The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  Before leaving Hawaii, he’d taped fourteen hours of Beatles songs. For inspiration, he listened to them nonstop on the long flight to New York.

  Outside, “Strawberry Fields Forever” begins to play. The song is one of his favorites. He especially enjoys the parts where he recorded himself screaming and chanting “John Lennon must die!” and “John Lennon is a phony.”

  Mark sees a familiar face at the 72nd Street subway station. He draws closer.

  It’s James Taylor.

  Mark follows the famous singer up a flight of steps. Then he corners Taylor against the wall of the station.

  “I’m a musician just like you,” Mark says. He begins to sweat, and his pupils are dilated. “I’m working on a project with John Lennon. I have something that I need to get to him. You know him, right?”

  Taylor seems unnerved. He tries to peel himself off the subway wall.

  “I’ve gotta go, man,” the singer says softly.

  Taylor turns north on Central Park West. After around twenty yards, Mark sees the man look over his shoulder. Mark stands alone across the street from the Dakota, muttering to himself, when their eyes lock.

  Taylor looks away and picks up his pace.

  “A creepy, sweaty guy recognized me and got in my face,” Taylor will later recall. “He was talking fast, telling me about himself—that he was working on a project with John Lennon. I had spent nine months in a psychiatric hospital, and it seemed to me that he was mentally ill.”

  Chapter 36

  I don’t need to fight to prove I’m right.

  —“Baba O’Riley”

  In US folklore, nothing has been more romanticized than guns and the larger-than-life men who wielded them,” states Time magazine in its June 21, 1968, cover story titled “The Gun in America.”

  During the last week of September, the Beatles continue to record songs for their double album. Like the majority of the thirty songs on the White Album, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” originated when John began writing it at the ashram in Rishikesh. He envisions its multiple distinct phases as “sort of a history of rock and roll.”

  When George Martin hands John a visual, the fragments become an ingenious whole. “A gun magazine was sitting around,” John remembers, “and the cover was the picture of a smoking gun. The title of the article, which I never read, was ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’

  “I thought, what a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you’ve just shot something.”

  American gun laws have been static since 1939, but in the wake of the political assassinations of JFK, MLK Jr., and RFK, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushes for reform, sponsoring the Gun Control Act of 1968, which Congress passes into law on October 22.

  On November 20, two days before EMI releases the White Album—pressed with Apple labels—Paul is interviewed on Radio Luxembourg, calling the song “a favorite of mine” while dismissing the content that inspired it.

  “And it was so sick, you know, the idea of ‘Come and buy your killing weapons,’ and ‘Come and get it.’ But it’s just such a great line, ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun,’ that John sort of took that and used that as a chorus. And the rest of the words…I think they’re great words, you know. It’s a poem. And he finishes off, ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun, yes it is.’”

  Critics agree. “‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ is one of the greatest numbers on the album,” the International Times says, praising the Beatles’ ninth studio album and latest chart topper, the reviewer catching John’s musical intention that “the music has three distinct phases ending with a touch of the ’50s…a snatch from ‘Angel Baby’ by Rosie and the Originals at the end.”

  “Obviously a Lennon composition,” the Record Mirror states. “The firearm becomes feminine and the lyrics ambiguous,” referencing the intrigue that has circled for decades as to whether the lyric “When I hold you in my arms / And I feel my finger on your trigger” is sexual—“Oh, well, by then I’m into double meanings,” John later says.

  According to the BBC, that’s precisely what makes the White Album “the greatest and truest most popular work of art in the history of the world, with the greatest cover—both avant-garde and incredibly popular at the same time.”

  American rock critic Lester Bangs observes the passage of another creative milestone: “The first album by the Beatles or in the history of rock by four solo artists in one band.”

  Each Beatle is to receive one of the first four albums in the run, with a sequential number printed on each cover.

  John wants the first of the first, calling out, “Bagsy No. 1!”

  “John got 000001 because he shouted the loudest,” Paul remembers.

  Ringo keeps his double album in a bank vault. And there it stays until 2015, when the drummer discovers that his copy, not John’s, is the original—number 000001.

  That Saturday, December 5, 2015, Julien’s Auctions, in Beverly Hills, sets a guide price of $40,000 to $60,000, which will go to Ringo’s charity, the Lotus Foundation.

  The bidding shatters records, bringing $790,000. Ringo has a message for the buyer: “Whoever gets it it will have my fingerprints on it.”

  * * *

  Forty-seven years earlier, in December of 1968, Mick Jagger is asking musical stars to appear in a concert he’s calling the Rock and Roll Circus. The BBC books twenty-eight-year-old Michael Lindsay-Hogg to direct the film at the Intertel Studios, Wembley. “All the performers in the show had basically come out of a little address book in Mick Jagger’s back pocket,” Lindsay-Hogg recalls. “He looks up L, he calls John, and then John says he’ll do it.”

  On the afternoon of December 11, 1968, celebrity guests in costumes, including Yoko Ono and Marianne Faithful, gather in a studio space decorated as a circus tent. They watch as ringmaster Mick Jagger moves among the members of Sir Robert Fossett’s Circus, including trapeze artists, a live tiger, and a fire eater.

  Jethro Tull and the Who are slated to perform, but the main draw is the supergroup dubbed the Dirty Mac, featuring twenty-eight-year-old John Lennon on vocals and guitar, twenty-three-year-old Eric Clapton on guitar, almost-twenty-five-year-old Stones guitarist Keith Richards on bass, and twenty-one-year-old Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums.

  When one of the crew asks John for his choice of amp, he answers, “Oh, one that plays!”

  The all-star quartet launches into John’s “Yer Blues.” It’s John’s first performance outside the Beatles. Their second song, “Whole Lotta Yoko,” features Yoko Ono wailing over a blues-rock jam.

  * * *

  On New Year’s Day in 1969, the British writer Barry Miles, whose byline was simply “Miles,” reports on his recent visit to Apple’s Trident Studios in Soho, where over the past few months the Beatles have been finishing the White Album while twenty-one-year-old musician James Taylor—who sang “Something in the Way She Moves” and passed a spring 1968 audition with Paul and George to become Apple’s first American artist—was recording his eponymous debut album.

  “I was pleased,” Miles writes in his favorable review in the International Times, “because it’s nice to see and hear people working happily together, in close coordination, producing sounds which are good to hear, trying out ideas, getting it all down on tape for everyone to hear later.”

  The harmonious picture Miles paints of Taylor’s recording sessions is perfectly in line with Paul’s vision for Apple, though according to Ken Mansfield, the US manager of Apple Records, in reality “the atmosphere at Apple is utter chaos…‘We can’t be more number one, we can’t be more famous. We’re going to start a business, and we’re gonna do it right,’” Mansfield remembers Paul telling him. “Everything is about creativity.”

  John tests the boundary between art and commerce, insisting that a nude photo of him and Yoko taken at 34 Montagu Square appear on the cover of Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins.

  The idea came to him during a meditation session in India. “I wrote Yoko telling her that I pl
anned to have her in the nude on the cover,” John later says. “She was quite surprised, but nowhere near as much as George and Paul.”

  Sir Joseph Lockwood, head of EMI, grouses, “Well, I should find some better bodies to put on the cover than your two. They’re not very attractive.” In November of 1968, the album, which features the avant-garde recordings that John and Yoko made on their first night together, goes out in a plain brown wrapper—selling only five thousand copies in the UK.

  On January 2, 1969, officials at Newark airport seize a shipment of thirty thousand copies, denouncing the album cover as “pornographic.” The incident prompts the FBI to open a file on John.

  “But it was worth it for the howl that went up,” John says. “It really blew their minds. It cleared the air a bit. People always try to kill anything that’s honest. The album wasn’t ugly, it was just a point of view.”

  George and John’s definitions of art are rapidly diverging. Since returning from the maharishi’s ashram, George “was angry because he couldn’t achieve the level of spirituality he wanted,” his wife, Pattie Boyd, recalls.

  “Fuck off—can’t you see I’m meditating?” he lashes out at one stewardess who disturbs him during a transatlantic flight.

  In the studio on January 8, George plays his song “I Me Mine” (also the title of his 1980 memoir) for John. It’s a barbed commentary on the epic clash of egos that’s crippling the band.

  “I just got so fed up with the bad vibes,” he explains.

  And then George turns his anger on Yoko. “Dylan and a few people,” he lights into her when they’re all sitting in the Apple offices at 3 Savile Row, “said that [you’ve] got a lousy name in New York and you gave off bad vibes.”

  George and John sit and stare at each other.

  “I didn’t hit him,” John remembers. “I don’t know why.”

  “I Me Mine” would be the last new song the Beatles ever recorded.

  “John had a tremendous weight on his shoulders,” Ken Mansfield observes. “He wanted to use his fame to change the world. Unlike the others, he was becoming a real political force.”

  Chapter 37

  Let’s stay together.

  —“Let’s Stay Together”

  The Beatles return to Twickenham Studios, where they’d filmed A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who directed The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (which winds up shelved and not unveiled to the public until 1996), will film the making of the band’s tenth British studio album, Let It Be (originally titled Get Back). “It’s another of Paul’s projects,” says Barry Miles: the title song is inspired by a dream Paul had about his mother, Mary, ten years after her 1957 death.

  “I think we should go back on the road,” Paul says as the 1968 holidays approach. “Small band, go and do the clubs. Let’s go back to square one and remember what we’re all about.”

  There’s a new kind of pressure behind his words: financial.

  Back in October, the Beatles’ accountants had issued an urgent warning: because of their extreme tax exposure, the band needs to earn £120,000 for every £10,000 it spends. The costs of running the sprawling Apple Corps have spiraled.

  Director Lindsay-Hogg has grand ideas about the way to execute the film’s concert finale. He’s thinking of staging a multicultural tribute to world peace to be shot on an ocean liner or in the Sahara. “The Beatles were to start playing as the sun came up,” he says, “and you’d see the crowds flocking toward them through the day.”

  “We can build a replica of the Roman Colosseum so the band can arrive with a group of lions,” Paul suggests.

  “Let’s go back to Liverpool,” Ringo puts in. “To the Cavern Club.”

  John says, “I’m warming to the idea of doing it in an asylum.”

  A movie about the world’s greatest band needs a daring ending.

  George has one.

  “That’s it,” he says over lunch on the seventh day of tense rehearsals being captured on film. “See you ’round the clubs.” Then he walks out of the meeting and out of the band he joined at age fourteen.

  John isn’t rattled. “I think if George doesn’t come back by Monday or Tuesday, we ask Eric Clapton to play in it,” he suggests. It’s not an entirely out-of-the-blue idea; in early September, George had invited Clapton to play on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” as part of the White Album sessions. “The point is, if George leaves, do we want to carry on the Beatles? I do. We should just get other members and carry on.”

  George quits on January 10, 1969. He returns on January 15. But he’s still dead set against touring.

  On January 29, a location for the concert scene still hasn’t been chosen. Then it hits them, all of them. “What a great idea it would be to play on the roof—play to the whole of the West End,” John says, with a knowing look to Ringo and a mischievous smile to Lindsay-Hogg.

  The city of London is in for a surprise.

  At one o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday, January 30, 1969, Apple executives are given short notice to report to the rooftop of 3 Savile Row. Engineers haul up a river of electric cables while carpenters build a makeshift stage.

  John and the others go over the set list. We haven’t played live together in almost four years. John’s nervous as hell.

  The others are, too. He can see it in their eyes.

  “I don’t want to go,” George says.

  “What’s the point?” Ringo adds.

  John makes the final decision. He borrows a fur coat from Yoko, adjusts his glasses, and climbs the stairs from the dressing room to the rooftop.

  Wind whips off the Thames, and it’s too dangerous for a helicopter to provide aerial shots. Filmmakers will have to divide the shoot into a series of close-ups of the band and reaction shots from the crowd gathering on the street.

  Though his hands feel “too cold to play the chords,” John grabs his guitar and sees the familiar face of Billy Preston. The American R&B keyboardist the Beatles met while touring with Little Richard in 1962 has been sitting in with the band on electric piano.

  Ken Mansfield holds four lit cigarettes toward George to allow the lead guitarist to warm his fingertips.

  They tear into the opening number, “Get Back.”

  Curious passersby stop dead in their tracks in front of the building. They crane their necks and point to the sky.

  That’s right, John wants to tell them. The Beatles are giving you a free concert, their first concert since Candlestick in 1966, right above your heads.

  That’s the precise location of American photographer Ethan Russell, who at John’s invitation has trekked up to the rooftop and made a death-defying climb of an adjacent wall to get an overhead shot of the world’s most famous rockers against the vastness of London, “mere mortals after all.”

  For forty-two minutes, the Beatles play five songs, including three versions of “Get Back” and two apiece of “Don’t Let Me Down” and “I’ve Got a Feeling,” for a total of nine performances.

  The Metropolitan Police are circling the building, having told Apple employees, “You’ve got ten minutes.” But the constables are Beatles fans, too. They let the band play on for a little while longer. Finally, officers make it inside and up the stairs to shut the performance down. Assistants scramble to flush drug stashes down the toilets, just in case.

  Once police reach the rooftop, the Beatles finish playing.

  John quips into the microphone, “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.”

  The four Beatles smile in agreement.

  We’re still the best damn rock ’n’ roll band on earth.

  When Paul is asked in 2019 if he sensed at the time that the rooftop concert would be the group’s last, he says, “No, I don’t think I did; I don’t think any of us did. It was really just the culmination of a lot of writing and rehearsing that we had done up to this point.”

  But the end never needs an invitation
.

  Chapter 38

  Keep me searching for a heart of gold…

  —“Heart of Gold”

  Apple’s losing money every week,” John tells Ray Coleman, editor of Disc and Music Echo, in January of 1969. “If it carries on like this, all of us will be broke within the next six months.”

  “That was my opening,” Allen Klein later says. The thirty-seven-year-old New Jersey–born music executive has already guided the finances of the Rolling Stones as well as those of Sam Cooke and Bobby Darin, plus Donovan and the Animals. He’s become legendary in the music world as “the Robin Hood of pop” for negotiating huge advances for his recording artists—and for regarding a contract as “just a piece of paper.” A sign on Klein’s desk in New York reads: YEA, THOUGH I WALK THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH, I SHALL FEAR NO EVIL: FOR I AM THE BIGGEST MOTHERFUCKER IN THE VALLEY.

  Via his connections to Mick Jagger, Klein sets up a clandestine meeting with John and Yoko in the Harlequin Penthouse at the Dorchester hotel in London.

  “He was very nervous, you could see it in his face,” John remembers, but Klein, trained as an accountant, quickly succeeds in charming John because “he not only knew my work, and the lyrics that I had written, but he also understood them, and from way back. That was it.”

  John likes Klein’s brashness and his bulldog mentality. So does Yoko, to whom Klein promises a solo art show.

  “He’s a fucking sharp man, and anyone who knew me that well, without having met me before, had to be the guy to look after me,” John explains. He can’t wait to document his commitment to Klein, writing a letter to all parties with a financial interest in the Beatles, including the record company EMI, saying that “I’ve asked Allen Klein to look after my things. Please give him any information he wants and full cooperation. Love. John Lennon.”

  George and Ringo are convinced that Klein is well suited. Like John, they sympathize with Klein’s hardscrabble upbringing. “Because we were all from Liverpool,” George reasons, “we favored people who were street people.”