The Love You Make (59 page)

John was so infuriated by this interview that he dictated a long letter to
Melody Maker
and asked that it be published in the next edition. Several lines had to be edited out for libel. John asks in the letter, “For the millionth time… I repeat, what about the TAX? It’s all very well playing ‘simple honest ole human Paul’ in the
Melody Maker,
but you know damn well we can’t just sign a bit of paper… If you’re not the aggressor (as you claim), who the hell took us to court and shat all over us in public?”

The argument continued on vinyl. Paul, responding to the criticism that his
McCartney
LP was too raw and unfinished, went in the opposite direction with his second solo outing called
Ram. Ram
was recorded at Abbey Road with the best studio musicians available. It was a cute, tuneful little album, a bit silly in its musical innocence but not in its lyrical content. The cover featured a Linda McCartney photo of Paul taking a ram by the horns, with an interior photo of two beetles fucking each other, a not so oblique reference to the way Paul felt his pals were treating him. Lyrically, the references were more direct. When Paul sang, “Too Many People Preaching Practices,” John knew he was singing it to him, and that he was just a “silly boy(s) breaking their lucky breaks in two.” And it was to John to whom Paul sang, “Dear Boy, I hope you never know how much you missed [me].”
Rolling Stone
called the album “the nadir in the decomposition of sixties rock thus far.” One English newspaper posed the question, “How do you tell an ex-Beatle that he has made a lousy album?”

John Lennon was gleeful. In September of 1971 he responded with an album called
Imagine,
recorded during the summer in his studios at Tittenhurst Park. In comparison to the pain of the primal LP,
Imagine
was a pleasantly tuneful album but not without some good old-fashioned rock and roll nastiness. In “How Do You Sleep?”—on which George happily plays guitar—John spells it all out to Paul: “those freaks was right when they said you was dead… / The only thing you done was yesterday / And since you’ve gone you’re just another day… / A pretty face may last a year or two/ but pretty soon they’ll see what you can do / The sound you make is Muzak in my ears / You must have learned something in all those years / Oh, how do you sleep?”

There was also a tune called “Crippled Inside.” And just in case anybody missed the point, the album package included a postcard with a parody of Paul’s
Ram
cover: John wrestling a big old barnyard pig by the ears.

All this vitriol managed to overshadow one of the most popular tunes of John’s career, the title tune, “Imagine,” which wasn’t even released as a single in England until 1975. “Imagine” is one of John’s heartfelt but hopelessly naive visions of a world free from strife. “Imagine,” he sings, “there’s no heaven, / It’s easy if you try, / No hell below us, / Above us only sky. /… Nothing to kill or die for, / And no religion too. / Imagine all the people living life in peace, /… you may say I’m a dreamer, / But I’m not the only one. / I hope some day you’ll join us / And the world will be as one.”

The
Rolling Stone
critic, Ben Gerson, wrote, “I fear that John sees himself in the role of the truth-teller, and as such can justify any kind of self-indulgent brutality in the name of truth.”

Mick Jagger, when asked if the Rolling Stones would ever break up said, “Nah. But if we did, we wouldn’t be so bitchy about it.”

chapter Nineteen

—Paul McCartney
“Too Many People”

Everywhere they went,
people on the street, desk clerks, interviewers, all asked the same thing: “When are the Beatles going to get together again?” Each of the ex-Beatles hated the question as much as the frequency with which it was asked. If you said “never,” which was the truth, it made you the bad guy, so Paul and George and Ringo just sloughed it off. John had a pat response: “When you go back to high school.”

If the dissolution of the Beatles benefited anyone, it should have been George. George was always complaining about how John and Paul oppressed him, and now he had his chance to show his stuff. Free of the Beatles’ yoke, George went into the studios with Phil Spector and spent six months handcrafting his first solo venture,
All Things Must Pass.
This beautifully boxed, three-record set included four sides of new material by George and a third record of a superstar jam session, which included Eric Clapton, Dave Mason, and Billy Preston, who also appear on the rest of the album. Released just before Christmas of 1970 at a record-breaking $13.98 retail price, the album instantly became number one in America and England. It was perhaps the most lavishly praised album since
Sergeant Pepper,
and deservedly so. George proved once and for all that he was something of a musical genius on his own. Bolstered by Phil Spector’s highly orchestrated production techniques,
All Things Must Pass
managed to be an uplifting listening experience. As
Melody Maker
said, “Garbo talks! George Harrison is free!”

Despite the sudden accolades and solo credit, George didn’t seem any happier than the rest of them. This confirmation of his talent didn’t take the edge off his strident personality, if anything he seemed moodier and more dissatisfied than ever. He became inwardly spiritual and turned away from his friends. In one of his more famous quests for religious fulfillment, he spent several days sitting on a mountaintop in Cornwall on a search for “truth.”

In 1970 George bought an enormous mansion in Henley-on-Thames, thirty miles west of London. This $300,000 estate, called Friar Park, was in terrible disrepair and would cost George hundreds of thousands more to put it in shape, yet it was undoubtedly one of the most fabulous and eccentric domiciles in the world. It had been built some eighty years before by multimillionaire Sir Frank Crisp, a lawyer and advisor to the Liberal Party. Sir Frank’s sense of humor was obviously as big as the eighty-room house. Each room was more overwhelmingly elaborate than the next. The theme was friars and religion, and there were ornate carved wood moldings and faces everywhere, around all the windows, doorframes, ceilings, and staircases. They were carved into seraphim, serfs, flowers, and thousands of fat little friars’ heads. There were friars’ heads everywhere you turned, on every door, in every nook and cranny, even on the light switches, which were friars’ heads cast of brass with the switch sticking out of their mouths. Some rooms were as vast as ballrooms, and the bathrooms were as big as an average flat in London.

The grounds of the house featured three man-made lakes and seven major theme gardens, including one with a replica of the Matterhorn. One of the lakes was equipped with stepping-stones just below the surface of the water, so one could give the appearance of walking across the lake. The gardens had some 40,000 different varieties of flowers and trees, which took five full-time gardeners to care for them. There was also a complex of subterranean caves, some with skeletons and distorting mirrors. One was filled with statues of gnomes (which can be found on the cover of
All Things Must Pass)
and one was a wine cave illuminated by glass grapes that were actually tiny lightbulbs.

In this bizarre, quasi-religious setting, George continued along his spiritual path, now almost obsessively. He supported the growing Krishna movements around the world and hooked up with a new guru, Bhaktivedanta Swami, the seventy-seven-year-old spiritual leader of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He invited the guru and several saffron-robed monks to live in one of the smaller houses on the grounds of Friar Park. He began to rise at the crack of dawn, bathe in cold water, and study the
Bhagavad-Gita.
As time passed he became more and more fascinated by Friar Park’s massive gardens and spent hours walking through them, examining the plants and trees. He found particular pleasure in making things grow and began planting and tending the garden himself. He became, to all those he considered less enlightened than he, a stern lecturer. His conversations consisted of long, wandering dissertations on karma and life metaphors to plants. He spouted on about the problems of being a rock-star millionaire confronted with the luxuries of the material world, when the spiritual one was the only one that really mattered. His friends began to call him “His Lectureship” behind his back, and his beliefs, however well intentioned, became one big bore.

Pattie Harrison was miserable. After six years of marriage she felt unfulfilled and stifled. Only twenty-six years old, she was forbidden to have her own career and was isolated almost continuously in the big gloomy house with all the friars’ heads. She wanted dearly to raise a family, but she never seemed to get pregnant. George was the only Beatle who had never become a father, and in a peculiar way it embarrassed him. Both George and Pattie went for fertility tests, and George, who discussed the problem with a few close friends, said the medical problem was his. But, around Apple, it was suspected that this was not true, that it was Pattie’s problem and that George was being gallant by taking the blame.
³⁷
Pattie was willing to adopt children, but George refused. They had heated arguments over this, and Pattie began to escape him by taking overnight trips to London. Once, after one of their more violent arguments, Pattie climbed onto the roof of the main building of Friar Park, as far as the uppermost cupola, removed the OM symbol that always flew there, and replaced it with a pirate’s skull and crossbones. The war was on.

Pattie’s strongest weapon against George was the man who had become his best friend now that the Beatles were gone: Eric Clapton. Clapton’s own career had recently skyrocketed, and he had become perhaps the most revered virtuoso rock guitarist in the business, called “Old Slow Hand” because of his distinctive twangy guitar sound. For a long time now it had been obvious to anyone who saw Eric and Pattie together—including George—that Eric was madly in love with her. He turned into a pile of romantic mush in her presence, while she blinked at him with those big blue eyes and giggled. Now that Pattie was so unhappy in her relationship with George, she encouraged the attentions of the handsome and romantic rock guitarist. She began to manipulate Clapton’s infatuation with her to control and anger George. “She used me, you see,” Clapton later admitted, “and I fell madly in love with her.”

That didn’t stop the three of them from socializing together, however, and the dangerous chemistry between them led to some explosive moments. One of the worst was on the opening night of
Oh Calcutta!
in London.
Oh Calcutta!
was being produced in London by Robert Stigwood, who was also managing Eric Clapton’s career. Since George was toiling in the studios on
All Things Must Pass
on the night of the premiere, I took Pattie to the opening as my date. After the show, Stigwood threw a gala party at his newly purchased £100,000 estate, the Old Barn, on the far side of Stanmore.

When George finished his work in the studios in the early hours of the morning, he set out for the Old Barn to join Pattie and me. Unable to find a parking space near the gate, he drove his Ferrari up the long driveway to the main house. Exhausted from his recording session, he wanted only to find his wife and take her home with him. He searched all over for her, but she was nowhere to be found. George came up to me and asked what had happened to Pattie. I found myself in the difficult position of telling George that I didn’t know where Pattie was, but she was last seen with Eric Clapton.

George was furious that the two of them had gone off together so long ago and still hadn’t returned. He stalked back to his car and set off down the driveway. He had gone only a few yards when in the early-morning mist his headlights picked out two figures walking hand in hand at the side of the driveway. It was Pattie and Eric. George stopped the car with a screech of brakes and burning tires, flew out of the car, and launched into a terrible tirade that could be heard by the guests in the house. He forbade them to ever see each other again, practically shoved Pattie into the car, and tore off into the night with her.

Eric’s consuming passion for Pattie eventually wore him down. He withdrew to his baronial mansion, Hurtwood Edge, in Ewhurst and started to shoot heroin to dull the pain of his longing. In desperation he began a new relationship with Alice Ormsby-Gore, the daughter of Lord Harlech, whom some said bore an eerie resemblance to Pattie. Locked away in Hurtwood Edge for months on end, Eric was ravaged and withered by the effects of the heroin. During this time he read the great Persian love poem, Nazimi’s
Layla and Majnum,
about the obsessive love between a lovesick man and a married woman. Pattie became his Layla. Now in perilously ill health, Eric flew to Miami to record his pained but beautiful masterpiece,
Layla
, for her, perhaps the most impassioned love song of the pop era. Even as the album hurtled up the charts, he moved back to Hurtwood Edge and continued shooting heroin. We all worried that he would not survive.

During the summer of 1971, George received worldwide acclaim for his concert for Bangladesh, which took place on August 1 at Madison Square Garden. This charity affair was organized to raise funds for the starving people of war-torn Pakistan, and he invited a sparkling array of superstars to appear on stage with him, including Ringo, Leon Russell, Ravi Shankar, and surprise guest Bob Dylan. The plan was to raise money not only through ticket sales but through the release of a live album and a documentary movie as well. Even Eric Clapton, despite his illness, managed to show up. George had invited the other Beatles to join them, but Paul flatly refused, not wanting to confuse the public with what might seem to be a Beatle reunion. John accepted George’s invitation and flew to New York and checked into the Park Lane Hotel with Yoko. The morning of the concert, John and Yoko had a fierce fight. When John got in touch with George, he was infuriated to learn that George didn’t want Yoko on stage with them. He thought it would be insulting to ask the greats of the rock and roll business to share the stage with John’s wife. John was so angry that he checked out of the hotel within fifteen minutes and took the next flight back to London, leaving Yoko behind to catch up with him forty-eight hours later.