Sessions for Imagine began at the almost completed recording studios at Tittenhurst Park in June 1971. Yoko, as well as John, would be credited as one of the producers, along with Phil Spector – who brought the (very stoned) film star Dennis Hopper along with him on the first day. Being a producer was quite a promotion for Yoko, as her experience in the studio was minimal. That, however, didn’t prevent her from sometimes telling very experienced musicians how they should play. George Harrison had agreed to be lead guitar for the basic band, and would turn up when necessary, and Alan White, who was soon to join Yes, was on drums. Klaus Voorman was again on bass, with top session player Nicky Hopkins at the keyboards.
Only ten tracks long, some of the songs that John chose for this second solo album had been around for some time, ‘Jealous Guy’ being a rewrite of a song he’d composed while in India, while ‘Gimme Some Truth’ had been tried at a Beatles Let It Be session. Altogether it was a mix of styles, and this time he was ‘trying to make a bloody variety show’, or at least something that would be popular. Although ‘Oh Yoko!’ was considered by EMI for a single, controversy would later rage around just two of the other songs. One was a soul number called ‘How Do You Sleep?’
Relations with Paul had worsened since his former songwriting colleague’s decision to ask the High Court to wind up the Beatles a few months earlier, and John had not taken well some silly digs about him and Yoko on Paul’s album Ram. ‘Too many people going underground . . . too many people preaching practices,’ Paul had sung. It was silly, but it was no big deal.
John’s response was, however, vicious. Playing ‘How Do You Sleep?’ on the piano he was grinning with delight as he sang the words to George Harrison, as captured on the promotional documentary Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s Imagine Album. ‘This is a nasty song,’ we see him say. ‘Think nasty.’
It was an unkind song. ‘A pretty face may last a year or two, but pretty soon they’ll see what you can do’ was one line, while another suggested that the only song of value that Paul had written alone was ‘Yesterday’. There was much more, and Paul was understandably upset when he heard it. It could, however, have been a lot worse, had Allen Klein not explained that John was laying himself wide open to a very damaging libel action if he didn’t change one of the lines. He did.
Not only was it unpleasant, it was also a self-revelatory own goal, demonstrating as it did John’s continuing jealousy of Paul’s good looks, as well as his prevailing envy of the younger man’s gift for melody. While a gratuitous dig at Linda, suggesting that she wore the trousers in the McCartney house, was deeply ironic. If any of the Beatles had a demanding wife, it was John himself.
Nine years later, he regretted the lyrics – ‘they just came out of my mouth’, he would say. ‘I wasn’t really feeling that vicious . . . I used my resentment and withdrawing from the Beatles and the relationship with Paul to write a song.’ It was a pretty lame excuse. Had the title song of the album not been one of his most commercial ever, ‘How Do You Sleep?’ might have been the album’s most memorable track. Nothing, however, could top ‘Imagine’. With a litany of suggestions for brotherly love, it captured the moment that year and for many more to come. The music and words had come quickly, and had been inspired, John said, by ‘instructions’ that Yoko had written in her book Grapefruit which began with the word ‘imagine . . .’.
‘Imagine letting a goldfish swim across the sky . . .’ was one of them. From this John fashioned ‘Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try . . .’ The song was, in his words, ‘anti-religious, anti-conventional and anti-capitalist, but because it’s sugar-coated, it’s accepted’. By sugar-coated he meant that it had a pretty tune and an almost churchy piano feel. It was recorded quickly in just three takes, the second version being chosen for release.
He knew when he wrote it that he’d come up with something special. But it was always good to get an outsider’s opinion. So, a few weeks later, just after the album was completed, he took me to his and Yoko’s bedroom and played me some of the tracks on an acetate he’d had cut.
He began with ‘Gimme Some Truth’. ‘This,’ he said, ‘will be the new single.’
I tried to hide it, but I wasn’t very impressed. It sounded like a rant to me, rather than a hit. ‘What’s on the other side?’ I asked.
Then John turned the acetate over and played me ‘Imagine’.
‘Surely that should be the A-side,’ I said as it ended.
John looked across at Yoko who was sitting on the bed. ‘Yoko, Ray thinks “Imagine” should be the single.’
‘Oh, good,’ she said. ‘I like that one, too.’
Neither gave so much as a hint that they’d known all along what the A-side of the single was going to be, and that Imagine would be the name of the album. Presumably John had wanted to test his own opinion on someone who hadn’t been involved in the recording.
The film that was made during the sessions is both cringe-making, in that it includes some staged sections of John and Yoko in matador hats and cloaks running around the gardens pretending in pop video fashion that they have lost each other, and fascinating in that it reveals several facets of John’s character. There’s his quickness while at work in the studio, his unpleasant impatience when the engineer screws up, and, in contrast, his patience with Yoko’s interruptions.
But there is something else in the film that hadn’t been planned but which, in retrospect, would look significantly ominous. In a break during recording a young American hippy in a sheepskin coat turned up at the door wanting to talk to John about the messages in the Beatles’ lyrics. Normally he would have been kept well away by Mal Evans, who was there acting as a minder, but John wasn’t opposed to meeting the young man.
It was a touching moment caught on film, as the scruffy and lonely young man asked John if he was thinking of anyone in particular when he wrote ‘Carry That Weight’.
That song, John explained, had been written by Paul. But even if it hadn’t . . . ‘I’m just a guy who writes songs . . . Don’t confuse the songs with your own life.’ If the songs meant something to other people that was good, but he was only writing about himself, his feelings and his own experiences.
Disappointment and confusion washed over the young man’s face as he was told bluntly by the man he idolised that he had been wasting his time. He couldn’t answer.
‘Are you hungry?’ John asked finally.
The reply was inaudible.
‘Let’s get him something to eat,’ John said, and led the young, confused stranger into his house.
Those weeks during and after the recording of Imagine were as cosy a time as there would ever be at Tittenhurst Park, and one day when a Hare Krishna group turned up they were given a cottage in which to live, and the job of painting a little temple on the estate.
‘They’re all ex-druggies, but they’re all right,’ John told me when I asked about them.
At first everything went well and the lodgers would ghost around the grounds chanting ‘Peace, man’, ‘Hare Krishna’, ‘Peace’, whenever they passed anyone.
Then, suddenly, they were gone. ‘What happened to the Hare Krishna people?’ I asked the next time I was there.
John grinned. ‘Oh, I had to show them the door. They were driving me mad with all that chanting of “Hare Krishna” and “Peace” all the time. I couldn’t get any peace.’
A new Saturday night TV chat show, hosted by Michael Parkinson, started that summer on BBC1, and because I knew Parkinson I was asked if I might help with suggestions for guests. I suggested John and Yoko.
Parkinson was keen but, illustrating how far John had slipped in mainstream public interest in Britain, the producer was worried. Three years earlier he would have gone down on his knees to get John Lennon on a chat show. But now? ‘What if they both get into a bag and won’t come out?’ he fretted. Or if they just want to talk about peace or beddism or turn up in their pyjamas or do some crazy avant-garde thing like taking their clothes off . . . ?
I assured him that wouldn’t be the case and that John could be very funny when he wanted to be.
Finally, the go-ahead was given.
My assumption had been that the whole show should be given over to a John and Yoko interview. But at the last minute the producer decided that he daren’t risk it. Film actor Trevor Howard was booked for the second half of the show, presumably on the basis that if John and Yoko did do something too zany their interview could be quickly terminated. So, John became the warm-up act instead of the main attraction. Now, that was crazy!
As I expected, John was on top form, and kept the studio audience laughing throughout. So, it was with some chagrin that halfway through the programme host Michael Parkinson had to apologise that they had run out of time, thank John and Yoko for coming and promise that they would have more time on another occasion.
There never would be another occasion.
By 1971 satellite television had shrunk the world. And when a new and bloody conflict erupted in what had been East Pakistan but was now struggling to be born as the new country of Bangladesh amid a terrible cyclone which added floods, starvation and a mass exodus, its showing on the TV news every night pricked consciences. Conflicted geopolitical interests stayed the hands of the nations who might have helped most, but music was non-political. So when Bengali sitarist Ravi Shankar telephoned his friend George Harrison and asked if there was anything he could do to help, a new movement was begun as George found himself arranging the biggest concentration of rock stars ever to appear on stage together on behalf of the Bangladeshi victims. It was the most laudable of aims, and would be copied several more times during the next forty years.
The plan was that two concerts would be held in New York at Madison Square Garden on 1 August 1971, and, naturally enough, one of the first friends George invited to join him was John. Thinking it might turn into a Beatles reunion, which was the last thing he wanted, John was unsure at first. But when word came that Paul would definitely not be there, John agreed to appear alongside Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Leon Russell, Badfinger, Billy Preston, Ravi Shankar and George himself.
As plans were rapidly put into place for the concerts, John was staying with Yoko in the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, with Yoko’s sister, Setsuko, flying over from university in Switzerland to join them there. Everyone was excited. But then, it all went wrong. George had invited only John to appear on stage. He didn’t want Yoko’s style of music in his charity show. He didn’t like it. It wouldn’t fit. The concert was billed as ‘George Harrison and Friends’. He didn’t consider Yoko to be one of his friends.
Yoko, however, had always assumed that she would be included; and that the all-powerful John Lennon would persuade George to let her sing. John was torn. He wanted to be loyal to his wife, but he could see George’s point of view, too. Inevitably he and George fell out over it and John returned to his suite to give Yoko the bad news. She erupted. She was a strong woman and she didn’t take defeat easily. John, she felt, hadn’t fought hard enough for her.
They rowed for hours, with John throwing furniture around, before, unable to face the situation any longer, he simply walked away from it. Calling a taxi, he went to the airport and caught the first plane to Paris, leaving Yoko, who still believed that George would back down, behind.
Only the next afternoon did Yoko admit defeat. On Allen Klein’s advice, she flew back to London. The following day, she and John, now both back at Tittenhurst Park, were reconciled, and put out a story that they had always intended to be in England for the British publication of Yoko’s book Grapefruit the following week. No mention of the row was made by either. They decided upon a story and stuck to it, although they both knew that it wasn’t true. The rewriting of history would always be a feature of their relationship. Having settled on a version of events that best suited them and the way they told their lives as a perfect, if unconventional, love story, they would stick to it, with any blemishes or inconsistencies painted out.
It was a pity that John missed George’s Concert for Bangla Desh. He would have enjoyed it and his presence would have enhanced it. But it was better for George that he wasn’t there. It was a momentous moment when rock music found a new and benevolent purpose, and when George, for so long a junior partner in the Beatles, finally came of age. Had John been beside him on stage, he might once again have been eclipsed.
John and Yoko stayed at Tittenhurst Park for only a few more weeks. Despite the mountain of money John had spent on the house and gardens, the two had never really settled. Yoko was bored there as she’d been bored when they’d lived together at Kenwood. She was a metropolitan woman. And John, too, always liked to be where the action was.
In August 1971, he and Yoko returned to New York. That was the place to be, the city Yoko thought of as home. By leaving England without a backward glance, John felt that he was beginning again, finally fully shedding his Beatle skin and all that it entailed. He would never return, although for nine more years he always planned to. He would never see Mimi again either.