McCartney’s suit against Apple, during the last two days of 1970, neatly bookended the Beatle era as Fleet Street’s biggest story since the Profumo scandal in 1963. The writ, issued in the Chancery Division of the High Court, sought to dissolve The Beatles and Co.1 John and Yoko saw the headlines at Tittenhurst and became newly wary. This legal expedition smelled like one more savvy public-relations move from cheery Paul. McCartney’s press quotes waved off the intricacies of taxes, publishing, and royalties with panache: “If the three of them want, they could sit down today and write a little bit of paper saying I’ll be released . . . that’s all I want!”2 The partnership’s one-upmanship had simply moved venues, from competitive collaboration to high command of the great Beatle myth.
Unbowed by Klein’s Apple housecleaning and back royalties negotiations, McCartney’s suit requested appointment of a receiver for Apple until the settlement and charged Klein with mismanagement of Apple funds. The numbers attached to the case were sobering: credit to the four individual Beatles stood at £738,000, of which £678,000 was due in taxes, leaving £60,000. When the news hit the papers that first day of 1971, the whole “end-of-era” hook proved irresistible for too many gadflies, even though they had already worn it out the previous New Year’s. But they needn’t have worried: the Beatle mystique was built for the ages, and the era of reissues had not yet dawned.
Because the Beatles had dominated the center of cultural life for so long, their unraveling was traumatic for everybody except newspaper accountants. If the band held the keys to British cultural identity, what did it mean once they went at one another’s throat? Was the promise of the band’s magic mixture of beat and melody too good to last? Or had the audience simply invested too many hopes in rock musicians who came of age only to be as perplexed as anybody else about moving on from the delirious sixties? All of the Beatles’ cultural triumphs gave way to new questions in Lennon’s mind: how best to transform sexual liberation, creative triumph expressed in popular terms, and a global peace movement into meaningful political change? As top forty radio put George Harrison’s smash single, “My Sweet Lord,” on a relentless tape loop, John and Yoko read the newspapers aloud to each other, as they had done in their Amsterdam and Montreal honeymoon beds, and tried to laugh about it. Maybe this year they would get lucky and have a child. Lennon was a big boy, he could outtalk McCartney any day, and he still had plenty in his arsenal for the ongoing PR war.
Within days of the new legal battle, both ex-Beatles fled the country. McCartney flew to New York to hire musicians for his next recording—Ram. The Lennons hopped into their limo and headed to Liverpool, where John gave Yoko a tour of childhood landmarks and the Cavern, before they boarded a boat to Miami. From there, they flew to Toronto for interviews with the CBC, and then returned to Miami for a flight to Japan.
From Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel, they rang up Yoko’s parents to arrange a surprise visit. Ono’s mother remembered the meeting with affection, remarking on the rock star’s good manners and “quiet” disposition. To Lennon, it was not just important to make a good impression on the Ono family—it felt like he had married into Japanese royalty. And in some ways, he had. Ono’s mother remembers a perfectly compliant young man, eager to please, who had no trouble adapting to a class system so similar to his own: “John made his own concession to our custom by taking off his white tennis shoes and leaving them at the door. We offered them tea at a table with chairs but John said it would be more appropriate to behave in the Japanese style. I thought that was very charming.”3
They talked about Yoko’s family, her brother and two sisters, and the Lennons’ home in England. But they ultimately couldn’t escape the court case that had hounded them from Britain. When Mr. Justice Stamp brought the case to order in London’s High Court on January 19, he heard David Hurst QC, representing McCartney, argue that the Beatles’ affairs were in a “grave state,” estimating there were not enough funds even to pay taxes. A London solicitor tracked Lennon down in Japan, though Lennon tried hard to avoid the call: “I got to Japan and I didn’t tell anybody I’d arrived,” Lennon complained. “Then suddenly I got these calls from the lawyer. Fucking idiot! I didn’t like his upper class Irish-English voice as soon as I heard it. He insisted that I come home. I could have done it all on the fucking phone!”4 This prompted the couple’s early return to England on January 21, to disappointing chart news: John’s Plastic Ono Band was the kind of hit record that didn’t sell very well. It peaked first in America, at number three, over Christmas week, for a thirty-week run. But even the Christmas season couldn’t nudge it past number eleven in Britain, where it took only ten weeks to stall out. To cap it off, BBC-TV broadcast A Hard Day’s Night after Christmas, which sent its soundtrack back into the UK top forty. In the public mind, no mere court case could kill the idea of this almighty band.
The political impulse that had been bugging Lennon since the “Revolution” controversy tugged him in opposing directions: one half yearned to join with fringe radical causes; the other half still idealized music with broad, Beatle-size appeal. When they returned from Japan, Lennon sat down with Tariq Ali, editor of the Red Mole, for his most political British interview to date. Ali had run Lennon’s letter back in 1968 defending “Revolution” and pursued Lennon as a prominent leftist ever since. Now Lennon determined to backtrack and clarify his earlier positions, as well as deal with some of the fallout from his Rolling Stone tirade.
And McCartney’s suit likely pricked Lennon’s political conscience—surely there were more important things to talk about than how all the bean counters were getting on. Yoko Ono had obviously been chatting with him about art and her storied past as a downtown artist who ran with like-minded freethinkers in the early 1960s. Marcel Duchamp had attended one of her loft concerts even before the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show, and modernism’s great provocateur intrigued Lennon. His remarks to Wenner in the Rolling Stone interview revived his inner art student, especially when he said:
All I ever learned in art school was about fuckin’ Van Gogh and stuff! They didn’t teach me anything about anybody that was alive now! They never taught me about Marcel Duchamp, which I despise them for, and Yoko has taught me about Duchamp and what he did, which is just out of his—fantastic! He got a fuckin’ bike wheel and said, “This is art, you cunts!” He wasn’t Dali. Dali’s alright, but he’s like Mick.5
All modernists are poseurs . . . like Jagger. To Lennon, these art movements resembled nothing so much as another version of rock history. Dada, after all, had been a bohemian response to Europe’s descent into World War I, and its strategies overlapped with rock ’n’ roll’s: self-published magazines, a fascination with typography, advertising, and humor, subtle plays on gender identity, and a constant fluidity between form and content. Most of all, rock music resembled Dada as anti-art, the impulse to kick sand in the official version of reality and invest minimalism with ideas that couldn’t be ignored. Think of Duchamp’s signature acts: placing a toilet in a museum exhibition (signed “R. Mutt”), complete with female pseudonym (“Rrose Sélavy”), or painting a mustache on da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Richard Hamilton, who designed the White Album’s “limited edition” bare cover, had worked with Duchamp reconstructing some of his major pieces, including The Bride Stripped Bare . . . ; and art schools, once an outpost, now teemed with students who admired the Beatles’ sophisticated sense of design.
Under Ono’s influence, Lennon began making connections between rock’s popular breakthroughs and Dada, surrealism, and pop art. He became intrigued by how rock ’n’ roll played into every aspect of modernism’s mission—to disrupt the “petty morality” of middle-class mores and challenge everybody’s assumptions about oppressive political systems, especially during wartime, when third world civilians were bombed and gassed in the name of “honor.” The connections Lennon had been trying to make in his music since “Revolution” now steered him toward more radical gestures. Promoting his most personal record, he shifted gears again back toward the political.
Much of his Red Mole interview reframes a lot of his embittered Rolling Stone quotes, and maps out issues that would concern Lennon for the rest of his life. But since it ran in a political fringe publication, not many Americans are widely familiar with his extended ruminations on these topics. He began by trying to clarify the “Revolution” contradictions: “On the version released as a single I said ‘when you talk about destruction you can count me out.’ I didn’t want to get killed. I didn’t really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know.”
This may be another case of trusting the art—the song makes Lennon’s verbal explanation seem clunky. The quote is delightful if only for his use of the word “unsubtle,” which is rich coming from Lennon; it would get attached to his own political songs. And he could have gone further: Mao had become a fashionable radical-chic totem in Europe long before Tom Wolfe branded Leonard Bernstein with the epithet at his Dakota apartment party for the Black Panthers. New Wave French director Jean-Luc Godard had spoken highly of Mao, even after the Chinese leader’s crimes against humanity were public knowledge. In leftist terms, Mao had already become the new Stalin, the crowbar figure in defining your attitudes toward socialism.
“I’ve never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days; that would be around ’65 or ’66,” Lennon continued, “and that religion was directly the result of all that superstar shit—religion was an outlet for my repression. I thought, ‘Well, there’s something else to life, isn’t there? This isn’t it, surely?’ ” Lennon credited psychologist Janov with the notion of “religion as a form of madness,” and the therapy itself as a way for Lennon to dissolve “the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” The discussion continued into practical concerns of how to empower the working class, how the Communists failed to take advantage of the 1968 strikes in France, and how corporate entities still controlled everybody’s access to information. “We tried to change that with Apple but in the end we were defeated,” Lennon argued. “They still control everything. EMI killed our album Two Virgins because they didn’t like it. With the last record they’ve censored the words of the songs printed on the record sleeve. Fucking ridiculous and hypocritical—they have to let me sing it but they don’t dare let you read it. Insanity.”
And then a new theme emerged from all this rhetoric, the veiled class shame Lennon hid behind. As Aunt Mimi’s proper middle-class schoolboy, he identified so strongly with “working-class” music that he bent over backward so it might define him, even if he had to fudge the fact that he was the only Beatle with indoor plumbing. And a new feminism lurched out as the key hypocrisy behind many competing revolutionary notions. Lennon praised Yoko for calling his bluff early on over this, when he thought he was simply behaving normally. He mentioned the Ono phrase “Woman is the nigger of the world” for the first time. “If you have a slave around the house,” Yoko asked, “how can you expect to make a revolution outside it?”
Tying his new direct song language in to his interest in Japanese haiku, Lennon closed by articulating an artistic motive behind his political ideals: “The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.”6 This formed the exact opposite musical tack he would take on his follow-up to Plastic Ono Band.
The very next day Lennon called Tariq Ali to play him a new song over the phone: the interview had fermented overnight into “Power to the People.” It stuffed all the “in-out-in” ambivalence from “Revolution” back in its hat, quoting his original lyric and declaring, “You say you want a revolution/We better get it on right away . . .” Almost as quickly as Lennon wrote it, he tracked it with his usual crew (Alan White and Klaus Voormann) and had it ready as a single (backed with Ono’s “Open Your Box”) on March 12. This single marked an end to running into London to record at EMI: with major work on the Tittenhurst home studio nearing completion, Lennon was eager to record his entire next album there.
After he finished off a few more songs, he called on Phil Spector to produce again and began inviting musicians over to rehearse as “Power to the People” stalled out at number ten. Klaus Voormann returned on bass, with Nicky Hopkins on keyboards, and Alan White instead of Ringo Starr on drums (with Jim Gordon drumming for “It’s So Hard” and Jim Keltner doing “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama”). George Harrison was invited in for slide guitar work (notably on “How Do You Sleep?” “Crippled Inside,” and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama”).
As Lennon recorded and filmed these Imagine sessions, the McCartneys snuggled up on the cover of Life magazine for a Richard Merryman profile to promote their new single, “Another Day,” which competed for radio time with Ringo’s “It Don’t Come Easy.” McCartney held to his PR campaign of being blameless in the Beatles’ bust-up. He singled out the Epstein contract the four of them signed in 1967, talking around and through all the Klein-Eastman wrangling. “You see, there was a partnership contract put together years ago to hold us together as a group for 10 years,” McCartney explained. “Anything anybody wanted to do—put out a record, anything—he had to get the others’ permission. Because of what we were then, none of us ever looked at it when we signed it. We signed it in ’67 and discovered it last year. . . . But the trouble is, the other three have been advised not to tear it up.”
In his view, the other Beatles forced him to play fate’s reluctant emissary, as he hid out in the Scottish Highlands: “My lawyer [and brother-in-law], John Eastman, he’s a nice guy and he saw the position we were in, and he sympathized. We’d have these meetings on top of hills in Scotland, we’d go for long walks. I remember when we actually decided we had to go and file suit. We were standing on this big hill which overlooked a loch—it was quite a nice day, a bit chilly—and we’d been searching our souls.” The only alternative, as McCartney and Eastman could see it, was seven more years of phony partnership.7
Nobody to this day talks about the glaring conflict of interest McCartney pricked by choosing his brother-in-law for representation. Given the tangle of alliances and sensibilities that made the Beatles so magical, how could the other three possibly side with McCartney when he’d been buying up shares of Northern Songs behind Lennon’s back and then balked at Klein for a manager with Eastman as his only alternative? Once his band mates got a whiff of the legal empire McCartney had hitched his wagon to, Klein seemed just the streetwise tough they might need to clean house and fight for their interests. Innumerable takes of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” for the sake of Beatle cheer, perhaps; an army of lawyers attached to the cute one’s wife meant long-term trouble.
Journalists never asked McCartney how he might have reacted if Yoko Ono’s banking family were pitched to manage their finances. And the press never asked why he felt so strongly about bringing out his first solo album, McCartney, right alongside Let It Be, creating a retail bottleneck and snubbing the others’ efforts to bail Apple out. From Lennon, Harrison, and Starr’s viewpoint, they had a renegade in their midst who would stop at nothing to sabotage the company they had formed together. But McCartney’s PR charm ran on irresistible hooks: family values and an irrepressible nonchalance that said, “How can you possibly take anybody else’s side in this?”
Unlike Lennon’s confessionals, “Another Day” resembled McCartney in the “life-passing-him-by” voice of the character from “A Day in the Life,” minus the tragic frame. The B side, on the other hand, featured a chilling rock vocal on a throwaway called “Oh Woman, Oh Why,” told by a man who’s just been shot by his lover (“What have you done?!?”); McCartney sang it like he was bleeding from his gut. In the great back-and-forth between former songwriters, McCartney condensed all his post-Beatle anxiety into a mini–Plastic Ono Band, a novelty with a vocal passion that rivaled “Hey Jude”; but as an obscure B side, it never made it onto an album.
The Royal Courts of Justice handed down their opinion in McCartney’s Apple suit on March 12, 1971. The official forty-five-page opinion by Mr. Justice Stamp furthered McCartney’s narrative and began a public demonization of Allen Klein and his company, ABKCO.8 Every Beatle except for Paul McCartney had signed with ABKCO, and the Apple board had approved a broad arrangement giving Klein discretion over numerous scattered Beatle accounts. Since McCartney had never consented to this arrangement, he asked the court to nullify it. His lawyers presented paperwork supporting McCartney’s claim that Klein was unfit to supervise the band’s affairs and had mishandled the Apple accounts for the year he had been at the helm.
The judge was quick to find fault with Klein’s bookkeeping, especially given the “generous” terms with which he lured Lennon into his initial signing. “On the figures before me what has been charged is not less than three times the amount chargeable under the old agreement, and the excess is at least something over half a million pounds. ABKCO has also charged commission at the rate of ten percent on the royalties still payable under the EMI agreement; that is to say, in respect of the records sold otherwise than in North America. The amount of this charge, according to a schedule produced by Mr. Klein, is £123,871, of which 114,000 has been paid.” In other words, Klein not only overcharged, he cost the band three times the amount they would have been charged under the existing agreement with Brian Epstein.
Furthermore, the judge noted, Klein’s stewardship of Apple had been anything but professional: “Messrs Arthur Young & Co. [the court-appointed accounting firm] found a state of confusion, papers missing or in confusion, and necessary information lacking. As between the Plaintiff [McCartney] and Apple, the managers of the partnership business, Apple had, for one reason or another, fallen down and failed in its duty.”9 To settle matters, the judge appointed a receiver to “receive the assets and manage the business.” This part of the decision froze all of the Beatles’ publishing, royalty, and earnings accounts until a new settlement could be reached. “It will be many months before the parties are ready for trial, more before the action can be heard,” the judge concluded.
In order to stay afloat, and live to fight another day for monies rightfully theirs, McCartney had forced the others’ hand. Now the best they could do was to keep releasing solo albums, and perhaps tour under their own steam, to refill their coffers to pay more lawyers to settle these matters at some future date. It would take another four years of wrangling to finally reach settlement and close the Beatle books.
In the PR sweepstakes over who controlled the Beatle narrative, this decision scored in McCartney’s favor. The previous year, his aw-shucks McCartney debut and prodding attitude in Let It Be vied with Lennon’s howling finale to “God” (“I don’t believe in Beatles”) and venomous quotes in Rolling Stone. Now he had taken his band mates to court and proven their alliance with Klein something of a disaster. McCartney made sure to show up in court himself, as plaintiff, which impressed the judge; the other three never set foot in the door. By way of response, Lennon started writing a new batch of songs.
Alan White remembers Yoko Ono being very influential during the Imagine sessions—her experience reading and writing music facilitated Lennon’s concepts with his players. This new partnership gave John his head and helped his musical fluency. But even though their house and grounds had been upgraded, the Lennons complained about the continuing stream of hate mail they opened. The more Ono talked to him about her downtown art scene in New York, the more Lennon wondered what daily life would be like there. They planned a trip in early June 1971, and seemed smitten by the city’s pace the minute they arrived.
According to the Zappa biography by Barry Miles (the same figure who had carried Ono’s Grapefruit at his Indica bookshop and went on to cowrite McCartney’s Many Years from Now), the two rock stars met courtesy of the Village Voice columnist and radio personality Howard Smith. Smith, who mentioned a forthcoming interview with Zappa, was surprised to hear of Lennon’s enthusiasm for the California rock experimentalist: “Wow, I always wanted to meet him. I really, really admire him. . . . He’s at least trying to do something different with the form. It’s incredible how he has his band as tight as a real orchestra. I’m very impressed by the kind of discipline he can bring to rock that nobody else can seem to bring to it.”
Smith took Lennon to Zappa’s hotel room; the latter seemed slow to realize Lennon was not putting him on. His band “leapt up,” anxious to be introduced, and Lennon spoke deferentially, as if Zappa were the real artist and Lennon simply a pop star. Yoko, on the other hand, “acted like Frank Zappa had stolen everything he had ever done or even thought from her,” Smith says. Zappa ignored her. Howard proposed to Zappa that John and Yoko take the stage that night at the Fillmore East in the East Village.10
When they walked out onstage for Zappa’s encore, the New York audience gasped. Like the Toronto Rock ’n’ Roll Revival, Lennon preferred these hastily arranged, unannounced gigs; they gave him less time to get nervous. “For those of you in the band who don’t know what’s happening,” Zappa said, “we’re playing in A minor.” Lennon had to wrestle with a twitchy amp, and he read his guitar chords off Zappa’s half the time. One of the singers from the Turtles put a bag on Yoko’s head, and she kept on wailing into her microphone. John and Yoko remained onstage, tweaking the feedback, after everybody else had left. It was an event, but nobody knew quite what to make of it, or whether it pointed more toward Zappa or John Lennon.
“We went down there and I did an old Olympics number,” Lennon said, “the B side of ‘Young Blood.’ . . . It was a 12-bar kind of thing I used to do at the Cavern. . . . It was pretty good with Zappa because he’s pretty far out, as they say, so we blended quite well. . . . We did a three- or four-hour gig and it was beautiful. There was no rehearsal. It’s much better like that. I’m sick of going on stage and being judged, you know.”11 Before the second show, Zappa, Lennon, and Yoko jammed in the second-level dressing room to an overflow crowd of Fillmore cognoscenti and hangers-on.
Compared to the relative isolation of Lennon’s British country mansion, New York’s Village scene swarmed with antiwar activists and countercultural creatives of all stripes. And John and Yoko’s timing had a certain clairvoyance, given the kind of material Lennon wanted to start writing: the week after they played the Fillmore, the New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s top-secret government report on U.S. involvement in Vietnam between 1967 and 1969. Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND Corporation military analyst, leaked the file as an act of conscience. Government war lies dominated headlines, slowly curdling the Pentagon’s official Vietnam narrative. The Nixon administration filed suit to block further publication, but in a celebrated First Amendment case, the Supreme Court ultimately intervened (this all happened during the month of June 1971). This scandal gave the lie to both Johnson’s and Nixon’s reckless military pursuits, and undermined a sitting president’s powers. Lennon’s live appearances in New York created new hope among peaceniks: after all, the war machine had started rotting from within. To Lennon, the energy surrounding the antiwar effort felt irresistible; three years after he put out “Revolution,” this cause didn’t know the meaning of ambivalence.
John and Yoko returned to Britain briefly that summer of 1971 to promote the new edition of Ono’s Grapefruit, and to invite the media to an “open house” at Tittenhurst on July 20. They blabbed quotes like buckshot, but the hate mail persisted. “Being misunderstood,” John explained to Steve Turner in Hit Parader magazine, “is being treated as if I’d won the pools and married a Hawaiian dancer. In any other country we’re treated with respect as artists, which we are. If I hadn’t bought a house in Ascot I’d leave because I’m sick of it. It’s only because it’s such a nice house that I’m staying. I’m a fantastic patriot for Britain. Ask Yoko—I never stop selling it! But she finds it hard to love England when they never stop shitting on her.”12
They flew back to New York in August, only to get pulled into Beatle reunion rumors. George Harrison’s mentor, Ravi Shankar, appealed to his rock-star student to mount a large charity event for the struggling nation of Bangladesh. The young country, which broke off from India and fought a civil war in 1970, had created a human rights crisis largely unreported by the Western media. Harrison, whose All Things Must Pass late in 1970 yielded a huge radio hit with “My Sweet Lord,” planned an all-star rock concert to donate ticket receipts and film and record royalties to the relief effort.
The Bangladesh conflict came after the massive Bhola cyclone hit the coast of East Pakistan in November 1970, killing five hundred thousand people. The government responded ineptly. To aggravate the humanitarian crisis, President Yahya Khan blocked Sheikh Mujibur Rahman from taking office, even though his Awami League won a majority in Parliament in the 1970 elections. Khan arrested Mujibur in March 1971 and launched a bloody assault on the Awami League separatists. This war aggravated the humanitarian crisis, leading to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths as Khan targeted intellectuals and Hindus. Ten million refugees flooded into India.
Harrison’s concert took shape with great urgency throughout July. He invited all three of the other Beatles to appear, and Lennon seemed open to the idea, at least for a time. Rumors lit up fan networks and radio shows. Only after Lennon showed up for a rehearsal did things fall apart: Yoko assumed Lennon would perform with her, since they were now a duo and had been performing together for three years. She felt even more strongly about this in her adopted artistic home of New York City. Lennon either didn’t anticipate this or failed to get it straightened out beforehand. A huge row erupted, and Lennon walked.
In fact, Harrison and Klein insisted that the Lennon invitation never included Yoko; Lennon couldn’t persuade Yoko that the fans would be expecting him without her. Differing stories circulate around McCartney’s invitation, but it’s likely Lennon also walked out over his fear of a “surprise” reunion. He didn’t want to hit the stage only to get blindsided by a prank, or simply a well-meaning surge of feeling from colleagues who couldn’t help themselves. Perhaps some Beatle rumors filtered among the musicians themselves. Either way, this open conflict with Yoko, in front of Harrison and other players, overwhelmed Lennon, who felt doubly embarrassed by his wife before other rock stars, and rarely entered into confrontations where he wasn’t the aggressor. Humiliated, he fled straight back to Tittenhurst without Ono.
The concerts went off as Concert for Bangladesh on August 1 (afternoon and evening shows), with Ringo Starr double-drumming next to Jim Keltner and an all-star band, including Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Klaus Voormann, Badfinger, and Eric Clapton. Reunion rumors evaporated the minute Harrison introduced Bob Dylan, who hadn’t performed widely in America since his motorcycle accident in 1966. Except for the Woody Guthrie memorial concert with the Band in 1968, Dylan hadn’t appeared on a New York stage since 1966, and he quickly upstaged everybody by reworking five songs that signaled a larger return to form. Once again, Harrison trumped expectations by bringing in a ringer.
British journalist Ray Connolly met up with a distressed Yoko Ono in New York days before the show, just after Lennon had left the country. Ono gave him the rundown, and he confirms how the rift between John and Yoko had more to do with billing than any tiff between Lennon and Harrison. Yoko told Connolly how Lennon tried to persuade her that his appearance onstage with his former Beatles would be what the audience expected, and that spotlighting the John and Yoko act would detract attention from the larger humanitarian cause. Ono’s younger sister Setsuko had flown in specifically for the occasion, and now Yoko wanted to follow John back to England and skip the concert entirely.
“Yoko left me the keys to her car and told me to wear John’s clothes, and it was a pretty strange weekend,” Connolly remembers. “Setsuko got mistaken for Yoko all over town as we wandered around in the days around the big concert.”13
Even though this Bangladesh concert led to a falling out, the idea of living in New York, where he routinely walked around and ate in public without incident, as is the custom for celebrities in the city, had already seduced Lennon. After he and Ono were reunited back at Tittenhurst, they decided to decamp to New York for a longer stay, and they spent August packing up their belongings. Alan Smith of the New Musical Express interviewed Lennon this month about his new album, Imagine, and the way McCartney always dodged the issue of taxes when summarizing Beatle business affairs. Curiously, Lennon makes known his abundant affection for the Beatles by telling Smith that while he disagreed with McCartney’s methods, he agreed that the band had reached its end. “Look at us today,” Lennon argued. “I’d sooner have Ram, Plastic Ono Band, George’s album and Ringo’s single and his movies than Let It Be or Abbey Road.”
Asked if he’d listened to McCartney’s Ram, Lennon said: “Of course I did. A couple of times. The first time I heard it I thought, fucking hell, it was awful. And then, ahem, the second time I fixed the record player a bit, and it sounded better. In general I think the other album he did [McCartney] was better. At least there was some songs on it. I don’t like this dribblin’ pop opera jazz, y’know. I like pop records that are pop records. I know you yourself didn’t like it. I was really surprised when I saw that bit.” Then Smith talked to him about the differences between Glyn Johns’s Get Back and Phil Spector’s Let It Be, which Lennon defended. “I’m glad the bootleg [Get Back] is going about,” he said, “because it shows that Paul was wrong when he was putting down Spector.”14
By the end of August, John and Yoko had packed up all their belongings and posed in Tittenhurst’s “Imagine” living room, surrounded by memorabilia and trinkets, as if about to hold a garage sale. But in the ongoing PR show of their marriage, John and Yoko did more than relocate—they hunkered down on American network television.
The minute they hit Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel, they started calling friends and watching TV and making arty little movies, just as they had done in Britain. Talk-show host Dick Cavett, ABC’s hip late-night alternative to NBC’s Johnny Carson, took a phone call from Lennon one morning and visited their room, where they put him in a quickie conceptual film. Within a week of their arrival, this conversation spilled onto Cavett’s show.
Cavett, of course, was delighted with the booking. He was carving out a position to the left of Carson and had already welcomed Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to his couch. With the famous ex-Beatle about to release a major new album, his second solo effort, featuring John and Yoko as guests boosted Cavett’s countercultural cachet.
Lennon walked on chewing gum, wearing an ironic green army shirt, white pants, and black boots; Yoko strutted behind him in an orange velour minidress, black choker, beret, and black stockings. After a bumpy start, the couple came across as animated, curious, lively, and innately funny. Together they unveiled a new agenda, beyond marketing Lennon’s new record and talking back to Beatle rumors. Lennon spoke openly of the Beatles in the past tense, confronted Yoko’s image as a shrew, and extended his argument about all the great solo work the band was doing. Lennon sometimes fought back his inclination to interrupt Yoko to proclaim his newfound feminism. But the tape reveals him in very good humor, apologetic whenever he steps on Ono’s sentences, and generally disarming Cavett’s awe at his presence with mock hostility.
To Beatle questions, Lennon replied with tart but polite dismissals, and steered most queries back toward his and Yoko’s avant-garde films and recordings. Yoko mentioned how John learned the term “chain-smoking” while reading an article about her. Lennon chimed in, “Smoking kills. . . . It didn’t work, Janov. . . . It didn’t work, Arthur,” insinuating that Janov’s therapy promised to “cure” them of cigarettes.15 They both smoked nonstop.
When Cavett brought up Yoko’s image as a witch and dragon lady, they chuckled. Lennon said, “If she took them apart, can we please thank her for all the nice music that George made and Ringo made and Paul made and I’ve made since we broke up?” which got spontaneous applause. “She didn’t really know about us,” Lennon says. “The only name she knew was Ringo, ’cause it means ‘apple’ in Japanese.”
To finish their appearance, they opened things up for audience questions. Lennon answered one question about the “out” versus “in” versions of “Revolution,” explaining how there were three versions of the song, how he made up the Chairman Mao lyric in the studio, how he regretted that line since it might prevent him from traveling to China, and he wished he played Ping-Pong so he could go over there. Now he believed that courthouse theater (like the Chicago Seven) and the bed-ins for peace had a larger effect on the opposition. “The ‘establishment’ doesn’t understand them, so they can’t kill them off,” he said.
Then, a question about the recent Village Voice letter to the editor set Lennon off on a particularly revealing tirade from the man who twisted “Working Class Hero” into something far more poetic than literal: “I’m not an intellectual, I’m not articulate,” Lennon argued sternly. “I’m working class and I use few words, I use words that the people around me used when I was a child. So when somebody comes at me with a bunch of [bullshit], I just give them [bullshit] back, and there it is.” There’s an illuminating distinction: in Lennon’s mind, intellectuals by definition can’t be working class.
They closed with some snarky comments on the runaway catchphrase of the day:
CAVETT: “My definition of love is not having to read Love Story . . .”
LENNON: “Love is having to say you’re sorry every five minutes . . .”
Cavett made the era’s best possible choice to keep pace with rock’s great quote machine, but throughout the interview, he looked torn between reaching for his next question and paddling fast just to stay afloat. Lennon went from zero to caustic in no time, and it was all Cavett and his late-night format could do to keep up with him. Compared to Britain, where the press treated John and Yoko more like a cartoon, the American media embraced their political talk and treated the couple like substantive artists. The U.S. government, however, reacted quite differently.