John Lennon: The Life (81 page)

Early in the week, a journalist asked for a capsule summary of what he and Yoko were trying to do. “All we are saying,” John replied, “is give peace a chance.” It was a phrase with inbuilt rhythm, like “Honi soit qui mal y pense” or “Now call we this the field of Agincourt,” and within hours, prompted by Yoko, he had turned it into a song—or, rather, a mantra like those he had learned in India. The verses were pure nonsense, spinning off rhymes from “Bagism” (“Shagism, Dragism, Madism…”) and “Revolution” (“Evolution, mastication, flagellation, regulations, integrations…”) and listing some of the people who had joined the bed-in, together with others he wished had done so (“Timmy Leary, Rosemary, Tommy Smothers, Bobby Dylan, Tommy Cooper, Derek Taylor, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg…”). “I sort of cheated,” he later admitted. “The word ‘masturbation’ was in it but when I wrote in the lyric-sheet—because I’d had enough of all the bannings…I copped out and wrote ‘mastication.’ It was more important to get it out than be bothered by a word.”

Aside from the bedlam of those eight days, Yoko remembers quiet and intimate moments. “After we finished doing interviews and talking to people and everyone else had gone away, it was the nicest time in our lives. One night, there was a beautiful full moon in the sky and no clouds and John said ‘Well, we’re going to keep on writing songs together and our songs are going to be played all over the world. That’s our life. That’s how it’s going to be.’ It was just the moon and us. It was great.” Yet even here, John was still looking over his shoulder, half expecting Tony Cox to come along and take back Yoko. One day when Kyoko was with them, Cox telephoned long-distance to talk to her. “Tony was only on the line for a couple of minutes,” Yoko says. “But John was really uptight about it.”

On the final day, they recorded their song “Give Peace a Chance,” still in situ, using a borrowed eight-track machine and enlisting the vocal help of some who were roll-called in its lyric, Timothy and
Rosemary Leary, Tommy Smothers, Allen Ginsberg, Derek Taylor, plus the British singer Petula Clark, the black comedian and activist Dick Gregory, and every reporter, TV person, and casual gawker who happened to be in the room. The track featured Yoko singing in conventional Western style, her voice not at all untuneful and strangely childlike against the lemon-squeezed tartness of John’s. By now, his appeal against the Canadian government’s refusal to grant him a visa had failed: next day, the couple were deported and put on the first flight out of Montreal, which happened to be bound for Frankfurt.

The companionable bedside choristers who joined him on “Give Peace a Chance” had suggested an exhilarating new concept of recording and performing to John. Back in London, he and Yoko decided to keep alive the idea of a performing group that was not limited, like the Beatles, to a sacred four; not introverted, formula-bound, and hostile to outsiders, like the Beatles, but open to anybody, regardless of musical ability, appearance, age, or gender, and with as many or as few members as suited the moment. Its nucleus, moreover, would not be egotistical, quarrelsome humans, like the Beatles, but conceptual artworks which might have stepped straight from one of Yoko’s shows.

To play the roles of unsinging, unplaying, unproblematic anti-Beatles, they designed four acrylic towers, two tall and rectangular, one tall and cylindrical, one short and cube-shaped. Like intestines inside their transparent bodies, the robot quartet contained all the latest sound and vision technology: a tape recorder, a record player, a closed-circuit TV camera and monitor, and a lightshow projector. The constitution of this revolution in pop-group evolution—allied to the name that was now his as well as Yoko’s—led to their instant baptism as the Plastic Ono Band. The same label would be given to any configuration of human performers who appeared alongside them.

The open-door ethos was announced in press advertisements showing an acrylic robot’s electronic innards silhouetted against a random page of the London telephone directory. “You are the Plastic Ono Band,” promised the caption beneath. John stressed that the new entity was not a replacement for the Beatles but simply a diversion to keep his hand in as a performer. Nor, even now, did he rule out the chance of the Beatles going on the road again. “The Plastic Ono
Band’s going to be pretty flexible—because it’s plastic. The Beatles playing live is a different matter—we’ve got that great thing to live up to, it’s a harder gig—but just for Yoko and me to get out there, we can get away with anything.” Although “Give Peace a Chance” was billed as the first incarnation of the Plastic Ono Band, it was still cataloged according to longtime Beatle practice as a Lennon-McCartney composition. He would later bitterly regret “[being] guilty enough to give McCartney credit as co-writer on my first independent single instead of giving it to Yoko, who had actually written it with me.”

Privately, he seemed to think the Beatles no longer had any viable future even in the studio. After devoting months to the mess of tapes from January’s confused and acrimonious Apple basement sessions, plus some made later at Trident Studios, engineer Glyn Johns had pieced together an album’s worth of material and submitted it to the four for approval. All of them hated it. John was the most appalled by what he described as “the shittiest load of badly-recorded shit with a lousy feeling to it ever.” Yet a new Beatles album was long overdue, and wheels were turning to package and market one called
Get Back
. A cover photograph had already been shot, reflecting that supposed nostalgia for simpler times: the present-day Beatles, bewhiskered and tense, looked down from the very same balcony that their clean-shaven, optimistic young selves had on their debut album in 1963.

Much as John loathed the Glyn Johns compilation, he was all for releasing it anyway. “I thought it would be good…because it would break The Beatles,” he remembered. “It would break the myth…[It would say], ‘That’s us with no trousers on and no glossy paint over the cover and no sort of hope. This is what we are like with our trousers off, so would you please end the game now?’”

George Martin had played little part in trying to salvage
Get Back
and, after the tetchy atmosphere in the Apple basement, felt his long association with the Beatles had ended on the sourest possible note. He was thus astounded to be rung up by Paul in mid-June and told that the band wanted to get back with him at Abbey Road and make a new album from scratch “like we used to.” Martin replied that he wasn’t prepared to repeat the experiences of January, with John telling him there must be “no production shit.” “‘No, it won’t be like
that.’ Paul told me. ‘John’s come around and realises how much we need you.’ So, against my better judgement, I agreed.”

A
fter the final break with Cynthia a year previously, John had been too frantically preoccupied even to remember that he had a six-year-old son, let alone feel many stirrings of paternal affection or remorse. But in the lull that followed the Montreal bed-in, he was seized by a sudden wish to see Julian. Cyn was by now in a relationship with the Italian Roberto Bassanini and was living in Kensington, West London, where Julian attended an ordinary state school. She invited John to her housewarming party and, much to her amazement, he turned up, accompanied by Yoko, and had an apparently friendly talk with Bassanini. Soon afterward, he notified her that he finally wished to exercise his court-awarded rights of access to his son. Les Anthony duly appeared in the Rolls and took Julian off alone to spend the first of what would be regular weekends at Ringo’s Sunny Heights.

Against all precedent, John seemed to relish his role as paterfamilias. Toward the end of June—only a few days before work with George Martin and the Beatles at Abbey Road was scheduled to begin—he decided to show Yoko and Kyoko the Scottish Highlands where he had spent so many happy holidays as a small boy. In his enthusiasm, he announced that the trip would not be by chauffeured Rolls but that he would drive them himself in his supercharged, lavishly customized Mini Cooper. Julian happened to be visiting and was included on the trip without any consultation with Cynthia.

Since passing his driving test in 1965, John had rarely sat behind the wheel of a car and, on those few excursions, had terrified passengers by his myopic unawareness of other traffic, tardy reflexes, and almost nonexistent navigational skills. Nonetheless, he managed the first leg to Liverpool without mishap. There he realized the Mini Cooper was too small to carry two adults and two children on such a marathon journey, and telephoned Les Anthony to bring him up a larger car, an Austin Maxi. Anthony then took the Mini back to Weybridge.

A secondary purpose of the trip was to introduce Yoko to his three
other aunts, Nanny and Harrie on Merseyside and Mater in Scotland. He spent several days showing his charges around Liverpool, staying first with Aunt Nanny and Uncle Charles in Rock Ferry, then with Aunt Harrie and Uncle Norman in Woolton. Nanny and Harrie had been as baffled and appalled by recent events as their sister Mimi but, despite their own significant part in John’s upbringing, did not share Mimi’s prerogative to tell him so. As Nanny’s son Mike Cadwallader remembers, they confined themselves to expressive looks when Yoko commandeered their kitchens to prepare John’s macrobiotic meals, and to surreptitious tut-tutting to each other about his drastically changed appearance. “I overheard a lot of ‘He can’t just eat beans…needs a proper meal…he’s fading away…he’s all skin and bones.’ The comments weren’t necessarily anti-Yoko or pro-Cynthia. but just anti-anyone who got their hands on one of ‘their’ children.” When Mike’s girlfriend, Linda, produced a bag of jelly beans, those once-hated symbols of Beatlemania, John’s dietary principles wavered. “He grabbed them and scoffed quite a few before being told off,” his cousin recalls.

His intended final destination was Aunt Mater and the remote Highland croft, near Durness, Sutherland, which he had helped his Uncle Bert to renovate as a fifteen-year-old during that life-changing “Heartbreak Hotel” summer of 1956. Here, the welcome was a little cooler. Stately, elegant Mater was as forthright a character as Mimi and, moreover, the only one of John’s aunts who had actively liked Cynthia. And near here, his luck behind the wheel finally ran out. On July 1, the day that work on the new album officially began, he was driving his brood near the small town of Golspie. On a stretch of providentially empty road, he lost control of the car, and it veered into a roadside ditch. He, Yoko, and Kyoko each suffered cuts to the face and Yoko an injured back. They were rushed to Golspie’s Lawson Memorial Hospital. John’s facial injuries required seventeen stitches (and left a permanent scar), Yoko’s fourteen, and Kyoko’s four, and the unharmed but tearful Julian received treatment for shock.

Cynthia’s first inkling that Julian was not in Weybridge was a telephone call informing her that he’d been in a car crash in northern
Scotland. With the help of ever-sympathetic Peter Brown, she caught the first plane up there. John, Yoko, and Kyoko were still detained in the hospital, but Aunt Mater was caring for Julian back at Durness. When Cyn tried to see John and demand an explanation for what had happened, she was told he didn’t wish to talk to her.

When John and Yoko finally joined the other Beatles at Abbey Road Studios, both still bore the marks of the accident. Yoko’s back injury gave her constant trouble, and to save her the discomfort of sitting for hours on a stool beside him, John had a bed delivered from Harrods and set up on the studio floor. There she spent several sessions, propped on pillows à la Amsterdam and Montreal, with a microphone rigged above her head so that she could comment on the proceedings at will.

After this unpromising start, something marvelous, one might almost say magical, was to happen. Now that they had stopped trying—and now that it was far too late—the Beatles finally got back to where they once belonged. Got back to working together without grumbling and bickering. Got back to George Martin’s indispensable influence. Got back to taking as much trouble over each other’s songs as they did with their own. Got back to having fun. Got back to sounding as if no power on earth could come between them.

The album that took shape between July and August turned out to be one of the easiest as well as, arguably, one of the three best they ever made. When all was said and done, no better vibe existed than in this leafy North London boulevard with its turreted mansion flats, nor around these familiar institutional EMI corridors where echoes of
Beatles for Sale
and
Rubber Soul
mingled with those of Caruso, Sinatra, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Abbey Road pardoned the truants their defection and gave them back their infallibility. Existing tracks that had been virtually written off as irredeemable messes at Twickenham and in the Apple basement now coalesced without further struggle. New tracks were developed and perfected in short order. Such was the Abbey Road effect that, despite all his other preoccupations and his burning desire to be up, up, and away, John performed more brilliantly within the Beatles than at any time since
Sgt. Pepper
. “We all knew this was the end,” George Martin
says. “There was an unspoken feeling of ‘Let’s make it the best we possibly can.’ I’m sure that’s why John was so collaborative.”

The three principal songs he brought to the table, while reflecting his absorption in Yoko and new dedication to world enlightenment, also showed his love of nonsense and trivia and instinct for a catchy hook to be working as strongly as ever. “Come Together” had originated as a theme song for Timothy Leary’s abortive 1968 campaign to become governor of California. With its slow, stoned, hissing beat, it was at once a caricature of Leary, a “free your minds” tract, a cornucopia of private jokes (“Ono sideboard,” “Bag production,” “juju eyeball,” “walrus gumboot,” “toe jam football”) and a dispatch straight from the bedroom. “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” testified to a passion almost beyond words, switching from anguished blues to orgasmic hard rock and back again. At previous sessions, repeated unsuccessful attempts to play it in the “honest” one-take way that John demanded had made everyone, including himself, sick to death of it. Now Abbey Road administered a French kiss of life, via what he no longer scorned as “production shit.” The final version was an amalgam of the best three of thirty-five takes, which then received extensive further overdubbing and remixing.