John Lennon: The Life (54 page)

Dylan, meanwhile, had returned to America to detonate his long-fizzing bombshell. That July, his audience at the Newport Folk Festival broke into scandalized cries of “Traitor!” when he took the stage backed by the electrified Paul Butterfield Band. Over the summer, he released two pop singles—“Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Like a Rolling Stone”—each a mold-shattering blend of verbal virtuosity and supercharged beat. He would later attribute his conversion to another British band, the Animals, and their cover of an old blues lament, “The House of the Rising Sun.” But John always begged to differ. “Dylan liked to say how much the Beatles learned from him,” Neil Aspinall remembered. “John used to mutter, ‘He learned a bit from us, too.’”

Despite the little time available, John and Paul were equally determined to make this sixth Beatles album a conclusive answer to Dylan and all the other rivals snapping at their heels. One innovation they discussed with George Martin (but would not employ until four years later) was leaving out the spaces between tracks, so that one song merged into another with only the briefest pause, like movements in a classical symphony. They also deliberately put behind them the small-group arsenal of guitar-bass-drums, which until now had served them as well on record as in live performance. In Abbey Road’s Studio One, under the long open staircase to the control room, there was a cabinet full of exotic instruments left behind by other musicians who had worked there down the decades. The four had always enjoyed rummaging through this miscellany of tambourines, sleigh bells, and Moroccan hand drums; now it became an ally in the fight to prove themselves top dogs again, as did Martin’s classical background and every possible resource of the studio itself. Implicitly, from the very start, this was not stuff intended to be played live onstage.

John was later to call the end result “the pot album,” implying that the whole thing had taken shape amid sage-scented clouds of the stuff. He certainly intended it to be that way, lighting up a joint
as his Rolls left Weybridge for the nightly trip to Abbey Road, passing it to Ringo and George as each came aboard. Unfortunately, the billowing fumes in the Rolls’s heated interior tended to produce an effect inimical to “having a laugh”: often by the time they reached London, all three would be feeling thoroughly nauseous. Out of respect for Martin, they did not smoke in the studio but withdrew to toilets or unfrequented stairwells like schoolboys skulking behind the bike sheds. As Ringo has since recalled, anything they tried to record under the influence always proved unusable: “It didn’t do for the Beatles to be too demented while making music.”

Eight of the eventual fourteen tracks were enough on their own to have put clear blue water between the Beatles and every home and foreign competitor, and reconfirm Lennon and McCartney as creators of the catchiest, classiest, edgiest pop around. “You Won’t See Me,” “I’m Looking Through You,” and “Wait” were grade-A, Paul-dominated productions in a steady line of ascent from “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” “Drive My Car” followed a tradition of novelty motoring songs, down to the “Beep-beep, yeah!” chorus and surprise punch line. John’s “Run for Your Life” (its opening line, “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man”) slipped unchallenged into a world not yet disturbed by feminism or concerns about domestic violence. Two songs by George (“Think for Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone”) and a token hillbilly vocal by Ringo (“What Goes On?”) reinforced the irresistible image of a foursome whose greatest joy still came from being together.

But the remaining seven songs were of an order so different, so vastly superior, it was hard to believe they sprang from the same musicians, the same studio, or moment in time. These owed nothing to any other current pop sound and fitted no known categories. In them, John’s and Paul’s individual creative voices first come clearly into counterpoint: one that of a matchlessly artful, perfectly focused commercial songwriter, the other torn between the impulses of a poet, journalist, autobiographer, satirist, sloganeer, nostalgic, and melancholic.

For John, composing under pressure, like some reporter chasing an edition, at first seemed to have negative effects. He would later
recall a day at Kenwood when he spent five fruitless hours trying to think of something clever until finally, “cheesed off,” he went for a lie-down. Stretched on his king-size bed in his mock-Tudor mansion, with his myriad possessions all around, he suddenly thought of “a Nowhere Man…sitting in Nowhere Land.” With this as a peg, the song took only minutes to write itself.

“In My Life,” another superlative achievement, began with similar brain-cudgeling and false starts. Since the publication of
In His Own Write
and
A Spaniard in the Works
, various interviewers—notably the challenging Ken Allsop—had asked John why his song lyrics did not have the same highly individual stamp as his prose. He himself was aware of having “one mind that wrote books and another mind that churned out things about ‘I love you and you love me.’” Accordingly, he sketched out a song that would use poetic observation in the style of Wordsworth or Tennyson, recalling the Liverpool he had known as a child and lamenting how, even over his short lifetime, that old, solid world of ships and docks had all but vanished.

The choice of subject can have been no accident. His Aunt Mimi was soon to leave Mendips for Harbour View, finally closing the long-extended chapter of his boyhood. His original lyric was a wistful return to years gone by, reliving the bus journey he had taken countless times from Menlove Avenue into central Liverpool, via Penny Lane, Church Road, “the Dutch and St Columbus, and the Dockers’ Umbrella [elevated railway] that they pulled down.”

Somehow, this first attempt to immortalize Penny Lane refused to jell, so John cut the “travelogue” part of the song, making it instead a personal requiem for “friends and lovers…people and things that went before.” Even with an “I love you” payoff, it broke new ground. In the onward-and-upward-thrusting mid-Sixties, nostalgia was still comparatively rare. A twenty-five-year-old pop superstar was the least likely person to be looking back over his life as if time were already growing short.

John’s laissez-faire attitude in the studio provided the track’s final winning touch. As usual, the vocal was recorded first, with space for an instrumental break to be added later. While the Beatles were out having dinner, George Martin devised a piano solo in the style
of Bach, then fiddled with the recording speed so that on playback it had the spindly quiver of a harpsichord. He wondered how John would react to so pretty and demure an interpolation. John loved it.

Also on the agenda was that other scrap of autobiography Martin had heard in the rough at the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz, while Cynthia Lennon sat nearby, listening in happy incomprehension. Now titled “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” its purpose seemed to combine one existing trendy craze with another soon to dawn. All over Britain, people were transforming their once-cluttered kitchens and living spaces with austere tracts of Scandinavian stripped pine. And, rather than a guitar, as if in perpetuation of
Help!
’s comic subplot, George Harrison played a jangly Indian sitar.

But no one who knew John—other than his wife—could fail to recognize the situation the song described or wince at its ring of absolute truth. Here he was in some arty dolly bird’s stripped-pine flat, talking and drinking wine into the small hours in hopes of seducing her, but at the crucial moment losing his nerve and slinking off to sleep the night in her empty bathtub, much like some overflow visitor long ago at Gambier Terrace. In the unnamed girl, most of John’s circle thought they recognized Maureen Cleave, the
Evening Standard
writer whose appeal for him plainly went beyond her Richmal Crompton-esque prose style. However, Cleave says that in all her encounters with John there was “no pass.” And Sonny Freeman, then wife of the Beatles’ favorite photographer, has always taken the lyric as an oblique reference to her. Circumstantial evidence seems compelling: her preference to be known as Norwegian rather than German, her wood-paneled flat under John’s in Emperor’s Gate, the late-night assignations they used to make under everyone’s noses.

Classic pop tracks are a synthesis of words, music, and production; in general, the most effective lyrics turn to lead on the printed page. John’s for “Norwegian Wood” are among very few that can also be read as poetry or even drama. In twenty-six skillfully rhymed, perfectly scanned short lines, a scene is set, two characters are created and converse, a farcical climax is reached, followed by a slightly sinister epilogue. The ambiguous ending, “So I lit a fire…” (to comfort his bruised ego on waking to find the “bird has flown”? Or to
torch the pristine timbers in revenge?), is almost worthy of Beckett or Pinter.

However unalike the material Lennon and McCartney wrote on their own, they instinctively tuned in to each other’s wavelength, often supplying some final touch that turned a good song into a superb one. As John previewed the unfinished chorus of “Nowhere Man” and came to “making all his nowhere plans…,” Paul extemporized the little twist of “for nobody.” John in turn supplied the plaintive “I love you I love you I lo-ove you” bridge in Paul’s “Michelle,” modeling it on Nina Simone’s soul classic, “I Put a Spell on You.” Their closest collaboration was “The Word,” a song foreshadowing a whole era with its advocacy of “love” as a cure for all ills, and John’s promise to “show everybody the light.”

“Nowhere Man” is generally viewed as a self-portrait, expressing John’s frustration and self-disgust at his exile in the Stockbroker Belt. In fact, he distances himself from the Nowhere Man (“…isn’t he a bit like you and me?”), leaving us with a character who could have stepped from some modish black-and-white TV play. No, the real window on his emotions—the raw anguish that, decades later, still rises up and batters you with a brick—is in the innocent-sounding “Girl.” John himself always insisted the song had no real-life model, that the girl in question was “just a dream.” God knows what kind of dream it could have been to provoke such aching misery, such dark visions of male enslavement and humiliation. In contrast with the Frenchified romanticism of “Michelle,” “Girl” has a zithery, Viennese-café, film-noir sound, punctuated by sharp hisses that could be pain or disbelief. Only once ever again will John sing thus, as if his heart is breaking inside him.

“We’ve written some funny songs—songs with jokes in,” Paul somewhat misleadingly informed a journalist as the album neared completion. “We think that comedy numbers are the next thing after protest songs.” Its title was a pun on soul music and a sly dig at their archrivals (and private best mates) the Rolling Stones. A black American musician had recently commented that British groups like the Stones, for all their invasive power, played only “plastic soul.” The Beatles decided on
Rubber Soul
, implying that their variety at least was stamped out by a good strong northern Wellington boot.

The cover was originally to have been a straight Robert Freeman group photograph, showing off their latest suede and leather Carnaby gear. To help them decide which image would work best, Freeman projected each color transparency onto a cardboard square the same size as an album cover. As a close-up head shot appeared, the cardboard slipped askew, distorting their features and making John dominate the frame like some cruelly impassive, suede-collared Tartar prince. All four loved this “fisheye” effect and unanimously picked it as the cover shot.

John had scarcely delivered his lyrical tribute to “people and things that went before” when he found himself facing the most unwelcome of all possible examples. After a silence of more than a year, his father, Freddie, again reappeared in his life, this time even more publicly and embarrassingly.

Early in 1965, Brian Epstein received a letter from a firm of literary agents announcing that they had “Mr Alfred Lennon, father of John,” under contract to write his life story. Their client, they said, was “deeply resentful of letters he has received from relatives and others, accusing him of trying to exploit the now famous son he neglected as a child.” Before starting the project, he wished Brian to arrange a meeting with John “so that he can give his own explanation of what happened when the family split up.” Brian wrote back a dismissive couple of lines saying he could not get involved in so private a family matter. The life story—really an extended interview—was duly sold to downmarket
Tit-Bits
magazine for £200.

The genie was now well and truly out of the bottle. Following the
Tit-Bits
article, Freddie struck up an acquaintance with a Liverpudlian wheeler-dealer named Tony Cartwright, who was then working for Tom Jones’s manager, Gordon Mills. Cartwright was intrigued to discover what hotel workers up and down Britain already knew: that John Lennon’s errant father had had a lifelong ambition to become an entertainer himself. He offered to become Freddie’s manager and, on the strength of the Lennon name, had little trouble in getting him a recording contract with the Pye Piccadilly label. The two then set to work to write a song for the novelty market that had previously seen such money-spinners as Rolf Harris’s “Ringo for President” and Dora Bryan’s “All I Want for Christmas Is a Beatle.”

The result was “That’s My Life (and My Love and My Home)”, a title uncomfortably though quite accidentally close to John’s “In My Life.” A monologue with instrumental accompaniment, it combined romantic allusions to Freddie’s seafaring years with self-justification about his failings as a father. The chewy Scouse voice (which not all of Pye Piccadilly’s technical resources could make a jot like his son’s) intoned sonorously against a background of violins and crashing waves: “It started in Liverpool where I was born…No father to advise me, but I carried on…I saw a lifetime of love go wrong…Pity was my partner all along…I’ll make no excuses for my own abuses…Because life makes us all that way…I could blame the cruel sea for taking me away…It could be the end of my story, but my story will never end.”