Elvis Presley, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison own the No. 1 album spot from May through July, alongside the Beatles’ own greatest hits collection 1967–1970. John Lennon writes a comeback anthem for Ringo Starr. The father of the rock and roll image, Marlon Brando, receives an X rating and upsets the Oscars.
Much of 1973 could be traced back to the Big Bang when Elvis Presley shook like a cross between a Pentecostal Holy Roller and R&B shouter on television and birthed the industry of rock and roll. To date he’s the only person to have five singles reach the No. 1 spot on the pop, R&B, and country charts at the same time. He was the father of both country rock and glam. Roy Orbison remembered the first time he saw him, back when Presley wore pink suits and had royal blue eyeshadow streaming down from his eyes mixed with sweat. “I can’t overemphasize how shocking he looked and seemed to me that night. Actually, it affected me exactly the same way as when I first saw that David Lynch film [Blue Velvet]. I just didn’t know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it.”1 And then Presley would sing his family’s favorite hymns, saying without having to say anything that the walls between passion, spirituality, and the races were false.
He was still on top in the spring of ’73. Elvis on Tour won the Golden Globe in January. He Touched Me won the gospel Grammy in March; the album featured some of his most joyous rockers. He played more shows (167) than in any other year.
His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, wanted to beat the Beatles’ performance of “All You Need Is Love” on the One World TV special, reputedly viewed by more than three hundred million worldwide in 1967. Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite was broadcast to over twenty countries on January 14. In the US, NBC held it until April 4 so as not to compete with the Super Bowl.2 At $2.5 million, it was the costliest television program to date,3 and with 51 percent of TV viewers tuning in, it would be NBC’s most-watched show of the year.
Presley lost twenty-five pounds to look good in the gem-studded American Eagle jumpsuit created for the event, Presley’s favorite of the many costumer Bill Belew designed for him. With the set list he summed up his career from “Hound Dog” through “Suspicious Minds.” “Burning Love,” which had peaked at No. 2 three months earlier, was a worthy addition to his canon. The Aloha concert generated its own No. 17 pop hit with his rendition of James Taylor’s “Steamroller Blues.”
He was more sedate now than he had been in 1970’s That’s the Way It Is, where he danced Mick Jagger under the table, flailing and pounding wildly. This was partly because he was now as big an opioid addict as Keith Richards, if not bigger (as Taylor’s lyrics about “injecting your soul” and “shooting you with rhythm and blues” implied). And it was probably partly because he had just filed for divorce four days before the Aloha concert. Thus one of the program’s most impassioned performances was “You Gave Me a Mountain,” about a man struggling to cope after his wife leaves and takes their child.
“American Trilogy” sought to reflect all sides of the Civil War by combining “Dixie,” a blackface minstrel song from the Confederacy, with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a Union Army song based on an ode to abolitionist John Brown, and “All My Trials,” a lullaby from the Bahamas that became an anthem of the civil rights movement. Perhaps the best track was left off until the reissue of Aloha, a wistful interpretation of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain.”
Aloha became the first quadrophonic album to top the charts and is still the bestselling quadrophonic LP. It was Presley’s first pop No. 1 since 1965’s Roustabout, and his last.
Two weeks after the show he canceled some dates in Vegas for the first time, blaming the flu. He obsessed on how Priscilla had left him for her karate instructor, Mike Stone, even though he precipitated it with his own womanizing. Then when he was back in concert on February 18, four men, possibly drunk, climbed onto the stage, the reason unclear. Presley’s bodyguards intercepted them, and Presley himself used karate on one to propel him back into an audience table, roaring, “Come on, you motherfuckers!” Afterward, he apologized to the audience: “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry I didn’t break his goddamn neck is what I’m sorry about.”4 In the aftermath, an amped-up Presley decided that Mike Stone must have sent them, and he told his bodyguard Red West to arrange a hit on Stone. “There is too much pain in me.… He has no right to live.” When Presley kept talking about it for two days, West reluctantly made inquiries and told Presley it would cost $10,000.
“Aw hell. Let’s just leave it for now. Maybe it’s a bit heavy.”5
When he played Lake Tahoe in May, he was thirty pounds overweight and canceled thirteen gigs. His divorce was finalized on October 9, and six days later he was hospitalized in Memphis for pneumonia, hepatitis, and an enlarged colon. It was there his doctor, George Nichopoulos, learned that Presley had been receiving daily acupuncture treatments from someone who put Demerol, a synthetic opioid like morphine, in the needles. He was also addicted to another synthetic opioid, Dilaudid, which was five times stronger than Demerol and two and a half times as powerful as heroin.6 Presley told himself he was different from regular junkies because he had employees inject him in the hip rather than shooting up himself. But he made sure to collect as many badges as he could from various police departments and the Bureau of Narcotics, even scoring one from Nixon himself, to help ward off the authorities should he ever be busted. He also had a California dentist who gave him cotton swabs dipped with liquid cocaine to put in his nostrils. He overdosed twice that year. His mother had struggled with similar addiction to pills and alcohol, which killed her at forty-six.
Despite the drug problem, he recorded enough great songs in 1973 to form an album that could have been his own Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan’s 1975 masterpiece about his dying marriage. Presley captured twenty-eight in two sessions at Stax Records in July and December. (He picked the soul studio because it was five minutes from his house and his daughter was due to visit.) However, instead of selecting the best twelve songs to create one devastating LP, his management dispersed the tracks into five singles and three albums over the next two years.
After Presley’s ’68 comeback, he released critically acclaimed albums for three years, then started falling back into bad habits, putting out tons of filler in slapdash albums that seemed like they all had the same damn cover. Only hardcore fans could tell the difference between the spangled outfits he wore, whether it was the Sun King jumpsuit cover, or the Peacock cover, or the Aztec bling superhero cover, or maybe the Greg Brady Johnny Bravo matador jacket cover (that Brady Bunch episode aired September 14). The ’60s covers at least had vibrant primary colors, but now they were all burned out. To compound the absurdity, they had indistinguishable titles like Elvis or Elvis Now or Elvis Today. The original title for Elvis was going to be FOOL, named after the opening track, but at least someone woke up for a minute to stop that.
Members of the Beatles, Stones, and other British bands with cool covers had all gone to art school. But the Colonel was an ex-carny who sneered, “Those guys at RCA want to do fancy artist stuff, but they don’t know who the audience is.”7 Meanwhile, the Colonel blew a million a year in the casinos gambling (per the Memphis Mafia), and sold Presley’s back catalog for $5 million, ensuring that Presley would never receive royalties for songs he recorded before 1973. He sabotaged it when Barbra Streisand tried to get Presley to star opposite her in A Star Is Born, just like he convinced Presley to pass on West Side Story.
Hardcore Elvis fanatic Bruce Springsteen saw the Colonel as a cautionary tale. A few years later he found the anti-Colonel manager in Jon Landau, who had edited Rolling Stone, mentored Lester Bangs, produced the MC5, and taught Springsteen about great films and literature. Like Presley, Springsteen recorded dozens of songs a year, but in the middle of the decade he started to wait two or three years before putting an album out, picking only the best songs. Then twenty years later he would put out a box set of outtakes for fans who appreciated them in that context, something Dylan did, too.
Yet for all the career missteps, Presley’s canon equaled Sinatra’s for songs of failed relationships to be played on jukeboxes in the wee small hours—only in country bars instead of New York saloons—and they didn’t get really dark until the ’70s. In the ’60s when Presley sang sad songs he interpreted them beautifully, but he wasn’t critically depressed, so they were safe. When he sang that he had no reason to live, you knew he didn’t mean it. But a hint of doom crept into the tearful lion voice around ’70–’71. He told his friend Larry Geller that 1972 was his worst year since 1958, when he lost his mother and went into the army. As U2’s Bono said, “The big opera voice of the later years—that’s the one that really hurts me.”8
A well-sequenced Presley ’73 album could start out deceptively happy with “I’ve Got a Thing about You Baby,” his last sunny single. Like “All Shook Up,” it had no snare drum, no big beat, just took it light and laid-back and made it to No. 4 country. His cover of Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land” was his last song to make the pop Top 20, celebrating the touring lifestyle, a barreling successor to “Guitar Man.” The writer of “Guitar Man,” Jerry Reed (Burt Reynolds’s sidekick in Smokey and the Bandit), provided “Talk About the Good Times,” commemorating the church socials where Presley first learned to love the music.
The record could take a turn toward the pensive with “Where Do I Go from Here,” the Paul Williams song that closed the Clint Eastwood–Jeff Bridges starrer Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, then start heading toward the broken dreams with “Mr. Songman,” arriving at “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.” You could compare how mournful Presley’s version sounded next to the original, by Danny O’Keefe, or even Waylon Jennings’s cover. The song could be Presley’s epitaph: “Play around, you lose your wife / play too long, you lose your life.”
“Thinking About You” clothed Presley in an unusual (for him) singer-songwriter/soft rock acoustic sound, and his voice betrayed a touching fragility, trying to stay upbeat even though his woman’s left. Then the final suite of post-Priscilla despair: “Separate Ways,” co-written by Memphis Mafia member Red West, which peaked on February 3 at No. 20. The Elvis on Tour documentary showed Presley recording it and “Always on My Mind,” which made No. 9 in the UK. “Man, you’re killing me with these songs,” Presley said in the movie, before finding solace singing gospel with his friends, the way he’d always done.
“Loving Arms” was perhaps the best of them, a bleak contrast to the warm duet version Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge offered on their Full Moon album that year. Presley almost goes over the top on “Fool,” with a Morrissey-like vibrato baritone, walking the tightrope between camp and something that could depress the hell out of you if you heard it at the wrong time. That song rose to No. 12 on easy listening. Finally, in “My Boy,” a father watches over his sleeping son. His marriage is dead, but he resolves to stay in it because he doesn’t want to be separated from his child. It was the kind of song you didn’t hear in rock and roll, only easy listening and country, where it made No. 1 and No. 14, respectively (and No. 20 in pop).
A week after Presley filmed Aloha from Hawaii, Time magazine put Marlon Brando on the cover to celebrate his return to form, after a decade of mediocre films, with The Godfather (1972) and Last Tango in Paris. The latter movie was released in the US in February after a four-month delay due to a struggle with the Motion Picture Association of America, which ended up giving the film an X rating.
Almost as much as Presley, Brando created the image of rock and roll. Rebelling against a cold father who stuck him in a military academy, he popularized ripped T-shirts and jeans in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and made it cool to be a sweaty, sullen, mumbling slob, flouting the dress code of the Sunset Strip nightclubs. When he starred in The Wild One (1953), based on fabricated news reports about biker gangs running amok in Hollister, California, the leather-jacketed Brando defined the rock and roll attitude seven months before Presley’s first single. “What are you rebelling against?” they asked his character in the film. “Whaddaya got?” he deadpanned.
Presley copped Brando’s surly attitude in Jailhouse Rock but seemed lightweight in comparison. Both he and Gene Vincent borrowed the actor’s leather look. Lennon howled, wounded, like Brando yelling, “Stella.” Pete Townshend and Keith Moon smashed their instruments like Brando smashing windows in Streetcar. Keith Richards named his son after him. Kurt Cobain slouched like him.
His X-ray presence exposed the mainstream’s inherent phoniness. Before cinema, actors onstage needed to overact to project to the back row. They no longer needed to after the invention of the close-up, but continued performing in a mannered style, which no one noticed until Brando’s naturalistic method acting revealed how unrealistic the others were.
Jack Nicholson had recently established himself as heir apparent in Five Easy Pieces, both exploding in rage—punching cars, smashing dishes off restaurant tables—and crying tears of regret in front of his father rendered immobile by a stroke. Brando took back the crown in Last Tango with his own tour de force. Confronting the corpse of his wife, who had cheated on him before killing herself, he excoriates her with a string of foul abuse before breaking down, apologizing, and sobbing. He later wrote, “When it was finished, I decided that I wasn’t ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie.”9 Perhaps he was drawing on his confused feelings for the two women he said influenced his relationships with all other females: his mother, who abandoned him in his youth for alcoholic benders, and his nanny, who co-slept nude with him until he was seven, before abandoning him to get married.
When he was awarded Best Actor for The Godfather at the Academy Awards that March (after having been nominated for both films), he showed again that he was ahead of the curve, in this case on the issue of diversity. He stayed away from the venue and asked Apache/Yaqui actress Sacheen Littlefeather to take his place at the podium, where she announced, “He very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.” At that moment the American Indian Movement (AIM) was in a stand-off with FBI agents and federal marshals in South Dakota, protesting failures to honor treaties, which resulted in shootouts that killed two Native Americans and left one marshal paralyzed. Littlefeather later recalled, “John Wayne was in the wings, ready to have me taken off stage. He had to be restrained by six security guards.”10
Along with Brando, Last Tango’s director, Bernardo Bertolucci, was nominated for an Oscar. “This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made,” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael raved. “Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies.”
She proved more prescient than even she suspected. Forty-three years later, a Spanish nonprofit condemned the film on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and ignited a Twitter storm. The controversy concerned nineteen-year-old actress Maria Schneider’s lack of consent in a scene in which Brando’s character raped hers. The scene had been written in the script, but on the day of the shoot Brando and Bertolucci decided to add the detail that he uses butter to anally rape her—and didn’t discuss it with Schneider beforehand.
“Maria knew everything because she had read the script, where it was all described. The only novelty was the idea of the butter,” Bertolucci maintained. “We wanted her spontaneous reaction to that improper use [of the butter].”11
“When they told me, I had a burst of anger. Woo! I threw everything,”12 Schneider recounted. In another interview she remembered, “Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”13
Ironically, Brando felt exploited by Bertolucci’s process as well. “Marlon said he felt raped and manipulated by it and he was 48. And he was Marlon Brando!”14 Schneider said.
The director wanted Brando to actually have sex with Schneider on camera, as the actors had in Andy Warhol’s Blue Movie. “But I told him that was impossible,” Brando said. “If that happens, our sex organs become the centerpiece of the film. He didn’t agree with me.”15
Still, he did try to do a scene nude, but, as he wrote in his 1994 autobiography, “it was such a cold day that my penis shrank to the size of a peanut.… It simply withered.… I was humiliated, but not ready to surrender yet.… One of the more embarrassing experiences of my professional career.”16
Brando’s secretary advised him to quit, but Brando believed he would be sued if he did so. Robert Hofler wrote in Sexplosion, “[Schneider] often rolled her eyes at his habit of disrobing behind drawn curtains.”17 The actress said, “Marlon was shy about his body, but nudity wasn’t a problem for me in those days as I thought it was beautiful.”18
In the end Bertolucci cut Brando’s nudity. “I had so identified myself with Marlon that I cut it out of shame for myself. To show him naked would have been like showing me naked.”19
Brando didn’t speak to him for fifteen years.
Red Rose Speedway had the makings for a strong album, but McCartney fumbled the assembly, like Presley. The sessions included “Live and Let Die,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “C Moon,” “Country Dreamer,” and “Mama’s Little Girl,” but he decided to use them for singles and not include them on the LP. He did perform three of them in the album’s promotional TV special, James Paul McCartney, which aired on April 16. The program was memorable primarily for the glam androgyny sequence where he sang a Busby Berkeley number surrounded by dancers who wore tuxes on one side of their body and sequined bathing suits on the other.
“Hi, Hi, Hi” was cut from the broadcast because it advocated meeting up with your woman, buying a bootleg record, smoking marijuana, and doing it with your “sweet banana.” After it peaked at No. 10 in February, the police fined him £240 for growing cannabis on his Scottish farm. He maintained that a fan had sent him some seeds and he didn’t know what they were, so he just planted them to find out. He would rack up an impressive list of pot busts (Sweden ’72, Los Angeles ’75, Tokyo ’80, Barbados ’84).
The best moment of the special was the opening sequence, which featured McCartney and Wings jamming “Big Barn Bed” in front of a wall made up of dozens of TV sets. The song carried some of his finest post-Beatle harmonies, though it was a pity he wasted the cool groove on lyrics like “sleeping on a pillow / leaping armadillo.” But after years of pushing himself to write significant anthems like “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be,” and “Maybe I’m Amazed,” he was giving his brain a rest. Or maybe it was the pot.
The best of his new songs celebrated his bucolic life in Scotland. Wading in a stream in “Country Dreamer,” playing with his daughter on a mountainside in “Mama’s Little Girl,” commiserating with a bird after a fight with his woman in “Single Pigeon,” or with a sheep in “Little Lamb Dragonfly,” before drifting into an orchestral reverie with the New York Philharmonic.
Only two songs, perhaps, drew on the bad blood from the Beatles’ breakup, the first being his theme to the James Bond film Live and Let Die. Maybe the subtext of lyrics about how “you got to give the other fella hell” was “All right, Lennon, you wanted to leave the group? Well, I’ll crush you”—which he did on the charts, if not with the critics.
“C Moon” was McCartney’s answer to Lennon’s line in “How Do You Sleep,” which sneered that McCartney lived “with straights.” “So what if I live with straights?” McCartney shrugged in an interview. “I like straights. I have straight babies.”20 The title was inspired by “L7” from “Wooly Bully,” meaning “square,” the shape that the symbols L and 7 make when combined. The opposite of a square is a circle, which a C and a half-moon form. He gave the song a Jamaican feel, to further underscore that he was hip.
Harrison addressed the animosity more directly in “Sue Me Sue You Blues.” But fans actually had cause to hope for a thaw in ex-Beatle relations when Lennon, Harrison, and Starr announced they were not renewing their contract with Allen Klein in March. Klein was one of the main reasons the group split three years earlier; McCartney didn’t trust him and didn’t want to be managed by him. “Let’s say possibly Paul’s suspicions were right,” Lennon conceded in an interview.21 Indeed, Klein conned the Rolling Stones out of the publishing rights to their songs before 1970.
“Well you know they were wrong … and you knew it all along, you did the right thing,” McCartney sang in “Get on the Right Thing,” an exuberant example of why he was the guru of the power pop genre featuring the Raspberries, Big Star, and Apple’s own Badfinger.
Even after their split, the Beatles were bigger than ever on the pop chart. Their greatest hits compilation The Beatles 1967–1970 (known as The Blue Album) was No. 1 the week of May 26, while its companion 1962–1966 (The Red Album) was No. 3. Then Red Rose Speedway took over the peak for three weeks, before being knocked out by Harrison’s Living in the Material World for five weeks. In the UK, neither album made the summit, because they were blocked by the soundtrack to Starr’s movie That’ll Be the Day. On the singles chart, McCartney’s “My Love” ruled for a month starting June 2, before Harrison’s “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth)” replaced it, followed by Beatles compatriot Billy Preston’s “Will It Go Round in Circles.”
Harrison produced Material World himself. He regretted the excess echo Phil Spector glazed All Things Must Pass with, though he brought back classical musician John Barham to orchestrate a few epics like “The Day the World Gets Round,” which Harrison wrote the day after he staged the Concert for Bangladesh.22 (The album for that charity benefit won the Grammy for Album of the Year in March ’73.)
“Give Me Love” managed to be a remake and sequel to “My Sweet Lord” while transcending it, standing alongside “Imagine” as the purest expression of the Beatles’ Aquarian Age idealism. The fact that Harrison’s voice did not have the raw power of Lennon’s or McCartney’s actually made the song more moving, as his strain to hit the high notes mirrored his effort to connect with God. It might be a standard hymn today were it not for the line “keep me free from birth.” It reflected his Hindu goal of attaining enlightenment so he would not have to reincarnate again—and maybe a desire not to have kids at that time, though he certainly loved his son, Dhani, when he had him years later. But most listeners didn’t analyze the lyrics, and everyone from Presbyterians to Jesus freaks to Hare Krishnas bought the record in droves.
“Don’t Let Me Wait Too Long” should have been the follow-up single, as it delivered that exuberant Beatles sound so many craved. But maybe Harrison wanted people to have to buy the album to get it, since LPs cost four and a half times as much as singles. The album was otherwise a more minor-key, somber effort, but its warm sound grew on you with sustained listens.
April saw the release of two Ringo Starr films. He directed the documentary Born to Boogie about his friend Marc Bolan. He acted in That’ll Be the Day alongside David Essex (“Rock On”); they played young men in the early days of British rock and roll. Starr brought the same naturalistic, low-key charm that he had to the Beatles’ films. But just as he got his film career rolling, an old mate dragged him back into music.
Lennon wrote “I’m the Greatest” after catching a rerun of A Hard Day’s Night on TV. “It’s the Muhammad Ali line, you know. I couldn’t sing it, but it was perfect for Ringo. He could say ‘I’m the greatest’ and people wouldn’t get upset. Whereas if I said ‘I’m the greatest,’ they’d all take it so seriously.”23
Lennon, Starr, and Harrison were all in Los Angeles that spring, attending a fundraiser for Daniel Ellsberg together on March 7. Six days later Starr and Lennon entered Sunset Sound Recorders with the backing group that regularly played on Lennon and Harrison albums: keyboardist Billy Preston, drummer Jim Keltner, and bassist Klaus Voormann (a friend since the Beatles’ early days in Hamburg).
When Harrison called the studio, Lennon told him to come down to help. Harrison added the guitar hook, as he often did on Lennon-McCartney songs like “And I Love Her” and “Help!” They tweaked the lyrics so Starr could revisit his Billy Shears persona from Sgt. Pepper. Lennon harmonized. Starr climaxed with a rant that he was the greatest in any world, and in eighteen minutes it was done. Harrison said they should form a new group called the Ladders. Within four days Melody Maker was reporting that Voormann was “the bassist rumored to replace Paul McCartney after his departure from the group.”
McCartney was stuck in the UK, his visa blocked due to his pot conviction. When Starr returned to London the following month, McCartney gave him another song for his rapidly evolving Ringo album, “Six O’Clock,” a dawnbreak vow from a husband to treat his wife better after a night spent fighting.
Back in New York, Lennon filled his new album, Mind Games, with many such appeals to his wife to save their marriage. He’d shattered it the previous November when he and Ono watched the presidential election results with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. The landslide for Nixon shocked Lennon, and he quickly grew bitter over how “stupid” he’d been to believe in the possibility of Revolution. Now Nixon would be able to eject him from the country for sure, he assumed. He got hammered on tequila and cocaine and turned on the other three, just as he did with everyone who at one time or another served as a guru in his life. He’d put them on a pedestal, then decide they betrayed him, from the Maharishi to Allen Klein—replaying the pattern with his parents, who had both abandoned him as a child.
Per Jerry Rubin’s roommate Carol Realini, Lennon told Ono in front of the party, “I don’t want to be John and Yoko anymore.” Later that evening he had sex with Realini in the basement. “He told me that before he and Yoko married, they made a pact and were totally monogamous for all the time up until that moment. It’s true, she told me. And he told me he wanted to break the pact. He wanted her to know that he was through with her and he had been trying to tell her this for some time and he couldn’t get through to her. He felt the one way that he could get through to her would be to break the pact in a way that she would know he broke the pact.”24
Almost immediately he was consumed with regret, as photographer Bob Gruen captured in a picture the next day. He, Ono, and Lennon “took a walk down to the river and as we were walking along the jetty [Lennon] suddenly prostrated himself at Yoko’s feet. It was very spur of the moment, totally unposed.”25 Many songs on Mind Games were likewise apologies or tribute songs, “Aisumasen” (Japanese for “I’m sorry”), “You Are Here” (the name of a joint art exhibition they staged in happier times), “I Know (I Know),” and the best of them, “Out the Blue,” which could be a wedding standard. He strove to get Ono pumped back up for more political activism with “Only People”: “We can’t be denied with woman and man side by side!” He whooped like a cheerleader while the gospel chorus clapped.
But Ono was done with Lennon—though she wasn’t ready to say goodbye permanently. She noticed Lennon was attracted to their Chinese assistant, May Pang, and decided to set them up together, so she could still call him multiple times a day and take him back later, if she felt like it. Pang (born 1950) was shocked when Ono suggested the arrangement; she resisted for two weeks but eventually found herself falling for Lennon. When the time came for Lennon to actually sing “Out the Blue” in the studio, it was Pang he sang it to. On “Meat City” he yelled, “I’m going to China!” He departed for Los Angeles with Pang in tow.