John Lennon: The Life (82 page)

Significantly, his most impressive contribution was not a solo vocal but a chorale for Paul, George, and himself, which no bedroom full of Montreal friends or acrylic robots could ever have attempted. It had begun with Yoko, that trained classical pianist, who one day happened to be playing the introductory chords of Beethoven’s
Moonlight
Sonata. “Give me them chords backwards,” John demanded. The result was “Because,” a paean of pure erotic rapture, with George Martin on harpsichord and the three divergent Beatle voices overdubbed twice to create a nine-part harmony closer, purer, and sweeter than any they had made since “Here, There and Everywhere.”

In reality, the old balance had gone forever. As though in corroboration of his new minority status, Paul ended up with only two full tracks, the unmemorable “Oh! Darling” and the uncharacteristically dark and vicious “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” George, meanwhile, had come up with a brace of compositions, “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun,” that, for the very first time, stood comparison with
any under the Lennon-McCartney imprint. Ringo, too, was making strides as a writer and now chipped in a country-flavored children’s song called “Octopus’s Garden,” meriting production values almost at the level of “Yellow Submarine.”

Ever since
Sgt. Pepper
, George Martin had tried to persuade John and Paul to think in terms of symphonies and concertos rather than three-and four-minute pop songs. “Paul wasn’t unamenable,” he remembers. “But John always used to say ‘I’m a rock-’n’-roller. I can’t do clever stuff like that.’” For their present album, Martin resurrected the idea in a less intimidating form. He knew how many unfinished songs lay in both of their bottom drawers, and proposed making the second side a medley of such fragments, running into each other like a purpose-written suite. “As soon as we started, John got into the spirit of it. He kept coming along and saying ‘I’ve got another bit here. Do you think you can find room for it?’”

Though not technically their last appearance together on record, this was to be the Beatles’ formal farewell to their listening public. So how richly appropriate that it consisted of John and Paul, bouncing half-developed ideas off each other, much they used to as teenagers across the fireplace in Jim McCartney’s front room. Only Paul’s overture, “You Never Give Me Your Money,” with its mention of “negotiations,” “funny paper,” and “breakdown,” hinted at the late conflict between them. The rest of the thirty-minute medley, beginning with John, then shading into Paul, not only celebrated their partnership at high tide but somehow managed to take it to a new levels of competitive empathy.

John’s three unfinished songs added up to a kind of backward voyage from the flower-power era to the unflowery city and culture that had raised him. First came “Sun King,” a hippie incantation subverted by a chorus of spoof-Spanish nonsense like “chickaferdy” and “cake-and-eat-it’; then “Mean Mr. Mustard,” a remnant of mid-Sixties enamel-sign Victoriana; then “Polythene Pam,” inspired by a long-ago sex game in a threesome with his poet friend Royston Ellis. Sung in rabid Scouse calculated to chill his Aunt Mimi’s blood, it even broke into “yeah yeah yeah” as if some disgusting adolescent habit had got the better of him.

Paul took over with “She Came In Through the Bathroom
Window,” picking up John’s last theme almost psychically, as with the middle section of “A Day in the Life”; then “Golden Slumbers,” an adaptation of Thomas Dekker’s seventeenth-century lullaby; then “Carry That Weight,” a prophecy that for both of them was already coming true. As much as a trawl through their past, the medley was a glimpse into a future never to be—the ground they could still have broken together, the symphonies and operas they might have gone on to write. But no one by now was under any illusions. Its wrap-up track was called “The End” and featured guitar solos by John and Paul as well as George and an unprecedented drum solo from Ringo. As a surprise bonus there was a tiny Paul oddment called “Her Majesty,” a kind of postscript to the 1963 Royal Variety performance and “just rattle yer jewellery,” when a Beatle could get away with anything.

In acknowledgment of its resuscitator—and of reliable good vibes back to 1962—the album was named
Abbey Road
. For a front cover, the Beatles were photographed walking single file over the zebra pedestrian crossing a few yards south of the studio gate at a brief moment when no traffic was passing and mansion flats and horse chestnut trees slumbered in midsummer sun. Compared with
Sgt. Pepper
’s excesses, the image was simple to the point of banality (though destined to be imitated and parodied forevermore). A white-suited John was first in line, as ever, shoulders hunched, hands thrust into trouser pockets, his hirsute profile irradiating boredom and impatience.

T
he previous May, John and Yoko had finally found a home that satisfied all—or almost all—their exacting joint requirements. A hideout where they could enjoy some privacy and recharge their batteries between one public foray and the next was only one of several needs to be met. They also planned an operations center for their professional partnership, which would free them from dependence on Apple, with a recording studio, art workshops, photographic darkrooms, and film-processing and editing facilities. And John stipulated that the garden must have a lake.

They looked at properties all over southern England, including a house in Churt, Surrey, which had once belonged to the Great War statesman David Lloyd George, and a disused church in Hertford-shire. The winning candidate was Tittenhurst Park, a white Georgian mansion near Ascot, Berkshire, which had formerly belonged to the industrialist Peter Cadbury and was on the market for £145,000.
With the house went a seventy-two-acre estate, including spectacular gardens, a row of former servants’ cottages, and a mock-Tudor villa as big as the one in which John had grown up. Wherever he went, Mendips always seemed to follow.

The whole upper part of the house became a private sanctum for Yoko and him, with its own separate kitchen as well as a huge master bedroom, his and hers walk-in closets, and a circular bath. Most of the ground floor was opened up into a single long, white room lined with French windows facing onto the garden.

The various ancillary buildings were also expensively refurbished to provide quarters for employees or friends in temporary need of a roof. First in this pecking order came a young American mime artist and choreographer named Dan Richter, who, with his English wife, Jill, had been Yoko’s and Tony Cox’s next-door neighbor at Hanover Gate Mansions, and who had since become John’s de facto personal assistant. Two of the former servants’ cottages were combined to make an apartment for the Richters and their small son, Sasha. The gatekeeper’s lodge was turned over to John’s chauffeur, Les Anthony and his woman friend, who brought with her six young children from a previous relationship. After the Amsterdam bed-in, the exguardsman had been told to dispense with his official chauffeur’s cap, grow his hair longer, drop the punctilious “Mr. Lennon,” and call his two charges by their first names.

The lake that meant so much to John was created on sloping greensward below the house, despite the unsuitable sandy soil and in defiance of the local planning authority’s refusal to grant permission for anything larger than a pond. Fired by childhood memories of Robert Louis Stevenson, he also specified that there should be an island in the middle. Nearby stood one of the garden’s stranger new ornaments, an Austin Maxi estate car with a badly crushed front, mounted on a concrete pedestal. It was the rental vehicle John had wrecked on his family trip to the Scottish Highlands the previous July. Afterward, he bought it from the rental company and had it transported to Tittenhurst and installed on its plinth in exactly the same condition that the accident had left it, with traces of his and Yoko’s blood still on the seats.

Among the pantheon of European surrealists, John had always felt a special affinity with Jean Cocteau, whose genius spilled over from art into writing, filmmaking, and theatre design and whose drawings were everything he wished his own could be. While camping out with Yoko at Montagu Square, he became immersed in Cocteau’s book
Opium: The Story of a Cure
. “He was fascinated by Cocteau’s experiences with opium and how he got clean of it,” Yoko remembers. “The story was all about Paris in the Twenties, Picasso, Diaghilev, Eric Satie and people like that. John couldn’t put the book down.” Cocteau’s illustrated reminiscences spurred him to fresh interest in Yoko’s own Parisian encounter with opium’s most powerful derivative two years earlier. “He started asking me again what taking heroin was like, saying how interesting it must have been.”

Despite their devotion to pot and acid, British pop stars at this time still largely steered clear of junk—aka smack, Henry, or just plain H. Along with fear, snobbery managed to play a part: trendy acidheads looked down on smackheads with their unaesthetic sunken eyes, skeletal frames, and needle-pitted skin. Other musicians of the first echelon would later fall victim to the drug, notably Keith Richards and Eric Clapton. But John was ahead of them all.

His squeamishness about injections was soon allayed. Heroin could be taken as painlessly as pot, either snorted or swallowed in pills, called jacks. When he decided to take it, there was no question but that Yoko should join him. And for both, the seduction was instantaneous. Compared with pot’s fuzziness and acid’s unpredictable magic carpet ride, this seemed the easiest of trips, neither disorienting nor distorting—on the contrary, seeming to focus the mind and sharpen the senses to a wondrous new degree. Dan Richter was already a user, further reason for his welcome at Tittenhurst Park.

Heroin was to have been John’s secret ally against the scorn and vituperation of the media and the infighting at Apple. But, as always, reality failed to live up to his expectations. “It was not too much fun,” he would later admit. “We sniffed a little when we were in real pain. We got such a hard time from everyone, and I’ve had so much thrown at me and at Yoko, especially at Yoko…. We took H because of what the Beatles and others were doing to us.”

The drug can imprint its death’s-head on its victims with horrible swiftness. In January, during a break at Twickenham Studios, Canadian TV had interviewed a John showing all the signs of what heroin users call “pulling a whitey”—deathly pale face, slurred speech, jumbled thoughts. After a few minutes, he jumped out of his canvas director’s chair and vomited just off camera. When his cousin Liela Harvey, now a qualified doctor, called at Apple to see him that summer, she was horrified by the change in his appearance. “He looked about 90, his eyes were staring. He was a sick boy,” she remembers. Underneath, though, he was still the Just William character who used to keep her “in tucks” when they were children. “We talked about my career and I told him I was specialising in anaesthesiology. ‘I’d rather be doing the operations,’ John said.’”

According to Yoko, they kicked the habit before any serious damage could be done. They still hoped to have a child together, and had been warned that heroin could increase her chances of a second miscarriage or could addict the baby she bore. “John said, ‘Right, that’s it. We cut it here,’” she remembers. “‘And we can’t go into any clinic or the press will find out. So we have to do it ourselves.’”

It is a peculiarly vivid twist of language that withdrawal from heroin should be nicknamed “cold turkey,” its horrible physical symptoms—fever, palpitations, insomnia, nausea, diarrhea, alternate sweats and goose-bump chills—equated with the gruesome leftovers of a Christmas feast. For John and Yoko, cold turkey was the housewarming of Tittenhurst in late summer, 1969. The task was made a little easier than it might have been because John used an inferior dealer who had often diluted their supplies with talcum powder. “It was still a battle for him much more so than for Yoko,” Dan Richter remembers. “Yet he still managed to be supportive of me as I was trying to deal with my habit. I owe a lot to both him and Yoko.”

Where Cocteau had kept a diary, John wrote a song named after the ordeal he was putting himself through, detailing its manifestations and his own reactions as precisely as a chart at the foot of his bed: “temperature rising…fever is high…36 hours rolling in pain…body is aching…goosepimple bone…Oh, I’ll be a good
boy. Please make me well….” “It took courage enough for John to go cold turkey on his own,” Richter says. “But to admit it, and tell you everything about it, how he wanted to be a baby again, how he wished he were dead…that took real guts.”

In an afterglow of Abbey Road togetherness, he immediately offered “Cold Turkey” to the other Beatles. “…I said, ‘Hey, lads, I think I’ve written a new single,’” he recalled. “But they all said ‘Umm…aah…well,’ so I thought, ‘Bugger you, I’ll put it out myself.’” The track thus became a second single for the Plastic Ono Band, in this instance consisting of John, Yoko, Klaus Voormann, and Ringo Starr, with John acting as producer as well as singing and playing shuddery, feverish lead guitar. The B-side was given to Yoko and a song about her daughter, “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For A Hand in the Snow).”

As if in step with John’s peace campaign, young people everywhere continued to demonstrate their power to gather in huge numbers and worship their heroes without doing harm to one another. The fashion for giant open-air rock festivals, begun in Monterey in 1967, seemed to work just as well however far-flung from sunny California. On June 7, Eric Clapton’s new “supergroup,” Blind Faith, played for free to 150,000 in London’s Hyde Park; a month later, the Rolling Stones performed gratis to around 500,000 in the same venue. Between August 15 to 18, another peaceable half million bivouacked on muddy farmland near Woodstock, New York, to watch an Anglo-American bill including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, and send up a shout of contempt for the insatiable U.S. military draft to Vietnam. The organizers had written to John, offering the Beatles any fee they cared to name if they would appear; his counteroffer of just him with the Plastic Ono Band had been declined. Despite this snub, he found Woodstock hugely exciting—a giant response to the crusade he and Yoko had launched from bed. “[The festival crowds] were…getting together and forming a new church…saying, ‘We believe in God, we believe in hope and truth and here we are, 20,000 or 200,000 of us, all together in peace.’”

The most amazing visitation was reserved for a sleepy British
offshore island that Sixties pop culture had hitherto left almost untouched. A week after Woodstock, 250,000 hippies trekked south to the Isle of Wight for a three-day festival headlined, unbelievably, by Bob Dylan and the Band. Like the Beatles, Dylan had seemingly retired from live performing in 1966, in his case following a serious motorcycle accident. What brought him to the Isle of Wight when all other lures had failed were its associations with one of his favorite poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. John and Yoko attended the festival, and afterward George Harrison brought Dylan to Tittenhurst just as John was preparing to record “Cold Turkey.” There was a fleeting idea that Dylan should join the Plastic Ono Band on piano, but nothing came of it. “I remember, we were both in shades and both on fucking junk,” John remembered. “And all those freaks around us, and Ginsberg and all those people. I was as nervous as shit.”

On September 10, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London staged the first of two evenings devoted to John and Yoko’s films. The program comprised
Two Virgins
,
Rape
,
Smile
,
Honeymoon
, and a new offering called
Self-Portrait
, a twenty-minute study of John’s penis achieving semierection in slow motion. Beside the screen stood a large white sack containing two people, assumed to be the filmmakers but actually stand-ins, or crouch-ins. The second evening featured a single production entitled
Apotheosis
, an extended study of clouds, shot in color with the aid of a helicopter and a hot-air balloon. Despite the prestigious venue, no mainstream film critic could be persuaded to attend either night, and the coverage inevitably centered on
Self-Portrait
—a form of self-portrayal for which, it was widely pointed out, sad men in dirty raincoats got arrested on Clapham Common. In reply, in typically quotable and homely terms, John stated the principle Yoko had developed with the Fluxus group; that shocking an audience into any kind of strong emotion could do only good. “People are frozen jellies. It just needs somebody to turn off the fridge.”

However, defrosting a few dozen jellies at the ICA hardly compared with the communicating that Dylan, Jagger, and the rest were now doing through rock festivals. And there was a further temptation to play truant from “pure” art. At Woodstock, one of the best-
received acts had been an American vocal group called Sha Na Na, affectionately pastiching rock-’n’-roll and doo-wop hits of the fifties. Long-dormant giants from that era, like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, were emerging from their sepulchers and proving that no one had ever surpassed them in energy or anarchy. Elvis Presley himself had shaken off the shroud of Hollywood and, at a barely conceivable thirty-four, been restored to his old place as sexiest dude on the planet. The X-rated songs that had once turned John and his schoolfriends into pariahs were reincarnated as harmlessly hilarious family favorites, adding a layer of nostalgia for the Fifties to that for the departing Sixties. Ten years on, and several universes away from Litherland Town Hall and the Kaiserkeller, there was still no music John loved more.

Coincidentally, at this very moment, the first festival dedicated to the rock-’n’-roll revival was being put together in Toronto, Canada, with a lineup including Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Bo Diddley. Just two days before its opening on September 13, John received an invitation for Yoko and himself to attend. “They were inviting us as the king and queen to preside over it, not play,” he remembered. “But I didn’t hear that bit. I said, ‘Just give me time to get a band together,’ and we went the next morning.”

It was a perfect opportunity to unveil the Plastic Ono Band as a unit that could instantly meet any challenge, like World War II pilots dashing for their Spitfires. To accompany Yoko, the four acrylic robots, and himself to Toronto, John recruited his old Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann on bass, Eric Clapton on guitar, and Alan White, later of Yes, on drums. He also asked George Harrison, but George was the last person to jet off at a moment’s notice to a gig about which almost nothing was known.

There was no time for rehearsal other than during the flight and backstage at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium a few minutes before showtime. Having been so desperate to get there, John was now so overcome with terror at competing with so many of his boyhood idols at once that he threw up violently backstage. “We’re going to do numbers we know ’cause we’ve never played together before,” he told the audience. “But here goes—and good luck.” He sang three
old Cavern showstoppers—“Blue Suede Shoes,” “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” and “Money”—followed by “Yer Blues,” Give Peace a Chance,” and a first live preview of “Cold Turkey.” Yoko then emerged from a white bag to unveil two new compositions, “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For A Hand in the Snow)” and the thirteen-minute “John, John (Let’s Hope for Peace).” Little of it counted as rock-’n’-roll revivalism, but nothing could mar the crowd’s joy at seeing John live again, in whatever eccentric and synthetic company. “The buzz was incredible,” he remembered. “I never felt so good in my life.”