Being a Beatle had by now become a part-time job for John, as illustrated when at the end of May 1969 he turned up in Canada with Yoko. He’d wanted to go to the US on the Queen Elizabeth, taking with him a two-man film crew. But when he reached the ship at Southampton he discovered that his US visa request had been turned down, because of his UK drugs conviction the previous year. The Bahamas was his next choice, because of its proximity to the US, but then he changed his mind and moved on to Montreal to stage another peace bed-in there. As North American journalists queued up to interview him, he and Yoko talked day after day from their bed in Room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.
Throughout 1969, colleges across America were racked with protests against the Vietnam War, to which John’s perhaps surprisingly mild response was that the students should act responsibly and peacefully in their confrontations with the police. ‘All I’m saying is give peace a chance,’ he would sum up many a conversation.
That should be a song, Yoko told him. Which is what it became a couple of days later in the shape of ‘Give Peace A Chance’, with a local Canadian record producer, Andre Perry, bringing a recorder and microphones to his hotel room. The recording didn’t take long. Helped by Tommy Smothers on another acoustic guitar, someone to open and close a wardrobe door to provide a steady rhythm, and the voices of disc jockey Murray the K, who was up from New York for the occasion, singer Petula Clark, Timothy and Rosemary Leary, various journalists and the Canadian branch of the Radha Krishna Temple, an eight-bar chant was elevated into a classic protest anthem. John, wearing white pyjamas this time, sang from his bed.
The interviews John and Yoko did may have garnered widespread press coverage, but it was ‘Give Peace A Chance’ that was John’s real gift to the peace movement as it became an instant hit, drawing people together to be sung on anti-war marches in many countries. It didn’t matter that more voices were later secretly added to those present by the record producer to give it more body; or that the words that John sang between the choruses were gobbledegook; or that one of them was ‘masturbation’ while ‘mastication’ was written on the lyric sheet, because the message of the song was too important to risk it being banned by radio stations over a jokey reference to onanism. What mattered was that the song summed up in nine English words and a couple of chords the expression of millions.
Creating a slogan and setting it to the simplest of music – this was where John was brilliant. Released as a single by the Plastic Ono Band, ‘Give Peace A Chance’ would be his first recorded venture outside the Beatles.
Back in London, meanwhile, a problem had arisen. If Allen Klein was to succeed in his promise to get EMI and Capitol Records in the US to increase the Beatles’ royalty rate, he was going to need some new material to dangle in front of their eyes. But the Let It Be film and tapes were going to take months more to edit.
It was diplomatic Paul who broke the ice. After talking to John, he rang George Martin and asked if the producer would work with the Beatles again, just like they used to. Martin agreed that he would, but he insisted there could be no messing about as there had been at Twickenham. There wouldn’t be, Paul promised, and the Abbey Road studio was booked for the beginning of July.
This gave John just enough time to drive Yoko, together with Julian and Kyoko, up to Liverpool to show them where he had grown up, and then on to Scotland to meet some members of his family. Bizarre as his life had become, he’d always stayed in touch by letter and postcard with his mother’s sisters and his cousins.
By all accounts it was a pleasant enough family holiday, despite Yoko’s insistence, to Scottish horror, on feeding John a macrobiotic diet. Not long after starting back again, however, John accidentally drove the family saloon he’d hired into a ditch. With his very poor eyesight, he’d never been better than a terrible driver. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured, although both John and Yoko had to have several stitches, as did Kyoko, while Julian was in shock.
Yoko had, however, also suffered a whiplash back injury, which meant that when John finally reached Abbey Road to begin recording, he was followed by a hobbling Yoko, and then by four porters who wheeled a bed into the studio. More porters then appeared carrying sheets and blankets and made up the bed, into which Yoko then climbed, propped up by pillows so that she didn’t miss being part of the session. ‘It wasn’t the ideal way for making records,’ Paul would remember. George Martin wasn’t much amused either, but he would laugh about it for years afterwards as he told and retold the story.
Apart from that little surprise, this last album that the Beatles would make together, and which was appropriately given the title Abbey Road, could hardly have gone more smoothly. Because he’d arrived late, John didn’t play on one of George’s two stand-out tracks, ‘Here Comes The Sun’, although he was on ‘Something’, and he hated Paul’s song ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, which he considered twee. And, while improving John’s ‘Come Together’ with a thumping bass riff, Paul wondered if his colleague might not be sued for plagiarism for a line in the lyrics – which he eventually was. But these were everyday recording differences, and nothing to fall out about. The real problem was that even with Ringo’s ‘Octopus’s Garden’ and John’s sexy, bluesy paean to Yoko ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy’), the Beatles didn’t have enough new songs to fill both sides of a twelve-inch record.
At which point George Martin came into his own, encouraging John and Paul to rummage around in their minds for any unfinished songs that might be fitted together to create a continuous twenty-minute piece. Paul leapt at the challenge and quickly delivered ‘Golden Slumbers’, ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’, ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ and ‘Carry That Weight’. While John, less enthusiastically, dug out ‘Mean Mr Mustard’ and ‘Polythene Pam’ for which he used a pronounced Scouse accent and an inimitably Liverpool turn of phrase – ‘You could say she was attractively built’.
‘It was supposed to be about a mythical Liverpool scrubber, dressed to kill in her jackboots and kilt, like a whore,’ was how he described it to me, before casually, and rather unfairly, dismissing the entire medley. ‘They were just bits of songs that had been forgotten and should have probably stayed forgotten.’ But without them there would have been no album.
In the year since he’d left Cynthia, John liked to say that he and Yoko were living out of a suitcase. They’d certainly been a moveable feast, having shuttled between Kenwood and Montagu Square before ending up at Ringo’s house, just down the road from Kenwood, when the drummer and his family moved on to a grander home in Surrey. Now, however, Tittenhurst Park, an estate in Berkshire that John had bought for £350,000 with money owed from US publishing royalties, was just about ready for occupation – if you didn’t mind living with the builders. Finally, he and Yoko had a home of their own. It would, John believed, give him the seclusion he needed, and it was quite a place. First built in 1769, with later early nineteenth-century additions, its main building was a graceful white-painted mansion, surrounded by over seventy acres of private parkland, with groves, lodges and protected massive Oriental trees. If John’s previous house in St George’s Hill Estate had been rich, mock Tudor suburbia, Tittenhurst Park was genuine Georgian/Regency England.
Out in the country, though less than forty miles from London, it should have been ideal for an eccentric millionaire and his new wife. John and Yoko, however, though they spent much of the next two years having walls pulled own, a recording studio built and white carpet imported through Harrods from China and laid throughout their home, never really settled. With the two gardeners, the housekeeper/cook, the two secretaries and Yoko’s old friend Dan Richter there to pursue their whims and projects, everything they could have wanted was to hand. They even had a lake dug in the grounds, lined with rubber and stocked with fish, when the whim struck them. But the fish died, and so did their early enthusiasm.
It didn’t help that, from the start, John and Yoko were dabbling with heroin again, with Dan Richter, who had a heroin problem himself, acting as an occasional courier for them. As he admits in his memoir, he would leave a little supply outside their bedroom door. When John was in a mean and martyred mood, he would sometimes blame his recourse to drugs on the pain that the other Beatles had inflicted on him and Yoko by their attitude towards her. But that was just an excuse. The truth lay closer to his addictive personality. He liked what drugs did to him. ‘I started to smoke at fifteen, though I hated the smell,’ he told me one day at Tittenhurst. ‘And I started drinking then too. All I did later was mix some stuff in the tobacco and add pills to the drink when I was on tour or working in Hamburg.’ Later, along came other drugs. In the world in which he lived, that was hardly unusual.
He would always insist that he never injected, although some friends wonder whether that was true, as days would go by when he and Yoko would be locked in their bedroom that summer, only coming out when they had to. Such a day occurred in August when John joined the other Beatles for their final official photograph together as they all crossed the zebra crossing on Abbey Road for the cover of their last album.
He was still unwell from heroin use when he was present a few weeks later on a cold, late August night as Bob Dylan made a return to live appearances at the Isle of Wight Festival of Pop. It wasn’t a great gig, but the atmosphere must have sparked something in John. He’d never appeared at a mass rock festival like Woodstock or Monterey. Was he wondering what it was like? Whatever the reason, he accepted the very next invitation he received, which happened to be a rock and roll peace festival in Toronto, starring Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Bo Diddley. Hastily ringing around, he put together a band of Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Klaus Voorman on bass and Alan White on drums, met them at London airport, and then decided what they were going to play on the flight over.
It began as a difficult night for him, when he suffered a fit of vomiting backstage which was believed to be a side effect of the heroin battle he was fighting. But the ovation that erupted when his presence was announced both astonished and galvanised him as he and his new friends launched into some formulaic rock and roll standards, before getting to his own songs ‘Yer Blues’ and ‘Give Peace A Chance’. Naturally, Yoko ended the set by doing her wailing thing to John’s guitar feedback accompaniment, and, not surprisingly, she wasn’t so well received. That didn’t matter to John, as he continued to blank out any negativity towards her. What did matter was that he’d loved being back on stage before an adoring crowd. Did he really still need the other Beatles alongside him? ‘The buzz was incredible,’ he said after the show. ‘I never felt so good in my life.’
Then it was straight back to Tittenhurst, where he forced himself to kick heroin, or, as the euphemism went, to go ‘cold turkey’ and come off the drug. It was, he told me, dreadful and made him desperately unwell, but, more than ever anxious to write from within himself, he turned the experience into a song, ‘Cold Turkey’.
‘Thirty-six hours rolling in pain, Praying to someone, free me again,’ he screamed. It was harrowing stuff, and too tough for Paul and George when he suggested it might make a Beatles single. So, undeterred, and with the help of the ever-faithful Ringo and Klaus Voorman again, he recorded it as another Plastic Ono Band record. It was a flop. The world wasn’t ready for a pop record about getting off heroin – if, indeed, the fans even knew that was what it was about. Not every record buyer was familiar with the patois of the drug subculture. In Britain ‘cold turkey’ was something you ate with the Christmas dinner leftovers on Boxing Day.
And not every fan wanted to see John’s penis gradually growing into tumescence and then slowly settling into detumescence either. But that was the subject of a twenty-minute film, titled Self Portrait, that he and Yoko had made. Neither John nor Yoko attended the screening at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, nor, as far as I know, was the film ever shown again. Perhaps even John realised that, this time, he really had gone too far.
Since the appointment of Allen Klein as business manager, the Apple headquarters in Savile Row had ceased to be the merry, daylong cocktail party that it had been in the carefree days of ‘Western Communism’. There had been resignations, with Peter Asher having gone and taken James Taylor with him, after finding that the Klein atmosphere was no longer convivial. And there had been sackings, too, most notably that of Ron Kass who was running the Apple record label. More poignant, though, was the firing of a tearful Alistair Taylor who had been a good friend and servant of the group ever since Brian Epstein had requested that he accompany him on that fateful first visit to the Cavern back in 1961. What most hurt, Alistair told me, was that having been told of his sacking by an upset and embarrassed Peter Brown (doing Klein’s dirty work for him), he could no longer get John or Paul on the phone.
Not that it was all dirty work that Klein was doing. At a board meeting on 20 September, which was attended by Ringo, John and Yoko, and Paul but not George who had gone to Liverpool to see his mother who was ill, he had some good news to impart. EMI and Capitol Records had agreed to a huge hike in the Beatles’ record royalties. Even Paul had to admit that the man he so disliked had done well for them. It was good for Klein, too, of course.
It might have been best if the meeting had broken up at that point. But, instead, ever enthusiastic, Paul then began to suggest ways in which the Beatles might progress in the future. This is how he recalled the afternoon, to me.
‘I began to feel that the only way we could get back to playing good music again was to start playing as a band again,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t want to go out and face two hundred thousand fans because I would get nothing from it. So, I thought up this idea of playing surprise one-night stands in unlikely places . . . just letting a hundred or so people into the village hall, so to speak, and then locking the doors. It would have been a great scene for those who saw us and great for us, too.’
When he’d finished speaking, he asked the other Beatles what they thought.
John’s reply was: ‘I think you’re daft.’
Paul asked him what he meant . . . ‘after all, he is John Lennon, and I’m a bit afraid of the “rapier wit” we all hear about,’ he said.
So, John repeated himself. ‘I think you’re daft. I’m leaving the Beatles. I want a divorce . . . like I had from Cynthia.’