Lennon’s late solo career, between 1975 and 1980, represents an anomaly not just in his personal life but in the larger story of rock ’n’ roll. His withdrawal from the stage at thirty-five, so completely at odds with every myth Lennon ever created about himself, stirred a sense of potential around what he might be doing. After all, even detractors had to admit his solo career boasted deeply inspired work. Perhaps he had ransacked the Beatle castle so ferociously with Plastic Ono Band that he never quite regained his footing; Imagine settled in as a quiet rock classic, but it had more polish than reach: “Gimme Some Truth” evened out the ranting he attempted in “Give Peace a Chance” for a smooth-ride contempt, but “How Do You Sleep?” sank of its own small-minded rancor. For his last two years with the Beatles (1968–69), Lennon veered toward elaborate conceptual sideshows prodded by Ono’s art, branching out into film, gallery, and performance pieces. Ceding his rock ’n’ roll stage to her squalls in Toronto took both nerve and a new kind of pretense.
But critics rarely note that once he played rock’s doo-wop Nietzsche in “God,” Lennon did, in fact, retreat from the musical avant-garde. Although John and Yoko shared the stage with Frank Zappa on their early visit to New York, and again at the One to One concert supporting Some Time in New York City, Lennon’s formal songwriting experiments receded. In the press he was outspoken and radical, but on record his pop sensibility never wandered. His conservatism dramatized itself best through a curious reversal: Yoko Ono made her best album, Approximately Infinite Universe, in 1973, with Lennon’s weakest support, the Elephant’s Memory Band.
From Plastic Ono Band onward, Lennon increasingly moved toward safe, conventional, and overproduced pop, spiked by raunchy outbursts like “Do the Oz,” “Tight A$,” “Beef Jerky,” and “Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple),” all B sides and album tracks. His talent for ripe inference, as well as his uncanny bond with listeners, and his increasing silence after Rock ’n’ Roll and the Shaved Fish compilation (both 1975), signaled more unfinished business than irrevocable retreat. His best work plunged into adult rock themes: “Mother,” at once a Freudian cry at ripping himself from the Beatle womb, and “Working Class Hero,” which absorbed and reflected his parochial Scouser resentment—sarcasm draped in sophistry, his great misunderstood Dylan impersonation.
The uneven mid-period work had held up through piercing songs about midlife stasis—“Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out),” “Steel and Glass”—and love songs that grew wary of romanticism—“Look at Me,” “Oh My Love,” “Jealous Guy,” and “How?” right on through “Bless You.” By contrast, Lennon’s late themes were suffused with deeply felt quietude, as challenging a mood for rock ’n’ roll as compliance. Capitol Records underlined Lennon’s pop conservatism by releasing “#9 Dream,” side two’s lead-off track from Walls and Bridges, as a follow-up single to his first solo American number one, “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.” “#9 Dream” angled the nostalgia of “Mind Games” off straightforward Beatle romanticism that kept fans in thrall to a reunion, even if it was just a fantasy. Over the holiday season between 1974 and 1975, it hit number nine in the U.S., to become his second best-selling single, behind “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night” and “Instant Karma” and “Imagine” (which both peaked at number three). In Britain, he often scored in the top ten but had to wait until 1980, after he was dead, for “Starting Over” to reach number one. This conservatism, Lennon’s hewing to the public favor, reversed his Beatle path, especially considering how Double Fantasy (1980) would radicalize rock themes far beyond the agnosticism of “Imagine.” For Lennon, casting fatherhood as redemption counts as an exceptional, all-consuming irony.1
Given his frequent betrayals of Ono, whom he idealized beyond all romantic proportion, this redemption came with great cost in both personal and mythic terms. While writing songs like “Oh My Love” and “Oh Yoko!” his zipper problem begged for comeuppance. Ono had finally kicked him out, as any self-respecting wife would. In the last interviews, both he and Yoko portrayed his years in the L.A. wilderness, followed by a humbling return in early 1975, as salvation lost and found, the prodigal husband reclaiming an epic lost affair. The bond persuaded even cynics of its monumental stature, the kind of Tristan-and-Isolde love that knew the outer realms of betrayal and forgiveness.
As much as people protested, Lennon’s withdrawal from recording after 1975 did the whole Beatle mystique far more good than ill: better he turn in one final decent record and leave behind tempting outtakes than continue ramming his head against the wall of insurmountable expectations. Lennon’s weakest solo record, Mind Games, held its head above almost any weak McCartney effort and most of Harrison’s solo output; even when the material lacked depth, nearly everything Lennon sang rang out with mythos reflected, or just beyond reach.2
And to those who lamented Lennon’s reuniting with Ono, his entrenched battle with Nixon’s cronies turned him into a liberal saint, redeeming all his radical outbursts and misguided agitprop through the quest to remain in America. Among journalists and cultural critics, led by Rolling Stone’s Ralph Gleason and the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell, Lennon’s INS case shouldered considerable historical weight. Column after column lamented the specter of Lennon as rock ’n’ roll’s Charlie Chaplin, yet another victim of Cold War furies, hounded out of the country by small, paranoid minds. Lennon’s victory compounded the left’s sense of relief after Nixon resigned—on a purely political level, Lennon’s triumph meant that everybody had won more rights to push back against imperious governments run amuck. (Culturally, of course, Lennon knew he had long since defeated Nixon and his ilk—that’s one of the more persuasive explanations for Nixon’s paranoia.)
In the days before his death, Lennon portrayed himself as proud, happy father, bread-baking househusband, off the sauce and out of rock’s loop, and better for it. The reality was messier, of course, with the radical twist that Lennon kept his indiscretions private and made sure his comeback conveyed a resolve toward stability and composure. He also dodged a central contradiction, the false choice he had created for himself by positioning Ono as the imagined sky on Mind Games, an indomitable force of nature. For some reason, having moved back from Malibu to New York with May Pang in June 1974, alternating nights with her and his room at the Pierre Hotel, Lennon felt his choices to be stark: either remain untethered on a celebrity-party circuit between New York and Los Angeles, and risk bottoming out like Phil Spector, or Janis Joplin, or Jim Morrison, or return to Ono and build a stable family. Somehow, he was humbled, or desperate, enough to choose the healthier of these two options. But many listeners mistook the public Lennon persona, the man who wrote “If I Fell” and “Dr. Robert” and “A Day in the Life,” for the private person. This public Lennon would have had no trouble pointing out the false dichotomy he imposed on himself. The archest rock ’n’ roller sold this choice to his listeners through yet another public-relations flourish, accomplished with the help of one final Rolling Stone cover, published in the weeks after his death.
For all the complicated, contradictory, and distressing associations fatherhood summoned in Lennon, he turned his relationship with his third son, Sean, into a mythic bond. The idea of John as the doting father seemed to take everyone by surprise, especially Julian, who had to settle for Paul’s sympathy and the dubious distinction of having inspired “Hey Jude.” Lennon marked his love affair with Yoko by writing songs like “Julia,” and “Don’t Let Me Down,” and “Oh Yoko!” and his filial attachment to Sean with “Beautiful Boy.” A handful of unsurpassed late songs, including “Woman,” “Beautiful Boy,” “Grow Old with Me,” and “Nobody Told Me,” reached beyond atonement to seal Lennon’s new life-begins-at-forty persona despite all the stray details they conveniently overlooked.
Then, as quickly as he returned, Lennon became spectral, in the most traumatic reversal of all: the rock star shot by a delusional fan. In death, Lennon surpassed the hoariest of clichés: the violent yet accidental deaths of heroes like James Dean, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding; or the cautionary drug abuse tales like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. Lennon’s death recast all of these—and many since—as that of a rock star whose lambent flame expires in the midst of a triumphant comeback.
Lennon’s personal battles between 1970 and 1975 paralleled his immigration struggles. Many interviews in this period voice his resolve to return to Britain and do more serious traveling. But if he left the United States, he might never get back, and so where once he had used the Beatles as his fallback position while branching out with Yoko, he now stayed in America as a way of falling back in with his wife. This cat-and-mouse game resembled Lennon’s passive-aggressive late-Beatle maneuvers: the INS kept threatening to kick him out, but Lennon’s legal team kept filing appeals and extending his temporary visas as his case bounced around, in semipermanent limbo, in appeals. Being hounded by Nixon strangely was no match for the pressures of being an ex-Beatle.
Early in January 1975, U. S. district court judge Richard Owen ruled that Lennon and his attorneys, led by Leon Wildes, could access Immigration and Naturalization Services files dealing with his deportation case. Wildes was also granted permission to question INS officials. This gave Wildes leverage to determine whether the whole deportation order was based on his client’s 1968 drug conviction, or whether the files would show Lennon was being hounded for political reasons, which eventually proved to be the case. It was a major victory, and Lennon eventually went on the record with Lisa Robinson for Hit Parader magazine. His quotes revealed a thorough knowledge of the law, of the U. S. government’s overt hypocrisy, and how his British record had been twisted against him.
Robinson asked him how many other lawsuits he was juggling at the time, and Lennon gave the immigration matter top priority. He seemed confounded that the government kept falling back on his 1968 marijuana misdemeanor: “My lawyer has a list of people . . . ,” Lennon told her, “hundreds of people in here who got around the law for murder, rape, double murder, heroin, every crime you can imagine. People who are just living here. I want it to end, but I can go on as long as they go on. It’ll probably go on until it gets to the Supreme Court.”
Lennon also faced legal action from the man he had entrusted with his break from the Beatles, Allen Klein. Klein, the one who won Lennon over by doing his childhood-trauma homework, now appeared as a foe. As Lennon told Robinson: “He’s suing me, and Yoko, and all the ex-Beatles, and everybody that ever knew them! And he’s suing me individually, me collectively, any version of me you can get hold of is being sued. But immigration is the important one—the others are all just money, somehow a deal will be made. Immigration, that’s the one. I mean, if they can take Helen Reddy, they can take me.” What Lennon really wanted to do was travel. “That’s the thing I really miss most. I miss England, Scotland, Wales, all that sentimental stuff . . . but I also miss France, Holland . . . Germany I haven’t been to for years. I’d like to go to South America. I’ve never been. I’d like to be based here, and just travel.”
Robinson’s interview plants another clue to Lennon’s evolving state of mind. Even before moving back into the Dakota with Yoko, he looked on his Los Angeles period as a nightmare. He describes waking up in the middle of another drunken bender and realizing he had to “straighten out.” And the lawsuits required as much attention as he could muster. “I don’t know how they happen—one minute you’re talking to someone, the next minute they’re suing you.”
Perhaps he was wooing Yoko through the press the way he had once jilted McCartney. Only this time, when Robinson pressed him about gay rumors, she only got more candor. “I was trying to put it ’round that I was gay, you know—I thought that would throw them off . . . dancing at all the gay clubs in Los Angeles, flirting with the boys . . . but it never got off the ground.” Robinson goaded him, saying she’d heard that “lately about Paul.”
“Oh, I’ve had him, he’s no good,” Lennon shot back.3
Then, on January 9, 1975, the London High Court finally ruled on the dissolution of The Beatles and Co. partnership, four years after McCartney originally filed his suit against Klein and Apple. These two court breakthroughs accompanied some phone calls with McCartney, who invited Lennon down to New Orleans for Wings sessions that would lead to the Venus and Mars album. According to Pang, Lennon agreed to go and was even considering writing songs again with McCartney.
One month later, in early February, Lennon paid a visit to Yoko at the Dakota. Pang describes Yoko luring him back with a new hypnotist’s smoking cure—an addiction Yoko knew Lennon was eager to break. Pang portrays Yoko as wielding a powerful psychic sway over Lennon. But ever since that backstage reunion at the Thanksgiving concert with Elton John, they had been visiting cordially and continued to speak on the phone daily. Later, Lennon said of this visit, “I was just going over for a visit and it just fell in place again. It was like I’d never left. I realized that this was where I belonged. I think we both knew we’d get back together again sooner or later, even if it was five years, and that’s why we never bothered with divorce. I’m just glad she let me back in again. It was like going out for a drink, but it took me a year to get it!”4
One early Ono biographer, Jerry Hopkins, speculates that Ono welcomed Lennon back to the Dakota under three strict conditions: that he clean up his drug intake, flush his body of poisons, and adopt a macrobiotic diet; that he “repair the holes in his aura” and submit to her counsel on matters spiritual and astrological; and finally, that she take over his day-to-day business affairs.5 Tired of endless legal meetings that made the Get Back sessions in early 1969 seem like a lovefest, and worn down from months of hard living, Lennon enthusiastically agreed. It didn’t hurt that the Beatles court case had just closed. Now he needn’t bother Ono with that anymore, either. This time, instead of seeking out a new business manager to handle his affairs, he simply decided to appoint Yoko as heir to what he once expected from Epstein, McCartney, and Klein, and be done with it. He also resolved to clear his desk of all the lawsuits that had dragged on his career, both his immigration status and the Morris Levy lawsuit over Rock ’n’ Roll, Roots, and settling publishing accounts.
John and Yoko’s overriding concern, however, was far from legal. They recast their reunion in glowing romantic terms to the press and privately pursued an even more intimate goal: to have a child. Yoko Ono, as we have seen, had suffered at least three miscarriages with Lennon. Once Lennon moved back into the Dakota in early February 1975, Ono became pregnant almost immediately, as if the fates were once again smiling. Counting back from Sean Lennon’s birth date, October 9, puts his conception around February 9. That same week, Rock ’n’ Roll hit stores, and Lennon went on the Scott Muni show on WNEW-FM, to sync the music up with his rejuvenated marriage: “The separation didn’t work out,” he said, in a widely quoted interview.6
With a new hit album suddenly a reflection of his redeemed personal life, Lennon capped a middle-period trifecta: Mind Games entered a tunnel, Walls and Bridges groped toward the light, and Rock ’n’ Roll delivered a huge payoff for rock history—if not on par with early Beatles, then the next best thing. A towering record without the fierce complexity of Lennon’s original material, Rock ’n’ Roll became a great work ardent followers disagreed about. As a vocal performance, it ranks with Plastic Ono Band as some of Lennon’s most passionately compressed singing. Hearing “Stand By Me” seduce FM radio throughout early 1975 was all the argument you needed that Lennon’s solo songwriting career had fallen off: he vented much more through other people’s songs on this newly minted classic than he had on either Mind Games or Walls and Bridges.
Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, and Buddy Holly all helped shape Lennon’s early Beatle persona, and by revisiting these writers, Lennon revived his career with reverse daring—backshifting into oldies mode seemed, paradoxically, both conservative and radical. Whether you take to its thicker arrangements or find them gaudy, the Spector tracks sound like a slow-motion train wreck averted by Lennon’s vocals, schlock snatched back from oblivion: numbers like Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” toot along with colossal jive, and Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula” bulldozes forward with sheer ebullience. Typically, for Lennon, this wasn’t just an aesthetic argument: in 1975, alongside George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) and its TV spinoff, Happy Days (1974), this release helped ignite oldies format for FM radio. And it earned Lennon some of his most bipolar reviews.
Like pop stars falling back on country material (and loyal audience) when their careers hit the skids, the “oldies move” can work like a hymn to the gods that ward off doom. The Beatles themselves fell back on early rock ’n’ roll during the stalled Get Back sessions in 1969, and John Fogerty surfaced with a country-rock pearl, The Blue Ridge Rangers, in 1973, after losing control of his Creedence Clearwater Revival catalog. The flip side of this myth succumbs to nostalgia, the symbolic tide writers wade into when their muse dries up. With originality and versatility performed through other people’s material as the ideal, the Band’s bravura Moondog Matinee from 1973 towers over this subgenre, eclipsing efforts like David Bowie’s Pinups or Bryan Ferry’s These Foolish Things (which included “You Won’t See Me”).
History inserted another wrinkle to Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll album even long before Spector was convicted of murder in 2009: before Anthology came out in 1995, a two-disc compilation of early Beatles BBC broadcasts called The Beatles at the BBC appeared, and bootleggers quickly dug deeper for the totality of that work, most notably on a ten-CD box, The Complete BBC Sessions (Great Dane, 1994). Eleven CDs of material have since surfaced from these vaults, comprising a huge tapestry of their live set list, encompassing the periods gigging throughout the north of England and Hamburg, before they finally recorded “Love Me Do.” The repackaging of this bold new rock ’n’ roll frame, the one featured on The Ed Sullivan Show in early 1964, rescued the work from American neglect. In 1975, Lennon landed nearby some of the same songs the Beatles had once used to craft their cherished young ensemble.
Their overlapping song selections provide commentary on Lennon and McCartney’s shared view of rock history, and where they differed. For the BBC audience, of course, a lot of this early Beatle material survived in British cultural memory as an oral prehistory to the band’s recorded legacy; for Americans, the BBC material trickled out slowly at first. Finally, two years after Lennon’s death, in 1982, a syndicated radio special commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the band’s first appearance on the BBC, and Americans became familiar with how the Beatles sounded before “Love Me Do.” This new substratum of Beatle tracks held implacable charms. The Rock ’n’ Roll catalog Lennon siphoned off Radio Luxembourg and his mother Julia’s banjo chords recontextualized rock ’n’ roll anew; play it alongside McCartney’s workouts in this vein—1988’s Choba b CCCP (Russian for Back in the USSR) and 1999’s Run Devil Run—for a diagram of how Lennon and McCartney’s early repertoire echoed into middle age.
Lennon’s list features several gaping omissions: Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the looming invisibility of a singer Lennon shrank from competing with, Elvis Presley. “Blue Suede Shoes” from the 1969 Toronto show and “Hound Dog” at 1971’s One to One set remain Lennon’s only published Presley takes, one-offs he never returned to. By comparison, McCartney does Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock” (and superbly), but tackles Presley only twice, with “It’s Now Or Never” on a 1988 tribute to Presley film songs (The Last Temptation of Elvis) and “All Shook Up” on Run Devil Run (1999).
As if to diagram their distinct yet complementary tastes, both Lennon and McCartney’s oldies albums are, by any measure, vocal triumphs. On his second effort, Run Devil Run, McCartney’s virtuoso touch added two imposing originals (“Try Not to Cry” and the title track), which were so attuned to early rock style that many simply assumed they were more obscure throwaways. His wiggling firehose on Larry Williams’s “She Said Yeah” spewed especially boyish wrath, a long-awaited answer to Lennon’s treatment of Williams’s “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie.” (Like “Twenty Flight Rock,” “She Said Yeah” had been a Rolling Stones staple.)
Among the American songwriters Lennon and McCartney both covered, a different conversation took shape: with Chuck Berry, Lennon juiced up “You Can’t Catch Me” like a rebuilt Cadillac, and slowed down “Sweet Little Sixteen” to a purr, while McCartney shrink-wrapped “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” into tidy zydeco. McCartney paid tribute to Lennon via Lloyd Price (“Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and “Just Because”), Sam Cooke (“Bring It On Home to Me”), and a Gene Vincent number he heard his partner do numerous times (“Blue Jean Bop”). Lennon alone chose a girl-group standard (“Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes, without its signature opening drum calls, a dandy trick) and took on Buddy Holly (“Peggy Sue”), where McCartney backed off both. Instead, McCartney produced an entire Buddy Holly album for his Wings cohort, Denny Laine, called Holly Days (1977). This set featured McCartney overdubbing backup parts to Laine’s cardboard lead vocals, which is a bit like Prince backing up Cat Stevens. McCartney still has a Buddy Holly tribute record burning inside of him, if he ever takes the leap.
Most tellingly, neither Beatle ever revisited any of the Beatles’ own defining covers, such as Smokey Robinson’s “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” or Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” which cemented both their good taste and respect for their own catalog. In 1976, when Capitol reissued Beatle covers and originals for a trumped-up package called Rock ’n’ Roll Music, it inexplicably excluded defining pieces, such as Lennon singing not only “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” but Arthur Alexander’s “Anna (Go to Him)” and the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You.” To add insult to irony, two of Lennon’s Rock ’n’ Roll tracks lined the coffers of Lennon’s rivals: for Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” he paid royalties to McCartney, who owned the rights to Holly’s catalog; and for “Bring It On Home to Me,” he paid rights to Allen Klein, who owned Sam Cooke’s material.
In the years since Lennon’s death, the cutting-room floor has coughed up a magnanimous Lennon take of Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby” and Phil Spector’s 1958 number one with the Teddy Bears, “To Know Her Is to Love Her,” on the four-CD Anthology box Yoko Ono assembled in 2001. But only a plebe would prefer Spector’s treatment to the Beatles’ earlier renditions of that song for the BBC.
Listening to Lennon’s updates, it’s important to remember the engines of desire motivating these early Beatle covers: more than many other groups, they performed this material as a living tradition. They paid no mind if Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen,” a hit in 1958, was already “old” in pop terms by 1963, when they played it on the BBC. For them, these songs had nothing to do with looking back: it was always about how much energy Chuck Berry had set in motion, and how much potential they heard coursing through his pregnant guitar licks. In the strongest Beatle covers, it’s almost as if you can sense their original material in the background, pushing its way forward: “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” inspired Lennon’s “No Reply” and “Help!” and “I’m a Loser” as surely as “Long Tall Sally” yielded McCartney’s “I’m Down.”
Returning to “You Can’t Catch Me” with Spector for Rock ’n’ Roll, Lennon tackled the song with similar fervor from a new vantage: if it had saved his life once as a teenager, perhaps it could rescue him again—from celebrity ennui, choppy marital waters, and the quandary of staring down Beatle ghosts while constructing a new persona. For some critics, like Jon Landau in Rolling Stone, Lennon sounded tired, incapable of harnessing his lightning-in-a-bottle personality. “In making an album about his past,” Landau wrote in May 1975, “he has wound up sounding like a man without a past. If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed that this was the work of just another talented rocker who’s stumbled onto a mysterious body of great American music that he truly loves but doesn’t really understand. There was a time when he did.”7
Dismissing this music, however, didn’t account for the peculiarly lopsided embrace it received, on both the radio and the charts. In the Britain of early 1975, Rock ’n’ Roll spent twenty-eight weeks on the charts, peaking at number six, outperforming every previous Lennon solo album except Imagine. In America, the album tied with Plastic Ono Band at number six, but spent only fifteen weeks on the charts, Lennon’s weakest performing title since his first three albums with Yoko Ono (the two Unfinished Music titles and the Wedding Album). After everything the Beatles had done, this early rock ’n’ roll material burnished Lennon’s reputation more than his coffers. (It also made him the most exotic of UK “exports”: an ex-pat Scouser retooling American engines for British drivers.) Furthermore, it made hash of the UK’s supposed blackballing of Phil Spector’s work after Let It Be. Even critics tend to forget that Lennon employed Spector for four out of seven solo albums.
Lennon’s oldies set leapt into the top ten on his soaring cover of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” King had used the song as his second solo flight from the Drifters, back in 1961 (after 1960’s “Spanish Harlem” and “First Taste of Love”). He cowrote the number with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, working off a 1960 Soul Stirrers’ number, “Stand By Me Father,” making it one of Lennon’s few gospel-sourced tracks (his other gospel move sets the underrated “Woman Is the Nigger of the World” swaying). Lennon also remade Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me,” but only stitched up with “Send Me Some Lovin’,” the weaker of two medleys. The stylistic reach mattered less than the way Lennon twisted nostalgia into a vital contemporary gesture. Where the typical oldies move serves as a stall tactic, a retreat or fallback position, Lennon’s immersion in this material suggested enough untapped richness and innuendo to tip the music (originally for and about teenagers) toward adult metaphors. The finale, “Just Because,” forges a truce between sentimental nostalgia and rearview regret: how faded teenage romance needn’t be patronized.8
As “Stand By Me” became an FM rock radio staple, reviving Lennon’s presence after its agonizing delays, Capitol asked him to assemble a solo greatest hits package, called Shaved Fish, which got scheduled for Christmas 1975. Returning to the charts in top form sparked a new cross-Atlantic volley with his ex-partner: Paul McCartney had thrown down a sassy guitar slam called “Junior’s Farm,” which reached number three in November 1974, in between Lennon’s hits “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” and “#9 Dream.” “Stand By Me,” Lennon’s spring 1975 single, bumped into “Listen to What the Man Said,” McCartney’s Venus and Mars hit. (These song volleys across albums between ex-collaborators went back to “How Do You Sleep?” and McCartney’s “Dear Friend,” and continued on McCartney’s Band on the Run [1973].)
In Lennon’s mind, this jockeying for popular attention must have felt like par—only this time, when he picked up the phone, David Bowie came on the line. “David rang and told me he was going to do a version of ‘Across the Universe,’ ” Lennon recalled, “and I thought ‘great’ because I’d never done a good version of that song myself. . . . It’s one of my favourite songs, but I didn’t like my version of it. So I went down and played rhythm on the track. Then he got this lick, so me and him put this together in another song called ‘Fame’ . . . I had fun!”9
Lennon made a series of appearances that spring of 1975 to demonstrate his belief in Rock ’n’ Roll and reform his “lost weekend” reputation. For the Los Angeles–based music industry, it was as if he’d finally chosen to play the game. In early March, he walked out onto the Grammy Awards as a presenter alongside Paul Simon, wearing a long tuxedo jacket, beige beret, and scarf. Lennon announced the winner, Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You,” only to spy Art Garfunkel bounding up the stage steps, which sent Lennon and Simon off into a string of reunion gags.
JOHN LENNON: (introduces Art to Paul): Which one of you is Ringo?
PAUL SIMON: (to Garfunkel): I thought I told you to wait in the car . . .
JL: Are you ever getting back together again?
PS (motioning to Garfunkel and Lennon): Are you guys getting back together again?
JL: It’s terrible isn’t it?
ART GARFUNKEL (deadpans to Paul): Still writing, Paul? (huge laughs)
PS: I’m trying my hand at a little acting, Art.
JL: Where’s Linda? (delayed tittering) . . . Oh well, too subtle that one.
At this same event, McCartney was a no-show for two awards: Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group and Best Produced Non-Classical Recording, for Band on the Run. The Beatles also received a Grammy Hall of Fame Award. Lennon made some of the parties with Yoko Ono on his arm, which ran on the entertainment wires, just like a regular celeb.10
As his public persona restored itself, and he approached his final public performance, Lennon’s immigration status turned a decisive corner. In March, Leon Wildes began reporting his findings in the INS files he’d been poring over, saying he now had “information that shows that the Government deliberately ignored [Lennon’s] application, actually locking the relevant document away in a safe.” One memorandum stated that John and Yoko were “to be kept under physical observance” because of their political activism. This became the first substantiation of wiretapping that the FBI had engaged in, beginning back in 1971. Wildes added that once he found the source for this document, it would “break the case wide open and prove that there has been a miscarriage of justice.”
The next month, April 1975, Lennon filmed a TV tribute to Sir Lew Grade, chairman of ATV Publishing (which controlled Lennon and McCartney’s Northern Songs publishing concern), at the Hilton Hotel in New York, the result of another court settlement. Lennon and his band members wore face masks attached to the back of their heads, which Lennon called “a sardonic reference to my feelings on Lew Grade’s personality!” (two-faced). For “Slippin’ and Slidin’ ” and “Stand By Me,” Lennon sang in front of a band called BOMF (Brothers of Mother Fuckers), and for “Imagine,” he sang alone with his guitar, his hair pulled back across the top of his head into a ponytail, chewing gum and somehow lending the song a cynical undertone. Honored to be a featured performer at a gala event, he couldn’t let the 1969 Northern Songs takeover go unremarked. It marked the last time Lennon sang in public.
By all appearances, Lennon enjoyed his new comeback status and had no intention of retiring. He sat down with Tom Snyder, NBC’s smug late-night talk-show host, for a full hour on Tomorrow at the end of April. To continue his public-relations campaign for his legal residence status, he brought Leon Wildes out for the final segment. Snyder asked Lennon why he wanted to stay in America when he could live anywhere he wanted. Lennon replied, “I like to be here, because this is where the music came from; this is what influenced my whole life and got me where I am today, as it were.”11
The following month, Lennon accepted Larry Kane’s invitation to participate in WFIL’s Helping Hand Radio Marathon, an annual Philadelphia charity event for multiple sclerosis. Kane had traveled with the Beatles on some of their first tours of America, as a radio reporter from Florida. Since then he’d served in Vietnam, bounced around broadcast journalism, and landed as the local news anchor for WFIL.
Surprised and delighted by Lennon’s assent, Kane now hosted the biggest draw the event had ever seen. Lennon “spent the entire weekend, every waking moment, pitching for the cause and signing autographs for thousands and thousands of people,” Kane remembers. Fans waited in line for hours to shake his hand and say hello, and Lennon patiently signed autographs for every single one. “You can’t imagine what an effort he made. He came down on the train and basically said, ‘Put me to work.’ He told me he always wanted to do the weather, so we did a little gag with him on the evening news. He had a blast.”
Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia’s mayor and former police chief, made a remark that Kane didn’t seize upon until much later. Rizzo shuddered at the idea of such a big star roaming unprotected through the outdoor crowds gathered at the TV station. He assigned extra police units throughout the weekend, which passed without incident. “That guy needs to pay more attention to his security,” Kane remembers Rizzo saying.12
In June, John and Yoko headed for a summer on Long Beach, Long Island. From here on in, interviews slackened, and Lennon went into retreat from public life. To jerk an impervious system into action, Wildes decided to shift tactics and filed suit against former U. S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell on June 16, 1975, charging “improper selective prosecution.” Wildes’s gambit worked: if the government wouldn’t take Lennon’s steel-cased legal defense seriously, perhaps they’d respond differently to an offensive tack. It paid off much better than anyone might have hoped.
That fall of 1975, two happy events found Lennon back in the headlines. On October 7, a three-judge U. S. Court of Appeals overturned his deportation order. Wildes had called the government’s bluff, and backed up against a new suit that would have opened more files, the INS finally folded. The government decided any more revelations from such a high-profile case could only damage their eroded reputation. Calling his 1968 UK drug conviction “contrary” to the “U.S. understanding of due process,” the ruling spelled out a sweeping reversal of the government’s “excludable alien” pursuit: “Lennon’s four-year-battle to remain in our country is a testimony to his faith in the American dream,” the ruling stated. Instead of being an enemy of the United States, the government now declared him a hero.
Yoko Ono stayed home, due to deliver at any moment. Lennon made his own best narrator for this story later, in the 1980 Playboy interview. He talked about a Chinese acupuncturist in San Francisco who listened to their fertility troubles and scoffed at the British doctors: “Heck, you have a child,” Lennon quoted the healer as telling them. “Just behave yourself. No drugs, no drink, eat well. You have a child in eighteen months.” When Western doctors told the couple they couldn’t conceive, Lennon realized “that I did want a child, and how badly.” And it wasn’t just any baby Lennon wanted: “I wanted Yoko’s baby, not a baby.”13
Having endured the miscarriages, and an infant who died only days old after the drug arrest back in November 1968, avoiding the public glare for the last two trimesters of Yoko’s pregnancy finally left them blessed. It was a lesson they promised to honor. After a long, difficult labor, forty-two-year-old Ono gave birth to Sean Taro Ono Lennon on Lennon’s thirty-fifth birthday: October 9, 1975. “I feel higher than the Empire State Building,” Lennon told reporters. He also announced Sean’s godfather: Elton John. “Ah, we worked hard for that child. We went through all hell together—through many miscarriages and terrible, terrible times. So this is what they call a love child in truth. We were told by many doctors in England that we could never have a child.”14 Relief collided with elation. Apparently, Ono’s age was less of a concern during the delivery than her bad reaction to a blood transfer. Lennon, the anxious husband, had to literally force the physician’s attention. “Somebody had made a tranfusion of the wrong blood type,” Lennon later told Rolling Stone, and Ono began convulsing.
“I was there when it happened,” Lennon recalled, “and she starts to go rigid, and then shake from the pain and trauma. I run up to this nurse and say, ‘Go get the doctor!’ I’m holding on tight to Yoko while this guy gets to the hospital room. He walks in, hardly notices that Yoko is going through fucking CONVULSIONS, goes straight for me, smiles, shakes my hand, and says, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you, Mr. Lennon, I always enjoyed your music.’ I start screaming: ‘My wife’s dying and you want to talk about music!’ Christ! A miracle that everything was okay.”15
The Lennon househusband myth that emerged from his five-year seclusion (1975–80) proved largely true, if oversimplified: after breakfast, Ono descended to the ground-floor Dakota offices to run Lennon’s estate, intimidating financiers by pulling out Tarot cards in the middle of negotiations and deploying her reputation as a wacky artist, the high priestess of Lennon’s fortune, to outmaneuver opponents. Lennon stayed in to look after Sean. There was help, of course, so between personal assistants and nannies, unlike the many househusbands he inspired, Lennon could afford plenty of time to himself.
Fatherhood became Lennon’s new career, and his great late theme. He spent long stretches completely disengaged from the music business. Too many competing yet unreliable testimonies among personal assistants, numerologists, acupuncturists, and other service providers create this period’s patchy narrative. The better sources—producers, engineers, musicians, and interviewers—help confirm the contours of Lennon’s own accounts. As usual, Lennon exaggerates things. In contrast to his first years with Yoko Ono outside the Beatles, when he courted publicity for his heady romance, for once in his life he shut down his public persona and focused on home life.
Occasionally, Lennon would peep out from behind his curtain to blurb an article he took an interest in. The September 1975 issue of Modern Hi-Fi & Music magazine featured an interview with Hal Fein, who mentioned Bert Kaempfert. Lennon responded, banging out familiar absurdist cadences on his typewriter, worth quoting for his inimitable voice.
He begins with vivid memories of his first producer and the record’s circuitous path to Epstein’s ears:
He Fein must have been one of the people working with [Kaemfert][sic] . . . but he no rings da bell (too much). Brian (Epstein) didn’t hear the record over the air . . . one of the kids went to his shop to see if he had our record . . . he didn’t . . . so he checked it/us out . . .
Lennon recalls cutting a few tracks behind “Tony Sheriden” (sic), including “My Bonnie,” but that Kaemfert thought the Beatles too bluesy. He signs off with “Those were the days mein friend! Very corduroy, j.l.”
He finishes by mentioning the book about the bands first manager, Allan Williams, “The Man Who Gave the Beatles Away,” and apologizes for his sloppy typing. It’s a hastily dashed-off note that looks toward the epic stories he recounts in late 1980.16
As the tumultuous year of 1975 wound down to the happiest of endings, Lennon felt a strong tug to stay in and help mind his child, even as rock stars kept knocking on his door. Over the holidays, John and Yoko invited Bob Gruen to the Dakota to take some family pictures. His hair tied back in a tight ponytail, “Lennon never looked happier to me,” Gruen says now.17 During that Christmas week, Gruen happened to be visiting when carolers came to the door, which initially caused alarm—nobody made it up to that level without getting buzzed through first. Gruen went to see what the noise was about, and the singers turned out to be Paul and Linda McCartney. The scene became a warm reunion, with the McCartneys taking turns holding Sean. Gruen resisted the urge to take photos. The two couples shared Christmas together, ordering out pizza, and watching the sun go down on the Manhattan skyline from John and Yoko’s living room. Elliot Mintz, the California deejay, who was also there, remembers the scene, and took vivid mental notes.
“The conversation became less rhythmic, the words more sparse,” Mintz wrote later. “I was paying close attention to John and Paul and the way they looked at each other . . . during this Christmas sunset, it was obvious to me that the two of them had run out of things to say.” In wry conclusion, Mintz describes a fond farewell between John and Paul, and then adds with withering understatement: “Yoko and Paul have yet to reach comfort level with each other.”18
Children’s redemption of wayward parents became Lennon’s great late theme. He talked about it throughout all his later interviews, retelling the story of Sean’s hard-fought journey and how it seemed to link up with his own. Ever since he buried his first child with Yoko back in November 1968, the miscarriages and separations only seemed part of some bigger narrative. “In the way we think,” Lennon said in 1980, “Sean chose us as parents. The gift of that responsibility doesn’t end. I don’t know if it ends when we die. It’s an ongoing process. It’s a tremendous gift and a tremendous responsibility. And I think responsibility was something I never wanted—of any description. . . . It was a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turnaround.” He made it sound as if he’d renounced drugs, even though there’s plenty of evidence that he hadn’t. Still, it was hard to argue with a quote like this: “More than taking a tab of acid in 1965, you know, that kind of thing, which I thought was the biggest thing that ever hit the world at that time, you know. But this is more than.”19
To many fans, hearing this former acidhead and loose cannon talk about “the gift of that responsibility” was like Little Richard extolling abstinence. And John and Yoko centered their new romantic persona more around parenthood than romance. The young Lennon had created his first family from his band mates, surrounding himself with his best friends making music, presenting a collective front to the world as a way of masking the free-fall isolation. Now, at the age of thirty-five, after years of hard living that had brought him little pleasure and less security, Lennon settled into a daily routine. For the first time in his life, he stepped off the pop treadmill for an extended break.