Every successful songwriter writes a number that becomes his or her signature, and “Imagine” became Lennon’s musical autograph upon its release in the fall of 1971, for good and ill. This makes it a cousin to McCartney’s “Yesterday,” projecting only a slice of Lennon’s irascible calm, arguably the least revealing slice. Like “Yesterday,” “Imagine” comprises a blatant sop to commercial taste, although it avoids the romantic cliché. As Lennon admitted, it sponges off some “instructions” from Ono’s Grapefruit, although he wasn’t so far into the feminist camp yet as to actually put her name on the song (he gave lip service to this idea later on). Ironically, it was McCartney who made the first move, with Ram, putting “Paul and Linda McCartney” onto the songwriting credits, which caused consternation and disbelief from his publishing company when he began asking for separate royalty checks. Both these former partners had not only chosen American wives but insisted on dragging them onstage and having them coauthoring songs as part of their “solo” personas. This suggests how reliant Lennon and McCartney each were on collaborators, how each viewed the creative process as a form of intimacy, and how a wife replaced the other Beatle once the group sundered.
Whether it charms you or strikes you as philosophical cotton candy, “Imagine” could be Lennon’s most widely misunderstood song. A hushed vocal atop piano framing a stridently antireligious lyric, it’s “Hey Jude” and “Let It Be” distilled into his own image. Instead of listing everything he doesn’t believe in, Lennon gift-wraps his tirade at the end of “God” as a hymn to the most benign brand of secular pacifist humanism. In this respect, this gentle sleight-of-hand has a beguiling appeal: Lennon might as well be singing, “I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in nationalism, I don’t believe in capitalism,” as if sixties utopianism had not disappeared but gone mainstream, like the gentle lullaby of a baby-bath-soap commercial. Five years earlier, the Bible Belt had burned his records and sent death threats for such sentiments; by 1971, it was a measure of Lennon’s enormous effect on culture that such spiritual doubt seemed largely a matter of individual freedom—the song is sugarcoated agnosticism for the masses.
As the title track to the Imagine album, it traced a sea change in Lennon’s tone and production approach, airbrushing Plastic Ono Band’s anguish for a much larger hit. However, Imagine acquired a sunny reputation without soft-pedaling its thematic conflicts; the title track is the only song to “counterbalance” Plastic Ono Band’s ordeal. The emotional tone of Imagine lurches back and forth between Plastic Ono Band’s trauma (“Mother”) and heady utopian sentiment (“Love”). Given its scabrous opinions (“Gimme Some Truth”) and paranoid insomnia (“I Don’t Want to Be a Soldier Mama”), Imagine boasts a broader poetic reach—for a full two acts (these first two solo albums), Lennon sings convincingly as though the Beatles are behind him. And songs like “How?” “Oh My Love,” and “How Do You Sleep?” wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Plastic Ono Band.
“Imagine” also has an inimitable touch of Beatle magic to it, a clue that Lennon missed his band mates after heaping two years of constant scorn on them. The album and hit single returned “All You Need Is Love” gallantry to the top ten, convincing many critics Lennon might just be warming up for the great solo career of the four that everybody had fully expected. Even the throwaway tracks had evidence of the salty Scouser stirring up trouble. “Crippled Inside” straddled both skiffle music and ragtime while sidestepping both styles, a rewrite of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” that juggled knives. Jim Keltner’s lumbering beat built up a slow-swelling fear in “Soldier,” as Lennon voiced what boys pray to themselves alone at night, flummoxed by the Vietnam era’s blurred conceptions of “manhood,” “bravery,” and “patriotism.” In an unnervingly stilted and hazy tone, a superstar inverted his culture’s prevailing machismo to voice a universal fear of death.
As a post-Beatle landmark, parts of Imagine resemble a Lennon album in McCartney clothing, until “How Do You Sleep?” brings such fancies to a full stop. Lines like “The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday’ / And since you’ve gone you’re just ‘Another Day’ ” unleash a veiled, damningly faint praise of McCartney’s spring single.1 That line gives you pause: does Lennon really mean to compare “Another Day” with “Yesterday”? More likely, it’s a cheap shot that belies how closely Lennon watched his ex-partner’s work. Lennon lynched McCartney with unrepentant smugness, the same blunt edge that suggested the mock book title “Queer Jew” for Brian Epstein. George Harrison ladled “How Do You Sleep?” with acidic slide guitar to make it the great anti-McCartney diatribe. (McCartney limped back with “Dear Friend,” which he wrote after Lennon’s Rolling Stone interview, on December’s Wild Life.) Most of the world may have hoped a song titled “How Do You Sleep?” might be about warmongers like Nixon or Kissinger; Lennon sounded somewhat less heroic singing, “The sound you make is mu-zak to my ears / You must have learned something in all those years . . .” The contradiction seems to have eluded him: if he truly no longer “believe[d] in Beatles,” why devote his epic, two-part interview to snarling personal attacks and whole songs picking apart his former partner’s output?
For all his charisma, Lennon couldn’t see the contradictions inherent in preaching peace from one side of his album and spitting vitriol from the other: “I wasn’t really feeling that vicious at the time, but I was using my resentment toward Paul to create a song. Let’s put it that way. It was just a mood. Paul took it the way he did because it, obviously, pointedly refers to him, and people just hounded him about it, asking, ‘How do ya feel about it?’ But there were a few little digs on his album, which he kept so obscure that other people didn’t notice ’em, you know, but I heard them.”2
“How Do You Sleep?” gets answered by the disarmingly timid “How?,” where Lennon extends his doubts to the larger culture he speaks for. After questioning his own confidence and self-image in the first two verses, he leaps to the universal in the last verse: “How can we go forward when we don’t know which way we’re facing?” is the more honest and forthright question submerged in the vagaries of “Revolution,” drawing on all the emotional privation from his last record to raise bigger questions: how could personal neglect evoke such eloquence? The links between “How Do You Sleep?” and “How?” go beyond the combined word and question-mark alliteration. Lennon’s artistic gift—his raging compassion, his epic insecurities—binds up the personal with the political in a feat of understated vocal control. It’s enough to steal attention from those “invisible” strings.
In the end, however, no amount of religious, political, or friendship betrayals can upstage Lennon’s romantic subversion. Among great songwriting tricks, the most dazzling may be making an unsympathetic subject sympathetic. Throughout Imagine, Lennon hitches the Beatles’ communal dream to his romance with Yoko Ono. The closing “Oh Yoko!” portrays Yoko as lovable even if her voice grated on every Lennon ideal; if this is what this woman meant to this singer, how could the world possibly resist? “Oh Yoko!” starts where Grapefruit leaves off, copping Ono’s strategy of taking everyday imagery to weave Zen-like riddles with warm, rippling embrace. “In the middle of a shave” becomes “In the middle of a dream” by the last verse, which harks back to “A Day in the Life” and “I’m Only Sleeping” as a metaphor for the imaginative possibilities couched in the ordinary. “My love will turn you on,” picks up on that “I’d love to turn you on” “Day in the Life” catchphrase for a flirtation aimed somewhere on the far side of romantic. Instead of being boastful, Lennon’s delivery steers this line toward coyly adorable. The refrain holds frighteningly innocent pleasures, and when Lennon holds out notes on repetitions—“My love . . . will . . . turn . . . you . . . on”—he pulls off a cornball sentimentality to make McCartney blush. Fading away by itself for the album’s curtain, Lennon’s harmonica sounds almost as joyous and carefree as it had in 1963’s “Little Child” or 1964’s “I Should Have Known Better.” Even to those who still found Ono unsympathetic, Lennon canonized her name for an irresistible track.
Imagine came out with heavy promotional support alongside Yoko Ono’s Fly, on October 8, 1971, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic lauded Lennon’s return and the former Beatle’s pop gumption. Within weeks the title single dominated American radio and held firm at number three (stalled by Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” and Cher’s “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves”), his first top-five hit since “Instant Karma” (also number three) eighteen months previously. (No single came out in Britain.) The album quickly went gold in both Britain and America, combining what UK critic Jon Savage called “the best and worst of the man—the idealist and the ranter, the righteous and the vindictive anger.”3
After he’d finished mixing and mastering the album, and sent the recording off for packaging, John and Yoko leapt into New York’s slipstream of activism and radical street theater. That Dick Cavett Show appearance in September, where they made late-night’s hippest host play catch-up, was just a prelude. As “Imagine” climbed the charts, they hunted for an apartment in the Village and spent every waking hour doing interviews, hitting sessions, catching bands, ducking into art shows, and giving celebrity gadflies fits keeping up with them.
They watched in dismay as the Attica State Prison riot unraveled. Back on August 21, guards had killed an armed Black Panther and author, George Jackson, as he attempted to escape three days before his murder trial; two guards and two more inmates also died in the incident. On September 9, nearly a thousand of Attica’s 2,200 prisoners rioted, seized control of the grounds, and took forty-two corrections officers and civilians hostage. Tense negotiations huddled state law-enforcement officials in Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s office, where they agreed to twenty-eight of the prisoners’ thirty demands—reforms that included religious freedom for Black Muslims, competent medical treatment, and a framework for airing future grievances. Rockefeller responded by ordering the National Guard to storm the prison with tear gas on September 13, leaving thirty-nine people killed: twenty-nine prisoners and ten guards. The coverage blamed prisoners for slashing throats, but the medical examiner discovered that, in fact, the National Guard’s raid had slaughtered all ten hostages.
This event galvanized political views, with leftists defending the mistreated prisoners, whose list of demands included more than one shower a week, and right-wingers becoming incensed at the lack of respect for law and order. Like the Kent State killings, and the overarching agony of the Vietnam War, the event underlined class and political fault lines. Now that Lennon and Ono had settled in Manhattan, they joined other New Yorkers in their outrage. And the riot completely reoriented Lennon’s political muse as his most popular album rose up the charts.
The first indications of explicit political themes came as Lennon celebrated his thirty-first birthday on October 9, 1971, in Syracuse, where Yoko Ono had mounted an art show with John as “guest artist.” Footage from the opening party in a hotel room, by filmmaker and friend Jonas Mekas, shows friends milling about, a tape recording running, and a bunch of songs sung halfheartedly by denizens like Ringo Starr, Phil Spector, Allen Ginsberg, and Jerry Rubin. In There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Peter Doggett describes the scene where Lennon unveils a new song:
Amidst the musical chaos, Lennon toyed with a new composition. “It was conceived on my birthday,” he confirmed later. “We ad libbed it, then we finished it off.” In its semi-complete state, the song sounded banal; it gained little in stature when Lennon and Ono completed the lyrics in subsequent weeks. But this coruscating revolutionary protest song sported a timely title: “Attica State.”4
At the same time, Lennon worked on a holiday jingle. Richard Williams booked a Lennon interview at their St. Regis Hotel suite in Manhattan later that month, where they chatted about future projects while sorting through Lennon’s collection of Presley singles to be installed on his jukebox in his new Greenwich Village loft. Lennon talked of a Plastic Ono Band tour with Nicky Hopkins, Klaus Voormann, and Jim Keltner. Yippie Jerry Rubin would play advance man, laying the groundwork for all kinds of music and political theater. And he spoke about doing more sessions with Spector.
“I’ve got a lot to learn,” Lennon told Williams. “It’s been seven years, you know . . . but it’s important to get the band on the road, to get tight. It’s been fun just turning up at odd gigs like Toronto and the Lyceum and the Fillmore, but I’m sick of having to sing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ because we haven’t rehearsed anything else.”5
Perhaps Spector talked about the work he and Harrison had done on the Concert for Bangladesh tapes; perhaps Lennon had ambitions to carve out his own charity cause. That evening, Williams took notes on the “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” session at the Record Plant on 44th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. “The ‘War Is Over’ bit’s in brackets, like the old American records,” Lennon announced proudly. When he first played the song for Spector, it reminded the producer of an old Paris Sisters song he’d made back in 1961: “I Love How You Love Me,” for Leiber and Stoller’s Red Bird label. The session musicians that evening included the young Hugh McCracken on guitar. When Lennon learned that McCracken had just played for McCartney’s Ram, he quipped, “Oh, so you were just auditioning on Ram, were you? Yeah, ’e said you were all right.”
“Just pretend it’s Christmas,” John exhorted the musicians in rehearsal. “I’m Jewish,” Spector shot back over the intercom. “Well, pretend it’s your birthday, then.”6
As the engineers got the equipment set up right for all the guitars, Spector came out to the studio floor and danced around the room with Lennon. Voormann’s flight from Germany was delayed, so one of the guitarists sat in on bass; they were too restless to wait. They kept going over the changes, with Spector running playbacks so the musicians could hear what they sounded like.
The next night, John and Yoko invited the Harlem Children’s Choir down to sing the chorus of “Happy Christmas,” and tracked Yoko Ono’s “Listen, the Snow Is Falling.” Alongside Spector’s wide-screen rhythmic track, the sound of a boys’ choir on a Lennon record had a counterintuitive effect: it revived their billboard peace slogan with a gently rolling holiday message that has been a seasonal radio staple ever since. Here was a clue that Lennon and Yoko were actually writing together: she sang a marginal bridge lyric (“A very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year/Let’s hope it’s a good one without any fear”), and they claimed coauthorship of the song. But the overall effect was of a return to the “Give Peace a Chance” template, a “standard” but in a new rock idiom, not a chestnut like “White Christmas,” but a seasonal record that put their billboard campaign to a sing-along refrain. Before the vastly inferior Live Aid anthem “Feed the World,” the fledgling rock catalog knew few such classics. To his peace anthem (“All You Need Is Love”), anti-war hymn (“Give Peace a Chance”), and fist-thumper (“Power to the People”), Lennon now added a cathartic rock Christmas jingle (without mentioning Christ) as a coda to his defining agnosticism (“Imagine”). Largely through Lennon, rock began to define its audience’s rituals.
By early November 1971, John and Yoko moved into former Lovin’ Spoonful drummer Joe Butler’s 105 Bank Street apartment in the West Village. The couple befriended neighbors, attended local concerts and parties, and developed political plans with activists who had their sights on the summer’s coming political conventions. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman hung out with them regularly. Both men had learned a lot from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the trial of the Chicago Seven. Now they set their sights on Republicans.
These authority figures were so clueless, and so easily provoked, Rubin argued, that with a rock star like Lennon at the helm, they could mount a far more meaningful protest. John and Yoko expressed admiration for how the Yippies had cast the itinerant Chicago judge, Julius Hoffman, as the disintegrating establishment’s fuddy-duddy, garnering headlines for the movement and advancing the antiwar cause. Judge Hoffman proved his own worst enemy: he had Black Panther Bobby Seale bound and gagged in the courtroom rather than have him removed, and finally sentenced him to four years in prison for “contempt.” (Graham Nash referred to this outrage in his 1971 hit single “Chicago,” from Songs for Beginners.) In short, John and Yoko already admired the Yippies as creatives; the Yippies in turn had long seen Lennon as a nascent politico.
With a name attraction like Lennon on their side, Hoffman and Rubin hoped to enlarge these Chicago courtroom pranks and spring them on Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. Since Lennon had already talked radical politics quite comfortably on late-night network talk shows, he made a charged symbol for the left’s antiwar efforts. Lennon gave generous contributions to Rubin and Hoffman’s Rock Liberation Front and took part in street rallies and spontaneous songfests in Washington Square Park. This loose-knit alliance of lefties carried off “media theater” just the way John and Yoko had hoped their bed-ins might inspire people to do. They never imagined that the only figure more paranoid than a rock star like Lennon was the president himself.
Gradually, New York’s counterculture music world gathered around Lennon. Through some political friends, Jerry Rubin knew of a group, the Elephant’s Memory Band, who had just booked a residency at Max’s Kansas City. “Lennon heard about us, and came to hear us at the club,” guitarist Wayne “Tex” Gabriel remembers. “And he asked us if he could come play with us sometime. So we said, sure, you know, of course. And that first night he came in and we must have played seven hours together.”7
The Elephant’s Memory Band gets a bad rap from most critics, but Lennon made strong commitments to the group and its work, signed the act to Apple, and helped members with their songs. Yoko Ono used the players for her Approximately Infinite Universe project, some of her best rock ’n’ roll after Plastic Ono Band. The Elephant’s Memory Band had an early breakthrough working on the rock score to Midnight Cowboy, and when Lennon found them they sported “Tex” Gabriel, a dandy new lead guitarist who had just landed in New York from Detroit.
For this first jam session, they launched into the classics, “rock numbers, all the old Beatle songs and Beatle covers, anything we could think of,” bassist Gary Van Scyoc remembers. “And he was singing and sweating and working out, it was quite a session, I wish we had tapes of that evening.”
A Village apartment, a Village band: now Lennon could get to work on a new record in his new home and push back against all those oppressive Beatle reunion rumors. Whatever the public perception, Lennon’s attitude with these musicians conveyed the utmost respect. Naturally, at first the musicians were intimidated to play with the former Beatle. But they quickly found the rock star quite personable. “It was pretty much like he joined the band,” Scyoc says. “It wasn’t like he had hired us to back him, he chose us to work with, and we just started working together. He sought out our input constantly, and had a very collaborative approach to rehearsing and getting tracks down on tape.”8
To Lennon, the idea of joining a band meant acting like a band member. “I’ve worked with a lot of celebrities since then,” Gabriel confirms, “and Lennon had the least attitude by far of anybody I’ve ever worked with. It was all about getting it right, best idea wins, and he always wanted to hear what we thought of anything he brought in.”
For these sessions, Yoko’s presence was a given. Gabriel remembers her having more of a sobering effect on her husband, while Van Scyoc has only praise for Ono, her material, and her working relationship with the band. “When John wasn’t around Yoko, that’s when you’d get the more jovial John, the joking guy,” Gabriel says. “When Yoko showed up, he’d be more reserved, less likely to be a cut-up. I never got a good feeling off of her; I’m not sure I trusted her, and she kept her distance more from us, much more than he did.” Van Scyoc remembers it differently: “John was simply attentive to Yoko and her material, I wouldn’t say he was being ‘obedient’ or anything like that. I never noticed any difference in his behavior whether she was there or not. . . . I mean, when you were off getting pissed with Lennon, he was not holding anything back, even when Yoko was there.”
Half the ease of this new situation stemmed from how John and Yoko came in as partners, without interrupting any previous relationships. “That whole Yoko Ono thing gets blown way out of proportion,” Van Scyoc points out. And contact with McCartney actually continued, even though the two stars maintained a very distant public façade. “The McCartney thing, too,” Van Scyoc says. “It was nothing for John to take a call from Paul right in the middle of a session and talk to him for ninety minutes while we took a break. And they were not fighting or arguing. They talked about family, about the search for Kyoko, Yoko’s daughter, about McCartney’s kids, trips they were taking. It was family stuff. And you would swear they were best friends.”
The Dick Cavett Show appearances that September set off a ripple effect. Living and working in New York made John and Yoko a constant media presence, and Cavett had given them the TV bug. So, in addition to rehearsing new material with his new players, Lennon accepted some of the chat-show invitations that flooded in. On a brief trip to Philadelphia that fall, he and Yoko met an enterprising young TV producer named Michael Krauss.
Krauss had taken over The Mike Douglas Show that year with an impossible mandate: to reframe his forty-seven-year-old star, an antiquated big-band singer, for a younger audience. A former Chicago jazz drummer, Krauss had just turned thirty. To get Douglas across to youth culture, he booked guests like Karen Valentine, the actress who played a schoolteacher on the prime-time drama Room 222; James Brolin, Marcus Welby, M.D.’s sidekick; and singer Bobby Goldsboro. These special guests typically spent the entire week on Douglas’s daily show, to build continuity and show off various aspects of their talent. Because of his music background, Krauss quickly became known in industry circles as somebody who booked jazz titans like Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson.
Douglas, a washed-up lounge singer in search of a lounge, got his singing out of the way at the top of each show and then chatted up celebrities and did the odd cooking segment. He was hopelessly square but, like Ed Sullivan, willing to gamble on what rock audience ratings might do for his career. “Douglas just read off cue cards the whole time,” Krauss remembered. “He had no idea who many of these people were.” Meanwhile, the show’s syndication was dropping as Merv Griffin made inroads with the celebrity set from Los Angeles and Las Vegas. When Krauss learned that John and Yoko were staying at the Bellevue Hotel, right down the street from where the show taped, he grabbed an assistant and went straight for his target.
“I was hip to what Lennon was up to at this point,” Krauss says. “I had lived in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention . . . and there was a definite impulse to push back against Nixon’s war and the entire establishment, which was beating up peaceful demonstrators and all that.” Krauss knew simply booking the Lennons would send a signal to middle America, Nixon’s “silent majority,” and help his host’s ailing ratings ailing host’s ratings.
Lennon answered his hotel-room door, welcomed Krauss in, and they jumped into a lengthy discussion about current events: Nixon, Vietnam, the antiwar movement, and all kinds of music. Krauss invited them to be on the show with Mike Douglas, explaining that their ideas needed to reach this larger middle-class audience. He offered to pay them scale, which got a laugh, and then aimed his pitch even higher. “I told them I didn’t just want one show, I wanted them for a whole week. ‘Here in this room,’ I said, ‘you’re preaching to the choir, but I have a mission: The Mike Douglas Show goes into people’s living rooms, and there’s this whole other audience that needs talking to.’ ”
Krauss threw his weight behind making the show happen, even if it meant battling his network bosses at Westinghouse every step of the way. He knew there would be fights, but he could barely imagine the scale of the venture. Mostly, he remembered a very warm feeling as John and Yoko agreed to the challenge together: “They were very excited about it all, they asked if they could spend a week putting together each of the five shows, so I said sure.”
They agreed to tape in Philadelphia on Thursday nights, and Lennon asked “very politely” if he could have a few minutes to talk it over with Yoko in private. Krauss agreed, and when they came back into the room they all hugged, and Krauss recalled a thrilling feeling at what he had just accomplished: booking the world’s most famous rock star on daytime TV in the era before Oprah. “I mean, this is why I got into the business,” Krauss says now, “for the big stuff, you know, change the world, expose the older audience to the great things these people were doing. . . . And we all just kept hugging each other, and it was very trippy for a few minutes there, like something very special was going to come out of this meeting.”9 Krauss could not have fathomed how his producing skills were about to get tested.
Throughout November and December, John and Yoko commuted between New York and Philadelphia by limo to tape their shows. As hosts, they listed the radicals they wanted as guests, including Jerry Rubin and other members of the Chicago Seven. Krauss made every effort to balance this radical agenda with his host’s base audience. Rubin showed up, only to explode into expletives (“Fuck the president! Fuck the president!” in a sequence that never aired). When he wasn’t massaging his nervous Westinghouse executives, Krauss took daily, hour-long phone calls from Yoko Ono, who wanted to know every detail about each and every guest. Rubin flamed out, but Krauss successfully booked Tom Hayden and Black Panther Bobby Seale. Lennon brought down the Elephant’s Memory Band to perform songs from both Imagine and his forthcoming Some Time in New York City. Yoko smashed a teacup and put it back together over the course of the week to symbolize world peace.
Once Mike Douglas’s wife learned of the booking, she started complaining to Krauss regularly, and his superiors urged him to cancel Lennon because of all the noise coming from Douglas’s chief protector. From the other side, Yoko Ono’s daily calls ultimately drove him even crazier than the network. When he booked a regular comic, Louis Nye, Ono called him to ask, “Who is this Louis Nye?” Krauss explained how Nye’s routines gave the show variety and helped with pacing, but Ono complained, “Well, we’ve never heard of him, we don’t think we should be on with him.” Krauss had to smooth over her constant harping while keeping everything on track. He wound up dreading her calls. “This went on day after day; Yoko was relentless,” he says. “There is no question in my mind she broke up the Beatles. It was awful. . . . You’d take Yoko’s call and it always meant a long, drawn-out debate, and she didn’t appreciate the different political interests I was juggling just to make it happen.”
The other show tradition Krauss engaged in with John and Yoko was to pull off a surprise guest, somebody John hadn’t dared ask for, who would turn him into a driveling fan. “I always liked to surprise the guest hosts, like when we had Mama Cass on, she was a General Hospital fanatic, so I got the entire cast of General Hospital to surprise her on the set one day and she was just flabbergasted,” Krauss recalls. “I’d always ask, ‘If you’d like to meet anybody in the world, who would it be?’ I knew Lennon would want to meet Chuck Berry, so I worked very hard to get him on and kept it a big secret until the day of the taping.”
When Berry appeared, Lennon gaped at the man backstage, then sang two numbers with him: “Memphis, Tennessee,” which he hadn’t sung since his BBC radio days with the Beatles, and “Johnny B. Goode,” Berry’s discrete history of the style, the Presley epic in miniature. It would be the only time these two harmonized.
They taped one show per week for four weeks, and Krauss remembers juggling a very eager and conciliatory Lennon against Ono’s constant phone calls. Things went relatively smoothly until the final taping, when everything unraveled, and the early camaraderie Krauss felt with John and Yoko nearly exploded just before the last show. By this point, however, the couple’s phones were being tapped, and FBI agents followed them around everywhere, which gave their already hounded lives a surreal aspect, especially since nobody believed them when they complained about government harassment.
“We got into a real hassle in my office,” Krauss remembers. “Here I was busting my ass to accommodate them; I stuck my neck way out, and yet it wasn’t enough for them.” Suddenly, John and Yoko accused Krauss of working with the FBI, which he found simply preposterous. “They were paranoid,” he remembers thinking. “And John was agreeing with her. . . . She said to me, ‘In fact we know you’ve tapped our phone. We know you’re trying to kill John.’ And I looked at them in shock and all I could say was ‘No, I’m not.’ And then I stood up, and John stood up, and we started to go at it: it was ‘Fuck you!’ and ‘Fuck you!’ ” A show assistant ran back to Mike Douglas’s office, so Douglas came running down the hall, followed by security and several executives. Somehow the backstage scene settled down, and everybody walked out onstage to do the last show.
This incident shows just how nervous Lennon got before performing, and how intimidated he was at this early stage of his immigration fiasco. In addition to coping with his cars being followed and hearing phone taps, nobody could believe that what John and Yoko were experiencing had anything to do with reality. The flare-up also shows considerable marital strain. Krauss tried to forget the whole thing, but once the final taping wrapped, John and Yoko acted like nothing had happened:
After the show I stayed away from them, I had had it. At the end of the show, John comes up to me, and it was like nothing had happened, he gives me a hug and shakes my hand and he doesn’t let go. And he says, “Michael, I think they went off great, what do you think, were they good for you?” And I just said, “John, they were just great.” Yoko was still seated, and she turned to me and said, “Michael, they were terrific, and you’re terrific.” And just an hour before Lennon was ready to kill me.
These programs aired the following February, 1972, and turned Mike Douglas into a ratings champ because of his counterculture booking. Before the week was out, salespeople called Krauss to tell him, “We just want to thank you: our rate card has increased ten percent, you’re making us all money.” The viewership jumped to an all-time high, and because Krauss ran the Lennon shows during sweeps week, when Nielsen collected viewer data, they “picked up close to one hundred more stations, and that meant a lot . . . because the show was starting to wither on the vine; now it was this whole new thing.” But with all of Lennon’s antiwar talk on The Mike Douglas Show, the FBI suddenly felt vindicated in stepping up its surveillance against this influential peacenik.
This daytime talk-show success fed the long, late-night bull sessions at the Lennons’ apartment, and sent Hoffman and Rubin off scheming for more exposure. The perfect event seemed to drop in their laps even before the Douglas episodes aired: Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the state’s leading university, harbored a fervent political scene headed by the radical band the MC5. Its manager, John Sinclair, had been thrown in jail in 1969 for passing along two marijuana joints to an undercover cop.
Ann Arbor rockers championed Sinclair’s cause at concerts and through alternative newspaper ads, which caught Jerry Rubin’s attention that fall. He networked to get John and Yoko on a benefit bill December 10 in the Crisler Arena at the University of Michigan. Lennon wrote a bluesy slide number called “John Sinclair,” which told the man’s story and landed on a hiccupping “Gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta . . . set him free!” refrain that coaxed whoops and hollers from fifteen thousand fans who heard its inaugural voyage. Those hiccups, puffing atop a steam engine of injustice and resentment, refashioned Buddy Holly’s glottal barbs into political frustration. Also at this event, Lennon debuted “Attica State,” the gorgeous and underrated “Luck of the Irish,” and Ono’s “Sisters, O Sisters,” which was backed by Jerry Rubin and a pothead evangelist named David Peel with his troupe, the Lower East Side.
The audience had to wait more than eight hours for Lennon to appear, but the bookings showed good taste: Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs, and a young Bob Seger (formerly with the System); jazzers Archie Shepp and Roswell Rudd were broken up by leftist speeches and poetry from Allen Ginsberg, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, and Bobby Seale. Lawyer William Kunstler, who defended the Chicago Seven, sent a taped message which told the audience that Sinclair’s “harsh sentence dramatizes the absurdity of our marijuana laws, which are irrational, unjust and indefensible.”10 The event was televised locally by Detroit’s WTVS, even though Lennon didn’t go on until after 1 A.M. on Sunday morning.
Like turning a key, the concert sprang Sinclair from jail. The Monday after the Saturday-night concert, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the state’s marijuana statutes were unconstitutional. The TV news footage that evening showed Sinclair coming out of prison to greet his wife and kid. Lennon had finally resolved the ambivalence of “Revolution” and appeared at a political rally with topical protest songs, the way leftists had always hoped he might. And while the songs weren’t top shelf for Lennon, they showed lots of promise, binding leftist outrage with rock journalism. In Sinclair’s case, it marked a heady victory. If only all revolutions could be this simple.
Reviewers, however, singled out Ono—reviving some of the sting that had driven them out of Britain. “One major factor nearly spoiled the whole thing,” wrote Bill Gray in the Detroit News on December 13. Lennon “brought Yoko Ono. . . . Mrs. Lennon may be the genius that John keeps insisting she is. Possibly, if he keeps heavily hyping her, someone might believe it. But before a singer can be judged, she must first be able to carry a tune. Yoko can’t even remain on key.” And the new songs Lennon offered up were “interesting, but lacking in Lennon’s usual standards.”11
The following week, on December 17, the Apollo Theater staged a benefit for the Attica State Prison victims’ families, and John and Yoko showed up to play three songs: “Attica State,” Ono’s “Sisters, O Sisters,” and “Imagine.” Afterward, Lennon quietly contributed a large check to the Attica Defense Fund.
Backstage, a young photographer named Bob Gruen snapped some photos. He met John and Yoko waiting for their limo and posing for photographs with some other musicians. Lennon told him, “We never see any of these pictures, where do they all end up?” And Gruen replied, “Well, I live right around the corner from you, I’ll show ’em to you.” A few days later, Gruen brought over some prints, knocked on Lennon’s door, and Jerry Rubin answered. Rubin said, “Who are you?” and Gruen told him he was simply dropping off some photos. Gruen’s discretion may have made his reputation: “Yoko later told me that nobody ever visited them without wanting to meet them.”12 The next week, they rang him up to take more photos.
Another John and Yoko daytime TV appearance featured a heated political argument, but most Americans never saw it. To promote “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” which came out on December 1, the couple appeared on a David Frost talk show taped in New York on December 16. Hunched over his skiffle tea-chest bass, Lennon performed with Yoko as a member of the Lower East Side backing David Peel for “The Ballad of New York,” before Peel’s group gathered at the lip of the stage for Lennon’s “Attica State,” “Luck of the Irish” (a shorter version), Yoko’s “Sisters, O Sisters,” and “John Sinclair.” Two middle-aged audience members spoke back after “Attica State” and accused Lennon of sympathizing exclusively with the prisoners. “You make it sound like the only worthwhile people in this world are the ones who committed crimes and were put away,” a woman said.
This direct confrontation seemed to take Lennon aback. “When we say ‘poor widowed wives,’ ” he responded, “we’re not just talking about prisoners’ wives, we’re talking about policemen’s wives, anyone that was there—” The idea that someone might defend the state’s actions at the prison simply baffled him. “They must have done something wrong in the first place, or they wouldn’t have been there!” another man shouted, interrupting Lennon. The crowd divided, and the class and cultural lines became clear: the bohemians fielded accusations of glorifying terrorism, and the hard-hat conservative crowd condemned Lennon’s response. “We’re not glorifying them,” Lennon contended, visibly upset. “This song will come and go. But there will be another Attica tomorrow.”13
Frost seemed intrigued that such a discussion had broken out after the music. But while Lennon argued that he lamented every single Attica death, the audience exchanges veered toward hostile. After the commercial break, Lennon stayed backstage while Yoko handled Frost’s remaining questions; the anomaly went unexplained. As when he fled the Concert for Bangladesh rehearsal, such open confrontation spooked Lennon beyond words.
As a politico, Lennon’s songwriting dipped, but not nearly as much as he took heat for. He seasoned his vitriol with humor in many scattered editorials from this period. In early December 1971, he signed a rather flat defense of Bob Dylan, who had suffered months of harassment from a “fan” named A. J. Weberman: “A.J. claims everything Dylan writes is either about Weberman or about heroin. What bullshit,” the letter read. “It is time we defended and loved each other—and saved our anger for the true enemy, whose ignorance and greed destroys our planet.” The letter was signed: “The Rock Liberation Front, David Peel, Jerry Rubin, Yoko Ono, John Lennon.”14
The Elephant’s Memory musicians remember chatty phone calls with McCartney, but in public, Lennon still stoked the showbiz feud, ridiculing his former partner in print. In a piece he wrote for Crawdaddy magazine, he said he heard things on McCartney’s Ram that struck people as bent. Even if you credited “Too Many People” with some offhanded swipes (“Too many people preaching practices / Don’t let ’em tell you what you want to be!”), “Back Seat of My Car” was a make-out anthem that Lennon persisted in pointing in the wrong direction: “Too many people going where? Missed our lucky what? What was our first mistake? Can’t be wrong? Huh! I mean Yoko, me, and other friends can’t all be hearing things.” Defending “How Do You Sleep?” Lennon admitted, “So to have some fun, I must thank Allen Klein publicly for the line ‘just another day.’ A real poet! Some people don’t see the funny side of it. Too bad, what am I supposed to do, make you laugh? It’s what you might call an ‘angry letter,’ sung—get it?”15
He got more specific when the UK’s Melody Maker ran a year-end McCartney interview, repeating a lot of the comments he gave Life magazine, with some potshots at John and Yoko’s political escapades and slaphappy concertizing. Lennon dashed off a hilarious response, which Melody Maker printed on December 4, 1971, capping off a year of exchanges both overt and opaque:
It’s all very well playing ‘simple honest ole human Paul’ in the Melody Maker, but you know damn well we can’t just sign a bit of paper. . . . You say, ‘John won’t do it.’ I will if you’ll indemnify us against the taxman! Anyway, you know that after we had our meeting, the fucking lawyers will have to implement whatever we agree on—right?
Lennon mentioned a phone conversation where they combed over all the legal issues once more, still getting stuck on Apple issues: “As I’ve said before—have you ever thought that you might possibly be wrong about something?” And Lennon got defensive when McCartney criticized his playing live, which sent him ranting about all the concerts he’d done even before he’d left the Beatles:
“Half a dozen live shows—with no big fuss—in fact we’ve been doing what you’ve been talking about for three years! (I said it was daft for the Beatles to do it, I still think it’s daft.) So go on and do it! Do it! Do it!” Lennon listed all his live appearances: “Eg Cambridge (1969 completely unadvertised! A very small hall), Lyceum Ballroom (1969 no fuss, great show—30 piece rock band! “Live Jam” out soon!), Fillmore East (1971 unannounced. Another good time had by all—out soon!!) with the great David Peel!!! We were moved on by the cops, even!!! It’s best just to DO IT, I know you’ll dig it, and they don’t expect The Beatles now anyway!”
Lennon probably projected a lot of himself into many innocuous stretches of Ram, but he knew exactly what he was on about with Imagine: “It’s ‘Working Class Hero’ with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn’t dig the words. Imagine! You took ‘How Do You Sleep’ so literally.” He signed off with “No hard feelings to you either.”16 Later that month, Lennon roared from the op-ed page of the New York Times about how Nixon made “an Audie Murphy–like hero out of Lieut. Calley [of the My Lai massacre]. People aren’t born bloody-minded.”17
Early in 1972, White House counsel John Dean began subscribing to underground newspapers to keep tabs on radical activities that might threaten the coming Republican National Convention in San Diego. One quote jumped out: “For the past five months in New York City people have been feeling that the worst is over and that people are creating again and coming together again and something new is in the air. Somehow the arrival of John and Yoko in New York has had a mystical and practical effect that is bringing people together again.”18 Shortly after Dean came across this story, John and Yoko’s Mike Douglas Show appearance aired, staggered across media markets for maximum effect (because it was a syndicated show, local stations could run it according to their own schedules).
Dean didn’t work in a vacuum; the White House responded to a February memo passed through the Justice Department, from Republican congressman Strom Thurmond of South Carolina: “This appears to me to be an important matter, and I think it would be well to be considered at the highest level . . . as I can see many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action be taken in time.”19
In his expansive history of leftist activism and rock music, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Peter Doggett details how the Nixon administration placed Lennon within its sights: “Lennon was added to the list of dangerous radicals who required constant surveillance by FBI agents. As a British citizen with a conviction for drug possession, he was vulnerable to the whims of the U.S. Immigration Service, who had allowed him into the country on a series of temporary visas.” Hoover’s FBI sought to deport Lennon and defuse the “plot” against the Republican National Convention. “Ironically,” Doggett writes, “in another classic piece of White House miscalculation, the struggle to throw Lennon out of the country generated more publicity for his political sympathies than he could have mustered himself, and added to the impression that the Nixon administration was losing its senses.”20 But the wiretapping and harassment of the Lennons took its toll on their marriage.
Their cherished status as New York City residents was already apparent as early as 1972. On January 8, 1971, the New Yorker welcomed them with a “Talk of the Town” piece by Hendrick Hertzberg. With a spacious West Village apartment, Lennon sounded like a Big Apple booster. Hertzberg spoke to him about the apparent contradiction of living like a rock star while singing about “no possessions” in “Imagine”: “I don’t want that big house we [re-]built for ourselves [sic] in England,” Lennon told him.
I don’t want the bother of owning all these big houses and big cars, even though our company, Apple, pays for it all. All structures and buildings and everything I own will be dissolved and got rid of. I’ll cash in my chips, and anything that’s left I’ll make the best use of. . . . It’s clogging my mind just to think about what amount of gear I have in England. All my books and possessions. Walls full of books I’ve collected all my life. I have a list this thick of the things I have in Ascot, and I’m going to tick off the things I really want, really need. The rest goes to libraries or prisons—the whole damn lot. I might keep my rock-n-roll collection, but even that I’m thinking about.21
Over in the UK, the Irish “troubles” boiled over enough to turn McCartney himself into a politico. He took to the stage on a college tour with Wings, and put out his own protest single, “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” at the end of February. March brought Ringo’s “Back off Boogaloo,” and in May, John and Yoko returned to The Dick Cavett Show for a second run, this time sitting opposite Shirley MacLaine, and performing “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” and “We’re All Water.” Cavett had to fight his network bosses, too, to keep the incendiary Lennon lyric. The week Lennon sang “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” on Dick Cavett, McCartney put politics back on the shelf with his new Wings single, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
The more paranoid the Lennons became, the more the FBI gave them reason to be paranoid. Bob Gruen told Lennon about a strange encounter in the dead of night, which was clearly meant to intimidate him. One evening Gruen emerged from his photography studio on Twenty-ninth Street with a friend, and caught a glimpse of someone across the street taking his picture. A second look confirmed two men in a car wearing “real old-school fedoras . . . and suits; they looked like G-men out of the movies, and one of them had a camera.” Then the car sped off. At first, Gruen was simply puzzled. “It became like just another New York moment, you know, where something happens for some weird reason. It was only later that we put together that it was the FBI that had been spying on Lennon and his known associates,” he says now.
At another point, Gruen pulled his car out from its parking place outside the Record Plant on 44th between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and spotted a tail. “To get to my place in the Village,” he says, “you would have to turn a few times to hit Ninth going downtown, and then turn a few more times on 14th Street and Washington to get to Bethune Street.” This seemed curious to him at first, until he got downtown. “Once we got downtown, it was like 3 A.M. in the dead of night, there were no other cars, and it was really weird to get followed all the way home on this circuitous route I took. So when I pulled up to my apartment, I jumped out of the car to watch them make the last turn, and I’m standing there looking at ’em, and the men ducked in the car as they drove by and again I was left thinking ‘What was that? Who would want to follow me home?’ This really made absolutely no sense until much later, when we learned.”22 Naturally, the FBI wanted Gruen to spot the tail and tell Lennon about it, to intimidate him into leaving the country.
Of course, this kind of thing only made Lennon more determined—if he left America, the country might not let him back in. He settled into work toward a new album with the Elephant’s Memory Band and pointed his new songs directly at the repressive forces harassing his every move. Phil Spector came in to produce, and Gruen and some of the band members fault the flow of tequila and harder drugs for creating the tracks’ self-righteous tone.
One band member in particular picked up on some previously hidden Lennon ambitions. “He was like a mentor to me,” recalled guitarist “Tex” Gabriel, the Detroit native who had just turned twenty. “We used to sit for hours and trade licks, like guitarists do. Lennon always wanted to be a better guitar player, but he knew he never would be. He would ask me how I did stuff, and I would pick his brain about his rhythm chops, which were absolutely great.” Many other rock stars might have treated their players as hired guns; Lennon just seemed to be looking for companionship. “There was absolutely no rock star stuff going on there,” Gabriel remembered, “it was just two guitarists, working out parts the way they do in every band.”
“What Gabriel won’t mention is that his mother had died recently before he got the Lennon gig,” Van Scyoc says now. “That was a big bond for those two, since Lennon had lost his mother when he was a teenager.” The two musicians spent hours together, using guitars as a metaphor. “They sat cross-legged together for a couple hours while the rest of us went off to eat,” Van Scyoc remembers, “they had a special thing.” Gabriel continues, “He had this basic insecurity, you know, he really didn’t walk around with this ‘I’m John Lennon’ attitude, he really worked hard at his music and it came from a place of ‘What’s the best way to pull this off?’ ”23
Like most musicians, even once they got a gig with Lennon, the Elephants held on to their day jobs to support their music, doing TV jingles and studio sessions. They came together in the evenings to work on their tracks. The Some Time in New York City sessions started most evenings around seven. “He’d write the song the night before,” Van Scyoc remembers, “come in at seven, work up a feel for it, figure out a tempo, we’d have dinner, talk about the track, then go back and get the balance figured out, bang on the drums, then start doing takes. And by seven the next morning we’d have a track—mixed. He liked to work fast. And when it came time to do Yoko’s album (Approximately Infinite Universe),” Van Scyoc continues, “he gave just as much, to every song, every part for three full weeks. He helped us with our material, our lyrics, too, and we could never convince him to take any credit for that. He was humble like that. Yoko Ono deserves far more credit than she’ll ever get.”24
A radical broadsheet disguised as a rock album, Some Time in New York City was released in the summer of 1972 to mostly negative reviews. Its cover laid out the song lyrics as newspaper articles under a New York Times headline font. “Sisters, O Sisters” showed a photo of the band with Lennon on The Mike Douglas Show set, above a photo of Black Panther activist Angela Davis. John and Yoko appeared over the headline “Woman Is the Nigger of the World”; above Yoko Ono’s “We’re All Water,” a doctored photo appeared of Nixon dancing naked with Chairman Mao.
For some, the imagery alone distracted from the music; for others, the music never lived up to its packaging. Critics tended to undervalue the material based on loftier expectations, but its sturdy, driving lead track, “New York City,” a fetching Chuck Berry tribute, and several standout numbers (“John Sinclair,” “Woman Is the Nigger of the World”) rebuff its weak reputation. A bonus album included some music from the Frank Zappa Fillmore East jams from 1971.
Even when they agreed with the politics, many critics couldn’t defend the writing. In the August issue of Creem, Dave Marsh took apart the Irish message songs: “ ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ cuts McCartney’s ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’ and it don’t even matter much that [Ringo’s] ‘Back Off Boogaloo’ is a better statement on the subject than either.” Marsh went on to note how Yoko Ono’s bridge muddied a potential marvel of a song, “Luck of the Irish”:
Let’s walk over rainbows like leprechauns
The world would be one big Blarney stone
Without this intrusion, marred by Ono’s off-pitch delivery, Lennon could have released a classic rebellious statement in a beguiling, sentimental mode. But his indulgence of his wife’s pretensions compromised both his politics and one of the better songs in this sequence.
“That isn’t just false, it’s racist,” Marsh notes, “in the same way that the insistence of John’s Yoko-hype is inadvertently sexist.”25 (Yoko Ono: she’s a lot of things, but she’s no Sinead O’Connor.) The British press, of course, had a harder time watching Lennon side with the Irish Republican Army. A beloved Brit who had settled in a former colony accusing the English (“the bastards”) of “genocide” had a bit too much condescension in it even for rock lefties. Ian MacDonald later reported in Uncut, “as FBI papers released in 1997 show, [Lennon] got involved with Irish Republicans in New York early in 1972, having toted a placard proclaiming ‘Victory for the IRA Against British Imperialism’ at an anti-internment rally in London the previous August. How did Lennon reconcile his pacifism with his support for the IRA? ‘It’s a very delicate line,’ he feigned, soon thereafter quietly discontinuing his romance with terrorism.”26 Being stalked by the FBI sorely tested Lennon’s commitment to nonviolence, although this appears to be his only brush with Irish revolutionaries.
As critics wrung their hands, radio recoiled at the word “nigger,” and a potential single, “New York City,” didn’t get the chance it deserved. Out in California, a young deejay at KABC named Elliot Mintz had interviewed Yoko Ono, and he stayed friendly with her on the phone. They discovered they were both telephone freaks. Ono had ideas about the “purity” of the human voice removing prejudice, and Mintz suffered from chronic insomnia—they loved to gab through the night. Pretty soon, Lennon joined in. For kicks, Mintz played Some Time in New York City all the way through on the air the week before its release. It got him fired. Lennon found this hilarious. They invited him up to San Francisco, where they could continue their phone conversations in person, and Mintz became a lifelong friend. “Pack a bag and join the circus,” said Lennon.27
As more and more political rallies and charity events came along, John and Yoko developed a deepening attachment to New York and American society at large. Geraldo Rivera, then a young reporter for WABC-TV’s Eyewitness News, took on Lennon’s immigration case for frequent updates on the evening news, regularly catching him outside the courthouse for quotes. Another Rivera story followed up on a public television exposé of the Willowbrook facility for special needs children on Staten Island, which documented the neglect and dismal living conditions of its patients. Rivera dubbed the facility “the Big Town’s leper colony” and stirred up outrage over the lack of care for the mentally ill. Since part of the inequity stemmed from up to fifty patients being supervised by a single staffer, Rivera launched a charity crusade called “One to One,” advocating for bigger staff budgets and better hygiene.
In response, the Rockefeller administration restored a $20 million budget cut. Rivera persuaded John and Yoko to stage a charity concert at Madison Square Garden modeled on Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, filmed for television, dubbed the One to One concert. The bill featured Sha Na Na, Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, and Lennon and Ono doing Some Time material with the Elephant’s Memory Band. Ticket demand added a second matinee show before the evening concert. Ono later repackaged this concert as John Lennon: Live in New York City, an uneven set bound together by his continuously inspired singing.
For the show, Lennon boosted the Elephant lineup to thicken the sound for the huge Madison Square Garden venue. “Lennon wanted to hire Hendrix drummer Noel Redding for the gig,” Van Scyoc says, “but he wasn’t available.” So he hired Jim Keltner to double on drums (“Jim was his rock,” Gruen confirms), and Van Scyoc suggested the former Elephant bass player, John Ward, for the low end. “He hadn’t performed in a while, so he was a little nervous, and he had a sore throat that day,” Van Scyoc remembers. “But you’d never know it. It went very smoothly, we might have muffed one arrangement, but he muffed it with everybody else and we just kept going.” The band pushed Lennon to sing at least one Beatle number, and they settled on “Come Together,” which turned from delicate production piece to virulent antiwar blues.
“Sitting next to him while he sang ‘Imagine’ has to be one of my all-time biggest moments as a rock fan,” remembers Bob Gruen. “It was one of those untouchable moments that sent shivers down everybody’s spine.” For the encore, they were having such a good time, Lennon pulled out “Hound Dog,” which they had never rehearsed. “He was really a huge Elvis fan,” Van Scyoc says.
The concert has an uneven reputation, and made a better live experience than recording or film, at least according to those who were there. “That One to One concert was supposed to be the beginning of a world tour,” Tex remembers. “But the critics were so sour on that record, and it really took Lennon aback. We were all having such a good time and fighting the good fight.”28 It didn’t occur to them that the rest of the world might not hear it the way they did.
The next week, as if affirming they wanted to become mainstream American celebrities, John and Yoko showed up on the annual Jerry Lewis telethon, the all-day charity event to raise money for muscular dystrophy. Lennon sang “Imagine,” Ono did “Now or Never,” and together they did a reggae version of “Give Peace a Chance.”
But the negative reviews and the generalized hostility that greeted Yoko sent Lennon back spiraling into insecurity about his solo career, and the musical value of political activism. In November 1972, the left watched with dismay as George McGovern lost to Nixon in a landslide, the second biggest electoral thumping in modern history to that point (Nixon carried every state except Massachusetts).
This had a devastating effect on what remained of the antiwar left. For Lennon, it meant that on some level all his activism had backfired, and that once again everybody had lauded his music without listening to his message. At Jerry Rubin’s party on election night, Lennon monopolized the tequila and out came the self-loathing and abandonment issues: All the funny sounds on his phone and the blatant tails he spotted from his limo made him suspect Rubin was a CIA agent who had double-crossed him. After all, Rubin had induced the Lennons into the revolutionary fray, and now all their worst fears about leaving Britain were coming true.
Unfortunately, no matter how far Lennon had grown as a musician, the bottle always dragged him right back down into his angry paranoid shtick. He berated his hosts and accused the activists of ruining his career. He blamed the legal process and the shadowy FBI characters who followed him everywhere for hampering his creativity. Meanwhile, Yoko Ono’s current songs were indictments of the male chauvinism with which Lennon was treating her.
The party disintegrated, with one humiliation piled on another. Nixon won with bigger numbers than when Johnson defeated Goldwater back in 1964, and now here was the partygoers’ own leftist icon, the leader of the Beatles, shaming himself and his wife even further. He began flirting aggressively with one of Rubin’s roommates, and Hoffman’s sometime romantic partner, right in front of Yoko. Then he took the woman’s hand and led her into the next room, playing the rock star with no scruples. The remaining guests were obliged to begin talking more loudly so as not to hear Lennon and his pickup going at it. When he reemerged, he simply took Ono’s hand and left.
“That was the only time I remember Yoko breaking down and showing any of us what she was feeling,” Tex Gabriel says. “I gave her my sunglasses so she could leave with some self-respect. Everybody in the room knew what was going on, it was extremely humiliating. And we were all just sort of humiliated along with her, having watched Nixon’s landslide.”29
The following morning, John and Yoko took a walk on the pier by the Hudson with Bob Gruen, who photographed Lennon down on his knees to Yoko begging for forgiveness. “He had been drunk, he was sorry, it was the same old story,” Gruen remembers. A new wariness emerged in Yoko—how long could this kind of public humiliation continue? At that afternoon’s session, Ono sang “What a bastard the world is,” a searing rebuke of male chauvinism. What kind of justice was this? Ono must have wondered: What did Lennon’s romantic idealization count for if not simple monogamy? As much as she adored her husband, Ono had more self-respect than Cynthia—this behavior was not the sort of thing she could build a marriage on.
Lennon had moved to his wife’s artistic home and reworked his political identity by bonding with America’s most theatrical radicals. But in doing so, he became the target of U.S. authority in ways few could fathom, just as his marriage, already another outsize myth, foundered on his own self-destructiveness.