John Lennon: The Life (63 page)

For Martin and the other three Beatles, this new interpretation lifted the song to a thrilling new plane. But John, although pleased with its added complexities and ambiguities, decided that after all he liked the earlier, simpler arrangement just as much. Martin’s solution was to splice the two different versions together, beginning in the dusty church hall then, after about a minute, plunging into the undergrowth of manic celli Cs and shivery Indian strings. This instrumental split personality exactly caught the contradictions in John’s lyric: the oracular wisdom mixed with confusion and uncertainty, the mysticism and yet ordinariness, the carefully crafted incoherence. Listening to it now, one does not feel its author’s new acid sensibility so much as his old, chronic nearsightedness: the picture of iron gates, weathered sandstone, and overgrown garden seems clear enough at first, then dwindles into the blurry perspective of the boy who never would wear his glasses. Martin summed up the effect perfectly as “dreamlike without being fey, weird without being pretentious—nostalgia with an air of mystery.”

Paul, too, had been working independently on a song harking back to the Liverpool of his childhood. For him, the portal into Proustian remembrance was Penny Lane, that modest little thoroughfare in Liverpool 18, with its parade of shops and commercial buildings,
where, in years past, he had changed buses and trams more times than he could count. Penny Lane was part of the other Beatles’ childhoods, too, and also of Brian Epstein’s. But for John—as that verse deleted from “In My Life” had already shown—it had the deepest resonance of all.

The whole district was woven into his family history, both the one he knew and the one that had been kept from him. His father, Alf, now Freddie, had been educated at the Bluecoat Hospital in nearby Church Row. His mother, Julia, was working at a café in Penny Lane when she met Taffy Williams, the young soldier who made her pregnant during Alf’s wartime absence at sea. John had even lived in the immediate vicinity as a toddler, when his parents shared the Stanley family home in Newcastle Road. Later, in Aunt Mimi’s care, he had taken the bus to the Penny Lane junction each morning on his journey to Dovedale Primary. The pre-McCartney Quarrymen had made their debut at St. Barnabas church hall, and in early Beatlemania days, Cynthia had been secreted in a bedsit in adjacent Garmoyle Road. The lane itself had also witnessed a tragedy for John’s family in which history eerily repeated itself. Earlier in 1966, his mother’s former lover, Bobby Dykins, the father of his two half sisters, Julia and Jackie, had crashed a car into a lamppost there. Like the elder Julia after another road accident eight years earlier, poor well-meaning “Twitchy” had been rushed to Sefton General Hospital, but had died soon after admittance.

In utter contrast with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Paul’s re-creation of Penny Lane was another short story in miniature, using photographic clarity and detail where John had fuzzy impressionism. McCartneyesque though the overall vision, almost every scene and character was like a snapshot from John’s boyhood. The “barber showing photographs” was Bioletti, the elderly Italian who had cut his hair—and his father’s before him—and whose shop window used to display sun-bleached pictures of customers proudly showing off their Tony Curtis or Jeff Chandler cuts. The “shelter in the middle of the roundabout” was where John had often lurked with his Outlaws, to gloat over stolen Dinky cars and, later, to grope girls. The “pretty nurse…selling poppies from a tray,” though principally a memory
of Paul’s mother, was also a nod to John’s arch-crony Pete Shotton, whose girlfriend, later wife, Beth Davidson, often used to perform that voluntary duty each November before Remembrance Sunday.

In the recording, Paul told George Martin he wanted a “clean sound,” different in every possible way from the aural tangles of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Hence the feeling of breezy open air under those “blue suburban skies” and the piccolo trumpet solo, borrowed from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, as if Bach himself were strolling among the Saturday-afternoon shoppers, debating whether to buy a poppy or get a haircut. Though absent from the finished track, John provided crucial input, helping to write the third verse, about the “fireman with an hourglass” (whose fire station, strictly speaking, lay some way off, along Allerton Road). There was also a typical Lennon leer as well as typical Lennon surrealism in the second chorus’s “four of fish and finger pies.” “Four of fish” meant four old pennyworth, the price of a goodly slab of battered cod or hake at a Liverpool chippie when he was a child, while “finger pie” was the olfactory reward of groping inside a girl’s crotch in a dark, windswept bus shelter. No pop song before had ever smuggled such arrant smut onto a million turntables—but at the time it was not even noticed, let alone challenged.

With these two disparately stunning autobiographical fragments in the can, John and Paul decided the concept album that everyone now expected from the Beatles would be all about their memories of Liverpool and childhood. But even now their prerogative was not absolute. Despite almost three months’ intensive work at Abbey Road, they had not put together a second album for 1966, the one traditionally aimed at the lucrative Christmas market. George Martin therefore had no alternative but to make a selection from their past releases, stretching back as far as “She Loves You” and half apologetically entitled
A Collection of Beatles Oldies…but Goldies!
After Christmas, with no new album yet even remotely in sight, Martin decided to release “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” as a double A-side single on February 17. He has since called it “the biggest mistake of my professional life.”

Record buyers had never before, and have never since, been offered such superb value on one two-sided disk. Yet, such are the ways
of the world, “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” became the first Beatles single since “Love Me Do” not to reach number one in Britain. It rose to number two, but could not dislodge Engelbert Humperdinck’s country ballad, “Release Me.” For John, after so many effortless number ones, this came almost as a relief: in his new hippie love-all persona, he denied feeling any hostility toward Humperdinck or to a song that might ordinarily have made him stick his fingers down his throat. As if the Top 10 were now a commune rather than a greasy pole, he observed magnanimously, “There’s room for everything.”

T
he story of John and Yoko has always been represented as that of a scheming, self-aggrandizing woman who marked out the famous Beatle as her quarry at their first meeting—or even before it—and then pursued him with ruthless dedication until she got him. In fact, no other pair of famous lovers in history can have come together in quite so roundabout a fashion, nor with so many mutual misgivings.

Yoko admits to having been attracted to John at their first encounter, largely thanks to a penchant for “working class guys” that was part of her rebellion against her parents and background. Having just arrived in London as an unknown, she was also in urgent need of a wealthy patron to sponsor her work. Previously, the drumming up of such finance had been left to her husband, Tony Cox. But with their marriage now foundering, Yoko had to take on the task herself.

Following their meeting at the Claes Oldenburg show, she did send John a copy of
Grapefruit
, her collection of “instructional poems.” But that had no ulterior motive, she insists: “I’d brought some books with me from New York because it wasn’t out yet in Britain. I’d mentioned it to John when we talked and, like any author would do, I sent him a signed copy.”

Grapefruit
confirmed to John that this unknown woman from inconceivable other worlds was on a wavelength he’d always thought to be his exclusive preserve. He kept the chaste little white book beside his bed, suspending all his other omnivorous reading in favor of it, returning time and again to the single, unrhymed stanzas—
sometimes only single lines—that hovered so intriguingly between the mystical and mischievous: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” “Make a key. Find a lock that fits. If you find it, burn the house that is attached to it.” “Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” Conscious as he was of pop music’s barefaced opportunism and ridiculously inflated values, he also loved the “Ono price-list,” offering blank audiotapes said to be various types of “snow falling at dawn” at “25 cents per inch.”

Cynthia Lennon would later claim that Yoko subjected John to a “determined pursuit” in which she bombarded him with letters and cards and “came to the house looking for him several times.” According to Ray Coleman’s 1980s biography of John, she turned up unannounced at Kenwood one day and, finding neither him or Cyn at home, persuaded the housekeeper, Dot Jarlett, to let her in to make a supposedly urgent telephone call. Later, she phoned John to say she had left “a valuable ring” beside the phone and would have to come back and collect it. Yoko says the whole story is pure fabrication. “I was never standing in front of the gate. That wasn’t my style. And anyway, I didn’t know where the house was.”

Her only visit to Kenwood during this era was at John’s invitation, for what she presumed would be a pop-star party. Instead, it turned out to be a lunch, prepared by Cynthia, with two members of a design group named the Fool—soon to loom large in Beatles business—as the only other guests. That day, John was no longer arrogant, as at the Indica show, nor surly, as Claes Oldenburg’s, but a convivial host who talked animatedly about what he had enjoyed in
Grapefruit
. He was particularly struck by Yoko’s idea for “A lighthouse…constructed from prisms which exist in accordance with the changes of the day”—an effect which, unbeknownst to her, was already being developed under the name
hologram
.

“John said to me, ‘I thought maybe you could build this lighthouse in my garden,’ she remembers. I said, ‘It’s just an illusion, it’s not a built thing.’ He looked a bit disappointed: ‘Oh, OK—I thought the Americans had found out something we don’t have yet….’ I thought it was cute. I laughed about it. But that was just an excuse, I know. He wanted me to be somehow involved in his life, and that was one way he might have done it.”

During these first months of 1967, however, John had little time for anything but writing and recording. The premature release of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” had taken all the steam out of the Liverpool concept album idea, leaving George Martin to wonder remorsefully forevermore how great an album it might have been. Yet the need remained to come up with something that would knock Bob Dylan’s, Brian Wilson’s, and the Byrds’ collective socks off.

On a recent solo visit to America, Paul had been struck by the fad among West Coast rock groups for ironically long and nonsensical names: Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Pacific Gas and Electric Band. Also in his mind was swinging London’s current obsession with Victorian militaria, either picked up in original forms in Portobello Road antiques markets or mass-produced for a store chain called I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. The result was a McCartney song for the still-unfocused new album, mixing these two trends together with nostalgia for north-country brass bands and a touch of “Eleanor Rigby” melancholy; its title was “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Not until the Beatles were developing the track at Abbey Road did their roadie Neil Aspinall finally come up that elusive “concept.” Why not record a whole album, not as themselves but under the alias of Sgt. Pepper’s band, giving it all the atmosphere and spontaneity of a live show? They had recently been amused to read that Elvis Presley was sending out his gold-plated Cadillac to tour America, confident that the same crowds would gather to view this symbol of himself as once had for his living presence. With the question still constantly in the air of when the Beatles would play live again, a make-believe theater show on record could be their own Elvis Cadillac; instead of returning to the road themselves, they could send the album.

Keenly though they all embraced this idea, it soon bit the dust. Having recorded Paul’s overture number as Sgt. Pepper’s band with the atmosphere of a circus big top seething with excited spectators, they peremptorily abandoned their alter ego and returned to being the Beatles in real time and familiar order of precedence. A reprise of the overture near the album’s end would be their only other nod toward thematic continuity. Not that it would ever matter, as
Ringo Starr later recalled: “A bunch of songs and you stick two bits of ‘Pepper’ on it and it’s a concept…. It worked because we said it worked.”

Certainly, John’s most significant contributions had little to do with faux-Victorian fun and burlesque. They were products of yet another “trough,” as he himself termed the dives into despair and self-disgust that he took every year or so, unknown to almost everyone around him. He had emerged from one circle of Beatle hell only to find himself in another, less crazily hectic but no less arid and unfulfilling, from which the only escape seemed to lie in drugs. A few rare pieces of art turn the bleakest negatives into radiant positives, telling you life is not worth living in terms which reassure you that it is. So now from the most unpromising elements—indolence, passivity, a sense of time ticking uselessly away—John made his masterpiece.

Lying on his undersize couch in the rear sun parlor at Kenwood, scanning newspapers and magazines with half an eye, watching almost-mute TV with the other half, he had absorbed two separate random news items. The first concerned a death among London’s innermost in-crowd, where the highest class now mingled democratically with the lowest. Just before Christmas 1966, Tara Browne, the twenty-one-year-old son of brewing heiress Oonagh Guinness and friend of the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, had inexplicably driven his Lotus sports car through a red traffic light in South Kensington, crashed into a van, and been killed. The second was a
Daily Mail
snippet of the “Just Fancy That” variety John had always loved. In Blackburn, Lancashire, the Borough Surveyor’s department had decided to count the number of potholes in its roads and announced there were exactly four thousand.