“This-ism, that-ism”
The Puzzling Politics of John Lennon
IN THE LAST WEEK OF AUGUST 1968, the same week that the New Left and Mayor Daley’s thugs waged war on the streets of Chicago, both of Britain’s biggest bands released new singles: the Beatles put out “Revolution,” written by John Lennon, and the Rolling Stones unveiled “Street Fighting Man.”
The contrast between the two was eerily perfect. Since debuting in the Top 40 within months of each other (the Beatles in October 1962, the Stones the following June) they had become the estranged twins of British music. Their differences in sound and temperament were easily caricatured as a series of Manichean oppositions: love and sex, day and night, clean and dirty, ego and id, reassurance and danger. What these new singles did was map those simplistic polarities onto the chaotic political terrain of 1968, turning, at least for a while, a listener’s preference for one band or another from a question of aesthetics to one of ideology. Both songs sprang from the unrest of the preceding spring, but offered dramatically different prescriptions. Lennon scolded radicals who carried pictures of Chairman Mao, and instructed them to “free your mind instead” the Stones’ Mick Jagger whooped, “Summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street.”
Greil Marcus, who was demonstrating in Berkeley during convention week, wrote: “The Beatles were ordering us to pack up and go home, but the Stones seemed to be saying that we were lucky if we had a fight to make and a place to take a stand.” He remembers hearing of a radio DJ who played the two songs back to back and said, “You know which one of these they aren’t playing in Chicago this week.” He was right: “Street Fighting Man” was banned from radio stations in Chicago and the Bay Area, while “Revolution” was put on heavy rotation. All that the Berkeley marchers knew of the Stones record, Marcus noted, was its title: the sheer idea of it possessed talismanic power.
The Left’s reaction to Lennon’s antirevolutionary stance was furious disappointment. The New Left Review damned it as “a lamentable petty bourgeois cry of fear.” In Britain’s radical newspaper the Black Dwarf, John Hoyland penned “An Open Letter to John Lennon”: “Love which does not pit itself against suffering, oppression and humiliation is sloppy and irrelevant.” The same issue reprinted, with Jagger’s permission, the handwritten lyrics to “Street Fighting Man,” juxtaposing them with a quote from Engels. “The rhythm of the Stones’ music captured the spirit of ’68 much more than did that of the Beatles,” Black Dwarf editor Tariq Ali later wrote.
But it was Lennon, not Jagger, who would become the face of the peace movement and then proceed to throw himself wholeheartedly into every left-wing cause he could find. And it was Lennon who would give the movement its abiding anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.” “Revolution” was merely the faltering start of an unprecedented journey into the heart of rock star activism.
COMMENTATORS SEIZED upon these two singles with such zeal largely because of their novelty value. While American songwriters had been dealing with politics since the folk revival, topical songwriting in Britain had withered on the vine. One reason was that the British folk scene had produced no Dylan-like figure who could bridge the gap between folk and rock, certainly not one who could compete with the white heat of the Beatles.
Another reason was simply that there wasn’t as much to protest about. With the relatively benign Harold Wilson (incompetent, arguably, but not belligerent) in Number 10 Downing Street, and none of the dramas which convulsed America, the concerns of the average young Briton were blessedly parochial. Not that the country was problem-free: the devaluation of the pound in 1967 was only the most blatant indicator of serious economic ill-health. But exchange rates do not forge revolutionaries. * “We were not pushed by any major issues,” remembered Sue Miles, whose husband Barry owned the counterculture bookshop Indica. “There was no draft, you could piss around in England quite a lot.”
So while Americans fretted about living on the eve of destruction, the defining British protest songs of 1965—the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and the Who’s “My Generation”—were libertarian rather than reformist. Where Dylan had solemnly painted the generational divide as an almost biblical battle between idealistic youths and death-dealing Methuselahs, the Who demanded nothing more than the right to have hassle-free fun: “I’m not trying to cause a big sensation / I’m just talkin’ ’bout my generation.”†
Until 1968, the Beatles’ music was political by accident rather than design. In 1964, Sing Out! argued, “Their enjoyment of life now is a strong protest and alternative to world preparation for war,” but this was not something the band themselves articulated. If some critics chose to contrast the wild joy of “She Loves You” with escalation in Vietnam, well, that was up to them. In October 1965, Paul McCartney told the NME: “We don’t like protest songs of course, because we’re not the preaching sort and in any case we leave it to others to deliver messages of that kind.” Asked if the group would be releasing a Christmas record, he joked, “Definitely not our style, though come to think of it, I might suggest a Christmas protest song to John!” having no idea that six years later the joke would become a reality.
Lennon first ventured a political opinion in June 1966, when the Beatles’ American label, Capitol, withdrew an edition of their Yesterday…and Today album amid uproar over its cover image of the Beatles in butchers’ smocks, draped with raw meat and beheaded dolls. Lennon called the picture “as relevant as Vietnam.” During their subsequent U.S. tour, he diligently followed the progress of the war. At a press conference in August, the band chorused, “We don’t like war, war is wrong.” Lennon later emphasized their position: “We think of it every day. We don’t like it. We don’t agree with it. We think it’s wrong.” It was a bold and unambivalent statement, but its impact was somewhat overshadowed by the gigantic controversy over his earlier remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”
Upon returning to England, Lennon took time off to appear in How I Won the War, a peculiar World War II black comedy directed by Richard Lester, who had previously established the Beatles’ celluloid image in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! At the premiere, in October 1967, Lennon declared: “I hate war. If there is another war I won’t fight and I’ll try to tell all the youngsters not to fight either. I hate all that sham.”
Lennon’s songwriting voice, however, did not lend itself to direct protest. Such antiestablishment sentiments as did creep into his songs were antic and oblique. While the Beatles’ first political lyric was the unedifying “Taxman” (1966), George Harrison’s petulant moan about the Wilson government’s sky-high top-rate tax, Lennon, awestruck by the mind-expanding power of LSD, was more interested in bending reality than quibbling with the details. The extraordinary “A Day in the Life” turned “newspaper writing” on its head, making recent headlines seem dreamlike, distanced, absurd. And the Lewis Carroll–inspired “I Am the Walrus” was by no means as nonsensical as it initially appeared. It can be read, as Beatles scholar Ian MacDonald argues, as “a damn-you-England tirade that blasts education, art, culture, law, order, class, religion, and even sense itself…the most idiosyncratic protest song ever written.”
ON MARCH 17, 1968, twenty-five thousand people gathered in Trafalgar Square for Britain’s biggest antiwar demonstration yet. It was the work of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), founded the previous year by a group of left-wing activists including Tariq Ali, the charismatic young Pakistani editor of the Black Dwarf. Although Harold Wilson’s support for President Johnson’s war was enough to trigger such a campaign, his refusal to make that support military ensured that the conflict remained distant from British life. As Ali’s Black Dwarf colleague Robin Blackburn later remarked, “The Vietnam War, however much one might demonstrate against it here, was theirs.”
Nonetheless, the VSC members were energetic campaigners. Their first march, scheduled to coincide with the U.S. Stop the Draft Week, had taken place in October 1967. About ten thousand protesters had peacefully picketed the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, drawing letters of support from students, trade unionists, Labour MPs, and celebrities such as actor Vanessa Redgrave. On the day of the March demonstration, Viet Cong flags fluttered in Trafalgar Square as Redgrave addressed the crowd. The mood as they marched towards Oxford Street was ebullient. “I am sure that the overwhelming majority wanted more than just a victory in Vietnam,” Ali recalled. “We wanted a new world without wars, oppression and class exploitation, based on comradeship and internationalism.”
But when they reached Grosvenor Square, they met far fiercer resistance than before. Somebody cried, “The cossacks are coming,” as a troop of police horses charged the picket line. The demonstrators retaliated with chunks of brick and paving stones. After two hours of fighting, the demonstrators, some badly beaten, evacuated the square. The next day’s tabloids, Ali noted, seemed most concerned with the welfare of the horses. This so-called peace riot was 1960s Britain’s first experience of real street fighting, and the presence of one particular marcher added an extra frisson of rebel glamour to the whole affair, although Mick Jagger seemed more interested in checking out the scene than taking up arms himself.
Jagger’s outlaw chic had already been enhanced by his own recent run-in with the law when he and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards were sentenced to jail for drug possession. Although the judgement was overturned on appeal, there were whispers of an orchestrated establishment plot against these dangerous miscreants. Jagger then told the Sunday Mirror that “war stems from power-mad politicians and patriots” and that “there should be no such thing as private property.” For those optimists who believed that rock stars could be in the vanguard of the revolution, Jagger’s presence in Grosvenor Square was too good to be true.
In fact, Jagger was rather ambivalent about the whole thing. “Street Fighting Man,” inspired by what he saw in Grosvenor Square and by the student uprising in Paris in May, is less a call to arms than a confession of disappointment with “sleepy London town.” “What can a poor boy do / Except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band?” he shrugged, helplessly. When Melody Maker asked Jagger about politics, he lapsed into flip hipster gobbledegook: “Oh, what? Own up! Just groove. Play another record and don’t worry about a thing.” He told NME: “It’s stupid to think that you can start a revolution with a record. I wish you could!”
The Stones’ cynicism was not unwarranted. The VSC’s next demo, held at the end of October, was effectively its last gasp. University sit-ins, with a variety of agendas, took place during the same period before they too ran out of steam. “In America, the rock’n’roll bands have gotten very political,” said Jagger. “They express themselves very directly about the Vietnam war. But when I come home to England, everything is completely different, so quiet and peaceful. If one lives in such an atmosphere, one has a great detachment from politics and writes completely differently about them.”
Greil Marcus astutely described “Street Fighting Man” as “a challenging emotional jigsaw puzzle, not congratulations for being on the right side.” But, as is so often the case, Jagger’s lyrical reservations were obliterated by the music’s exultant menace. It sounded like revolution, and that was what mattered.
At the end of the year, the Rolling Stones released Beggars Banquet, which also featured the sardonic class dialogue “Salt of the Earth” and the sulphurous “Sympathy for the Devil,” on which Jagger sounded both repelled and seduced by mankind’s history of violence. Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau approvingly wrote: “Beggars Banquet is not a polemic or manifesto. It doesn’t advocate anything…. They make it perfectly clear that they are sickened by contemporary society. But it is not their role to tell people what to do. Instead, they use their musical abilities like a seismograph to record the intensity of feelings, the violence, that is so prevalent now.” In short, the Stones were political without having to say much at all.
LENNON, MEANWHILE, wasn’t even in the country when the “peace riot” happened. He was on an ashram in India with George Harrison, studying with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and it was there that he came up with the line for “Revolution,” “You know it’s gonna be all right”—“this, you know, ‘God will save us’ feeling,” he later explained. From that peaceful remove, events in Grosvenor Square doubtless did seem ugly and futile. What’s surprising is that he didn’t qualify the song’s message upon his return to the UK. His argument that violent protest provoked police aggression and tabloid backlash was true enough, but he phrased it in a lofty, condescending manner that was bound to raise hackles. Like the tabloids, he spent more time critiquing the form of political anger than its causes.
“Revolution” quickly became the most hotly discussed protest song in history—on the streets of Chicago and Berkeley, in the organs of the Right and Left, even in music. Nina Simone recorded a pugnacious answer record, also called “Revolution,” which subverted Lennon’s lyric virtually line by line (Lennon later called it “very good”). The New York Times juxtaposed Lennon’s face and words with those of New Left hero Herbert Marcuse. The right-wing National Review Bulletin crowed: “The International Communist enterprise may at last have met its match: the Beatles. Radical sorts anxious to preempt the Beatles’ creative and immensely popular music for the Left have found little or nothing in it to comfort them over the years.”
Greil Marcus hated the message but loved the vehicle—“There is freedom and movement in the music, even as there is sterility and repression in the lyrics”—the irony being that this raucous recording was McCartney’s idea; Lennon favored the slower version, “Revolution 1,” which subsequently appeared on The Beatles (popularly known as The White Album). In that incarnation (recorded first but released second) Lennon fudges the message, following “count me out” with an awkwardly inserted “in.” “I put in both because I wasn’t sure,” he later admitted. If he wasn’t sure what he thought about such a flammable issue then, you might ask, why write the song? When Rolling Stone’s Jonathan Cott asked him how his “free your mind” pablum would play with a frustrated Black Panther, Lennon offered a feeble “I don’t know.”
Lennon’s muddled thinking also extended to the album’s “Revolution 9,” a brave and divisive attempt to foist avant-garde collage on the record-buying public. Although he later claimed he was “painting in sound a picture of revolution but…the mistake was that it was anti-revolution,” good luck to anyone finding any message, pro-or anti-, in its eight minutes of brilliantly dislocating clamor.* Towards the end of 1968, disenchanted Beatles fan John Hoyland concluded his damning “An Open Letter to John Lennon” with an invitation: “Look at the society we live in and ask yourself: why? And then—come and join us.”
And then Lennon did something very unusual: he wrote back. The singer was in a state of unsettling flux. In 1967’s “Strawberry Fields Forever,” he had sung: “No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low,” meaning that he knew that he felt apart from everyone else, but not whether that meant he was, he later explained, “crazy or a genius.” He was also feeling personally victimized over his new love affair with Yoko Ono. Facing such a hard-nosed assault on “Revolution,” he put in an aggrieved call to Tariq Ali, accusing him of “publishing these attacks on me.” Ali suavely explained that they were just “friendly criticisms” and invited Lennon to respond.
In a letter which appeared in the January 1969 issue of Black Dwarf, Lennon snapped, “I don’t worry about what you, the left, the middle, the right or any fucking boys club think. I’m not that bourgeois. I’m not only up against the establishment but you too.” No one I think is in my tree. He argued that all revolutions failed because of “sick heads.” He ended with a PS: “You smash it—and I’ll build around it.” Richard Neville of OZ magazine described it as “a classic New Left/psychedelic left dialogue.”
Hoyland shot back with a Marxist analysis which blamed the system, rather than individual sick heads, for the world’s ills: build a better society and you create better people. The call of “Revolution” to “free your minds instead” still rankled. “You simply cannot be completely turned on and happy when you know that kids are being roasted to death in Vietnam. . . . Why couldn’t you have said—‘as well’—which is what I would say?” It concluded, “I just wish you were a bit more on our side. We could do with a few good songs.”
LENNON AND ONO married in March 1969 and honeymooned at the Amsterdam Hilton, where they announced they would stay in bed for a week as “our protest against all the suffering and violence in the world.” This “bed-in” united John’s whimsy, Yoko’s love of performance art, and the Yippies’ ideas about “fight[ing] through the jungles of TV,” and provided a playful alternative to the dryness of the peace movement. Inevitably, many in the mainstream media and counterculture alike scoffed that it was the worst kind of rock star narcissism, but, measured purely in terms of column inches and airtime, the stunt did its job.
Other light-hearted gimmicks followed: the happy couple sent symbolic “acorns for peace” to world leaders, and invented “bagism,” which argued that if everyone was cloaked in a bag then they would be judged only on what they said, not on how they looked. What, the curious press corps wanted to know, did the couple hope to achieve? “All we’re saying is give peace a chance,” Lennon told journalists in Vienna. “If the least we can do is give somebody a laugh, we’re willing to be the world’s clowns, because we think it’s a bit serious at the moment.”
In May, the couple attempted to repeat the bed-in in the United States, but a visa refusal left them stranded on the other side of the forty-ninth parallel—in Room 1742 of the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal. They lay in the king-size bed, dressed entirely in white, surrounded by flowers, while reporters and fans thronged the corridor outside. “It was hilarious,” Lennon later told Playboy. “In effect, we were doing a commercial for peace on the front page of the papers instead of a commercial for war.”
Meanwhile, events in one corner of Berkeley were reaching a head. Encouraged by Yippie leader Stew Albert, hundreds of local residents had transformed a vacant plot of university-owned land downtown into a picturesque spot known as People’s Park. Governor Reagan, who saw the campus as “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants,” sent in police officers to seize the park and erect a fence. On May 16, six thousand demonstrators marched on the park, to be met by nightsticks, buckshot, and tear gas. Reagan called in the National Guard; James Rector, blasted in the chest by a police shotgun, became the era’s first student fatality. Speaking to Berkeley’s KPFA radio during the battle for the park, Lennon urged nonviolence of the flimsiest kind. “The monster doesn’t care—the blue meanie is insane,” he said, somewhat undermining his point by comparing Berkeley police to the cartoon villains from the Yellow Submarine movie. The young critic Robert Christgau spoke for many on the left when he retorted: “Lennon’s call firmed up his newfound status as a pompous shit.”
During the dozens of interviews to which the couple submitted in Montreal, Lennon vacillated on the issue of activist tactics, neither endorsing nor condemning campus violence but suggesting that the protesters think of “something else.” As to what this “something else” might be, he was unforthcoming. But on the final night of the bed-in, Lennon pulled a masterstroke, debuting a song he had just written, based on his slogan from the Vienna press conference: “Give Peace a Chance.” In the room with John and Yoko were Timothy Leary and his wife, Rosemary, Beatles confidant Derek Taylor, and journalist Paul Williams, who was there to document Lennon’s first meeting with Leary for Playboy. As Williams recalled: “He gave the impression that he’d just been fooling around with this chorus phrase…and then the verses were spontaneously strung-together talk about anything that had recently caught his attention…. He sang to us, charmingly, as though he were a poet just reading some recent notes from his journal.”
Late the next morning, Lennon recorded the song on a portable eight-track and video camera, with a roster of back-up singers and guitarists which reads like the set-up to an elaborate joke about people walking into a bar: Yoko, Taylor, Williams, the Learys, comedians Dick Gregory and Tommy Smothers, pop singer Petula Clark, a rabbi, a priest, and the Canadian chapter of the Radha Krishna Temple. The beat was banged out on Hare Krishna drums and a mahogany dining table. The chorus lyrics were written on a sheet and hung on the wall.
“Give Peace a Chance” has to be the most ramshackle single ever released by a global superstar. The verses, which poke fun at politics, religion, the media, and all manner of isms (revolution half-rhymes with masturbation, rabbis with popeyes), peter out before the halfway mark, leaving just the chorus, over and over, accompanied by the clumping tabletop rhythm. It is also the only protest song that is literally self-congratulatory, ending with the sound of Lennon and his ad hoc band clapping themselves. It is less an end in itself than a launchpad for something bigger.
DURING 1969, the antiwar coalition crumbled and rebuilt itself, in circumstances too Byzantine to describe here. The newborn Vietnam Moratorium Committee, founded to prove that students are “not just ‘crazy radicals’ but ‘your sons and daughters,’” masterminded a National Moratorium Day on October 15. Two million people across the country wore black armbands, tolled churchbells, flew flags at half-staff, read out the names of the dead, and otherwise expressed nonviolent dissent. The New Mobe, which had replaced the fragmented old Mobe, followed with its own day of action on November 15.
At the main demo in Washington, DC, Pete Seeger began singing “Give Peace a Chance” to a crowd half a million strong. Seeger had initially been unimpressed—“I confess when I first heard it I didn’t think much of it. I thought, ‘That’s kind of a nothing of a song, it doesn’t go anyplace’”—but then he hadn’t thought much of “This Land Is Your Land” either. He changed his mind when he heard a woman singing it on Moratorium Day and decided, on an impulse, to try it in DC. “Are you listening, Nixon?” he cried. “Are you listening, Agnew? Are you listening in the Pentagon?”
“For those present, it was one of the most moving days of their lives,” he remembered in The Incompleat Folksinger. “The high point of the afternoon came, if I say so myself, when a short phrase from a record by Beatle John Lennon was started up by Brother Fred Kirkpatrick and me. Peter, Paul, and Mary joined in, also song leader Mitch Miller, and soon hundreds of thousands were singing it over and over, swaying their bodies, flags, and signs from right to left in massive choreography. It was not as militant or as forceful a song as will be needed, but it united that crowd as no speech or song had been able to all afternoon.”
Lennon was overjoyed. As he would later tell Tariq Ali: “I was…pleased when the movement in America took up ‘Give Peace a Chance’ because I had written it with that it in mind really. I hoped that instead of singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ from 1800 or something, they would have something contemporary. I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration.” The single and the chant were, in effect, separate entities. On the record, the chorus comes as both punchline and rejoinder to the verses’ prolix overload. Divorced from them, it became the whole message, either joyous or solemn depending on the crowd’s mood, and thus squarely in the venerable tradition of “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved.” No wonder Seeger grew to love it: it was a bona fide people’s song. “We might not have a leader, but now at least we have a song—and a mass movement doesn’t go anywhere without a song,” one DC protester told Newsweek.
Meanwhile, Lennon embarked on a frenzy of political activity, publicizing the plight of starving refugees in the breakaway Nigerian province of Biafra, giving money to gypsies and squatters, and joining the campaign to exonerate James Hanratty, hanged for the so-called A6 murders in 1962. In November, he returned his MBE insignia in protest against “Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against [new single] ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.” John and Yoko also announced plans for a peace festival in Toronto the following July and an unworkably ambitious International Peace Vote, neither of which came to fruition. Clearly, there were limits to even a Beatle’s powers of persuasion.
In December, the couple launched a new campaign which, perhaps unwittingly, used Phil Ochs’ phrase: “War Is Over.” But whereas Ochs had taken to the streets in aid of the concept, the Lennons simply hired billboards in major international cities to carry the message: “War Is Over—If You Want It—Happy Christmas, John and Yoko.” It was a somewhat aristocratic gesture.*
The same month, the Rolling Stones marked the end of the decade with Let It Bleed, a record Jagger described as “apocalypse.” “Gimme Shelter” opened the album like a thunderclap. Inspired, said Jagger, by “the Vietnam War, violence on the screens, pillage and burning,” it truly sounded, unlike Barry McGuire’s effort, like the eve of destruction. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” saw out not just the album but the decade on a suitably ambivalent note, at once jubilant, defeated, and pragmatic. Jagger’s reference to attending “the demonstration” sharpened the song’s political implications: you can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need. It marked the end of the Stones’ period as revolutionary pinups. As Keith Richards remarked, “You don’t shoulder any responsibilities when you pick up a guitar or sing a song, because it’s not a position of responsibility.”
In his 1970 book, Revolt Into Style, musician and critic George Melly reflected on the events of 1968 in London: “This was surely the moment when you might have expected pop to provide the anthems, the marches, the songs for the barricade. In fact it did nothing of the sort…. At all events the political upheaval of 1968 proved that pop music, in the revolutionary sense, was a nonstarter, a fake revolt with no programme much beyond the legalisation of pot.”
Though Melly’s analysis is hard to dispute, by the end of 1969, Lennon was, for good or ill, the public face of the peace movement. He issued a statement announcing that 1970 would be “Year One. Because we believe the last decade was the end of the old machine crumblin’ to pieces. And we think we can get it together, with your help…. We have great hopes for the new year.” The BBC anointed him “Man of the Decade.” The Daily Mirror, however, crowned him “Clown of the Year” in a mocking editorial: “Mr Lennon’s Cry is ‘Peace!’ How about giving us some, chum?”
UNBEKNOWN TO THE MIRROR, or anyone else outside the Beatles’ inner circle, Lennon had told his bandmates that September that he wanted to quit, agreeing to keep the news secret while various legal issues were resolved. The most potent song he brought to their final recording sessions, which would become the Abbey Road album, was “Come Together,” which stemmed from Timothy Leary’s request, in that Montreal hotel room, for an anthem to soundtrack his implausible bid to replace Reagan as governor of California (campaign slogan: “Come together, join the party”). The gobbledegook verses recalled “I Am the Walrus,” though the chorus, “Come together right now over me,” was rather more emphatic than “goo goo goo joob.”
At the start of 1970, with the Beatles’ demise still a secret, Lennon’s activism continued apace. He threw his weight behind the anti-apartheid movement, CND, and Michael X, a self-styled spokesperson for black Britons whose egotistical posturing and foggy rhetoric earned the suspicion of many on the left but succeeded in seducing the Lennons.
In March, Lennon came across the work of psychotherapist Arthur Janov, who believed in exorcising childhood demons through what he called primal scream therapy. Emerging from heroin addiction, Lennon signed up wholesale. While undergoing therapy in Los Angeles, he wrote most of the songs for his first post-Beatles album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Released at the end of the year, it was the most painfully personal statement ever made by a major rock star. While songs such as “Mother,” “My Mummy’s Dead,” and “Isolation” offered gruelling emotional catharsis, there were two significant engagements with the outside world. On “God,” Lennon discarded a series of icons, from Jesus and Buddha, through Kennedy and Hitler, to Dylan and, most heretically of all, the Beatles. And then there was “Working Class Hero.”
Lennon would later declare it “a revolutionary song…I just think the concept is revolutionary and I hope it’s for workers and not for tarts and fags.” Delivered with a snarl, it combined Marxist rhetoric (“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV”), Janovian analysis (“The pain is so big you feel nothing at all”) and autobiography. If some lines could apply to any worker, then others could only be about Lennon himself: the man who had climbed to the top to find that he was still a “fucking peasant.” The last line is bitterly sarcastic: “If you want to be a hero, well just follow me.” As a song about John Lennon, it is astonishing, but the “worker” remains intangibly vague; Lennon always lacked McCartney’s instinctive empathy for the common man or woman.
If these songs gave fans several clues as to Lennon’s new state of mind, then he unveiled his full ideological makeover in two extensive interviews published in early 1971. Not content with killing the Beatles, he now seemed bent on burying them, and all that they represented. “Nothing happened except that we all dressed up,” he told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner. “The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it’s exactly the same…. The dream is over.”* The furor over “Revolution” still bothered him. “I really thought that love would save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at. . . . I’m just beginning to think he’s doing a good job, he seems to be.”† He also grumbled about leftists who preferred “Street Fighting Man”: “I resent the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and that the Beatles weren’t.”
His dialogue with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn in the new Marxist newspaper Red Mole was even more eye-opening. The interview, conducted over several hours at John and Yoko’s Berkshire estate, Tittenhurst Park, was a work of wholesale revisionism, riddled with radical and psychiatric jargon. Somewhat melodramatically, he described his time in the world’s biggest band as “complete oppression” and “humiliation after humilation” (whether this variety was worse than that experienced by dissident artists during the Cultural Revolution, he did not say) and dismissed his drive to succeed as a product of emotional repression. The playful, idiosyncratic language for which he was famed was being subsumed by boilerplate dogma: “If we took over Britain, then we’d have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind.” Ali’s last question is perhaps unique in the annals of rock star interviews: “How do you think we can destroy the capitalist system here in Britain, John?”
The day after the Red Mole interview, an enthusiastic Lennon phoned Ali. “Look, I was so excited by the things we talked about that I’ve written this song for the movement, so you can sing it when you march.” He sang it down the telephone line and asked the stunned Ali: “Well, what do you think?” Ali told him it was “an ideal marching song.”
Adapting the Black Panther slogan, “All Power to the People,” the song was called “Power to the People” and it was an explicit repudiation of “Revolution.” “Say we want a revolution,” sang Lennon. “We better get on right away.” And where “Give Peace a Chance” had only requested the possibility of change, this new anthem demanded it. Released as a single in March 1971, it climbed higher in the U.S. charts than either “Revolution” or “Give Peace a Chance,” demonstrating Lennon’s unrivalled ability to bring radical politics into the mainstream. “‘Power to the People’ isn’t expected to make a revolution,” he clarified in Melody Maker. “It’s for the people to sing like the Christians sing hymns.”
But in later years, when his revolutionary fire had dimmed, Lennon would dismiss it as “written in the state of being asleep and wanting to be loved by Tariq and his ilk,” a tacit admission that his much-touted political awakening was another kind of self-delusion. Having dispensed with God, heroin, and the Beatles, Lennon needed something to plug the void. As Stew Albert told writer Jon Wiener: “You wonder, when a person gets so rich and famous, where their motivation comes from. You’re not hungry any more. Politics was a new hunger for John. It was a new world to learn.”
IN NOVEMBER 1971, Paul McCartney was asked by Melody Maker about his old bandmate’s new single, “Imagine.” He ventured that it was “what John is really like, but there was too much political stuff on the other albums.” Lennon dashed off a letter to the paper, telling McCartney that “Imagine” was “‘working class hero’ with sugar on for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn’t dig the words. Imagine!”
But McCartney wasn’t alone in perceiving only the sugar. Line by line, “Imagine” is a radical song, repudiating both God and private property. It speaks both to the life’s-what-you-make-it idealism of “All You Need Is Love” and, as Jon Wiener argues, Marcuse’s ideas about social change coming via the utopian imagination. But the song itself was so pretty and vague that it sowed the seeds of its own misreading, and something about the tone, as so often with Lennon, jarred. The smugness of “I hope some day you’ll join us” was cemented by the hideously misjudged video. If you’re going to sing “Imagine no possessions,” it’s a good idea not to do so while seated at a grand piano in your palatial country retreat. As with “Revolution,” Lennon seemed to expect every listener to understand his true intentions, oblivious to his own mixed messages.
It’s striking how many of Lennon’s latest lyrics took the same basic format as “Give Peace a Chance” and “God,” i.e., lists of things he wanted nothing to do with: social constructs (“Imagine”), roles (“I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die”), and pernicious people (“Gimme Some Truth”). The latter was by far the most combative, denouncing hypocrites, chauvinists, primadonnas, and “short-haired yellow-bellied son[s] of Tricky Dicky [Nixon].” It functioned as the bilious twin of “Imagine.”
By the time the album was in the stores, however, Lennon had left Britain for good, and he would be greatly missed. During the summer, he had been wherever the left-wing action was. When the editors of the underground magazine OZ were successfully prosecuted for obscenity, Lennon released “God Save Us” and “Do the Oz” to raise money for legal fees. When the British government began interning without charge alleged paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, he joined a demonstration, marching down London’s Oxford Street with a placard reading, “For the IRA, against British imperialism.” When shipbuilders in Scotland’s famously radical Clydeside staged a “work-in” to protest the closure of the shipyards, Lennon sent them thousands of pounds. (One confused shipbuilder, on hearing the news, exclaimed, “But Lenin’s dead!”)
So one can imagine the shock and disappointment when, just a few days later, Lennon told Tariq Ali that he was moving to America to help Yoko win custody of her daughter by a previous partner, Kyoko. Ali later wondered what might have happened if Lennon had stuck around a few months and witnessed Britain’s first national miners strike since the 1920s. “In New York, Lennon met the yippy leaders, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, whose remoteness from the working class was celebrated,” he grumbled. “The young miners who marched on Saltley Gates in Birmingham would have been far more satisfying to Lennon and, I am sure, he would have responded generously to their calls for solidarity.”
Well, perhaps. Even if he had stayed, the mercurial Lennon would doubtless have drifted away from the Red Mole gang soon enough. As his experiences in the United States would prove, his activist fervor was destined to burn out quickly. Before it did, he would plunge into the chaotic diaspora that the New Left had become, discover the limits of celebrity, and produce some of the worst protest songs ever recorded.