John Lennon: The Life (86 page)

The workmen still around the studio created intermittent noise and distraction, so after a few days John suggested moving to the house and continuing the sessions around the long rustic table in the kitchen. As their talk widened from his personal history into generalities, Janov was struck by his “amazing mixture of complexity and simplicity…. He could see right into people, the way some schizophrenics can. He was all right-brain [instinctive and intuitive, not analytical]. He would say, ‘What about religion?’ and I would say something like, ‘People in pain usually seek out religion.’ And John would say, ‘Oh—God is a concept by which we measure our pain.’”

John himself believed the most important service Janov did for him was to break down “the religious myths” he had been absorbing all his life, from St. Peter’s Church Sunday School in Woolton to the Maharishi’s Indian ashram. “You are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of someone up in the sky. It’s the
result of your parents and your environment. As I realized this, it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit…. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it…[I started] facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of Heaven.”

The Janovs made it a firm rule not to develop personal friendships with their patients. But they both recall the trouble that John took to make their stay in England pleasant. “While Vivian and I worked with John and Yoko, our children were sent tickets to all the best rock shows that were on,” Arthur Janov says. “One day there was some mix-up over the schedule and I had to take my son, Rick, down to Tittenhurst Park with me. John was incredibly nice to him and took him out to play Frisbee in the garden.” After three weeks, even though the treatment was not nearly over, Janov felt he could no longer neglect his patients back in America. He urged John and Yoko, and they agreed, to complete it at his Primal Center in Los Angeles that summer.

On April 1, Great Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court ruled that John’s erotic lithographs of Yoko were not liable to “deprave or corrupt” under the letter of the Obscene Publications Act. In the artist’s defense, a lithograph and a catalog of drawings by Picasso were shown to the magistrates. The prosecution was so fatuous, and the verdict so predictable, that John did not have to testify or even attend the hearing. (Three decades later, a set of the lithographs would be on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) By now, no fan or journalist in the world mistook him for a Beatle, despite Apple’s vehement protestations to the contrary. “Spring is here!” began a rather desperate press release from Derek Taylor, “and Leeds play Chelsea tomorrow and Ringo and John and George and Paul are still alive and well and full of hope. The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops, that’ll be the time to worry. Not before.”

Though the Beatles were unable to work together anymore, they still had one major unreleased product, the album recorded early in 1969 under the title
Get Back
. Since Glyn Johns’s failed attempt to give its voluminous tapes some coherence, the project had been in limbo—and, with it, the “Beatles at Work” documentary film di
rected by Michael Lindsay-Hogg. Such waste was anathema to Allen Klein, especially with a new Capitol contract entitling him to 20 percent commission. Unfortunately, even John, his strongest advocate in the band, could not be persuaded that
Get Back
was other than irredeemable “shit.”

Klein’s solution was to hire Phil Spector—a producer revered as much by Paul, George, and Ringo as by John—to attempt a further remix of the album. Spector worked on the tapes intensively at Abbey Road Studios for several weeks, adding extra vocal and instrumental effects to what in some cases had been barely more than run-throughs. When Paul heard the first pressing, he was appalled to find both his main vocal appearances melodramatically embellished with strings, brass, and celestial choirs. He registered an angry protest, but once again was overruled by the other three. To add insult to injury, the album was retitled
Let It Be
after one of those “Spectorised” McCartney tracks, an elegiac ballad built on a phrase all the Beatles had grown up with, and which now seemed strangely appropriate. In Liverpool, when small boys quarreled or nursed grievances, their parents would tell them (as Mimi often had John) to “let it be.” Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary received the same name, and album and film were finally scheduled for release in April.

Outvoted, marginalized, now widely believed to be dead, Paul had suffered a drop in self-esteem more vertiginous than any of his erstwhile colleagues could have guessed. His therapy—the only kind he would ever need—was to spend time with his new baby and start making a solo album of his own. In compensation for his loss of control on
Get Back/Let It Be
, this was a defiantly one-man enterprise, recorded in his private studio, with every instrument played by himself, and nobody else involved but his wife, Linda, on backing vocals (for which she received the same cobilling that John now gave Yoko). Titled simply
McCartney
, its front cover a head shot by Linda, the album was handed to Apple Records without reference to the other Beatles or Klein, and a release date set of April 10.

The trouble was that three other Beatle-related albums had been scheduled for around the same time:
Let It Be
, Ringo’s
Sentimental Journey
, and a compilation for the American market entitled
Hey Jude
. Since the most obvious mutually detrimental clash was between
Let
It Be
and
McCartney
, one or the other would have to be postponed. With Paul refusing to talk to Klein, and no one at Apple Records possessing real executive clout anymore, it fell to John to deal with the problem. On March 5, he handwrote a note to Paul, with George as cosignatory, announcing that they’d told EMI to put back
McCartney
’s release date to June 4. “We thought you’d come round when you realised the Beatles album was coming out on April 24th,” the note continued. “We’re sorry it turned out like this—it’s nothing personal. Love John and George (Hare Krishna).”

The letter was delivered to Paul at Cavendish Avenue by Ringo Starr, normally an infallible pourer of oil on troubled Beatle waters. But this time, even Ringo’s emollience had no effect. Paul, understandably, could not bear his precious solo debut to be elbowed aside, particularly by a Beatles album containing work of his that he felt had been mutilated. His long self-schooling as Mr. Nice Guy forgotten, he lost his temper and ordered poor, blameless Ringo out of the house. Ringo, that unchangeable Mr. Nice Guy, returned to John and George and talked them into backing down.
McCartney
kept its April 10 release date while
Let It Be
, the album and film, were pushed back to May.

It says much about his demoralized state of mind that the Beatles’ former tireless PR man now shrank from doing media interviews on his own behalf. Instead, press copies of the
McCartney
album came with a printed Q & A sheet, put together in consultation with Derek Taylor, which vented all the resentments and frustrations of recent months and finally confirmed what had been so long suspected.

Q: Will Paul and Linda become a John and Yoko?

A: No, they will become a Paul and Linda….

Q: What do you think about John’s peace effort? The Plastic Ono Band? Giving back the MBE? Yoko’s influence? Yoko?

A: I love John and respect what he does—it doesn’t give me any pleasure.

Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?

A: No….

 

As he would later explain: “I couldn’t just let John control the situation and dump us as if we [were] the jilted girlfriends.”

Just before the release of
McCartney
, he telephoned John and announced, “I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing and putting out an album. And I’m leaving the group, too.” John’s initial response was relief, that this most stubborn resuscitator of the band was finally giving up. If he felt anger with anyone, it was with himself for having heeded those appeals to his team spirit and kept his own exit under wraps so effortfully for so long. Now Paul had stolen the headlines yet again by grandly exiting a stage that John—and George and Ringo, too—had quietly left six months earlier. “[Paul] just did a great hype. I wanted to do it and I should have done it. I thought, ‘Damn, shit, what a fool I was.’…I was a fool not to do it, not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record.”

After all its travails, the
Let It Be
film won an Oscar, and a Grammy for best original music sound track, while the album went to number one in both the United Kingdom and the United States, eventually spending more than a year on the charts. To John, there was never any doubt that Phil Spector had been its savior. “If anybody listens to the bootleg version…, which was pre-Spector, and listens to the version Spector did, they would shut up—if you really want to know the difference. The tapes were so lousy…that none of us would go near them. They’d been lying around for six months. None of us could face remixing them, it was terrifying. But Spector did a terrific job.”

In interviews, he repeated that the breakup had been inevitable, that no one person or thing had been to blame, and that the worldwide mourners should keep a sense of proportion. “The Beatles were disintegrating slowly after Brian Epstein died, it was slow death and it was happening. It’s evident on
Let It Be
although Linda and Yoko were evident then, but they weren’t when we started it. It was evident in India when George and I stayed there and Ringo left. It was evident on the
White Album
. It’s just natural. It’s not a great disaster. People keep talking about it as if it’s the end of the earth. It’s only a rock group that split up. It’s nothing important….

“It takes a lot to live with four people over and over for years and
years, which is what we did. We’d called each other every name under the sun…. We’d been through the mill together for more than 10 years. We’d been through our therapy together many times…It’s just that you grow up. We don’t want to be the Crazy Gang or the Marx Brothers being dragged onstage playing ‘She Loves You’ when we’ve got asthma and tuberculosis and when we’re fifty.”

I
n May 1970, John finally managed to get back into America. After long negotiations with the U.S. Embassy in London, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) waived the visa ban in force since his British drug conviction eighteen months earlier. Accompanied only by George and Pattie Harrison (and using the alias Chambers), he was permitted to fly to Los Angeles, then on to New York for business meetings with Capitol Records and Allen Klein. In July, he was again granted admittance to return to L.A. with six-months-pregnant Yoko for their second course of primal scream therapy under Arthur Janov.

Janov had warned that, to be effective, the therapy must proceed uninterruptedly for between four and six months—and in John’s case might take even longer. He and Yoko came fully prepared for this, clearing their joint schedule of all commitments until September and renting a house in the film-star colony of Bel Air. They attended the Primal Center almost daily, continuing their respective one-on-one sessions with Arthur and Vivian Janov and also joining in group discussion and self-exploration with other patients.

Aware how beadily the eyes were trained on him, John kept a low profile, giving no media interviews, avoiding anyone who might drag him into compromising headlines. One exception was Jann Wenner, twenty-four-year-old editor and publisher of San Francisco’s
Rolling Stone
magazine. Wenner was emerging as John’s doughtiest press champion:
Rolling Stone
had reproduced the
Two Virgins
album cover in the teeth of American conservative outrage, sympathetically reviewed every John-and-Yoko album, and backed their peace campaign to the hilt. Now he wanted John to do one of the extended interviews for which his magazine was noted. That quest had already taken him to Britain, but, in the dark days just before meeting Janov, John could not contemplate such an idea. When Wenner arrived at Tittenhurst Park, Yoko said his prospective interviewee was “too paranoid” even to come downstairs and meet him.

Hearing that John and Yoko were receiving treatment at the Primal Center, Wenner invited them up to San Francisco for a weekend and gave them their first real tour of the city that first made
peace
a global buzzword. With Wenner’s wife, Jane, they also saw an afternoon showing of
Let It Be
in an almost empty cinema. “After the show—moved at whatever level, either as participants or deep fans—we somehow cried,” Wenner would remember.

Five or six more weeks with Arthur Janov convinced John that primal scream therapy was the Answer that neither God, rock ’n’ roll, nor the Maharishi had been able to give him. And, as usual, he felt a need to share his feeling of redemption with the whole world. “He came to me and said he wanted to take out a full-page ad in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, saying, ‘This Is It,’” Janov remembers. “I told him as politely as possible, ‘John, this stuff is serious. It doesn’t live or die on the approval of a rock musician.’”

Then, early in July, he suddenly announced that the INS was harassing him for overstaying his time, and he would have to leave America forthwith. He asked if Janov would assign him a personal therapist to continue his course in Mexico. “Just then, I had 5,000 applicants for treatment. I couldn’t possibly spare anyone from my staff to go off with him like that,” Janov says. “So the therapy had to end at what was a crucial point for John. We’d opened him up but
we hadn’t had time to put him back together again. A lot more work needed to be done to get right down to the root of his anger. I estimated it would take at least another year.”

The solution was to employ a new therapist: himself. After his first sessions with Janov, he had begun work on a new batch of songs. These were polished, and new ones added, during his time at the Primal Center, and the minimum complement for an album—eleven tracks—finished off after his premature return to Britain. He had often written lyrics about himself, from “Help!” to “A Day in the Life,” but always hitherto cloaked their message in poetic imagery or punning wordplay. Now all that seemed part of the repression that primal scream therapy sought to break down. “I had to look into my own soul,” he would recall. “I wasn’t looking at it from a mystical perspective…or from a psychedelic perspective or being-a-famous-Beatle perspective or making-a-Beatle record perspective…. This time, it was just me in a mirror.”

The result was his first named solo album,
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
, recorded at Abbey Road Studios during September and October 1970. The Plastic Ono lineup this time was minimal, as if only trusted friends and colleagues could be allowed to hear the confessions in their raw state: Klaus Voormann on bass and Ringo Starr on drums, plus occasional keyboard contributions from Billy Preston. Production was credited jointly to Phil Spector, John, and Yoko, with Yoko receiving an additional credit for “wind.” At the same time, Yoko made an album of her own with the same musicians, to be released alongside John’s.

For the very first time, he was singing on his own, without backup harmonies or any of the sonic embellishment and distortion he habitually used with the Beatles. “It used to get a bit embarrassing in front of George and Paul,” he would recall, “’cause we know each other so well: ‘Oh, he’s trying to be Elvis, oh he’s doing this now,’ you know…. So we inhibited each other a lot. And now I had Yoko there and Phil Spector there, alternately and together, who sort of love me, okay, so I [could] perform better. And I relaxed. The looseness of the singing was developed on ‘Cold Turkey’ from the experience of Yoko’s singing—she does not inhibit her throat.”

The opening song went straight to the core of his deepest-seated misery: it was called simply “Mother.” By way of introduction, a church bell tolled slowly and sonorously, a summons to mourning rather than festivity. Though John had copied it from an old Hammer horror film, no sound was more evocative of the years that Janov’s therapy had forced him to relive. That slow, ominous chime might have been from St. Peter’s in Woolton, echoing through the silent winter Sunday evenings of his boyhood.

The lyric was a blunt accusation leveled at both the parents, whom he believed had so grievously failed him: one by giving birth to him, then giving him away; the other by walking out on him when he was a toddler. “Mother, you had me / But I never had you…. Father, you left me / But I never left you.” The purpose of the song was what no one yet called
closure
—a final, liberating good-bye to the bewitching redhead who had loved him, but never quite enough, and the sailor who had always seemed to prefer the sea. Its ending was a repeated scream of panic that might have come from John’s six-year-old self that sunny day in Blackpool when Julia and the father then known as Alf had forced him to choose between them: “Mama, don’t go…Daddy, come home!”

The whole album was the same mixture of dam-bursting anger and haunting vulnerability. In contrast to the blind terror of “Mother,” “Hold On” was a reassurance to Yoko, humanity in general, but, above all, himself, that “It’ll be all right…we’re gonna win the fight.” “I Found Out” bitterly ticked off every nostrum he had ever tried, from “dope and cocaine” back through “Hare Krishna” and hippiedom’s “brother, brother, brother” even unto wanking. “Isolation” owned up to the fear that he and Yoko often felt as “a boy and a little girl, trying to change the whole wide world,” while “Remember” reflected that, however bad things might get, at least he was no longer small. “Look at Me” echoed his demand to Yoko that she must never for one second lift her attentive, adoring gaze from him. “Love” was haiku-brief (“Love is touch / Touch is love”) sung in the wistful, fragile voice only previously used for “Julia” on the
White Album
—John with all his defenses down.

After “Mother,” the most notable track, both for its self-lacerat
ing emotion and its selectiveness with history, was “Working Class Hero.” This one was squarely aimed at Aunt Mimi, Mendips, and the strainingly aspirant middle-class world that had put his childhood on terra firma but also, he now thought, destroyed his self-confidence and joie de vivre beyond rescue.

To repudiate this part of the past, he had turned to a genre he used to despise and written a folk song. He performed it alone with acoustic guitar, talking rather than singing the perfectly scanned rhyming triplets, resurrecting deprivations and grievances of twenty years ago (but forgetting the security, good cooking, and ample pocket-money): “As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small…They hurt you at home and they hit you at school…” Big business and the military each received a swipe, as did even the Sixties generation and their mirage of being “clever and classless and free.” But his iciest contempt was reserved for himself, as the fraudulent apotheosis of working-class “heroism” and dubious exemplar for all who aspired to it: “If you want to be a hero, well just follow me.” He also did for pop albums what Kenneth Tynan had done for television four years earlier, premiering the F word not once but twice. Such was the virulence of every other word, it barely stood out.

His ad-lib to Arthur Janov, “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” triggered the climactic rite of renunciation in a song simply titled “God.” Paradoxically framed in a slow gospel style, like the Anglican Creed in reverse, came a roll call of every once-awesome power he no longer believed in, Magic, I Ching, Bible, tarot, Hitler, Jesus, Kennedy, Buddha, mantra, Gita, yoga, kings, Elvis, Zimmerman [Bob Dylan], and finally, with almost audible nausea, Beatles. Spleen turned to softness again as he contemplated what was left: “I just believe in me / Yoko and me / And that’s reality.” The ending was a belated farewell to the world’s Beatlemaniacs, apologetic, a little sad even, but irrevocable: “I was the Walrus but now I’m John / And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on. The dream is over.”

It might have seemed impossible for him to twist the knife in himself anymore, but he did. The album’s final, fragmentary track, “My Mummy’s Dead,” transposed his 1958 heartbreak into a nurs
ery rhyme, sung in the voice of a dazed child and strummed on a tinny guitar that might have been the very Gallotone Champion Julia saved up to buy him. The broken words—“I can’t explain…so much pain”—were like some psychic message; indeed, his handwriting in the original lyric has the jaggedly chaotic look of dictation from beyond the grave.

Like meditating in times past, the technique he had learned from Janov became part of daily life, converted into a verb:
to primal
. For Yoko, one positive effect was to curb his jealousy and possessiveness toward her. “If we were in bed and he’d start to accuse me of this and that, ‘Why were you looking at that guy, why were you smiling at him?’ he’d say ‘Give me a pillow’ and start to punch it…. It became a ritual for him to scream and shout. Then he’d immediately realise he was not angry at me but at something that happened long before he met me.”

Yoko’s baby was due in October, around the time of John’s thirtieth birthday. They had stayed free of heroin and, with their cleaner and less frantic lifestyle of recent months, had every reason to hope this second pregnancy would be successful. Then, late one August night, an ambulance was called to Tittenhurst Park to rush Yoko to King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill, Dulwich. John went with her, and became so concerned by the bumpiness of the ride that a mile or so down the road he made the driver stop, then telephoned Les Anthony to bring the Rolls. As before, doctors ordered a blood transfusion, and Anthony had to round up donors whom Yoko considered trustworthy, like the disc jockey John Peel. But a couple of days later, she miscarried again. John was told that his sperm count could be part of the problem.

Janov had been uneasy at halting John’s therapy before his reawakened anger over his early childhood could be fully laid to rest. The awful extent of this was revealed when, late in September, after an interval of more than a year, he heard from his father. Unconsciously adding insult to ancient injury, Freddie Lennon was no longer a rootless embarrassment but settled and happy with his young wife, Pauline, in the rent-free house provided by John in Brighton. After one miscarriage, Pauline had given birth to a son, David, granting Freddie an unexpected second try at fatherhood at the age of fifty-
seven. His potential as a breadwinner being limited, Pauline went out to work while he—eerily foreshadowing his son’s future role—looked after the baby, did the cooking, and ran the home. The arrival of a half brother had not seemed to interest John, however, and his always irregular letters ceased soon afterward.

Now Freddie had conceived the idea of writing his autobiography, and wanted John’s consent to begin work. He knew John had been receiving some kind of therapy but had no idea how crucially his own life story figured therein, as also in the album being screamed and sobbed out in group sessions with the Plastic Ono Band. The encouraging response was an invitation to pay his first visit to Tittenhurst Park, with Pauline and eighteen-month-old David, on John’s thirtieth birthday, October 9. Unaware that John had grown a beard since their last meeting, he took along a gift of aftershave lotion.

Freddie’s hopes of a pleasant birthday reunion were soon dashed. On arrival at Tittenhurst, he and Pauline were stopped in the driveway as if they were trespassers and, their bona fides established, made to wait in the kitchen. When John finally appeared, he was utterly changed from the generally friendly, sympathetic person Pauline had known at Kenwood. His face, she recalls, was pale and haggard, the pupils of his eyes were contracted behind his granny glasses, his unfamiliar beard gave him the appearance of “a wild and primitive warrior,” and he barely seemed to notice his new half brother playing on the floor. What happened next Freddie would later describe in a four-page handwritten statement, which he then deposited for safekeeping with his solicitor. Though highly melodramatic in tone, it is corroborated in every detail by Pauline: