played by anyone.
The bass was a broom handle in a tea chest with one string on it, the
percussion was an old fashioned washboard, and a guitar or banjo or two made up
the front line. The songs they performed were speeded up versions of American
folk songs, as perfected in the UK by a Scotsman called Lonnie Donegan.
Of course what John really
wanted to play was rock and roll, the music he was hearing on the radio by
Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, so because he was the
founder of the Quarrymen it was only a matter of time before he pushed the
others in this direction. He was, after all, the leader, the singer and only
member with any real talent or ambition. In time, by a process of attrition,
the Quarrymen would become the Beatles as members left and others joined.
First to join was Paul
McCartney who was introduced to John on July 6 1957 at a village fete where the
Quarrymen were playing. John was impressed by Paul’s ability on the guitar and
that he knew the words to several popular rock and roll songs. Indeed Paul was
better at it than John which meant he was faced with a dilemma. Should John
risk his own position as leader by inviting a superior musician to join, or
should he put the best interests of the group first. He chose the group. Good
job too.
Over the next year John, who
was 16, and Paul, who was 15, became inseparable, and began writing songs
together. John was untutored, experimental, full of ideas that hadn’t been
tried before. Paul was more traditional in his melodies. His mother had played
the piano before she died from cancer when he was 14, and his dad played the
trumpet. John and Paul got together every day after school at each other’s
houses. It was the beginning of the most successful partnership in songwriting
history.
Next to join the Quarrymen, at the beginning of
1958, was George Harrison who was two and a half years younger than John, a
huge age difference by teenage standards. But George was terrific on the
guitar, very determined to learn although perhaps not quite so naturally gifted
as John and Paul. He was also quiet, diligent, willing to do as the others
wanted, certainly not a threat to John’s leadership.
Throughout the rest of 1958 our Quarrymen made
little progress beyond some earnest rehearsals but it was during this year,
when John turned 18, that two crucial events occurred in his life. He’d become
closer to his mother in the past year or two and she’d taught him some banjo
chords and generally encouraged his wild ways. Then, tragically, in July, Julia
was killed by a speeding car as she was crossing the road near her home. John
was devastated and the fact that the driver was an off-duty policeman who got
off scot free soured his attitude towards the police for the rest of his life.
Julia’s death also brought him closer to Paul – they were now both motherless
boys.
The second big event was meeting Cynthia Powell, who
would become his first wife. By this time John had left school and was
attending Liverpool Art College which was where, in 1958, he met her. Cynthia
was by no means John’s first girlfriend and certainly not his last, but she
would stick by him regardless of his infidelities until finally ousted by Yoko
Ono in 1968.
The Quarrymen, meanwhile were struggling on with a
succession of different drummers until they found one called Pete Best whose
mother ran a teenage club where they sometimes played. But apart from a tour of
Scotland and a handful of local shows, including the first of almost 300 at
Liverpool’s Cavern Club, John, Paul, George and Pete still hadn’t got anywhere
by 1960 – which was when John invited a fifth member, an art school pal called
Stuart Sutcliffe, to join the group on bass guitar.
Any Beatle fan will tell you that Stuart was the
missing Beatle. He wasn’t much cop as a musician but he was a brilliant
painter, he loved rock and roll and he had ideas about style and presentation
which would influence them all. Stuart was a radical, a bohemian, an artist,
precociously literate, a free thinker, and for a while he became John’s best
friend and biggest influence, even ousting Paul.
At the beginning of the 60s Liverpool was awash with
beat groups. No one is quite sure why but the city was a melting pot for boys
with guitars and drums who made a lot of noise performing American rock’n’roll.
Some believe it was because it was a port and sailors brought back records from
America which found their way into local record shops, but a scene was
developing there that was quite different, and quite separate from the
established music business in London.
The Quarrymen, who by now had changed their name to
the Silver Beetles, were by no means leading lights in the Merseyside group
boom. Indeed they were looked on as a bit of a joke by most other groups. They
were too young, too inexperienced, used cheap equipment and, for some strange
reason, they wrote some of their own songs instead of playing the American hits
that audiences demanded.
There was another European port where groups were in
demand and that was Hamburg in Germany. Hamburg club owners would come to
Liverpool to book groups for two and three month periods and so it was that in
the autumn of 1960 that The Beatles, the name they’d now settled on, went to
Germany to learn their trade properly.
On this first visit they stayed for three months,
playing for anything up to eight hours every night of the week, and this – and
subsequent visits - turned them into the band they became. It was an
apprenticeship that was almost guaranteed to turn them into a great band, and
it opened John’s eyes to a world he never knew existed.
For months on end they played clubs in the
Reeperbahn area of Hamburg, the red light district, and found themselves
rubbing shoulders with hookers, drug dealers, transvestites, criminals and
drunken sailors from all over the globe. They also encountered young artists
and students interested in alternative lifestyles, clothes and haircuts -
people like Stuart Sutcliffe who would soon leave the group and shack up with a
beautiful German girl called Astrid who would take a series of moody photos of
the young Beatles that became world famous a few years later.
When the Beatles returned to Liverpool after that
first visit to Hamburg they were a different band. If one live performance
throughout their entire career could be said to be the one that changed
everything for them it was the one at Litherland, a suburb of Liverpool, on
December 27 1960. The posters outside said ‘The Beatles - direct from Hamburg’
and most of those inside thought they were German. When the curtains opened
they launched their set with ‘Long Tall Sally’ sung by Paul.
LONG TALL
SALLY (brief snatch)
And before the end of the song the crowd, which had
been milling around at the back were all pressed against the stage at the
front. No-one in England had heard anything like it before. Three years before
it took over the country at large, Beatlemania erupted that night in Liverpool.
Whatever happened that night, and boy do I wish I
was there, it would be wrong to say it was smooth sailing from then on. In the
two years before they signed a record deal with EMI, the Beatles would return
to Hamburg four more times for four more gruelling seasons of playing for hours
and hours on end. Stuart, who remained in Hamburg would die from a brain
haemorrhage – another tragedy for John to deal with – and they would find
themselves a manager in Brian Epstein, an upper class record shop owner whose family
owned Liverpool’s biggest furniture store, and who happened to be gay at a time
when being gay was a criminal offense.
John, meanwhile, had became a leather jacketed thug,
wild and out of control, drinking himself silly every night on the Reeperbahn,
kept awake by pep pills and becoming the most explosive but still unknown rock
and roll singer in the UK. On stage in Hamburg night after night he sang his
heart out, effing and blinding between numbers, and insulting the audience in a
dialect they couldn’t understand. No-one could control him, not Paul, certainly
not Cynthia who was by turns entranced and repelled by his behaviour, and
certainly not Mimi who wasn’t around anyway. Many who knew him in those days
are amazed he survived…
Back in Liverpool, between stints in Germany, he’d
dropped out of college, taken a flat in a run down part of town, occasionally
sharing it with Cynthia, and become notorious throughout the Liverpool beat
scene for his loutish behaviour. Brian Epstein, meanwhile, was infatuated by
him – though John wasn’t to know – and vowed to do anything he could to help
him and the Beatles succeed. The more Brian failed, the more John taunted him,
and the more Brian loved him. Then, finally, after being turned down by every
record company in London, in the summer of 1962, thanks only to his status as a
record store owner, he got them a second audition with producer George Martin
at EMI and things looked promising at last. The only snag was that Martin
didn’t like Pete Best as a drummer, so on the eve of the biggest success story
in pop history he was sacked in favour of a drummer called Ringo Starr who
played with another Liverpool group, Rory Storm & the Hurricanes and who
had befriended the Beatles in Hamburg.
By this time Brian Epstein had tidied them up a bit.
Paul went along with the image change but John hated it. Epstein made sure they
dressed in suits, with collars and ties, and refrained from drinking before
going on stage and not swearing at the audience. They also adopted the Beatle-fringe,
with their hair covering their foreheads, a style they’d picked up from their
student friends in Hamburg.
By now the Beatles were on a roll, playing shows
throughout the north every night of the week. In September they recorded their
first single Love Me Do. The only snag on the horizon for John was that he’d
made Cynthia pregnant, so he did the honourable thing and on August 23 1962 married
her at a Liverpool Registry office. That night the Beatles did a show in
Chester. John didn’t tell Mimi about the wedding until the day before. She just
groaned.
Love Me Do was released in October and made number
17 in the charts. Their second single, Please Please Me came out in January of
1963 and went to number one. There was no looking back now.
It’s impossible to separate John from the Beatles at
this point, so I’m going to digress for a moment and talk about the Beatles,
the group John formed and led, and the enormous impact they made.
The Beatles changed the entire British music
industry, almost overnight. Where previously the main currency was solo
singers, it was now groups. Where previously the singers had relied on
professional songwriters to supply songs to sing, the Beatles wrote their own.
Where previously the singers had required a team of session musicians to record
with them in the studio, the Beatles were self-sufficient, accompanying
themselves on electric guitars and drums. Where previously entertainers had
been deferential, the Beatles were unpredictable and cheeky but somehow always
loveable. And almost everyone else followed suit.
I was a teenager in 1963, and it’s difficult now to
convey the excitement that gripped the UK during that first year of
Beatlemania. It goes without saying that every time the Beatles released a
single it went to the top of the chart and that every time they released an
album it went to the top, and stayed there until they released another which
replaced it. Their domination was absolute. There were riots throughout the
country wherever the Beatles performed and Heathrow airport was brought to a
standstill whenever it became known that the Beatles were flying in or out.
Thousands of fans would descend on Heathrow and bring chaos to air services.
Newspapers carried stories about the Beatles every day of the week, often on
the front page. It was the first ever great celebrity culture binge, a bit like
Jordan and Peter Andre today – expect 100 times bigger and, of course, the
Beatles did actually produce something of merit.
So you can just imagine how excited I was when I actually
saw them on stage at the Bradford Gaumont in December 1963. I can still
remember the curtains parting. There they were, John, Paul, George & Ringo,
the new royal family in their shiny suits and Cuban-heeled boots, squinting
beneath their fringes, jiggling their guitars and trying to sing above the
incredible din. It was absolute pandemonium! They were only on for about 25
minutes and they were completely drowned out by relentless screaming which
didn’t let up for a second. I don’t think I heard a word they sang or a note
they played, even though I was quite near the front, to the left of the stage,
on Paul's side, but it remains one of the most exciting things I've ever seen
in my life, an unbelievable experience. John was pretty much motionless,
strumming his guitar worn high up on his chest, but Paul and George moved
around a bit which simply added to the chaos. All hell broke loose when Ringo
sang, and stewards had to hold back girls who rushed out of their seats. I
stood for the whole show, I didn’t know it then, of course, but John was very
short sighted and couldn’t see a thing.
For me Beatlemania is best evoked in two of the
singles they released that year, both sung by John. The first was She Loves
You, with its “Yeah Yeah Yeah” chorus, and the second I was “I Want To Hold
Your Hand”… and whenever I hear either of them now I always think of the
screaming crowd I was a part of that December night…
I WANNA HOLD
YOUR HAND (live version with screams)
Beatlemania was highly infectious and two months
after that show, in February 1964 America fell to them, opening up the US
market to British artists for the first time. Australia fell the same year in
even more spectacular fashion. Thousands met the Beatles in pouring rain when
they arrived in Sydney in June, and when they went to Adelaide it’s estimated
300,000 people lined the route from the airport to their hotel. In both
Adelaide and Melbourne almost 200,000 people blocked traffic on the streets
outside their hotels, and the Beatles had to make balcony appearances, waving
down to the crowds like the pope or the queen.
Beatlemania lasted about three years, during which
the group, with John at the helm, accomplished more work than today’s groups do
in a decade or more. Between 1963 and 1966, when they stopped touring, they
wrote, recorded and released seven albums and a slew of non-album singles, made
two full-length feature films, scores of live radio and TV appearances and gave
more media interviews in a day than today's superstars are inclined to give in
a year. John and Paul even wrote hits for other artists. The quality of their
records, all these songs dashed off amid the chaos of Beatlemania, is now the
most valuable music publishing catalogue in the world.
They turned touring upside down too. Before The
Beatles there were no stadium concerts: after they filled New York’s Shea
Stadium to its 55,000 capacity – the biggest audience ever assembled at that
time for one show – the American stadium tour became the norm for world-class
acts. The Beatles toured the world with two roadies and a press officer. Modern
acts like U2 or Bruce Springsteen tour with a crew of 150 or more.
Somehow, amidst all this, they also coped with being
the most famous and sought after people on the planet. John, especially, felt
trapped by fame… fame on a scale no one had ever experienced before. This might
have been what he wanted when the Beatles started out but when he got it, it
wasn’t what he wanted at all, so he wrote a song about it called ‘Help!’, and
although no-one realised it at the time, if you listen carefully to the words
you can tell that it really is a cry for help…
HELP!
By the time Beatlemania exploded the group had moved
from Liverpool to London. John & Cynthia and their son Julian had a flat in
Kensington, off Cromwell Road, George & Ringo shared a flat in
Knightsbridge and Paul lodged with the family of his girlfriend Jane Asher in
Wimpole Street where Jane’s father, a doctor, had a practice. When fans
discovered where he lived John moved Cynthia and Julian out to Weybridge, to a
large detached house called Kenwood. George and Ringo moved in nearby but Paul
stayed in London, eventually buying the house that he stills owns in Cavendish
Avenue in St John’s Wood which is just around the corner from Abbey Road
Studios. John’s Aunt Mimi was obliged to move too, so John bought her a
bungalow at Sandbanks, on the edge of Pool Harbour, where she would live until
her death in 1992, aged 89.
Although all the songs they wrote are credited to
Lennon & McCartney, increasingly after 1964 they wrote individually,
bringing their songs to each other when they were complete as a sort of quality
control exercise. John might prevent Paul from becoming too sweet, while Paul
might prevent John from becoming too sharp. It worked well too, though
generally speaking it is easy to tell who wrote what by who sang lead. Also,
John tended to write more personal, confessional songs, often in the first
person, while Paul’s were vaguer, and in the third person. As ever, John took
more risks, moving the group forward, and in 1965 he wrote about an affair he’d
had.
NORWEGIAN WOOD
(first two verses)
The girl in question was the wife of the
photographer who’d taken the pictures for several of the Beatles album covers.
They lived upstairs from the Lennons in the flat in South Kensington, so he was
taking a bit of a risk. No one can be quite sure how many affairs John had
before he met Yoko, but it’s a safe bet to assume that hundreds of women passed
through his bed, most of them very briefly. This only served to reinforce the
male chauvinist mindset that had been ingrained in him since Liverpool. He
expected Cynthia to stay and home and raise Julian while he brought home the
bacon, and lots of it.
In August 1964, in New York, John, and the rest of
the Beatles, were introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan. They loved it. The
following year, John and George were introduced to LSD by, of all people, their
dentist. They loved that too – and many of John’s songs from this period were
influenced by his experiences with drugs, not that anyone knew at the time –
least of all the Queen who bestowed MBEs on all four Beatles at Buckingham
Palace in October 1965.
The following year John created an uproar when he
was quoted in a British magazine proclaiming that The Beatles were bigger than
Jesus, which at the time was probably true. The quote was misconstrued in
America and as a result the Beatle’s subsequent tour there was beset with
problems. In the south, there were public burnings of Beatle records – though
George, pragmatic as ever, pointed out they had to buy them first - and even death
threats. John was coerced into making a humiliating public apology on US TV but
it was probably this, and an ugly incident in Manila where they failed to show
up at a party thrown by Imelda Marcos, that convinced them to retire from
public performances. The Beatles gave their last show in San Francisco on
August 29 1966 and when the final screams died down all bar Paul breathed a
sigh of relief.
By
now EMI had realised how much the Beatles contributed to their profits – they
were on a notoriously mean royalty deal – and more or less allowed them
unlimited access to Abbey Road Studios. So for much of the next three years they
spent almost all their waking hours in the large windowless room that is Studio
2 at Abbey Road. This was where
they conceived Rubber Soul, which contained another famous song of John’s ‘In
My Life’.
IN MY LIFE (excert)
The
following year the group were even more adventurous with Revolver,
which is my actually my favourite Beatles album. This featured some of John’s
most adventurous work, the world-weary ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ and two LSD-inspired
compositions ‘She Said She Said’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’.
As far as creativity goes John was on a roll. Next
came ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, perhaps his best ever Beatles composition,
which was named after the parcel of land adjoining his primary school.
STRAWBERRY
FIELDS FOREVER
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ turned out to be a
taster for one of rock music’s most famous albums, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. With its iconic sleeve of
the Beatles surrounded by all their heroes, it revolutionised rock music with
its complex array of electronic recording techniques and powerful, elusive
lyrics. John’s influence was notable on several of the tracks, including the
psychedelic-tinged ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ which most people assumed
was inspired by the LSD acronym of the title but actually came from a drawing
by his son Julian, and the mind-expanding ‘A Day In The Life’, which many
critics cite as the Beatles greatest sonic achievement.
In many ways Sgt.
Pepper was the high point of the Beatles’ career. Thereafter they began to
drift apart, not least because shortly after it was released their manager
Brian Epstein died from what is generally assumed to have been an accidental
overdose of sleeping pills. The Beatles were in Wales when Epstein’s death was
discovered, sitting at the feet of the bearded Maharishi, seeking a greater
enlightenment through his Indian spiritual teachings. Though George would go on
to become the most spiritual Beatle, at the time John was equally keen on this diversion
for the group. He’d already demonstrated his independence, cutting his hair short
for the role of Private Gripweed in a satirical movie called How I Won The War. This was the first
indication of the political activism that would occupy so much of his energy
for the next few years.
Without Epstein to guide them the Beatles simply
went back to recording. Next on the agenda was Magical Mystery Tour, mostly Paul’s concept, although it did
include one of John’s greatest surreal songs, ‘I Am The Walrus’.
I AM THE
WALRUS
(brief snatch)
Needless to say it was banned by the BBC for the
line about naughty girls letting their knickers down.
The next Beatles album, the sprawling double ‘White
Album’, offered a portrait of a group in disarray, one that was rapidly
disintegrating. Though outwardly a group project, it was clear now that the
Beatles merely acted as backing musicians on each others’ songs. If nothing
else the album gave lie to the assumption that Paul wrote ballads and John
wrote rock songs. In fact John was just as capable of writing a tender ballad
as his more tuneful colleague, as shown by this song to his mother, Julia.
JULIA
No-one knew it at the time but the words Ocean Child
are a translation of the name of a woman John first met at her exhibition at a
London art gallery in late 1966. He went before the exhibition opened to the
public and the artist was there, putting up the exhibits. She didn’t know who
he was and watched as he climbed a ladder to read a message on a small piece of
paper on the ceiling. The message consisted of just one word: YES.
The courtship of John Lennon and Yoko Ono has gone
down as one of the great romances of the 20th century. It didn’t get
off to a great start. Yoko – unlike almost every other woman John encountered –
did not submit to his advances within seconds of meeting him, which made John
very nervous. Indeed, it wasn’t until May 1968, almost 18 months after they
first met, that they spent a night together at John’s Weybridge home while
Cynthia was away. When Cynthia returned the following afternoon, she found John
and Yoko sitting calmly in dressing-gowns in the kitchen and fled in panic. By
November 1968, she and John were divorced and four months later, on March 20,
1969, John married Yoko in Gibraltar.
Yoko Ono changed John Lennon in every way possible.
If John’s life can be seen as two acts, then act II started when she came into
his life. A Japanese avant-garde artist from a wealthy banking family, she was
very different from the mild mannered Cynthia and, for that matter, every other
women John had ever encountered. For starters she demanded equal rights in
everything. Her artistic endeavours, though not nearly so well known as those
of her new husband, were of equal significance and John, surprisingly, agreed.
John even brought Yoko to the studio when the
Beatles were recording, which was unheard of in their boys club. While the
other wives stayed at home and concerned themselves with domestic matters, Yoko
not only sat alongside John while he was recording but criticised his and their
efforts. Paul, George and Ringo were shaken to the core, especially when John
sided with Yoko.
With Epstein gone, the Beatles were trying to manage
themselves, not always successfully. They had formed their own business
organisation called Apple and though it was certainly successful as regards
records, other aspects of the business were fast draining their bank account.
Sycophants and down right fraudsters were robbing the Beatles blind and there
was no-one to stop them until John brought in a hard-nosed American businessmen
called Allen Klein. He was supported by George and Ringo, but Paul, recently
married to Linda, favoured his new father-in-law John Eastman, a New York
lawyer. This, more than anything else, brought about the break up of the
Beatles.
John, meanwhile, had embarked on a parallel life
with Yoko. With hair down to his shoulders and a long straggly beard he looked
a bit like Rasputin as they celebrated their marriage in a peace crusade across
Europe and invited the world’s media to their honeymoon suites in Amsterdam and
Vienna. The press duly obliged, probably because they thought John and Yoko
might, er, well you know, in front of the cameras. Instead, at time when it was
neither safe nor fashionable, they simply promoted the strange concept that
world peace, an end to war, might be a good idea.
In general they were portrayed as clowns, nutcases.
But I believe John was far cleverer than the media would have you believe. He
knew how much media power the Beatles wielded and he was determined to use it
in what he thought was promoting an idea beneficial to mankind. If he had to
look like a fool doing so, then so be it.
Their travels inspired the only Beatle single to feature
just John and Paul, though no one knew it at the time. George and Ringo were
both unavailable when they recorded it, so Paul played drums.
THE BALLAD OF
JOHN & YOKO
Of course the concept of world peace would wreak
havoc with any economies in which defence and arms manufacture played a large role,
so the establishment wasn’t too keen on the idea. This and the fact that John
returned his MBE in protest at Britain’s involvement in various conflicts
probably explains why the police planted cannabis in the London flat that John
and Yoko were occupying in 1968. John knew it wasn’t his. He knew perfectly
well where he kept his dope and it wasn’t where the police found it, but he
pleaded guilty to save a lot of fuss, and because Yoko was pregnant and might
be deported. In the event they lost the child, but that guilty plea would come
back to haunt John a few years down the line. They left the flat and bought a
big house at Ascot called Tittenhurst Park where John built his own recording
studio. They eventually sold the house to Ringo and when Ringo decided to move
to Cranleigh he sold it to the Sultan of Brunei who still owns it and spends
only a few days a year there during Ascot racing week.
With the Beatles disintegrating John embarked on a
series of avant-garde projects with Yoko, appearing on stage in large sacks and
making a fearful electronic din, planting acorns for peace and releasing
strange sound effect albums. He also formed a group called the Plastic Ono Band
that recorded the definitive version of a song which has become the world
anthem for peace campaigners everywhere.
GIVE PEACE A
CHANCE
The strain of being John Lennon, the vilification of
Yoko, the loss of their child and a bad car crash in Scotland, was getting too
much for the pair and as the 60s ended they began using heroin. Fortunately
John was strong, and sensible, enough to realise the dangers and they both
managed to drop the habit. The period inspired the harrowing ‘Cold Turkey’,
John’s brittle account of his withdrawal from the drug.
In 1969, John was actually the first Beatle to tell
the others that he wanted to leave but he was persuaded to keep the news to
himself for commercial reasons. There were two more Beatles albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be, and by everyone’s standards bar their own they were
great records. Whatever the personal and ideological differences between John
and Paul, the Beatles always took pride in their work.
Though increasingly estranged from each other, The
Beatles limped on until April 1970 when Paul announced he was leaving and took
the other three to court to formally dissolve their partnership. In John’s own words,
the dream was over.
In March 1970, John and Yoko enrolled in psychiatrist
Arthur Janov’s primal therapy programme in which they were encouraged to express supposedly
long-repressed childhood pain. The experience inspired John’s first solo album proper – John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band – one of
the most lacerating and self-analytical albums ever issued by a popular
performer. It remains the most accomplished work of John’s post-Beatles period,
and among its tracks was ‘Working Class Hero’ containing a well known four
letter word which was certainly the first time it was heard on a record which
would automatically sell over a million copies.
WORKING CLASS
HERO
The
follow-up album, Imagine was recorded
at Tittenhurst Park and was more successful commercially. Its title track
became one of John’s most well-known and loved songs. Another song ‘Jealous Guy’ was later a big hit for Bryan
Ferry.
When
John and Yoko flew from Heathrow to New York on August 31, 1971, they probably
had every intention of returning to England fairly soon. In the event John
never came back to the country of his birth. It was in New York that winter
that he recorded his famous Christmas song, ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’.
HAPPY CHRISTMAS
When
they first arrived in New York John & Yoko were befriended by political
radicals like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffmann, and they teamed up with a bar
band called Elephant’s Memory in 1972 to make the overtly political album Some Time In New York City. This offered
John’s views on women’s liberation, the IRA and US prison riots. These sorts of
activities would not sit well with the US Government and sowed the seeds for
the immigration problems that John would face in the near future. By this time,
the Lennons had scaled down their public appearances, though they did top the
bill at Madison Square Garden for a charity show for mentally handicapped
children.
Then,
in 1973, the unexpected happened. John split from Yoko and moved to Los Angeles
with their personal assistant, a beautiful Chinese girl called May Pang. They
rented a house with a pool on the Bel Air estate and one night in October went
out for a drink at a bar called the Rainbow on Sunset Strip. I was in that bar
that night too, now working as US editor for a London-based music magazine
called Melody Maker, and I was introduced to John by a mutual friend. He seemed
quite pleased to meet me and knowing that I’d interviewed Paul earlier in the
year, asked me how he was. In truth John seemed a hit homesick, and asked me
all sorts of questions about the UK. The following week we sat down together by
his pool to do a full scale interview for Melody
Maker.
It
was the start of a friendship that lasted for about three years. In that time I
did two more long interviews with John and we met socially a few times too. I
was a bit cheeky once and asked him for his phone number but he told me he
didn’t know it, Yoko dealt with the phone, so we made an arrangement that if I
wanted to get in touch with him I’d send him a telegram with my phone number on
it, and he’d call me back. He kept to his word. “Hello Chris, it’s Johnny
Beatle here” was how he would introduce himself.
Meanwhile
John and May Pang had moved back to New York and into a suite at the Paul
Getty-owned Pierre Hotel. I went round to see him there one night in June 1974
and found myself acting as his wine-taster. It seems former Beatles manager
Allen Klein had sent him a very expensive bottle of vintage red wine but
because the Beatles and Klein were involved in a law-suit John thought the wine
might be poisoned. So he asked me to try it first, and he and May sat staring
at me for two or three minutes before they took a chance on the wine
themselves. I suppose if I’d died I’d have saved his life and been a hero.
John’s
next album Walls And Bridges contained
a song on which his friend Elton John played piano and sang back-up vocals. It
was called ‘Whatever Gets You Through The Night’.
WHATEVER GETS YOU THOUGH THE NIGHT
Though
it wasn’t a big hit in England the song had plenty of significance for John. Instead
of asking for payment Elton made John promise that if the song reached number
one in the US he would come on stage and do a guest spot during Elton’s next
concert at Madison Square Garden. Much to John’s surprise, it did reach number
one and, shaking with nerves, John kept his promise and performed three songs
with Elton there in November 1974. I wasn’t there, unfortunately, I was back in
England, but I was told that the ovation that greeted John lasted almost ten
minutes. It was to be his last ever public appearance.
In
the audience that night was Yoko, and afterwards she went backstage. After this
reunion John moved back into their New York flat in the Dakota building and
stayed there. Soon he would make her pregnant with their son Sean. Not long
before they got back together John had looked back on their relationship with a
song that has always been one of my favourites.
No 9 DREAM
The only cloud on the horizon for John’s life in
the US now was that the American government wanted to deport him. Evidently Richard
Nixon and his gang of warmongers thought John might mount an effective peace
campaign and spoil his plans for obliterating Vietnam. The excuse they used was
the drug conviction in London from back in 1968. A long legal battle ensued which
John eventually won and in 1976 he was finally awarded permanent residency.
Nixon had, of course, left the White House in disgrace in 1974.
I was there at the hearing in New York when John
finally got his green card and it was the last time I ever saw him in person. I
watched in amazement as the judge asked John’s lawyer if he was likely to
become a ‘state charge’, i.e. claim welfare payments. “No your honour,” he
said. “My client is a man of considerable means. He has written at least 300
songs which generate an annual income of well over five million dollars.”
Outside on the pavement John was surrounded by
photographers but I managed to push my way through, shake his hand and
congratulate him. A few weeks later I sent him another of my telegrams, asking
for another interview, but for the first and last time he declined. In fact
John sent me a postcard on which he wrote “I am invisible”. I still have it, of
course.
For the next four years, most of the remainder
of his life, John Lennon really was invisible. Yoko had given birth to his second
son Sean, and John effectively retired. All his contracts, his musical
obligations, had expired and he saw no reason to renew them. So he became a
house husband, as he put it, baking bread and raising Sean, and handed all his
business affairs to the financially astute Yoko. He did travel a bit, to the
Caribbean, where he became an accomplished yachtsman, and to Japan to meet his
in-laws. None of these trips were publicised. John travelled incognito.
There’s a lovely story about that visit to Japan
that I can’t resist telling. John & Yoko had taken a large penthouse suite
in a Tokyo hotel that had its own private lift. One day an elderly Japanese
couple got into that lift by mistake and found themselves whisked up to the
penthouse. The lift opened out on to a sitting room with a bar and a piano and
John happened to be sat at the piano, tinkling away, when they walked in. They
went over to the bar expecting service, and John saw them and continued
playing. I’m not sure what. The couple listened for a few minutes, assuming no
doubt that John was the entertainment, then, when no barman appeared, they turned
on their heels and went back to the lift. They had no idea who the pianist was.
In late 1980 John re-emerged into the public eye
with a series of interviews promoting the comeback album Double Fantasy on which he and Yoko had recorded alternate tracks.
Released just three weeks before his death, the first single, ‘(Just Like)
Starting Over’ zoomed up the charts.
JUST LIKE
STARTING OVER
One
of the reasons why John and Yoko moved to New York was that John felt he could
live a more normal life there, that although he was one of the most famous men
in the world he could walk its streets and avenues without being molested by
fans. To a certain extent this was true. New Yorkers are far too cool to make a
fuss of celebrities. Unfortunately there’s always an exception to the rule.
On the morning of December 9, 1980, like most
people in the UK I was in bed when I heard that John had been killed by a gun
toting lunatic. My then girlfriend Jenny had got up before me and she’d heard
it on the news on the radio, and she rushed into the bedroom to wake me. I
couldn’t quite believe it, not until I bought the newspapers. His assassin was
an obsessive Beatles fan who pumped seven bullets into John as he emerged from
a taxi late the previous evening and walked with Yoko to the gates of the
Dakota building. He died from his wounds in the back of a police car on the way
to hospital.
Earlier in
the day, John had signed his killer’s copy of Double Fantasy; and the record was left on a window ledge of the
building. Pleading guilty to first-degree murder the following year, he was
sentenced to 20-years-to-life in prison. Because the authorities believe he
might be targeted if he was released, he is still there.
The following Sunday, at 2.00pm American Eastern
Standard Time - 7.00pm in Britain - a worldwide 10-minute vigil of silence was
observed in John’s memory. It was marked by commemorations in New York’s
Central Park and in Liverpool, both of which were broadcast live around the
globe. A big crowd also gathered at Abbey Road studios in London where the
staff stopped work and played John’s music from speakers in the car park.
Hundreds of radio stations around the world maintained a ten minute broadcast silence
as their contribution to the tribute.
I have read a great deal of rubbish about John
Lennon in the years since his death, much of it written by people who might have
reason to envy his achievements and ongoing influence, but none of it in any
way alters my firm conviction that the John Lennon I knew was a good-natured
man of integrity and talent who tried to use his exalted position to right a
few wrongs and spread what he thought were ideas that would benefit us all. He
was no saint, it’s true, but he never pretended to be either.
Whenever rock stars die their record sales shoot up.
John was no exception. Two weeks after his death ‘Imagine’ was number one, so
I’ll finish by playing this – probably his best loved song.
IMAGINE
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