John Lennon did many brilliant things in his life, but arguably
one of his most inspired acts was his deliberate destruction of the
Beatles in 1969 — just 40 years ago this month. It didn’t seem that
way then, not to tens of millions of devastated Beatles fans around
the world, and not to Paul McCartney, who, feeling abandoned, went
off to his farm in Scotland and into a deep depression.
But if Lennon, who’d started the group that evolved into the
Beatles, hadn’t murdered his creation at that moment, if the band
had somehow struggled on through their rows into the 1970s,
I doubt that you’d be reading this article today.
By killing the Beatles before they could disappoint us, as they
inevitably would have done when music fashions changed and the
band’s later albums didn’t quite live up to the ones we still love,
Lennon froze them for ever at their peak.
At the time of their break-up in 1969, I was an interviewer on
London’s Evening Standard with the special task of covering rock
music. Today, journalists are kept at arm’s length from stars by
legions of publicists, but it was different then, for me anyway.
Only now, looking back, do I fully appreciate the astonishing
access to the Beatles
I had, from 1967, that Sgt Pepper high water of their careers,
until 1972, when their dissolution was making its way through the
High Court.
So I was at the Abbey Road studios in October 1968 to hear Yoko
Ono be happily indiscreet about her affairs during her first two
marriages, before ending the evening being given a personal concert
by McCartney at the piano as he worked on a new song called Let It
Be — while from down the corridor I could hear John Lennon and the
producer George Martin mixing Cry Baby Cry for the White Album.
Almost every conversation I had during those final febrile
Beatle days ended up in my new little Sony recorder, where
intimacies and opinions were caught on cassettes, and then stored
away, forgotten and uncatalogued in an old Pickfords packing case.
And it’s those tapes, unplayed in decades (if ever, in some cases),
that I recently unearthed — recordings that in some cases challenge
views of the Lennon-McCartney relationship that have been held for
40 years.
Not all the interviews have survived. Cassettes were expensive
then, and I’m mortified to admit that I have one on which the names
McCartney, Jagger and Hendrix have each been successively crossed
out as the interviews were recorded over. Nor was everything that
was recorded published. Much was off the record. Time heals. Now it
doesn’t matter that I write some of it here.
By 1969 there were rumours of strife in the Beatles camp, but on
the surface it still seemed jolly enough. Then, while I was hanging
around their Apple headquarters in Mayfair one day in September, I
realised something was seriously wrong. There was a Beatles meeting
in the boardroom that suddenly ended in a row, followed by much
running up and down the stairs. But nobody was saying what it was
about.
A few weeks later I got a call from John telling me he’d just
sent his MBE back to the Queen. He was in a giddy mood,
I reflected, as I typed out my story. But he was also acting so
separately from the other Beatles that two days later I wrote a
piece headlined "The Day the Beatles Died".
At the time I was half-afraid I’d overstated my case, because to
the outside world they were still very much alive. But no sooner
was the article published than a white rose wrapped in Cellophane
was delivered to my desk with the message "To Ray with love from
John and Yoko".
From then on, when it came to covering Beatles affairs, my tape
recorder and I would have the best possible source. And, just
before Christmas that year, I would listen in astonishment (and
some despair) as John, who’d flown me out to join him and Yoko in
Toronto, gleefully let me in on the secret of how he’d destroyed
the band.
"At the meeting Paul just kept mithering on about what we were
going to do, so in the end
I just said, ‘I think you’re daft. I want a divorce.’"
He hadn’t planned to say that, but once spoken, and although
news of the split wasn’t going to be announced until the Let It Be
album came out the following May, the words were never
withdrawn.
Of course, there are McCartney interviews on tape, too. While
John was busy pulling the walls of the Beatles temple down around
him, Paul eventually recovered from the setback enough to make his
first solo album, McCartney. Usually astute with publicity, at this
point he slipped up, putting out an ambiguous press statement along
with his record in April 1970 that was interpreted as saying that
he’d broken up the band. Headlines of blame ran around the world.
"How could he?" distressed fans wanted to know. "It was all a
misunderstanding," he told me a few days later. "I thought,
‘Christ, what have I done now?’ and my stomach started churning
up.
I never intended the statement to mean ‘Paul McCartney quits
Beatles’."
It was ironic. The Beatle who had most wanted the group to stay
together, the biggest Beatles fan of all, was being blamed for its
dissolution.
"Why didn’t you write it when I told you in Canada?" John
demanded when he realised that Paul had accidentally got the
dubious honour of ending the world’s favourite group. As he’d
started it, he thought he should be the one to end it. "You asked
me not to," I said. He was scornful. "You’re the journalist,
Connolly, not me," he snapped.
What strikes me most, though, listening again to the tapes, is
how prescient John was, how closely his ear was tuned to the
changing mood of the times. As once he’d instinctively known which
songs to write and what pithy comments would grab a headline,
somehow, while in the middle of the whirlpool that was the Beatles,
he’d seen the end approaching.
"The whole thing died in my mind long before all the rumpus
started," he said in 1971 when I was spending a few days with him
and Yoko in New York. "We used to believe the Beatles myth just as
much as the public, and we were in love with them in just the same
way. But basically we were four individuals who eventually
recovered our own individualities after being submerged in a
myth.
"I know a lot of people were upset when we finished, but every
circus has to come to an end. The Beatles were a monument that had
to be either changed or scrapped. As it happens, it was scrapped.
The Beatles were supposed to be this and supposed to be that, but
really all we were was a band that got very big.
"Actually, our best days were before we got that big, when we
used to play for hours in clubs. My favourite number was always
Elvis’s Baby Let’s Play House. We’d make it last about 10 minutes,
singing the same verse over and over.
I pinched one of the lines from it later to put in one of my own
songs called Run for Your Life — something about ‘I’d rather see
you dead, little girl, than to see you with another man’.
"Mick Jagger said we weren’t a good band as performers. But he
never saw us at our best in Liverpool and Hamburg. We were the best
bloody band there was. I know all the early rock songs much better
than most of those I’ve written myself."
During most of that time, however, John was in iconoclastic
mode. It was as though, having made his decision, he couldn’t smash
his Beatle persona quickly, or outrageously, enough. He didn’t want
to be "one of four gods on the stage", he told me, so instead he
invited the world’s press to his honeymoon bedside for a week "in
aid of world peace". Then, not minding that he was being widely
ridiculed, not to mention chastised by his formidable Aunt Mimi for
"making an exhibition of himself", he appeared naked with Yoko on
an album of electronic music called Two Virgins, before really
chasing controversy with a series of erotic lithographs featuring
Yoko, and sometimes himself too.
"Why do you draw so much cunnilingus?" I asked him during the
trip to Canada, as I passed the lithographs for him to sign.
"Because I like it," the one-time moptop grinned merrily. London’s
Metropolitan Police would later close down his exhibition in a West
End gallery. They didn’t like it.
At the time, Yoko was much publicly blamed for the Beatles’
demise, and she certainly might have played her part more
tactfully. But she was only one of several catalysts. And John, as
I’ve been hearing again on my tapes, was absolutely besotted by
her, this sexy, mysterious artist who matched the zany dottiness in
him.
"It was Yoko that changed me," he teases her during one
conversation in 1970. "She forced me to become avant-garde and take
me clothes off when all I wanted to do was become Tom Jones. And
now look at me! Did you know avant-garde is French for bullshit?"
Then, referring to how she’d begun to join him on stage, he goes
on: "We’ve only got to play four bars and she grabs the microphone
and she’s off… Aggghhh! Take her anywhere and she does her number
for you." In the background, Yoko giggles. She was his pal.
The John Lennon I recorded was a very funny man who liked to
paint himself ironically as the indignant butt of his own stories.
"Did you see that Time magazine is saying that George is a
philosopher?" he asked me one day. "And
there’s an article in The Times , that I’ve actually thought
about sending to Pseuds Corner [in Private Eye] — anonymously, of
course — saying how Paul is this great musician. One a philosopher,
another a great musician. Where does that leave me?"
"The nutter?" I hear myself suggest.
"Yes. I’m the nutter. F*** ’em all."
Today he would have been a star as a stand-up comedian with a
line in self-mockery. And, having returned from a session of primal
therapy in California in 1970, he was more loquacious than ever. He
could have done a whole act on the subject of what made people like
him want to become famous. "There you are up on the stage like an
Aunt Sally waiting to have things thrown at you. It’s like always
putting yourself on trial to see if you’re good enough for Mummy
and Daddy. You know, ‘Now will you love me if I stand on my head
and fart and play guitar and dance and blow balloons and get an MBE
and sing She Loves You — now will you love me?’" It was a typical
Lennon rant, but he was smiling all the time.
On another occasion, talking about his song Not a Second Time
from the Beatles’ second LP, in a conversation devoted to his
music, he says: "That was the one where that f***ing idiot Thomas
Mann (he meant William Mann, the Times music critic) talked
about the aeolian cadence at the end being like Mahler’s Song of
the Earth . They were just chords like any other chords. It was
the first intellectual bullshit written about us." Then the knowing
pause. "Still, I know it helps to have bullshit written about
you."
Later, saying how a favourite of his songs, You Can’t Do That,
was his attempt at being Wilson Pickett, he becomes mock-anguished
when admitting it was "a flip side because Can’t Buy Me Love
[Paul’s song] was so f***ing good".
He was competitive with Paul, yes, and, when relations between
the two were really bad, vituperative, as evidenced in a line in a
song about his former partner on his Imagine album: "The sound you
make is Muzak to my ears."
Paul had to have been hurt, and a few months later in New York
even John would admit slightly ruefully: "I suppose it was a bit
hard on him…" But, as he would so often say, "They were just the
words that came out of my mouth at the time."
In truth, he always knew how good Paul was, without necessarily
liking everything he did.
"I only ever asked two people to work with me as a partner," he
would boast of his talent-spotting abilities. "One was Paul
McCartney and the other Yoko Ono. That’s not bad, is it?" Indeed, I
recall a writer from an underground magazine being snide about
Paul’s song Let It Be, presumably assuming John would agree. He
didn’t.
"Paul and me were the Beatles," he would emphasise to me
privately. "We wrote the songs." And on the subject of his debt to
the young McCartney, he was actually generous. "I didn’t write much
material early on, less than Paul, because he was quite competent
on guitar.
Paul taught me quite a lot of guitar, really."
Those who see John as the towering greatest of the great should
reflect on that: John Lennon quietly, happily admitting how much he
owed to Paul McCartney. And while he could be flattering about some
of Paul’s songs — he liked For No One particularly ("that was one
of his good ones. All his semi-classical ones are best, actually")
— he was disarmingly dismissive about several of his own. "I Am the
Walrus didn’t mean anything," he says, consigning to the pointless
bin the work of a generation of Beatles anoraks who’d tried to
interpret its lyrics, while he always hated Yes It Is, didn’t think
he sang Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds very well ("I was so nervous
I couldn’t sing, but I like the lyrics"), and admits that he and
Paul would give the lousy songs they wrote to George and Ringo to
sing.
But It’s Only Love from the Help! album was the one that earned
his greatest ire. "It’s the most embarrassing song I ever wrote.
Everything rhymed. Disgusting lyrics. Even then I was so ashamed of
the lyrics, I could hardly sing them. That was one song I really
wished I’d never written," he says. Then, after another comic
pause: "Well, you can say that about quite a few." And the ones he
liked? "Across the Universe was one of my favourites. I gave it at
first to the World Wildlife Fund, but they didn’t do much with it,
and then we put it on the Let It Be album. It missed it as a record
but maybe the lyrics will survive. And Strawberry Fields Forever
meant a lot. Come Together is another favourite. It started off as
a slogan song for Timothy Leary’s wife, but I never got around to
finishing it. Everyone takes it as meaning ‘come together in
peace’, but there’s the other meaning too!" Actually, he was proud
of quite a few — In My Life, I’m a Loser, Girl…
"When I was in therapy I was asked to go through a book of all
the songs I’d written, line by line. I just couldn’t believe I’d
written so many."
Interestingly, and it’s something I’ve only realised listening
again to the tapes, no matter how much John publicly criticised
Paul, in none of my interviews with Paul did he ever criticise
John. Quite the contrary. "On Abbey Road
I would like to have sung harmony with John, like we used to.
And I think he would have liked me to. But I was too embarrassed to
ask him."
I always wished I’d been involved in the Beatles’ early happier
days, but my role was to cover the final act of their career, and
to observe the fallout, mostly, though not totally, with John.
There were some bizarre and revealing moments during those days.
Visiting a Native American village in upstate New York the day
after his
30th birthday, he showed that even he, in his enthusiasm, could
get it wrong. "When I used to see cowboys-and-Indians films when I
was a kid in Liverpool, I was always on the side of the Indians,"
he told the assembled group, not realising how patronising he
sounded.
I’m sure when he said he wanted a divorce from the Beatles he
never imagined how complicated, or expensive for all of them, it
would be. But by October 1971, when he was living in New York, he
was beginning to get a good idea. Asking me to be a go-between, he
gave me a message to take to Paul suggesting that perhaps the two
of them could solve at least one of their differences without
either Allen Klein, his manager, or Lee Eastman, Paul’s manager and
also Linda McCartney’s father, becoming involved. Back in London I
delivered the message, but in the end it was inevitably lawyers who
sorted out their problems.
Listening to the tapes, and hearing John’s singsong voice again
after all these years, has led to some poignant memories. But what
has stayed with me most from all the interviews is the vitality of
the man, and that straight-faced, British, tongue-in-cheek delivery
he had. A very generous person, he would say: "I can’t think about
money. It rains in and rains out.
"I always wanted to be an eccentric millionaire, and now I am."
John on his education made me laugh: "If I’d had a better
education, I wouldn’t have been me. When I was at grammar school I
thought I’d go to university, but I didn’t get any GCEs. Then I
went to art school and thought I’d go to the Slade and become a
wonder. But I never fitted in. I was always a freak, I was never
lovable. I was always Lennon!"
Then there’s John, as forthright as ever when I suggested he
might like to write a musical. "No. No musicals. I loathe musicals.
I never did have a plan for doing one. My cousin made me sit
through some f***ing musical twice. I just hate them. They bore me
stiff. I think they’re just horrible. Even Hair. And they’re always
lousy music." What he would have made of Cirque du Soleil’s Las
Vegas show Love, an interpretation of the Beatles’ records, would
have been interesting to know.
John, talking about a Hare Krishna group who’d been painting a
little temple in the grounds of Tittenhurst Park near Ascot, which
was briefly his home, was typical. "I had to sack them. They were
very nice and gentle, but they kept going around saying ‘peace’ all
the time. It was driving me mad. I couldn’t get any f***ing
peace."
And finally there’s John in 1970 being ominously prophetic. "I’m
not going to waste my life as I have been, which was running at
20,000 miles an hour. I have to learn not to do that, because I
don’t want to die at 40."
He was 40 and two months when he was murdered by a mad fan in
New York in 1980.
I was due to interview him for The Sunday Times the following
day
Initial
reports
said that
hundreds of thousands of people watched YouTube’s Live
U2 concert on Sunday night. Then
reports
See
all
Post
Loading...
wait how is that possible? The channel only has 8.5 million views…
The channel had a lot more than 8.5m views at one stage but then it appeared to be reset. I’m not sure why but I was watching the page when there was millions more than 8.5 and then when I refreshed it had dropped. Not sure why they did that though.
Ok, not digging the title quite so much this time…
Agree. U2 has a library and a fan base large enough to write a better headline than going for the easy hit.
I might be slow, but I still don’t get it.
It’s more than just “widely believed”:
http://twitter....atus/5166213580
“The U2 concert is streamed via Akamai, not Google: tracert u2.youtube.com.edgesuite.net Tracing route to a1448.g.akamai.net [208.49.52.51]“
good stuff. will add that in.
nice find!
welcome to a new age of rock concerts… virtual woodstock, delivered right into your lap; nee laptop!
arvind
Yup, everything in your lap, music, girls, news, everything.
If you believe that attending Woodstock and watching YouTube are the same, or even remotely same, experience, you really have missed something:
Life.
I wanna konw how many people were participated in ‘Twitter chat’ during the u2uge show.
Where can I get those numbers?
Awesome news
))
MG, you have bent that headline in a cruel and unusual way. I feel sorry for the poor thing.
How about:
“10 million U2 fans found what they were looking for on YouTube”
or
“YouTube rattled and hummed to 10 million U2 fans”
(Ok they’re pretty bad too…)
Watching a U2 concert on YouTube is NOT even better than the real thing.
Youtube Shows its Pride – U2 in the Name of Love
Great show – terrible headline.
Yeah the headline is mangled….
Hyphens preferred: With – Not Without – U2, YouTube Saw….
Off with your headline! Try…
U2ube to 10mil
But, but, but… Microsoft told us that this kind of livestreaming is only possible with Microsoft(r) Silverlight(tm) technology
good old flash… and it’s only going to get Harder Better Stronger Faster. (with 10.1 next spring)
Yet their sales jump was minimal this week on Soundscan. Another losing biz model for YouTube as I can’t imagine the bill from Akamai.
The headline is based on their wong: with or without you!! how lame…:)
I watched that live was great too see it run so smooth
trying this again
How much time before Youtube kills ustream/justin.tv by letting their users live stream?
This is probably using the impressive (and expensive, I understand) Akamai EdgeSuite product.
and the show ROCKED!!!