From May 1968, when they first began living together, until September 1973, when they publicly split up for eighteen months, John and Yoko were inseparable. Lennon positioned them as two intense artists who needed each other so badly that all other concerns became secondary, and they projected a hyped-up mixture of mutual obsession, creative reciprocity, and narcissistic oblivion. His public face read romantic delirium, but the overlapping political agendas Lennon pursued as the Beatles worked on Let It Be and Abbey Road were unguardedly selfish, and Ono became a clever, not to say cynical, decoy to his withdrawal from the band. History ladles irony on this moment: the band that had once literally slept on top of one another in Neil Aspinall’s van now sought to pool all their collective business interests just as their two most productive songwriters formed new families. For added curiosity, both new Beatle wives had non-British upbringings.
After leaving her first husband in Tucson, Arizona, Linda Eastman returned to the East Coast with her daughter, Heather, and became a rock photographer with a colorful reputation in the scene’s elite boys’ club. Like Ono, she came from a well-to-do background that bespoke education and worldliness. Her mother, Louise Sara Lindner Eastman, was heir to the Lindner Department Store fortune; her father, born Lee Epstein, practiced entertainment law at his own firm in Manhattan while collecting modern art. They raised four children in Scarsdale, New York, and, like many other Russian Jewish emigrant offspring, had gradually assimilated into mainstream New York life.
McCartney’s on-again, off-again engagement to Jane Asher, which had greased tabloid sales for months, finally crashed when Asher returned early from a theatrical job to find McCartney cavorting with another American, Francie Schwartz (“Frannie”), that summer of 1968. (While staying at McCartney’s during that same period, John and Yoko watched TV in the evenings with her. One day they returned to find a card on the mantelpiece in Paul’s familiar handwriting, which read: “You and your Jap tart think you’re hot shit.” When Lennon confronted McCartney, his partner laughed it off, saying he’d done it “on a lark.” Within a few days, John and Yoko moved on.)1 McCartney had already met Eastman at the Bag O’ Nails club in 1967 when she was on assignment photographing “Swinging London,” and again at a Procol Harum concert at the Speakeasy.
When he spoke with Linda next, at Epstein’s Sgt. Pepper party in May 1967, Linda took some famous photographs of the band in full psychedelic regalia, standing at Epstein’s fireplace. McCartney began pursuing her seriously during the summer of 1968, soon after Lennon became obsessed with Ono—both Beatles were drawn to women whose intellectual pursuits in the past differentiated them from an endless bevy of groupies. These romances have enough of a tit-for-tat quality to suggest how much Lennon and McCartney’s intimate pursuits were entangled with their musical one-upmanship.
Lennon and McCartney expressed these tensions throughout the band’s final eighteen months together with varying degrees of sincerity and prevarication. The received line on this period is how everything worked to pull Lennon and McCartney—and the Beatles—apart. But the music conveys a different story: despite their differing personalities and writing sensibilities, the band became their rallying point, and every ensemble impulse held them together even as they composed from separate orbits. Nightfall and bemused introspection mark Lennon’s “Good Night,” “Cry Baby Cry,” and McCartney’s “Blackbird,” as well as twilight duets like “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “Because,” where romantic themes double as songs about male bonding and reluctant farewells. In these songs, the Beatles pushed rock into a new maturity, where teenage-identity themes became larger metaphors for fraught intimacy (“Two of Us,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” “You Never Give Me Your Money,” “Carry That Weight”). If their financial disputes created havoc, the music always pulled them back together even when they were at loggerheads. Divergent interests only quickened their ensemble. Creating alliances amid all the tension turned into an imposing late theme, as they proved themselves their own biggest fans: nobody had more trouble putting this career to bed than the Beatles themselves.
Lennon lost himself in a flurry of new projects with Ono. For their first several weeks together, John and Yoko mooched beds off London friends, first at McCartney’s house in St. John’s Wood, then at Apple A&R man Peter Asher’s place, then Neil Aspinall’s before settling into Ringo’s empty Montagu Street apartment in late July, where they stayed through the end of 1968. Their intense rapport manifested itself immediately; a new creative chemistry infused a series of side projects as Lennon recorded his Beatle material. Before they even moved out of Kenwood, Lennon and Ono shot an experimental movie, Film No. 5 (Smile), a long, sustained take of Lennon smiling on his back porch, as if one of those indelible facial frames from A Hard Day’s Night got elongated into a Warhol feature. They also made the film Two Virgins, which debuted at the Chicago Film Festival later that fall. And paralleling the Beatles sessions throughout the summer of 1968, Lennon mounted his first art show and visited rehearsals for Victor Spinetti’s staging of In His Own Write, a one-act production of the National Theatre at the Old Vic (produced by Sir Laurence Olivier). He may not have dealt with his drug habit, but he certainly rousted himself from boredom.
A casual afternoon song-demo session at George Harrison’s Esher home has been widely bootlegged as “the Esher Demos,” the most complete record of the band’s familiar preproduction routine: like a script’s first table read, or a newsroom’s first editorial meeting of the day, song run-throughs preceded discussion of a general outline for an album as material got sketched out for the first time. As with the Hamburg Star-Club tapes from New Year’s Eve, 1962, this tape reveals how thoroughly conceived and arranged most of this White Album material already was even at this early “demonstration” phase. Each songwriter prepared his own demo tape to sing along to, to suggest vocal harmonies, rhythmic figures, and guitar breaks. There were at least two tape recorders in the room, since whoever taped this session (most likely Aspinall) caught Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison singing along with themselves, with Ringo chiming in on congas for a sound unlike any other. This uncanny setup displays the band’s elaborate shorthand, where even early drafts graduate from lyrics and melodies to band music as it would ultimately be produced for tape. Far from sketchy, early drafts of most Beatles songs arrive fully conceived, with imaginative spaces mapped out for the others. Production blueprints were inseparable from song arrangements. Even unfinished songs like “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” or “Sexy Sadie” give off an underlying ensemble energy, grooves so suggestive you can almost feel the others eager to add their as-yet-invisible parts. The distance between the Esher Demos and The White Album is largely technical; the raw material is all there.
Perhaps, in Lennon’s mind, his harried schedule provided an excuse to avoid his wife and son. Apple aide Peter Brown turned into Lennon’s royal go-between, fending off Cynthia’s frequent phone calls. Finally, after many, many queries, Brown confirmed a time for Lennon to discuss matters in person with his wife at Kenwood. When Cynthia opened the front door, she found Yoko standing beside him, both of them dressed in black.
“I barely recognized John,” Cynthia noted, and she worried about his drug use; although the remote air of her husband’s new companion must have slighted her. “It had been only a few weeks since we’d last met, but he was thinner, almost gaunt. His face was deadly serious. There was no hint of a smile, even when Julian ran up to him. He was, quite simply, not the John I knew. It was as if he’d taken on a different persona. . . . What power did she have over him? The thought of her looking after my son was ghastly.”2
The couple sat awkwardly in Lennon’s former living room as Julian hovered about them, staring wide-eyed at his father’s new partner. Such a scene is unsettling for any child, but it must have been particularly traumatic for Julian, who saw his father so rarely in the first place. “What did you want to see me for?” Lennon began impatiently. In the past, he had avoided confrontation with women at all costs, and he had gone to great lengths to avoid this one. But when finally forced to meet with his wife and child, he came out blasting, no matter how hypocritically. Cynthia sent Julian to her mother in the kitchen, tracing the very same steps Lennon had taken at the same age of five when Julia confronted Alfred in Blackpool. Here, the roles reversed: instead of the mother unwittingly rescuing the boy from abduction to New Zealand, Lennon came to threaten Cynthia and virtually ignored Julian.
Once the boy had left the room, Lennon threw a curveball, with Ono sitting calmly at his side. He accused Cynthia of cheating on him, with “that yankee cowboy,” he hissed, the actor Tom Simcox, her Rishikesh friend whose note Mardas had purloined. This betrays a deeply cynical streak: as a tactical matter, Lennon may have reasoned the angle worth a try even if false, since he could afford more expensive lawyers and massage his story later through Apple’s publicity machine. After all, he was a championship talker, and commanded fairly reverential treatment from the press when he so desired. Putting Cynthia on the defensive constituted his best strategy for that, given that he would soon be negotiating a settlement. This maneuver backfired.
The other cynical motive behind Lennon’s accusation played to the issue of public identity: no matter how this situation unraveled, Cynthia and Julian stood to be big losers. Cynthia’s status greatly depended on her being Mrs. Lennon. As the mother of his only child, this got tied up with the only reason she would have tolerated all his infidelities for so long, or roped her mother into the many indignities of his celebrity lifestyle. To sit still for his accusations in her own home created a new low for Cynthia to contemplate from the marriage that she had hoped to salvage just weeks before. If anything could have upstaged her arriving home from Greece to find Yoko Ono padding around in her robe, this would be it. His attack, both humiliating and unexpected, shocked Cynthia to her chair. It’s easy to imagine a weaker character cracking up on the spot. John and Ono left quickly after that first encounter, without John so much as hugging Julian. After a few days, Cynthia collected herself and countersued, giving London divorce lawyers a taste of Beatle litigation yet to come.
With John finessing his silent treatment, the other Beatles retreated where they would have otherwise been in touch with Cynthia on at least a weekly basis—Ringo, after all, was still a neighbor. But Paul, reflecting a deep sense of personal honor, was the only one to pay Cynthia and Julian a visit. After his fallout with Jane, he found himself single, and full of regrets. He knew Cynthia well enough to pay his personal respects. He brought small comfort, and a big song:
The only person who came to see me was Paul. He arrived one sunny afternoon, bearing a red rose, and said, “I’m so sorry, Cyn, I don’t know what’s come over him. This isn’t right.” On the way down to see us he had written a song for Julian. It began as “Hey Jules” and later became “Hey Jude,” which sounded better. . . . Paul stayed for a while. He told me that John was bringing Yoko to recording sessions, which he, George and Ringo hated.3
Beyond the echoes of Alfred and Julia, this romantic impasse parallels the crossroads Lennon and McCartney encountered five years earlier, when Lennon married Cynthia with the quaintest of old-fashioned motives: to put a respectable face on his indiscretions.4 In McCartney’s mind, Lennon’s first marriage appeared rash and unwise. Still, everybody liked Cynthia: knowing Lennon’s unpredictability, everybody benefited from her reliable emotional anchor and unswerving devotion. Suddenly, for Lennon, these qualities counted for far less than creative stimulation.
Visiting her in the midst of John’s new fling, which would hopefully blow over any week now, Paul sang Cynthia an early draft of a new song, inspired by the child Lennon couldn’t bear to confront (“Hey Jules, don’t make it bad/Take a sad song and make it better”). After all, McCartney had known the boy’s namesake, Lennon’s mother (Julia, Julian, Jude), and the melody swelled with redemption to all who heard it. The romantic fallout at the heart of the band—between two songwriters who had no zipper control—became the subject of the song that revived the Beatles’ bond with their audience, beating out even “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “She Loves You,” and “Yesterday” to become their best-selling single. In the days they spent working out the song before recording, Lennon heard his own situation in early McCartney drafts (“You have found her, now go and get her”) and pronounced it finished by barely touching it. Depending on your vantage point, keeping his fingerprints off McCartney’s lyric was either the most selfish, or the most generous, response Lennon could have had.
With so much fresh material, White Album sessions began in promise before splaying every which way as personality conflicts flared. The week after the songs were demo’d at the Esher meeting, the band gathered at EMI to give “Revolution” eighteen takes, adding overdubs to create Lennon’s lead vocal takes (sung lying on his back) through takes 19 to 20. But the track ran to over ten minutes, trailing off into a fascinating distention of sound effects, pillow talk, and garbled radio. Lennon simply cut the final four minutes and began piecing together an entirely new track, which became “Revolution 9.”
Yoko kept a revealing audio journal of this early “Revolution” session, which still circulates among bootleggers for rare insight into her state of mind. “You mustn’t do anything without me!” she tells John. She praises Paul for communicating with her as an equal and even professes that she has grown to like him as “a younger brother.” When John goes up to the control booth, however, Yoko claims to be “the most insecure person in the world right now,” clearly terrified that John will abandon her and return to his family at any moment.5
By now, Yoko had graduated from “flavor of the month”—her early Apple nickname—to an appendage, and Lennon’s grace period with the press quietly lapsed. The couple made their first public appearance together at the National Sculpture Exhibition in Coventry, where they planted acorns for peace at Coventry Cathedral on June 15. After that, reporters pounced. On June 18, Lennon brought Yoko Ono to the opening night of In His Own Write at the Old Vic.
The confidence he displayed in his music rang smug as he paraded his new lover on his arm in public. Lennon had no patience for how long it took the rest of the world to catch up with his personal life; he simply behaved as though people should get accustomed to his new flame and pay attention to his work. Throughout the spring, he had brainstormed with Victor Spinetti to shape his verse for the stage, and Spinetti remembers this collaboration more than the media commotion. The two rarely discussed the personal upheaval Lennon was traveling through. “Backstage after the first night, he came up to me beaming, and said, ‘Victor you cunt! [a Scouser endearment]. You reminded me of all the things that got me started in this stuff before rock ’n’ roll came along.’ ” 6 The press, however, blared the bigger story. Reporters yelled, “Where’s your wife, John?” as John and Yoko ran into the theater. The next morning, infidelity headlines upstaged his leap to theater. Still in shock, Cynthia and Julian watched the paparazzi hound him from where they had fled in Italy.
Rumors hit the street that the Beatles were recording again, and Apple projects quickly competed with one another for attention and studio time. McCartney produced and promoted Mary Hopkin, Apple signed a new group called Grapefruit, and life around the 95 Wigmore Street offices took on a surreal air of playing at the music business. The Beatles came and went, dashing off ideas and plunking themselves down into studios for consults. While creative in intent, most Apple endeavors now swirled with chaos.7
Peter Asher, Jane’s older brother, had come aboard as an A&R man and soon brought in a young singer-songwriter named James Taylor. When Starr and Harrison flew to California, where Harrison was to appear in a Ravi Shankar documentary, McCartney hung back to tape “Blackbird,” and Lennon and Ono collected EMI sound effects for “Revolution 9.” When Harrison and Starr returned, McCartney took off to promote Mary Hopkin in Los Angeles and Harrison helped Lennon with “Revolution 9.” Harrison skipped the brass session for “Revolution 1,” though, to produce and play his underrated “Sour Milk Sea” for Jackie Lomax, his own Apple signing.
In Lennon’s mind, no theatrical premiere impeded work on his tracks. Sessions forged ahead with Martin’s new twenty-year-old assistant, Chris Thomas, as Lennon led his band through an obstacle course called “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.” With its trapdoor transitions and pointed counterrhythms, the number tested every facet of the Beatles’ ensemble, and they spent a whole session leaping its hurdles in rehearsal before devoting another full recording day to seven takes. The final six-count guitar break held back a flood of energy before opening the spigot into the fade-out, cowbells flailing. Other tracks ambled off into multiple takes that never found traction. The sheer number of songs they pounded out created an exhausting schedule; and unlike previous years, when the sessions had rewarded concentration with ingenuity, these sessions began to drag. Band members routinely avoided one another’s songs, and engineers dodged Lennon numbers instead of jockeying for the chance to work with him.
Some weeks the schedule scans as though Lennon simply hadn’t the time to notice, or care, what others thought, never mind sleep. On July 1, John and Yoko launched a joint gallery exhibition, titled You Are Here, at the Robert Fraser Gallery near the British Museum. From there, they released 365 white helium balloons with messages encouraging people to send return notes on where the balloons were found. The next day they jumped right back into work on Lennon’s “Good Night,” which he had tracked alone on guitar for Martin to score for strings, and then “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the first sketch of which included only Ringo and Paul in seven takes. Saxes were overdubbed onto that sketch before the whole thing was wiped and restarted, with twelve takes at Lennon’s new tempo on July 8.
Fed up with McCartney’s endless fussing over this ditty, Lennon, lead engineer Geoff Emerick remembers, cracked after endless takes chasing McCartney’s precise instructions. “I am fucking stoned!” Lennon declared, “and this is how the fucking song should go!”8 With that, he hammered out a quicker intro on the piano that gave the sing-songy tune some sardonic bite. That evening, the band minus Lennon and Ono attended the press screening for Yellow Submarine. They returned the next day to remake “Revolution” at a quicker tempo, after vetoing Lennon’s desire to make their first attempt the next Beatles single. It’s too slow, came the band’s response. Lennon’s new arrangement roared off a blast of overloaded lead guitar that quotes Pee Wee Gayton’s “Do Unto Others,” a 1954 Imperial side.
Two weeks after the gallery exhibition, on July 15, as the Beatles started work on “Cry Baby Cry,” Apple moved from Wigmore Street to 3 Savile Row, the address seen in the movie Let It Be. The next day, after ten more takes on “Cry Baby Cry,” in which the Beatles barely seemed to cooperate with one another, never mind the technicians, Geoff Emerick walked out, calling the atmosphere “poisonous”: “If anybody of the band members had done anything that an overly defensive John viewed as a potential slight to his new girlfriend—who sat by his side impassively the entire time they were making the album—he would be lashing out at them all with his acid tongue.”9
Lennon was so happy with the “Revolution” remake, he pitched that as their next single. The song Cynthia heard when McCartney came to console her, however, quickly bumped Lennon’s headline. (While Lennon and McCartney worked on this new number, Harrison went into Studio 2 and laid down an acoustic take of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”) The finished song, “Hey Jude,” became famous as a collaboration story: McCartney introduced Lennon to the melody with a “dummy” (or placeholder) lyric, hoping Lennon could punch it up. Lennon, disappointed about redoing “Revolution,” was nonplussed at what his partner had come up with. According to myth, Lennon signed off on McCartney’s “dummy” lyrics at first pass.
“We’re both going through the same bit,” Lennon announced, after taking the line “You have found her, now go and get her” literally.10 However, we now know they spent at least one entire day on “Hey Jude” alone together at McCartney’s house before a week’s worth of sessions at two different studios, so they probably worked this lyric harder than they let on. Like “Yesterday,” or “In My Life,” each of which went through many drafts, “Hey Jude” sounds too cleanly born to be free of effort. It’s the highest kind of art: that which conceals its craft.
The track’s effortless feel belies its bumpy recording. They rehearsed “Hey Jude” assiduously before tracking six takes of it at the first EMI session and adding another twenty-three takes the next day. But slower grooves can be demanding in curious ways, and capturing this one proved elusive. A documentary film crew attended one of these sessions, filming McCartney at the piano, Ringo on drums, and Lennon playing acoustic guitar, with Harrison up in the booth alongside Martin and engineer Ken Scott. This session ended with a terrible row about Harrison’s lead guitar line, which McCartney vetoed. They weren’t in a rush, but EMI was inexplicably booked, and they still wanted to improve the basic track.
To keep the musical momentum rolling, they booked more sessions, plus an orchestra, at a new Soho shop across town called Trident, which boasted London’s first operational eight-track recorder. Tony Bramwell remembers EMI treating new technology “like the Enigma decoding machine that they cracked at Bletchley and drove off in an olive-green camouflaged truck with an armed guard to be returned—sometimes months later—like a new rocket installation, under conditions of great secrecy.”11 This put the Beatles in the awkward position of “inventing” eight-track recording procedure—by linking two four-track machines for eight-track simulation on Sgt. Pepper—but unable to use it for their follow-up. The fourteen-hour Trident session remade the basic rhythmic track and received new bass, lead and backing vocals, and Martin’s orchestration the second day. More overdubs and mixing took place on a third.
Sure enough, this Trident eight-track tape they brought back to EMI sounded funky. The EMI playback equipment gave Ken Scott fits. Scott had actually snuck into Trident to help with the session (even though the EMI headmasters considered such “sneaking around” scandalous) and remembers being satisfied with what he had heard.12 But when he played back the master tape at Abbey Road the next day, he couldn’t explain the murky sound to George Martin. “Just at that moment, John Lennon walked in,” Emerick writes. “George Martin, in his inimitable manner, turned to John and said bluntly, ‘Ken thinks the mix sounds like shit’ ”13 Luckily, Emerick happened to be picking up some personal effects, and Martin grabbed him to help fix the Trident sound. When Emerick reappeared to help Scott, Lennon cried, “Ah, the prodigal son returns!”
“Paul hit a clunker on the piano and said a naughty word,” Lennon gleefully crowed, “but I insisted we leave it in, buried just low enough so that it can barely be heard. Most people won’t ever spot it . . . but WE’LL know it’s there.”14 The group voted to put “Hey Jude” out as the next single, with the new, rockier version of “Revolution” as its B side. The “Penny Lane” single pattern reasserted itself: Lennon had fussed over “Revolution” just as he had over “Strawberry Fields Forever” the previous year, but the McCartney track got far more airplay. In the battle for hits, McCartney’s star presence began to upstage Lennon’s.
As if this weren’t plenty to keep track of, the band pulled the plug on their Baker Street retail-clothing store, which had devolved from its previous year’s headlines, and sponsored an open raid on the final stock, which turned into a near riot. Despite their first business division collapse amid the constant onslaught of tabloid coverage, the Beatles’ ability to focus on music reveals how far their ensemble groove carried them from one crisis to the next—where the business, relationships, and outside activities caused friction, the music held them together.
With “Hey Jude” reviving that ensemble, and the Apple label’s first single appearing to dizzying triumph, the band went straight back to work on two more numbers that didn’t even make the final cut. Once Emerick had helped equalize the Trident sound, Harrison led the band through “Not Guilty” over two nights, staying until 5:45 A.M. on August 8 to go through over one hundred takes. On August 14, Lennon laid down a zany track called “What’s the New Mary Jane,” which had the frazzled, ditzy air of a pothead rounding some cosmic bend, credited to Lennon-McCartney even though Lennon more likely wrote it with Alex Mardas.
Also in August, they finished “Yer Blues” and added horns to McCartney’s solo “Mother Nature’s Son,” before Harrison brought in Eric Clapton for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” which Harrison suggested to him out of the blue as they pulled up to the studio. “I was quite taken aback by this and considered it a funny thing to ask, since he was the Beatles’ guitar player,” Clapton writes. “I was also quite flattered, thinking that not many people get asked to play on a Beatles record. I hadn’t even brought my guitar with me, so I had to borrow his.” It would not be the last time Harrison would revive sessions by inviting a surprise guest.
Clapton’s read of this session portrays Lennon and McCartney as critical of both Harrison and Starr, wisely interpreting Harrison’s invitation as more about group politics than virtuosity. (One of Harrison’s finer musical traits was to steer clear of the whole “guitar hero” playbook.) “George would put songs forward on every project only to find them pushed into the background,” Clapton remembered. “I think that he felt our friendship would give him some support, and that having me there to play might stabilize his position and maybe even earn him some respect. . . . We did just one take, and I thought it sounded fantastic.” John and Paul, however, were “noncommittal.” But their behavior slowly relaxed. Together, the band listened to the track over and over in the control room. After adding some effects and assembling a rough mix, the group then played some of the other songs they were sitting on—an event rare enough that Clapton felt as though he’d “been brought into their inner sanctum.”15 Here was a band confident enough in its work to turn a guest spot into a small listening party with an acknowledged rival, and they knew word would spread about what Clapton heard.
Clapton’s perceptions reflect Lennon and McCartney’s attitude toward both Harrison and Starr, and anticipate the next wallop. One day, Emerick recalls, John and Ringo happened upon McCartney’s brass overdub to “Mother Nature’s Son” and “shattered” the good vibe; but after they left, the bassist laid down two more songs: “Etcetera,” which has never appeared, and “Wild Honey Pie,” a wacky throwaway (as if responding to Lennon’s “Mary Jane”; there was more than one pothead in this band). Finally, at the end of a long, grinding summer when song takes stretched out indefinitely and wait times lasted even longer, Ringo Starr simply walked out.
It’s hard to emphasize how dramatic a move this must have been, coming from its most insecure member, the last to join, and its most politically adept. To drum on Lennon and McCartney songs his whole career would have been more than enough to keep any player with less self-respect groveling until the act hit Vegas. But Ringo had always been the perfect fit for the band precisely because of his humility, which many still mistake for dumb luck. With two of the biggest egos in the business running sessions, and a third figuring out how to gain a foothold with his original material, Ringo’s sturdy presence on the stool in back anchored the band’s dual monarchy as nothing else could. So far, disputes had tended to be between Lennon and everybody except Ringo; these sessions are a first, where McCartney’s veto of Harrison’s “Hey Jude” lines signaled greater political tension.
Ringo’s abrupt walkout measures the band’s deteriorating purpose. Far more than in any previous sessions, group interactions had turned into political quicksand; his peers treated him like a hired hand and made him play a waiting game on a daily basis. You might think Harrison would have joined Ringo’s protest for moral support, but the other three simply forged ahead: McCartney’s “Back in the USSR” spilled out with its author on drums, Harrison on guitar, and Lennon on bass (for the first time). That same day in August, Cynthia served Lennon with divorce papers. McCartney laid down two more drum tracks the next day, and then put down his own bass track and lead vocal, and Lennon and Harrison sang along with handclaps. They all felt quite sure Ringo would return in a day or two, and they kept the whole incident quiet from the press (which shows just how much control they exercised around their image).
Then they tackled Lennon’s “Dear Prudence” all over again at Trident studios, with McCartney impersonating Ringo on drums (he may imitate Ringo even better than he imitates Little Richard). The next day brought overdubs and lead vocals. They mixed “Prudence” at the end of August as the “Hey Jude” / “Revolution” single hit stores, their first record with the new, frankly enigmatic green Apple label, designed by Gene Mahon.
Through gallery owner Robert Fraser and Barry Miles, McCartney had begun collecting paintings by the surrealist René Magritte, one of which was an oversize apple sitting inside a typical morning room (The Listening Room, 1958). As the new logo for their company, it sat inside the 45-rpm grooves as a photographic still life, with a hole in the middle suggesting a donut, as if the subtext read, “This is not an apple.” Along with their string of witty album covers and packages, it was another design coup.
After a band meeting where egos were massaged, Ringo returned to EMI on September 3, and the group prepared for a David Frost (Frost on Sunday) TV appearance. McCartney smothered his drums with flowers. Ringo’s walkout got resolved just before George Martin left for a long-planned vacation in September.
Martin’s departure became an index of the indecision and miscommunication among principals—he was clearly as much a part of the band’s dysfunction as their own superstar preoccupations. Martin, who had sat by for all manner of madness, including a Lennon acid trip in the middle of Sgt. Pepper, was stumped by the band’s current quandary. The sessions dragged on far beyond what anybody had planned, and they already had more than enough material for a very strong album. They had simply failed to tell their producer that they were intent on creating a double record to complete a contractual matter with EMI and move ahead with Apple. Martin’s departure (or escape) was his way of throwing up his hands; he had always been against a double album. McCartney was so self-involved he didn’t seem to realize Martin would take a break. Chris Thomas was absolutely petrified. Martin had simply left him a note saying, “Feel free to attend Beatles sessions.” “But Paul walked in and he was obviously a bit knocked about the whole thing,” Thomas remembers. “ ‘Well, if you want to produce us, then produce us. But if not, then you can just fuck off!’ And I just went ‘What?! Nobody said anything about producing.’ ”16
Thomas, at just twenty-one, had to prove himself very quickly to appease the four-headed monster. “It was more like, ‘Well we’ll give you a try, and if you don’t measure up, you’re out.’ ” A storied producer now, with a thousand credits, Thomas can laugh about it.17 Over the first several days remaking “Helter Skelter,” he proved his musical smarts and quickly won the band’s trust. He got producer credits on session logs, and Lennon insisted his name get listed on the album credits. In a small way, the band’s sealed perimeters opened up to include a new engineer, which may have helped convince them that Martin was not the “essential” man he made himself out to be. Another side benefit to Martin’s absence came as the Beatles liberated the new 3M eight-track machine from EMI technical engineer Dave Harries for the remaining work, doubtless using the competing Trident machine as leverage.
“Hey Jude” sounds like a benediction, and it gave the Beatles’ relationship with their audience the jolt of recognition everybody had been waiting for. Finally, the summer of turmoil and loss took refuge in a perfect single from the band that had always reflected the audience’s best hopes back to itself. But the song also trumpeted the Beatles’ new company, Apple, and everyone agreed it needed a proper televised launch, especially after the retail-clothing fiasco on Baker Street. It had been more than a year since their last formal album (Sgt. Pepper), and with the world reeling from war, revolution, and student protest, the band’s spring oldies romp, “Lady Madonna,” began to sound like cheery tokenism (and couldn’t quite atone for Magical Mystery Tour).
The Frost on Sunday appearance on September 8 kicked “Hey Jude” into the stratosphere. Already, radio had made the song inexorable; it soared beyond everything else it followed that summer, including Otis Redding’s aching, posthumous “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” and Archie Bell and the Drells’ “Tighten Up,” as well as strong work from Simon and Garfunkel (“Mrs. Robinson”) and The Doors (“Hello, I Love You”). The stiffest aesthetic competition to “Hey Jude” came from Lennon’s old sparring partner, now a mumbling god: Bob Dylan had put out a quiet, commanding acoustic album, John Wesley Harding, back in December 1967. As 1968 wore on, its fiercely obscure tone seeped through rock’s heavier textures. These were the competing sounds that sound-tracked Chicago’s days of rage.
For both “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” on TV, the instrumental background came from the master track, and the vocals were done live. This gave McCartney’s close-up shots immediacy and freshness, with Lennon, newly hippified, harmonizing beneath. “Revolution” added McCartney and Harrison doing their doo-wop “bow-ohm, shoo-be-do-wah, bow-ohm, shoo-be-do-wah” rejoinders to the faster tempo, an instant collectible, the irresistible new groove giving leftists fits: the song was a tour de force of rock classicism, but they chafed at Lennon’s seemingly deliberate irony. “There is freedom and movement in the music, even as there is sterility and repression in the lyrics,” Greil Marcus wrote. “The music doesn’t say ‘cool it’ or ‘don’t fight the cops’. . . . The music dodges the message and comes out in front.”18
Again, the debate over this song brings a case where all sides make valid points. Taped on September 4, Lennon reiterates his “count me out—in” hedge, which got criticized as fence-sitting, but could just as easily be construed as emphasizing awareness of the left’s setbacks in Paris, Chicago, and Prague since Lennon’s first take on the same lyric in early June. In interviews, Lennon insisted on the equivocation. For all the controversy surrounding “Revolution,” and how it disappointed radicals, close attention to Lennon’s comments reveals ambivalence vying with principle. To Lennon, revolution for the sake of revolution seemed as wrongheaded as the politics that had steered the system wrong in the first place. Wiping out the existing order would only create a vacuum, he argued. Just where had any modern, all-inclusive “revolution” succeeded—Communist China? Lennon’s Mao reference puts the onus on “revolutionaries” to come up with something better—“We’d all love to see the plan”:
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone any-how . . .
Why should any social “revolution” necessarily refer to Communism? Lennon asked. Mao may have found Marx useful, but he was clearly a cautionary counterexample: in Lennon’s view, backing China’s Communist tyrant equaled enforced abstinence. Paradoxically, Lennon’s “Revolution” makes Winston Churchill’s famous argument about democracy: that it’s the most oppressive system tried “except all those other forms.”
The song became a flash point, and Lennon did his best to answer for it in interviews with the leftist press. On September 17, Robert Fraser brought journalist Jonathan Cott to Lennon’s apartment for his first lengthy interview for Rolling Stone, the San Francisco bimonthly that had debuted with Lennon (as Private Gripweed) on its cover the previous year. Like the faster “out/in” version of “Revolution” he sang on Frost on Sunday, this interview took place just weeks after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, somehow an American rejoinder to Russian tanks that had rolled into Prague, wiping out Prague Spring hopes. Lennon’s attitude shifted markedly from when he wrote and recorded either version of the song, and yet his candor remains decisively nonviolent and antimilitant. “There’s no point in dropping out because it’s the same there and it’s got to change,” Lennon told Cott. “But I think it all comes down to changing your head and, sure, I know that’s a cliché.” What would Lennon say to a black power guy, for example?
“Well, I can’t tell him anything ’cause he’s got to do it himself,” Lennon replied. “If destruction’s the only way he can do it, there’s nothing I can say that could influence him ’cause that’s where he’s at, really. We’ve all got that in us, too, and that’s why I did the ‘Out and in’ bit on a few takes and in the TV version of ‘Revolution’—‘Destruction, well, you know, you can count me out, and in,’ like yin and yang. I prefer ‘out.’ But we’ve got the other bit in us. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I was in his position. I don’t think I’d be so meek and mild. I just don’t know.”19
While the White Album sessions had already produced more than the usual walkouts and musical standoffs, the wonder is how many gratifying rhythmic waves the Beatles still shaped. “Birthday” turned into an all-night affair: the bassist, first to arrive, at 5 P.M., reworked yet another Bobby Parker “Watch Your Step” circular riff, and the Beatles laid down twenty takes of the track, until eight-thirty, and then broke to watch The Girl Can’t Help It at McCartney’s house with Chris Thomas and Pattie Harrison. Revived by the energy from Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Little Richard—and a bodacious Jayne Mansfield—they returned to the studio to finish nine more takes and overdubs (with Pattie Harrison and Yoko Ono singing backup, Yoko’s first) for a final mono mix at five-thirty in the morning.
In October, they finished off “Honey Pie,” “Savoy Truffle” (without Lennon), “Martha My Dear” (without Lennon), Harrison’s “Long Long Long” (without Lennon), “I’m So Tired,” “Bungalow Bill,” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” (featuring McCartney and Ringo alone). If “I’m Only Sleeping” was one long slow leak of a song, “I’m So Tired” was the flat tire of celebrity tedium flopping around in Lennon’s head. Singing “curse Sir Walter Raleigh” while dragging on a cigarette, Lennon exhales with an addict’s anguish over the physical compulsion, the inability to quit, and the profiteer’s trickery that got him hooked in the first place. “I’m So Tired” also became a song that expressed everything about the sessions that made them both unbearable and worthwhile, exhausting and yet meaningful, Lennon turning fame’s fatigue into an exercise in redeemed contempt. If “Birthday” celebrated the heights the band could still plunge into, “I’m So Tired” conveyed the weariness that was setting in.
Finally, on October 13, four months and a lifetime after starting, Lennon recorded the last song, the open-wound ballad named for his mother, “Julia,” by himself. It still captures the isolated dread, confounding fear, and free-fall grief his mother’s death summoned in him, and it’s hard to imagine he would have found this same emotional pitch in front of the others. Alongside “Look at Me” (written in India), “Julia” hints at the amplified anguish to come on 1970’s Plastic Ono Band.
The tracks completed, Harrison and Starr fled, and Lennon and McCartney put The White Album to bed with Chris Thomas over one final, grueling session where they mixed, sequenced, and mastered all thirty numbers in twenty-four hours to meet EMI’s November 22 release date for the Christmas market. “Not many people realize, sequencing comes at the end and it can be tricky,” Thomas remembers. “You think certain tracks go together and then you try it and they don’t, so you go back and try it again . . . and you go round for a bit like that. It can be a brain-boxer.”20 At one point, Thomas came upon McCartney sprawled across a mixing board, completely conked.
After Lennon agreed to let “Hey Jude” win the A side of the band’s summer single, backed with the revised, faster version of “Revolution,” the battles over sequencing during this marathon twenty-four-hour session included Lennon’s snarky title to “Yer Blues,” despite McCartney’s arguments that the track deserved better. But there was no doubt in Lennon’s mind about commanding three studios at once and every engineer who was available to help him mix and master “Revolution 9,” and staring down McCartney to insist on its inclusion against everybody else’s wishes. This last one proved him not just right but prescient in ways McCartney still doesn’t seem to understand. It’s possible Lennon used “What’s the New Mary Jane” as a negotiating chip to keep “Revolution 9” in track sequence—he’d give McCartney “Wild Honey Pie,” but insisted on concluding with “Revolution 9.” (Did McCartney answer this by placing Lennon’s “Good Night” afterward as a hushed coda? Or was that Lennon’s insecurity, leaping into the void and then pulling back?)
Emerick’s memory of how “Revolution 9” made the final cut has the sting of resignation: “I heard through the grapevine that John and Paul ultimately had a huge row over ‘Revolution No. 9,’ Paul absolutely did not want it on the album, and John was just as adamant that it would be on there. In the end, of course, he got his way.”21 McCartney can still give reporters quotes about wanting credit as the “true” avant-garde Beatle when he’s never talked about “Revolution 9,” or defended it alongside his vaunted affection for John Cage and Edgard Varèse.
Perhaps “Revolution 9” makes the most “sense” as an audio collage in the same way Richard Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) worked as a visual collage of American magazine advertisements. Since his splash at the Independent Group’s 1956 This Is Tomorrow show, Hamilton had inspired many pop art imitators. He went on to become an influential instructor at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with students who included Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry. Robert Fraser suggested Hamilton for the White Album design, and the choice extended the Beatles’ identification with the pop-art movement and its principles.
As Eduardo Paolozzi did in I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything from 1947, Hamilton’s “Just What Is It . . .” compiles all the hoarier aspects of consumer culture into an “idealized” living room haunted by Al Jolson from the window, trying to “make sense” of all the competing modernist images of perfection, unity, and art. What kind of “art” hangs on the wall of the future? A cartoon-book cover next to an old-fashioned portrait of a dignitary above a woman (wife? mother?) sitting on the couch dressed as a stripper, touching her left breast, with “pasties” on her nipples. The dad, “Mr. Universe,” flexes for the camera with a huge Tootsie Pop obscuring his undies.
For the Beatles, Hamilton aimed to create something as iconic as Sgt. Pepper, only completely different, and he sold them the sheer white sleeve by saying it would “stick out” in crowded record shops. In Hamilton’s hands, however, this simple gesture transformed a “high”-art device with a Dada conceit: the cover “photo” was a blank white space, with the words “The BEATLES” stenciled at an angle off-center above a serial number. The idea merged the “limited edition” lithograph or etching category with the mass-produced pop album, the blank projection screen of a band so famous they needn’t appear on their own album with the pretense of printing a limited number of copies for collectors.
It’s not clear whether Hamilton heard “Revolution 9” before conceiving his poster design, but the collage and pop-art conceits play off Lennon’s extended sound quilt—the parallels are striking enough that Hamilton’s fold-out print probably made “Revolution 9” more accessible to more listeners. In the poster, Hamilton mirrors Lennon’s aural ideas through visual imagery. Like a good art student, Lennon uses appropriation, ironic quotation, and commodity fetishism, editing together the chaos of Beatlemania (wild screams) with found sound (from radio, TV, and crowd noise) and transforming them into a larger, fully realized theater of the mind. If “Revolution 9” was a dreamscape, Hamilton’s collage suggests a formalized, static snapshot of its images in motion. As an experiment in the same line as “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am the Walrus,” “Revolution 9” is a pure exploration of how Lennon’s bugged subconscious sounds, or at least how he imagined it might.
Finishing off this giant album, the single biggest project in the Beatles’ career, might have felt like relief to Lennon and Ono. But their increasingly active public profile hid some explosive secrets. Already, they faced a harsh British conservatism for the way they snubbed marital convention and parenthood. Kyoko, Ono’s daughter, had stayed with her father for the interim, but Ono was preparing for a custody battle. Beyond this, Lennon grew his hair down to his shoulders, and Ono confronted far more prejudice and hate mail for being a rock star’s Japanese girlfriend than she had ever confronted as an avant-garde artist. On top of all this, John and Yoko broke two more giant taboos that only aggravated everything else.
Ono had become pregnant as early as May 1968, and must have known her condition by June, or July at the latest. This means Lennon accused Cynthia of adultery at Kenwood in June while fathering a new child with Yoko—a child they desperately wanted. It makes his confrontation both more abusive and glaringly hypocritical. Second, Cynthia’s remarks about John looking thin and “gaunt” hint at heroin abuse as early as June, and the Beatles knew of his new proclivity even sooner, and probably swapped junkie readings of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” behind his back when they recorded it in July (“I need a fix ’cause I’m goin’ down”). So beyond upsetting his divorce settlement, Ono’s pregnancy threatened their recreational heroin sniffing. And only a deeply addictive and disorienting narcotic like this explains why they still portrayed themselves as victims of both Lennon’s band and his larger circle even as McCartney and Starr gave them shelter.
Other forces allowed Lennon to present a much more sympathetic picture to the world. On Friday afternoon, October 18, barely twenty-four hours after John got home from his epic White Album mixing session, he and Yoko awoke to a loud banging on their front door. The London Drug Squad, led by Sergeant Norman Pilcher, ordered them to allow police dogs in for a drug raid. Ono answered the door, but seeing police, and dressed only in a vest, she bolted it shut again and returned to bed with Lennon, who called his solicitors. Sergeant Pilcher later reported that “An attempt was made to enter the premises by way of a rear ground floor window but this was prevented by Lennon who held the window closed.” The detective sergeant claimed Lennon had said: “I don’t care who you are, you’re not bloody coming in here.” A struggle ensued for eight minutes as they tried to force open the front door. Lennon finally relented and let them in.22
He had known he was in Pilcher’s sights. His friend Don Short from the Daily Mirror had tipped him off. But coming off that final White Album marathon, Lennon was caught off guard. Once the police established that the twenty-eight-year-old Beatle and thirty-five-year-old Ono were alone, they all waited half an hour for two search dogs, Yogi and Boo-Boo, to sniff out the four large rooms. By that point two lawyers and several press photographers had also arrived, as word spread of Lennon’s troubles. Although the dogs discovered only 219 grams of cannabis resin, about two ounces, hidden in a leather binoculars case, they hauled John and Yoko into custody amid a squall of paparazzi. (Starr had taken over the flat from Jimi Hendrix, who had a ghastly dope reputation even then, so Lennon had scoured the place for drugs when he and Yoko moved in after their awkward stay as guests of McCartney’s in St. John’s Wood.)
No account of London’s upper tier of law enforcement would be complete without Norman Pilcher, who climbed to the rank of detective sergeant by arresting Donovan in 1966 and the Rolling Stones in 1967. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards actually did time in jail, a miscalculation that brought enough notoriety to earn Pilcher a veiled sneer in Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” (“Semolina Pilchard . . . climbing up the Eiffel Tower”). Busting Lennon suggested that Pilcher understood rock’s rough pecking order—nobody brought bigger headlines. John and Yoko were taken to Paddington Green police station and charged with possession and “obstructing the police in the execution of a search warrant.” The next day at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court, the couple was remanded on bail and their case was scheduled for November 28.23 A picture snapped outside the courtroom showed Lennon sheltering a distraught Yoko from baying paparazzi. (They used this shot on the back of Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions.)
Lennon’s arrest renewed the war of public relations between the fading cultural values of those in power and the new ethic of subversive pleasure from the young. Jagger and Richards had been sprung from jail the previous summer. But tabloids like the News of the World still fueled negative opinion by reporting on elaborate rock parties, even tipping off officials in exchange for headlines. In this heated atmosphere, John and Yoko were engulfed in a press frenzy.
The next week, they stirred more outrage by announcing that Ono was carrying Lennon’s child, due in February 1969. Suddenly, it was clear that Yoko had become pregnant before Lennon left Cynthia the previous May, and this trumped even his marijuana bust. History condemns them further, now that we know of Ono’s heroin use during this period.24 To the public of that era, though, the event underscored how even as the Beatles soared back into favor with a hit single and pending album, they were no longer untouchable. In the establishment mind, Lennon deserved scorn for abandoning his first wife and Julian, who had turned five. As the court papers put it, Lennon’s was an “offense of moral turpitude.”
Within a fortnight, Ono was admitted to Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in Mayfair. Between five and six months pregnant, she showed symptoms she might miscarry, and doctors urged hospital bed rest to save her baby. With the timeline of Lennon’s extramarital love affair now a public matter, his first wife was granted a swift divorce, and sole custody of Julian, on November 8. At month’s end, Apple Records released John and Yoko’s first album, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, a series of tape experiments recorded the previous May in Lennon’s attic, packaged between full frontal (and rear) naked photos of the couple holding hands, eyeing the camera with bemused indifference. Even as the musical Hair shocked Broadway audiences with its nude cast, for the prudish Brits (“No sex, please”), this image was roughly ten times as mortifying.
“Originally, I was going to record Yoko,” John said, “and I thought the best picture of her for an album would be naked. So after that, when we got together, it just seemed natural for us both to be naked. Of course, I’ve never seen my prick out on an album before.”25 EMI’s CEO, Sir Joseph Lockwood, refused to distribute the record, saying both parties looked “ugly.” In some ways, because neither John nor Yoko possessed “conventional” Hollywood beauty, their celebration of their natural bodies was a revolution in itself. Track Records, an independent label, stepped in to handle the product in the UK. In America, Tetragrammaton handled distribution by papering over the nudity with a brown paper sleeve, with only John and Yoko’s heads peering from behind an oval cutout. Officials in New Jersey weren’t having any of it: they seized the product as “pornographic.” “When two great Saints meet it is a humbling experience,” McCartney wrote in his understated yet revealing dedication. “The long battles to prove he was a saint.”26
Public outrage was sudden and irreversible: the sharp-witted Lennon, the “engine room of the Beatles,” who had presided over the English music scene for the past five years, honored guest in 1965 at Buckingham Palace for his MBE, had suddenly morphed into a busted hippie and faithless husband. This was a fate far worse even than Magical Mystery Tour. At least that was simply daft—a pretentious home movie posing as a Christmas TV special. Lennon had not only abandoned his child and wife but—worse still—begun dabbling in wacky art projects with an Oriental consort, a Japanese hippie turned concubine with strange first and last names. All this counted against Ono even before her outspoken (then radical) feminism.
To the older generation, Lennon’s crime lay in taking a lover and abandoning his family. Add to this the token racism of Anglo-American society, which viewed Yoko as a foreigner, an Asian seductress. And to Lennon’s fans, it was hard to figure which offense was greater: setting up shop outside the Beatles, or this strange new companion, a far-out “conceptual artist,” a New York “intellectual,” who in addition to being foreign was downright alien. Wasn’t Yoko Ono another one of those arty, pretentious sophisticates Lennon enjoyed mocking? In the wake of 1967’s Sgt. Pepper and “All You Need Is Love,” it almost seemed as if he were flushing all the Beatle goodwill down the toilet. In America, a novelty song by an unknown nineteen-year-old singer named “Rainbo” voiced what many fans were thinking: “John, You’ve Gone Too Far This Time.” “Rainbo” was a pseudonym for future Oscar nominee Sissy Spacek.
Hounded by the press, separated from Julian, and finished with his latest Beatle epic, Lennon moved into Ono’s hospital room, preferring the confines of a healing chamber to the Beatle bubble. He slept at her bedside for two weeks, on the floor first and then, when the hospital relented, an adjacent cot. The two of them filled time by making tapes on a portable cassette recorder, writing poems, reading the papers aloud, and singing songs (“No bed for Beatle John,” Yoko ad-libbed). With the drug hearing still ahead of him, Lennon distracted himself with a cartoon called “A Short Essay on Macrobiotics,” for the underground magazine Harmony.
As Yoko’s condition worsened, they placed a microphone on her womb and recorded the child’s heartbeat. Having weathered their first eight months together, they desperately hoped a child might bring them the comfort the rest of the world withheld, and sanction their affection with the promise only babies bring. Here, something inside Lennon found its voice: insisting on staying with his lover instead of fleeing toward his manager or his band, he fought the hospital authorities to sleep on a cot if that’s what it took. He didn’t seem to care if his label rejected his experimental noise or the law hassled him for drugs or nudity; his goal was to comfort Yoko and secure her strength for a healthy baby. Cynthia could only wonder how such a forbiddingly small and intense woman brought about such a gallingly decent reversal in Lennon’s behavior, although you could analyze this gesture as compensating for the child he had abandoned.
No heroic measure, by Ono, Lennon, or medical authorities, could ultimately prevent what increasingly appeared as inevitable. Yoko, who had already suffered miscarriages with Anthony Cox, finally lost Lennon’s child on November 21. The child was buried quietly at a secret location; no paperwork has ever surfaced.
Given no time to recover, Lennon appeared the next week in court on drug charges. His solicitor told the judge that Yoko had miscarried as a result of the arrest and surrounding press storm. Beyond their loss, there were fears about how a conviction might affect Yoko’s visiting visa status, as well as her custody of Kyoko. All charges against Yoko were dropped; Lennon pled guilty only to cannabis possession.27 In exchange, the court waived the obstruction charge. Lennon paid a fine of £150 plus 20 guineas in court costs. It seemed like a good deal at the time.
That fall, as Lennon lunged from crisis to metaphysical trauma, The White Album flew out of record shops, its all-white cover an instant talisman that mixed hip nonchalance with austere craftsmanship. Two Virgins followed and flopped, but not because of any outrage its cover inspired. Those who picked it up bought it for its cover, and treated the record’s experimental sounds as a mild curiosity, something to be listened to once and filed away.
By the end of the year, political obsessions loomed so large that they distorted the personal tragedies of John and Yoko. Jonathan Cott’s landmark Rolling Stone interview ran in the issue dated November 28, 1968, with John and Yoko’s naked bums on the cover (anticipating Two Virgins), and a series of letters appeared in the Black Dwarf about listeners’ lost faith in the “Revolution” single: “An Open Letter to John Lennon,” signed by columnist John Hoyland, criticized the Beatle of naïveté, and denounced his dabbling in political themes without understanding the street’s-eye view of the organizer: “Recently your music has lost its bite. At a time when the music of the Stones has been getting stronger and stronger. . . . The Stones have understood that the life and authenticity of their music—quite apart from their personal integrity—demanded that they take part in this drama—that they refuse to accept the system that’s fucking up our lives. . . . There is no such thing as a polite revolution.” The letter reflected a political intensity so profound that only those alive at the time can understand Hoyland’s criticism and his recognition that the political violence of this period had now made the Beatles seem staid.
Such criticism understandably had an effect on Lennon. His printed response touched on themes he would stick to even through his most radical phase in the early 1970s, when he joined up with politicos Hoffman and Rubin in Greenwich Village. He was adamant about nonviolence, and how the concept of any “revolution” rang hollow without a clear plan for what new society might replace the old:
Dear John,
Your letter didn’t sound patronizing—it was. Who do you think you are? What do you think you know? . . . I know what I’m up against—narrow minds—rich/poor. . . . I don’t remember saying that “Revolution” was revolutionary. . . .
Lennon zeros in on the key point about destroying what’s wrong with the existing political systems. Of course there’s something wrong with a system that inspires such a destructive response, Lennon argues, since it would only reinforce the existing violent pathologies.
What are the alternatives? Lennon demands. What new system of government will replace the old? And if the Beatles vs. the Stones inspires the same kinds of arguments, then such analogies provide weak frames of reference, and listeners can’t be paying very close attention. Rock ’n’ roll had already been a powerful force for changing people’s worldview; ambivalence about political upheaval would seem to be a relatively sane response to 1968’s dilemmas.28
It’s curious that leftists like Hoyland weren’t more incensed by Magical Mystery Tour, which overplayed the psychedelic conceits just as the antiwar movement surged. With the billowing success of the “Hey Jude” / “Revolution” single, and the thirty songs that came tumbling after on The White Album, the Beatles erased Magical Mystery Tour from pop consciousness. In any other context this would have done more than simply revive their career. But an audience once enthralled by the Beatles now seemed immune—Lennon’s engagement wasn’t enough, or didn’t measure up to radical hopes, or sent the wrong signals when he could be doing so much more.
The battle in the United States between youth and the establishment had reached one impasse after another, and the Beatles had regained their footing only to find they had lost some relevance. The punch line came just as Yoko entered Queen Charlotte’s Hospital the week after the arrest: Nixon’s “law and order” campaign, and cynical “Southern strategy,” elected him president of the United States in November 1968, dashing what was left of antiwar hopes.
Ever since, the sixties rock mythos has been oversimplified beyond all reason: to the left, it represents a ferment of change and possibility; the right still uses it as shorthand for all manner of cultural ailments, from sexual and women’s liberation to religious freedom, abortion rights, and civil dissent. Ronald Reagan, governor of California from 1967 to 1975, went on to become president in 1980 by leveraging these same cultural divides, and George W. Bush, a boomer himself, ran his entire presidency on these themes. As the Vietnam War dragged on, American campus dread of Nixon between 1968 and 1974 reached fever pitch, rivaled only by progressives’ distaste for George W. Bush two generations later.
As 1968 began to recede into the holidays and New Year, Lennon and Ono grieved the loss of their first child by diving back into public appearances. The times called for activist rock stars, and no Two Virgins nudity scandal or miscarriage would get in the way of their promoting their romance as performance art. Their most notable performance came at Stonebridge House in Wembley, on December 11, where the Rolling Stones were filming Rock and Roll Circus. The prospective TV special featured the Who doing “A Quick One, While He’s Away,” Taj Mahal, and the debut of a band Jagger had discovered, Jethro Tull.
Lennon sang a shaky version of “Yer Blues” with Keith Richards on bass, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, and Hendrix’s Mitch Mitchell on drums, billed as the Dirty Mac. Lennon and Jagger taped a halfhearted introduction, but the entire project got shelved due to the Stones’ misgivings about their own tired performance. It was Brian Jones’s last appearance. Between Lennon’s vocal and some admiring support, “Yer Blues” achieves a sloppy grace that lives on in the ABKCO DVD which finally appeared in 1996. But the comedy bit with Jagger flops.
Over Christmas, John and Yoko took the stage at the Royal Albert Hall for a “Celebration in December” art benefit, billed as an “Alchemical Wedding,” in which they squirmed inside a white bag on the stage, shades of stunts still to come. The following week they dressed up as Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus for the Apple Christmas party.
To get his comments into the British press alongside Cott’s Rolling Stone interview in America, Lennon greeted two students, Maurice Hindle and Daniel Wiles, for a long talk that expanded on leftist discontent with “Revolution.” Lennon, fast becoming an authority on political revolution, stuck to his ambivalence, insisting that “ruthless destruction” would only lead to having “ruthless destroyers” in power. The Soviets were just as ambitious as any Capitalist country when it came to competing in the Olympics or the Space Race, he continued. Lennon added that the petty bickering on the far left about being “extremer than thou” revealed them as “exclusionary snobs,” incapable of leading, never mind organizing, a united movement. “But I tell you what,” he continued, “if those people start a revolution, me and the Stones’ll probably be the first ones they’ll shoot. Y’know, I mean that. . . . And it’s him—it’s the guy that wrote the letter that’ll do it, y’know. [Gestures around to his stockbroker mansion] They’d shoot me just for living here, y’know.”29
Ono’s miscarriage may have pricked Lennon’s conscience, and prompted some meager attempts at civility. He in fact asked Cynthia for visitation rights with Julian. She in turn asked their longtime chauffeur, Les Anthony, about the scene at the Montagu Street flat and he described it for her over a cup of tea:
He told me it was just as well that Julian hadn’t gone to the . . . flat while John and Yoko were there. “It was a complete tip,” he said. “They were doing heroin and other drugs and neither of them knew whether it was day or night. The floor was littered with rubbish. Couldn’t have had a little one there.”30
Cynthia duly moved out to find her own place with Julian, and John and Yoko returned to Kenwood for a month near the end of the year to get the property sold. Then they took over Ringo and Maureen Starr’s neighboring house as the Starrs moved into Peter Sellers’s home. Only a year earlier, Lennon had been marching down glitzy stairs in a white tuxedo, snapping his fingers to “Your Mother Should Know” for the finale of Magical Mystery Tour as protestors marched on the Pentagon. Now, as he moved into Ringo’s house with a new lover, the Lennon who sang “I Am the Walrus” seemed like a character from some distant past.