The Love You Make (65 page)

He had gone to L.A. ostensibly to record a new album with Phil Spector. This was going to be a “return to roots” album for John, tentatively titled
Rock and Roll.
John had made a list of his old favorites, songs like “Be Bop a Lula,” the Gene Vincent song Paul was playing the moment they met, and Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” John anticipated giving Spector all the responsibility, hoping he could sit back and relax, to be used like a superstar session singer. But when John arrived in L.A., he found Spector was more out of control than he was. A legendary rock and roll eccentric in his own right (it is Spector who appears in the back of the limousine at the beginning of
Easy Rider
to collect the dope), Spector’s own vices had sent him over the edge. Spector’s peculiar behavior began from the moment they got together at Spector’s Beverly Hills mansion. Spector promptly locked John and May Pang in the house and kept them prisoner for nine hours.

Spector and Lennon in the studio together weren’t much more winning. Spector acted flakey and weird all the time, and John’s voice was too laced with brandy. The sessions climaxed one day when Spector fired a revolver into the ceiling of the control booth. He disappeared shortly after, taking all of John’s tapes with him. When John protested that he owned the tapes, not Spector, he was informed that Spector had personally paid for the sessions through Warner Brothers, and John would have to get the tapes from Spector. Spector literally barricaded himself in his Beverly Hills mansion, and whenever John called, a servant informed him that “Mr. Spector was ill” or “Mr. Spector has died in an accident.”

“I’m crazy, he’s crazy,” John said. “And he’s crazier than me, that’s all.” A custody battle over the tapes developed, which only depressed John even further; there didn’t seem to be anything he could do that didn’t disintegrate into lawsuits. Without the regimen of the studio to keep him on at least a minimal schedule, John slipped further into his binge. During this period John’s public behavior got correspondingly more desperate, the kind of things an unhappy man does as a cry for help. These incidents were widely reported in the papers back East and in England. In one of the more famous incidents, John was thrown out of the Troubadour, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard, for heckling the Smothers Brothers show. It seems that John and Harry Nilsson got blitzed on Brandy Alexanders, and John couldn’t restrain himself from interrupting the Smothers Brothers act with wisecracks. The show was brought to a complete halt until John and Harry Nilsson could be ejected from the club. On the way to the parking lot, a shoving match with the club’s manager and a photographer ensued. An ugly photo of Nilsson about to throw a punch, with John trying to hold him back, was on all the wire services the next morning.

Another famous incident, often repeated, occurred at a small restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard called Lost on Larabee. John, drunk again, returned from the rest room with an unused sanitary napkin stuck to his forehead. When the waitress came to the table, John demanded, “Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” said the waitress. “You’re some asshole with a Kotex on his forehead.”

One morning John turned to Harry Nilsson and said, “What are we doing? Why don’t we do some work instead of getting into trouble, you know? My name gets in the paper, you never get mentioned and I get all the problems, and
I’m
the one with the immigration problem—so let’s do something constructive!”

Like little boys setting out to build a tree house, John and Harry decided to occupy themselves by recording an album for Harry, which John would produce. They rented themselves a vast beach house in Malibu and moved in together. It couldn’t have been a worse arrangement. Harry was John’s partner in crime, and John had to literally lock himself away in his bedroom not to drink. Harry’s voice was almost gone from cigarettes and alcohol, and it was to John’s credit that an album was produced at all. Entitled
Pussycats,
it was released on RCA to no big fanfare.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Yoko’s so-called friends dropped her like a hot potato, figuring she was washed up without John. The phone at the Dakota stopped ringing, and Yoko became a virtual recluse. No longer under the protection of John’s effective tongue, Yoko now took the full blast of hostility from the rock press, who still blamed her for breaking up the Beatles. After a few months of hermitage, she forced herself out of the apartment and became a regular browser in the many antique stores that lined nearby Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.

I was touched by a phone call I received from her that winter, asking me to please include her in my social calendar. I made sure that Yoko knew she was a welcome visitor in my home. She was always a fascinating yet slightly intimidating dinner guest and a worthy conversationalist. However, she declined more invitations than she accepted, and when she did come by, she was more retiring than I had ever seen her. The fire was still there, but it had been turned down low. People gossiped constantly about whether or not John would ever take her back.

Little did anyone realize at the time that it was Yoko’s decision whether or not she would take John back and that she spoke to either John or May Pang almost every day. Yoko got reports from Pang on John’s daily behavior and mental condition. Often Yoko would give some specific advice on how to handle John in a sticky situation. It was a most sophisticated relationship. John would often say he missed the Dakota and wanted to come back to New York, but Yoko would say, “No, you’re not ready,” and would encourage him to stop drinking and using drugs.

In August of 1974, after eight months in Los Angeles, John returned to New York. “I sort of woke up, still very fuzzy, because I’d been drinking like a lunatic, and it takes it out of your body. And so then I finished what I could of the work in L.A. and dragged it back to New York. Even though [Yoko] said I couldn’t come back, I had to get back to New York anyway and get rid of Harry and this business, and then see where I’m at. So the first instinct was to stop drinking and playing around with the guys, and the thing was to finish off the responsibilities I had, which was my own album and Harry Nilsson’s album, which was very difficult because everybody else was still loony.”

John checked into a suite at the Regency for a while and then into May Pang’s apartment, until he found a large place on East Fifty-third Street and the East River. As soon as he arrived in New York, he felt a creative outburst and in one marathon writing session he composed all the songs for a new album, this one entitled
Walls and Bridges.
“I’m surprised it wasn’t all bluggghh,” John said. “I had the most peculiar year. I’m just glad something came out. It’s describing the year, in a way, but it’s not as schizophrenic as the year really was … only the surface had been touched in
Walls and Bridges.”
Along with Klaus Voorman, Jim Keltner, and Nicky Hopkins, John recorded the album in a creative frenzy at the Record Plant Studios on West Forty-fourth Street.
Walls and Bridges
was an important album for John, a revelatory one in which he comes to terms with himself, similar in a way to his primal LP. Two of the more obvious instances of this are “Scared” and “Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out).” “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” which made it to number one on the lists as one of the most popular lighthearted hits of the year, is a brilliant bit of hip philosophy. The critics were rapturous, as were fans, and having a number-one single out of the clear blue was an enormous boost to John’s confidence and spirits.

The day before he began work on
Walls and Bridges,
the tapes of the Phil Spector album were returned to him. Capitol Records president Al Coury paid Spector S94,000 for their release. John put them on the console and listened to them. According to John, only four cuts were salvage-able, and he didn’t know what to do with them. “Some were all right, but I didn’t feel confident about ‘em. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll record some more.’” John went back to the Record Plant and in five days recorded ten more classic rock and roll songs, using the musicians he had assembled on the
Walls and Bridges
album.

Now a typically Lennonesque complication arose. Years before, John and the Beatles had been involved in a minor plagiarism suit over a passage in “Come Together.” Morris Levy, publisher of Big Seven Music, felt “Come Together” sounded suspiciously similar to Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me,” which Big Seven owned. It was one of many annoyance suits the Beatles had to contend with, and it was settled out of court in October of 1973 in Levy’s favor. In the settlement John agreed to record three Big Seven oldies on his next album. These Big Seven songs were to be recorded on the
Rock and Roll
album in L.A., but Spector had kidnapped the tapes, so when John’s “next album”—
Walls and Bridges—appeared
and only one song, a cover of Big Seven’s “Ya Ya,” was to be found, Levy was angry. Somehow, John took over the negotiations with Levy himself, and John allegedly made a verbal promise to record an album of oldies for Levy’s Adam VIII label. Adam VIII was a TV mail-order company that usually advertised on the late-night movies. Whether or not this is so, John did send Levy a raw tape of his
Rock and Roll
album, albeit only on 7½-inch per second tape and hardly of broadcast quality. Levy packaged this as an album called
Roots
and started hawking it as a TV mail-order item.

When Capitol learned of this album, they rush-released a version of the Phil Spector
Rock and Roll
tapes into the stores, although at a dollar more in price than the
Roots
album. Levy responded with a $42 million lawsuit for damages. The trial started in January and dragged on for three months. The first trial ended in a mistrial when Levy’s lawyer, William Schurtman, allegedly prejudiced the jury by holding up the
Two Virgins
nude album cover. The case was finally settled in July—in John’s favor. Big Seven was awarded $6,795 for John’s breach of contract, and John was awarded $109,000 in damages for lost royalties on Rock
and
Roll and another $35,000 in compensatory damages for the damage his reputation suffered by the release of
Roots.
John was more than happy with the results. It wasn’t the money, and it wasn’t even winning the case exactly, but for once in his whole life, the powers that be, the schoolmasters, the police, the judges and the jury, had found in his favor. There was some justice in this world after all, he decided, and renewed his determination to fight for his immigration clearance in the U.S.

During this period, as John began to take more responsibility for his life, he had three meetings with Yoko. She invited him to the Dakota for tea on three specific occasions. Each time John brought a chum along with him for confidence, usually Harry Nilsson. On the first visit conversation was warm but awkward and kept to generalities. At a signal prearranged by Harry and John, Harry stood up and said he had to leave for an appointment. Yoko walked him to the door, while John sat where he was, hoping Yoko would invite him to stay awhile. But no such invitation was forthcoming; Yoko stood holding the door for him, while Harry waited in the elevator. Yoko remembers how guilty she felt when John called sadly after Harry, “Hold on, wait for me. I’m comin’, too.”

On another visit John looked out the tall windows overlooking the Central Park skyline and said, “I forgot how beautiful it was.”

“Don’t start that again,” Yoko said, tears in her eyes. She sent him away quickly before her resolve broke.

The first real glimmer of reconciliation occurred at the Elton John concert at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving of 1974. This was a particularly festive holiday concert at the height of Elton’s popularity, and John was rumored to be making a surprise appearance on stage with Elton in payment of a happy debt. Elton had helped out by singing and playing piano in the sessions for John’s “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.” When Elton recorded John’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” for his own album, John sang in the backup chorus. At that recording session Elton asked if John would appear live with him on stage if “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” became a number-one hit. “I said ‘Sure,”’ John said, “not thinkin’ in a million years it was gonna get to number one.” The single indeed hit number one, and Elton was calling in the chips. John was expected to appear in the latter half of the show as a poorly kept surprise.

When Yoko heard about this she called Tony King, who happened to be working for Elton. “I would like to go to Madison Square Garden to see John, but I don’t want John to know I’m there,” she told Tony. “I want to sit somewhere where I can see him but he can’t see me.” This was arranged, and Tony ushered Yoko to her seat just after the lights went down in the Garden.

Just before John and Elton were about to go on stage, two gift boxes containing white gardenias were delivered to their dressing rooms backstage. Both notes said, “Best of Luck, all my love, Yoko.” John rushed into Elton’s dressing room and said, “Oh, look what Yoko sent me!” and Elton said, “Me too!” They both pinned them on their lapels. “Thank God Yoko’s not here tonight,” John said. “I couldn’t go on I’d be so nervous.”

Elton smiled knowingly.

When Yoko first saw Elton wearing her gardenia she broke into a broad smile. She applauded excitedly throughout the concert, beaming in the dark. Finally, Elton introduced his surprise guest. All the lights in the Garden went up, a blinding white light that illuminated 22,000 fans in the huge rotunda, and then John appeared on the stage. The impact of recognition was breathtaking. The crowd burst into cheers and applause that far exceeded anything heard in the sports arena that night. There was an out-pouring of love and respect for him that would have melted the coldest heart. In her box seat, lost among the waving mass of fans, Yoko burst into tears. All these people worshipping and loving the man, and yet he was still alone.

When the show was over, she asked Tony King to take her backstage to see John. Tony knocked on the door to John’s dressing room and said, “I’ve got a surprise for you,” and in walked Yoko.