John Lennon: The Life (62 page)

Cox put his own artistic ambitions largely on hold and became a tireless proponent of Yoko’s work, seeking out sponsors to finance her, negotiating with galleries, and also looking after Kyoko, while she gave her whole attention to creating. But he was a volatile character, she was obsessed with her work above all else, and within three years this marriage, too, was breaking down. In September 1966, Yoko’s friend Mario Amaya, editor of
Art and Artists
magazine, invited her to come to London to attend a symposium on “The Destruction of Art.” Mainly to escape the growing pressures of her marriage, she accepted. “I thought, ‘This [New York] is the Mecca of art,’” she remembers. “‘Now I’m going to be going to nowhere.’” She meant it to be a clean break from Cox, but he insisted on accompanying her, so Kyoko had to be brought along, too.

The symposium over, Yoko decided to stay in London and persevere with marriage and motherhood. She and Cox took a flat in Hanover Gate Mansions, an Edwardian block just down the road from Lord’s Cricket Ground (and not far from Abbey Road Studios), where their neighbors included the art critic Robert Hughes and the widow of the conductor Sir Henry Wood. Though impressively spacious, the flats rented for as little as £14 per week and backed on to a railway switchyard.

For the majority of Londoners in 1966, encountering a Japanese person was exceedingly rare. With the war only twenty-one years distant, attitudes remained colored by the ill-treatment that the “Japs” had inflicted on their British and Commonwealth prisoners in southeast Asia. However, the diminutive figure to be seen around Hanover Gate Mansions did not at first arouse hostility so much as bafflement. Her long, unstyled hair crowded in on her face so closely that her eyes and mouth seemed to merge seamlessly with it. In contrast with the vivid, skimpy female fashions of the hour, her clothes were always concealingly shapeless and funereal black. Two teenage sisters from the same block who occasionally babysat three-year-
old Kyoko told their parents incredulously of a flat painted blinding white throughout, without carpets or furniture beyond a few brocaded cushions on the floor.

Her name might still be unknown to most of Britain, but in her own recondite world she was a star. Certainly, when John Dunbar heard she was in London he lost no time in offering her an exhibition at the Indica Gallery, which duly took shape as
Unfinished Paintings and Objects
, aka
Yoko at Indica
. There, just two months after she had arrived in London, and three after he stopped touring with the Beatles, John Lennon walked into her life.

A
t the time, she was still putting the last touches to her show before its opening the next day, so was not best pleased to see Dunbar bring in an early visitor. “I thought, ‘What’s he doing? Didn’t I tell him I didn’t want anyone to come until the opening?’ I felt a bit angry about it, but I was too busy to complain or make a fuss. And, no matter what anyone said later, I didn’t realise then who John was. He was an attractive guy…that’s all that passed through my mind. Up to then, English men had all looked kind of weedy to me. This was the first sexy one I met.”

She has no recollection whatsoever of the unshaven, bleary-eyed, half-stoned scruff that John himself always claimed to have been that evening. “He was shaved—and he was wearing a suit. He just came back from Spain, so he had a tan. I thought he was rather a dandy kind of person. I called it clean-cut; that’s what we used to say at Sarah Lawrence. John hated that expression when I told him later how he looked to me that evening. ‘Clean-cut!’ he said. ‘I was never clean-cut!’ But he was going to a gallery in London, and he’d taken trouble to look good. He could do that dandy thing very well when he wanted to.”

The exhibition combined works that Yoko had already shown in New York and Japan with others created specially for the occasion. Here was her
Eternal Time Clock
, showing only seconds and sealed inside a Plexiglas bubble attached to a stethoscope. Here was her
Ladder Piece
, a white stepladder up to a card on the ceiling, with the single word
Yes
written in script so tiny, it had to be read through a
magnifying glass. Here was a large, empty black bag labeled
WITH A MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC INSIDE
, and a plain green apple bearing a price tag of £200. It was John’s first serious exposure to antiart, and at first—without Dunbar at his elbow to prompt him—he assumed he was merely being had. “There’s a couple of nails on a plastic box. Then I look over and see an apple on a stand with a note saying ‘apple’…I was beginning to see the humour of it. I said ‘How much is the apple?’ ‘£200.’ ‘Really? Oh, I see. So how much are the bent nails?’

“Then Dunbar brings [Yoko] over, because The Millionaire is here, right? And I’m waiting for the bag. Where’s the people in the bag? So he introduced me, and of course there was supposed to be this event happening, so I asked, ‘Well, what’s the event?’ She gives me a little card. It just says ‘Breathe’ on it. And I said, ‘You mean [exhaling]?’ She says, ‘That’s it. You’ve got it.’…I got the humour—maybe I didn’t get the depth of it but I got a warm feeling from it. I thought, ‘Fuck, I can make that. I can put an apple on a stand. I want more.’”

Again, Yoko’s recollection is somewhat different. “He said, ‘I heard there’s a happening or something…it’s about a bag.’ I said, ‘No, today’s event is this,’ and I showed him the sign that said ‘Breathe.’ When he breathed out, he did it really hard and he came so near to me, it was a little bit flirty in a way. Then he went to the apple and just grabbed it and took a bite. I thought, ‘How dare he do that?’ I thought it was really gross, you know; he didn’t know manners. He must have noticed I was so angry because he put it back on the stand.”

The next exhibits to catch his eye really did invite spectator participation. “…I went up to this thing that said ‘Hammer a nail in.’ I said, ‘Can I hammer a nail in?’ and she said, ‘No,’ because the gallery was actually opening the next day. So Dunbar says, ‘Let him hammer a nail in.’ It was, ‘He’s a millionaire. He might buy it.’ She’s more interested in it looking nice and pretty and white for the opening…. There was this little conference and she finally said, ‘OK, you can hammer a nail in for five shillings [25p],’ so smart-arse here says, ‘Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings, and hammer an imaginary nail in.’ And that’s when we really met. That’s when we locked eyes and she got it and I got it and that was it.

“Then I saw this ladder on a painting leading up to the ceiling where there was a spyglass hanging down. It’s what made me stay. I went up the ladder and I got the spyglass, and there was tiny little writing there. You really have to stand on top of the ladder—you feel like a fool, you could fall at any minute—and you look through and it just says ‘Yes’…And just that ‘Yes’ made me stay in a gallery full of apples and nails instead of walking out, saying, ‘I’m not gonna buy any of this crap.’”

Yoko, however, was quite unaware of the epiphany. “He came back down the ladder again, said ‘Mm’ or something and just left. I went downstairs, where there were several art students who were helping us. And one said, ‘That was John Lennon…one of the
Beatles
.’ I said, ‘Oh, really? I didn’t know that.’”

A fortnight or so later, she happened to be at the opening of a new show by an American rival—and friend—the Pop Art sculptor Claes Oldenburg. As she passed through a crowded space dotted with Oldenburg’s giant plaster milk shakes and foam-rubber hamburgers, she remembers: “Somebody grunted. And in a corner there’s a guy standing, looking so unshaven and pale-looking, a drugged-out-of-his-mind kind of guy. He’d been up with John Dunbar or someone, taking acid. And looking very angry…totally different from what I saw at Indica Gallery. And that was John. I think he always mixed up that night with the one when he came to my show at Indica.”

Yoko moved on through the crowd to speak to Claes Oldenburg, but a few minutes later found herself back in the vicinity of John’s corner. “Then Paul [McCartney] came up and started to talk to me, saying, ‘My friend went to your gallery show….’ While we were talking, John walked over and said, ‘We have to go now,’ and just pulled Paul away. He seemed like an angry guy…an angry working-class guy.”

T
he Beatles might have stopped performing onstage, but they still had to do so on record—and here there was no letup in the pressure to outdo their rivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Principally, this meant the Rolling Stones, who had become almost as big a concert attraction as the Beatles in their prime and who, having
found fame as their polar opposites, now seemed to be muscling in on their territory. The Stones’ 1966
Aftermath
album was not the familiar raunchy R&B but a crafted song cycle, overtly modeled on
Rubber Soul
and showcasing the talents of lead guitarist Brian Jones, an instinctive musical genius whose sitar playing made George Harrison seem ploddy by comparison. It was mainly to prove they had not been eclipsed by
Aftermath
that John and Paul took their next quantum leap and created
Revolver
.

The Beach Boys’ superb 1966 album
Pet Sounds
was an answer to
Rubber Soul
by their unstably brilliant leader, Brian Wilson. No sooner had the Beatles answered Wilson with
Revolver
than he answered back with “Good Vibrations,” a single that took two months to make, cost a phenomenal $40,000, and packed in more layers of electronic and harmonic wizardry than many an entire album. The Byrds, too, those former Beatle look-alikes, had marked out their own unique territory athwart psychedelia and old-fashioned folk. Nineteen sixty-six saw the release of their
Fifth Dimension
album, containing the supremely weird and wonderful “Eight Miles High,” the closest aural re-creation of an acid trip that anyone had yet dared commit to vinyl.

From New York’s Greenwich Village came the Lovin’ Spoonful—a play on the traditional, multihandled loving cup—whose singer-songwriter, John Sebastian, was like John and Paul rolled into one sunny smile. From the West Coast, where group names were growing as long as freight trains, came the Mothers of Invention, fronted by a dervish-headed, chin-bearded former advertising man named Frank Zappa. The Mothers’ album
Freak-Out
presented Zappa polemics such as “Trouble Every Day” and “Who Are the Brain Police?” as a sequential performance on a common theme, like a classical symphony or oratorio. This new notion of the “concept” album was something else the Abbey Road songsmiths would have to take on board.

One competitor, above all, hovered constantly at the edge of John’s consciousness; never more so than amid this creative meteor shower of 1966. In May, Bob Dylan released
Blonde on Blonde
, an album in the startling new format of two 33 rpm discs packaged together. Backed
by a circle of talented session musicians (including the future personnel of the Band), Dylan synthesized folk and rock with avant-garde poetry and rumbustious vaudeville into a string of instant classics: “I Want You,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” above all the sing-along, oompah-pah-ing “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35,” with its incantatory chorus of “Ever’body must git
stoned
!”

When Dylan returned to Britain on tour later that summer, he and John again hung out together, although there was too much mutual uncertainty about who was inspiring and who copying whom for the friendship ever to be entirely relaxed. Dylan’s UK performances were filmed by the American documentary maker D. A. Pennebaker as a color follow-up to
Don’t Look Back
, his black-and-white chronicle of the previous year’s tour. One scene in Pennebaker’s sequel shows John and Dylan traveling together by car from Weybridge up to London. Both have clearly heeded the call of the Rainy Day Woman (traditional slang for a joint), though the effects on each are very different. Whereas Dylan stoned is a self-regarding bore, John remains lucid and humorous and even seems slightly embarrassed by his companion’s ramblings. The sequence ends abruptly as the usual hazard of driving from Weybridge in a sealed limo full of pot smoke kicks in, and Dylan announces that he needs to throw up.

The Beatles therefore returned to Abbey Road Studios in late November with a daunting range of new possibilities to explore and competition to try to beat. The first potential new track that John played over to George Martin in their usual tête-à-tête manner was the song he’d written while away filming in Almería. “When I first heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’ I was sidesmacked,” Martin remembers. “Even with John singing it alone to his own acoustic guitar, I thought it was a wonderful piece of work. I said, ‘What do you want to do with it?’ and he said, ‘You tell me.’”

The song that subsequently evolved in the studio was at first simple, light, and literal. Where John had originally begun with the first verse, “Living is easy with eyes closed…,” Martin suggested going straight into the chorus, “Let me take you down,” that misleadingly plainspoken invitation to accompany him back
to boyhood. Paul McCartney provided a crucial atmospheric touch, playing a Mellotron intro like some creaky, dusty harmonium in a 1950s church hall. Otherwise, the first takes featured the Beatles’ playing unadorned, with John’s voice artificially lowered by a semi-tone and sounding warm, nostalgic, even folksy.

Martin (whose schoolmasterly reserve had long since disappeared) pronounced himself “thrilled” with this version, and even John seemed satisfied. A few days later, however, he decided the song needed a heavier treatment. Martin wrote a formal orchestral score for cellos and brass, changing the key without telling John in order to reach the cello’s dramatic bottom C, while George weighed in with a new instrument from his tutorials with Ravi Shankar, a swarmandel, or Indian zither. Further engineering work was done on John’s voice, which drained away its former warmth and involvement and retracted its three dimensions to one.