The Last Days of John Lennon Read online

  Ethan Russell lines the four long-haired bandmates against a carved wooden door on the estate. No one is smiling, and Russell doesn’t force it.

  Through his lens, it’s clear that “this marriage had come to an end—and boy does it show.”

  It would be the last photo ever taken of the band together.

  * * *

  John and Yoko make a pact. They want to try again for a child, so they’re quitting their heroin habit.

  “We were very square people in a way,” Yoko recalls. “We wouldn’t kick it in a hospital because we wouldn’t let anybody know. We just went straight cold turkey.”

  In an interview published on August 23, Apple recording artist James Taylor tells Rolling Stone, “John’s gone away for two weeks, just to get away from it all.”

  The experience is a nightmare.

  The gruesome withdrawal symptoms—fever, nausea, palpitations, sweats, chills, and intestinal distress—crash against them like a powerful wave. We have to do it this way, John keeps telling himself.

  During his self-imposed exile, John writes “Cold Turkey,” a song about his intense personal detox battle. “It took courage enough for John to go cold turkey on his own,” Yoko’s friend Dan Richter later comments. But writing a song about it? “To admit it, and tell you everything about it…that took real guts.”

  John proposes “Cold Turkey” to Paul and the others as a Beatles single on Abbey Road.

  They decline.

  * * *

  “I’m gonna leave the band,” John confides to Eric Clapton high over the Atlantic Ocean.

  John had called Clapton that morning. “How would you fancy playing at a rock ’n’ roll festival with the Plastic Ono Band in Toronto?”

  Tonight.

  Their first-class airline tickets are dated Saturday, September 13, a month after Woodstock, which the Beatles hadn’t played. This Canadian festival will be the first public outing for the Plastic Ono Band. “Nothing’s expected of John and Yoko or the Plastic Ono,” John says. “They would be anybody or perform anything. So with that sort of freedom there’s no hang-ups.”

  Except when it comes to preparing for the sold-out show.

  In addition to Clapton, John’s recruited drummer Alan White, and his old German pal Klaus Voormann to play bass.

  “We tried to rehearse on the plane,” John says, “but it was impossible.”

  At Varsity Stadium at the University of Toronto (capacity: 21,000), the Plastic Ono Band is a last-minute addition to a bill that includes the Doors as well as many of the musicians John once idolized, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Gene Vincent.

  John hasn’t played to a crowd this size since the Beatles’ 1966 American tour. He’s pacing backstage, chain-smoking, feeling the pressure of slotting between two of his musical heroes, Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

  “The show should be closed, by me, the King,” Little Richard declares. “You know that, Mr. Lennon. You know that, Mr. Promoters. You know that, Mr. Doors. I am the King and I should close the show.”

  It’s after midnight when American record producer Kim Fowley makes the new band’s introduction. “Everyone get out your matches and lighters, please. In a minute I’m going to bring out John Lennon and Eric Clapton and when I do I want you to light them and give them a huge Toronto welcome.”

  The Plastic Ono Band walks onstage to the glow of handheld lights. They play five songs, including the classics “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”—“only with all of us blasting it. Fantastic. It’s just pure sound.”

  “What’s next?” John turns to Eric Clapton, who doesn’t have an answer.

  “C’mon!” John calls while he keeps jamming. They play his “Yer Blues” and “Cold Turkey,” the song’s live debut.

  “Then we went into ‘Give Peace a Chance,’ which was just unbelievable,” John says. “The buzz was incredible.”

  “I never felt so good in my life,” he remembers, vowing, “I don’t care who I have to play with, I’m going back to playing rock onstage!”

  * * *

  Allen Klein calls a Saturday meeting on September 20. The Apple offices are empty as the Beatles file into the boardroom.

  Klein has hammered out a new deal with EMI’s Capitol Records that will sharply raise the Beatles’ cut of wholesale record prices from 17.5 to 25 percent.

  John, with Yoko by his side, stares across the table at Paul. Tell them now that you’re done, he wills himself.

  Instead, John launches an attack on Paul and his contributions to Abbey Road.

  “I liked the ‘A’ side but I never liked that sort of pop opera on the other side. I think it’s junk because it was just bits of songs thrown together. ‘Come Together’ is all right, that’s all I remember. That was my song.”

  Paul takes the slings and arrows.

  The pain gets worse. As Paul tries to convince John that they can find compromises to his complaints, John’s suddenly had enough. “You don’t seem to understand, do you? The group is over. I’m leaving,” he tells them.

  “I must say I felt guilty at springing it on them at such short notice,” he later reflects, though Paul says, “I remember him saying, ‘It’s weird, this, telling you I’m leaving the group, but in a way it’s very exciting.’ It was like when he told Cynthia he was getting a divorce.”

  * * *

  On September 26, John returns to the studio. With Eric Clapton on guitar, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Ringo on drums, he records twenty-six takes of “Cold Turkey” and rejects them all.

  That same day, Abbey Road gets its UK release.

  “It’s strange that we have now reached the point where nobody worries TOO much about what the Beatles are doing on record,” Melody Maker writes in its review of what will go on to become the group’s bestselling album.

  Many critics single out the album’s second song, the one inspired by George’s wife, Pattie. “‘Something’ is a song of mine,” twenty-six-year-old George says in an interview with the Detroit Free Press, “probably the nicest melody I’ve ever written.”

  John and Paul don’t agree on much these days, except that the song is indeed George’s best work yet. Frank Sinatra elevates the praise for “Something,” calling it “the greatest love song in the past fifty years” and covering the song in his own live performances.

  Musically, it is a fine farewell. The big valedictory comes, fittingly, on “The End,” with John, George, and Paul trading guitar solos (after an unprecedented Ringo drum solo) before landing on the line “And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make.”

  From his vantage point in the control room, engineer Geoff Emerick observed, “John, Paul, and George looked like they had gone back in time, like they were kids again, playing together for the sheer enjoyment of it. More than anything, they reminded me of gunslingers, with their guitars strapped on, looks of steely-eyed resolve, determined to outdo one another. Yet there was no animosity, no tension at all—you could tell they were simply having fun.”

  But that’s all in the past when, on October 20, Apple releases the single “Cold Turkey.” John’s testament is uncomfortably received. “‘Cold Turkey’ talks about thirty-six hours rolling in pain,” says the music coordinator of Detroit’s WKNR-FM. The BBC bans its airplay.

  “They thought it was a pro-drugs song,” John later tells BBC1 radio DJ Andy Peebles. “To some it was a rock ’n’ roll version of The Man with the Golden Arm,” a 1955 Frank Sinatra film showing his character suffering from drug withdrawal.

  That same day, Apple releases John and Yoko’s Wedding Album in the United States (it comes out a few weeks later in the UK, on November 7). They’d recorded it in April and, during a break on the afternoon of the twenty-second, had gone up to the Apple rooftop to take part in a quick ceremony in front of a commissioner for oaths, ratifying John’s formal name change from John Winston Lennon to John Ono Lennon. “Yoko changed her name for me. I’ve changed mine for her. One for both, both
for each other,” John declares.

  Wedding Album, side 1 of which offers John and Yoko pronouncing each other’s names for almost twenty-three minutes over a backing track of their heartbeats, marks the third of a trio of experimental albums that started with Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins and continued with Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions (which also included a recorded heartbeat, that of their miscarried son).

  The album is a critical and commercial dud, but John shrugs it off. “We didn’t expect a hit record out of it,” he later tells the BBC. It was more personal than that.

  “When people get married they usually make their own wedding albums,” John says, something to “show to the relatives when they come round. Well, our relatives are the…what you call fans.”

  He continues, “We’re public personalities,” and—referring to another celebrity couple that happens to be celebrating a first anniversary that same October 20—“I’d enjoy reading Jackie and Onassis’s album.”

  * * *

  The chorus of “Give Peace a Chance” echoes through Washington, DC. On November 15, activist Pete Seeger leads 250,000 demonstrators through Lennon’s lyrics in protest of the mounting death toll in the Vietnam War, in which American casualties surpass forty thousand.

  John and Yoko are heartened that their message is making a difference, pledging, “We’ll keep promoting peace in the way we do which, whichever way you look at it, is our way, because we’re artists and not politicians.”

  John’s unbothered when he and Yoko are mocked for their activism. “Laurel and Hardy, that’s John and Yoko,” he comments. Better not to be taken too seriously anyway, “because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi get shot.”

  Ten days later, John has his chauffeur drive the psychedelic Rolls to Buckingham Palace to return the MBE medal awarded him by the queen in 1965, along with a note stating it was being done in protest of the British government’s support of America in the Vietnam War “and against Cold Turkey slipping down the charts.” He explains his decision in a live interview on BBC TV. “Really shouldn’t have taken it,” he says of the MBE medal. “Felt I had sold out. I must get rid of it, I kept saying, I must get rid of it. So I did. Wanted to get rid of it by 1970 anyway.”

  John and Yoko create an international ad campaign around the slogan “War is over! If you want it.” The message, appearing in newspapers and on billboards, is signed “Happy Christmas, John and Yoko.” Though some people find the message too facile—American antiwar activist John Sinclair sneers, “You are going to sound awfully fucking stupid trying to tell the heroic Vietnamese people that ‘the war is over if you want it’ while they are being burned and bombed and blown out of their pitiful little huts and fields”—John explains that it’s not about ignoring reality but about taking action. “You’ve got the power,” he says. “All we have to do is remember that: we’ve all got the power. That’s why we said ‘war is over if you want it.’…Don’t believe that jazz that there’s nothing you can do, ‘just turn on and drop out, man.’ You’ve got to turn on and drop in. Or they’re going to drop all over you.”

  The Daily Mail names John Clown of the Year for his actions. But on December 30, ATV in England airs an hourlong special featuring three men, each chosen as a Man of the Decade: American president John F. Kennedy, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh—and British rock star John Lennon.

  Rather than focusing on the violence and turmoil of the past decade, John has a sunnier view. “Not many people are noticing all the good that came out of the last ten years,” John tells the interviewer, famed zoologist Desmond Morris.

  “And this is only the beginning,” he continues, sounding optimistic about the future of the peace movement. “The sixties was just waking up in the morning, and we haven’t even got to dinnertime yet. And I can’t wait, you know, I just can’t wait. I’m so glad to be around. And it’s just gonna be great.

  “It’s gonna be wonderful and I believe it.”

  Chapter 41

  Has anybody seen my old friend John?

  —“Abraham, Martin and John”

  John just wrote a great song and he wants to cut it as a single.”

  Beatles assistant Mal Evans puts out this call to Plastic Ono Band members Klaus Voormann (bass), Alan White (drums), and Billy Preston (organ).

  The concept for the song came to John just that morning, and he’d completed the lyrics in less than an hour. He’s calling it “Instant Karma!”

  George Harrison wants in on the project once John tells him about it. “I’ve written this tune and I’m going to record it tonight and have it pressed up and out tomorrow—that’s the whole point of ‘Instant Karma,’ you know,” John says.

  The musicians arrive at the Abbey Road studios on January 27, 1970, to begin recording John’s cosmic take on the human condition, which is that “there really is a reaction to what you do now.”

  They’re all rehearsing when White hears John say, “Alan, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. It’s wonderful.”

  Then a new voice says to White, “Uh, could you put the cymbals down?”

  The person speaking is not George Martin but producer Phil Spector, John’s friend since 1964, when the two chatted during the Beatles’ first flight to America.

  Spector, who’s stationed two bodyguards outside the door to the control room, wants no input from Apple engineers such as Geoff Emerick, who doesn’t like the way Spector is maxing out the sound on the consoles.

  “You’re making Phil a bit uncomfortable,” John tells Emerick, who promptly walks out of the session.

  “How do you want it?” Spector asks John, who answers, “You know, 1950s.”

  Spector works his “wall of sound” technique, mixing and layering the reverberations of multiple instruments, until John pronounces the result “fantastic.” When he hears the finished mix, in the early hours of January 28, he says, “It sounded like there was fifty people playing.”

  The whole thing is done with such speed, John says, “I wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch, and we’re putting it out for dinner.”

  On February 6, ten days after John first conceived of the song, Apple releases “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On),” credited to “Lennon/Ono with the Plastic Ono Band.”

  * * *

  Before Christmas in 1969, Paul begins noodling around in the four-track studio recently installed at his home on Cavendish Avenue. He records forty-three seconds of an acoustic-guitar ditty called “The Lovely Linda,” then a slightly more fleshed out song called “That Would Be Something,” its lyrics consisting solely of the title phrase and the line “To meet you in the fallin’ rain momma.” Aside from the Apple and EMI engineers he consults, his sessions are secret, but the solo work lifts his spirits, which had been crushed by John’s breakup announcement.

  On February 11, John and Yoko perform their new song on the Top of the Pops program, propelling it toward a top-five ranking in both the UK and America. It’s the first time one of the Beatles has performed on the program without the others.

  Meanwhile, Paul continues creating thirteen songs to fill a homemade eponymous album, scheduled for release on April 17.

  The rivalry between the two songwriting partners is ferociously rekindled.

  * * *

  The supposedly back-to-basics songs that the Beatles recorded in the studio and performed on the rooftop, as well as the film documenting the making of this album, have yet to come out. All four Beatles have approval over who will polish the songs to create an album they’ll call Let It Be. John and George propose Phil Spector, and Paul and Ringo agree.

  But Paul is horrified at what Spector does to his songs.

  When Spector begins work, on March 23, the George Martin–produced version of “Let It Be” (the Beatles’ last single with their longtime producer) is already number 2 on the UK charts.

  “Let It Be” is Paul’s song, as is “The Long and Winding Road.” Spector remixe
s both. When Paul hears “harps, horns, an orchestra, and women’s choir” on “The Long and Winding Road,” he’s first astonished, then enraged that he wasn’t consulted. “I would never have female voices on a Beatles record,” he tells journalist Ray Connolly.

  Things are further complicated when McCartney, Paul’s solo album, is pushed from April to June so that Let It Be can come out first.

  John and George write Paul a letter (addressed “From Us to You”), which Ringo delivers on their behalf. It reads, “We’re sorry it turned out like this—it’s nothing personal. Love John & George. Hare Krishna.”

  But Paul is still livid and takes it all very personally. In an effort to appease him, Ringo persuades the others to reinstate McCartney’s April 17 on-sale date.

  On April 10, Apple issues a press release touting the health of the band: “The Beatles are alive and well and the Beat goes on, the Beat goes on.”

  The release of McCartney is a week away, but Paul can’t face promoting the album with a press conference. He instead has Apple publicist Peter Brown (who’d orchestrated John and Yoko’s wedding plans) craft a questionnaire.

  When asked if this was the start of a solo career or a break with the Beatles, Paul replies “Time will tell” and “Both”; his response to whether his break with the Beatles will be temporary or permanent is “I don’t really know.” But his one-word answer to the follow-up question is a bombshell:

  Q. Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney will become an active songwriting partnership again?

  A. No.

  The Daily Mirror breaks the news—PAUL QUITS BEATLES—and he confirms it, telling the Record Mirror on April 18 how much working solo suits him. “I only had me to ask for a decision, and I agreed with me.”

  * * *

  John is woken from a deep sleep when reporter Ray Connolly calls for his comment.