John Lennon: The Life (43 page)

F
rom the moment the four entered the national spotlight, there had been awareness of John as a pungent character in his own right. As early as June 1963, he was invited to appear without the others on
Juke Box Jury
, a BBC television show where a celebrity panel voted new single releases a hit or a miss. To transport him from BBC
Television Centre in London to that night’s Beatles show in Wales, Brian spent £100 to charter a helicopter, even though the gig paid only £250. Much to the viewers’ delight, John voted every record a miss, saying of Elvis Presley’s “Devil in Disguise” that the King was “like Bing Crosby now.”

He also stood out from his fellow moptops by starting to sport a black leather peaked cap reminiscent of male headgear in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Though other young Britons already possessed such caps, and thousands more now rushed to buy them, John wore his in a distinctive way, slightly tipped back with a faint but discernible revolutionary air—Lennon half wanting to be Lenin.

His media interviews at this time often suggest someone trying—usually in vain—to show he has a mind with more on it than guitar chords, screaming girls, and new shirts. Unlike the decorous, diplomatic Paul, he would answer any question that was put to him, so long as it was sincere, with a directness his interlocutors seldom expected or knew what to make of. “…I don’t suppose I think much about the future. I don’t really give a damn. Though now we’ve made it, it would be a pity to get bombed [he means the hydrogen bomb]. It’s selfish but I don’t care too much about humanity—I’m an escapist. Everyone’s always drumming on about the future, but I’m not letting it interfere with my laughs…. I get spasms of being intellectual. I read a bit about politics but I don’t think I’d vote for anyone. No message from any of those phoney politicians is coming through to me.”

Attached to the Beatles in late ’63 and early ’64 was Michael Braun, a young American who would later turn their life on the road into arguably the first piece of serious pop journalism. A surprising feature of Braun’s account is how much of John and Paul’s offstage chat concerns avant-garde French cinema. John continually throws out puns on his childhood radio and film favorites, like a motor that can’t be switched off: “One more ciggy, then I’m gonna hit the sack; ‘hit the sack’ being an American thing we got off Gary Coople as he struggled along with a clock in High Goons…. You can sack Rome or you can sack cloth or you can sacrilege or saxophone, if you like, or saccharine….”

To Braun he confesses how “unnerved” he feels now that his cousin Stanley Parkes—the boyhood hero from whom he inherited that wonderful Dinky car collection—feels obliged to treat him “like royalty.” He is even willing to discuss his father, usually a no-go area to his closest friends, let alone the media. Braun remarks that it can be a handicap to have a famous father, but John demurs: “I could have stood a famous father rather more than the ignoble Alf, actually.” The dirt-digging
News of the World
has discovered how his father walked out of his life all those years ago, and claims to have traced a friend of Alf’s—by implication, a prelude to unearthing Alf himself. “I don’t want to think about it,” John says. “I don’t feel as if I owe him anything. He never helped me. I got here by myself, and this [playing music] is the longest I’ve ever done anything, except being at school.”

That Christmas, the Beatles sent a thank-you to their British fans via a flimsy plastic disk, recorded at Abbey Road, with tinkling sleigh bells, nonsense carols, and a spoken message from each in turn. Paul’s was a model of appreciativeness, wide-eyed wonderment, and tact; even while asking concertgoers to desist from throwing jelly babies (unpleasant missiles to receive continuously in the face), he stressed that he wasn’t denigrating their generosity and that the Beatles still loved jelly babies, along with other kiddy sweets like chocolate drops and Dolly Mixture. John read the words that had been written for him in an ironical monotone: “Our biggest thrill of the year well I suppose it was being top of the bill at the London Palladium….” At any risk of sounding too obsequious, he broke into parody Jewishness or Goon German. Here was someone taking all possible pains to distance himself from Dolly Mixture.

His favorite journalist, out of a very small field, was Maureen Cleave, pop columnist for the
London Evening Standard
, who had first interviewed him in Liverpool just before the Helen Shapiro tour. Cleave was a quintessential product of new London—a diminutive young woman whose chic outfits and Mary Quant bob contrasted with a precise, almost schoolmistressy manner. She was not particularly a pop music fan (not even owning a record player until the
Standard
bought her one), but covered it as an objective outsider, in sardonically grown-up prose that had never been used on it before.

Maureen Cleave was the first to observe that John had “an upper lip that is brutal in a devastating way,” and to find his cast of mouth and “the long pointed nose he peered down like an eagle” (mainly thanks to nearsightedness) reminiscent of Britain’s famously humorous and cruel monarch, Henry VIII. Though knowing nothing about his childhood and background, she instantly saw the connection with Richmal Crompton’s William; that, for all their exotic Liverpudliana, he and his fellow Beatles were essentially William and the Outlaws, meeting an unpredictable, unreasonable adult world head-on and doing their best to make sense of it. For John, Cleave’s astringent style awoke echoes of Richmal Crompton’s own; he even told her she was like “that woman who wrote William.”

She quickly realized that, with an interviewer he liked—especially one associated with his most cherished author—there were no boundaries to what John would discuss, no limits to what he would say, and no question of anything being “off the record,” much as he might later wish it had been. She even got to see his flat in Emperor’s Gate, a place usually off-limits to press. “He showed me an Elvis Presley album that had Stu Sutcliffe’s name on it, with his own name written over the top, I remember, he kept looking at Elvis’s picture on the cover and saying, ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ He said he’d felt disloyal to Elvis when he started liking Little Richard but because Little Richard was black, that made it all right.”

Six months earlier, while the Beatles were still purely a teenage obsession, Brian had been approached by a twenty-nine-year-old Russian émigré entrepreneur and filmmaker named Giorgio Gomelsky with a plan to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about them. Gomelsky also ran a blues club, the Crawdaddy, in Richmond, Surrey, whose star attraction was a group he informally managed called the Rolling—sometimes Rollin’—Stones. Though nothing came of his documentary idea, the Beatles liked the sound of Gomelsky’s Crawdaddy Club and agreed to drop by there and catch the Rolling Stones one spring Sunday night after taping
Thank Your Lucky Stars
at ABC-TV’s studios in nearby Teddington.

The Stones at this point were very much like the Beatles eighteen months earlier: a group with a fanatical following at a tiny venue—in their case the back room of a pub called the Station Hotel—but
without management of sufficient vision or resources to take them any higher. The differences were that (still with pianist Ian Stewart) they numbered six, not four; that they played Chicago and Delta-style blues unpolluted by any pop influences; and that their vocalist, a London School of Economics student then known as Mike Jagger, audaciously faced his audience without the bluesman’s traditional prop of a guitar.

The Beatles loved what they saw in Surrey and, big shots though they were by comparison, instantly chummed up with Jagger and the other two principal Stones, rhythm guitarist Keith Richard and lead guitarist–harmonica player Brian Jones. A week later, when the Beatles appeared in the BBC’s Great Pop Prom at the Royal Albert Hall, the Stones received front-row tickets, hung out with them backstage, even lent Mal and Neil a hand in carrying their equipment. Brian Jones, who had founded and named the group, was then its most magnetic figure, an oversexed blond leprechaun with command of an extraordinary range of instruments, from guitar and bluesman’s “harp” to saxophone, flute, and marimba. Watching Jones play blues harmonica at the Crawdaddy not only thrilled John; it also, typically, made him feel his own gold-spinning performances on the instrument to have been amateurish, even somehow fraudulent, by comparison. “You really play that thing, don’t you?” he said to Jones almost wistfully. “…I just blow and suck.”

By late 1963, the Stones had found their visionary manager in NEMS Enterprises’ former PR man, nineteen-year-old Andrew Loog Oldham, and had been signed to the Decca label by the very same A&R executive who turned the Beatles down. After making little impact with their debut single, Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” they reached number thirteen with a Lennon-McCartney song, “I Want to Be Your Man,” written for the
With the Beatles
album, which the composers obligingly turned over to them on learning that they were stuck for a follow-up. As a result, the Stones left purist R&B to become the Beatles’ main rivals in the pop charts, and Jagger and Richard were motivated to form their own songwriting partnership, ultimately with huge success.

Oldham’s inspired gambit was to market the not naturally aggres
sive Stones as British pop’s first antiheroes, aimed at teenagers for whom the Beatles were in danger of becoming too glossy and parent friendly. For an older generation barely reconciled to neat bangs and round-necked suits, their unkempt hair, ungracious scowls, and unmatched stage clothes would create almost the terror of an Antichrist. The rebellious, don’t-give-a-damn image manufactured by Oldham was, in truth, very much what the Beatles had genuinely been in Hamburg and at the Cavern, before Brian cleaned them up and got them bowing and smiling. As the Stones grew ever more anarchically successful, so did John’s angry regret deepen for having—as he thought—sold out to mainstream show business too easily.

Nor could any outsider have guessed what insecurity underlay even the greatest of the Beatles’ triumphs in 1963. As with every other pop hitmaker back to Bill Haley, the assumption was that sooner or later their novelty must inevitably wear off and fickle teenage taste move on to something else. It was the media question put to them most often, after the ones about their name and their hair: how long could all of this possibly last? John’s answer was always direct and self-deprecating. “You can be big-headed and say, ‘Yeah, we’re going to last ten years,’ but as soon as you’ve said that you think…we’re lucky if we last three months.”

As the Beatles knew, as their manager and producer and publicists knew, as every last fan who bought their records and screamed at their concerts knew, being big in Britain, even on such a scale, left massive heights unconquered. America still represented the world’s most boundlessly lucrative pop music market, still dictated pop’s every fashion and mood, still poured toxic apathy on almost any foreigner who tried to sell it facsimiles of its own inimitable product.

Of no help at all was the fact that a major American label, Capitol, was actually owned by British EMI. Each of the Beatles’ first three UK number ones had been submitted to Capitol by George Martin, and snootily declined as “unsuitable” for the U.S. market. An incredulous Martin had been forced to make deals with two tiny independent labels, Veejay and Swan, for “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You” respectively. Neither had made any impression on the American charts or, it seemed, on American teenage consciousness.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” (written by John and Paul in the Ashers family’s Wimpole Street basement) was something of a last-ditch attempt to crack America, with a sound as stylishly “black” and a sentiment as ingratiatingly “white” as possible. The quality of the end product distracted attention from its essential implausibility: John Lennon being content with holding someone’s hand?

Even at the height of British Beatlemania, the Beatles themselves were always looking nervously over their shoulders for competitors who might knock them off the charts, maybe for good. Brian’s other two main Liverpool acts, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, also with three hit singles apiece, frequently resembled such a nemesis. Then there were the Liverpool groups managed by other hands and signed to other labels, like the Searchers, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and the Fourmost. There were the harbingers of the rival sound from Liverpool’s old commercial adversary, Manchester: the Hollies, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. There were the bands now emerging in a retaliatory wave from London and the south, like Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, who had passed the Decca audition the Beatles failed and had made the Top 10 with a souped-up version of “Twist and Shout.”

John and Paul’s extraordinary success rate as songwriters generated insecurities of its own. To soak up all possible profit before the craze evaporated, George Martin demanded a new single every three months, a new album every six. What if their next effort didn’t reach number one? What if it only reached number two? What if the magic knack should desert them as mysteriously as it had come? The pair spent hours trying to analyze just what had made their latest hit a hit, so they could be sure to repeat the formula next time around. For a while, they believed the crucial ingredient was simply the word
me
or
you
, hence not only “Love Me Do,” “Please Please Me,” “From Me to You,” and “She Loves You,” but also “P.S. I Love You,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret?” “Thank You Girl,” “I’ll Get You,” “Bad to Me,” and “Hold Me Tight.” In the wake of “She Loves You,” the word
yeah
assumed a similar talismanic quality. The chorus of “It Won’t Be Long,” the opening track on
With the Beatles
, features six
yeah
’s
in two lines; “I Want to Hold Your Hand” has an
oh yeah
before the lyric even begins.