John Lennon: The Life (64 page)

Few song titles were ever more confessional: not “In My Life” or “A Day in My Life” but “A Day in the Life,” suggesting an existence almost too shameful to admit to. Here was the easily decryptable lament of someone who felt connected to reality only through newspapers and the media: reading about “the lucky man who…blew his mind out in a car”; learning only via the rushes of his own film that “the English army had just won the war”; speculating mindlessly, as in extreme stonedness or boredom, how many of the “4,000
holes in Blackburn Lancashire” might equal the volume of London’s Royal Albert Hall. It was almost as if he were having an out-of-body experience, floating unseen above the wreckage of Tara Browne’s wrecked Lotus and the horrified onlookers.

Early studio takes of “A Day in the Life” featured only Paul on piano, George on maracas and Ringo on bongos, John counting himself in by repeating “sugar plum fairy”—slang for a drug dealer. Those opening words “I read the news today oh boy,” with their huge weight of apathy, sent shivers down George Martin’s spine, as they would send shivers down spines ever afterward. He had told Martin to give him as much echo as Elvis had had on “Heartbreak Hotel”; as a result, his voice seemed to float from some cold, barren, lonely place, beyond the reach of all human help or comfort. He had written his very own “Heartbreak Hotel,” or maybe
De Profundis
.

For his second great achievement on the album, he seemed to cut himself off completely from everyday things, retreating with relief into a mental hideout that for him long predated LSD. His two favorite books in all the world were still Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
; indeed, using acid only sharpened his delight in the surreal fantasies that a nineteenth-century cleric apparently conjured from stimulants no stronger than weak China tea and cucumber sandwiches.

“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” as John would later insist, was inspired by a specific scene in
Through the Looking-Glass
. Alice walks into a shop to find a talking sheep in a poke bonnet knitting behind the counter; then, all at once, the two of them are drifting downriver in a skiff, using the knitting needles as oars. The book’s verse epilogue also played its part: “A boat, beneath a sunny sky / Lingering onward dreamily…. / Still she haunts me, phantomwise, / Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes….” Filtered through yet another of George Martin’s electronic strainers, John’s voice took on an almost childlike quality, as if the seven-year-old who had first followed Alice into the White Rabbit’s burrow were speaking through him.

Time being short as usual, other songs had to be improvised from any ingredients at hand. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” was sug
gested by a Victorian circus poster he bought in a Kentish antique shop while shooting a promotional film for “Strawberry Fields” in the grounds of a stately home called Knole. His lyric simply repeated the poster’s list of attractions, the trampolining Hendersons, “late of Pablo Fanques Fair,” the “hoops and garters and…hogshead of real fire,” adding an occasional grace note like “Henry the Horse dances the waltz.” The farmyard-themed “Good Morning, Good Morning” borrowed the slogan crowed by a cartoon rooster on Kellogg’s cornflakes packets. Though just “a throwaway” to John, it shed bitter sidelights on the Kenwood breakfast table (“…time for tea and meet the wife…”) and his own sense of intellectual sterility (“I’ve got nothing to say but it’s okay”). And of whom could he have been thinking in his obvious eagerness to be “in town…now you’re in gear…go to a show you hope she goes”?

John was never closer to Paul than during these weeks. Though hotly competitive in songs they wrote individually outside the studio, they remained a matchless team within it, each working unselfishly to set off the other’s latest brain wave at its best. Paul composed a piping intro for Lowry organ that established the drowsy riverbank atmosphere of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” before John had sung a word; he also contributed to the lyric, supplying “Cellophane flowers” and “newspaper taxis” to set alongside John’s “tangerine trees” and “marmalade skies.” A half-finished song in the McCartney bottom drawer became the urgent, real-world middle passage of “A Day in the Life” (“Woke up, fell out of bed…”) that is so inspired a contrast to its out-of-body languor. John and Paul together devised the lyric’s final touch: the drawn-out, syllable-stretching sigh of “I’d love to tu-u-rn you-ou-ou-ou o-o-on…” Paul remembers how at the microphone they exchanged a glance, as if to say “Should we really go on with this?” The “nice” Beatle was as sure as the “rebel” one that they should.

Not the least of Paul’s contributions was realizing John’s typically apocalyptic but vague wish for “a sound like the end of the world” to link the song’s contrasting movements and also bring it to a climactic finish. This was achieved by a forty-one-piece symphony orchestra, playing under no directions but to go from the lowest note
on their instruments to the highest—a conception worthy of Cage or Stockhausen. The recording session, on March 10, was a gala occasion, with the classical violinists and woodwind players decked out in carnival hats, red clown-noses, and gorilla-paw gloves, and Studio Two’s usually barred doors thrown open to a crowd of friends and colleagues, including Brian Epstein, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan.

Lennon and McCartney still composed together, as in hotel rooms of old, for instance hammering out “With a Little Help from My Friends” as a vocal for Ringo (who otherwise spent most of the prodigal studio time learning to play chess). And the light and shade of their respective natures could still grab perfect harmony out of thin air. One day John happened to walk into the studio while Paul was at the mike, singing “It’s getting better…” “It couldn’t get much worse,” his partner ad-libbed in counterpoint, and the line stuck.

Whatever John’s later opinion of Paul’s “soft” numbers, he threw his whole weight behind them now with backup vocals that remained totally faithful to their intent while adding a dash of vinegar to the honey. In “She’s Leaving Home,” his is the gently empathic voice of the parents who awake in horror to find that their daughter has eloped with the “man from the motor trade”: “We…sacrificed most of our lives…we gave her everything money could buy….” In “When I’m Sixty-four,” his responses to Paul’s George Formby-esque visions of “a cottage in the Isle of Wight” and grandchildren named Vera, Chuck, and Dave seem no less rapturous than their creator’s. “Lovely Rita” would not be half the song it is without John’s almost atonal background drone of “Lervly Rrrreeta Meetah-Maid!…” The same half-mocking, half-sleepy chorus echoes distantly in the finale of “A Day in the Life,” like the Cheshire Cat’s grin still floating in midair after every other bit of it has vanished.

Ironically for an album that would be so much identified with LSD, the Beatles took almost no acid while making
Sgt. Pepper
. The sense of forging into new territory each day, and infallibly conquering it, gave a high that no drug ever could. The only lapse that John would remember happened purely by accident: one night he swallowed a tab of acid by mistake for an upper to keep him going. Later,
while recording vocals for “Getting Better,” he suddenly felt overwhelming panic. George Martin noticed him looking “a bit peculiar” and suggested he got some fresh air. With fans besieging every street door, Martin had no option but to take him up onto the roof. The producer still knew nothing of mind-expanding substances, so could not understand why John should wax so ecstatic about a seemingly normal London night sky. When he rejoined the others, he had become atypically meek and reticent, telling them to carry on without him and he’d just sit and watch. It was the only time Martin ever saw him incapacitated in the studio.

Since he was clearly in no condition to return to Weybridge, Paul took him home for the night to nearby Cavendish Avenue. Though by now also initiated into LSD (by that “lucky man,” Tara Browne, as it happened), Paul had never taken a trip with John, and decided this was the moment. John insisted that Neil Aspinall should also be there, but not turn on “in case of emergencies.” They stayed up most of the night, Paul remembers, and “hallucinated a lot…John [was] sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity…in control of it all.” Finally Paul decided to turn in, despite John’s warnings from long experience that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Sure enough, the visions pursued him into bed. Every so often, roadie Mal Evans came in like a night nurse to check that he was all right.

F
or three years, Britain’s Establishment had looked on its frolicking youth culture with bemused indulgence. But by early 1967, things were starting to change. It had become clear that horrifying numbers of young people were turning on to drugs, encouraged ever more blatantly by the music they listened to and the musicians they idolized. Police forces up and down the land therefore began systematically targeting the main culprits, spurred on by savage envy of their quarries’ lifestyles and armed with draconian powers of search and entry. In February, an eighteen-strong task force raided a weekend house party given by Rolling Stone Keith Richards, from which Beatle George Harrison and his wife had departed just a few hours earlier. Richard and Mick Jagger were both charged with drug possession along with their friend, the art dealer Robert Fraser.

Searching official scrutiny also fell on London’s underground press, whose whole raison d’être was the promotion of drug use, anti–Vietnam War protest, and sexual nonconformity. In December 1966, one of the founders of the
International Times
, John “Hoppy” Hopkins, was busted for possessing cannabis and subsequently jailed for nine months. The following March, John’s and Paul’s friends at
IT
printed an interview with the black American radical Stokely Carmichael, which included the word
motherfucker
. Police instantly swooped on the paper’s offices, confiscated documents and reference books (even telephone directories), and charged its editors under the Obscene Publications Act.

To raise funds for their legal defense, a gigantic happening was held at Alexandra Palace, North London, on April 29. Billed as the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream and promising “kaleidoscopic colour and beautiful people,” the night-long mixed-media marathon featured music from bands like Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, the Move, and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, readings from poets like Christopher Logue and Michael Horovitz, films, lightshows, and the performance art of Yoko Ono. Thousands of hippies converged on the hilltop entertainment complex, paying £1 per shaggy head, and BBC television provided live coverage throughout the evening. John was watching with John Dunbar in Weybridge and on a sudden impulse decided to drive up to “Ally Pally” and take part.

Yoko’s contribution was to have been
Cut Piece
, in which she sat or knelt motionless onstage while audience members cut off pieces of her dress. However, the sight of the deranged throng, ingesting everything from outsize “banana joints” to STP (a psychedelic even stronger than LSD), caused her an uncharacteristic fit of stage nerves. A female stand-in therefore did
Cut Piece
—with the snippers using scissors wired to an amplifier—while Yoko watched from the sidelines. John had no idea that she was there, and she did not see him. After mingling with the spectators for a few minutes, he and Dunbar retreated to the gardens outside to share a more secluded joint, then were chauffeured back to Weybridge. “Nobody told me he’d been in the place,” Yoko remembers. “People were too high, I’m sure, to care if a Beatle was there or not.”

Throughout that portentous spring of 1967, John looked in several
other directions to cure his boredom and restlessness. Just before the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, he had read that a tiny, uninhabited island off western Ireland named Dorinish was for sale at £1,700. The following day, as the culmination of an almost weeklong acid bender, he and John Dunbar flew to Dublin, traveled by rental car to Clew Bay in County Mayo, then took a boat out to the rocky, wave-lashed outcrop that was available at such a bargain price. Fired by visions of a hippie existence close to nature, John used Dunbar’s sketchbook to draw a lighthouse-like structure, which he planned to build and inhabit, apparently alone. Dorinish duly became his, and he never set foot on it again.

His Rolls-Royce provided another short-lived burst of enthusiasm. During the car’s visit to Almería for
How I Won the War
, its black paintwork had been ruined by abrasive sand particles. Prompted by Ringo, John had the idea of repainting it in psychedelic style, like a full-size gypsy wagon caravan that he had recently installed in Kenwood’s garden. Since the Rolls-Royce company itself would never commit such sacrilege, a private coachbuilder named J. P. Fallon in nearby Chertsey—where John’s chauffeur, Les Anthony, happened to live—agreed to undertake the work. The Rolls was resprayed pale yellow and its radiator covered with Art Nouveau tendrils of red and green. The side panels were decorated with rose clusters reminiscent of Aunt Mimi’s best chinaware, while John’s astrological sign, Libra, covered the roof. The final touch was a still-unusual personalized license plate, WEYBRIDGE 46676. Crowds lined Chertsey’s streets to witness Anthony collect the transformed vehicle—as many as ever flocked around Elvis’s touring Cadillac.

For John, keeping boredom at bay required a constant turnover of people as well as things. This past year his favored sidekick had been John Dunbar, the most serious “art person” he had known since college days. Dunbar’s wife, Marianne Faithfull, had by now decamped to live with Mick Jagger and had been present at the Rolling Stones’ February drug bust. (A rumor was currently sweeping the country that, when the police arrived, Jagger had been licking a Mars bar lodged in Marianne’s vagina.)