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selenakThe above is a John Lennon quote from when he was being quizzed about How do you sleep?; I thought I might as well get the post about the fascinating horrible trainwreck period of post Beatles-relationships (i.e. the early 70s) and eventual recovery (because I just can't leave it at the trainwreck, I'm too much of a softie for that) out of my system. First of all, though, an anecdote from 1968 which isn't directly connected to the trainwreck but describes one of the few times a tale from the dissolution stage makes me grin, and I need a bit of a cheer before I get into the gory musical bitchfest of 1971.
So, in 1968, John and Yoko become lovers. This leads to many things, but not surprisingly given who we're talking about, one of them is an album, Two Virgins, the first Lennon solo album. Which is mostly a sound collage, but that's not what it became instantly famous for; what everyone fixated on was the cover, showing John and Yoko in the nude. It's not an erotic picture and not meant to be; truth to tell, they both look slightly doped. The point, as John put it, was to show the honesty of Yoko's work, "naked, basically simple and childlike and truthful", and to show the two of them as reborn anew in each other. The rest of the gang was less than impressed. Said Ringo: "Ah, come on, John. You're doing all this stuff and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer for it."
Paul's comment ended up as the sleeve note for Two Virgins and was somewhere between irony and admiration for the John-and-Yoko event: "'When two great Saints meet it is a humbling experience." The problem was how to get EMI to release it. A meeting was called between John and Yoko, Paul and Sir Joseph Lockwood, the head of EMI. Now you might wondering why Paul was there at all, given that he had nothing (sleevenote aside) whatsoever to do with the record and given that John's later presentation of the Beatles' breakup period was that everyone was against him and Yoko from the start. The explanation, as Sir Joseph Lockwood (usually referred to as "Sir Joe" by the Beatles and a gay old bachelor in both senses of the word) recalls: "I constantly saw Lennon and McCartney together because Paul always came along to see that I wasn't rude to John - who I can't say I got on with. Paul didn't want me to upset John."
In this case, running diplomatic interference between John and the rest of humanity didn't work, for the following dialogue, according to Sir Joe, ensued:
John: 'Well, aren't you shocked?'
Sir Joe: 'No, I've seen worse than this.'
John: 'So it's all right then, is it?'
Sir Joe: 'No, it's not all right. I'm not worried about the rich people, the duchesses and those people who follow you. But your mums and dads and girl fans will object strongly. You will be damaged, and what will you gain? What's the purpose of it?'
Yoko: 'It's art.'
Sir Joe: 'Well, in that case I should find some better bodies to put on the cover than your two. They're not very attractive. Why don't you put Paul on the cover instead?'
Sadly, not a single biography will tell me how the three parties concerned reacted to that one. If you're wondering, Two Virgins was eventually released through the EMI subsiduary Track Records, and the Beatles' accounting firm, Byrce Hammer, resigned in protest over the cover. And it didn't sell well. John was more than ever convinced that the world was a gigantic conspiracy out to get him and Yoko. And now fast foward three years.
If you want the short version, it goes like this:
John: 14564454 interviews on the theme of "everyone sucks but Yoko and me, and that's reality" (the best exampe for this is the 1970 Rolling Stone "Lennon Remembers" which is John at his most poisonous, not simply towards Paul and the group but really everyone other than Yoko. The only one who got a sort of apology later was George Martin who was told "well, I was smashed and I didn't mean it". Though John in his mid-70s and in some of the 80s interviews did admit he exaggarated and lied a lot in the 1970s stuff)
Paul: *releases his second album, RAM, with "Too Many People", a song to the theme of* "Fuck you. You'll rue the day you left me, you self-righteous bastard. Go on preaching your platitudes. P.S. I have Linda now, and she's great!"
John: releases his second album, "Imagine", which includes the song How do you sleep?, or: "The only reason anyone ever liked you was because you're pretty, you have no talent, you never did anything, I hate you and your music forever and ever, you're surrounded by syccophants, and also, you're totally your wife's tool. Why are you even still alive, you useless piece of garbage?*
(Sidenote: lines like "your mama tells you how to jump" is why I can never buy "Yoko made John into a feminist" claims. Yes, he talked the talk, but he never walked the walk towards anyone other than Yoko herself.)
Paul: ....
John: This wasn't personal, it was artistic. Or, you started it. Or, Actually, I meant me, not you. Or, hey, you started it!
Paul:....
John: I just realized that the guy I insisted the Beatles should have as manager is a crook and sued him, so you maybe kind of sort of were right about that. George and Ringo sued him, too. I'm not telling you this directly but I mention it in a couple of interviews, okay?
Paul: I'm cautiously expressing my relief about that in an interview. Also, I'm releasing a critically praised album that contains a song in your style that's a tribute, not a parody.
John: I've just separated from Yoko. Heading towards L.A. now for a long bachelor party of booze, drugs, hanging out with the old gang and getting kicked out of night clubs. I'm even mentioning you and the Beatles on the radio without including insults. Maybe SOMEONE should show up and intervene. Also, I like your new album.
Paul: How easy do you think I am anyway?
Yoko: I might have send John away because we were in a crisis, but I did make our P.A. babysit. Now it looks like he's going to settle down with her, which wasn't the intention. Also, did you hear about Phil Spector and the gun, and the getting kicked out of night clubs? In conclusion, help?
Paul: *packs for Los Angeles*
Prelude: the lawsuit from December 1970. It's best summed up and explained here; I have to say I agree with the author that the wonder isn't that Paul sued but that it took him so long. Of course, that he filed suit and that the judge found in his favour did not endear him to the other three in 1971. John's first reaction was via interviews, abounding with comparisons of Paul to Engelbert Humperdinck and swearing that they never ever were the littlest bit close. Urban legends also include incidents of John showing up at Paul's house to throw stones through the window and yelling his name, or climbing over the wall to destroy a painting he gave Paul in better times, but Paul says neither incident ever happened, and he ought to know. (John never mentioned anything like this happening, either.)
Act 1: Ram, or, Up Yours, Bandmate!
Paul's second solo album, panned at the time, currently enjoying a pretty good reputation. There are three songs John believed were about him, "Too Many People", "Dear Boy" and "3 Legs"; Paul said only one of these was about John, Too Many People, while Dear Boy was about Linda's ex husband and 3 Legs wasn't about anything in his life at all. Before John pointed it out, Too Many People hadn't been noticed by anyone as having a Lennon connotation, because the lines most obvious about this - "you took your lucky break and broke it in two" and "too many people preaching practices" - are cushioned in what John called "Paul surrealing it". John, about those digs: "He's so obscure other people didn't notice them, but I heard them." Here's the song itself:
Musically, it's a solid concert rocker (and he dusts it off now and then for concerts); lyrically, well, I may be biased but I see it more as bratty than as vicious. (As for the other two songs John believed were about him, Dear Boy which is basically - "how could you let this great woman go? I was so lucky to have found her!" really makes more sense when you apply it to Linda's ex (who had divorced her years before she met Paul and had shown no particular interest in her or their daughter Heather, whom Paul adopted, afterwards) than if you apply it to the Lennon and McCartney situation. (Unless John thought "guess you never knew, dear boy, that love was there" meant him.) Three Legs actually is just a collection of nonsensical rhymes, so unless there is some secret John and Paul code the rest of us isn't privileged to, I'm at a loss as to guessing what John thought was about him.
On the other hand, there's the backside of the cover.
Yes, these are two beetles in an unmistakable position you see there. Now whether the symbolism here is "I feel screwed over by my bandmates" or "fuck you, John!" is up to debate, but, well. To quote George Harrison about the Lennon/McCartney bickering of 1971, "childish, childish". So no, one can't say John was unprovoked. His retaliation was to go nuclear with rage. And he, for one, was determined not to be "obscure" about it at all.
Felix Dennis, one of the participants of the sessions for the Imagine album, was present when How Do You Sleep? was composed and recorded. Also present were George, who was pissed off enough at Paul to play lead guitar on the song, and Ringo, who tried to get everyone to calm down (mostly in vain) until he walked out in disgust. Felix D. describes the process thusly:
They were writing the song as they performed it. And as these lyrics emerged, I remember Ringo getting more and more upset by this. He was really not very happy about this, and at one point I have a clear memory of his saying, "That's enough, John.' There were two magnificent studio musicians, and they too were not very happy about it, but as usual, Lennon plowed his own furrow and he just didn't give a shit whether people liked it or not. It is absolutely true to say that Yoko wrote many of the lyrics. I watched her writing them and then watched her race into the studio to show John - which would often annoy the musicians, but she would race in there anyway, waving a piece of paper and show John she'd had an idea. He would say 'Great' or whatever, and he would add something to it, then he would come back and relax in the control room for a bit and they would confer together. They've both got appalling handwriting, writing in a great hurry.
He would think of a lyric, and then she would think of a lyric, and then they'd burst out laughing, they'd think that was absolutely hysterical. Some of it was absolutely puerile, thank God a lot of it never actually got recorded because it was highly, highly personal, like a bunch of schoolboys standing in the lavatory making scatological jokes and then falling about with laughter at their own wit. That was about the level of it but thank goodness in the end somebody obviously talked some sense to them, or they'd talked sense to each other. Maybe Ringo had got on to them and told them not to be so brutal. Some of the lyrics were a lot ruder than you will find on the final version.
To counterbalance that, even if it might have been very hurtful to Paul McCartney, I think that the mood in which it was written should be borne in mind, which was one of schoolboy for the hell of it. It's quite obvious that Paul must have been some sort of figure of authority in Lennon's life, because you don't take the piss out of somebody that isn't a figure of authority. They had one line about Paul's Little Richard singing. I don't know if this is true that Paul was always quite proud of his ability to sing like Little Richard; they were making reference to that. It never ended up on the final cut. Phil Spector never said a single word about the lyrics, but Ringo and other musicians there would remonstrate with him and say, 'Oh, for Christ's sake, John, that's a bit much, you know!' Sometimes he would agree and cross it out. All I can say, if he'd wanted to write something to really hurt Paul's feelings, they certainly compiled enough material to do so. If he'd had someone he could confide in, other than Yoko, I think they would have persuaded him to leave it in the vaults for posterity. It was a bit of a shame he ever let it out.
Allen Klein claimed he was another co-author of the song. Originally, the Yesterday-related line went "All you done was Yesterday/you probably pinched that bitch anyway!", but Allen Klein, already burned by one McCartney lawsuit and fearing another, persuaded John to change it in "all you are today is just Another Day". Yoko remembers the occasion with less giggles and more questions on her part. Here's what she had to say to Philip Norman about it in 2008:
As mild and oblique as the comment was [Paul's "You took your lucky break and broke it in two" line from "Too Many People"], it seemed to cut John to the heart. On top of the lawsuit, it was like the tipping point between a divorcing couple that turns love into savage, no-holds-barred hostility. Indeed, John's wounded anger was more that of an ex-spouse than ex-colleague, reinforcing a suspicion already in Yoko's mind that his feelings for Paul had been far more intense than the world at large ever guessed. From chance remarks he had made, she gathered there had even been a moment where - on the principle that bohemians should try everything - he had contemplated an affair with Paul, but had been deterred by Paul's immovable heterosexuality. Nor, apparently, was Yoko the only one to have picked up on this. Around Apple, in her hearing, Paul would sometimes be called John's princess. She had also once heard a rehearsal tape with John's voice calling out "Paul ... Paul ... " in a strangely subservient, pleading way. "I knew there was something going on there," she remembers. "From his point of view, not from Paul's. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn't help wondering what it was really about."
If you want a non-slashy theory of why John was so upset about the "you took your lucky break and broke it in two" line, I can offer relevant quotes as well. Given all the "John the genius, Paul the hack" dominance in the rock press for a long time, it may come as a surprise, but for all his "I don't need anyone but Yoko!" bravado, John seems to have been quite insecure about this if you look at a couple of early 70s quotes.
What did qualify Allen Klein, despite an impending conviction for tax criminality in the US and the Rolling Stones already muttering about how he robbed them off their song catalogue, so much that John wanted him as manager?
And one of the early things that impressed me about Allen - he went through all the old songs we'd written, and he really knew which stuff I'd written. Not many people knew which was my song and which was Paul's, but he'd say, "Well, McCartney didn't write that line, did he?" And I'd say, "Right," you know, and that's what really got me interested [in him], because he knew what our contributions were to the group. Most people thought it was all Paul, or all George Martin."
What was the most objectionable thing about Lee Eastman, Paul's idea for manager, other than that he was Paul's father-in-law:
He thinks I'm some kind of guy who got struck lucky, a pal of Paul's.
Why move to America?
“In the States, we (John and Yoko) are treated like artists. But here, it’s like, I’m the lad who knew Paul, got a lucky break."
In conclusion, the very idea that his success as a musician might have had something to do with Paul was unbearable to John in 1971. (The "people thought it was all Paul, or all George Martin" is especially glaring as Lennonian paranoia because while reviews in the 1960s weren't playing the "who's the one true genius?" game yet, John was still the more favoured by them if it came down to it. He was "the smart Beatle", Paul was "the cute one". He was the one voted as personality of the decade along with Kennedy and Martin Luther King by Time Magazine in 1969. And it still wasn't enough. No, he had to prove once and for all that not only was he perfectly able to work on his own, that he didn't need Paul, but he also needed to prove he never had needed Paul to begin with, that Paul never had had anything worthwile to offer. Presto, How do you sleep?
Act 2: Jealous Guy, or, I didn't mean it like that and if I did it was your fault anyway!
Imagine the album was released to general acclamation, especially the title track. But even Rolling Stone, a magazine solidly pro-John and anti-Paul in the breakup feud, found How do you sleep? such a vicious song that "it sanctifies its victim and demeans its attacker". John sounded uncharacteristically embarrassed and defensive about it when questioned about it on the Mike Douglas show, which he co-hosted with Yoko for a while, claiming that Paul didn't mind a bit, not really, "if I can't fight with my best friend, with whom can I fight?" and that Paul started it anyway, and it wasn't really aggressive, not really:
The song wouldn't go away. In the Imagine film, John tries another explanation: 'It's not about Paul, it's about me. I'm really attacking myself. But I regret the association, well, what's to regret? He lived through it. The only thing that matters is how he and I feel about these things and not what the writer or commentator thinks about it. Him and me are okay.'
Even two days before his death in 1980, in a BBC interview with Any Pebbles, How do you sleep? comes up again. Quoth John:
I used my resentment against Paul that I have as a kind of sibling rivalry resentment from youth, to create a song. Rivalry between two guys, I mean, it was always there, it was a creative rivalry, it was not a terrible vicious horrible vendetta. I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and the Beatles and the relationship with Paul to write 'How Do You Sleep?' I don't really go round with those thoughts in my head all the time.
Meanwhile, chez McCartney in 1971: "he's not offended" was either John being boundlessly naive or a deliberate lie to the media. Of course Paul was hurt. There were no statements to the media at the time, though much later Paul said: "I think he was a sod to hurt me. I think he knew exactly what he was doing and because we had been so intimate he knew what would hurt me and he used it to great effect."
He also knew that any retaliation would only cause further escalation and make things worse; someone had to wave olive branches for at least a truce, and it was never going to be John, unless you count those "him and me, we're okay now" quotes. And maaaaaaayyyybe Jealous Guy, another track from the Imagine album, which at various times has been claimed as a song about Yoko, about Cynthia, about an amalgan of all the women in John's life, and yes, about Paul, too. In any case, Paul's next author-confessed-to-be-about-John song from Wings Wild Life, still reeling from the How Do You Sleep? shock, is definitely a truce offer:
Not one of his best, but heartfelt. There were no more bickerings via the press for a while, at least not between John and Paul. For no sooner had the How do you sleep? waves started to settle, did the Concert for Bangladesh waves start to rise. This concert was organized by George, and was to take place at Madison Square Garden. Originally, John had agreed to appear with George and Ringo on stage, but had assumed this would mean Yoko as well. George, however, had only invited John, declared that he'd gladly provide Yoko with a ticket for the front row but under no circumstances would he appear with her on stage, least of all in a situation which could be interpreted as a Beatles reunion minus Paul and with Yoko in his place. At which point it must have become obvious to John and George that, to use the family analogy, while George had sided with Dad against Mum, he still didn't like Stepmum one bit better than he had done when she had first shown up in the studio, and indeed still wasn't willing to accept her as Stepmum at all. The net result being no John at the Bangladesh benefit concert, and George as the next target of public anger a la Lennon:
Int.: Do you have any regrets about not doing the Bangladesh concert?
John: I don't want to play "My Sweet Lord." I'd as soon go out and do exactly what I want. (...)
Int.: Let's talk a bit about George. He's perhaps the most enigmatic Beatle. Are you saying George is more conventional than he makes himself out to be?
John: There's no telling George. He always has a point of view about that wide, you know. [John places his hands a few inches apart.] You can't tell him anything.
Yoko: George is sophisticated, fashionwise. . . .
John: He's very trendy, and he has the right clothes, and all of that. . . .
Yoko: But he's not sophisticated, intellectually.
John: No. He's very narrow-minded and he doesn't really have a broader view. Paul is far more aware than George. One time in the Apple office in Wigmore Street, I said something to George, and he said, "I'm as intelligent as you, you know." This must have been resentment, but he could have left anytime if I was giving him a hard time.
Repeat after mer: poor George. To be compared unfavourably to Paul by John at the height of the Lennon/McCartney feud after playing guitar for John's How do you sleep? and backing John all the way before the Bangladesh affair must have stung nearly as badly as playing second fiddle to the big two when they were still working together.
The other aftermath of the Bangladesh concert was between Allen Klein, John, George and Ringo. Because not only did it turn out Klein had filed profit from what was a charity concert into his own pockets but he had made the mistake of siding with George on the no-Yoko-on-stage matter. Back when making his original pitch to John to become the Beatles' manager, Allen Klein had promised he would provide Yoko with film deals and exhibitions. The exhibition promise was he fulfilled after they moved to the USA. This was a huge one-woman show held in the prestigious Everson Museum of Fine Arts in Syracuse, New York, scheduled to open on John's birthday on 9 October 1971. Normally such a show would be a retrospective of a lifetime's work gathered together from other museums and private collections. Yoko had only exhibited a couple of times and had sold virtually nothing. Her complete existant work would not have filled even one of the huge Everson galleries. In order to fill the huge spaces - 50,000 square feet consisting of seven galleries, a sculpture court and other rooms for installations - a team of people was hired to make art objects. The Everson Museum had allocated one sixth of its annual budget to the show but cost overruns meant that the Beatles, not just John, but all four of them via Apple, finished up paying $80,000 towards Yoko’s exhibition. Then there was the matter of John's own concert in Madison Square Garden, where Klein had been forced to give away 5000 free tickets order to ensure a full house, something he solidly blamed on Yoko's presence. At which point Klein came to the mathematical conclusion of John alone on stage = money, John plus Yoko = loss of money, Yoko = more loss of money, and told John as much. It went down as well as you'd expect. By 1973, John and Allen Klein were sueing each other. (Klein was sueing John over for $508,000 in unpaid loans.) (It was now Allen Klein's turn to become the object of an aggressive John Lennon song, Steel and Glass. Melodic similarity to "How do you sleep?" a pure coincidence, I'm sure.)
What role the Allen Klein turnaround played on the increasing stress in the John/Yoko relationship, only they know, but Klein sued in the summer of 1973, and this was also when their period of separation started, the "Lost Weekend", a quaint name for eighteen months apart. Says May Pang, who had originally been hired by Klein for his company but had been both Yoko's and John's personal assistant during the last two years:
I was coordinating press for Yoko's new album, Feeling the Space - and simultanously starting the ssessions for John's upcoming album, Mind Games. Early one morning, Yoko came to my office in their apartment at the Dakota and told me that she and John were "not getting along". It was obvious to all of us who worked there that things were a bit tense between them, so this wasn't exactly a bombshell. Yoko went on to say that John would start seeing someone new, and she wanted it to be "someone who would treat John well". I now felt the bombshell coming. If they split up, I thought, who will I be working for? Yoko continued, "You don't have a boyfriend." I dropped my pad and pen. Did I just hear right? I assured her I wasn't interested in John, if that's what she was thinking. She told me she knew that. But she didn't stop there. "I think you should go out with him." I was dumbfounded. I kept telling her no, I would not go out with John. But apparently her mind was made up. "If John asks you out, you should go!" Yoko announced, making it sound a little stronger than a suggestion.
Now May Pang may be exaggarating her protests, and that it took her two weeks to say yes, but Yoko has confirmed the essentials of that conversation. (Today, methinks both Yoko and John could be sued for sexual harrassment of an employee.) At any rate, off to Los Angeles John went, without his wife, with his new girl friend, some new songs, and the oddest mixture of extended drunken bachelor party and making up with the exes and the estranged kids was about to start.
Act 3. Let Me Roll It, or: I Know (I know).
John wasn't the only one in a travelling mood. One of Paul's last (and rebuffed) plans to revitalize the Beatles had been for them to show up anonymously and play in university cafeterias and clubs, avoiding hysteria via anonymity and no annoucements and regaining the joy of playing for a live audience. When he had assembled his new post-Beatles band, Wings, he did just that. This had worked out well enough to make a first Wings album, Wild Life, which was promptly torn to shreds by the critics and bought by the public, and to start a more upscale tour. By mid 1973, however, when it was time for the next album, the Wings line-up was reduced again to Paul, Linda and Denny Laine. (He must have thought he'd never be able to keep a group together again.) Whom Mr. Workoholic packed in an airplane, together with Geoff Emerick, his balance engineer from the Beatles days, to record the album at the EMI studios in Lagos, Nigeria. There was, as mentioned in the previous post, a mugging right at the start, it was hot, some of the local musicians were afraid Paul was there to "steal their music" until played the music in question which showed no African influence whatsoever, and poor devoted Geoff E. was sick half of the time, but the resulting album was the first since Beatles times to both get critical praise and sell well, and got Emerick his second Grammy (after Sgt. Pepper) for his engineering. One of the songs on it was Let Me Roll It. To quote the often immensely quotable Peter Ames Carlin about it:
This is the shit, right here: The most simple bass line; stripped-down drums; a seething two-part guitar riff; and a guy so desperately in love/lust that he's gone totally primal. In its moment the song seemed like a blistering answer to John Lennon's great primal scream tunes and indeed, Paul has borrowed the sound and feel of "Plastic Ono Band" - right down to the funereal thump of the drums. He's got the Arthur Janov blues, you can hear it in the primal wail that brings the thing to its thumping, tooth-gnashing, seething fade. A rip at John? Not even - call it a tribute. And you know who dug the tune, and the album, more than anyone? That would be J. Lennon. He knew brilliance when he heard it, you know.
My own intepretation, entirely subjective, would be "Muzak to your ears, hm? Okay then. You know, I can do what you do; I just prefer not to. But let me give a little demonstration". Or I could be wrong. At any rate, Paul was always great with the musical tribute/parody/homage - think of Back in the USSR and its Chuck Berry and Beach Boys riffs, for example. This was a whatever you want to call it to solo John Lennon:
Back from Nigeria there were the Allen Klein news. (Did he resist the urge to say "I told you so" to any of the other three? I hope so, but somehow, I doubt it.) There were also suspiciously mellow utterings across the Atlantic via the press:
"I haven’t talked to Paul since before he did the last tour with Wings (apparently spring 1973), but I heard ‘Red Rose Speedway’ and it was OK. I liked parts of his TV Special (James Paul McCartney, from spring 1973), especially the intro. The bit made in Liverpool made me squirm a bit, but Paul’s a pro. He always has been."
"Of mine I like ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Walrus’, of Paul’s I like ‘Here There and Everywhere’. Of course I still love ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and another I liked was ‘For No One’.”
“Yeah, I miss Paul a lot. It’s been a year since I’ve seen him. He came over with Linda to me place in New York. Course I’d like to see him. He’s an old friend, isn’t he?”
“When I slagged off the Beatles thing in the press, it was like divorce pangs, and it was just like in the old days… you know, I’ve always had a bit of a mouth and I’ve got to live up to it. ‘Lennon beats up local DJ at Paul’s 21 birthday party.”. Then we had that fight Paul and I had through the Melody Maker, but that was a period I had to go through.”
and, on Rolling Stone, aka the magazine to which John had first vented his Paul = Engelbert Humperdinck comparisons:
Q: "George told Rolling Stone that if you wanted the Beatles, go listen to Wings. It seemed a bit of a putdown."
JOHN: "I didn't see what George said, so I really don't have any comment. (pause) Band on the Run is a great album. Wings is almost as conceptual a group as Plastic Ono Band. Plastic Ono was a conceptual group, meaning whoever was playing was the band. And Wings keeps changing all the time. It's conceptual. I mean, they're backup men for Paul. It doesn't matter who's playing. You can call them Wings, but it's Paul McCartney music. And it's good stuff. It's good Paul music and I don't really see the connection."
Otherwise, news of John via the public media weren't nearly as pleasant sounding. The were the tales of Phil (now serving time in prison) Spector(booze being poured down a mixing console, Spector waving his gun around and firing after which John said either to kill him or not but no more ruining of his hearing), brawls with various L.A. scene suspects, and John getting kicked out of the Troubadour twice, one with a Kotex on his forehead and once when he was heckling the Smothers Brothers. This even featured that most obnoxious of celebrity utterings, "don't you know who I am?" It all sounded a bit like John after Julia's death from a distance.
(On the bright side, John also for the first time in three years contacted his son Julian again and spoke to his ex wife Cynthia at May Pang's investigation; a visit was arranged and went over well, with the result that May and Cynthia hit it off and remain friendly to this day. This, however, did not make the headlines the way the Lennon-boozing-and-doing-drugs-in-LA events did.)
Band on the Run making it to number 1 in the US was as good a reason to go there as any. And then there was the visit from Yoko (Paul's version) or the visit at Yoko's (her version - but who visited whom is really the only difference):
When they split up, Yoko came to London, looking like a widow, a little diminutive sad figure in black. She came around to Cavendish, and she said, 'John's left, he's off with May Pang.' So, being friendly and seeing her plight, Linda or I said to her, 'Do you still love him? Do you want to get back with him?' She said, 'Yes.' We said, 'Well, what would it take then?' because we were going out L. A. way. (...) I said, 'I can take a message. What would I have to tell him?' And she gave me this whole thing: 'He would have to come back to New York. He can't live with me immediately. He'd have to court me, he'd have to ask me out. He'd have to send me flowers, he'll have to do it all again.' Of course, she'd sent him off with May Pang, but that wasn't the point at that time.
So I went out there and he was doing Pussy Cats with Nilsson and Keith Moon and Jesse Ed Davis, to name but three total nutters. Three beautiful total alcohol nutters plus John, forget it! Even the location is perfect. We went round to a session and sat there for a bit. It was a little bit strange, John and I, seeing each other at that time. But then we dropped by their house the next day for a cup of tea or something. I remember Harry Nilsson offering me some angel dust. I said, 'What is it?' He said, 'It's elephant tranquilliser.' I said, 'Is it fun?' He thought for about half a minute. 'No,' he said. I said, 'Well, you know what, I won't have any.' He seemed to understand. But that's how it was there.
Keith Moon was very sweet, we had a nice chat with Keith. He was very complimentary about Band on the Run, which was out recently. He asked, 'Who drummed on that, man?' and it happened to be me. So I said, 'Me, man.' Moonie is my second favourite drummer of all time. Ringo, Moonie, John Bonham would be my three main drummers. Not technically the best by a long shot but for feel and emotion and economy, they're always there. Particularly Ringo. So I was having fun with the guys sitting round the pool, and eventually John got up. Linda and I had kids so we'd be up early. We wouldn't be just lying in bed till three in the afternoon, which is what John was doing. He was a teenager again. It was everything he'd always wanted to do in Liverpool. He was just being his old Liverpool self, just a wild, wild boy. The Brendan Behan thing. He was involved in all sorts of punch-ups with Harry Nilsson, and Spector was there letting his gun off in the control room, apparently. I mean, those are not sessions I would want to be at.
But I took John in the back room of the house, sat down -'How you doing? Great. Lovely to see you ...' He was in quite a mellow mood. It was early morning for him, early morning in the afternoon. I said, 'Yoko was through London and she said she wouldn't mind getting back together. How about you? Would you be interested in that?' He said, 'Yeah.' That he still loved her and stuff. So I said, 'Here's the deal. You've got to go back to New York. You've got to go get a flat, court her, so-and-so ...' and that's just what he did.
Yoko, only last week: "Paul told me he was going to see John in L.A. He asked what it would take for me to go back to John, and I said, 'Well, maybe if he courted me.' I want the world to know that it was a very touching thing that he did for John. He'd heard the rumours that John was in a bad way, in a rough situation, and he was genuinely concerned about his old partner. It was so sweet that he wanted to save John. Sure, they were two macho, very talented guys who had strong opinions, arguments, like most brothers. But when it came to the crux of the matter, when Paul thought John was in dire straights, he helped... John often said he didn't understand why Paul did this for us, but he did.
As for how the actual first meeting in Los Angeles went, secret message from Yoko aside, we have May Pang's description for that one:
'Paul headed straight for John'. "Hello John", he said eagerly. 'John however, was a study in casualness.' "How are you Paul"?, he replied softly'. "Fine. How about you"? "Okay". "Hi duckie", Linda said to John, kissing him on the cheek.' "Hello Linda". 'John and Paul made small talk as if they had been speaking on the phone two or three times a day and had spoken just a few hours earlier. It was one of the most casual conversations I had ever heard. They couldn't be the two men who not only had been trading vicious attacks with each other in public but also had squadrons of lawyers poised in battle against each other while they carved up their multimillion dollar empire. They looked like any pair of old friends having a pleasant low key reunion. The small talk continued, then Paul, like a man possessed, suddenly bounced up and headed straight for Ringo's drum kit. and began to bash the drums. "Let's play!" he exclaimed. John strapped on his guitar and began to play Midnight Special, one of the numbers the Beatles used to jam on when they first began to play together. (...) John suddenly became very enthusiastic. "We need a bass player. Paul and I are jamming together". (...) 'When they were through playing, John and Paul once again, picked up their casual conversation. It was as if they had not played at all. It sounded as though (...) all of them were still teenagers and nothing in their lives had changed. I realized then, that no matter what might happen among them, this was the way they would always relate to each other'.
John's own summation of that reunion was: I went through a phase of hating all those Beatles years and having to smile when I didn’t want to smile, but that was the life I chose, and now I’m out it, it’s great to look back on it, man. Great! I was thinking only recently – why haven’t I considered the good times instead of moaning about what we had to go through? And Paul was here and we spent two or three nights together talking about the old days and it was cool, seeing what each other remembered from Hamburg and Liverpool.
And thus I'll leave them in the mid 70s, captured on a polaroid (no, Paul, you still can't carry off a moustache, especially not in the 70s - should have left it in the Sgt. Pepper era) on the Californian sun, with not quite said apologies.
After all, John was busy writing an apology song just about everyone in his life could have seen as directed at themselves. When talking about musicians, it makes sense to let music have the last word:
So, in 1968, John and Yoko become lovers. This leads to many things, but not surprisingly given who we're talking about, one of them is an album, Two Virgins, the first Lennon solo album. Which is mostly a sound collage, but that's not what it became instantly famous for; what everyone fixated on was the cover, showing John and Yoko in the nude. It's not an erotic picture and not meant to be; truth to tell, they both look slightly doped. The point, as John put it, was to show the honesty of Yoko's work, "naked, basically simple and childlike and truthful", and to show the two of them as reborn anew in each other. The rest of the gang was less than impressed. Said Ringo: "Ah, come on, John. You're doing all this stuff and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer for it."
Paul's comment ended up as the sleeve note for Two Virgins and was somewhere between irony and admiration for the John-and-Yoko event: "'When two great Saints meet it is a humbling experience." The problem was how to get EMI to release it. A meeting was called between John and Yoko, Paul and Sir Joseph Lockwood, the head of EMI. Now you might wondering why Paul was there at all, given that he had nothing (sleevenote aside) whatsoever to do with the record and given that John's later presentation of the Beatles' breakup period was that everyone was against him and Yoko from the start. The explanation, as Sir Joseph Lockwood (usually referred to as "Sir Joe" by the Beatles and a gay old bachelor in both senses of the word) recalls: "I constantly saw Lennon and McCartney together because Paul always came along to see that I wasn't rude to John - who I can't say I got on with. Paul didn't want me to upset John."
In this case, running diplomatic interference between John and the rest of humanity didn't work, for the following dialogue, according to Sir Joe, ensued:
John: 'Well, aren't you shocked?'
Sir Joe: 'No, I've seen worse than this.'
John: 'So it's all right then, is it?'
Sir Joe: 'No, it's not all right. I'm not worried about the rich people, the duchesses and those people who follow you. But your mums and dads and girl fans will object strongly. You will be damaged, and what will you gain? What's the purpose of it?'
Yoko: 'It's art.'
Sir Joe: 'Well, in that case I should find some better bodies to put on the cover than your two. They're not very attractive. Why don't you put Paul on the cover instead?'
Sadly, not a single biography will tell me how the three parties concerned reacted to that one. If you're wondering, Two Virgins was eventually released through the EMI subsiduary Track Records, and the Beatles' accounting firm, Byrce Hammer, resigned in protest over the cover. And it didn't sell well. John was more than ever convinced that the world was a gigantic conspiracy out to get him and Yoko. And now fast foward three years.
If you want the short version, it goes like this:
John: 14564454 interviews on the theme of "everyone sucks but Yoko and me, and that's reality" (the best exampe for this is the 1970 Rolling Stone "Lennon Remembers" which is John at his most poisonous, not simply towards Paul and the group but really everyone other than Yoko. The only one who got a sort of apology later was George Martin who was told "well, I was smashed and I didn't mean it". Though John in his mid-70s and in some of the 80s interviews did admit he exaggarated and lied a lot in the 1970s stuff)
Paul: *releases his second album, RAM, with "Too Many People", a song to the theme of* "Fuck you. You'll rue the day you left me, you self-righteous bastard. Go on preaching your platitudes. P.S. I have Linda now, and she's great!"
John: releases his second album, "Imagine", which includes the song How do you sleep?, or: "The only reason anyone ever liked you was because you're pretty, you have no talent, you never did anything, I hate you and your music forever and ever, you're surrounded by syccophants, and also, you're totally your wife's tool. Why are you even still alive, you useless piece of garbage?*
(Sidenote: lines like "your mama tells you how to jump" is why I can never buy "Yoko made John into a feminist" claims. Yes, he talked the talk, but he never walked the walk towards anyone other than Yoko herself.)
Paul: ....
John: This wasn't personal, it was artistic. Or, you started it. Or, Actually, I meant me, not you. Or, hey, you started it!
Paul:....
John: I just realized that the guy I insisted the Beatles should have as manager is a crook and sued him, so you maybe kind of sort of were right about that. George and Ringo sued him, too. I'm not telling you this directly but I mention it in a couple of interviews, okay?
Paul: I'm cautiously expressing my relief about that in an interview. Also, I'm releasing a critically praised album that contains a song in your style that's a tribute, not a parody.
John: I've just separated from Yoko. Heading towards L.A. now for a long bachelor party of booze, drugs, hanging out with the old gang and getting kicked out of night clubs. I'm even mentioning you and the Beatles on the radio without including insults. Maybe SOMEONE should show up and intervene. Also, I like your new album.
Paul: How easy do you think I am anyway?
Yoko: I might have send John away because we were in a crisis, but I did make our P.A. babysit. Now it looks like he's going to settle down with her, which wasn't the intention. Also, did you hear about Phil Spector and the gun, and the getting kicked out of night clubs? In conclusion, help?
Paul: *packs for Los Angeles*
Prelude: the lawsuit from December 1970. It's best summed up and explained here; I have to say I agree with the author that the wonder isn't that Paul sued but that it took him so long. Of course, that he filed suit and that the judge found in his favour did not endear him to the other three in 1971. John's first reaction was via interviews, abounding with comparisons of Paul to Engelbert Humperdinck and swearing that they never ever were the littlest bit close. Urban legends also include incidents of John showing up at Paul's house to throw stones through the window and yelling his name, or climbing over the wall to destroy a painting he gave Paul in better times, but Paul says neither incident ever happened, and he ought to know. (John never mentioned anything like this happening, either.)
Act 1: Ram, or, Up Yours, Bandmate!
Paul's second solo album, panned at the time, currently enjoying a pretty good reputation. There are three songs John believed were about him, "Too Many People", "Dear Boy" and "3 Legs"; Paul said only one of these was about John, Too Many People, while Dear Boy was about Linda's ex husband and 3 Legs wasn't about anything in his life at all. Before John pointed it out, Too Many People hadn't been noticed by anyone as having a Lennon connotation, because the lines most obvious about this - "you took your lucky break and broke it in two" and "too many people preaching practices" - are cushioned in what John called "Paul surrealing it". John, about those digs: "He's so obscure other people didn't notice them, but I heard them." Here's the song itself:
Musically, it's a solid concert rocker (and he dusts it off now and then for concerts); lyrically, well, I may be biased but I see it more as bratty than as vicious. (As for the other two songs John believed were about him, Dear Boy which is basically - "how could you let this great woman go? I was so lucky to have found her!" really makes more sense when you apply it to Linda's ex (who had divorced her years before she met Paul and had shown no particular interest in her or their daughter Heather, whom Paul adopted, afterwards) than if you apply it to the Lennon and McCartney situation. (
On the other hand, there's the backside of the cover.
Yes, these are two beetles in an unmistakable position you see there. Now whether the symbolism here is "I feel screwed over by my bandmates" or "fuck you, John!" is up to debate, but, well. To quote George Harrison about the Lennon/McCartney bickering of 1971, "childish, childish". So no, one can't say John was unprovoked. His retaliation was to go nuclear with rage. And he, for one, was determined not to be "obscure" about it at all.
Felix Dennis, one of the participants of the sessions for the Imagine album, was present when How Do You Sleep? was composed and recorded. Also present were George, who was pissed off enough at Paul to play lead guitar on the song, and Ringo, who tried to get everyone to calm down (mostly in vain) until he walked out in disgust. Felix D. describes the process thusly:
They were writing the song as they performed it. And as these lyrics emerged, I remember Ringo getting more and more upset by this. He was really not very happy about this, and at one point I have a clear memory of his saying, "That's enough, John.' There were two magnificent studio musicians, and they too were not very happy about it, but as usual, Lennon plowed his own furrow and he just didn't give a shit whether people liked it or not. It is absolutely true to say that Yoko wrote many of the lyrics. I watched her writing them and then watched her race into the studio to show John - which would often annoy the musicians, but she would race in there anyway, waving a piece of paper and show John she'd had an idea. He would say 'Great' or whatever, and he would add something to it, then he would come back and relax in the control room for a bit and they would confer together. They've both got appalling handwriting, writing in a great hurry.
He would think of a lyric, and then she would think of a lyric, and then they'd burst out laughing, they'd think that was absolutely hysterical. Some of it was absolutely puerile, thank God a lot of it never actually got recorded because it was highly, highly personal, like a bunch of schoolboys standing in the lavatory making scatological jokes and then falling about with laughter at their own wit. That was about the level of it but thank goodness in the end somebody obviously talked some sense to them, or they'd talked sense to each other. Maybe Ringo had got on to them and told them not to be so brutal. Some of the lyrics were a lot ruder than you will find on the final version.
To counterbalance that, even if it might have been very hurtful to Paul McCartney, I think that the mood in which it was written should be borne in mind, which was one of schoolboy for the hell of it. It's quite obvious that Paul must have been some sort of figure of authority in Lennon's life, because you don't take the piss out of somebody that isn't a figure of authority. They had one line about Paul's Little Richard singing. I don't know if this is true that Paul was always quite proud of his ability to sing like Little Richard; they were making reference to that. It never ended up on the final cut. Phil Spector never said a single word about the lyrics, but Ringo and other musicians there would remonstrate with him and say, 'Oh, for Christ's sake, John, that's a bit much, you know!' Sometimes he would agree and cross it out. All I can say, if he'd wanted to write something to really hurt Paul's feelings, they certainly compiled enough material to do so. If he'd had someone he could confide in, other than Yoko, I think they would have persuaded him to leave it in the vaults for posterity. It was a bit of a shame he ever let it out.
Allen Klein claimed he was another co-author of the song. Originally, the Yesterday-related line went "All you done was Yesterday/you probably pinched that bitch anyway!", but Allen Klein, already burned by one McCartney lawsuit and fearing another, persuaded John to change it in "all you are today is just Another Day". Yoko remembers the occasion with less giggles and more questions on her part. Here's what she had to say to Philip Norman about it in 2008:
As mild and oblique as the comment was [Paul's "You took your lucky break and broke it in two" line from "Too Many People"], it seemed to cut John to the heart. On top of the lawsuit, it was like the tipping point between a divorcing couple that turns love into savage, no-holds-barred hostility. Indeed, John's wounded anger was more that of an ex-spouse than ex-colleague, reinforcing a suspicion already in Yoko's mind that his feelings for Paul had been far more intense than the world at large ever guessed. From chance remarks he had made, she gathered there had even been a moment where - on the principle that bohemians should try everything - he had contemplated an affair with Paul, but had been deterred by Paul's immovable heterosexuality. Nor, apparently, was Yoko the only one to have picked up on this. Around Apple, in her hearing, Paul would sometimes be called John's princess. She had also once heard a rehearsal tape with John's voice calling out "Paul ... Paul ... " in a strangely subservient, pleading way. "I knew there was something going on there," she remembers. "From his point of view, not from Paul's. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn't help wondering what it was really about."
If you want a non-slashy theory of why John was so upset about the "you took your lucky break and broke it in two" line, I can offer relevant quotes as well. Given all the "John the genius, Paul the hack" dominance in the rock press for a long time, it may come as a surprise, but for all his "I don't need anyone but Yoko!" bravado, John seems to have been quite insecure about this if you look at a couple of early 70s quotes.
What did qualify Allen Klein, despite an impending conviction for tax criminality in the US and the Rolling Stones already muttering about how he robbed them off their song catalogue, so much that John wanted him as manager?
And one of the early things that impressed me about Allen - he went through all the old songs we'd written, and he really knew which stuff I'd written. Not many people knew which was my song and which was Paul's, but he'd say, "Well, McCartney didn't write that line, did he?" And I'd say, "Right," you know, and that's what really got me interested [in him], because he knew what our contributions were to the group. Most people thought it was all Paul, or all George Martin."
What was the most objectionable thing about Lee Eastman, Paul's idea for manager, other than that he was Paul's father-in-law:
He thinks I'm some kind of guy who got struck lucky, a pal of Paul's.
Why move to America?
“In the States, we (John and Yoko) are treated like artists. But here, it’s like, I’m the lad who knew Paul, got a lucky break."
In conclusion, the very idea that his success as a musician might have had something to do with Paul was unbearable to John in 1971. (The "people thought it was all Paul, or all George Martin" is especially glaring as Lennonian paranoia because while reviews in the 1960s weren't playing the "who's the one true genius?" game yet, John was still the more favoured by them if it came down to it. He was "the smart Beatle", Paul was "the cute one". He was the one voted as personality of the decade along with Kennedy and Martin Luther King by Time Magazine in 1969. And it still wasn't enough. No, he had to prove once and for all that not only was he perfectly able to work on his own, that he didn't need Paul, but he also needed to prove he never had needed Paul to begin with, that Paul never had had anything worthwile to offer. Presto, How do you sleep?
Act 2: Jealous Guy, or, I didn't mean it like that and if I did it was your fault anyway!
Imagine the album was released to general acclamation, especially the title track. But even Rolling Stone, a magazine solidly pro-John and anti-Paul in the breakup feud, found How do you sleep? such a vicious song that "it sanctifies its victim and demeans its attacker". John sounded uncharacteristically embarrassed and defensive about it when questioned about it on the Mike Douglas show, which he co-hosted with Yoko for a while, claiming that Paul didn't mind a bit, not really, "if I can't fight with my best friend, with whom can I fight?" and that Paul started it anyway, and it wasn't really aggressive, not really:
The song wouldn't go away. In the Imagine film, John tries another explanation: 'It's not about Paul, it's about me. I'm really attacking myself. But I regret the association, well, what's to regret? He lived through it. The only thing that matters is how he and I feel about these things and not what the writer or commentator thinks about it. Him and me are okay.'
Even two days before his death in 1980, in a BBC interview with Any Pebbles, How do you sleep? comes up again. Quoth John:
I used my resentment against Paul that I have as a kind of sibling rivalry resentment from youth, to create a song. Rivalry between two guys, I mean, it was always there, it was a creative rivalry, it was not a terrible vicious horrible vendetta. I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and the Beatles and the relationship with Paul to write 'How Do You Sleep?' I don't really go round with those thoughts in my head all the time.
Meanwhile, chez McCartney in 1971: "he's not offended" was either John being boundlessly naive or a deliberate lie to the media. Of course Paul was hurt. There were no statements to the media at the time, though much later Paul said: "I think he was a sod to hurt me. I think he knew exactly what he was doing and because we had been so intimate he knew what would hurt me and he used it to great effect."
He also knew that any retaliation would only cause further escalation and make things worse; someone had to wave olive branches for at least a truce, and it was never going to be John, unless you count those "him and me, we're okay now" quotes. And maaaaaaayyyybe Jealous Guy, another track from the Imagine album, which at various times has been claimed as a song about Yoko, about Cynthia, about an amalgan of all the women in John's life, and yes, about Paul, too. In any case, Paul's next author-confessed-to-be-about-John song from Wings Wild Life, still reeling from the How Do You Sleep? shock, is definitely a truce offer:
Not one of his best, but heartfelt. There were no more bickerings via the press for a while, at least not between John and Paul. For no sooner had the How do you sleep? waves started to settle, did the Concert for Bangladesh waves start to rise. This concert was organized by George, and was to take place at Madison Square Garden. Originally, John had agreed to appear with George and Ringo on stage, but had assumed this would mean Yoko as well. George, however, had only invited John, declared that he'd gladly provide Yoko with a ticket for the front row but under no circumstances would he appear with her on stage, least of all in a situation which could be interpreted as a Beatles reunion minus Paul and with Yoko in his place. At which point it must have become obvious to John and George that, to use the family analogy, while George had sided with Dad against Mum, he still didn't like Stepmum one bit better than he had done when she had first shown up in the studio, and indeed still wasn't willing to accept her as Stepmum at all. The net result being no John at the Bangladesh benefit concert, and George as the next target of public anger a la Lennon:
Int.: Do you have any regrets about not doing the Bangladesh concert?
John: I don't want to play "My Sweet Lord." I'd as soon go out and do exactly what I want. (...)
Int.: Let's talk a bit about George. He's perhaps the most enigmatic Beatle. Are you saying George is more conventional than he makes himself out to be?
John: There's no telling George. He always has a point of view about that wide, you know. [John places his hands a few inches apart.] You can't tell him anything.
Yoko: George is sophisticated, fashionwise. . . .
John: He's very trendy, and he has the right clothes, and all of that. . . .
Yoko: But he's not sophisticated, intellectually.
John: No. He's very narrow-minded and he doesn't really have a broader view. Paul is far more aware than George. One time in the Apple office in Wigmore Street, I said something to George, and he said, "I'm as intelligent as you, you know." This must have been resentment, but he could have left anytime if I was giving him a hard time.
Repeat after mer: poor George. To be compared unfavourably to Paul by John at the height of the Lennon/McCartney feud after playing guitar for John's How do you sleep? and backing John all the way before the Bangladesh affair must have stung nearly as badly as playing second fiddle to the big two when they were still working together.
The other aftermath of the Bangladesh concert was between Allen Klein, John, George and Ringo. Because not only did it turn out Klein had filed profit from what was a charity concert into his own pockets but he had made the mistake of siding with George on the no-Yoko-on-stage matter. Back when making his original pitch to John to become the Beatles' manager, Allen Klein had promised he would provide Yoko with film deals and exhibitions. The exhibition promise was he fulfilled after they moved to the USA. This was a huge one-woman show held in the prestigious Everson Museum of Fine Arts in Syracuse, New York, scheduled to open on John's birthday on 9 October 1971. Normally such a show would be a retrospective of a lifetime's work gathered together from other museums and private collections. Yoko had only exhibited a couple of times and had sold virtually nothing. Her complete existant work would not have filled even one of the huge Everson galleries. In order to fill the huge spaces - 50,000 square feet consisting of seven galleries, a sculpture court and other rooms for installations - a team of people was hired to make art objects. The Everson Museum had allocated one sixth of its annual budget to the show but cost overruns meant that the Beatles, not just John, but all four of them via Apple, finished up paying $80,000 towards Yoko’s exhibition. Then there was the matter of John's own concert in Madison Square Garden, where Klein had been forced to give away 5000 free tickets order to ensure a full house, something he solidly blamed on Yoko's presence. At which point Klein came to the mathematical conclusion of John alone on stage = money, John plus Yoko = loss of money, Yoko = more loss of money, and told John as much. It went down as well as you'd expect. By 1973, John and Allen Klein were sueing each other. (Klein was sueing John over for $508,000 in unpaid loans.) (It was now Allen Klein's turn to become the object of an aggressive John Lennon song, Steel and Glass. Melodic similarity to "How do you sleep?" a pure coincidence, I'm sure.)
What role the Allen Klein turnaround played on the increasing stress in the John/Yoko relationship, only they know, but Klein sued in the summer of 1973, and this was also when their period of separation started, the "Lost Weekend", a quaint name for eighteen months apart. Says May Pang, who had originally been hired by Klein for his company but had been both Yoko's and John's personal assistant during the last two years:
I was coordinating press for Yoko's new album, Feeling the Space - and simultanously starting the ssessions for John's upcoming album, Mind Games. Early one morning, Yoko came to my office in their apartment at the Dakota and told me that she and John were "not getting along". It was obvious to all of us who worked there that things were a bit tense between them, so this wasn't exactly a bombshell. Yoko went on to say that John would start seeing someone new, and she wanted it to be "someone who would treat John well". I now felt the bombshell coming. If they split up, I thought, who will I be working for? Yoko continued, "You don't have a boyfriend." I dropped my pad and pen. Did I just hear right? I assured her I wasn't interested in John, if that's what she was thinking. She told me she knew that. But she didn't stop there. "I think you should go out with him." I was dumbfounded. I kept telling her no, I would not go out with John. But apparently her mind was made up. "If John asks you out, you should go!" Yoko announced, making it sound a little stronger than a suggestion.
Now May Pang may be exaggarating her protests, and that it took her two weeks to say yes, but Yoko has confirmed the essentials of that conversation. (Today, methinks both Yoko and John could be sued for sexual harrassment of an employee.) At any rate, off to Los Angeles John went, without his wife, with his new girl friend, some new songs, and the oddest mixture of extended drunken bachelor party and making up with the exes and the estranged kids was about to start.
Act 3. Let Me Roll It, or: I Know (I know).
John wasn't the only one in a travelling mood. One of Paul's last (and rebuffed) plans to revitalize the Beatles had been for them to show up anonymously and play in university cafeterias and clubs, avoiding hysteria via anonymity and no annoucements and regaining the joy of playing for a live audience. When he had assembled his new post-Beatles band, Wings, he did just that. This had worked out well enough to make a first Wings album, Wild Life, which was promptly torn to shreds by the critics and bought by the public, and to start a more upscale tour. By mid 1973, however, when it was time for the next album, the Wings line-up was reduced again to Paul, Linda and Denny Laine. (He must have thought he'd never be able to keep a group together again.) Whom Mr. Workoholic packed in an airplane, together with Geoff Emerick, his balance engineer from the Beatles days, to record the album at the EMI studios in Lagos, Nigeria. There was, as mentioned in the previous post, a mugging right at the start, it was hot, some of the local musicians were afraid Paul was there to "steal their music" until played the music in question which showed no African influence whatsoever, and poor devoted Geoff E. was sick half of the time, but the resulting album was the first since Beatles times to both get critical praise and sell well, and got Emerick his second Grammy (after Sgt. Pepper) for his engineering. One of the songs on it was Let Me Roll It. To quote the often immensely quotable Peter Ames Carlin about it:
This is the shit, right here: The most simple bass line; stripped-down drums; a seething two-part guitar riff; and a guy so desperately in love/lust that he's gone totally primal. In its moment the song seemed like a blistering answer to John Lennon's great primal scream tunes and indeed, Paul has borrowed the sound and feel of "Plastic Ono Band" - right down to the funereal thump of the drums. He's got the Arthur Janov blues, you can hear it in the primal wail that brings the thing to its thumping, tooth-gnashing, seething fade. A rip at John? Not even - call it a tribute. And you know who dug the tune, and the album, more than anyone? That would be J. Lennon. He knew brilliance when he heard it, you know.
My own intepretation, entirely subjective, would be "Muzak to your ears, hm? Okay then. You know, I can do what you do; I just prefer not to. But let me give a little demonstration". Or I could be wrong. At any rate, Paul was always great with the musical tribute/parody/homage - think of Back in the USSR and its Chuck Berry and Beach Boys riffs, for example. This was a whatever you want to call it to solo John Lennon:
Back from Nigeria there were the Allen Klein news. (Did he resist the urge to say "I told you so" to any of the other three? I hope so, but somehow, I doubt it.) There were also suspiciously mellow utterings across the Atlantic via the press:
"I haven’t talked to Paul since before he did the last tour with Wings (apparently spring 1973), but I heard ‘Red Rose Speedway’ and it was OK. I liked parts of his TV Special (James Paul McCartney, from spring 1973), especially the intro. The bit made in Liverpool made me squirm a bit, but Paul’s a pro. He always has been."
"Of mine I like ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Walrus’, of Paul’s I like ‘Here There and Everywhere’. Of course I still love ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and another I liked was ‘For No One’.”
“Yeah, I miss Paul a lot. It’s been a year since I’ve seen him. He came over with Linda to me place in New York. Course I’d like to see him. He’s an old friend, isn’t he?”
“When I slagged off the Beatles thing in the press, it was like divorce pangs, and it was just like in the old days… you know, I’ve always had a bit of a mouth and I’ve got to live up to it. ‘Lennon beats up local DJ at Paul’s 21 birthday party.”. Then we had that fight Paul and I had through the Melody Maker, but that was a period I had to go through.”
and, on Rolling Stone, aka the magazine to which John had first vented his Paul = Engelbert Humperdinck comparisons:
Q: "George told Rolling Stone that if you wanted the Beatles, go listen to Wings. It seemed a bit of a putdown."
JOHN: "I didn't see what George said, so I really don't have any comment. (pause) Band on the Run is a great album. Wings is almost as conceptual a group as Plastic Ono Band. Plastic Ono was a conceptual group, meaning whoever was playing was the band. And Wings keeps changing all the time. It's conceptual. I mean, they're backup men for Paul. It doesn't matter who's playing. You can call them Wings, but it's Paul McCartney music. And it's good stuff. It's good Paul music and I don't really see the connection."
Otherwise, news of John via the public media weren't nearly as pleasant sounding. The were the tales of Phil (now serving time in prison) Spector(booze being poured down a mixing console, Spector waving his gun around and firing after which John said either to kill him or not but no more ruining of his hearing), brawls with various L.A. scene suspects, and John getting kicked out of the Troubadour twice, one with a Kotex on his forehead and once when he was heckling the Smothers Brothers. This even featured that most obnoxious of celebrity utterings, "don't you know who I am?" It all sounded a bit like John after Julia's death from a distance.
(On the bright side, John also for the first time in three years contacted his son Julian again and spoke to his ex wife Cynthia at May Pang's investigation; a visit was arranged and went over well, with the result that May and Cynthia hit it off and remain friendly to this day. This, however, did not make the headlines the way the Lennon-boozing-and-doing-drugs-in-LA events did.)
Band on the Run making it to number 1 in the US was as good a reason to go there as any. And then there was the visit from Yoko (Paul's version) or the visit at Yoko's (her version - but who visited whom is really the only difference):
When they split up, Yoko came to London, looking like a widow, a little diminutive sad figure in black. She came around to Cavendish, and she said, 'John's left, he's off with May Pang.' So, being friendly and seeing her plight, Linda or I said to her, 'Do you still love him? Do you want to get back with him?' She said, 'Yes.' We said, 'Well, what would it take then?' because we were going out L. A. way. (...) I said, 'I can take a message. What would I have to tell him?' And she gave me this whole thing: 'He would have to come back to New York. He can't live with me immediately. He'd have to court me, he'd have to ask me out. He'd have to send me flowers, he'll have to do it all again.' Of course, she'd sent him off with May Pang, but that wasn't the point at that time.
So I went out there and he was doing Pussy Cats with Nilsson and Keith Moon and Jesse Ed Davis, to name but three total nutters. Three beautiful total alcohol nutters plus John, forget it! Even the location is perfect. We went round to a session and sat there for a bit. It was a little bit strange, John and I, seeing each other at that time. But then we dropped by their house the next day for a cup of tea or something. I remember Harry Nilsson offering me some angel dust. I said, 'What is it?' He said, 'It's elephant tranquilliser.' I said, 'Is it fun?' He thought for about half a minute. 'No,' he said. I said, 'Well, you know what, I won't have any.' He seemed to understand. But that's how it was there.
Keith Moon was very sweet, we had a nice chat with Keith. He was very complimentary about Band on the Run, which was out recently. He asked, 'Who drummed on that, man?' and it happened to be me. So I said, 'Me, man.' Moonie is my second favourite drummer of all time. Ringo, Moonie, John Bonham would be my three main drummers. Not technically the best by a long shot but for feel and emotion and economy, they're always there. Particularly Ringo. So I was having fun with the guys sitting round the pool, and eventually John got up. Linda and I had kids so we'd be up early. We wouldn't be just lying in bed till three in the afternoon, which is what John was doing. He was a teenager again. It was everything he'd always wanted to do in Liverpool. He was just being his old Liverpool self, just a wild, wild boy. The Brendan Behan thing. He was involved in all sorts of punch-ups with Harry Nilsson, and Spector was there letting his gun off in the control room, apparently. I mean, those are not sessions I would want to be at.
But I took John in the back room of the house, sat down -'How you doing? Great. Lovely to see you ...' He was in quite a mellow mood. It was early morning for him, early morning in the afternoon. I said, 'Yoko was through London and she said she wouldn't mind getting back together. How about you? Would you be interested in that?' He said, 'Yeah.' That he still loved her and stuff. So I said, 'Here's the deal. You've got to go back to New York. You've got to go get a flat, court her, so-and-so ...' and that's just what he did.
Yoko, only last week: "Paul told me he was going to see John in L.A. He asked what it would take for me to go back to John, and I said, 'Well, maybe if he courted me.' I want the world to know that it was a very touching thing that he did for John. He'd heard the rumours that John was in a bad way, in a rough situation, and he was genuinely concerned about his old partner. It was so sweet that he wanted to save John. Sure, they were two macho, very talented guys who had strong opinions, arguments, like most brothers. But when it came to the crux of the matter, when Paul thought John was in dire straights, he helped... John often said he didn't understand why Paul did this for us, but he did.
As for how the actual first meeting in Los Angeles went, secret message from Yoko aside, we have May Pang's description for that one:
'Paul headed straight for John'. "Hello John", he said eagerly. 'John however, was a study in casualness.' "How are you Paul"?, he replied softly'. "Fine. How about you"? "Okay". "Hi duckie", Linda said to John, kissing him on the cheek.' "Hello Linda". 'John and Paul made small talk as if they had been speaking on the phone two or three times a day and had spoken just a few hours earlier. It was one of the most casual conversations I had ever heard. They couldn't be the two men who not only had been trading vicious attacks with each other in public but also had squadrons of lawyers poised in battle against each other while they carved up their multimillion dollar empire. They looked like any pair of old friends having a pleasant low key reunion. The small talk continued, then Paul, like a man possessed, suddenly bounced up and headed straight for Ringo's drum kit. and began to bash the drums. "Let's play!" he exclaimed. John strapped on his guitar and began to play Midnight Special, one of the numbers the Beatles used to jam on when they first began to play together. (...) John suddenly became very enthusiastic. "We need a bass player. Paul and I are jamming together". (...) 'When they were through playing, John and Paul once again, picked up their casual conversation. It was as if they had not played at all. It sounded as though (...) all of them were still teenagers and nothing in their lives had changed. I realized then, that no matter what might happen among them, this was the way they would always relate to each other'.
John's own summation of that reunion was: I went through a phase of hating all those Beatles years and having to smile when I didn’t want to smile, but that was the life I chose, and now I’m out it, it’s great to look back on it, man. Great! I was thinking only recently – why haven’t I considered the good times instead of moaning about what we had to go through? And Paul was here and we spent two or three nights together talking about the old days and it was cool, seeing what each other remembered from Hamburg and Liverpool.
And thus I'll leave them in the mid 70s, captured on a polaroid (no, Paul, you still can't carry off a moustache, especially not in the 70s - should have left it in the Sgt. Pepper era) on the Californian sun, with not quite said apologies.
After all, John was busy writing an apology song just about everyone in his life could have seen as directed at themselves. When talking about musicians, it makes sense to let music have the last word:
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Date: 2010-10-18 12:59 pm (UTC)And I can see where the line in the Rutles ("Let it Rot" was released simultaneously as a film, an album and a lawsuit) came from.
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Date: 2010-10-18 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-18 05:28 pm (UTC)I really am finding your posts very interesting, and enjoy hearing your perspective. (Although I don't actually like the Beatles very much--but I'm very interested in a lot of other bands and the Beatles are obviously the ur-example.)
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Date: 2010-10-19 06:46 am (UTC)And I can see what you mean about the Beatles being the ur-band. The only drama they missed were actual physical attacks on each other and a band member being certified with a mental illness; you'll have to go to the Beach Boys for that. (Sorry, Brian Wilson! I love Good Vibrations!)
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Date: 2010-10-19 12:50 am (UTC)Also, your post makes If Songs By The Beatles Lacked Any Subtlety Whatsoever a lot clearer.
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Date: 2010-10-19 07:05 am (UTC)I know I said something similar in an earlier post but it's fascinating how these two brilliant artists can be so stunted emotionally and so childish. Maybe it's because of the intense bond between John and Paul made them not able to see things clearly.
That, and nobody acts at their best and most mature during a divorce. (Well, okay, few people.) "Divorce" wasn't just John's metaphor; as Paul's stepsister Ruth once said, "for all intents and purposes, what they had was a marriage". And when a marriage breaks up, things get ugly. (*pause here for the sublime irony of Yoko drafting Paul as a marriage counsellor in the mid-70s.*) Including and especially for other family members and bystanders. Ringo is my hero because he actually managed to remain friends with everyone throughout the 70s (which is why all three of the others contributed songs for his albums).
Brian Epstein dying definitely was a big reason why things started to fall apart, and had Brian lived, there would obviously not have been Allen Klein versus Lee Eastman debates in the "who'll manage us now?" question, but I'm not sure he could have soothed George's increasing disgruntlement about getting only two or so songs per album, and how on earth he'd have responded to the Yoko situation is anyone's guess. (Not only because he liked Cynthia and would have been horrified by the bad PR of John's divorce but because he crushed on John himself, and whether or not something ever happened between them in Barcelona, it wouldn't have been easy for him to see John and Yoko together. So I'm not sure he could have kept his cool enough to make everyone else keep theirs. One suspects he and Paul would have gotten very drunk together at least once.)