John Lennon: The Life (84 page)

On December 11, the premiere of
The Magic Christian
took place at the Odeon cinema, Kensington, graced by those stalwart Beatlemaniacs Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. John and Yoko arrived in a limousine decorated with a large placard reading
BRITAIN MURDERED HANRATTY
. They took care to draw up right behind the Royal car, so their message would be seen by as many photographers as possible. But the next morning, no paper even mentioned it. Three days later, Hanratty’s father appeared at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, calling for a public inquiry into his son’s conviction. On the ground beside him was a writhing white sack labeled
A SILENT PROTEST FOR JAMES HANRATTY
. This time, the occupants really were John
and Yoko, as they proved later by accompanying Hanratty senior and other campaigners to hand in a petition at 10 Downing Street.

As if John did not already have enough product on offer, the Plastic Ono Band’s debut at the Toronto rock-’n’-roll festival was released as an album,
Live Peace in Toronto
, on December 12. To promote it, the band took to the stage once more, this time at London’s Lyceum ballroom, with John, Yoko, and the robots augmented by a vast lineup, including George Harrison, gigging with John for the first time since 1966, as well as Eric Clapton, Delaney and Bonnie, Billy Preston, Keith Moon from the Who, and disc jockey Jeff Dexter on tambourine. The performance was filmed by the
International Times
’s John Hopkins and was meant to have been shown simultaneously on the video monitor inside one of the robots—an idea later adopted by rock acts everywhere—but unluckily the equipment malfunctioned. “The sound was atrocious,” Dexter recalls. “But no one seemed to care.” Yoko began the show inside a white bag, then emerged to sing “Don’t Worry Kyoko,” punctuated by screams of “Britain murdered Hanratty!” It was to be John’s last-ever live performance in Britain.

Back in the summer, he and Yoko had begun discussing ways to link their peace campaign to the alleged season of goodwill. One short-lived idea was to persuade newspapers to run the headline
PEACE DECLARED
with the same prominence that
WAR DECLARED
usually received; another was to beam it out over the Telstar space satellite rather like a follow-up to “All You Need Is Love.” Finally they settled for the handbill-posting technique Yoko had often used for her art shows, but taken up a few notches by John’s wealth. On December 16, a huge white billboard appeared amid the hyperactive neon in Times Square, New York, and identical ones simultaneously at the hubs of London, Paris, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Berlin, Montreal, Toronto, Tokyo, and Port of Spain, Trinidad. Their message spelled out in plain black type was “WAR IS OVER if you want it, Happy Christmas, John and Yoko.”

As news organizations everywhere prepared reviews and retrospectives of the past year and past decade, one voice above all was sought to provide definitive commentary on both. BBC television made a documentary entitled
The World of John and Yoko
, to be
screened on December 30, filming their subjects over five days, at Apple, in the recording studio, and in bed.
Rolling Stone
magazine named John “Man of the Year,” opining that “a five-hour talk between John Lennon and [President] Nixon would be more significant than any Geneva summit conference between the USA and Russia.” The greatest accolade came when Britain’s ATV company (the same that had snapped up Northern Songs) invited three eminent intellectuals to make a short film on their respective choices as “Man of the Decade.” The veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke chose John F. Kennedy; the left-wing American writer Mary McCarthy chose North Vietnam’s leader, Ho Chi Minh; the anthropologist and sociologist Desmond Morris chose John.

Strolling through the grounds of Tittenhurst Park with Morris, Yoko, and a camera crew, John could not have sounded more upbeat, generally and personally. “Everybody is talking about the way [youth culture] is going and the decadence and the rest of it…. Not many people are noticing all the good that came out of the last ten years…Woodstock…is the biggest mass of people ever gathered together for anything other than war. Nobody had that big an army and didn’t kill someone or have some kind of violent scene like the Romans or whatever, and even a Beatle concert was more violent than that, you know….

“I’m full of optimism because of the contacts I’ve made personally throughout the world…knowing there’s other people around that I can agree with, you know. I’m not insane and I’m not alone. That’s on a personal level and of course the Woodstock, Isle of Wight, all the mass meetings of the youth [are] completely positive for me…. And this is only a beginning. The Sixties bit was just a sniff. The Sixties was just waking up in the morning and we haven’t even got to dinner-time yet and I can’t wait, you know. I just can’t wait. I’m glad to be around and it’s gonna be great and there’s gonna be more and more of us and [peering humorously into the camera] whatever you’re thinking there, Mrs. Grundy of Birmingham on toast, you know you don’t stand a chance.”

Sadly, rock festivals could no longer boast their impressive record of nonviolence. On December 6, at a free concert by the Rolling
Stones in Altamont, California, Hell’s Angels “stewards” had attacked spectators with pool cues, and a young black man been knifed to death a few feet from the stage. Undeterred, the organizers of the Toronto rock-’n’-roll festival were planning a follow-up event, “bigger than Woodstock,” to take place in Mosport Park, Montreal, over two days the following July. To distance it from the ugliness at Altamont, John’s participation was clearly a sine qua non. He agreed to make it in effect the John Lennon Peace Festival and, despite the imminence of Christmas, flew to Canada with Yoko on their third visit in six months to join in the planning.

Their first stop was Toronto, where they stayed on a ranch belonging to the veteran rock-’n’-roller Ronnie Hawkins. Hawkins and his wife, Wanda, gave up their marital bed, and chefs were brought in to provide macrobiotic meals. “Despite the diet, I caught John and Yoko down at the fridge a couple of times in the middle of the night, having a quick slice of bologna,” Hawkins remembers. There had been thick falls of snow and, between conferences with the festival organizers, John spent hours dashing around the ranch on a six-wheeled open buggy called an Amphicat. As well as a depleted fridge, the Hawkinses were left with a collapsed living-room ceiling after their guests’ bath overflowed.

To the reporters who dogged his every step, John repeated the mocking mantra that great world leaders like President Nixon were frightened of the acorn peace symbols he and Yoko had wanted to give them. Inevitably there were fresh waves of questions about his future with the Beatles and relationship with Paul, George, and Ringo. Still keeping his promise, he said he was merely “on holiday” from the band and there was no dissent between him and the other three, least of all over his peace crusade. “George is as big a peacenik as I am. Paul’s the same on a more intellectual level—and Ringo’s a living acorn.”

He dismissed any idea that he was setting himself up as a figurehead, either for antiwar activists or insurgent youth. “I’m not a leader; I’m just John Lennon who happens to think this way.” And if President Nixon’s doors remained barred, other eminent “squares” were lining up behind Desmond Morris to acknowledge the extraor
dinary, and undeniably positive, influence he wielded. Before leaving Toronto, he and Yoko had a meeting with Marshall McLuhan, guru of the new science of communications, whose famous axiom “the medium is the message” might have been coined especially for them. Why choose Canada as their arena rather than London, McLuhan asked. “Whenever we’ve done anything, we’ve done it out of London, ’cause they don’t take it seriously in England,” John replied. “They treat us like their children…. ‘It’s that mad, insane guy,’ you know. ‘He should be tap-dancing on the Palladium rather than talking about war and peace.’”

McLuhan observed that in the eyes of America’s government—especially the new Republican one personified by Nixon—anyone who inspired dissent on the scale that John did risked being branded “a long-haired communist.” “In Europe, it’s a joke, you know,” he replied, little dreaming how carefully his words were being monitored over the nearby border, nor how they would one day come back to haunt him. “I mean, we laugh at America’s fear of communists. It’s like, the Americans aren’t going to be overrun by communists. They’re going to fall from within, you know.”

The climax of the four-day visit was a train journey to Ottawa on December 23 for a fifty-minute audience with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, at that time the youngest and hippest leader on the world stage. John was consumed with nerves beforehand and, as if at Aunt Mimi’s invisible prompting, wore a formal dark suit and tie. Trudeau proved to be a fan of his books as much as of Beatles music, and promised full support for the Montreal Peace Festival. Later, John commented drily that his only contact with Britain’s prime minister Harold Wilson had been a photo-op handshake at an awards ceremony in 1964.

New Year’s Day 1970 found him and Yoko in Allberg, northern Denmark, where Yoko’s ex-husband, Tony Cox, was now living with Kyoko and a new Texan girlfriend named Melinda. The four spent almost a month together, in apparently perfect domestic harmony. A kitten named Miso was acquired for Kyoko, and John took special pains to prepare fish meals without bones that might stick in its throat. During their stay, he and Yoko both had their hair shorn
down to matching crew cuts to mark what they dubbed “Year One for Peace.” John also abandoned his Old Testament beard in favor of a bristly, jaw-hugging model that restored the animation to his face, if never quite its old derisive smile. The symbolism was obvious: the Sixties were behind him, as unmourned as sweepings around a barber’s chair.

He expected his Aunt Mimi to be pleased after all the years she had harangued him to get his hair cut. Instead, Mimi was appalled by what she called a “horrible skinhead style” and declared it was “too short.”

I
f the Beatles or the Sixties had a message,” John would later say, “it was learn to swim. Period. And once you learn to swim, swim. The people who are hung up on the Beatles’ and the Sixties’ dream missed the whole point when the Beatles’ and the Sixties’ dream became the point. Carrying [it] around all your life is like carrying the Second World War and Glenn Miller around. That’s not to say you can’t enjoy Glenn Miller or the Beatles, but to live in that dream is the twilight zone.”

Certainly the dawn of the new decade found him swimming at top speed into waters he had once thought way out of his depth. The previous year, his art adviser, Anthony Fawcett, had suggested he try his hand at creating lithographs, which could be both exhibited and sold in a limited edition. To save him the art-college drudgery of etching onto stone blocks, Fawcett supplied special drawing paper from which more patient hands could transfer his work onto sensitized zinc. By this method he had produced fourteen images, some of recent milestone events like his wedding and the Amsterdam bed-in, others erotic studies of a nude, recumbent Yoko. Three hundred sets were produced at £550 apiece, all signed by John, embossed with a personalized red seal, or “chop,” after the practice of Japanese artists, and packed in a white holdall inscribed
BAG ONE
.

The lithographs went on show at the London Arts Gallery on January 15, before John and Yoko had returned from Denmark. There would be further exhibitions at the Galerie Denise Renée in Paris and at the Lee Nordness Gallery, New York, where Salvador Dalí
attended the private view with a pet ocelot on a leash. In London, they had been on display barely twenty-four hours when uniformed police strode in and confiscated the eight Yoko nude studies (“arresting pieces of paper,” John called it) on grounds of an alleged complaint from a member of the public. Legal action was then taken against the gallery under the Obscene Publications Act. It was a ludicrous exercise; the images were not in the least obscene but skillful, tasteful, and rather touching, albeit adorned with forbidden bouquets of pubic hair. The result was to win huge publicity for
Bag One
and elevate John to the company of persecuted erotic geniuses from Gauguin to Aubrey Beardsley.

He had made up his mind that nothing in the seventies would be as before, least of all the process of making records. On January 27, he telephoned George Harrison (with whom his relationship still remained good despite everything) and asked him to join yet another mission for the Plastic Ono Band. The idea was to change the traditional slow, painstaking lithography of Beatles studio sessions and postproduction into an impulsive lightning sketch. “[John]…said ‘I’ve written this tune and I’m going to record it tonight and have it pressed up and out tomorrow,’” George would recall. “‘That’s the whole point—Instant Karma, you know.’”

Klaus Voormann had also been summoned to Abbey Road’s Studio Three that night, along with drummer Alan White and Billy Preston to play electric piano. “When I arrived, there was this little American guy in the control room, very busy, twiddling knobs and telling Alan, ‘Turn your cymbal up,’” Voormann remembers. “No one had told me who was producing the session and I didn’t know who this busy little guy was, except that on his shirt were the letters PS.”

It was none other than Phil Spector, the first producer in pop history to become more famous—or, in his case, infamous—than the artistes he put on record. Since the mid-Sixties, Spector’s legendary Wall of Sound had been all but washed away by the successive tides of psychedelia and folk rock. After the failure in America of his masterpiece, Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High,” he had closed his Philles record label, married the lead singer in his girl group, the Ronettes, and been reduced to taking small film parts, like
the drug dealer in
Easy Rider
. Even so, he was top of John’s wish list to mark the break from George Martin and all things Beatlesh. They had not met since 1964, when Spector had been among the copassengers on the Beatles’ first flight to America. However, Allen Klein knew him well and had no difficulty in bringing him to London for what would be as significant a fresh start for him as for John.