John Lennon would have turned 85 on October 9, cue the holiday box set. Some Time in New York City (1972) still gets underrated, as does Rock and Roll (see this), and Lennon’s vocals win those arguments handily. (Some young turk should re-mash “Luck of the Irish” to omit that cringe Ono bridge.) The Elephants Memory band can still sound amateurish, but that counted for a lot in 1972, much like Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, or Country Joe and the Fish. Sounding “slick” and “professional” in those days counted as inauthentic, and guess who needs those kinds of politics more than ever. “Woman Is the N_word of the World,” as soaring gospel imprecation takes a certain nerve, and Lennon was that rarity: a deeply humane troubled soul with the chutzpah to shoot off his mouth. “New York City” stands up against any Chuck Berry ditty you’d like to summon (The Who’s “Long Live Rock,” for example). In tribute, here’s the preface to my 2011 biography…
“When two great Saints meet, it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a saint . . .”
—Paul McCartney, dedication to Two Virgins (1968)
WHEN JOHN LENNON presented his fellow Beatles with the cover art forUnfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins in November of 1968, everybody recoiled. McCartney’s quote sat beneath a photo of Lennon and his lover, Yoko Ono, naked in their bedroom with postcoital grins. EMI’s lordly chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, refused to distribute the record, pronouncing John and Yoko “ugly.” In America, Capitol Records balked, and even when the album was shipped through an independent distributor, New Jersey authorities confiscated thirty thousand copies, declaring the cover “obscene.” Controversy subsumed the record’s experimental sounds. Nobody could understand why Lennon would deliberately extend the public-relations debacle he had already created by leaving his British wife and child for the Japanese-American “conceptual artist,” especially on the eve of the first Beatles album in eighteen months, the double White Album (originally The Beatles).
Loose exchanges, precious little respect…
Time has papered over the photograph’s insolence: Lennon was pouring acid on the Beatle myth, demonstrating how shallow and ridiculous pop stardom seemed even as his band hit new creative peaks. This would be just the first of many media campaigns he waged to kick his way out of the Beatles.
He rebuilt his peacenik/politico façade while ridiculing his former partner McCartney (in “How Do You Sleep?”), before careening into a hackneyed drunken-celebrity “lost weekend” in the early 1970s…
That July of 1968, when this insouciant photograph was taken, the Beatles were slogging through the “poisonous” White Album sessions that prompted EMI engineer Geoff Emerick to quit in a huff. Drummer Ringo Starr walked out soon thereafter. The Lennon and McCartney songwriting collaboration had long since trailed off into independent work, even though the songs still bore the trademark Lennon-McCartney authorship. Increasingly, their partnership had graduated from aesthetic one-upmanship to outright conflict: in that same hectic period, the band vetoed Lennon’s first rendition of “Revolution” as too slow, and even the blazing remake sat on the flip side of McCartney’s “Hey Jude,” the band’s revitalizing summer single.
To the others, this widening rift coincided with Yoko Ono’s divisive presence. Lennon could not have chosen a more passive-aggressive way to disrupt the group’s chemistry. Yoko planted herself not only at recording sessions but at private group demos and Apple business meetings, offering comments as if she were a de facto member of the band. Not even the “Beatle wives” had ever been granted such access. She roamed the EMI studios unfettered, without so much as an introduction to George Martin, the band’s producer.
But whatever resentments among the band, the bond between Lennon and Ono was already immune to protest. By now, some forty [sic] years after the group’s breakup, the Lennon legend has graduated into myth of an entirely different order than the one that turned him into an international rock star, the one he retired from for the last five years of his life to raise his son Sean. On the radio, he sings to us from some idealized Tower of Song, frozen in time and memory like Buddy Holly or Eddie Cochran, those creative martyrs who haunted his own impressionable adolescence.
The remaining three Beatles reunited in the mid-1990s to tell their own version of their story with the Anthology video and book, the band’s story tunneled into nostalgia. In 2000, the greatest-hits album 1 became the fastest-selling CD in history, reached number one in twenty-eight countries, and went on to sell more than thirty-one million copies worldwide, the best-selling album of the decade in the United States. At decade’s end, the Beatles became the best-selling band of the new millennium. (This would be the last release guitarist George Harrison oversaw directly; he died in November of 2001.) In 2006, the Cirque du Soleil’s Love began selling out six shows a week in a Las Vegas theater with a customized sound system by producer George Martin and his son, Giles. Its remashed soundtrack became still another huge hit.
Lennon’s own story, of course, had passed through rock’s looking glass long before. He hovered over every frame of the Anthology, and his familiar quotes heaved with subtext: it was hard to imagine Lennon participating in such a whitewashed, sentimental project devoted to enshrining a myth he had done so much to puncture during his lifetime. His post-Beatles revolts linked the personal with the aesthetic: he first ran off with Yoko Ono, then married her the week after McCartney married Linda Eastman, then howled at the demise of the Beatles (on 1970’s blistering Plastic Ono Band) even as he subtly helped to engineer it. He rebuilt his peacenik/politico façade while ridiculing his former partner McCartney (in “How Do You Sleep?”), before careening into a hackneyed drunken-celebrity “lost weekend” in the early 1970s. Finally, after winning a long immigration battle with the Nixon administration, he washed up onto the shores of storybook “monogamy” and parenthood during a five-year sabbatical. His assassination in 1980 quelled Beatle reunion rumors, but only temporarily…
MORE
* Power to the Peoplebox set, 9 CDs, including One to One charity concert, 1972
* The Lenono [sic] Grant for Peace
* Plastic Ono Band box (2022)
* The Beatles Anthology Volume 4, with “Helter Skelter” take 17
* The Beatles Bible, About the Beatles, David Haber’s Beatles Links List,The Art of John Lennon, FestforBeatlesfans, more Beatles links hereand here
* Christoper Newport University primary source archive
* more Beatles links on timrileyauthor.com
reading pile
John Foster Barlow’s Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times (with Robert Greenfield, Crown, 2019) features choice quotes from Brazil’s Gilberto Gil and Wyoming’s Dick Cheney to move his story along. When he’s not tripping at Radio City Music Hall with JFK Jr, he’s prompting Jackie Kennedy’s thoughts on fame:
I’m really kind of shy. But I wanted to be with [JFK] and if that was the price, I was willing to pay it. I then came to see that people were making a big deal out of me, too. At first, I liked this. But then it made me feel like prey. Gradually, I realized that all this stuff in the press really wasn’t about me. It was actually a comic strip that had a character in it that looked like me and did some of the things I did but wasn’t me. It was something they were making up. And I read it quite avidly for a while, and then I realized that it was making me sick so I stopped…
noises off
* From the archives: hagiography is his “middle” name: Springsteen and Landau Do Hollywood; George Clinton abides in the deepest funk; and Babygirl has nothing on Dying for Sex.
* Also: Tom Petty’s “American Girl” for One Battle After Another’s closing credits hits like a wet blanket. Jonathan Demme still owns this track for the finale to Silence of the Lambs. Imagine if Paul Thomas Anderson had used Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”… This Times reporter fails to mention how sculptor Fred Ajanogha got a standing ovation at this Tina Turner statue unveiling in Brownsville, Tennessee.
* Calling T Bone Burnett: AJ Lee called, she wants to sing the Harlan Howard songbook! Pickup pickup pickup! (See No Fences.)
* riley rock index: obits, bylines, youtube finds, reference sites, pinterest, beacons.ai, random deep link
