From the moment he and Yoko moved into their several suites on the seventeenth floor of the St Regis Hotel on East 55th Street, John was in love with New York. He loved the constant rattle of the city, the energy, the mix of peoples, the architecture and basically the whole twenty-four-hours-a-day feel to the place, where television never closed down. As he would often say: ‘If I’d lived in Roman times, I’d have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself. New York is at my speed.’
And, with the Imagine album released on 9 September, and the single already on the disc jockeys’ playlists, he found, almost as he had in 1964 when the Beatles had first arrived in America, that his voice was once again all over the radio stations. It was a terrific way to be welcomed to his new home and for him to start a new life.
‘It was Yoko who sold me on New York,’ he would later romanticise. ‘She’d been poor here and she knew every inch. She made me walk around the streets and parks and squares and examine every nook and cranny. In fact, you could say I fell in love with New York on a street corner.’
He was exaggerating again. Although they bought a couple of bikes to get around on, John and Yoko were never far away from a limousine. Nevertheless, he was hooked on New York as he had never been on London, and straight away he and Yoko set about establishing themselves, not as a rock star and his arty wife, but as an avant-garde film-making couple.
As the trunks began arriving from Tittenhurst Park, the extra suites they’d taken in the St Regis started to fill with newspapers, magazines, bundles of fan mail and posters, as well as film editing and video equipment and a copying machine. Soon staff were hired to stage-manage their various projects, and, as John luxuriated in America’s openness to them, other guests in the hotel, such as film stars Fred Astaire and Jack Palance, agreed to make fleeting appearances in their films. ‘Look at this,’ he said to me as he picked up a letter off the pile. ‘A university in Tennessee is offering me sixty thousand dollars just to talk. Just to talk! I don’t even have to bother singing. It’s unbelievable. Invitations like this come every day.’
One such invitation, for Yoko, actually – although he knew that he was the real draw – had already been accepted. It was for a retrospective of her work called This Is Not Here, to be mounted at the Everson Art Museum at Syracuse in upstate New York. There was a problem, however. Most of Yoko’s art had been in the form of ‘instructions’ and ‘happenings’, like bagism, where a few people would sit around and watch as she got into a bag. There had been a few films, admittedly, but not all of them were suitable to be shown to the general public. Her Bottoms movie might be all right but John’s penis in Self Portrait was unlikely to get past the artistic board at the museum. How best, then, to fill the massive amount of space being offered by the museum?
As she told me, ‘You don’t need to be an artist to make art . . . it’s just a frame of mind’, the solution was to write to every famous person John and Yoko knew and invite them to make an offering as a guest artist in what were described as ‘water pieces’. John himself set the pace with a joke – a plastic bag filled with water that he entitled Napoleon’s Bladder; George Harrison sent a milk bottle and Bob Dylan a copy of his Nashville Skyline album in a fish tank. There were, of course, some of Yoko’s greatest hits, too – her Eternal Clock, which had no hands, and an all-white and therefore unplayable chess set.
But mostly there was a lot of water, and, on the day the exhibition opened, thousands of students, most of whom had probably never been to an art exhibition in their lives before, invaded the gallery hoping to see a Beatle. They did. John, on his thirty-first birthday, was everywhere promoting his wife.
‘I’ve bet Yoko a thousand dollars that before the end of this year somebody somewhere will write an article which really understands her work,’ he told me. ‘I don’t mean any of that intellectual bullshit that I’ve had about my albums by people who like them but don’t understand them. I mean an article by someone who really knows what he or she is talking about. If nobody writes it, I’ll have to write it myself.’
To watch him that day, hurrying about mingling with students, was to see the needy side of him. No longer was he John Lennon the famous rock star. He was John the would-be intellectual, hustling for his wife, almost ingratiating himself as academics from the University of Syracuse hung about hoping to catch his Beatle eye.
Only Yoko could judge whether or not the exhibition was the success she’d hoped – but it probably wasn’t. With so much water sloshing about on the floor, a lot of people got wet, and some of the fans, in student guise, couldn’t help but take home some of the guest artists’ entries as souvenirs of the day that John Lennon went to Syracuse.
The following day, putting on his protest hat, and followed by a caravan of TV, radio and print media, John insisted on visiting a tiny Native American reservation of the Onondaga Nation who, he’d been told, were fighting plans to build an extra lane to a highway that ran through their land. It may have sounded a little patronising when, as he was buying up the village shop of souvenirs, he told his surprised hosts that as a boy he’d ‘always pretended to be an Indian’ when he’d played Cowboys and Indians in the back garden in Menlove Avenue. But he really had, as Mimi remembered.
He may not have got the Onondaga on to The Dick Cavett Show as he wanted, but his visit didn’t hurt. The extra lane on the highway was never built. If there was one thing John knew a lot about, it was the power of publicity.
He could hardly have done more to promote Yoko’s career and to be seen to be loving with her in public, but she knew about the sharp side of his tongue, too. While the St Regis Hotel was a useful base for a couple of months, what the couple really needed was a proper home in New York. So, hearing that there might be an apartment available in the stately Dakota building on Central Park West, John put on a suit and tie in order to be interviewed by the reputedly stuffy co-op board of directors who decided who could live there.
Yoko, unfortunately, didn’t know about their conservatism. As John and I were talking while he waited for her to get ready, she suddenly emerged from the bedroom wearing a pair of floral hot pants and a blouse with the top three buttons undone.
John exploded. ‘You look like a tart, a fucking whore,’ he raged, his temper out of all proportion to the situation. And then, since I had a friend who lived in the same block and knew the nature of the place, he turned to me for support. ‘Tell her, Ray.’
She didn’t need telling. Without a word, or indeed a change of expression, she went back into the bedroom to return a few minutes later wearing a demurely long skirt.
They didn’t find a new home at the Dakota that day, and they would soon move down to the West Village where they rented a sparsely furnished apartment on Bank Street from one of the Lovin’ Spoonful. But a volatile side to their relationship had been exposed. John had lost none of the temper with which he used to upset Cynthia. But Yoko, though she may have got the dress code wrong, knew how to handle it.
Astonishingly, although ‘Imagine’ was the biggest solo hit of his career, John was so bound up with his new life in New York he wasn’t aware that it hadn’t even been released as a single in the UK. A decade earlier, getting into the charts had been his greatest ambition. Now, Britain was history for him.
What he did want was a Christmas hit with a peace message, so, casually borrowing the off-the-shelf melody of the eighteenth-century folk song ‘Stewball’, he wrote ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’, which he recorded with Yoko and the children of the Harlem Community Choir. It wasn’t one of his best songs, and it wasn’t the hit in the US that he’d hoped for, but for well over four decades it would be a December staple in supermarkets and shopping malls. It would, however, mark a turning point for him. With the exception of ‘Imagine’, which would be finally released as a single in the UK in 1975, four years after he’d recorded it, ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ would, in 1971, be the last hit he would have in Britain in his lifetime. It wasn’t just that as he lost interest in Britain, British fans began to lose interest in him. In popular songwriting terms he was, as Cynthia would say, ‘losing his mojo’.
Why? Was it because tastes were changing? Or was his mind not on the day job any more, as he spent less time with musicians and more with others in New York who had attached themselves? With the Beatles, and even afterwards, there had been the stimulus of his old pals – musicians he trusted who weren’t afraid to tell him what they thought, and who, by their very presence in the studio, acted as editors of his work, as Paul had done par excellence. For years he’d turned to Ringo after each vocal take, or after he’d run through a new song, to get the drummer’s opinion. He would always insist that Yoko was a brilliant musical partner – ‘Why should I work with Paul McCartney when I have Yoko to work with?’ he would always tell me. But, whatever her talents in other fields, Yoko couldn’t begin to fill the void in John’s creative life that had opened when he’d ripped apart the band he’d started.
Nor could any of his new American friends. There were several, from David Peel, a Lower East Side street entertainer who would amuse with an album that John produced called The Pope Smokes Dope, to avant-garde film-maker Jonas Mekas. While at the other end of the social spectrum was Dick Cavett, who would later become a useful ally.
From the day John and Yoko made New York their base, noisiest of all their new pals were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, a couple of sometimes jokey counterculture Yippie activists who had achieved nationwide notoriety during the anti-war demonstration at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Like Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali before them, they saw John as a useful rallying tool for their anti-establishment programme, and, as others had found, John could be easily led when flattered.
He’d always liked to reminisce about when he’d been at art college in Liverpool, but, at that stage in his life, student politics and political revolt had largely passed him by as his total focus then had been on music. Now, as Hoffman and Rubin successfully tapped into the inner rebel on the seventeenth floor of the St Regis Hotel, or when playing at being a bohemian down in the Village, he would take to the streets as he had never felt able to do in London.
It was all radical chic, but soon, with him and Yoko wearing black berets, he was taking part in a freedom rally, and writing and singing a song about a guy called John Sinclair who had been given a three-year jail sentence for possession of marijuana. ‘It ain’t fair, John Sinclair,’ the ex-Beatle sang. It wasn’t fair. Sinclair was released three days later.
A riot at Attica State Prison near Buffalo, New York, that had left twenty-nine prisoners and ten guards dead was his next theme, which he sang about on David Frost’s TV show. He was the sermonising darling of the moment in New York and he was relishing it. So, when he was approached by the Northern Aid Committee in the US, more usually known as NORAID, which he believed raised money for the widows and orphans of Republicans involved in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, his instinct was, as always, to give.
It was a mistake. It was now 1972, and by getting involved in Northern Ireland he was treading on blood and uncertain ground. The sectarian bombings, murders and reprisals between militant republicans and equally militant unionist paramilitary groups were complicated and growing ever more violent. According to the BBC, in that year alone 470 ordinary people would be killed and almost 5,000 injured in 1,382 terrorist bomb explosions.
John, who still wore his pacifist colours loudly and proudly, would say that he was told that no money he gave to NORAID would go to the IRA to buy guns and explosives. That might well have been the case. But how could he be sure? He couldn’t. He got a roasting from the British press when the story got out.
It was another example of John’s naivety, of his being a soft touch and leading with his heart rather than his head. Ireland has a special place in the collective memory of many Liverpudlians, and, like many people in that city, John had Irish ancestors. But he had followed his emotions without taking the time to fully understand the complexity of the situation. In the event, when he was asked to do a benefit show for Republicans in Dublin, he scrambled for impartial ground and replied that he would do one only if he could do another the following week for the Unionist side. After that the idea didn’t go any further and he would say nothing more publicly about Ireland.
Nor did he have much to say when he learned that Michael de Freitas, for whom he had put up bail money in London but who had slipped away to Trinidad before his trial, had now been arrested there for a murder. Before de Freitas had left the UK, his Black House project had been gutted by fire. When his new commune in Trinidad had also been set alight, police investigated and discovered two freshly dug graves in the grounds. One contained the body of an associate of de Freitas, Michael Skerritt, and the other that of a young English woman, Gale Ann Benson, the daughter of a Conservative MP. They had both been hacked to death, with Benson, who was in a relationship with a cousin of de Freitas, an American called Hakim Jamal, having been buried while she was still breathing. By the time the police arrived, Michael de Freitas had escaped to Guyana, but he was soon captured and returned to Trinidad to face trial. Despite the enormity of the alleged crimes, John would loyally, but quietly, pay the fees of the defence lawyer.
Back in New York, John had something closer to home to engage his thoughts. His phone was being tapped. When he first mentioned it to me in 1972, I thought he was being paranoid. He sometimes was, but not this time. Richard Nixon’s government, however, were. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin had been high on the FBI watch list for four years, and, with a new Presidential election due in 1972, the last thing the Nixon administration wanted was John Lennon going across the country whipping up dissent among students and young people. And, importantly, the 1972 election would include eighteen-year-olds for the first time – not a naturally pro-Nixon age group.
So, when the rumour got around that a huge anti-war demonstration was being planned for the Republican Convention to be held in San Diego that summer, and that a performance by John was to be the magnet, it worried the FBI. It didn’t matter that John had no intention of appearing there, let alone of whipping up a demo crowd, it was time for the FBI to start surveillance on him with a view to having him deported. Pushed by H. R. Haldeman, an assistant to Nixon at the White House, and right-wing Republican senator Strom Thurmond, the FBI tried, but they couldn’t do it.
With the help of a clever and expensive immigration lawyer called Leon Wildes, John and Yoko always got the necessary extensions to their visas. And, as they sat through several Immigration and Naturalization Service hearings and Wildes would tell again and again how they needed to be in America in order to find Yoko’s missing daughter Kyoko, it began to occur to them that what they really needed was permanent residence in the US.
John had always been good at getting the public on his side through the media. So, when Dick Cavett gave his whole show on ABC over to him and Yoko, it was the perfect opportunity to speak directly to the public.
‘I felt followed everywhere by government agents,’ he told Cavett in his half-jokey, conversational style. ‘Every time I picked up the phone, there was a lot of noise [a sign that the call was being overheard] . . . I’d open the door and there’d be guys standing on the other side of the street. I’d get in the car and they’d be following me and not hiding . . . They wanted me to see that I was being followed . . .’
Of course, Cavett wanted him to sing as well as talk, so John promptly surprised a goodly section of the watching audience by singing ‘Woman Is The Nigger Of The World’. It was a song based on a quote given by Yoko to women’s magazine Nova in the UK in 1968, and knowing how controversial it would be, John neatly prefaced it by explaining that Irish republican James Connolly had once said ‘the female worker is the slave of the slave’.
Before the show ABC had been worried about the use of the ‘N’ word. But there were no protests about it. When the song had been released as a single a couple of months earlier it had been banned from most radio stations and hadn’t sold. So now John was hoping that it would be given a second chance when it became the lead song on his new album Some Time In New York City.
Again he was to be disappointed. The new album, a hastily concocted collection of the protest songs he’d written and recorded while living in New York, was savaged by the critics, who found the lyrics mostly trite. It would sell just a tenth as many copies in its first year of release as Imagine had. Ironically the best song and easily the best track was ‘Woman Is the Nigger Of The World’, with its second-line lyric ‘if you don’t believe me, just look at the one you’re with’. But it would remain a song that would be rarely heard.
It was a setback. John would later deride the songs of that period as ‘journalism’ when what he did best was ‘poetry’, but he’d never really known failure in records before. It hurt.
For the first time in his career, he began to feel alone and unsure. He still kept in touch with Neil and Mal, but Apple in the UK had become little more than a collecting house for royalties. His main contact with the record world was now Allen Klein at his ABKCO office in New York. But Klein, the man he’d championed as the saviour of the Beatles’ finances and to whom he’d given his psychedelically painted Rolls-Royce, didn’t seem so attractive any more. Although the manager had undoubtedly improved the Beatles’ royalty deals, there was disquiet among all four of them about how much Klein was paying himself out of their earnings. And George was now fretting about income from his Bangladesh concert that had gone Klein’s way in expenses. Law suits would inevitably soon follow.
As the FBI surveillance continued, John began drawing away from Hoffman and Rubin as he realised that he was more valuable to them than they were to him. As he would admit a few years later, they had been pretty well the first people to get in touch with him when he’d first gone to live in New York, after which he’d become swept up in their enthusiasm. It was time to end the relationship, but not before attending one last party at Jerry Rubin’s apartment on the night of Nixon’s re-election landslide victory on 7 November 1972.
It was a bitter evening for everyone there. The enemy had won. And then, after drinking far too much, and already high on cocaine, John lost control of his behaviour.