John Lennon: The Life (87 page)

…[John] launched into an account of his recent visit to America, and as the story unfolded, so the self inflicted torture began to show in his face, and his voice rose to a scream as he likened himself to “Jimi Hendrix” and other Pop Stars who had recently departed from the scene, ending in a crescendo as he admitted he was “Bloody Mad, Insane” and due for an early demise. It seemed he had gone to America, at great expense to have some kind of treatment through drugs, which enabled one to go back and relive from early childhood the happenings, which in his own case, he
should have been happier to forget. I was now listening to the result of this treatment as he reviled his dead Mother in unspeakable terms, referring, also, to the Aunt who had brought him up, in similar derogatory terms, as well as one or two of his closest friends. I sat through it all, completely stunned, hardly believing that this was the kind considerate “Beatle” John Lennon talking to his Father with such evil intensity. But much worse was to follow, I had cause to restrain my Wife in her efforts to defend me, as I had perceived that she was only adding fuel to the fire, for I was by now, convinced he would do us an injury if we tried to thwart in any way, his evil intentions. It was when I once more alluded to the fact, that I had never asked him for financial help, and was quite prepared to manage without it, that he flew into another abominable outburst, and accused me of using the “Press” to force him to help me, and that, if I were to do so again, particularly about our present discussion, he would have me “done In.” There was no doubt whatsoever in my mind, that he meant every word he spoke, his countenance was frightful to behold, as he explained in detail, how I would be carried out to sea and dumped, “twenty—Fifty—or perhaps you would prefer a hundred fathoms deep.” The whole loathesome tirade was uttered with malignant glee, as though he were actually participating in the terrible deed. The week following this nightmarish interview with my son, furnished proof beyond doubt, that, not content with terminating the weekly allowance, he had already begun proceedings, to force me from the house we were living in, which I had presumed was already in my name, and was even prepared to pay for. This sort of action, I could fight, but the threat, left me with no other alternative than to leave this full account with my Solicitor to be opened only if I should disappear or die an unnatural death.

Signed:
Freddie Lennon

 

By then, Freddie had received a letter from Apple, demanding that he sign a deed to transfer the Brighton house back to John. Also enclosed was his National Insurance card, which he had thought Apple was keeping supplied with regular contribution stamps. It bore not a
single stamp, making him liable for some £300 in arrears. The lodging of the statement with his solicitor (and notification to John that he had done so) was no mere dramatic flourish. As Pauline recalls, he was genuinely in fear of his life—and so was she, given John’s recent highly publicized association with dubious characters like Michael X. That threat of a watery grave was particularly terrifying because, as Freddie now confessed, in all his years at sea, he had never learned to swim.

The couple were not destitute, thanks to Pauline’s work as a freelance translator and a recent win of £2,500 in the football pools. Shortly afterward, John relented a little, offering them £500 to help pay for fixtures and furnishings at a new flat in Brighton. This was on condition Freddie sign back the house, gave no further interviews to the press, and sent his statement about the Tittenhurst meeting to Apple to be destroyed (which he did, while keeping a photocopy). He and John were never to meet again.

O
n November 27, two weeks ahead of
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
(and
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band
) George Harrison also came out with a solo album. Such was the backlog of songs he had been unable to place on Beatles albums that this debut took up three whole discs, packed in an Apple-chic box. Entitled
All Things Must Pass
, it converted George’s rather ponderous Indian mysticism into lush, uplifting soft rock, produced by Phil Spector, with star backup musicians, including Ringo, Eric Clapton, and Billy Preston. The keynote track,
My Sweet Lord
, an anthem crossing all religious boundaries, from “Hare Krishna” to “Hallelujah,” reached number one in America and spent thirty-eight weeks on the
Billboard
chart.

John could not but feel somewhat upstaged by that former tag-along “bloody kid.” Despite the uncompromising bleakness of his own album, he intended it to be a commercial success and hoped a hit single would come from it. “I mean to sell as many records as I possibly can,” he admitted, “because I’m an artist who wants everyone to love me and everybody to buy my stuff.” “Working Class Hero” was obviously excluded from the singles market by its double
fucking
, while he thought “Mother” too raw and personal, and likely
to fuel “suspicion that something nasty’s going on with that John Lennon and his broad again.” He considered releasing the evanescent “Love” but finally decided on “Mother.” Released only in the United States in January 1971, it barely scraped into the Top 50. The album did better, making number six in America and eleven in Britain (where EMI ordered the
fucking
s to be asterisked out on its lyric sheet). At Arthur Janov’s clinic in Los Angeles, it was played in full to an electrified gathering of patients, and thereafter became part of Janov’s lexicon, renamed The Primal Album.

To promote it in the U.S. market, John went to New York, sat down with Yoko in ABKCO’s boardroom, and gave Jann Wenner the
Rolling Stone
interview that Wenner had so long pursued. What he had to say was momentous enough to run over two issues of the magazine, on January 21 and February 4. By this time, news had come from London that Paul McCartney had begun legal proceedings to dissolve the Beatles’ business partnership, so putting their breakup beyond all question.
Time
magazine headlined the double story with a nod to Wagner’s epic opera about the twilight of the gods: “Beatledämmerung.”

John’s
Rolling Stone
interview was a further exercise in primal therapy, this time excavating a part of his life where the screaming had been done already. For the first time, he told what being one of the world’s four most adored and envied young men had really meant—the infantile mayhem that had progressively stifled their desire to do live concerts, the enforced kowtowing to insufferable dignitaries and officials, the ban on expressing a view on any grown-up topic whatever, the backstage sex orgies (“like Fellini’s
Satyricon
,” as he put it) belied by the front-of-stage squeaky-cleanliness, the sense of being trapped in ever-increasing, unstoppable madness. For the first time, he put on record that Brian Epstein had been gay, and how this and other uncomfortable “truth bits” about his childhood and his mother had been cut from Hunter Davies’s authorized biography. Wenner asked point-blank whether he and Brian had had an affair on their notorious Spanish holiday in 1963. “No, not an affair,” John replied. “…I watched Brian picking up the boys. I like playing a bit faggy, all that.”

Now, too, he finally broke his silence about the two old comrades who had become his competitors. The massive success of George’s
All Things Must Pass
and its spinoff single was understandably galling, as
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
moved rather effortfully up the album charts. “Every time I put the radio on, it’s ‘Oh My Lord.’…I’m beginning to think there must be a God.” What others were hailing as a masterpiece, John rated no higher than “All right…. At home, I wouldn’t play that kind of music…. George has not done his best work yet. His talents have developed over the years, and he was working with two fucking brilliant songwriters and he learned a lot from us. And I wouldn’t have minded being George, the invisible man, and learning what he learned. And maybe it was hard sometimes for him, because Paul and I are such egomaniacs, but that’s the game. So is George—just give him a chance and he’ll be the same. The best thing he’s done is ‘Within You, Without You,’ still for me.”

About Paul, however, he was strangely muted, despite condemning the “Paul and Linda”
McCartney
album as “rubbish.” “He’s a good PR man, Paul. I mean he’s about the best in the world, probably. He really does a job…. I was surprised [
McCartney
] was so poor. I expected just a little more because if Paul and I are sort of disagreeing and I feel weak, I think he must feel strong…. Not that we’ve had much physical argument…. So I was surprised. And I was glad, too.” Their power to stimulate and goad one another still clearly existed for John, even if he now saw himself as the main stimulator.
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
, he hoped, would “scare [Paul] into doing something decent, and then he’ll scare me into doing something decent, and I’ll scare him, like that. I think he’s capable of great work. I think he will do it. I wish he wouldn’t. I wish nobody would, Dylan or anyone. I mean in me heart of hearts I wish I was the only one in the world….”

His hardest words were reserved for the other Beatles’ supposed hostility to Yoko (forgetting that, to begin with at least, they had shown considerable tolerance). He mentioned almost hitting George, but omitted to mention having actually done so. Wenner asked if the
McCartney
album cover, showing Paul with a new baby daughter, might have been intended to rub in the fact of Yoko’s first mis
carriage. “I don’t think he did that,” John said. “I think he was just imitating us, as [he and Linda] usually do, by putting out a family album. You watch—they do exactly what I do a year or two later…. They’re imitators, you know.”

Fresh from sharing supreme studio power with Yoko and Phil Spector, he dismissed George Martin as “a translator” whose expertise had mainly benefited Paul. “If Paul wanted to use violins and that, [Martin] would translate it for him. Like “In My Life,” there’s an Elizabethan piano solo on it…. And he helped us develop a language a little to talk to musicians. Because I’m very shy and for many, many reasons, I didn’t much go for musicians…. That’s nothing personal against George Martin; he just doesn’t…he’s more Paul’s style of music than mine.” Harsh judgment on the man whose “translations” had included seamlessly joining the light and heavy versions of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” creating the fairground phantasmagoria in “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” and arranging the casually requested “sound like the end of the world” as the climax of “A Day in the Life.”

His view of the 1960s after almost a year’s reflection was that their great cultural and commercial youthquake had changed little of real importance. “The people who are in control and in power and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeois scene is exactly the same except that there’s a lot of fag fucking middle-class kids with long hair walking around London in trendy clothes. And Kenneth Tynan’s making a fortune out of the word ‘fuck.’ But apart from that, nothing happened [except] we all dressed up. The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything. It’s exactly the same…. We’ve grown up a little, all of us, and there has been a change and we are a bit freer and all that, but it’s the same game…selling arms to South Africa, killing blacks on the street, people are living in fuckin’ poverty with fuckin’ rats crawling over them…. That dream is over, it’s just the same only I’m thirty and a lot of people have got long hair, that’s all.”

He saw his creative future in protest songs, even though their simplicity and universality were even harder to bring off than multilayered masterpieces like “Strawberry Fields.” “If I could be a fuckin’
fisherman, I would,” he burst out at one point. “If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It’s no fun being an artist. You know what it’s like, writing, it isn’t fun, it’s torture…. I read about Van Gogh or Beethoven, any of the fuckers. And I read an article the other day—‘If they’d had psychiatrists, we wouldn’t have had Gauguin’s great pictures.’ And those fuckin’ bastards [the public], they’re just sucking us to death. About all we can do is do it like fuckin’ circus animals…. I’d rather be in the audience really, but I’m not capable of it…. I know it sounds silly, and I’d sooner be rich than poor and all the rest of that shit. But the pain. I’d sooner not be…I wish I was…ignorance is bliss or something. If you don’t know, man, there’s no pain.

“I have great hopes for what I do, my work. And I also have great despair that it’s all pointless and shit—how can you top Beethoven and Shakespeare or whatever? And in me secret heart I wanted to write something that would overtake ‘We Shall Overcome.’ I don’t know why, that’s the one they always sang. I thought ‘Why isn’t somebody writing one for the people?’ That’s what my job is. Our job is to write for the people now. So the songs they go and sing on their buses are not just love songs…To me, I’m home. I’ll never change much from this.”

Quoting a Beatles classic by other hands, Wenner asked if he had a mental picture of “When I’m Sixty-four.” “I hope [Yoko and I] are a nice old couple, living off the coast of Ireland or something like that,” John replied. “Looking at our scrapbook of madness.”

This was his first visit to New York with Yoko, and her first trip back since 1966. He reveled in being introduced to her old downtown haunts, so different from previous stays besieged in the Plaza or the Warwick, though he had no inkling yet that he would ever settle here. “This is the first time I’m really seeing New York, you see,” he told Wenner, “’cause I was always too nervous or I was a famous Beatle…But it’s so overpowering…. I’m too frightened of it. It’s so much and people are so aggressive. I can’t take all that, you know. I need to go home. I need to look at the grass. I’m always writing about English garden[s] and that lot. I need that, the trees and the grass.”