Lennon’s solo years trace a radically different creative arc from his Beatle career. By adopting a Scouser’s lower-class resentment to sneer his way into show business and conquer the world (“just rattle your jewelry”), his songwriting guile as a Beatle veered between musical fox and spiritual jape; hit movie songs and romantic ballads underwrote experimental rock concepts and lurching self-expression. In the sixties, Lennon had increasingly defined himself against McCartney to stretch standard songs toward impudent forms: the love triangles in “She Loves You,” “If I Fell,” and “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” sprint forward into coy first-personisms, like “Norwegian Wood” and “Nowhere Man,” and on through single-chord tape fantasias like “Tomorrow Never Knows,” even more personal statements like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and toward the outer reaches of “I Am the Walrus,” “Glass Onion,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” and his kitchen-sink manifesto “Revolution 9.”
Lennon’s radical threads dovetailed into early experimental solo efforts with Yoko Ono. Then, just as he set out on his own from the safest show-business harbor anybody had ever conceived, he redirected these stylistic extremes back into conservative frames. “Come Together” wedged hallucinatory doggerel into a tightly knit blues. And where “Hey Bulldog” and “I Dig a Pony” suspended nonsense atop blues forms, the daring on Plastic Ono Band, his first post-Beatle solo effort, is all thematic—here, even his lyrics trace a new minimalism. As if he couldn’t simply release something on his own, Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band album is the experimental mirror piece, and it still holds up extremely well, given that her strong suit was more visual and conceptual than musical. (Nobody would mistake these albums except for the title they share.) Anyone still underrating Lennon’s guitar flair needs to account for his yammering squalls on Ono’s “Why” or his slide work on “Why Not.”
The Beatles’ career now assumes such a familiar shape in rock mythology that it’s easy to forget their pioneering stature at the time. In late 1987, critic Mark Moses summed up the band’s influence back when reviewing an installment of their CD reissues for the Boston Phoenix: “Somewhere in our subconscious, we expect sufficiently ambitious bands to have life spans that mimic the contours and even the tempo of the Beatles’. In its grossest form, their trajectory could be described as frenzied pop mastery / unstuffy elegance / conceptual coup / renunciation of conceptual coup / end in pieces.”1 One way of looking at Lennon’s solo work is as Beatle John in reverse: blazing string of hit singles (“Give Peace a Chance,” “Cold Turkey,” “Instant Karma,” “Power to the People”) / kiss-of-death critical breakthrough (Plastic Ono Band) / utopian popular surge (Imagine) / political animus (Some Time in New York City) / midlife crisis as cautionary tale (the Los Angeles Troubadour incidents) / mid-period lull (Mind Games, Walls and Bridges, Pussy Cats) / celebrity collaborations (Elton John, David Bowie) / roots move (Rock ’n’ Roll) / greatest hits (Shaved Fish) / retire early: grand pause. Then: comeback.
Compared to his Beatle period, Lennon’s emotional life became ever more bound up with his work: during the sixties, his creative work collided with reality at irregular intervals; he wrote his most revealing song, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” while alone in Spain in October 1966. Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper countered an emotional black hole, which boomeranged back into so-called “reality” through more sobering material typified on The White Album and in later blues forms. In the early seventies, Lennon’s mediocre work channeled his emotional ennui more directly—his solo period contains weak records, but they tend to be weak in interesting ways. And his vocal audacity rescued him from many a wrong move. The hinge between these two periods comes with Plastic Ono Band, a thematic extension of “Cold Turkey,” which equated heroin withdrawal with pulling out of the Beatles.
Reducing Lennon’s end-game to pithy quips dramatizes just how far outside typical pop norms the new John Lennon brand reached. Insiders seesawed between delight and bewilderment at his uneven muse; the larger audience adopted him as another wacky eccentric who showed up on Dick Cavett or Mike Douglas or the Jerry Lewis telethon, paraded through wire stories and pulp magazines, presented at the Grammys or duetted with Elton John. Once again, the Atlantic Ocean barely explained the huge gap in Lennon’s persona: his British homeland never forgave him for relocating to America, while American fans cherished his presence and joined his battle for residency. He willingly traded his musical integrity to support radical causes: aesthetics became less important than protesting injustice (“John Sinclair,” “Attica State”) and feminism (“Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” “Woman”).
The Beatles and the 1960s defined each other, but for such a political decade, most of their music aimed somewhere beyond politics. Toward the end, Lennon pushed his peers to comment more directly on their era. Similarly, Lennon’s solo persona took shape as the sixties unraveled: his individual voice developed as America suffered a malignant presidency and constitutional crisis, and his marital squalls paralleled his legal battles, both over residency and intellectual property rights. He joined Woody Guthrie, Martin Luther King Jr., Charlie Chaplin, and many, many others in J. Edgar Hoover’s impressive string of intimate enemies. To British ears, a Japanese wife, cultural resentment, and radical politics made this post-Beatle Lennon seem vaguely ungrateful; to Americans, flashing a peace sign for photographer Bob Gruen in front of the Statue of Liberty, there were few greater symbolic Americans.
Paradoxically, the theme that grew increasingly more intense during Lennon’s solo career was his ongoing competition with Paul McCartney for a hit single, career reversal, or defining moment—the song, album, or tour when either might confidently step outside the other’s shadow. Lennon began breaking away from the band long before McCartney accepted the end, and the two wrote coded telegrams to each other across the pond as though volleying tennis balls of resentment and reproof as only sibling rivals could. McCartney’s high point during Lennon’s lifetime was Band on the Run from 1973, which contained “Let Me Roll It,” a guitar hook clawed from the death grip of “Cold Turkey.” Lennon slammed the door on the band by boldfacing his self-confidence, screaming, “I don’t believe in Beatles,” only to lob “How Do You Sleep?” to emphasize how defensive he remained. Without the Beatles to frame his braggadocio, each Lennon outburst sheathed insecurity. Lennon and McCartney each had more than enough talent to sustain himself with original material, but looking over their shoulders noticeably distracted both.
To the Beatles as individuals, the band’s dissolution had wrenching emotional effects. Typically, McCartney hid his grief by retreating up to rural Scotland; Lennon lashed out at anyone and everything for his first two solo albums. In symbolic terms, the end of the group took on vast cultural ripples, to the point where the messy legal battles became symbolic of how hard it was to let go of the larger Beatle ideal and the cultural authority their albums conferred.
To start with, the Beatle catalog retained such vitality on radio that it seemed cheap to watch this band dissolve in a blizzard of lawsuits. Courtroom haggling demeaned their aesthetic significance and corroded a lot of the charm they had traded on for so long. For the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team, so long a symbol of individualism within a larger partnership, crashing on the banal rocks of a showbiz publishing feud reflected an era’s coming-of-age anxiety. Well into the seventies, the 1960s still refused to die.
Every Beatle year between 1962 and 1969 brought convulsive changes in both persona and musical development, rippling outward into the way everybody absorbed and interpreted the band’s influence; how people thought and behaved, the ideas they carried around about themselves and their world, had forever changed. Now came the biggest change of all: the fallout and aftermath of show business’s biggest brand. Because the Beatles were as much pure symbol as they were musicians, the whole collapse-of-empire story became a tussle all by itself: who would control this narrative? In these mythological terms, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were already ancient, so it took years for everybody—these solo artists and an audience reluctant to let go of any possibility of reunion—to accept the new reality.
Lennon did his best to nudge things along. But dropping his Beatle persona meant confronting why he had erected such a beguiling façade in the first place. The end of the Beatles meant peeling back skin, exposing old wounds. When his defining band began to topple around him, all Lennon knew how to do was grab on tight to the woman who seemed to understand him best and lurch forward into parts unknown. Yoko Ono helped persuade him to aim at rock star fame beyond even Beatle fame: his solo status comprised a multimedia performance artist who dabbled in politics and whose marriage constituted a new writing partnership, voicing new utopian ideals nestled in a romantic frame. And whatever else everybody made of their romantic hype, all arrows pointed toward a true partnership. Until 1973, John and Yoko spent few nights apart—and Lennon liked to brag about bringing her into the men’s room. Now, as the press began publishing his quotes about feeling frustrated inside the band that had carried him for so long, Lennon adopted an even fiercer tough-guy cheek while one-upping every celebrity couple since Taylor and Burton.
Lennon left the band quite literally kicking and screaming. McCartney, outmaneuvered and outnumbered by Lennon, Harrison, Starr, and Klein, retreated with his new young family and gathered up his spirits for the coming fight. Linda, who already had a daughter, Heather, from her first marriage, gave birth to Mary at the end of August 1969. In those days, Linda took as much grief from McCartney fans loitering around his Cavendish Avenue home as Yoko did from racist hate mail, usually postmarked UK. Lennon carried on with Ono in public as though nothing much had changed: the Beatles had just released an album and spun off a huge international hit with George Harrison’s old-fashioned romance, “Something.” But the B side, Lennon’s hushed, inviolable “Come Together,” received lots of airplay, reminding pop how many leagues ahead of the game the Beatles remained.
To Lennon’s mind, however, another hit record played straight into Beatle myth. Wasn’t new product just another way of fulfilling everybody’s overhyped expectations? They had now released two complete albums built from fragments, and everybody on the inside could see they worked more and more independently. The ensemble peaks of The White Album and Abbey Road happened in spite of their faltering friendships, not because of them. (This ironic tension between the band’s musical fluidity and their interpersonal squabbling rivals even Harrison’s late songwriting surge.) And the four musicians had still not reconciled what to do with the Get Back tapes, which they feared might ruin their reputation.
Beatle news was old news; new windmills called Lennon’s name daily. He used his ground-floor Apple office to hold court with the press, sent acorns to politicians to plant for peace, worked on lithographs, and carried on in general like the madman he hoped the world still adored. There had always been a certain flexibility about the band and its aura; Lennon simply carried a bigger megaphone than the others—McCartney and Harrison had each worked independently on movie soundtracks, and Ringo dreamt of an acting career. As long as they took care of musical business together, Lennon felt free to carry on with whatever else caught his fancy. In this post-Woodstock autumn, as Abbey Road graced the airwaves, EMI—and the Beatles’ worldwide audience—resisted rumors of the band’s imminent breakup simply by wishing that the music had once again won out over the band’s conflicts.
As far as the public knew, Abbey Road sounded like another conquest, complete with iconic album cover and imaginative musical expanse. When pressed, even fans might admit to two side one clunkers, Ringo’s “Octopus’s Garden,” which sounded like a mere “Yellow Submarine” sequel, and McCartney’s overbaked trifle “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” which Lennon loathed (calling it “granny music”). Without the churlish undercurrents of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the synthesizer sheen in “Maxwell” quickly wore thin. If only McCartney had let Lennon take a run at the lead vocal of “Oh! Darling.”
As he turned his sights on his new life with Yoko Ono, Lennon expected a reprieve, or at least a whiff of relief. But the Beatles were not something anybody, even of Lennon’s outsize eccentricities, could simply set to one side. He had put it best himself back in 1963, to Michael Braun: “This isn’t show business. It’s something else.”2
Dealing with this confounding Beatle symbolism became Lennon’s next great subject: the Beatle cataclysm cried out for a soundtrack; perhaps he could use his parents as some kind of allegory. The biggest band in the world would necessarily throw the longest, most excruciating wrap party, right? And whatever “Cold Turkey” had represented (withdrawal projected outward, a bomb tossed at royalty and its subscribers by returning his MBE, among other metaphors), its anguished concision left a lot of ideas on the table. Even as Harrison and Starr joined up with Lennon and Klein, Lennon must have blanched at how the Beatles could actually turn “Cold Turkey” down—now there was a starting point. Time to dream up the next big thing.
Naturally, telescoping his new partnership into the end of his band complicated the new, improved John and Yoko romantic image, too: perhaps if the Beatles survived as fiction, he might fall back on them still. That way, Lennon could project fearlessness beyond what he felt capable of. If the Beatles were really over, that meant free fall, and none of his most intimate friends to bounce off of. And so, in his inimitable, discursive manner, he simply plowed forward.
In many ways, Lennon and the others had already faced this new struggle squarely, even sung it with lust, in “Carry That Weight,” which was impossible not to hear as intimidating yet collapsing faith in their own legacy. All of the ex-Beatles would spend the rest of their careers trapped in this defining conundrum: how to create new music for themselves that didn’t depend on the Beatles. In many ways, Ringo Starr was best positioned for this mission, and his first two solo albums rival McCartney and Plastic Ono Band for sheer pluck. Sentimental Journey, which commissioned big-band arrangements from leading orchestrators (like the pre–Michael Jackson Quincy Jones) for the songs of Ringo’s Tin Pan Alley childhood, makes for a respectable farce: Ringo as crooner, who invests material like “Stardust” and “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” with a goofy grin, whimsy of inimitable understatement. Doing Tin Pan Alley, Ringo was still far preferable to, say, Jack Jones or John Davidson. On the other hand, Ringo never got to host his own game show.
Starr’s Beaucoups of Blues, a Nashville session, brought the same flair to country songs, chiefly by Charlie Howard (“Love Don’t Last Long” and “I Wouldn’t Have You Any Other Way”) and Sorrells Pickard (“Without Her” and “Silent Homecoming”). Ringo, a “shit-kicker” from the Dingle, sounded like a Nashville hick. And with hands like Pete Drake on steel and D. J. Fontana on drums (Presley’s Sun Studios drummer), he could relax and let the band carry him. Most British critics abhor these sides, while Americans tend to ignore them. Unlike the other three, you get the distinct impression Ringo would have killed to play Vegas.
Harrison, on the other hand, flooded the engine with a double album, All Things Must Pass, overproduced by girl group svengali Phil Spector and supplanted by a third disc of ungainly jams (warm-ups that are more fun to participate in than to listen to). For a while there in 1970, Lennon had to read headlines like MAYBE GEORGE WAS ALWAYS THE MOST TALENTED AFTER ALL, which only fueled his revenge fantasies.
As the most overtly and expressively self-conscious of the four, Lennon knew full well that listeners would always compare anything he did to his immensely popular work with his former band, which made him timid in ways he hadn’t bargained for, and wasn’t used to. He compensated by reverting to his earliest pleasures, his wackiest instincts and most subversive impulses. In early 1970, this meant flailing about and grasping at chances as songs took shape. And in addition to Yoko, he turned to another musical partner to guide his voice and material for tape: Phil Spector, the titan he’d always wanted to work with.
“Allen [Klein], Yoko and I had been talking about him [Spector],” Lennon told Spector’s early biographer Richard Williams. “He’d had some kind of relationship with Allen, not a business one . . . or maybe it was. Anyway, they knew each other, and Klein really put us together. That’s one of Allen’s arts, bringing people together. It’s like a patron in the Arts. I mean, patrons used to get their percentages as well. . . . It’s the same kind of thing.”3
Paradoxically, his insecurity fed Lennon’s enormous ambition: his first several solo records (the singles “Cold Turkey,” “Instant Karma,” “Power to the People,” and “Happy Xmas [War Is Over]” and the Plastic Ono Band and Imagine albums) count as his best, made at the most precarious time for his emerging new identity, at many of the same studios he had worked at as a Beatle. For Plastic Ono Band and “Cold Turkey,” he deliberately chose Ringo Starr as his drummer, which conveyed both aesthetic insecurity and bold self-possession. (His choice of Manfred Mann’s Klaus Voormann on bass doubled as a cold, hard slap in the face to McCartney. No scene-stealing from the lower staves, thank you.)
One theme that emerged from this early solo period was just how chaotic and restless Lennon’s sense of self always had been—it was there underneath all those different Beatle guises, and it cropped up again in solo forms: towering pop romantic (“Instant Karma”), moon-howling ex-lover as wounded narcissist (Plastic Ono Band), New Age sage (“Imagine”), protest-song pamphleteer (Some Time in New York City), middle-aged cage-rattler and nostalgist (Mind Games, Walls and Bridges), hopeless and defiant romantic (“Stand by Me” and Rock ’n’ Roll), and finally, aging hippie house-husband on extended leave and father-redeemed-by-son in Double Fantasy. Each of these personas required steady maintenance, and Lennon was at his most revealing when caught contradicting his own billboards, either singing with others or trying to fit an outsize ideal into a half-assed concept. In retrospect, it’s clear just how hard he fought to get out from under the Beatle curse. In the end, though, he lived up to his sign-off line on the defining solo debut: “I just believe in me . . . Yoko and me . . . and that’s reality,” the corny, self-deflating myth of the giant who foreswore his kingdom for truth and beauty, only to lose everything so he could fight for it on adult terms all over again.
The four solo careers unveiled previously hidden internal politics as each man packed and moved out from the cozy Beatle mansion. Lennon seemed closest to Ringo, and then George; neither Harrison nor Lennon ever appeared on a McCartney solo album or vice-versa, whereas Ringo played for all three. Of course, Lennon’s solo “career” had begun as early as 1968 with numbers like “What’s the New Mary Jane” and “Revolution 9” during the White Album sessions, and then his avant-garde projects with Ono. Casual jams reflected these affinities as well: John and Yoko appeared onstage with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and the Bonnie and Delaney band in London in December of 1969. Harrison was slumming with the band after sitting in for a night and having rather too much fun; he appeared onstage anonymously until it got reported in the music press. Mostly they got away with two weeks of touring, with Clapton and Harrison sharing lead guitars almost before most audiences figured this out.
Only two semi–Beatle reunions reached the press in the early seventies, both offstage. McCartney joined Starr, Clapton, and others at Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding in Saint-Tropez in 1971; and Lennon, Harrison, and Starr did a session for Ringo’s Ringo album early in 1973 in Los Angeles. Harrison and Lennon often sat in on each other’s solo tracks, and drummer Alan White remembers Lennon anonymously adding acoustic guitar to All Things Must Pass. Harrison appeared on Imagine (1971), Mind Games (1973), and Walls and Bridges (1974). Ringo appeared on all three others’ solo records, most notably Lennon’s first, Plastic Ono Band, where he set down a new visceral authority in rock drumming and teased a new riddle from the band’s interpersonal chemistry: here Lennon and Starr’s musical intimacies rival Lennon and McCartney’s.
McCartney contributed material and played and sang on Ringo albums (most notably on 1973’s Ringo, with a standout track, “Six O’Clock”), but never on a Lennon or Harrison solo record. Lennon also contributed to Ringo’s projects (1973’s “I Am the Greatest,” which rivals “With a Little Help from My Friends” as a Ringo signature, plus a guide vocal of the Platters’ “Only You” and the writing of “Goodnight Vienna” the following year). On Harrison’s work, Lennon chose anonymity. Lennon and McCartney never played on each other’s solo sessions, save for one informal Los Angeles jam from 1974, bootlegged as A Toot and a Snore, named for a snowy-oldies session with Lennon, McCartney (on drums), and Stevie Wonder; the dates coincide with reports about McCartney’s visit to Lennon’s Malibu hangout with Starr, Keith Moon, and Harry Nilsson. However, to prevent runaway rumors and preserve their hard-fought integrity as solo figures, Lennon and McCartney visited far more often and warmly throughout the seventies than they let on to the press.
But in the beginning, the spat had an epic stature, and when Lennon used the term “divorce,” few considered it an exaggeration. Never one to acknowledge grief, let alone submit to it, Lennon seems to have been so convinced of his choices that grieving came as a surprise, if it came consciously at all. The pop world at large may have lost its center, but Lennon seemed to feel everything more keenly, and in more complicated fashion, than the other three. As usual, he wanted his future to happen yesterday, the way some songs just tumbled out. But his divorce from the Beatles made his divorce from Cynthia look like child’s play, since these early conflicts defined the legacy of the Lennon-McCartney publishing catalog indefinitely.
The Beatles made it through 1969 intact, if only in spirit. Part of the problem came from the façade they felt forced to construct around Apple. Some cite reports of Lennon’s decision to quit the band as early as November 1968, when the others probably greeted it with the same bemused alarm with which they took in his announcement that he was Jesus Christ six months earlier.
This fiction, of an ongoing band with a future, came apart in a series of events over which they quickly lost control, and of which Lennon typically considered himself the victim. The Two Virgins controversy resurfaced as police raided Lennon’s erotic lithographs from the London Arts Gallery on New Bond Street on January 16, 1970. The gallery reopened that afternoon, but a summons entered Lennon’s legal file, and the underground reveled in how eagerly the authorities leapt for the bait.
Combined with John and Yoko’s peace campaigns, these tired obscenity charges stoked an increasing cynicism in the expanding boomer electorate. In Britain, this culminated in the International Times obscenity case, which sent its editor, John Hopkins, to jail. To British youth, this seemed unfathomable: the American student protests had grown far bigger in number, and the black power movement raised the ominous specter of radicals with automatic rifles terrorizing the post-riot world. That the UK government had succeeded in sending student leftists to jail for pictures of nipples seemed the height of absurdity, especially given the volatile, progressive fumes rock ’n’ roll had been spewing for years. A feeling of defeat hung over the counterculture as the new decade crept into view.
After a trip to Denmark to visit Ono’s daughter Kyoko, who was living there with her father, Lennon tooled around in a snowmobile, and the couple shaved their heads to auction off their locks “for peace.” The new Tittenhurst mansion they planned to move into underwent renovations for a new studio, so they stayed with friends and moved in slowly as work progressed. Part of Anthony Cox’s divorce agreement with Yoko allowed him to film the couple for several days, granting him exclusive rights to the content.4
Approximately one hundred twenty minutes of this cinema verité circulates in bootleg circles. The footage features a single handheld camera for an extended look at John and Yoko, roaming around a kitchen area and some bedrooms, listening to the radio, rolling joints, and watching TV with their new political cause, Michael X, a British Malcolm X wannabe who latched onto rock star patronage. The only dramatic moments come at the end, when Lennon appears on Top of the Pops to sing “Instant Karma,” with Yoko behind him, knitting blindfolded.
The song’s uplift rebuffed any cultural malaise. Lennon had woken up on January 27 with a new song exploding in his head, music that felt like the antithesis of “Cold Turkey” and all its careening exhaustion. He ordered a piano delivered to his Apple office and jumped in his car to lunge at one of his long-held pop ideals: to record and mix a single in one day. Everybody who heard it knew it was a hit, and EMI could barely get it out fast enough for Lennon: it appeared on February 9.
“I’m fascinated by commercials and promotion as an art form,” Lennon said later, “I enjoy them. So the idea of ‘Instant Karma’ was like the idea of instant coffee, presenting something in a new form. I wrote it in the morning on the piano, and went into the office and I sang it many times. And I said ‘Hell, let’s do it,’ and we booked the studio, and Phil came in and he said: ‘How do you want it?’ And I said ‘fifties,’ and he said, ‘Right,’ and boom, I did it, in about three goes. He played it back and there it was.”5
Richard Williams also talked later on about that day with Lennon:
It was a surprise session, typical of those days. Alan White remembers getting a phone call, saying that John wanted to do a session at EMI, and White “just turned up.” According to John, Spector was absent as the evening began. “We were playing, and we weren’t getting very far,” he remembered. “I knew I had a hit record. I’d written it that morning, and I knew I had it, but it would’ve taken me a couple of days to make, building up and building up and running between the two rooms. That way, it might have turned out very heavy and funky, like ‘Cold Turkey,’ but then Spector walked in.”6
Alan White, the Toronto Plastic Ono Band drummer, tried out a wayward drum fill in the middle of the second verse that Lennon adored—after the line “Why in the world are we here?” White tilted the whole track sideways for a few bars and then jumped right back into the groove, as if some alternate reality tore a brief hole in the song. (This linked the material with other deliberate Beatle mistakes, like the extra beat in “Revolution,” or the sideways 6/4 bar that launches the coda to “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey.”) With Harrison on guitar and leading the chorus, it all jelled spontaneously: “Suddenly when we went in the room and heard what [Spector had] done to it . . . it was fantastic. It sounded like there was fifty people playing.” Some hangers-on got in a car, “drove into central London to a discothèque,” noted Williams, “and dragged people out to the studio to sing the infectious chorus, ‘All shine on . . . like the moon and the stars and the sun,’ behind John.”7
One of these people happened to be Beryl Marsden, the young Liverpool singer Lennon had admired at the Cavern. Lennon was thrilled with the original rough mix that came out in Britain. But Spector snuck back to the States and kept working on it, and Capitol put out a remixed version of the song for the U.S. market later in the month. “It’s the only time anyone’s done that,” Lennon told Williams, sarcastically berating both Spector’s pretension and Capitol’s history of fiddling with Beatle tracks, a practice he took care to avoid as a solo artist.
As early as May 1969, while Lennon, Harrison, and Spector worked on “Instant Karma,” Allen Klein had trimmed Apple company fat by littering the place with pink slips. (“At one point, the company was losing money faster than the British government,” went Eric Idle’s joke in his TV parody, the Rutles). Apple offices kept functioning, but mostly as a façade. Even Brian Epstein’s assistant from the old NEMS shop on Charlotte Street in Liverpool, Alistair Taylor, had sought a Beatle override unsuccessfully. Film, electronics, and avant-garde divisions got the ax, except for Geoff Emerick, who was kept on to build his dream studio in Apple’s basement (and deliver the ultimate humiliation to Alex Mardas). Once built, this studio served as an elite facility for a brief period and was then closed. Demonized as both an American and a ruthless capitalist, Klein watched as Peter Asher stole off to California to launch James Taylor’s huge career. Only Derek Taylor, the colorful press chief, still held court most days in his second-floor office. But this now seems like another Klein calculation: Taylor simply kept feeding the band’s activities to his extensive contacts in an adoring press; why mend an unbroken myth machine?
For a time, Lennon and Ono enjoyed driving into London, holding forth to the press, and hatching new plans for festivals, events, art exhibitions, and future projects. Thrilled by Woodstock, and unshaken by the Rolling Stones’ Altamont fiasco (documented in the film Gimme Shelter), Lennon worked with Canadian promoters Ritchie Yorke and John Brower, who planned a huge outdoor music festival in Toronto the following summer. Yorke wrote dispatches about the utopian event in Rolling Stone, but Lennon could not hold on to his wish that it be free and finally abandoned it in early spring.
With all the band’s earnings from previous releases funneled into a frozen escrow account, Klein lobbied for a new release for quick cash: Couldn’t they cobble together something from that album and film made back in early 1969? Bootleg activity had turned Get Back into both a headache and a giant sunken cost. Now Lennon brought Phil Spector back in to see if he could sidestep the rough mixes that Glyn Johns had prepared from the previous spring. It’s a measure of the band’s low regard for these sessions that they not only sat on these tapes for a year but stopped doing so only under threat of bankruptcy. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr concurred that a revival of Get Back material could give them some wiggle room to sort out Apple’s mess; but McCartney, who loathed Klein, left countless messages unanswered from his Scottish hideaway. His absence, and complete unwillingness to communicate with the others, became silent assent.
Riding the brash stylistic coup of “Instant Karma,” which neatly stitched Lennon’s futurism with a booming girl group echo (with an opening piano quote from Richie Barrett’s “Some Other Guy”), Spector set up shop with fourteen-month-old Beatle tapes from January 1969. All four Beatles had pronounced the project hopeless. Within a couple of weeks, Lennon came away dazzled: “When I heard it, I didn’t puke,” he said. “I was so relieved after hearing six months of this like black cloud hanging over, that this was going to go out. I thought it would be good to go out, the shitty version, because it would break The Beatles, you know, it would break the myth. ‘That’s us, with no trousers on.’ We were going to let it out in a really shitty condition, and I didn’t care. I thought it was good to let it [the Glyn Johns mix] out and show people what had happened to us, ‘This is where we’re at now. We can’t get it together. We don’t play together anymore, you know, leave us alone.’ ”8
Had it worked, they might have pulled off a major PR reversal—but the other three Beatles hadn’t counted on McCartney’s plan: he had been recording his own material and booked some London studios with engineers Alan Parsons and Chris Thomas to finish a solo project. Even more brazenly, he intended to release it within weeks of Spector’s Let It Be; the feature film was slated for late spring release. As the first Beatles record produced without George Martin, Spector’s Let It Be incensed both Martin and McCartney. When he finally emerged from Scotland to give Spector’s package a listen, McCartney spat nails in a letter to Klein, reprinted in the Anthology:
He addresses Allen Klein with deeply sarcastic formality and tears apart Spector’s arrangement: “In future no one will be allowed to add to or subtract from . . . one of my songs without my permission . . .” He then gives Klein explicit instructions on how to fix the overwrought production. McCartney insists he had considered orchestrating the track, but decided against it. As for the new version, he gives explicit instructions: reduce volume for strings, horns, voices, and all added noises; bring up lead vocal and Beatle instrumentation; completely remove the harp and reinsert piano statement at the end.
He signed it bluntly: “Don’t ever do it again.”9
Because McCartney steadfastly refused to answer his messages or attend Apple meetings, Ringo was sent to his Cavendish Avenue home to discuss putting off Paul’s solo debut. After all, McCartney had an interest in the Let It Be project: it would give them all solvency and options, and for the good of Apple, they hoped the genial Ringo could persuade McCartney to be reasonable and follow Lennon’s lead from the previous fall: put off talk about a breakup until the band’s new record had a chance to perform.
They all underestimated McCartney’s determination. In one of the biggest confrontations yet, with Ringo as proxy, McCartney let loose all his rage at Spector’s mixing “Long and Winding Road” without his input, and Klein’s bulldozer style, by many accounts shouting Ringo from his front door. Starr returned to the others and suggested they simply gulp hard and go along with both albums coming out during the same season. In some ways, this accidental decision worked in everybody’s favor.
In some UK promo copies of McCartney, Paul conducted a coy self-interview where he blandly let slip he would probably never work with the others again. If this wasn’t intended as a bombshell, McCartney made sure its effect got felt. On April 10, the press materials for McCartney spurred the Daily Mail headline: PAUL IS QUITTING THE BEATLES. Quoting the “self-interview,” Apple’s Derek Taylor dealt with a new deluge of phone calls. “They do not want to split up,” said Taylor’s official statement, “but the present rift seems to be part of their growing up. . . . At the moment they seem to cramp each other’s styles. Paul has called a halt to The Beatles’ activities. They could be dormant for years.”10
Lennon couldn’t believe McCartney’s gall, and how the press ate it up. After all, McCartney hadn’t put on his own gallery shows and made private art films and concocted zany media events from his honeymoon suite or appeared with an impromptu band at a Canadian festival with new solo material. Lennon had already jumped off the deck in public not once but innumerable times without his bandmates—they had even refused to record “Cold Turkey”—and yet here came Paul, announcing, “the Beatles are over.” McCartney even took journalist Ray Connolly out to lunch and tried to backpedal the whole thing, which created more furor. All of Lennon’s attempts to upstage McCartney were reversed in a single day.
“I wasn’t angry, I was just—‘shit!’ ” Lennon told Jann Wenner later:
He’s a good PR man, Paul. I mean he’s about the best in the world, probably. He really does a job. I wasn’t angry. We were all hurt that he didn’t tell us what he was going to do. I think he claims that he didn’t mean that to happen, but that’s bullshit. He called me in the afternoon of that day and said, “I’m doing what you and Yoko were doing.” . . . And I said, “Good.” Because that time last year, they were all looking at us as if it was strange trying to make a life together and doing all the things and being fab, fat myths. So he rang me up on that day and said, “I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing and putting out an album. And I’m leaving the group too,” he said. I said, “Good.” I was feeling a little strange, because he was saying it this time—a year later.11
From Lennon’s point of view, McCartney’s maneuvers seemed hypocritical and self-serving. How could anybody buy the idea that McCartney was breaking up the group when it was Lennon who had been actively releasing independent work ever since the spring of 1968? Did McCartney’s perpetual good cheer, even when twisting the knife, detract attention from his guile?
When reporters went around the horn compiling quotes from the others, Lennon simply said, “You can say I said jokingly, ‘He didn’t quit, he was fired.’ ” John and Yoko issued a hoax press release announcing: “They have both entered the London clinic for a dual sex-change operation.” As usual, Ringo Starr uttered the best break-up quote: “This is all news to me.”12
“I remember Lennon being very upset when McCartney made the papers with his announcement of the breakup,” columnist Ray Connolly recalls:
He had told me months before that he was leaving the Beatles, and I wrestled with that private confession terribly, wondering whether I should print it or not, knowing it was a huge story. But Lennon had asked me not to because of his contractual obligations. Now he tore me down for sitting on it, and I was stupefied. “But John,” I said, “you told me not to break that story . . .” He had no hesitation: “You’re the journalist,” he said derisively. Of course he would have been upset no matter what I did, but he took a certain pleasure in blaming me for McCartney’s ingenious PR play.13
McCartney’s guile wasn’t all public relations. Instead of cowering in the shadow of the great Beatle monuments, McCartney simply acted as if the Beatles were a Saturday-morning cartoon, and as if leaving the band and making a little solo record were of no consequence. This is what Scousers refer to as “cheek,” a giant flip-off couched in a smile, the sort of brutal reduction Lennon most admired in McCartney’s ego. He had already handed off a hit record to Badfinger (“Come and Get It”), Apple’s Scottish protégés, and McCartney contained a potential monster hit, “Maybe I’m Amazed”—a Beatle track from top to bottom, even though his bass playing paled compared to his fluid work on Abbey Road. It was as if McCartney hadn’t just quit the Beatles, he had quit the bass, which betrayed far humbler musical ambitions. McCartney seemed to orchestrate the whole charade—a soft-core solo tour de force, a press eruption, a looming legal standoff—with a churlish virtuosity, which gave John and Yoko pause: Lennon’s former partner had played a hand that would be very tough to beat.
In the midst of McCartney’s end-of-Beatles campaign, the gap between leftist activism in America and Britain widened. In Britain, this took shape around an underground newspaper, Oz, which invited schoolkids to help edit one issue. The May 1970 issue included an article which parodied Rupert Bear, created by one Vivian Berger, who pasted the head of the cartoon character onto an X-rated cartoon by Robert Crumb. (Coincidentally, Paul McCartney had just bought the rights to Rupert the Bear to develop as a children’s project.) Unfortunately, like a lot of censors before and since, the Obscene Publications Squad lacked humor, and since the Oz editorial offices had already been raided several times (mostly for photos of shirtless females), this time they made their case.
Oz had just been through a debilitating Australian trial around similar issues; now its British publication became the counterculture cause of 1970, accused of “conspiracy to corrupt public morals” and fined out of operational costs. Alongside Barry Miles’s International Times being hauled into court for carrying a classified ad with “homosexual content,” this defeat dragged antiestablishment morale to new lows. (In 1971, Lennon took a look at the situation and coughed up one of his better political songs, “Do the Oz,” to help the paper defray its legal costs.)
While British authorities derailed youth culture’s momentum by chasing obscenities, American protests had long since darkened. The Vietnam War entered a prolonged stalemate as President Nixon played a cynic’s game of outmaneuvering his critics: “Peace with honor” became double-talk for bombing Laos and Cambodia, stretching Cold War “domino theory” beyond all reason. In this netherworld of war logic, one had to “destroy villages to save them.” It took a Pentagon insider, Daniel Ellsberg, to leak the military’s history as the Pentagon Papers, which pulled the thread from the official narrative. Ellsberg emerged as a counterculture hero, an insider willing to stand up to corruption. Student unrest became a weekly headline, to the point where Governor Reagan of California proclaimed, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.”14 He got his bloodbath. Later that month, a radical leftist SDS faction formed the Weather Underground and plotted a bombing campaign on government buildings in New York, California, Washington, Maryland, and Michigan.
The courts finally acquitted the Chicago Seven (including Tom Hayden, the author of the Port Huron Statement, and Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin) in February 1970, but the charges of “crossing state lines” were upheld until overturned on yet another appeal. At the end of April, the Vietnam War intensified. On the advice of Henry Kissinger, Nixon began bombing Cambodia to stop the supply lines and safe harbor of the Vietcong, a war crime that would render Henry Kissinger’s 1973 Nobel Peace Prize a moral affront. On May 4, four college students were killed and nine others wounded by the Ohio National Guard, ordered to push back against protestors at Kent State University. The cruel thud of police clubs at 1968’s Democratic National Convention had turned fatal: America’s own soldiers were now gunning down peaceful, unarmed civilians on a state campus. Two more students were killed at Jackson State University in Mississippi on May 14. 1968’s political assassinations still haunted the American mind. How many more nonviolent marches would it take to end this immoral war? How many more students would be killed expressing their constitutionally protected right to peaceful dissent?
A new protest song appeared that summer: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio”—snarling guitars driving a plodding, mournful groove that owed a lot to the barren outrage on Lennon’s “Cold Turkey”: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming / We’re finally on our own . . .” By May 9, when one hundred thousand antiwar protestors marched on Washington, the mood had turned bitter and antagonistic. Only now they had a new song to sing: Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” still credited to Lennon and McCartney. Lennon counted it among his most cherished accomplishments and hoped to write more songs in the same vein; perhaps he began to realize how unforgiving the verse was for large crowds, with prolix, run-on stanzas that vexed even solo singers.
When Let It Be showed up in movie theaters over the summer of 1970, it captured this frayed cultural hangover like a bookend to A Hard Day’s Night’s Beatlemania only six years before. In the public’s mind, early distinctions took shape between the album and its feature-length film, which did poor business up against Woodstock (which ultimately grossed more than $50 million). The same figures who once snubbed the grim businessman in the opening sequence of A Hard Day’s Night now invited their audience into rehearsal dysfunction. What kind of insolence was this, inverting showbiz tradition by allowing their huge worldwide audience to eavesdrop on these dreary, end-of-the-line scrimmages? Only those in the know deciphered the January 1969 filming date; this out-of-order anomaly made an awkward appendage to the Abbey Road songs that were still on the radio. Let It Be slumped in theaters like the first countercultural dinosaur.
Lennon saw the movie in San Francisco with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner: “There were a couple of jam sessions in Let It Be, with Yoko and The Beatles playing, but they never got in the movie, of course. I understand it all now. . . . That film was set up by Paul for Paul. That’s one of the main reasons The Beatles ended. I can’t speak for George, but I pretty damn well know, we got fed up of being sidemen for Paul.” Lennon’s voice collapses as he spills these secrets, knowing how vengeful they’ll sound: “After Brian died, that’s what began to happen. . . . The camera work was set up to show Paul and not to show anybody else. That’s how I felt about it. And on top of that, the people that cut it, cut it as ‘Paul is God’ and we’re just lying around there. And that’s what I felt. . . . There were some shots of Yoko and me that had been just chopped out of the film for no other reason than the people were orientated toward Engelbert Humperdinck.”15
There are two comic shots of Ringo peeping from behind his limousine in front of Apple and feigning shock when Heather, Linda’s daughter, hits one of his drums. But Ringo’s balefully detached expression, especially during the Twickenham sequence, rivals Lennon’s quietude.
The closing rooftop set was almost too successful—it didn’t make any sense coming after all the stops and starts and a wearied McCartney looking up at the camera on “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road.” By the time fans screened the movie, the breakup was public knowledge, and it looked like a leftover diary of defeat. Here were the Beatles falling apart, and the whole myth of sixties utopianism seemed to crumble with them. That final sequence on the roof, the briefest reprise of past glories, closed the movie with an ironic freeze-frame, as if trying to stop the inevitable.
Here was another chance to argue about cultural identity and how Americans had done the most to bring down Britain’s pride and joy. British critics in particular lashed Phil Spector for the applied histrionics on the Let It Be album. But Spector had no trouble pushing back: “Most of the reviews were written by English people, picked up by the American Press, and the English were a bit resentful of an American, I don’t care who it was, an American coming in, taking over. They don’t know that it was no favor to me to give me George Martin’s job, because I don’t consider myself in the same situation or league.” As far as Spector was concerned, the band’s regular producer, George Martin, had failed (even though the Beatles deliberately kept him out of this loop). Seen from his point of view, Spector did everybody a favor with a rescue job. Besides, Spector didn’t consider Martin, or anybody else, in his league at all: “I don’t consider him with me. He’s somewhere else. He’s an arranger, that’s all. As for Let It Be, he had left it in deplorable condition, and it was not satisfactory to any of them, they did not want it out as it was. . . . If my name hadn’t been on the album, there wouldn’t have been all that.”16 (That’s like a composer calling a piano player a mere “instrumentalist.” From Spector’s imperious vantage, an “arranger” is a lowly hired hand.)
The Glyn Johns version of Let It Be (which included Lennon’s “Don’t Let Me Down” and McCartney’s “Teddy Boy”) circulated widely among fans who preferred the material without the commercial gloss. But the noise around Spector’s work is a red herring: all he did was buff up rough tracks—another producer might have made different choices, but Spector’s are perfectly respectable as far as it goes. Let It Be became a Rorschach test. Most of the British sharks felt Spector never deserved to get his hands on Beatle tapes in the first place. Glyn Johns’s mix has achieved the status of “lost classic,” although its dashed-off brilliance lacks sonic definition. Spector has the dubious distinction of overseeing the one album not produced by George Martin, the one that elevates all Martin’s other Beatle achievements.
Unlike Abbey Road, which sported Harrison’s hit single “Something” and the cathartic finale of “Carry That Weight” (“Boy . . . you’re gonna carry that weight a long time . . .”) and “The End,” Let It Be sounded unfinished and underwhelming, even though Spector dressed up songs where he could, roping in “Across the Universe” from early 1968. Most famously, he added strings, harp, and female chorus to “The Long and Winding Road,” forever alienating McCartney. McCartney seemed not as upset about the actual arrangement as the simple fact that he was not given veto power before its release. His lifelong gripes to rework the record would culminate with his release of Let It Be . . . Naked in 2003.
McCartney’s obsession with this track seems misplaced: the strings on “Across the Universe” brought no Lennon complaints, and Spector’s lush arrangement had plenty of precedent; George Martin added orchestra and chorus wash to Lennon’s “Good Night,” and McCartney’s “Hey Jude” had strings, brass, and choir. If any Beatle song deserved to be smothered in glucose, it would be “The Long and Winding Road.” McCartney complaining about Spector’s arrangement is a bit like Cher complaining about the tabloids—at a certain level, this material begs to be exploited.
Spector didn’t sit by for McCartney’s abuse, either: “Paul took the Grammy for it, though,” Spector says. “He went and picked the Grammy up, for the album that he didn’t want out, supposedly that we used to ruin him artistically. . . . What did he pick the Grammy up for? Silly.”17
Like The White Album, Let It Be grouped together songs that stressed individuality. Understated ensemble fireworks punched everything up a level, especially on “Dig a Pony,” “Get Back,” and the quickened pulse of “One After 909,” the 1963 song they revived for a nostalgic romp, which bathed the live set in youthful afterglow. Watching the rehearsal sequences during the first two-thirds of the film, there’s no predicting the emotional rush “One After 909” gave the band on the rooftop, and in many ways it said as much about their shared history and commitment to the music as even “Don’t Let Me Down,” which had already been sliced off the album for the B side to the “Get Back” single. Let It Be follows The White Album by three months chronologically and several eons perceptually. To have dumped thirty songs on the market in November, only to regroup with a new chest of material for January’s cameras, argues for the Beatles’ intense work ethic. On songs like “Let It Be,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “Two of Us,” Abbey Road’s twilight emotional colors come into view.
This material also sits outside their catalog in ways that make its frame not just anachronistic but anomalous. Let It Be’s ensemble and attitude situates it decisively between The White Album and Abbey Road. But by dumping it on the market in 1970, Klein gave Let It Be an after-the-fact brilliance that worked in its favor. A throwaway like Harrison’s “For You Blue” or Lennon’s “Dig It” (cut down from its original nine minutes) sounded like lost treasure, Beatles filler that would count as inspired moves from lesser groups. That they were so determined to film themselves at this chaotic point in their collapse only underlined their musical bonds. Only a world-class act could get away with that, and the footage told a Sisyphean story of how songs take shape from the ground up. Even the best band in the world starts with song fragments and loose arrangements. Bringing the music in for a landing on the roof restored both their musicianship and their collective self-respect.
The world heard Let It Be as a contemporaneous experience, but the sixteen months between its filming and release seemed like a trek across an emotional Siberia to each Beatle. As Lennon retreated into private superstar therapy, more Beatle fumes enlarged the myth. McCartney projected an imperious whimsy on the band’s close that hinted at extreme form of denial.
In aesthetic terms, none of this fazed Lennon. Except for “Instant Karma,” Lennon remained secluded for the first half of 1970, in direct contrast to his nonstop posturing on the world’s stage throughout the previous year. As the band’s magnificence drew to a close, the end became as hard for its members to accept as for its audience. In the quiet zone before he came out with his divorce record to proclaim his independence, Lennon set new standards that he himself, and the others, would never quite live up to again.
At the end of April 1970, Lennon and Harrison flew to Los Angeles for business meetings at Capitol Records, and then back to New York. The Immigration and Naturalization Service issued Lennon waivers for such short visits, but the trip shows up in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI file. Hoover had already collected letters about Lennon’s “pornographic” Two Virgins album cover and begun tracing his cross-continental trips as a matter of routine government business. A known “narcotics user” and “radical,” Lennon inspired more fear from the establishment than he knew: the FBI files for the April trip open with an entry detailing Lennon and Harrison’s visit, visa status, and business locations.
A book had arrived in Ascot’s mail that spring. The title caught Lennon’s eye: The Primal Scream, by a California therapist named Arthur Janov—and then he couldn’t put it down. The opening passages described patients who quickly and permanently purged their neuroses by revisiting their most traumatic childhood separations. These intense personal stories pushed all Lennon’s emotional buttons, as though all the experimenting he had done onstage with Yoko suddenly had therapeutic potential—wouldn’t trying make it so?
That sex-change ruse had a code meaning: John and Yoko enrolled in a four-week course of primal therapy with Dr. Janov, first in Ascot, then in London. Lennon gave it a serious effort throughout much of 1970, as his multiple anxieties proved too cumbersome to cope with.
He committed to a series of private sessions, and a further four months of group sessions in California. Yoko Ono agreed to the same regimen. While Janov visited, they stayed in separate wings of the Tittenhurst mansion. Janov insisted on separating John and Yoko as a key aspect of his treatment:
I mean, Yoko’s been screaming for a long time. Just the words, the title, made my heart flutter. Then I read the testimonials, “I am Charlie so-and-so, I went in and this is what happened to me.” I thought, “That’s me. That’s me.” We were living in Ascot and there was a lot of shit coming down on us. And these people say they get to this thing and they scream and they feel better, so I thought, let’s try it. They do this thing where they mess around with you until you reach a point where you hit this scream thing. You go with it, they encourage you to go with it, and you kind of make a psychical, mental, cosmic breakthrough with the scream itself.18
Lennon had to persuade Janov to accept him as a patient after several rebuttals. Janov recalled that he “initially refused to go to England to treat Lennon, but later when my kids found out that I had refused to go they just went nuts and made me call back and agree.”
The Lennons’ personal assistant, Anthony Fawcett, describes these visits in his book One Day at a Time. Janov came to Ascot and laid down a strict protocol: “They were to be separated from each other twenty-four hours before the first session, completely alone in a room with no TV, radio or phone, only pencil and paper. Yoko stayed in the bedroom and John went to the other end of the house and took over the half-completed studio. This was the first time they had been apart from each other for well over two years, since perhaps May of 1968.”19
Fawcett describes John and Yoko being surprised by Janov’s warmth and youthful appearance, how, like a lot of other California psychiatrists emerging in this era, he exuded Hollywood charisma. Lennon became the star-struck patient. Janov’s early phase of private treatments took up three weeks, with separate daily sessions. “We did a lot of it in the recording studio,” Janov told Mojo magazine in 2000. “While they were building it. That was kind of difficult. But it went very, very well. John had about as much pain as I’ve ever seen in my life. And he was a very dedicated patient. Very serious about it.”20
Soon, Lennon and Janov took a suite at the Inn on the Park Hotel in London, and Yoko went to the Londonderry Hotel. After another three weeks, Janov praised Lennon’s progress and urged them both to continue at his Primal Institute in California. This would take another four to six months, Janov explained, and he would combine private sessions with group therapy. Only if they finished this round properly, he insisted, would they see the results they were looking for. In private, Janov thought Lennon would need at least another year. While the Primal Institute stressed group sessions, Lennon apparently did not receive rock-star treatment as a group member. “The thing in a nutshell,” said John, “is that Primal Therapy allowed us to feel feeling continually, and those feelings usually make you cry. That’s all. Because before I wasn’t feeling things. I was blocking the feeling.”21 There was only so much Lennon could block, however.
The sudden dash to America overlooked his immigration status: his visa allowed a limited three-month stay. Attending to this matter became all-important: Yoko had been granted custody of Kyoko, but Tony Cox had gone into hiding with her. Upsetting his visa status meant Lennon might complicate reuniting Yoko with her daughter. They had already suffered non-entry dictums from the U.S. government when they tried to mount an American bed-in the previous spring.
Although he never finished treatment, Janov’s ideas went straight to Lennon’s head, feeding a musical impulse that sent him back to pre-Hamburg guitar rock to express triumphant anger and redemptive ardor. Approaching thirty, he never got closer to the dual passions of childhood. As he returned to Tittenhurst, songs started pouring out of him.
Like the Rishikesh meditation trip two years earlier, Lennon’s California retreat fed him a surfeit of material. He quickly booked EMI’s London studios with Phil Spector, and staff engineers Phil MacDonald and Richard Lush, for four weeks of sessions that led to the Plastic Ono Band. Lush remembers the sessions as agreeable, even pleasant: “Those were really good sessions, I remember. I always got along with Phil, he was good fun to work with. And we did it all very quickly, because Phil MacDonald did the first two weeks, and I came in for the last two, so it was about four weeks work total. And everything went very smoothly.”22
Ringo Starr spoke even more fondly than Lush about these sessions: “It was fantastic! It was such a heavy album for me. I was on it so maybe I was just getting off on it because of that, but the songs were so great and there were three guys and the cuts are really terrific.”23 If the sessions were as giddy and professional as everybody remembers, the angst in Lennon’s voice came as release. Even to this day, the album makes for acid listening and scopes out a defiantly primitive sound that would make fiercest punk sound thin. In a perversely professional way, this also signals how well EMI had trained engineers like Lush, who separated pure sound from meaning as a matter of technical expertise.
Lennon’s vocal attack vents the emotional spoilage motivating these songs. On tape, this material sounded as if it had been marinating far beyond what a healthy person might carry around. In person, somehow, it sounded less agonized than triumphant.
This dual quality hints at Lennon’s preoccupations: the seductive yet hollow Beatle myth, and the awful relief made possible by rock ’n’ roll. At the time, Plastic Ono Band was the kind of early seventies work that gave people the shivers—like the movies Last Tango in Paris or The Godfather, its confrontational tone gave listeners plenty to think about for the first hundred listenings or so: so this is what it felt like to lead the world’s mightiest band. Its contours have grown familiar, but the album’s opening church bells still toll for the band and its era, the farewell of an obsessively distracted eccentric, emphatically dismissing years of great work just to clear his palate. Even for Lennon’s career, already studded with hyperbole, Plastic Ono Band remains one of the great self-deflating gestures in the history of pop culture. Its emotional glare defies everybody’s fondest illusions about Lennon. “The Beatles were an act,” he says with a glower: “now I get to be John Lennon.”
Yoko Ono’s indefatigable presence in the sound is palpable, even though she’s nowhere to be heard. Everywhere and in every way, the music binds the intensely inward with the defiantly exhibitionist, as the awkward in Lennon stares down the brash. “Mother,” the opening track, peels the submerged motivations of “Strawberry Fields Forever” away as primal anxiety. The agony of “Mother” gives way to the Sesame Street yelp of “Cookie!” shortly into track two, “Hold On.” Chastened yet monomaniacal, the authority in Lennon’s Beatle persona shrinks inside these two tracks. New tensions define new poles of Lennon’s sensibility: the sheer ambition of the sound, the dry-ice rockabilly of “I Found Out,” cuts loose all kinds of fiction with irrefutable force. Lennon doesn’t expect anybody to buy the line “They didn’t want me so they made me a star” except as the crudest possible metaphor for abandonment—how the world’s adoration can’t compete with childhood loss.
Like eavesdropping on a hero’s therapy session, the scalding anxiety in these grooves cues off Lennon’s private yet direct vocals. Lennon’s confessional mode transforms his platitudes and ranks with anything he’s ever done, from “Cold Turkey” back to “This Boy” and all the compressed fury tamped down into the Please Please Me Shirelles’ cover, “Baby, It’s You,” where male anxiety took a shower. But there is no Beatle precedent, no brilliant pop trigger lying in wait behind these tracks the way there is throughout a lot of McCartney and Ram. The whole thing might sound like a parody of Primal Scream pretensions if Lennon’s stabbing attacks didn’t slice with such emotional precision. These performances eliminate the distance between singer and song to wed form with content. McCartney has great vocal moments, but here Lennon makes McCartney sound like a performer who’d invest himself in almost anything—it’s an album McCartney could never make.
The opening funereal church bells at the top of “Mother” descend straight into Freudian reverie. Those somber, quiescent chimes bear down with irrepressible force. Lennon’s emotional tone is immediately raw and explosive; his voice threatens and then cracks with each chord change. The frame, an agonizingly slow nursery rhyme, becomes an avant-garde rant, as if “Yer Blues” and “I Want You” and “Cold Turkey” had sprouted an album of harrowing footnotes. Just as Lennon’s starkly roiling delivery breaks the spell, a fearsome, tightly coiled ensemble steps in beneath him, chasing his outbursts warily, scared of what they might yield.
The standard nursery rhyme slows to an ancient blues pattern, its harmonies tracing circles through each verse toward a massive, repetitive wheel of a coda (“Momma don’t go/Daddy come home!”), which turns of its own sluggish momentum. Somehow, this airtight piano-bass-and-drum trio yields vast orchestral effects; the solo vocals, often doubled in unison, convey a keening intimacy, as if struggling to keep up with the voice in his head.
“Working Class Hero,” a ruthless Dylan parody that also works as a scathing smack-down of the luckless Scouser mystique, has the same bitter, stony-faced irony of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” or “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” It walks a frightening line, and too many people still hear it literally. This attack is anything but first-person revelation—the first thing Liverpudlians still resent about Lennon’s persona is his solid middle-class upbringing and schooling; any talk of his “working-class” background connotes sheer ignorance. And yet the more you understand about Lennon’s boyhood, the more poetry leaps out of this lyric: the orphaned father, Alfred, who orphaned Lennon; the wrenching Blackpool choice between his two parents; the ongoing betrayal of living with an auntie just two miles from his mother’s home without ever knowing her proximity; and the irony of growing up in poncy Woolton while taking in student lodgers to make ends meet, squeezing two students in a house with only two bedrooms. How can such an economically and emotionally perplexing upbringing in Woolton be reduced to “middle-class”? Just where does such abandoned penny-pinching in a “posh” British golf course neighborhood fit in that culture’s scrupulous class distinctions? On another level, Lennon defines showbiz as the new escape hatch for “working-class” strivers. Like art college, pop music became one of the few release valves Lennon devised for outsiders in a closed system.
Tracks like “Mother,” “I Found Out,” “Working Class Hero,” and “Well Well Well” scan like excerpts from your best friend’s private diary; you hang on every word while squirming through their revelations. When he surfaces for a romantic sketch like “Love,” the mood shifts like a dropping breeze. The Times classical critic, William Mann, made pedantic comparisons to Lennon-McCartney “Aeolian” cadences in “Not a Second Time,” which always gave Lennon fits. It seemed supercilious that the highbrow snobs deigned to give Beatle popularity some sham intellectual respect. If anything, Lennon’s command of musical irony in a song like “Love” resembles the way Schubert brings back a minor theme in the major mode. Like Schubert, the contrast alive in Lennon’s fragile hope lurches toward the tragic, as if the minor statement mocks the major mode from below. “Love” subsumes its bleak surroundings to catch sunbeams.
Throughout the record, consolation vies with desperation, the way “Hold On” mops up after “Mother,” for example, or the way “Look at Me” seeps from the tormented cracks of “Well Well Well.” Side one ends with the simple piano-ballad reassurance of “Isolation” as balm to the wounds inflicted in “Working Class Hero”; side two rears back into the frantic, odd-meter “Remember,” which dissolves into the eerie calm of “Love.” By the end, Lennon’s vocal tour de force redeems the hoariest of seventies “inner self” clichés and surges toward the divine on the concluding “God.” The Beatles had perfected the album closer as “big statement” with “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “A Day in the Life,” and the black hole of “Revolution 9” and “Good Night.” Now Lennon ushers in the pop apocalypse: everything you think you know is wrong, Beatle people. Stay tuned for the Great Revelation.
“God” quickly veers toward vengeful parody of the lopsided coda to “Hey Jude,” placing both the band and its rock mystique up there with Gandhi and Buddha and Hitler and the inexplicably missing Churchill—smashing busts in the pantheon of twentieth-century culture’s museum of heroes and antiheroes with an implicit ellipsis near the end to extend the notion of heroes itself on toward futility. When Lennon lands on the jugular, “I don’t believe in Beatles,” spitting out the name with rancor, the whole tirade doubles as a pretty good shaggy-dog joke, despite its pretensions. Having shot down his own Beatles alongside class hypocrisy and religious fraud, Lennon’s final swipe topples the Sgt. Pepper celebrity parade.
And “I don’t believe in Beatles” had the weird effect of confirming everything Lennon was pushing up against—just another celebrity inflating his stock by railing against the system. But like “Nowhere Man,” or “Revolution,” or the longer-form works—Tommy and “We Won’t Get Fooled Again”—that used rock to denounce rock pretensions, the energy behind the naïveté replenished a lot of Lennon’s “pronouncements” and made the reach admirable while magnifying the problem. With this kind of passion, Lennon could have made the phone book sound defiantly enchanting; his delivery here made his most extreme vocal leads (“Yer Blues,” “Hey Bulldog,” or “I Want You [She’s So Heavy]”) sound like auditions, a humbled rock original fighting for his sanity.
Perversely, “My Mummy’s Dead,” a homemade demo tagged on after “God” like an afterthought, detracts attention from Lennon’s bigger subject—his disfigurement at the demise of his band (“bigger than Elvis!”) has the tug of an unfathomable dilemma, the one beast he might never slay. By this point, Elvis himself was famous for shooting out TV sets in his Las Vegas hotel room. Lennon put television to better use: he stole from it shamelessly and bragged about working with the set on. Instead, he takes aim at the cultural mirror, and indicts everybody who holds on to inflated Beatle hopes that lie somewhere beyond human understanding or, in sixties parlance, confusing hero worship with “faith in the human condition.” Such expectations—from rock ’n’ roll, never mind its performers—can be even harder on romantics than on natural-born cynics.
The reviews tended to be uninformed raves, but Robert Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” capsule in the Village Voice spelled out some of the larger aesthetic feats everybody sensed in the sound: “Of course the lyrics are often crude psychotherapeutic clichés,” he noted. “That’s just the point, because they’re also true, and John wants to make clear that right now truth is far more important than subtlety, taste, art, or anything else.” Even in its reductionism, Christgau heard expressive technological metaphors: “John is such a media artist that even when he’s fervently shedding personas and eschewing metaphor he knows, perhaps instinctively, that he communicates most effectively through technological masks and prisms.”24
In retrospect, it’s difficult to emphasize the shattering effect this renunciation had on Beatle listeners. After two years of nonstop defiance with this new avant-garde wife, Lennon pissed on everybody’s fondest hopes. As he slammed the door on his own cage, he denounced the idea that he was shattering any larger symbolic ideal, and in this way only insured that he did so. That the Beatles survived the slam suggests both the band’s indomitability and Lennon’s parochialism. Only rock’s most famous man could renounce his fame while insisting such moves didn’t make him even more mythical.
Lennon remained sympathetic and almost heroic even as the swelling tide of “God” swept his Beatle persona, perhaps because Ringo was right behind him on drums and the gentle doo-wop cadence that brought the song home (I-vi-IV-V) had a jaunty, rakish self-deprecation. The chord progression that scaled a junkie’s self-ridiculing torment in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” now connoted reassurance, even redemption, of the type only Lennon’s cherished fifties records could.
Except for “AOS,” Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band album was recorded at the same sessions, and comprises some animated Lennon guitar work to cross avant-garde ideas with rock ’n’ roll forms. On “Why” and “Why Not” this same ensemble inverts the Lennon hard-core formula for an unconscious descent, a wordless trip built on Ono’s virtuosity disguised as vocal chatter. Think of “Revolution 9” as a straight “performance piece”—something musicians might attempt onstage—and Ono’s fingernail-across-chalkboard glottal attacks take root as noise for noise’s sake. It takes repeated listening, and a forgetting that reverses most pop listening habits, but the payoff reaches a parallel emotional intensity to Lennon’s confessional barbs.
In a little-known but probing Creem review several months after both these records came out, Dave Marsh dubbed Ono “the first rock scat singer” and favored her record even above Lennon’s. “And she’s done it without a backbeat,” Marsh marveled.
A major portion of her increased validity must be credited to the fact that she works on one cut (“AOS”) with the Ornette Coleman group. Coupled with the fact that this cut was recorded several years ago, long before it became “hip” in the youth community to be involved with avant-jazz figures, one begins to get a real feeling that it is Yoko who was brought artistically downward by her Beatles’ involvement rather than vice-versa. . . . She uses her voice here much as John Coltrane used his horn; that is, in order to explore every possible nuance of the word-sound (chord) she scats about, using the word as a base for all but never quite saying it simply.25
Lennon’s absolute faith in his new partner’s aesthetics struck most people as balmy at the time. “Yoko’s album complements mine for people who are interested in that kind of thing,” he told Howard Smith of WPLJ in New York. “Hers is a kind of, er, well, I call mine like a literate version of what we went through in the last year or so and Yoko’s is a sort of a sound picture, rather than a word picture. . . . I was dancing around with the guitar in front of her, sort of catching her eye and she was screaming back at me. It was a fantastic scene. There was just the four of us there, Klaus Voormann on the bass and Ringo on the drums, me on the guitar and Yoko on voice and we just knocked it off you know.”26
By contrast, the British press, predictably, mostly dismissed Ono’s material, as if avant-garde devices and strategies were still beyond the realm of most rock critics there: “John’s material is predictably mysterious and way-out, with him singing in the persuasive suggestive style, and appearing to enjoy every moment. . . . But, it’s senseless to try and define Yoko’s efforts. They are simply a wicked waste of wax! Lennon—four stars. Yoko—no rating,” complained one unsigned Disc and Music Echo review.27
John and Yoko’s creative largesse lay at some distant pole from Janov’s traumatic therapy. Long before there was rock ’n’ roll or a group to belong to, there was a father who had abandoned his son, who kept popping up at odd intervals, asking for money. Shortly before Lennon put Plastic Ono Band to bed, his Apple office passed along another note from his father. Alf’s timing could not have been worse.
They had not seen each other since early in 1968, when Alf stayed for a couple of days at Kenwood. Since then, Alf had remarried and settled in Brighton. His young wife, Pauline, had given birth to a son, David, and they wanted to wish Lennon a happy thirtieth birthday. Lennon invited Alfred and Pauline to come down for a visit to Tittenhurst on Friday, October 9. They brought David along to meet his famous stepbrother.
Lennon seems to have had a long speech planned. And the force of this tirade carried all of the anxieties he had been channeling in therapy and song throughout the year. When Alf and his new family arrived, they were shown by an aide into the back kitchen, where they waited in silence. Then a grim-faced Lennon appeared, followed by Yoko, and they suddenly realized this was not going to be a happy reunion. Pauline describes Lennon’s flaming red beard, which made him look “like a fierce and primitive warrior” and rendered their birthday gift of aftershave “laughably inappropriate.” Once he began ranting, they got the impression he was stoned.
This may have been true. Or cutting his Janov treatment short may simply have left Lennon’s wounds too tender to enter such a confrontation with any semblance of balance or purpose. “I’m cutting off your money and kicking you out of the house,” Lennon snapped for his opening. He quickly took a seat and launched his harangue. Turning to Ono for support, Pauline was struck both by her beauty—“flawless skin”—and her air of detachment. Alf tried to speak calmly in answering Lennon’s accusations: “I’ve never asked you for money—it was your choice to give me an allowance.” This time, Lennon had no patience for his father’s excuses. Yoko remained poised but completely silent, supporting her husband by simply sitting at his side.
Engaging with Lennon only made him angrier: “Have you any idea of what I’ve been through because of you?” Lennon continued. “Day after day in therapy, screaming for my Daddy, sobbing for you to come home. What did you care, away at sea all those years.” “You can’t put all the blame on your Dad,” Pauline interjected. “Your mother was just as much to blame for your problems.” This stirred a vehement rant against Julia, which struck Alf and Pauline as even more alarming. Lennon told them Julia was someone “he reviled in the most obscene language I had ever heard, referring to her repeatedly as a ‘whore.’ ” In this storm, no character could be safe. But Lennon certainly never wrote a song called “Alfred.”
John scolded Alf. “Do you know what it does to a child to be asked to choose between his parents? Do you know how it tears him apart, blows his bloody mind?”
Finally, Lennon felt the need to threaten Alfred should he ever try to make money off his famous son: “As for your life story, you’re never to write anything without my approval,” he insisted. “And if you tell anyone about what happened here today. . . . I’ll have you killed.” Pauline describes the look on Lennon’s face as one of “sheer evil” as he went on to explain “in extraordinary detail the procedure by which he would arrange for his father to be shot.”28
Pauline tried to intervene to defend her husband, but Lennon controlled the scene. When he finished, he simply left the kitchen with Yoko. Freddie, Pauline, and their little son went back to their car and drove home to Brighton. Father and son would never see each other again.
According to Alf’s book, Lennon was more agreeable in dealing with the sale of their home than they’d expected, but he was true to his threat about cutting them off. It’s hard to tell if Plastic Ono Band gave him the courage for this scene, or if Lennon had imagined such a confrontation for so long that it had formed the subtext and secret script for those songs. Alfred raised two boys with Pauline and seems to have had a happy, settled second family much the way his son would. They would speak again, but only by phone, some six years later.
On December 8, 1970, at the ripe old age of thirty, Lennon sat down with Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine for one of the great performances of his life, a sprawling interview later published as Lennon Remembers.29 His muscular talk counterpoints Plastic Ono Band, offhanded brutality as rock star candor. After this rant was published over the 1970 Christmas/New Year’s holidays, nothing about Beatlemania would ever be the same. With too much of the Let It Be film and album still hanging in the air, feeding the Beatle beast, Lennon had to get literal on his audience. Despite its frequent exaggerations, false claims, misremembered history, and prickly outbursts, this Lennon sit, brilliantly orchestrated by Wenner, became a central part of rock lore, the venting every rock star would later claim for granted, even though nobody can hold forth like Lennon. It almost made you wonder why in the world McCartney provoked him.
Many listeners picked up the album before they read the interview (release date: December 11, 1970). Like leaked testimony from a bitter custody battle for the soul of a group’s mystique, Lennon’s use of the word “divorce” suddenly took on added weight: feelings this fierce could only stem from an intimacy that rivaled marriage. Early on, Wenner asks, “Would you take it all back?”
“If I could be a fuckin’ fisherman, I would, you know,” Lennon responded. “If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It’s no fun being an artist. You know what it’s like, writing, it isn’t fun, it’s torture. . . . I resent performing for fucking idiots who don’t know anything. They can’t feel; I’m the one that’s feeling because I’m the one expressing. They live vicariously through me and other artists. One of my big things is that I wish I was a fisherman.”30
That kicked off a windy yet absorbing descent into Lennon’s deconstruction of his own fame, how the Beatles had lost control of their story, and how complicated popular success became when it stemmed from—and often blurred—aesthetics. Wenner ran the interview over two separate issues, and each paragraph held more outrage than the last. The insecurities Lennon sang about seemed as nothing compared to the supersize ego they came packaged in: “People like me are aware of their so-called genius at ten, eight, nine. I always wondered, why has nobody discovered me? In school, didn’t they see that I was cleverer than anybody in the school? That the teachers were stupid, too? That all they had was information I didn’t need? I got fuckin’ lost being in high school. I used to say to me auntie, ‘You throw my fuckin’ poetry out and you’ll regret it when I’m famous.’ And she threw the bastard stuff out.” The resentment in Lennon’s voice as he says these things (recently more widely circulated once Rolling Stone made the tape available as a podcast in 2006) has a bitterness that can only be explained as carryover from his therapy. In fact, one of the reasons this interview proved so explosive was the way it exposed Lennon’s confusion between confessional interview and therapeutic gush. He goes to such pains to denigrate his audience, and the many petty humiliations of celebrity, that half the time it’s not clear who Lennon thought he was talking to—Wenner, Janov, his readers, the Beatles, or rock history itself:
It just built up; the bigger we got, the more unreality we had to face and the more we were expected to do. They were always threatening what they would tell the press about us, to make bad publicity if we didn’t see their bloody daughter with the braces on her teeth. And it was always the police chief’s daughter or the lord mayor’s daughter—all the most obnoxious kids, because they had the most obnoxious parents. . . . One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. It just happens bit by bit, until this complete craziness surrounds you and you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand—the people you hated when you were ten.
But he saves his biggest resentment for the Beatles themselves, who set off daggers of invective, mostly against McCartney: “After Brian [Epstein] died, we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.”
Lennon’s talkathon suddenly gave shape to years of withheld tension and made twisted sense of his Let It Be passivity. At the end of 1970, this historic interview appeared as blowback to McCartney’s own passive resistance during his Scottish retreat. If his ex-partner persisted in his charm offensive, Lennon retaliated with a barrage of self-righteous umbrage. Here was the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership reduced to verbal one-upmanship. Lennon had the smarts, the wit, the guile, and a fearless urge to pontificate, but the subtext of all his posturing leaked through the bravado: How could any band contain the likes of Lennon? How had the Beatles possibly stayed together for so long? It made McCartney’s patience and forbearance seem Herculean.
And in the other corner, Lennon made this interview style so garishly primal, he opened himself up for vicious parody. Tony Hendra’s hooting National Lampoon satire (“Magical Misery Tour”) came at the end of side one on 1972’s Radio Dinner. The comedy troupe cynically predicted Nixon’s demo-derby landslide as all but inevitable and wove Beatle mythology through bowling-alley stoner talk and game show farce. “Genius is pain!” Hendra howls into the fade-out, as if a thousand spikes had been driven through his privileged rock-star senses. With every line a direct quote from Lennon’s Rolling Stone interview, Hendra commits the great Lennon deflation of the Lennon deflation, affectionately ripping every Plastic Ono Band pretension to shreds.
Critics lauded Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band as genius, but his brash interview stole some of its thunder. A lot of Beatle reactions coupled regret with affection: “It was so far out that I enjoyed it actually,” McCartney told Life magazine when promoting his new single, “Another Day,” in early 1971. That would have to be the attitude of the man who had stuck with Lennon through tirade after tirade, and knew how to filter obnoxiousness through a keen understanding of Lennon’s insecurities: “I ignored John’s interview in Rolling Stone. I looked at it and dug him for saying what he thought, but to me, short of getting it off his chest, I think he blows it with that kind of thing. . . . I know there are elements of truth in what he said and this open hostility, that didn’t hurt me. That’s cool. That’s John.”31
In London, McCartney filed suit against the other three Beatles in the High Court of London on the symbolic date of December 31, 1970. John and Lee Eastman had demonstrated to him that with Klein in charge of Apple, the only way to deal with Epstein’s final contract from 1967, which bound the Beatles’ fortunes together through 1977, was to dissolve the partnership. McCartney reasoned he couldn’t pursue his solo career while still operating as a collective with the other three. The sixties, a splatter-painting era prone to oversimplifications, needed several curtain-closers for its outsize ideals. The McCartney album, Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, his revenge interview, and a stream of legal headlines became successive fake endings as the uncertain post-Beatle era finally took hold.