The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

The result is the double A–side single “Strawberry Fields Forever” / “Penny Lane.” The record is slated for a February release.

  On January 31, the band is in Kent, working on promotional materials. “We’d been filming a TV piece to go with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever,’” John explains in a 1967 interview. “There was a break and I went into this shop and bought an old poster advertising a variety show that starred Mr. Kite.”

  He hangs it on the wall of his living room.

  Driven by American radio play of “Penny Lane,” the dual-side single hits number 1 in America—but in Britain it ranks behind “Release Me” by balladeer Engelbert Humperdinck. It’s the first time that a Beatles single has taken second place since January 1963’s “Please Please Me.”

  John says he isn’t bothered. “There’s room for everything. I don’t mind Engelbert Humperdinck. They’re the cats. It’s their scene.”

  Throughout 1966, the band has been challenged by the achievements of new and established rivals on both sides of the Atlantic. The April 15 release of the Rolling Stones’ chart-topping fourth UK (and sixth US) album, Aftermath, marks two firsts for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: they cowrote every song and recorded the entire album at California’s RCA Studios. On August 15, Jefferson Airplane introduced the “San Francisco sound” with RCA’s release of its debut studio album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off. On December 9, the Who’s second album, A Quick One, climbs to number 4 on the UK charts.

  The Jefferson Airplane lead singer, Grace Slick, who joined the band on October 16, 1966, recalls that if “you were in a rock ’n’ roll band in the ’60s, the only thing you couldn’t do was kill people. Everything else was acceptable. You’re being paid to travel around the world, and people admire you because you’re a rock ’n’ roll star.”

  The Beatles rose to fame on the strength of their live performances. Now they must discover a way to enthrall fans from inside the studio.

  “I was going through murder,” John says of the uncertain transition.

  Then Paul has a brainchild. “How about if we become an alter-ego band, something like, say, ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’”? he suggests to John, George, and Ringo. “I’ve got a little bit of a song cooking with that title.”

  Studio Two fills with smoke and teacups swimming in cigarette butts as they listen to Paul’s idea for a symphonic concept record. While John strums his guitar, Paul sits close by, playing piano.

  Suddenly it’s clear to John how to work Paul’s grand plan. Take “a bunch of songs, and you stick two bits of Pepper in it, and it’s a concept.”

  Yet what’s even more certain to all four of them is that the music is far too complicated to ever be performed live.

  “Let Sgt. Pepper do the touring,” Paul says, then calls George Martin over to the piano. He’s working on the melody for a song based on that poster Paul saw in John’s house in Weybridge.

  “It was all there, the trampoline, the somersets, the hoops, the garters, the horse,” Paul says. “It was Pablo Fanque’s fair, and it said ‘being for the benefit of Mr. Kite’; almost the whole song was written right off this poster.”

  John calls out, “It’s a fairground sequence. I want to be in that circus atmosphere. I want to smell the sawdust when I hear that song.”

  “John would deal in moods, he would deal in colors,” the producer notes, and he’s learned to translate those signals into instruments.

  Those will work, John thinks when he hears the organ, harmonium, and bass harmonica sounds that George Martin provides.

  Paul goes to John’s house for another of their traditional songwriting sessions. John is holding a drawing made by his son, Julian. It’s a picture of his schoolmate with the handwritten title “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  They go up to the music room.

  “Cellophane flowers,” Paul says. “Newspaper taxis.”

  John counters with “kaleidoscope eyes” and “looking glass ties,” and suddenly they’re riffing together like the old days.

  Paul is happy to see a glimmer of the John he knows. “You’re stuck out in suburbia, living a middle-class life,” he tells his old friend.

  Cyn, too, barely recognizes John, complaining that “it was becoming impossible to communicate” with her husband. “I think the drugs destroyed a lot of his creativity,” she says, despite his connecting ever more deeply with fans on songs like “Strawberry Fields,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  On the evening of March 21, at Studio Two, John accidentally drops acid, mistaking it for the amphetamine he sought to combat the boredom of watching Paul and George finesse the vocals on “Getting Better.” Suddenly, his roiling existential struggles burst into an immediate danger.

  “George, I’m not feeling too good,” John tells their producer. “I’m not focusing on me.”

  The ever-present fans are clustered outside. The only safe refuge is the rooftop, so that’s where George Martin takes him.

  John looks up at the clear night sky. “Aren’t they fantastic?” he asks of the stars, pressing up against the eighteen-inch guardrail for a better view.

  “They just look like stars to me,” the producer says, gently guiding John away from the precipice.

  * * *

  “John always had a way of having an edge to his songs,” George says.

  The making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has further sharpened those edges. At John’s insistence, the album is “one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right.”

  In contrast to the ten-hour recording session for the Beatles’ first studio album, Please Please Me, on February 11, 1963, the band logs seven hundred hours of studio time to create this thirteenth LP—at the astounding cost of $100,000 (more than $750,000 today).

  Brian Epstein hosts two release parties for the album. The first is held for the press at his house in London on May 19, 1967. Based on the strength of her portfolio, Brian’s assistant has invited a twenty-five-year-old American photographer, Linda Eastman, to attend. By chance, Paul had just met Linda a few days earlier at the Bag O’Nails club, where she was being shown around London by the Animals, another leading British music export and one of her first celebrity photo subjects. Paul and Linda hit it off, but Paul is still in a serious relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Jane Asher, to whom he’ll announce an engagement on Christmas Day in 1967.

  The second party is on May 28, at Brian’s recently purchased country home. While Paul doesn’t attend, John does—in spectacular fashion. He uses the occasion to unveil that he’s had his enormous (nearly twenty-feet-long and six-and-a-half-feet-wide) 1964 Rolls-Royce Phantom V painted in vibrant colors reminiscent of a gypsy caravan. “It was sprayed all yellow first,” John’s chauffeur, Les Anthony, says, “then hand-painted” with ordinary latex house paint in elaborate Romany designs and astrological symbols. “The first time I drove it, I was followed by hordes of photographers and Pathé News.”

  “John and friends floated in on his gaudy yellow Rolls, through bucolic country lanes adrift with clouds of May blossoms, as if in a magic pumpkin on the way to the ball,” says fellow party guest Tony Bramwell. Cynthia Lennon remembers that inaugural drive as having “all the feeling of a school outing. Every time the car passed through town or villages it stopped the traffic. Crowds of jeering, waving people pressed up against the tinted windows trying to get a better look at the occupants of this crazy car.”

  Not everyone approves of the paint job—“You swine! How dare you do that to a Rolls-Royce!” John often gleefully recounts an old woman once shouting at him—but there’s no question that his “psychedelic Rolls” is as subversive and of-the-moment as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band itself.

  The crescendo toward the June 1967 worldwide release is building as powerfully as the resounding orchestral chords that George Martin engineered to close the album’s anchor track, “A Day in the Life.”

&
nbsp; EMI won’t be releasing any singles from Sgt. Pepper, so disc jockeys and reviewers who receive advance copies are forced to listen to the album from start to finish—just as the Beatles intend.

  Joe O’Brien, DJ at New York’s WMCA, is the first to spin the record live. He tells The New Yorker that “listeners are unprepared because this album is not a teen-age album, but a terribly intellectual one.”

  The album soars to the top of the British and American charts. While the fans’ warm embrace generates 2.5 million US sales in its first three months of release, and although it stays at number 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for fifteen weeks, critics engage in a protracted war of words.

  Even as Time magazine reports that the album is touted by legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein as being on par with the work of Robert Schumann, and even as The Guardian declares, “There is no longer any need, thank goodness, to apologize for talking seriously about Beatles music,” The Observer argues, “The record is not perfect, even on pop terms” (calling out George Harrison for being increasingly under the influence of his Indian mentor, Ravi Shankar: “On the musical side there is tendency to overdo the curry power”).

  Twenty-two-year-old freelance music writer Richard Goldstein has the harshest words of all. His review, headlined WE STILL NEED THE BEATLES, BUT…, suggests the album is derivative of the artistry of Beatles’ rivals. “There is a touch of the Jefferson Airplane, a dab of Beach Boys vibrations, and a generous pat of gymnastics from The Who.”

  “The music critic of the New York Times hated Sgt. Pepper,” Paul says. “And we had to sit through that.”

  That being a mockery of John and Paul’s greatest songwriting achievements. “There is nothing beautiful on Sergeant Pepper. Nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about. The Lennon raunchiness has become mere caprice…Paul McCartney’s soaring pop magnificats have become merely politely profound.”

  The BBC piles on, banning airplay of “A Day in the Life” over the suggestive lyric “I’d love to turn you on.” British politicians disassemble the song line by line in search of hidden meaning. They seize on the line “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,” as Lennon’s ode to needle marks.

  “I’d like to meet the man who banned this song of ours,” John says. “If they want to read drugs into our stuff, they will. But it’s them that’s reading it, them!”

  The band’s next project will premiere not on an album (though the band recorded the title track of their upcoming Magical Mystery Tour in April) but on the Our World television program.

  “It will be the first worldwide satellite broadcast ever,” Ringo tells the others.

  The air date is June 25, 1967.

  “Oh, God, is it that close?” John says, “I supposed we’d better write something.”

  John and Paul each scramble to write a song for the global broadcast. Paul comes up with “Your Mother Should Know.” John presents “All You Need Is Love.” John wins.

  Engineer Geoff Emerick is struck by the sharp contrast between the way Paul and John work yet how easily the two musicians seem able to write together. “Paul was meticulous and organized: he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d hurriedly scribbled ideas on. Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator. Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a right loudmouth and quite rude. Paul was willing to put in long hours to get a part right; John was impatient, always ready to move on to the next thing.”

  On June 14, in Studio Two, the band does thirty-three takes of John’s new song. “Keep it simple so viewers across the globe will understand,” the television producers have instructed.

  John delivers. He’s written the anthem of the season, soon to be known as the Summer of Love, declaring—against the backdrop of the conflict raging in Vietnam and the aftermath of the Six-Day War smoldering in the Middle East—“All You Need Is Love.”

  “Well, it’s certainly repetitive,” George complains to Paul in rehearsal of the multiple choruses replicating the title of the song.

  On June 25, 1967, John perches on a high stool, and with a little help from his friends in an all-star chorus, including the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, and Eric Clapton, begins to sing to four hundred million watchers and is anointed a pop-cultural prophet for peace.

  One person who isn’t witnessing it in person: Brian Epstein. That same evening, he is descending further into the depths of alcohol and amphetamine addiction. Though Epstein was recently treated and released from a clinic—where John sent an extravagant bouquet with a card reading You know I love you…I really mean that—the Beatles’ management contract with him is set for renewal in a few months’ time, on September 30, 1967. The band’s drastic change in focus from touring to studio is certain to change the financial terms, and not in Brian’s favor.

  And it’s not a good omen that the man who ushered the Beatles to stardom is currently too addled to attend the live broadcast of “All You Need Is Love.”

  Chapter 34

  What’s so funny ’bout peace love and understanding?

  —“(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace,

  Love, and Understanding”

  On August 24, 1967, John joins Paul, George, and Ringo near the front of the ballroom of the London Hilton. A diminutive guru named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, surrounded by flowers and security guards, is getting ready to speak about Transcendental Meditation.

  George has pushed the band to attend, and Paul reminds the others that their original pledge still holds. “George wants it. What one of us wants, the others go along with.”

  Their minds are blown.

  “It’s fantastic stuff, Cyn,” John tells his wife. “The meditation’s so simple, and it’s life-changing.”

  The maharishi invites the Beatles and their wives and girlfriends (Paul is still dating Jane Asher) to join him for a ten-day conference in Bangor, Wales. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull decide to go along, and Brian Epstein plans to follow in a couple of days.

  London’s Euston train station is packed with screaming fans, reporters, and camera crews.

  Every bloody move we make causes pandemonium, John thinks as he jumps out of the car. He runs for the platform, leaving Cyn behind to manage their luggage.

  She gets swallowed by the crowd, and a police officer, convinced that she’s just another groupie, pushes her away from the platform.

  “Tell him to let you on!” he yells to his wife. “Tell him you’re with us.”

  The train begins to pull away.

  When she catches up with them at the retreat not long afterward, John scolds her. “Why are you always last, Cyn?”

  On August 27, 1967, the phone rings at the Beatles’ dormitory on the grounds of the retreat. There’s terrible news from London: thirty-two-year-old Brian Epstein has been found dead at home from an overdose of sleeping pills.

  John’s first reaction is practical. “Now we’re our own managers; now we have to make all the decisions,” he tells the others.

  Then a horrible shock sets in, the same as he experienced when his mother died.

  When his uncle George died.

  When Stu died.

  And now Brian.

  Complicating matters was that “I introduced Brian to pills—which gives me a guilt association with his death.” John is desperately in need of guidance. “But then,” he says, “the maharishi talked to us and, I don’t know, cooled us out a bit.”

  “He just told us not to be overwhelmed with grief,” John tells an interviewer. “Whatever thoughts we have of Brian…keep them happy, because whatever thoughts we have of him will travel with him, wherever he is.”

  The Beatles choose not to attend Brian’s funeral, fearing a mob scene.

  * * *<
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  Brian’s absence is felt when the Beatles pursue their first project without him. Feeling like the group should push forward, Paul takes the reins and spearheads a project that has its beginnings in a song they recorded in April: “Magical Mystery Tour.” The band agrees to make Paul’s song the basis of a British TV movie in which the Beatles and an eccentric cast of characters take a Ken Kesey–inspired bus tour across the English countryside. When two weeks of shooting begins, on September 11, there’s no script, so almost all the movie’s promised “strange things” are improvised. Among the many bizarre scenes is a reenactment of one of John’s dreams in which he keeps shoveling heaps of spaghetti onto a table in front of a heavyset “Aunt Jessie.”

  The new Beatles music—released as a six-song EP in England and padded with contemporaneous singles to create an American album—proves as popular as always. Paul supplies three of the sound track’s songs plus the separately released number-one single “Hello, Goodbye,” but the highlight belongs to John, who finally sets his Lewis Carroll obsession to music with the psychedelic milestone “I Am the Walrus.”

  When the fifty-two-minute movie airs in black-and-white (though it was shot in color) on BBC1, on December 26, viewers are baffled, and reviews—for the first time ever for a Beatles project—are uniformly terrible. The reception is so bad that US networks decline to show it, and Paul must go on Britain’s The Frost Programme the following day to defend it. “We don’t say it was a good film,” he says later. “It was our first attempt. If we goofed, then we goofed.”

  Being disliked is a new phenomenon for John, Paul, George, and Ringo, and there’s grumbling that this wouldn’t have happened under Brian’s watch.

  * * *

  On February 16, 1968, the Beatles opt to follow the guru all the way to India. They touch down in Delhi with their wives (in Paul’s case, with his girlfriend, Jane), and a celebrity entourage including Mike Love of the Beach Boys, the folksinger Donovan, and actress Mia Farrow. Farrow is recovering from her own public loss—her marriage to Frank Sinatra. The fifty-year-old crooner and twenty-one-year-old actress had been married in 1966, but although the divorce won’t be finalized until August of 1968, he’d already served her with divorce papers on the set of Rosemary’s Baby, the supernatural thriller she was then filming inside New York’s historic Dakota apartment building.